How Flyplugins CEO Benjamin Arellano grew to $500K revenue and 6K customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is ben ariano he is the founder and creator of a company called flyplugins.com an e-learning solution for wordpress he worked in i.t for 12 years before he got the entrepreneurial bug and jumped ship to run his own plug-in business full-time he's happily married with three boys and he loves to serve at his church ben you ready to taste the top let's do it man all right did you sell your pastor on the wordpress plugin is he a customer or she a customer uh you know what they're not teaching courses right now but they do have one of my plugins they do have s3 media meister but but not the wp course for one fair enough fair enough all right so yeah let's let's focus here on which which business is primary so fly plug-ins you have two primary plug-ins is that right so we have three plug-ins so so uh the primary business is fly plugins and when we initially launched we had we had dreams and plans and i say we cause i'm co-founder i have a business partner nate we had plans of launching multiple premium plugins um when we got started you know we built wp course were the first ones s3 media meister was second surely came much later actually we had another one in between there which we pulled off the market um but we've gotten to three products so far uh we feel that that's just kind of where we're at we're comfortable with three products it's kind of surrounding that e-learning space um which which we kind of settled into we it's it's not something that we plan to do um it just kind of it sort of just happened we were scratching our own edge and it's just kind of how we is there one plug-in that makes up the majority of the revenue yes wp courseware makes up i would say about 75 of our revenue okay wp courseware and so what's the website for that uh it's it's still fly plugins forward slash wp courseware okay and how do you build for that is it sas or one time license or what it it it's a it's a yearly subscription so it's not sas it's it's actually a downloadable product so um but it but it is a yearly subscription and what do you build for it what do customers pay on average uh depends on the licensing model so we got a two five and ten license it starts out at i believe right now it's at 124 bucks right around there for two site license and then it goes up from there and what's the most expensive uh right now i think we got it built at about 175 i believe right now we're running some specials right now 50 offside i'm thinking it's about 170 175 179 right around there somewhere so if you average what your average customer pays you it's going to be somewhere around 130 140 bucks a year yeah roughly now we do have customers that come in they buy wp course where they see s3 medium maestro which is also very useful for online courses um so we kind of we can we can upsell them with that as well okay when did you launch the company what year uh 2012 2012 very good this a while how did you get your first you know 510 customers you remember yeah so um so so back in the day a lot of a lot of plugins i mean we were kind of like we had no idea what we were doing because we launched the plugin right who launches the wordpress plugin there's no forums out there or anything that tells you how to do this so we were just thinking like how did we launch this thing what we we started noticing that a lot of people were launching uh plug-ins on the warrior forum not sure if you're familiar with warrior forum network marketing internet marketing yeah yep sort of like that so we did a what they call a wso uh warrior special offer i think it was and we we launched this thing for like 20 bucks i mean it was just 20 bucks and we got the first i don't know five six seven sales in the first day i think it was like a uh something so it was a day in september i remember in in 2012 and we were just like stoked it actually sold you know very good so those are your first ten how many customers have you scaled to today oh we are over twenty thousand twenty thousand okay wow and so okay yeah let me let me let me digress a little bit so when we first launched obviously we were flipping at 20 20 bucks a pop i mean that was not recurring revenue um so then uh we finally got marketable and stuff like that we started raising the prices i think we got up to like 60 bucks at some point um but at that point we're still we're not recurring revenue now um we had some guys come and tell us hey you you should be charging yearly for this thing um we did not get that launched until i think 2014 we launched recurring revenue uh type systems in our with our plug-in the problem is is we we couldn't have we didn't have a system that would divvy out licenses and then track you know the recurring uh revenue and stuff like that so we um we finally got a system together uh there's another plug-in company called easy digital downloads and they they put together a really nice package for for stuff like software licensing for recurring revenue and stuff like that so so we've implemented that in 2014 late 2014 so a lot of our customers came in those first first couple years and and unfortunately and we grandfathered a minute we still support them to this day so they they they still get support they still get updates um and then thereafter we we took off with recurring revenues so we've had we've had a lot of we've had a gamut of customers that came in non-recurring and then uh since then we have nothing but recurring as i understand so so this year how many people on the recurring planet of the 20 000 oh i would say people that are still still on it maybe maybe 6 000 people 7 000 people okay 6 000 on the recurring got it and and then so sum up uh between 2012 and 2014. do you remember like in 2014 how much revenue you guys did total uh you know honestly it was it wasn't it wasn't a ton it was maybe if i had to guess 14 000 40 000 a month okay well so how much did you do total in 2014 do you remember it sounds like like 150 160 000 close yeah yeah right and scale obviously you've scaled up today have you done that on bootstrap or did you raise capital it's all bootstrapped i love that how many are on the team today so it's me and my business partner nate we've got uh two teams of developers now they are they're just contractors so we've got a team out in india we've got a team up in portland um so they're both working on different uh plug-ins and then we have two support guys one in bosnia and then one in poland so how many total would you say are employees working on the company uh we don't have any employees i mean they're all contractors i mean how many contractors total yeah so i mean the the development companies i mean they run maybe teams of four to five each and then you know we got our two supporters 14 total two teams of five two support people and then you and your co-founder sounds about right interesting um why bosnia um well we we put out ads for uh you know for support and uh the couple of companies that we went through the ads too for um that's just where they responded we we liked what we saw with these guys they had you know multiple experience with other plug-ins supporting plug-ins and so when we interviewed them they just seemed to be on point so we hired them what does i mean with this sort of license especially where it's downloadable do people pay it every year in other words the cohort that's signed up of june last year they were new june this year they do and it's automatic so it's automatic