How Flowster CEO Trent Dyrsmid grew Flowster to $120K revenue and 500 customers in 2020.

hey folks my guest today is trent dearsmith he's a serial entrepreneur the founder of flowster.app and a complete nerd when it comes to creating scalable business processes and by the way i mean nerd because i've seen this process on the last time we had a call and it's impressive trent you ready to take us to the top i'll do my best nathan thank you so much for having my favorite thing about you is you eat your own dog food this started because you are so into documenting processes and you showed me some of them last time they said i've got to build something to make this easier and now we have flowster yeah it's actually not so much that i'm into documenting processes that's an input i'm into the output which is the freedom that that gives me in my life um because it allows me to delegate to to train new people really quickly and to delegate work to people all around the world and obviously we're taking advantage of labor in low-cost countries and that's been super beneficial for the company now we last spoke back in october of 2020 so this is a while ago but you'd already passed you're bootstrapped you had 500 customers paying about 20 bucks a month so doing about across your first 10 000 bucks in mrr couple questions here are you still bootstrapped we still are yes i love that love that that's bonus point one uh number two talk to us about customers are you still serving the same customers as two years ago or have you changed markets so we still have um we get a lot of inbound from those customers and they have been causing growth to occur at a steady rate we are now wanting to grow faster and so i'm in the midst of testing moving up market a bit to slightly larger customers same niche same problems just slightly more employees per customer okay that makes sense so is it fair to say has your arpu increased are you average customer pays more than 20 bucks a month today yeah yeah is uh actually double that now oh wow okay so was that because of new product features or more seats per account or what enabled that um raising prices was part of it and some new product features and some a new plan actually all of the all those three things have all contributed to it let's break that down for a second so raising prices are something founders always go oh but if i raise price everyone's going to cancel but then you do it and you're surprised like no one cancels and you just doubled your revenue so how did you think about increasing your price um really we there was a somebody wrote a 185 page long pricing experiment i wish i could remember who it was so i could give them attribution but we as a management team looked at that very very closely and decided to make some changes as a result of that because our the unit economics just weren't going to allow us to uh to grow while continuing to bootstrap if we had you know the lower prices that we had in the past and so we really just decided to we picked numbers out of the air well not really out of the air but we picked new numbers and um we we didn't force all the the older accounts onto the new pricing plan this was really just for newer accounts um so it hasn't been detrimental so far it's been positive so now you have a seven day free trial how many people today as of recording july 27 2022 how many people are in the free trial uh as of this moment right now there's a couple hundred okay wow okay so very healthy pipeline how are you finding these customers what's your growth strategy they're actually finding us oddly enough we just because of the content marketing that we're doing and the facebook groups and the youtube channel and the and the end the stuff we are adding around 30 to 50 leads a day into the funnel and they just keep coming every day day after day oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview is there one of those channels that is just clearly doing more than the others facebook youtube search search search what's the number one keyword you rank for uh i see i don't even know what it is off the top of my head i don't run content for the team that's actually my wife that does that so embarrassed to say i don't know what it is okay search so search drives you the most traffic interesting do you have does your wife have you guys built a system to like onboard writers to crank out blog content at scale or how he built that machine we're actually uh we have been doing that and now we've been stepping up our game over the last quarter um there's uh something a concept that was taught by uh backlinko what's the guy's name behind backlinko i'm forgetting his name i i know you're talking about i forget his name too anyway um brian dean brian so brian dean talks about these things called power pages which are basically just big huge long blog posts and so we've started to publish power pages and then we're doing we're working on a lot of guest posting to get the backlinks to increase the domain rating and so it's been a combination of that and just kind of our quote-unquote regular blog posts that that are getting traction we have one in particular which uh i forget what the keyword is it's sop templates for digital agencies there's something similar to that and that actually gets a pretty decent amount of traffic that's interesting okay so that's working nicely and you know you look at obviously you and your wife are running this how many full-time employees outside of youtube are at the company uh i think it's 12 11 12. i because i don't run the dev team i don't i don't always know exactly the head count but let me just think one two three four five six yeah it's between 10 and 12. and so talk to me about how you've done the engineering so my co-founder is the cto he's the technical brains of the company we have hired exclusively so he was trained as a software developer his entire life he's run software teams he's built and sold a sas business in the past and so i really don't tell him how to do his job at all he just recruits developers typically out of india and africa we do have a few in eastern europe i think um again i i don't that i can't speak specifically because i just don't stick my nose in that particular area of the business um the reason i'm asking is because i always am on the hunt for who's going to be the first one-person team to reach you know like a hundred million bucks in revenue and it's going to be someone that can really build systems and rely on contractors at scale uh if anyone's going to do that it's going to be you right my ego is not that big but maybe maybe okay we'll see uh talk to me though about this i i imagine a lot of folks use you to onboard contractors to run repeatable tasks right so what are some best practices you've seen for creating system to take off you know a founder's plate for example and give...