How Flowster Doubled Its ARPU to $40 a Month and Stayed Bootstrapped and Profitable (Interview with CEO Trent Dyrsmid)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Trent Dyrsmid. He's a serial entrepreneur, the founder of flowster.app, and a complete nerd when it comes to creating scalable business processes. And by way, I mean nerd because I've seen his process on the last time we had a call, it's impressive. Trent, you ready to take us to the top?

Trent Dyrsmid

00:14>> I'll do my best, Nathan. Thank you so much for having me.

Nathan Latka

00:16My 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 gotta build something to make this easier, and now we have flowster.

Trent Dyrsmid

00:27>> 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, because it allows me to delegate to 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.

Nathan Latka

00:50Now we last spoke back in October 2020, so this is a while ago, but you'd already passed. You're bootstrapped. You had 500 customers paying about $20 a month. So you know about crossed your first $10,000 in MRR. Couple questions here. Are you still bootstrapped?

Still Bootstrapped After Two Years

Trent Dyrsmid

01:02>> We still are. Yes.

Nathan Latka

01:04I love that. Love that. That's bonus point one. Number two, talk to us about customers. Are you still serving the same customers as two years ago, or have you changed markets?

Customer Base and Moving Upmarket

Trent Dyrsmid

01:13>> So we still have, 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.

Nathan Latka

01:35Mhmm. Mhmm. Okay. That makes sense. So is it fair to say has your ARPU increased? Are you average customer pays more than $20 a month today?

Trent Dyrsmid

01:42>> Yeah. Yeah. Our ARPU is, actually double that now.

Nathan Latka

01:46Oh, wow. Okay. So was that because of new product features or more seats per account, or what enabled that?

Trent Dyrsmid

01:52>> 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.

Nathan Latka

02:04Let's break that down for a second. So raising prices are something founders always go, oh, but if I raise price, everyone's gonna 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?

ARPU Growth and Price Increases

Trent Dyrsmid

02:18>> 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, to grow while continuing to bootstrap if we had, you know, the lower prices that we had in

02:45>> the past. And so we really just decided to we we picked numbers out of the air. Well, not really out of the air, but we picked new numbers. And, we we didn't force all the the older accounts onto the new pricing plan. This was really just for newer accounts. Mhmm. So it it hasn't been detrimental so far. It's been positive.

Free Trial Pipeline

Nathan Latka

03:04So now you have a seven day free trial. How many people today as of recording July twenty seventh through twenty twenty two, how many people are in the free trial?

Trent Dyrsmid

03:12>> As of this moment right now, there's a couple 100.

Nathan Latka

03:16Okay. Wow. Okay. So very healthy pipeline. How are you finding these customers? What's your growth strategy?

Inbound Growth Strategy

Trent Dyrsmid

03:21>> 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 and the and 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.

Nathan Latka

03:41Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:04your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

04:29get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

04:51not 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, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

05:16going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if

05:38you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the

SEO, Power Pages, and Blog Content

Nathan Latka

06:05interview. Is there one of those channels that is just clearly doing more than the others? Facebook, YouTube Search. Which Search. Search. Definitely. What's the number one keyword you rank for?

Trent Dyrsmid

06:17>> 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 I'm embarrassed to say I don't know what it is.

Nathan Latka

06:25Okay. 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 how have you built that machine?

Trent Dyrsmid

06:35>> We're actually, we have been doing that and now we've been stepping up our game over the last quarter. There's, something a concept that was taught by, Backlinko. What's the guy's name behind Backlinko? I'm forgetting his name.

Nathan Latka

06:49I I know you're talking about, I forget his name too.

Trent Dyrsmid

06:52>> Anyway, Brian Dean.

Nathan Latka

06:55Brian Dean.

Trent Dyrsmid

06:55>> 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 I forget what

07:21>> the keyword is, it's SOP templates for digital agencies or something similar to that. And that actually gets a pretty decent amount of traffic.

Nathan Latka

07:30That's interesting. Okay. So that's working nicely. And you you look at obviously you and your wife are running this. How many full time employees outside of you two are at the company?