unless they cancel so um and that and that buys you another year of support and updates so what percent renewed this year oh um i'd have to if i had to guess right now i've not looked at the numbers this year about fifty percent okay so typically about fifty percent of each month's cohorts or renews the year later yeah because i mean so there's a lot of people that right out the gate they just want to cancel they cancel the bad thing about that is they don't lock in the price so for example a lot of people that came in in the early years 2014 2015 they locked in a renewing rate because we were discounting the renewal rate at 30 there was a point where we we had talked to some people we were doing some masterminding and they're like you know why are you doing that why are you why are you discounting that new renewal year and so we thought well let's just try it you know so we took off that 30 renewal fee and so it bumped it up so but a lot of people that uh didn't lock in um unfortunately yeah they've got the higher renewal rates um and then you have also you have you know credit card return and that kind of thing you know credit cards fail because they're they're expired um so yeah you deal with some of that stuff too what's it cost you fully waited to get a new customer that's willing to pay 120 bucks a year for the license well honestly man we've all we've done really is like you know facebook advertising what we've been we've been really um lucky i guess to to get get on some you know really well known blogs and so we've got you know people naturally just uh marketing us um but to get a customer right now i think we're we're probably paying i don't know five six bucks i mean because it's like it's all it's all facebook you know facebook ads so why doesn't it scale i mean why don't you have 20 million in revenue of cac so cheap where is it where's that system break that system breaks at the point because so so it's very niche so so what we're doing i mean we're targeting people that are using wordpress wordpress runs about 30 of the internet so you would think that's like a huge pool but then that really narrows down because now you're trying to figure out okay of those 30 million or i'm sorry 30 of the internet that 30 how many people are actually running online courses and how do you figure out who wants to run an online course so we're it's just it's just trying to find the markets it's trying to find um the target really is what it is it boils down to and so uh i mean we've we've found some really cool targets with you know um i'm not sure if you're familiar with like wpbeginner um that's syed bulky he runs that that blog which is very prominent in the wordpress space um so we target them you know we target people like kat flynn who's you know who's really promoting online courses and things like that so um it's it's just a matter of targeting i don't know that we've necessarily dialed it in we're we're kind of i don't know we've since it's all been bootstrapped we've not brought in like some really you know big-time experts or anything to really you know take a look at our entire business and really figure out you know who's our target market we've really just been trying to figure that out on our own so i mean partially it's probably our fault just because we've done that um but then again it's just it is difficult to find that market it's pretty niche yep and i don't disagree with any of that um to back into again growth so if you were doing 150 000 back in store 2014 and today you've got 6 000 people at 130 bucks per year i mean that puts you at like 800 000 bucks a year in revenue is that about right uh that seems a little bit seems a little bit a little bit high um yeah i think we're a little bit lower than that to be honest with you um what do you think you'll break what do you think you'll bring in zero five thousand yeah so what's that what do you think you'll break this year i'm hoping we'll break half a million this year okay when what'd you do last year so what growth rate would that be uh we're probably doing about maybe four and a half four and a half and a half what 450 yeah 450. interesting um okay good so so so again good growth bootstrapped company um talk to me about the multiple plug-in strategy right so if this one's so profitable why do anything else well that all happened in the beginning so when we first launched wp coursework that was again to scratch our own niche we wanted we wanted to create an online course there were no platforms out there to do it on wordpress um we actually ended up creating an online course without any type of plugin we kind of just hack some things together make it look like a course um the course utterly failed and then and then what we did is we took those ideas and thought hey i wonder if we can make a wordpress plugin to run an online course so we did we each threw in about 500 bucks and and we built this plug-in now right out of the gate we we kind of determined a couple things one of the things was hey you know a lot of people use video to to run their online courses um the problem is if you throw up a video on youtube what what's the problem i mean anybody can watch it right and it's public now i could i could upload an mp4 file to like let's just say aws but it's unprotected and so what happens then people download the video so we we launched this through medium it's a video player that interacts with aws it locks down it creates an expiring url so that your videos can't cannot be uh hotlinked across the internet so that was just kind of out of necessity as well because we were doing video type courses so we built those two plugins right out the gate a little bit later a third one came along like i said we we we uh we put that one on the shelf just because it wasn't it wasn't doing very well we came out with churnley maybe a couple years ago and that's just to uh basically reduce credit card churn because we were seeing that in our own business so again just scratching our own edge um all that does is send out a reminder prior to a credit card expiring so that they can update the credit card without having to log into the site very good so so yeah very good all right ben we're out of time here let's wrap up with the famous five number one is there a ceo you're following or studying uh not any particular i mean i follow a lot of people um but yeah pick one so i i follow um so there's the guy nathan barry i'm not sure if you're familiar with him yeah convertkit very cool i love his business model he's a sas guy number two is there a book you're reading right now business book no no not at the moment number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company besides your own i mean wordpress i love wordpress number four how many hours are sleeping every night um about seven okay and situation married single kids married and kids how many three three boys three kids oh busy guy how old are you i'm 40. okay last question what's something you wishing you knew when you were 20 online business i wish i wish i would have i would have started much clearer guys there you have it flyplugins.com their number one plug-in wp courseware has over six thousand customers on a recurring basis they'll hopefully break about 500 000 this year in sales up from 450 000 last year again all bootstrap so good growth healthy company profitable team of 12 people 10 of those are outsourced obviously engineers working on different plug-in sets but growing nicely ben thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan appreciate it man