Folderly Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Vladislav Podolyako. He's building a tool called folderly.com, an email, a platform that helps you understand your email deliverability problems and how to solve them. Vladislav, are you ready to take us to the top? [00:14] >> Absolutely. [00:15] Okay. First off, how did you discover this problem? Were you a marketer that had email deliverability problems? [00:21] >> Yeah. So I had, like, backstory about that. We have our our sales agency called Belkins. We serve for our clients as an email marketing provider. We help them with b to b appointment setting. And, like, back, like, two years ago, we had an issue when, like, you can imagine we had we had that back there, like, 200 clients. It's around, like, 500 up to 1,000 mailboxes under our manage. We usually have our successful email campaigns where [00:53] >> where we are getting around, like, huge open rate, like, percent plus, and great reply rate, like, 20 to 25% plus, and great appointment rate. And someday, it, like, went up to 5% open rate, low replay or replay rate, and no one like answer you at all, and there is no meetings. And our clients expected to to get those meetings. And it was so frustrating, so I need to to spend so I needed to spend some time to like [01:22] >> solve this problem. And I'd like start to dive deep to this durability topic and find out that there is a lot of stuff we forgot to take care of. And for me starting from the that time email marketing start to be like technical marketing because you need to take care of different things like DNS settings, like set up in the right way your domain, mailboxes, tools. You need to have like keep an eye on your content [01:50] >> that you need to like do not use links or spam words and you need to take care of your lead as well. So you need to like have hand tailored leads and show like top notch quality and collecting all those case studies makes me like make me the thought that we can pivot to the product because a lot of marketers on the market and salespeople like SDR SDRs head of sales etcetera, They're struggling with email deliverability [02:18] >> because no one on the market shows you how to fix any spam problems. It appeared on your mailboxes. Basically yeah. [02:27] So this law launched out of Belkins, your agency, where you discovered the problem. Now how big is Belkins? How much revenue did Belkins do in 2020? [02:36] >> So in 2020, Belkins did almost 6 mil in ARR, so in their annual revenue. We have, like, 150 people on the on the board of Belkins. There's a lot of sales marketing people, also we started there to collect the our development team which is now product team for the Folderly. And to give you an idea how those companies are related to each other, so we split it up all those those two companies, and each of our [03:05] >> product we build here, split it up to a different company with different team with own resources. Because if you're bootstrapping, need to take care of all those stuff. And since we're like like to bootstrap and we hate to earn investments because we can do it by ourselves, like, lessly do more work, etcetera. So we want to split up everything and keep clean as possible and even we do not do not outreach the clients of Belkins with [03:34] >> the Folderly stuff yet and we try to do it by our by our own. Because we're like starting from scratch just what's the difference? We have our expertise and maybe resources at the beginning like hiring or some sales and marketing efforts, but Just we [03:53] to jump in real quick, how many people are full time only on Folderly? [03:58] >> 20. So in total, we have 180 people. Engineers, seven. [04:04] And how many are sales and marketing? [04:07] >> Two. [04:08] How many any quota carrying reps on Folderly or no? [04:13] >> We have customer success team, and it's now, like, three people. [04:18] Three people. Okay. So got it. There's 20 people on the Folderly specifically, 180 over at the agency. There are two separate cap tables. So how is the equity of Folderly split up? Do you own the majority? [04:31] >> Yeah. So I have a partner, Michael, as my partner in Belkins. So we like equal partners, but in Belkins. And what we do to in order to creating our product. So we split it up on the each and every product we will build and the person who like involved most have a majority and the other person who like just helping with advisers or some other staff have less. [04:59] Folderly? [05:00] >> Yeah. [05:01] So you have the how much equity do own in Folderly? [05:05] >> So we did, like, 60 on 30. [05:08] You own 60% of the agency? [05:09] >> Yep. Yep. [05:10] Got it. So the agency will basically sit on the cap tables of these products that you guys spin out, and then you or Michael or whoever the leader is of the product will own 60% of the business. [05:23] >> Yep. [05:24] I