Trent Dyrsmid

07:41>> I think it's twelve, eleven, 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. Yeah. It is between ten and twelve.

Nathan Latka

07:57And so talk to me about how you've done the engineering.

Team Size and Engineering Setup

Trent Dyrsmid

08:00>> So my cofounder 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 he's run software teams. He's built and sold a SaaS 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. Again, I I

08:28>> don't I can't speak specifically because I just don't stick my nose in that particular area of the business. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

08:35The reason I'm asking is because I always am on the hunt for who's gonna be the first one person team to reach, you know, like a $100,000,000 in revenue. And it's gonna have to be someone that can really build systems and rely on contractors at scale. If anyone's gonna do that, it's gonna be you. Right?

Trent Dyrsmid

08:53>> My ego is not that big, but maybe.

Nathan Latka

08:56Maybe. Okay. We'll see. Talk to me though about this. 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 it to a contractor?

Trent Dyrsmid

09:12>> So there's I mean, that's kind of a long answer, but I'll do my best to answer it quickly. Did when with what the the first part of the question is you've gotta create systems. So where should you create systems? Well, it's gonna be one of two areas depending upon where the where in the life cycle your business is. If you're earlier on and your bigger problem is pipeline and lead gen, then create systems in the area

09:36>> of prospecting, funnels, all of that kind of stuff. But if you're a little bit later stage and you're like, no, we got lead gen and pipeline all figured out, but fulfillment is our issue or something else that's after the acquisition of the customer, then I would say, look where the biggest fires are and try and reverse engineer and see what's causing those fires And instead of being a firefighter, be a fire preventer. So create processes for

Building Systems for Contractor Delegation

Trent Dyrsmid

10:00>> one of those two areas or maybe it's both in your organization. And then, we have a and we actually have a free template for this that you can link to in your show notes, but we've we've had tremendous success.

Nathan Latka

10:11Give it a call. What do know the name of it so the audience can search it?

Trent Dyrsmid

10:14>> Yeah. Hire if you just search for the word hiring, if you go into our marketplace and just type in hiring, I think it says virtual assistant hiring process or something like that. And so we don't have to go into the details here unless you want to, but we we've been doing this now for over a decade and we almost never have a hiring fail. So if you have great systems and then you use our system to

10:34>> find a human being, odds are you're gonna have really good success right out of the gate with, delegating that work.

Nathan Latka

10:41Yeah. Yeah. This is the best system I built for this is I put together the process in a word doc. I probably should be using flowster. I record a loom video.

Trent Dyrsmid

10:48>> Oh, you're killing me, man.

Nathan Latka

10:50I know. I know. And then I I go on to Upwork, and the trick is I I I go on to Upwork and I post a job. And what most people do is they click on, the cheapest labor. What I do is I put filtering in place, I I click on the most expensive hourly rate. And I pay 10 people to do the same task. And then I look at the work quality, and then I I

11:06use the one ongoing, which who who gave me the best hourly rate for the best value output of following the procedure I gave them. You they could automate all this through flowster effectively.

Hiring Process and Honesty Test

Trent Dyrsmid

11:16>> Yeah. And our and our process isn't much different than that. We we pick five people. We pay them to do the thing. So we give them the flowster SOP. We all pay them to do it. We do and then there's one little trick that we do to test their honesty. If it's a fifteen minute task, if we know it should take fifteen minutes, we'll tell them that it takes an hour because that way the person who

11:36>> comes back and says, yep, took the whole hour, I know that that person's gonna milk me for extra labor dollars. Whereas if the other person comes back and says, no, actually I got it done really quick. They, they just passed an honesty test that they didn't even know they were taking.

Customer Count and Revenue Disclosure

Nathan Latka

11:49That's pretty cool. I love that. Okay. Very cool. How many customers now today?

Trent Dyrsmid

11:56>> Not gonna disclose that actually.

Nathan Latka

11:58Oh, okay. Why is that? You said 500 about two years ago. Is that something that's drastically changed?

