How Gmelius CEO Florian Bersier grew to $1.2M revenue and 10K customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is florian bersie he's the founder and original developer of gmailis prior to founding the company he acted as a cyber risk consultant and digital economy researcher for private and public organizations such as the world bank the london school of economics and the swiss confederation he has 10 years plus years experience in the design of algorithms and complex network architectures he's a member of the network of excellence in internet science and regularly intervenes as a speaker to diverse blockchain events in switzerland and abroad flooring you ready to take us to the top yeah i'm already i have to tell you i'm jealous and envious of your country i i went out to and skied at courchevel during uh new year's eve and it's just beautiful country out there yeah and now it's really snowy so it's really the best time to to go to switzerland i assume you're a big skier then right yeah yeah you know when you grow in situation at two or three you're already on skill that's funny all right tell me about the tell me about the tool so what does gmailius do and how do you guys make money are you a sas company yeah we are a freelance sales company basically what we offer is a kind of new generation next generation crm which is light and collaborative and lives right inside gmail we make possible for customers to automate their outreach manage their support right inside gmail and really get a kind of transparent real-time view of all the different pipelines within the company so should people think of this almost like streak yeah it's a kind of streak but really with a better let's say collaborative dimension and not mainstream just they applied a kind of strict standard crm crm viewpoint where we are really more flexible we really target smes companies who don't have this kind of very strict uh processes the workflow part of their companies and we really try to offer something that is easy to use and light okay interesting and tell me kind of what your model is so on average what are companies are people paying per month to use this tool yeah so currently we offer three different paid plans different depending on the segments we we currently observe um so on average first sips it will be an error pay you of 10 10 dollars okay uh per user eight seats for a per user that's ten dollars per user per month yeah okay and when did you start working on this what your launch yeah so the company was incorporated in let 2016 so a bit more than two years ago and but jimmy just really started as a side project during my studies so basically i i did the first version just for myself what year a long time ago i think it was around 2014 2015. and why did you build it for yourself you had some problem you really wanted to solve and you built yes the thing is i had to handle a few different uh projects with people around the world and our main herb was the inbox so i really tried to automate a few things and make the process easier for myself by developing the provision of what became gmail and so what have you been able to scale the company to today in terms of total seats on the platform or customers on the platform yeah in terms of paid seats we are more than 10 000 paid uh set places today um an average of 100 000 daily active users so we have a conversion rate which is close to 10 in person yes you have a 10 you know we've had the type form folks on we've had a lot of the mailchimp focus on whether essentially it's a freemium model getting 10 percent free to paid is actually fairly high so um how are you hitting that conversion rate where do you show the paywall inside the app yeah so well basically up to now the the growth was really organic mainly via in-app variety and uh content but are we are we actually when you're gonna use the solution you install gmedius you're gonna start with a try supporting the trial for upper tier and really try to uh to onboard you in quite a quick way uh show you the the fact that you can really have this collaborative dimension part of the product so people are gonna try the solution with their teammates and it's like that that we can trigger the upgrade and the decision to stay with a solution it's really i mean the other thing that's perhaps nice for solution is that our typical customers they are mainly using trello for project management they're going to use a cell solution such as mixed marks or yes where and perhaps another help desk uh like senders help scout or even front and when they they come to gma's they can really replace two or three different services before solution and that is quite obvious when whenever you start using gmail properly so yep so how many you know this is a chrome extension and the chrome store if you rank high on the chrome store you get a lot of organic new users every day just for things like you know crm or gmail or send later in gmail or things like that so how many new installs are you getting per day would you say today when you look at the google developer dashboard so uh on average uh every every day we add 200 users okay we have four four we have four thousand new users every month correctly and what about uninstalls per day so earned souls uh i i'm i think the last time i saw it was like something like five percent monthly so on installs okay five percent on what base on or on the base of installation of plasma okay so if you do 200 per day times 30 days what what is that that's called 6 000 new installs per month you're saying on average five percent of those will be uninstalls yeah i mean you know mainly as the size of premium says if you go to the free plan and you really start not using it it's kind of people are going to organize the solution so yeah we have around five percent of those people okay that's not a ton i mean that means you're doing about 300 installs per month uninstalls per month cool that's great one thing a lot of people have troubles with that are in the chrome store space is google is changing uh how the chrome store works with all these data issues recently how have you managed to stay ahead of that curve yeah so actually the main channel for installs was our website and not the chrome web surface and basically a few months ago they changed the inline install so whenever you try to install a chrome extension you will be redirected to to the chrome lift store while before you just add a kind of small dialogue or small process directly on your website so we have to find a way to uh to learn a lot uh we are maybe testing a few different things honestly today but that's a shame that they changed this kind of mechanism yeah no it makes good sense um talk to me a little bit more about um you said a lot of the installs are coming from your website um what kind of content are you putting out that are attracting people to your website yeah so currently we do some seo research we're researching for keywords topics that make sense for solution so for instance it will be all the the sharing box short level things um whether you want to improve your project management right inside right inside your inbox so we're going to try to provide and offer content around those lines we also try to be quite present on platforms such as cora google product forums just ways to uh to make the brand and the solution even more visible and then up to now we uh we started with a large customer world of north and now the inaugurality meaning people are going to invite other people to to to install the solution so it's a big part of our acquisition and foreign 10 you know 10 000 people paying 10 bucks a month right it means about a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue is that kind of where you're at today yeah the monthly recurring revenue actually we just pay the past this uh 100k um mrr congratulations and where were you about a year ago a year ago i think last february we were around 21k oh wow okay so a significant