How Flowvella CEO Brent Brookler grew to $288K revenue and 1.2K customers in 2019.

hello everybody my guest today is brent brookler he's a product focused entrepreneur with the deep domain expertise and mobile apps and mobile ecosystem and bringing innovative products to market after years of building and managing some of the biggest branded apps on mobile brookler uh is now focused on innovating sales enablement through presentation and kiosk software the company is called flovella.com brent you ready to take us to the top sure all right tell us about full velo what's the company doing what's your revenue model we are we build a presentation and kiosk software we first built it for the ipad after building apps for big brands like cbs we actually built 60 minutes we wanted to build a system to allow anyone to create these their own kind of interactive multimedia driven presentations using uh using the ipad was the first and so it's a sas model it's all subscription based we have some trial periods and then we've found it kind of focused on really in-home sales so people who sell to people that way they need the ipad it also works 100 offline and you have these videos and you have these presentations that really go to the next level okay why do you beat like a keynote uh well on the kiosk side which has been a growing part of our business they don't allow this so when i say kiosks you can turn any any ipad at a store or an event or a trade show you make it a secure thing so that way someone can't go into your uh your youtube they can view and play with the presentation and but they can't go in and edit it and then mess it all up and that's what teenagers do whenever you place these things in a traditional i see so if so if someone used keynote on all these things and someone touched it or something and exited out of the keynote app they could be browsing internet or in your email before you know it yeah or go into the presentation and just is that it is that the mouse trap that i figure kino would have some button to make you know solve that they they they actually don't and then the other the other way we're different than the keynote is we we really focused on like multimedia and and and offline and so you're able to to embed these videos and make a true interactive experience and you also can embed pdfs which no other presentation allows you to do which is a pretty amazing uh uh thing some people have especially sales people have these one-page uh call sheets and you can all actually email that pdf without leaving the uh the application right from the middle of presentation yeah all right interesting what are people paying on average per month or per year for this it's 20 a month 200 a year for the pro we have a premium but we've really focused we cut we we continue to go kind of like up market and really help sales people help sell yeah and you and when'd you launch it what year it's been out for five years actually so is that 2014 yeah actually six years it's been a slow uh ramp and now it's doing quite well well how many customers have you scaled to uh paying customers were like 12 or 1300 although the numbers kind of changed because uh the way we've done the pricing on the kiosk side it could be one customer but we re restricted to one ipad per per user but then they have to buy additional devices so it may look like one customer but they could be spending a lot more because they have multiple devices well yeah so let's go away from the per device cost of 20 bucks a device and go to the customer level so on average what is the customer paying per month yeah yeah that twenty dollars a month two hundred dollars a year it could have it could average up we also have some older plans or a little bit less so let's just that's like our main plan okay so generally speaking people are paying for one device yeah okay got it and it costs 1200 i mean so i can take 1200 times 20. there's 24 grand a month about yeah okay and a year ago where was the company uh we did we we've been growing about 30 a year consistently for the last four or five years okay so what that puts you at like 18 or 19 000 a month about a year ago about a year ago we did like 180 grand in in 18. well yeah that's over the total year though but if we just take a snapshot of the month right to compare this month to a month 12 months ago it was about 18 000 a month yeah maybe a little bit less maybe some okay all right yeah fair enough um that's great now where's most the growth come from how are you getting these customers it's almost all organic uh and referral so it's uh we have a decent relationship with apple they feature us every once in a while people find us uh you know search engines and we do some some advertising a little bit of apple search ads but uh that's where we could probably do better when you're doing apple search ads i mean what's it costing you fully way to get a new 20 a month customer on average we have a trial right so it costs we've calculated cost uh we get about 18 of a successful person who comes in if they if they do the trial because uh some drop off some don't how many trials do you need to get a new paying customer uh the trial rate is pretty good maybe it's like 35 but how long they stay after that is that is something that well let's talk about that in a second so you need you need essentially three try thirty percent conversion from trial to paid you need three trials it's gonna be paying customer if you pay apple when you do spend on ads 18 bucks for a good trial that comes out to essentially a customer acquisition cost for a customer paying 20 bucks a month now what you're alluding to i believe is churn right it can be tricky so so how so how bad is it how high is your turn right now uh i think it's on average like three or four months per user but it but some stay on for a really long time and some and some stay for a short time okay so three or four months uh per you i mean so do you know what your the percentage churn is uh meaning like if a hundred people are using it last month it goes down to 80 this month which would mean 20 churn no it's like three percent maybe less okay so three per okay so if you have if you have three percent churn per month right times 12 that's 36 percent churn annually am i understanding that right yeah but that also seems a little high okay well that if you have 36 percent churn annually right and you do one divided by that that would mean lifetime value is 33 months not four months like you just said you actually cut out for a second but that's okay i was just saying if your churn is 36 percent annually and you do one divided by churn to get your monthly lifetime value right that means the customer stays on average for 33 months but you just told me they stay on average for three to four months i i this is not the best part about my business i'm just trying to understand is your turn high or low 36 annually is not bad okay yeah a three if you think each customer pays you total on average four months at 20 bucks a pop right so 80 total that's is that what it is yeah except that if they come in through apple they uh apple gets 30 percent so that's a little challenge there so it's even worse yeah but if they come in through our website you know it's like it's standard credit card kind of charges so you click a lot more yeah i mean so so basically i mean what you're what you're actually looking at i mean you're churning between 10 and 20 of your customer base monthly um and that's what would give them about a four month lifetime value yeah i don't know i don't think we're turning our whole customer base 10 months okay you understand the math works though right i mean that's if you have a four-month lifetime value you have