How Folderly CEO Vladislav Podolyako grew to $1.6M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

Introduction hey folks my guest today is vladislav podoliako he's building a tool called folderly.com an email a platform that helps you understand your email delivered deliverability problems and how to solve them a lot of slob are you ready to take us to the top absolutely okay first off how did you discover this problem were you a marketer that had email deliverability problems 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 b2b appointment setting and like back like two years ago we had an issue when like you can imagine we have we had them back there like 200 clients it's around like 500 up to 1 000 mailboxes under our manage uh we usually have our successful email campaigns but where we are getting around like a huge open rate like 70 percent plus a great replay rate like 20 25 plus and great appointment rate and uh someday it like went up to five percent 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 get those meetings and it was so frustrating so i need to spend so i needed to spend some time to like 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 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-tailed leads and show like top-notch quality and collecting all those case studies makes me like make me the thought that we can private to the product because a lot of marketers on the market and sales people like hdrs sdrs head of sales etc they're struggling with email deliverability because no one in the market shows you how to fix any spam problems it appeared on your mailboxes so basically yeah so this law launched out of belkin's your agency where you discovered the problem now how big is falcons how much revenue did falcons do in 2020 so in 2020 balkans did almost six mil an error so in their annual revenue we have like uh 150 people on the board of balkans there's a lot of health marketing people also we started there to collect our development team which is our product team for the fall julie and to give you an idea how those companies are related to each other so we split up all those uh those two companies and each of our product will build here will split up to a different company with different team with own resources because if you boost traffic you need to take care of all those stuff and since we are like like to bootstrap and we hate to earn investments because we can do it by ourselves like leslie do more work etc so we want to split up everything and keep clean as possible and when we do not uh do not outreach the clients of balkans with the fold really stuff uh yet and we try to do it by our uh by our own because we like starting from scratch just uh or what's the difference we have our expertise and maybe resources at the beginning like hiring or some sales and marketing efforts but how many people are full-time only on folder late 20 so uh in total we have 180 people engineers seven and how many are sales and marketing two how many any quota carrying reps on folderly or no uh we have customer success team and it's now like three people three people okay so got it there's 20 people on the folderly specifically 180 over at the agency they're two separate cap tables so how is the equity of folderly split up do you own the majority uh yeah so i have a partner michael as my partner in balkans so we like equal partners but in the balkans and uh what we do to in order to create our products so we split it up on the each and every product we will build and uh the person who like involved most have a majority and uh the other person who like uh just helping with devices or some other stuff less [Music] yeah so you have the majority how much equity do you own in folder lately so we d like 60 on 30. you own 60 people yeah 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 yep i see interest do you like that model is it working so far you know that a company like worth nothing because no one asked you for the price yeah how many customers are you are you Currently serving 100 customers serving today on folder lee around hundred okay and what do they pay per month on average on there so we're starting to build our clients 200 bucks per month as a minimum subscription on average we charge our clients so whatever check it's around 1 500 bucks per a month so they scaled up on the system when they see the results so does that mean your monthly recurring Monthly recurring revenue revenue on folder lee is about 150 000 almost so uh it bit less i i can say that that's like a little bit less okay like 130 000 yeah somewhere how are you getting new customers are you just selling to agency customers from falcons or where are you getting new customers somewhere else so first of all since email marketing our bread and butter we heavily invested into the outbound marketing so we have like a sdr who handled 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 started to spend the content marketing ceo and organically we're getting around so not converted around 100 leads per month plus outbound leads we're getting like 100 uh 100 or 150 around that in terms of outbound meetings so in total we're having per month up to 300 meetings which is converting to our to like food clients so 300 meetings 150 convert into what oh no i i mean that 150 comes from the outbound marketing so the other 100 coming from the organically from the other sources like marketing and yeah from those 300 meetings how many convert to paid customers last month our average conversion rate around 10 plus so at the beginning when i were like most involved in sales it was like 25 because like founders can easily sell until you know what to say and uh our average conversion around 10 okay got it that makes sense now have you bootstrapped folderly or did you guys raise external capital yeah how much of your agency money