How HelloBox CEO Paul Anderie grew HelloBox to $187.2K revenue and 1.2K customers in 2019.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is paul andery he is in the messaging management for more lead space building a company called gethellobox.com all right paul you ready to take us to the top thanks a lot uh for yeah inviting me to the show i'm looking forward to good so tell us what the company does and are you guys a pure play sas model yeah like we we created hello box a year ago because we we've seen that a lot of website owners especially ones from like the real estate industry or also personal brands are lacking uh results from their websites they were like trying to convert people to buy programs or doing other sort of stuff but what we found out is that the easiest way to get in touch with them are their existing social media channel channels so like facebook messenger in europe whatsapp is like a big deal um or also in mexico and we we thought like why not offering website visitors the channels they are already using and love to use so we kind of build it a small widget for website owners where the visitors can get in touch with them via social media channels okay interesting now are you servicing mainly smbs what's the average customer paying per month or are you pre-revenue uh yeah we have already uh um some revenues uh at the moment we're like um at um like 15 000 mrr and uh that's kind of growing especially in like the real estate um industry how many customers at the moment they're like um thousand five hundred okay so fifteen hundred so they each pay about ten dollars per month right yeah some are on on free tier some are paying a bit more we are trying because pricing uh i guess your audience are kind of like tech startups tech uh entourage yes yeah that's right yep so what i really would like to share is also the our main point is at the moment the pricing because we were thinking so hard and so long how to like set up the pricing how to tier the pricing and um i know there are a lot of people out there who are who are saying um you have to give it away for free at the for like at the beginning but like giving something away for free it's so hard to like um charge them in in later stages so how many of the 1500 are actually paying at the moment uh it's basically 80 percent like 80 are paying uh we're giving away like free licenses um to like friends or at conferences so we are trying to so just be clear paul about 1200 are paying of the of the 1500 that's right that's right yep good and they pay anywhere between kind of 10 and 15 a month that's correct yeah depends on if they are built monthly or yearly and starting from next year we want to introduce a new pricing based on website um traffic okay and how when did you launch the company what year it was like 2018 like mid of 2018. okay so literally about 12 months ago so a year ago you had no revenue that's correct okay good so nothing to 15 000 a month in under 12 months that's great how much money did you spend on your mvp before your first dollar of revenue uh luckily my co-founder he he kind of builded that from scratch at the beginning so we had already an mvp um and i mean in total um we spent maybe two thousand dollars 2k total now are you bootstrapped today or have you raised capital no totally bootstrapped love that okay now are you so are you burning capital today or cash flow positive oh we're cash flow positive like we we haven't like raised capital we didn't do anything we are only paying for a few edwards campaigns how much a month are you spending on adwords that's maybe 500 us dollars oh okay on okay that's good so when you say you're profitable you're talking like a thousand dollars a month profit or 5 000 a month or uh depends always what you what you see we don't like um cash out any uh revenue or like give us any salary at the moment uh we would try to build put everything back into the product at the moment so how are you paying i mean how are you eating tonight how are we eating uh we're doing like a lot of consulting still okay so over the past 12 months how much consulting revenue have you guys done together together like i can say it individually for myself in the last 12 months i did maybe let's say 100k okay that's good yeah so 100 count consulting but in the background you're saying i'm only doing the consulting to reinvest in the software because i love the software more and you want to keep scaling the software that's correct that's a start smart way to do it all right how many folks on the team today at the moment they're like three plus one uh like freelancers who are like uh especially building out uh integrations with new uh or with other software platforms so how many engineers uh two two okay any quarter carrying sales reps or no sales reps at this price point most of the things we're doing on ourselves like no specific no um yeah special sales rep at the moment and paul if you figure out a way to manage churn you know at this price point these guys go out of business all the time which churn been last month it was definitely like uh under 20 annually or monthly monthly oh so that's really hot 20 monthly churn is really high yeah yeah that's um at the moment what we're struggling with because the market for especially website chat widgets or like messaging widgets is like super competitive um but it means all you're if you're turning 20 a month you're basically churning through your entire customer base twice every year so you must be adding a ton of customers every month to be able to i mean to be scaling yeah yeah and that's like a really big uh big thing for us um were we like trying to get like in touch with um those who were who canceled and to understand why they are canceling so um yeah at the moment that's the only way we we try to figure out why they are like choosing another product and um that's also why i'm a bit concerned about raising prices yep well i guess if is it a javascript embed what's the onboarding look like the onboarding is just like you can set it up on the website like the editor is straight on the home page and after you register for free trial you get like um five email sequences where we teach them small hints and give them just like some lessons to educate them on the product and uh as soon as we have um the phone number i try to like personally get in touch with them get very personal and try to also um yeah see what we can do for them okay so it just be clear like intercom and drift these are javascript embeds you don't require a javascript embed we do yes we do oh you do okay how many times has it been embedded um i need to look that up but like because we had probably a lot of like free trials also we gave away gave away like some free um lifetime um products on product hunt that's probably like 2000 like active who are really used at the moment or just on all time over the past 12 months probably like 2 000 okay that's good now talk to me about the product on launch you did this in july 4th of 2018. uh you got about 88 upvotes did this drive a lot of new signups yes for sure like how many especially awareness that was really high um [Music] it was definitely like two to three hundred like 800 new new email signups new signups for the trial and yes yeah okay and how many website hits the website hits um i really need to look that up but it was definitely like ten times more than um signups so about three thousand more than three thousand website hits from that product on launch like just for one or two days like the first and second day maybe that was it but it's really um fast increasing the the hits that's good any plans to raise capital to keep driving growth or no um at the moment no but depends all on our plans for next year when we want to change like pricing on them on a more kind of value-based pricing and if like the target is to get like at 100k per month and without any uh investors and if we can get that uh we might think about like getting into in touch with like investors or maybe also other um yeah directions yeah you said you're spending 500 bucks a month on kind of facebook ads and adwords how many customers will you get from that spend per month like we checked that especially on edwards there uh it's a much higher conversion rate we get maybe 10 to 20 new customers per month okay so 20 paid customers from 500 of spend yes i mean that what is that so 500 divided by 20 what's that 25 per customer sign up that's pretty good cac say that again sorry paul it sounds like you're spending 25 dollars to get a new 15 a month customer that's pretty good cac yes yeah so why not more than can you not why not spend more um yeah like at the moment the only thing where we...