see. Interest do you like that model? Is it working? [05:28] >> So far. You know that a company is, like, worth nothing because no one ask you for the price. [05:36] Yep. How many customers are you are you serving today on Folderly? [05:41] >> Around 100. [05:43] Okay. And what do they pay per month on average? [05:47] >> On we're starting to bill our clients $200 per month as the minimum subscription. On average, we charge our clients or whatever check, it's around $1,500 per month. So they scaled up in the system when they see the results. [06:05] So does that mean your monthly recurring revenue on Folderly is about a $150,000? [06:13] >> Almost. So it'd be less. I can say that's that's, like, it'd be less. Okay? [06:22] Like, 130,000? [06:25] >> Yeah. Somewhere. [06:28] How customers? Are you just selling to agency customers from Belkins, or where are you getting new customers somewhere else? [06:35] >> So first of all, since email marketing, our bread and butter, we heavily invested into the outbound marketing. So we have, like, SDR who handle the appointment setting, the guy who handles calls with me, and we, like, this is the first source. So open marketing and other source, we heavily starting to spend to content marketing, SEO, and organically, we're getting around so not converted, around 100 leads per month plus outbound leads. So we're getting, like, [07:09] >> one [07:12] >> hundred one hundred fifty around that in the terms of outbound meetings. So in total, we're having per month up to 300 meetings, which is converting to our call to, like, for the client. [07:27] So 300 meetings, a 150 convert into what? [07:33] >> No. I mean, that 100 to 50 comes from the outbound marketing. So the other 100 coming from the organically from the other sources, like company marketing and yeah. [07:45] From those 300 meetings, how many convert them to paid customers last month? [07:51] >> Our average conversion rate around 10 plus. So at the beginning when I like, mostly involved in sales, it was, like, 25 because, like, founders can easily sell until you know what to say. And our average conversion around 10%. [08:11] Okay. Got it. That makes sense. Now have you bootstrapped Folderly, or did you guys raise external capital? [08:17] >> Yeah. Bootstrapped. [08:19] How much of your agency money have you invested into Folderly? [08:24] >> I can say that nothing because if we will come to resources. So we hire the folks in the Folderly for the development team. We started to, like, raise the ideas that we need to build the product. So we have an idea that we solve for our clients in Belkins and we need to build the product. So we started to hire people under the Belkins and we started to build the product. And, you know, we've strapped for [08:52] >> the beginning and we do not like add some money on top because we started to sell the product to clients even though we probably have like that MVP version. So we started to figure those problems by our hands for some clients that they that they appeared that they have those delivery problems, and they agreed to us to do this. And we, like, we invest those money to the growth of the Folderly. [09:18] But, Vladislav, before you had your first customer, you were paying engineers to build the platform. How much total did you spend before your first customer? [09:29] >> It's it's, like, funny small sum. So it's around, like, under the $10,000. [09:37] Under 10,000. Okay. That's great. And you said there's 20 full time on that team today. Do you plan to stay bootstrapped, or are you gonna gonna go out and raise capital? [09:46] >> Planning to stay bootstrapped, so we'll see. [09:50] Is the business profitable today? [09:53] >> From day one. [09:55] How much profit last month? [10:02] >> Around 20%. [10:04] Okay. So call it $30,000 to the bottom line. What do you do with that money? Do you pay it out as dividends or do you live it [10:10] >> We're investing. No. No. We were investing to the growth. So we I've started to heavily, like, hire more more people to, like, handle handle the stuff or or, like, adding more position sources like PPC and others. So reinvesting and planning to, like, getting more and more ARR. [10:30] Is it sticky or are people churning? [10:33] >> You mean, like, people the employee turnover or something? Churn. So our churn, it was 10, but July and August it went up to 25 because of the summer and like cutting costs of the budgets until the September and other business months. But our average churn rate is 10, maximum 15. [11:01] Okay. Got it. And that's that's monthly churn? [11:04] >> Yep. [11:05] So that's really, really high. How why are people turning so much? [11:11] >> So because we're charging a lot for like average SaaS tool, we're charging $200 per mailbox, and they have other tools that they spend money with like Mailchimp or like Outreach. And other