to be churning that much okay then then they're left they're they're lasting a lot longer than that okay okay then there again then it would i guess i guess i'm confused and where why'd you say three to four months is what they'd spend and that might have been our analysis off like maybe trial users came in at that three to four months what else it could have been a uh when i did this this initial analysis was a a snapshot and i haven't updated the analysis from like the different cohorts so that's where it could be off but we're definitely not losing 10 to 20 of our user base a month okay so you think it's more like like three percent or four percent yeah yeah well by the way i hope so that would mean your economics are way way better right that that means that a customer is going to stick with you on average for you know 30 months right instead of sorry 300 months right so i mean math gets bad when you start extrapolating like this but um sorry it's not 30 months it's 26 months but the point but guess the point i'm trying to get at is is the apple ad spend an effective ad spend for you could you pour a million bucks into that and get an extra amount of new customers uh it's been challenging because they the the um we've kind of uh played with the numbers we're not putting that much into it but uh actually the i have two brands like i mentioned flo val and flo kiosk little kiosk is converting higher and i'm spending a bit a bit more yeah but you said flo vela is the bigger business right now at 24 grand a month yeah well i mean i actually group them together because they're they're they're very similar um they just it's a second brand that does almost the same thing that makes sense why do that why would you split two things that do the same thing uh it it's it's been working for us the reason why we do is because kiosk is a specific use case it's basically we're like we're in essentially two two niches you're like white labeling your own software kind of yeah except the the the they're about 95 percent the same the kiosk really forces you to put forces the user to go into this kiosk mode it makes it really convenient for them to go into this kiosk mode where flo vel you can do that but it doesn't force you into that god i got it got it okay cool and flush out your team for me is it just you or what's your team look like uh it's me and a few uh of a one half half sales person and on the product side i've got a couple uh part-time people but i've actually been doing a lot of development myself so what would you say kind of total equivalent full-time salaries you're paying three two two two-ish okay great now it sounds like you've bootstrapped this is that right or have you raised capital well the i've raised capital this company's been around for a while we actually had a big a big team built this originally relatively big like uh 12 or 13 people we like when i was saying before in the beginning how we built all these apps before we had a kind of out of a agency pseudo agency type business and then we built this and the team got smaller and smaller because i really couldn't keep that whole team together and then but now this is going up this way now we're looking to see how we can go to the next level so how much total have you raised uh this is like the most complicated like the most complex crazy story but we'll just say i raised two million dollars okay um i mean don't get into too much detail but like either your fundraiser you haven't fundraised why i assume i know there's changes in the business and you probably bought some investors out or whatever but why is it complex um because the company's been around before then we had like investors in like in 0 708 and then we basically then they took themselves out then it went back into common and so then it was kind of like a a restart of score in the in the cash and so then now we have like two million dollars in notes i think that's fine i think that happens all the time so the agency was around since 2007 you launched the sas company in 2013. yeah okay that's great and all anyone that's put in any money is still in some form on the cap table yes yeah yeah i know i'm all about i do not believe in wiping i don't i don't believe in wiping people out at all i think that's i think it's good i mean look we also have to call a spade a spade right you've raised 2 million bucks and the company is still doing 24 grand a month right so i mean it's going to require like a lot of you not spending a lot i mean i assume you've spent a lot already right yes yeah i mean that was like ages ago so are you is the company casual positive say are you still burning yes no oh that's that's a good thing um so how i mean so how do you go from 1200 customers up to 5000 customers that's why i'm talking to you yeah i don't have the answer you got to give me 30 of company to figure that out uh well i mean but i'm trying but we also work one of the ways we've been successful is going into one company and then they branch out like uh one company not coin customer customer what's that name one like uh clopay it's one of our customers that are the largest garage door manufacturer in the country so they first started they built this for a trade show and then now they're making this system our system available to all their dealers they have 400 dealers so it's dealer dealer uh frank dealers and franchises and resellers is is a route that we've been going after are there any other things you upsell against it seems like a cheap price point for the value you're giving why not price it also against there's a 20 a month flat fee and then there's also a you know number of times the presentation was viewed per month and there's a quantity-based upsell once you pass 100 views per month it goes up to 100 bucks a month it's decent idea i haven't really considered that can you track that yeah boom baby wait so right now monthly how many how many presentation views are you doing across all 1200 customers i don't i don't know that but i could hundreds of dozens of thousands hundreds of thousands or millions uh probably in between tens and hundreds of thousands yeah interesting all right very cool let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh uh never split the difference number two is there a ceo uh that you're following or studying is there a ceo that i follow or study um not really although i i track a few people name one marco armand and what's he running he runs he builds uh uh overcast the uh podcasting app yep number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company xcode ex xcode it's the programming tool for for building apps ex or just x it's just x code right number four how many hours of sleep to get every night between six and eight and what's your situation married single kiddos [Music] kids okay how many kiddos two all right and uh how old are you i'm 50. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew what i say again what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh how to code guys falvella.com helping folks at trade shows uh do better kiosk presentations uh via their presentation tool software serving 200 customers paying 20 bucks a month so 24 000 a month right now in revenue founded in 2013. uh they raised 2 million bucks because there's a long story there there was an agency beforehand but now casual positive team of two churning about 48 of their customers annually for 52 net revenue retention as they look to scale spending 54 bucks in the apple app store to get a new customer for a three-month payback period brent thank you so much for taking us to the top thank you so much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss 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