growth there was that really just doubling down on seo keywords on the website no no it's really the majority part is is really due to the product uh what we did is that we took time to reiterate of the solution and understand how our customers were using uh different tools and what was their workflow habits and then we really iterated over our imdp and i think that we found something that resonates in the market the last few months so the main really built uh kind of big growth over the last six eight months time and have you bootstrapped the company or raised capital no no it's bootstrap up to now i love that that's great and how many people are on the team so today 11 people old days in geneva all everyone's in geneva yeah yeah very good i love that um uh and talk to me about churn it's critical in a sas company so just just revenue churn obviously so so what does your turn look like so the revolution is a net negative today um so we have more expansion than contractions uh and uh the customer chance so let's say the the location is a range is between one and two persons monthly florian if you actually break down the net negative things so we look at contraction expansion so gross revenue churn over the past 12 months is what the growth revenue uh expansion chart uh of the churn uh yeah we are close to minus um one or five minus one point five percent yeah that's that's net revenue i'm trying to i'm trying to break it down between growth between contraction and expansion so how much did you contract last year and then we'll add back expansion oh i i actually if you look at i think i'm gonna just focus on the last six months so on the last six months we have i think five more than one than when we uh remove a contraction well again i'm trying to actually get to a percentage here so so for example if you have negative net churn of negative one percent that would mean maybe you're contracting by five percent but you're expanding by six percent that's how you get to net negative one so do you know what your contraction percentage is yeah i think we are close to seven on the same time seven on four or something like that i need to check myself i don't know i don't really know about that annual that's annually or every six months the the negative churn the seven percent revenue churn right the gross revenue churn that seven percent is every six months or every year yeah the last figure it was for six months okay so seven percent gross revenue churn every six months so 14 annually and you're saying you expand accounts by about 15 to get to net negative one yeah something like honestly i need to check i'm not sure what do you use to track all this do you use like one of these tools yeah actually before we're using uh barimetrics and profit well and now we develop our own in-house dashboard for that okay and why what did they do that what did they do that you or they didn't do that you had to build yourself yeah what i wanted is a way to correlate the usage of the of the solution with the different kpis that we have in the revenue and it's not possible today with those solutions so you know the the cross-referencing between uh what kind of features correlates to an upgrade and which plan so to do that we have to have our own architecture so for example now you know when someone installs and starts the free trial that you've got to get them to send four send laters in the first hour to increase the likelihood that they convert at the end of the trial something like that yeah i mean it's really useful for ib testing a few things in terms of onboarding in terms of user experience but it really makes sense to know which kind of future uh are are gonna be critical for for decisions to upgrade uh how we can present them uh that's that's why it was important for us to really get this kind of matrix and data yeah that makes good sense talk to me a little bit about cac so to get a new ten dollar a month customer fully weighted what are you spending on cac two today close to zero uh because we didn't have any uh uh actually we just ariel of course marketing person uh so even in terms of salary was not that much doing um so yeah but to be clear most your growth was coming from people writing around certain seo keywords so like do you and when you look at fully weighted cac do you include like there's the writer's salary the content the seo the yeah well i mean it was mainly me and uh so you did have a you said you just hired your first marketing and sales person but then you just said you had a vp of sales the the marketing person is just new but we had a sales person before yeah okay so do you measure fully weighted calc right now or no no currently i i i don't have any figures on the cache i need to get them down yeah i just ask because i see like um i see like boomerang and um streak and all these guys spend a fortune on on on ads because they know what their cac and payback is and i guess it must be working because i keep seeing the ads yeah now chloe if you look at the competition there are even uh ivor uh is doing a lot of ads currently so either have you ever hq your the shell level thing ah yeah yeah yeah are you so so how i mean how do you beat them oh how do we beat them i think that what really uh helps us is really the kind of extensive all in one solution the thing that we are easy to use that we live right inside gmail and we offer a kind of nice customer experience in terms of support we really try to to be proactive and the help of our companies customers to uh to get the maximum of the product from from day zero so i think it's uh it is the thing that uh that works uh we really really try to have a polished solution i mean there's perhaps of swiss nba that uh yep a dna but we try to have something that's beautiful but um no it is it is it is pretty it's i just think this space it's a land grab it's like who can get the most customers the fastest and then network effects take over yeah and yeah you know you know we are we are i think we are kind of um quite consolidated solution in terms of what you can do with it so yeah very good all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh currently i don't have any i'm currently reading omodeus by arrowry which is nice in terms of vision and the question that we can ask for for the coming years of recovering decades yeah number two is there a ceo you're following or studying again i'm i'm tending to to follow um ceos that are part of my space on my competition also name one yeah all of matteo from mixed marks or could matthew color from phone for instance yep number three uh what is your favorite online tool for building the company drift uh actually it's really really a nice tool that helps or conversions qualifications in terms of sales so i really like yeah i'm seeing lucy on your website right now using the drift app to chat back and forth with me which is great all right uh number four how many hours i sleep to get every night oh uh it really depends um let's say if it's a good night seven seven okay and what's your situation married single kids soon ah congratulations no kids no kids and how old are you some people last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew you focused more perhaps you learned to focus on different things guys focus more coming from florian building gmail yes really a way to collaborate with your team inside the inbox where you're already spending most of your time he has about 10 000 people paying 10 bucks a month so 100 grand a month right now in revenue up from 21 grand a month just a year ago so healthy growth 10 percent of his free users convert to paid he does that via a 14 day free trial gets 200 new installs per um about 6000 new installs per year month 300 uninstalls again from google product forms quora things like that he's bootstrapped team of 11 in geneva has net negative churn of a negative one percent as he looks to scale florian thank you for taking us to the top thank you thank you so much