Trent Dyrsmid

12:03>> It's more.

Nathan Latka

12:05Okay. And why why I guess, why choosing not to disclose that anymore? You just feel like it's sensitive data doesn't help you at all?

Trent Dyrsmid

12:10>> I just being a private company, we don't disclose revenue. We don't disclose customer count. Nope.

Profitability and M and A Ambitions

Nathan Latka

12:16Well, wait. But you, you did though. Alright. I mean, something changed Yeah. Between us So what changed?

Trent Dyrsmid

12:21>> We just decided that we didn't wanna do that anymore.

Nathan Latka

12:24Okay, fair enough. But ARPUs increased to $40. You're still bootstrapped. You were burning $20 a month last time we chatted. Are you profitable now today?

Trent Dyrsmid

12:34>> We are.

Nathan Latka

12:35Okay, that feels good. So any plans to, you know, use the profits to go out and maybe buy an adjacent competitor?

Trent Dyrsmid

12:42>> That is definitely on the radar screen. I'm very fascinated. Like, I've my wife this is the last startup I ever wanna do. I just wanna buy businesses going forward. I look at what, the founder of OptinMonster, and I can't remember the fellow's name, but he has built. Syed, yes. That dude is a freaking genius. He has built an empire based upon buying profitable businesses. It's just your Warren Buffett model, but he did it in SaaS. That

Nathan Latka

13:11>> is

13:11super specifically in WordPress plugins. Super neat.

Trent Dyrsmid

13:15>> Yeah. So that is super appealing to me, but we're not at the point yet where I want any distractions. What we've been doing has been working, and I wanna stay laser focused on it and just do more of it.

Nathan Latka

13:27Mhmm. I guess at what point in terms of I don't know what the number is. The head count when you break 10,000,000 in ARR. Like, what at what point do you go, okay. I have some bandwidth now and things are systematized. I wanna go look on being more aggressive in the M and A space.

When to Pursue Acquisitions

Trent Dyrsmid

13:40>> Yeah. For me, it would be when certain roles are filled. So when I have a COO and when I have a leader of marketing and I have a leader of sales and those are all senior people, you know, a $100,000 plus each, at that point, I don't need to, like, spin the wheels every day. I just need to be the the the head coach. At that point, I think it would be, not sabotaging my core effort

14:07>> to take some of my focus and look for acquisitions that could be strategic.

Nathan Latka

14:11Yep. Yep. Very cool. Love that. Now you don't wanna talk about customer count. Are you comfortable sharing? Have you guys broke a million dollar run rate at this point?

Trent Dyrsmid

14:19>> Not gonna say. Sorry.

Nathan Latka

14:20Don't wanna share. Most people at your stage are making about a bootstrapped or doing about $180,000 in revenue per employee. So if you have 13 employees, now obviously they're lower cost. Right? If you they're from the countries you mentioned. So it's maybe not direct math. But if for audience, if you wanna take 13 times a 180 grand revenue per employee, it'd be about $2,300,000 in AR. Maybe not there yet, but on the way and profitable, which

14:42we love. So let's let's move forward there. Do you wanna add something to that? Okay. Yeah. Great. Let's move forward. Talk you talked about some of the opening roles you have now. How do you go about recruit? Like, you're you're trying to hire a COO, it sounds like. How do you go recruit that person?

Trent Dyrsmid

14:57>> So I'm actually not trying to hire the COO just yet. If I was gonna hire a salesperson, I would be following Marc Roberge's guidelines literally to the letter. I consider this to be the bible. Then as far as a COO, I would be reaching out into my network. My wife is a member of EO. We'd be reaching into that network. It would very, very much recruiting affair more than a like, hey. We got an open position

15:26>> and we're accepting applications. Mhmm. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

15:28Very cool. Alright, Trent. We're out of time here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Trent Dyrsmid

15:34>> Well, lately, it's been Marc Roberge's book. I'm I'm really fascinated by that book.

