How Gmelius CEO Florian Bersier grew Gmelius 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...