How Harmonizely CEO Rafal Muszynski grew Harmonizely to $6K revenue and 50 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is rafael muchinski he's 29 years old and is a software engineer working on open source tools for journalists and media he founded a sas app called harmonizing 2018 which is online meetings scheduling tool designed to support calendars relying on an open standard called cal dav zoho fast mail nexcod etc they have over 50 paying customers and over 600 registered users and growing month by month profile are you ready to take it to the top hey hello rafael thanks for joining me man so tell us what harmonizely does and what's your revenue model how do you make money so harmonize is an online scheduling tool uh which helps to save a lot of time increase conversion leads and yeah our pricing plan is like based on the freemium model so we have a freemium model and we have a premium model so the premium model is of course free and the premium one is like eight euro per month uh and if you buy an annual uh subscription it's like six uh euro per month but paid at once which is like 72 uh euro okay so we talked euro per month or you know in usd call it call it 10 bucks exactly yeah okay and how many customers have you scaled to today so today we have 50 customers okay like out of 600 users okay so 50 customers at 10 bucks a piece you're doing about 500 per month right now right yeah that's not a lot but always something well hey everyone has to start at zero so uh i think it's fine and now you just launched right 2018 yeah 2018 it will be like inmate will be one year yeah so you launched the freemium tool how did you get 600 users on that uh mainly uh on advertising on like on free platforms like the product hunt india hackers so i was posting some posts on india hackers on how i started my site project application and then the company and yeah sharing all the details about the harmonizely on reddit hacker news so basically that was like organic traffic from from these websites and of course i had a landing page where i had a simple form and i was gathering all the emails from the users that were signing up there how do you so how do you win this is a very fragmented market i mean how do you win over customers that are using calendly or schedule once or you can book me or acuity scheduling how do you get them to switch to you yeah so the thing is that we have a really nice feature which integrates uh different calendars so not only the google calendar or or icloud calendar but we use this kaldaf protocol it's open protocol that every calendar uh works to exchange the data uh between so uh like the calendar or other competitors do not have an option to connect connect different types of calendars so we have this power that we can connect whatever calendar you want to to use so there is a niche of users that use their private calendars like the next cloud the fast mail for example but with the current competitors they do not have this option to to schedule meetings and actually they don't have an option to use their tools so yeah that's why uh we built uh harmonize using the called of profoco and so i mean give me a sense of growth right how many customers or how many free users are you adding per month today so per month it's like 20 users something like that on average okay i mean ha so i mean how do you scale that that's that's nothing how do you get that to 2000 or 20 000 yes so uh at this moment we will like change totally the the marketing we do because right now we we make some posts on on quora for example so we we don't spend much money on advertising so the idea is to make some advertisements uh and run some ads to yeah to make some traffics to real traffic okay do you have any idea what's gonna cost you get a new paying customer not at the moment but right now yeah we run some advertisement but it would be way too too much done than the uh price so what is it what is it today how much how much does it cost to get a new paying customer uh to the new paying customer we pay like i don't know it's uh 15 or something like that euro to get a new one yeah okay that's like that's really good that's very good why would you not spend a million dollars in that channel okay i thought it's it's already too much so why do you think it's too much like the the monthly subscription is like uh i don't know eight eight euros so i think it should be something close to that uh but uh well if you're if it's eight euros and you're spending 15 euros to sign them up you get your payback period is two months that's very good for software that's true yeah okay so why would you not spend more money there well there is a room to improvement so we will have to revamp the the whole process of selling because i'm software engineer and my teammate is also software engineer so it's really hard for us to sell things so there was also an idea to to like get someone from the marketing side that will like you know sell the product do you and your do you and your co-founder own 100 or have you guys raised capital uh no it's our own funds so you're bootstrapped exactly yeah so if someone came to you and they were the perfect marketing and sales person what percent of the company would you give them to come in and be the third co-founder uh sorry can you say again or whatever if you guys found someone that was really good at sales and marketing and you could they would you need to incentivize them to join you because you're there's a lot of risk what percent of the company would you give them to join you oh okay well like 30 percent maybe maybe less so it would be like each of you each of you would have 30 total yeah if if it's a good person then why not interesting have you tried to find that person or no and not yet i was doing just some kind of research on on the forums like on india hackers and and forums like that uh but this is still work in progress yeah well you're looking in the right spots those are where you're gonna find kind of marketing and sales hustlers um team size today is just you and your co-founder two people yeah two people exactly okay do you have any idea what churn is yet uh the turn rate is yeah i have it noted so the last month customer charge was like minus 20 so 20 churn yeah okay so you're churning annually then more than 2x your customer base in six months you know in five months you turned through 100 of your customer base yeah yeah but i don't know if you uh got that it's minus the charmander is on minus so gross churn can't be negative can be it cannot be negative gross gross churn so if you have a hundred people using your tool today and paying how many will stay next month um okay i can tell you this at the moment what does negative 20 mean i don't know what that means yeah it's like the customer time rate so it means that the cost the customer base is increasing uh month by month okay churn is typically measured on a cohort basis meaning it doesn't matter how many new customers you add this month it's how many from last month stayed so my my i think what you just gave me is like your overall growth rate which is you're adding 20 new customers every single month but if you look at your churn yeah okay so let's put it like this yeah how many people that have how many have canceled what's your k people start paying you they stop paying you yes so from the beginning uh only two people can sold the subscription okay so you have 50 total paying two if canceled which means it's four percent kind of four percent annual churn now obviously it's a very small cohort right now but four percent it is yeah okay very good that's great we'll see what that we'll see kind of how that pans out as that cohort uh grows um now how much of your own capital have you and your founder put in the company uh so we are software developers so we put a really little bit of money so it's like i don't know 500 dollars something like that okay so you're you're breaking even today you're just you're just not taking a salary you're just it's about zero breakeven right yeah i'm yeah what i get i i try to invest so yeah exactly are you i mean how do you support yourself on 500 bucks total revenue per month do you have side work where you're doing consulting gigs yeah i basically work full time so this is my site side job so to say so in free time i i push their old new features for example with my friend but basically i work full-time i work remotely got it okay let's wrap up here rafael with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book my favorite business book is the image revisited uh the e-myth revisit yeah number number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yeah there are plenty of them elon musk for example and from poland it's uh mike sadowski from brand 24 7. number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh i don't want to be selfish if i would say harmonizely inside your own yeah so besides my own it will be uh run 24 7 for monitoring social media number four how many hours of sleep to get every night seven eight and what's your situation married single kids yeah i'm married no kids okay and how are you i'm 29. all right last question rafael what do you wish...