How Fluidui CEO Ian Hannigan grew Fluidui to $4M revenue and 18K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is david carney he's the founder of a company called fluidui.com a software prototyping tool that has helped over a quarter of a million product managers entrepreneurs and product visionaries to create and communicate their ideas he cares most about great usability efficient product development processes and social socially responsible companies dave are you ready to take us to the top i am indeed okay so should people think of this like kind of like a mock-up tool or a prototyping tool or how do you think about it yeah i mean fluid wire is a prototyping tool mainly focused on kind of product designers uh product managers and early stage entrepreneurs okay and the way that you make money so you can support and reinvest in growth is what or is it a sas company it's a sales company it's a monthly subscription yeah i see okay so kind of give us an idea on average what do people pay for a month for this so the base price is fifteen dollars a month or a hundred dollars a year all the way up to a team license for five people is about five hundred dollars a year okay and what would you think of a fair average is it more 15 bucks a month uh yeah the majority of people are going to start off trying out the product they're on their own they come into the 15 account uh but then any of the larger companies coming in would go straight to team yeah yeah when you look though if you look at your current customer base today and you look at kind of like the average would you say the average is one seat at 15 or three or four seats at 500 sure i'd say probably 60 65 percent at the bottom tier about maybe 25 30 to the middle tier and then the rest of the top tier i see i see got it very good and put all this on a timeline for us when did you launch the company 2012 is when we kicked off uh fourth of july 2012 is when we launched i mean were there fireworks involved and what happened here why was that the date uh that was the day we were ready that was the day that um like literally the last thing we had to get started was the billing right uh we didn't we didn't want to launch a product that didn't have you know the capacity to build people from day one that was one of the things we were pretty solid about so um we as soon as the building was ready to go the product is ready put it out into the market and you know we've got customers on day one day two day three so here's the right decision that's great and uh and what have you scaled to today over the past six years in terms of total customers on the platform so we're thinking about at the moment about 18 000 customers that's amazing okay and now do you employ a freemium model are those all paying um so you know in terms of total signups i think we're probably about three quarters of a million okay um and then so all of those those people are paying okay god i got it so 700 so i want to i want to break this down because there's great lessons here we've had a couple people come on with successful freemium models like type form and there's a lot of good lessons in there so you've signed up 750 000 kind of accounts and you've converted 18 000 into paid walk us through that funnel how have you gotten 750 000 signups um i i'd love to say that there's a coherent strategy there a little part of it is getting lucky right at the very start right uh getting the product into the market at the the right time so kind of seeing where the space is see where the market is moving and then kind of putting your stuff out putting your the word out onto whether it was social media whether it's on to you know some of the big sites that we got traffic from early on like hacker news and reddit uh and really kind of building that early number of inbound links into the site that generated traffic for us all the way through um more recently then you know we've obviously had to you know become i guess more structured in our approach to marketing um so we have a mixture of paid advertising and kind of content strategy content marketing so when you now when you look at kind of your fully weighted cost to get a new 15 a month kind of user what would you pay to get that user so our yeah our lifetime value is about three times what our acquisition cost is and it's normally thirty to forty dollars to get the uh customer that's not bad at all so if you're paying you know let's be let's be most conservative here so let's say the most expensive you pay 40 bucks to get a 15 a month customer your payback there are still three months that's healthy yeah yeah are you bootstrapping the company or have you raised uh we did some early raise early on about a half million dollars um that'll last that was 2014 2015 but we haven't gone for any further funding so you've resisted the temptation i love i was saying i'd like you way more if you're totally bootstrapped but i still like you a lot if you only raise 500 grand that's pretty good yeah yeah what what has given you the leverage to be able to say no we don't want any more capital we're going to keep growing organically um some of it is personality uh some of it is you know we went down the the road of getting that initial funding uh it's a it's it's a torturous process right tell me about that it's it's not something that i particularly would have loved to do um and you know to a certain extent we haven't had to do that we built a company where you know we've hit our success success metrics we we know what our market is um and you know it's it's not going to be a billion dollar company right we're not out there trying to replace adobe we're not out there trying to embrace or replace some of those really big players in the market we know what our market is we're not you know to go out and then sell something to a venture capital organization you know we need to present a much much bigger vision than the market we're in so we actually need to build different products and work with different ideas or sell something that you know is different to the customers that we currently have yep so i assume today i mean you have full leverage your cash flow positive yeah that's great and tell me more about the team i want to understand kind of how many are focused on seo and content what's the total team size today so we i think it's age at the moment we're still relatively small relatively compact okay and where's everyone based on dublin um mostly dublin a couple of guys in poland okay dublin and poland that's great and what's the breakdown there how many engineers versus kind of seo marketers so uh we have two developers we have one can a sound video production slash development guys of front-end development uh and then we have two people in marketing uh myself and then one part-time person on support okay interesting and and so you know any volume based approach like this where it's kind of low arpu high volume churn and onboarding becomes very critical um what is your churn today and how do you make sure to keep that very low um i mean and that is that's always been