have you invested into folderly i can say that uh nothing because if we will count the resources so we hire the folks uh in the fall dealer 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 sold for our clients and balkans and we need to build the product so we started to hire people under the balkans and we started to build the product and you know web was trapped from the beginning and we do not like add some money on top because we started to sell the product to clients even though we don't have like that mvp version so we started to fix those problems by our hands for some clients that they that they appeared that they have those deliberately problems and they agreed to us to do this and we like reinvest those money into the growth of their possibilities before you had your first customer you were paying engineers to build the platform how much total did you spend before your first customer it's uh it's like funny small of some so it's around like under the 10 grand under 10 000. okay that's great and you Bootstrapped said there's 20 full time on the team today do you plan to stay bootstrapped or even is going to go out and raise capital planning to stay bootstrapped so we'll see and are you prof is the business Profits profitable today from the day one how much profit last month um around 20 percent okay so call it thirty thousand dollars to the bottom line what do you do with that money do you pay it out as dividends or do you live we're investing no no we were investing to the growth so we i've started to heavily like hire more more people uh to like under handle the stuff or like adding more acquisition sources like ppc and others so reinvesting and planning to like getting more and more error is it sticky are people churning uh you mean uh like people uh the employee turned over or something ah churn so uh our churn uh it was 10 the july on august it went under 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. okay got it and that's that's monthly churn yep so that's really really high how why are people turning so much so uh because we're charging a lot for like average test tool which are in 200 bucks per mailbox and they have other tools that they spent money with like mailchimp or like outreach at io and other tools they is like splitting those budgets between those tools because those tools must to solve those problems and they actually don't most of the time they say that this is the high price even though we solve this problem or they thought that if we will solve this problem for one they never appear again but the thing is with single deliverability that if you are sending emails you can go to the spam straight away because you like engaging with the people people can be in bad mood and they like can you report this spam etc so the like that the first reason would be like summer for us in terms of increasement of the churn rate the second would be that customer thought that the this problem like one time one time problem that will solve and nothing happens again and they like return back after the six months or even less i had the case when uh when folk our class our client churn and the next day he went again to the spam and they their open rate went like down and he told me that vlad can you like bring me again and we'll do the stuff over again 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 130 000 a month in revenue where were you exactly a year ago a year ago so we actually started in november in november or last year okay so you went from nothing to 130 000 per month in under what 12 months eight or nine it's already nine months 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 are you only folder late in some meetings so some like execution decisions that i need to make but overall uh i'm like i thought about building more products and creating some sort of balkans grow so we'll build uh products under the group or services uh and we'll like use our resources that we collect over the years and we'll like uh 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 yeah so uh building the grow building folder on the side and yeah planning to grow striping let's wrap up with the famous five number one your favorite book actually it's predictable revenue by aaron ross number three bible of sales here number two is there a ceo you're following or studying actually no one because i have a heaven like the free time for following i rather sleep number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business besides your own agency uh the good one so it's up here and uh like confluence and jira and all those development stuff number three or four how many hours of sleep every night it depends on the day but it's uh the lowest uh like four up to six okay and what's your situation married single kids married any kids no kids okay how are you 25 25. last question what's something you wish you knew five years ago when you were 20 i wish i knew the the the experience they collected over the sales and marketing was agency and that why it's so hard to build urgency 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 bill belkins with like 100 bucks and we like came so far with a lot of people so i think uh i will tell myself that uh it's never go it's never was easier just starting to go faster or something like that folderly was launched guys in november of 2020 they've gone from nothing to a 1.5 million dollar run rate in nine months how'd they grow so fast well founders vlad and michael had an agency that did six million dollars in revenue last year they built the sas 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 for taking us to the top thank you nathan 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 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 sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement 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