tools, they is like splitting those budget between those tools because those tools must solve those problems and they actually don't. Most of the time they say that this is the high price even though we will solve this problem, or they thought that if we will [11:42] >> solve solve this problem for one they never appear again. But the thing is with email deliverability that if you are sending emails you can go to the spam straight away because you are like engaging with the people, people can be in bad mood and they like can you report this spam, etcetera. So the the the first reason would be like summer for us in terms of increasement of the churn rate. The second would be that customer [12:10] >> thought that the this problem like one time one time problem that we will solve and nothing happens again and they are like returned back after the six months or even less. I had the case when when Folder our our client churn and the next day he went again to the spam and they they are open rate went like down and he told me that Vlad, can you, like, bring me again and we'll do the stuff over [12:39] >> again. [12:40] And so Vlad, people are coming and going. I understand that. You'll figure out churn over time, but what does growth look like today? If you're doing a $130,000 a month in revenue, where were you exactly a year ago? [12:51] >> A year ago so we actually started in November in November last year. [12:57] Okay. So you went from nothing to a $130,000 per month in under, what, twelve months? [13:05] >> Eight or nine. It's already nine months. [13:08] Nine months. Okay. Yeah. It's obviously a really high growth rate, so it's fun to see you growing so quickly using your agency model. What does your week look like today? Do you spend any time on the agency, or are you only folder late? [13:20] >> In some meetings. So some are, like, execution decisions that I need to make. But overall, I'm, like, thought about building more products and creating some sort of growth. So we'll build products under the growth or services and we'll like use our resources that we collect over the years and we will like building those frameworks for like faster building of the products and we will like bootstrap everything because we have an agency on the side. And So [13:52] >> building the grow, building Folderly on the side, and, yeah, planning to grow, bootstrapping. [13:58] Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book. [14:03] >> Actually, it's predictable revenue by Aaron Ross. [14:07] Number two bible of sales here. [14:10] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [14:15] >> Actually, no one because I have I have, like, the free time for following. I rather sleep. [14:21] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business besides your own agency? [14:28] >> The good one. So it's Zapier and, [14:34] >> like, Confluence and Jira and all those development stuff. [14:38] Number three or four. How many hours of sleep do eat every night? [14:45] >> It depends on the day, but it's the lowest, like four up to six. [14:52] Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [14:56] >> Married. [14:57] Any kids? [14:57] >> No kids. [14:58] No kids. Okay. How old are you? [15:01] >> 25. [15:02] 25. Last question. What's something you wish you knew five years ago when you were 20? I [15:09] >> wish I knew the [15:15] >> the the the experience I collected over the sales and marketing was agency and that why it's so hard to build agency first. So, you know, that if you're building service, it's hard because it's everything around you and the like your partner. Michael and I talked to build Belkins with like $100 and we like came so far with a lot of people. So I think I will tell myself that it's never go it's never was easier just [15:46] >> starting to go faster or something like that. [15:49] Folderly was launched guys in November 2020. They've gone from nothing to a $1,500,000 run rate in nine months. How did they grow so fast? Well, Founders Vlad and Michael had an agency that did $6,000,000 in revenue last year. They built the SaaS tool as a separate company outside the agency and are now scaling very, very quickly. The tool helps you make sure your emails don't end up in spam boxes. It's an email deliverability tool. Vlad, thanks [16:12] for taking us to the top. [16:14] >> Thank you, Nathan. [16:17] One 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 [16:42] p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's [17:03] an acquisition, a big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You You can go in there and quickly search and see [17:24] what people are 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. 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, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to [17:44] counter those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.