one of our our big problems right uh is that our turn rate has been higher than you know we would like it to how high would you say is a problem maybe 10 to 15 a month okay 15 revenue churn or logo churn uh revenue i'm not i'm not sure the exact definition so like if you churn a customer paying a ton of money and they churn and they were 10 of your revenue that's 10 percent churn but it's only one logo out of 18 000 which would be like 0.01 logo churn right um it's revenue and then i think okay so you lose it 15 revenue churn per month and why so why do you think it's so high um yeah it's i i for a long long time i thought it was primarily product or it was primarily marketing it was primarily a whole bunch of things that in some ways that we were responsible for um and then i finally kind of came across an article which made so much more sense because we we done gone through all of the kind of the iterations of the funnel and kind of tidying it up and sealing it off over and over and over again um but what you find is like churn one of the biggest impart that the biggest factors that impact churn is the type of audience that you get right so if you get a large corporate uh who signs up for a large number of accounts they're going to make a decision really really slowly but then they're going to turn maybe at one or two percent a year all right um if you get a smaller company they're going to be more agile um you know they'll share maybe five percent five percent a month that kind of thing particularly let's say for example startup they're up in the 10 15 and then if you go to students who are very very cash conscious you're looking at maybe 25 the audience that you heavily impacted into the chair that you get and then the style of the product the type of the product that we've built is very much a prototyping tool so we would people will come in they build a prototype the average customer customer lifespan for us is about seven months but they might go away you know come back two years later because they have a new project but once they have that prototype finished uh you know they they don't need to continue paying for the the paid account that's right yeah and i mean in terms of you know in terms of scale to really understand this problem today you know 18 000 customers paying your smallest price point which was 15 bucks a month i mean that means you're north you're north of 270 grand a month today correct uh a little bit less than that but a little bit okay a little bit so called like 250ish something like that and what does growth look like so if you go back a year from today what were you doing then so we've been staying people for about the last three years we haven't been you're staying flat yeah and that's it just because of churn yes yeah so so what um it must be like super stressful trying to figure out every month how to make up the 15 percent you're going to turn like i mean how do you deal with that stress as a founder um it's no i it's just part of what we do i mean you get to the point where your marketing processes are in place you know that's that's making that up um i mean eventually you turn through the whole market right that's the problem so constant contact is a great example of this they went public they served an smb with a price point of about 20 bucks a month uh the problem is they'd add 60 000 customers a month but they would churn 50 000. eventually they turned through the whole market and they they and the public markets only rewarded them with a horrible uh you know ratio in terms of what they traded at relative to other sas companies like so i'm just curious i mean eventually you've got to figure out how to get these people stickier uh yeah absolutely all right at the moment to be honest you know for free as that is it's it's in maintenance we're not actively we're we're developing new products and new so our strategy is more in relation to you know we will park that box what's the next product um it's it's it's just about begun in development um it is in the sports psychology space okay so how do you go from prototyping to sports psychology though i think maybe you go from prototyping to like something close to prototyping um it's um it's a long journey it's been a journey i've been on for about a year i think at this stage uh looking at markets and looking at all the decisions that i made first time around as a first-time founder uh looking at i i got interested in sleep uh i started thinking about a kind of a hardware play with sleep uh then i went into a like an app for sleep kind of a head head space for sleep uh again the market i just saw more and more stuff coming into the market there obviously headspace have gone into sleep cam i've gone into sleep there's a bunch more apps there so i kind of looked at that but i literally i went looking uh just on a whim i did a search for uh so i'm searching in the psychology space because it's just a personal interest of mine so you know coming from when you learn more about marketing when you learn more about design which is very much what fluid is about in the role i've played you realize that it's all based on the human mind right so i was just searching in that space and i just did a search and there's nothing in the app stores uh in that space so you're gonna take your team of eight currently working on this refocus them on this new idea launch it and see what happens absolutely very cool all right dave let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh mine blank right now uh i'm gonna say champion's mind by jim afromail because i'm reading it right now number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now no number three what billing software do you use uh realex it's an irish company real ex great uh number four how many hours i sleep to get every night eight hours and what's your situation married single kiddos i'm getting married next friday oh congratulations no kids uh one kid one kiddo okay and how old are you i am 40. 40 years old last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um you know what i wish i had the confidence to go out and be an entrepreneur earlier uh it's not something that existed in the the you know the world that i grew up in uh it was like that the banker job was safe the the lawyer job was safe um but i wish i knew a little bit more about how to do what i do earlier guys start a company earlier fluid ui now serving 18 000 customers over 750 000 free signups they each pay about 15 bucks a month for about 250 grand a month in revenue the problem is churn's too high and that's kind of a nature of the prototyping tool right so they've been flat year over year but they are cash flow positive 500 000 bucks raised team of eight between dublin and poland looking at new products to add on to really kind of expand revenue get new customers going to new spaces currently on the current again on the current product spending about 40 bucks to get a new customer so about a three month payback period all right dave enjoy the wedding thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much