How HockeyStack CEO Emir Atli grew HockeyStack to $148.9K revenue and 16 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is amir adley he's an 18 year old who's passionate about making things people need and use he's tried a lot of things very personalized book boxes to a social media app to solve different problems with his friends now growing his first software as a service company hockeystack.com amir are you ready to take it to the top yeah all right what is hockey stacking how do you guys make money um hockeystick is a um web analytics tool that is powerful and simple um so it's a sales company you can create um funnels goals um segments and get insights with it with no code and and so is this like a easier to use version of like a mix panel would you say or bare metrics or how would you describe it [Music] um so like mixpanel is more for like product analytics tool hockeysec is focused on web um conversions so it's more of a simplified version of um google analytics and um and like a faster way of hot char i would say okay got it so a version google analytics plus hotjar put together and when did you launch the business um so it's a little bit complicated because we pivoted from a product analytics tool so we first started working on analytics um in may last year um like eight eight months later this um this year in february we pivoted to akistec and we started working full-time on that on hockeystack oh great and now who is we have co-founders i'm sorry do you have co-founders yeah i have two other co-founders okay did you how did you guys support equity um 33 33 30. that's very nice you guys just said right down the middle yeah very cool okay so you split it down the middle and and how did you decide what to launch with pricing wise what do you charge for this um so we recently changed the pricing to domain based pricing um so before it was like um one domain three domain 10 domains and unlimited domains so right now we are charging it based on domains number of domains and page views um we are testing the new pricing model we also recently changed like added a new um free plan um it's going well right now and so when you look at your current customers what are they paying you per month on average um so we have um lifetime customers and monthly customers right now we launched an appsumo i would love to tell you that's there too so we have around i would say um 15 to around like 16 monthly customers um who are paying um on average 50 50 per month and we have around um a little bit more than thousand lifetime customers okay tell me about the absolute deal so um as i mentioned earlier we we started working on a product analytics tool last year in may um we worked on it for like eight months and um during those eight months we needed um an existing data point data set so we needed to um integrate our product into a sales company's product to get some data because of like the um product that we were building was about giving insights about who is converting well and why are they converting basically um and i contacted the founders but none of them make it to like integrate the product um it's like it's understandable but um then we launched this hockey stack um on product and appsumo to integrate our product analytics tool and get some data so that we can build the product still so it wasn't nothing serious then it started getting traction on appsumo and product hunt and we launched it we launched it in on appsumo in august last year and we made around thousand dollars um until february and then one thousand one thousand dollars yeah and then we started i started um working on sales and we started focusing on hockeystack and then in in one month we made around um 150 um thousand dollars on epsilon in sales and then they like we were on the marketplace side and then they like offered us to like be on the select side of my epsoma um and then we um we were on the select side for another month so uh we were on epsilon for two months um now it's ended and we are slowly focusing on our monthly revenue so when you were on the marketplace out of appsumo and you had 150 000 in sales how much of that did you get to keep um we we kept around 90 90 000 okay so you kept around 90 000 there and then you moved over to the other side where you did your own exclusive deal so you weren't in the marketplace anymore how many did you sell when you were not in the marketplace um on the select side on the front page um we sold the same amount but we kept only the 30 of the um sales so we made around um 40 000 i would say okay so on the marketplace side you made 90 000 and then on the select side you made 40 000. yeah okay and and so how many total buyers did you have from appsumo um i don't know the number but we sold 3 000 codes okay 3 000 codes so now fast forward a couple months are those 3 000 folks converting to monthly plans are they the users you want to go build a big company around are they good users how would you how would you analyze them um so nine um 900 of them like around around we have around um a little bit more than a thousand lifetime users so 900 of them are made to hockey stacks dashboard monthly um around 400 of them enter the dashboard weekly so it's a good number for a lifetime deal um we are not like um they're also they also know that like we don't um build the product for them because they won't ever convert into a monthly customer but um since we first launched the appsumo deal we like we added a lot of new features talking second they were the like um their feedback was the like um biggest source of inspiration for us and since then we really developed the product and it made um the like our cold outbound and um marketing much easier um so it was really beneficial for us you if you if you built the updated features based off the feedback from the appsumo the thousand apps small users why have only 16 of them one six converted into a paid plan i mean if you listened to them and built what they wanted one a lot of them be converting to paid um do you mean like monthly correct so we don't we we haven't offered any like uh monthly plan for lifetime deal customers yet um we will test it um i i guess next week um we will roll out two new features one is like revenue dashboard and one is automatic funnels um we will test it and see how it will go okay so so you're giving them all the new features for free right now if they have a lifetime deal but anyone who comes to you new today has to pay 50 a month yeah i see okay so how are you outside of appsumo and product hunt how are you getting new users today so we are doing a lot of seo and um cold out fund um cold outbound is going well right now we have been testing it for the last three weeks um how does that work tell me how you outreach is somebody called where do you use where do you do it um we are using apollo to prospect and um send cold emails so we are prospecting based on the pain points of different personas so we have three different personas one is a sas e-commerce and agencies um they like they all have different pain points for analytics um we are using different templates um and adding the pain points in them and then when a template works better than others we use that template and go forward with that um we book around uh my one of my co-founders and me we are doing it full time right now we are only doing sales right now and seo um so we are each booking around five to ten uh meetings per week um but we only started like three weeks ago so right now it's starting to work better and other than that we are also testing some new um tactics so we are we will launch a new free survey tool next week on product and um everywhere else so with that tool it will be free and we will have a branding okay sec branding uh we will get backlinks and some brand awareness um other than that we are also uh publishing another um landing pages for e-commerce and cms platforms things like analytics for e-commerce analytics for woocommerce etc it's uh easier to rank and um it gets you know like good traction because the people who are clicking on that are like um high intense people um so we are also trying a lot of new new things to scale the monthly revenue this is great and when people sign up for the 50 month plan are they sticking or have you got any churn yet um we didn't have um in like churn yet but we were on the like uh we are focusing on monthly recurring revenue for the last um month like two months or so so we didn't have any churn right now um but like i don't know if they return yeah well this is great you've gone from nothing to 900 a month and you know very quickly and they're two months so it'll be fun to watch what you guys do next have you done this all bootstrap or did you raise capital um it's all bootstrapped um we are not thinking about raising right now but we are also like meeting with investors but we don't think about raising right now yeah so why me with investors if you're not thinking about raising um because like it's our first like sales company uh my co-founders are 17 and our first developer like full stack developer is 15 years also we want to...