Sales Strategy and Enterprise Plans

Nathan Latka

15:39Number two, do you have any salespeople today?

Trent Dyrsmid

15:41>> No.

Nathan Latka

15:42Yeah. It's it's interesting you're reading that book because it's really hard to put that book into practice unless you have ACVs above 5 or $10 k because that's when it makes sense to have a sales rep with commission.

Trent Dyrsmid

15:52>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

15:53Are you planning on launching some sort of enterprise feature where you can charge $20 k a year?

Trent Dyrsmid

15:57>> We are. Yes.

Nathan Latka

15:58Ah, okay. Very cool. Very cool. This year you'll land at your first enterprise customer or that's the 2023 objective?

Trent Dyrsmid

16:05>> It could happen this year.

Nathan Latka

16:07Okay. Very cool. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Trent Dyrsmid

16:13>> Not that I could give you a quick answer to. So Okay. No.

Nathan Latka

16:17Number number three, what's your favorite online tool for building flowster besides your own?

Trent Dyrsmid

16:22>> My favorite online tool for building flowster

16:29>> I'm sorry that I'm blanking because flowster is my favorite tool. There's just so many others that I use that, you know, that everybody else uses that I don't think are particularly like, I would say, oh my gosh. That one's my favorite. So I, I don't have a great answer for you there. I'm sorry.

Nathan Latka

16:48You said SEMrush last time. Number four, how many hours of So sleep

Trent Dyrsmid

16:51>> do you actually, yes. That would be and and we now we're using Ahrefs. So, yes, I would say because SEO is our largest source of traffic and we use that tool, but my wife uses it, not me. That's why it didn't pop into my mind. Yeah, But, I would say that's pretty high up to list.

Famous Five and Closing

Nathan Latka

17:06The very strange pattern you guys have on Ahrefs, I looked you up ahead of this in my research team. Did you guys pop to a domain rating, which you said was your big objective with getting backlinks of, like, sixty, seventy back in late mid twenty twenty and then crashed back down to 27. And now you're currently at like sort of 38. Do you know what caused that pop back in 2020 or the decline?

Trent Dyrsmid

17:25>> No. I don't. As a matter of fact, I didn't even know that we had that pop back then.

Nathan Latka

17:28I'm sure your wife's I'm sure your wife's on it.

Trent Dyrsmid

17:30>> That's usually the case.

Nathan Latka

17:31So, okay. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Trent Dyrsmid

17:35>> Eight.

Nathan Latka

17:36Eight. And what's your open week?

Trent Dyrsmid

17:37>> Seven to eight. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

17:38Okay. Honestly, what's situation, married single kids? We know you're married. Still one kiddo?

Trent Dyrsmid

17:42>> Married with one kiddo. Stopped at one. She's eight now, and, one is is more than enough for

Nathan Latka

17:47a That's a that's amazing. And I think you've had two birthdays. Are you 52 now?

Trent Dyrsmid

17:52>> I I'm loathe to admit it, but yes, I am.

Nathan Latka

17:54Alright. 52. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Trent Dyrsmid

17:58>> Oh, man. The first thing is, spend less than I make, And the second thing is have more patience. I I'm I mean, there's yeah.

Nathan Latka

18:08Guys, flowster

Trent Dyrsmid

18:09>> myself down.

Nathan Latka

18:11Patience is key, guys. Flowster app launched back in 2017. If you're trying to build a massive team and not hire a bunch of FTEs and want contractors that run systems, flowster app should be your operating system effectively. They passed 500 customers back in 2020 and about $10,000 of monthly recurring revenue. Trent's not sharing revenue today, but he did share that ARPU has more than doubled and they are moving more enterprise. He's learning from Mark Roberge and

18:31they are profitable today, Still bootstrapped, which we love with a team of 13 as they look to continue developing product. Trent, thanks for taking us to the top.

Trent Dyrsmid

18:39>> Thanks very much for having me, Nathan. I appreciate it.

Nathan Latka

18:42One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on three hungry buyers. They try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one

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19:50are saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have

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