How Hopscotch CEO Rahul Anand grew Hopscotch to $19.6K revenue and 3 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is cam sloan he's a canadian entrepreneur who works the full stack developer until he was laid off in 2019. instead of finding a new job he said you know what i'm gonna start freelancing and his goal was eventually starting a product business today he juggles both as he works towards building a profitable software company he's building hopscotch.club cam you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right what is hopscotch so hopscotch is an app for doing interactive customer onboarding tours uh for sas companies and you're a developer so i'm sure you looked at other solutions out there before you started building this what are you building that people can't currently get at tools like pendo or other onboarding tools yeah so in terms of right now you know still an early stage product and so in terms of like product differentiation uh i wouldn't say that it's quite where i'd like it to be with hopscotch but there's another huge problem in this market is that all these other solutions have gone so far up market that they're really inaccessible to the majority of people who are trying to get their startups up and running so the pricing in a lot of these tools will start at like 300 a month 500 a month and so that's kind of where i'm starting with uh competing and then you know as i catch up on feature parody and then go beyond that there will be some interesting plays on the product side well that's what i'm asking sell me the future like you you didn't do this just build a copy of something already existed you believe something like should exist that currently doesn't exist what it once you reach feature parity like what are you gonna do differently that no one's doing right now yeah totally um so a lot of you know there's a lot of complaints and issues with product tours and i think a lot of it is warranted um you know they can be too long they can be just uh in the way maybe they're there when you uh don't want them to be but then when you do want that information they're not available and so a lot of what i intend to build uh with hopscotch is the ability to um you know recall product tours at the right time and kind of have these subtleties of being able to make it a better experience for the end user so if someone does want tours and they are that type of person who wants a little bit of hand-holding while they onboard into your app then they can get it and if they aren't then we should get out of their way and so i think there's a lot missing in the market there so that's kind of where i'm planning on going uh with some of the functionality side and right now on the site i can join a wait list does that mean your pre-revenue you're just building off demand right now i have a few early access customers um and so yeah pretty much pre-revenue as i'm just trying to build out yeah a product that's going to work for the current customers before i really open up the floodgates there how many current or testing uh i have three pain customers and i have you know a handful more that are kind of piloting it out seeing if it's something that they want to use but i wouldn't say actively like heavy users well congrats the hardest one is the first one so you're already up to three that's great what are they paying per month uh so i have a couple different um like i'm really testing pricing and it it's really depending on the company's size and scale um and so um you know i have someone paying 20 bucks a month i have another paying 99 per month um and then somewhere in between um so i'm figuring that out it will either be a combination of like number of seats and or like number of tours or potentially um number of monthly active users because that's kind of where my costs are going to scale so i'm still figuring that out right now it's just like a set price um you know if you're an indie hacker and you want to you know just try it out then it's going to be like 20 bucks a month but if you're a business and you want to remove the hopscotch branding and you're kind of up and running then that's when you look at like 99 per month this is the beauty of launching right you got to figure out the pricing and it's all manual when you start and then you'll figure out a sweet spot and then put up a pricing page right yeah yeah it's i really like this strategy of kind of launching quietly or like doing all this in the background and and onboarding customers manually to start with because then i can have this like data and this information to know how i should go about it when i put it up and i'm not just gonna be you know trying to guess from metrics like i can know from experience of talking to these people like that hopefully i'm coming out with something that uh makes sense from the get-go no cam you're bootstrapping right you haven't raised yeah that's right and and how did you get these first three customers where'd you find them um honestly most of the work that i've been doing i share publicly on twitter and so twitter's been really helpful even though most of the people who follow me are not like great customer fit they will often like refer other people who are asking about it and they'll they'll mention the product so that's been pretty cool and then um also just getting some natural like sign ups through uh google even though i haven't put a ton of work into that it's kind of starting to rank albeit low but starting to rank for some of the keywords like interactive product tours and product tours yeah that's important i mean seo is important so taking back to that moment you know now we understand what you're working on taking back to that moment in 2019 when you were laid off i mean what was going through your head when it happened oh man i it was i was in a pretty good position where i wanted to go and do my own thing but i i wasn't quite ready and i feel like you're never really ready and so i wanted to uh have some more time with this job but then it kind of got lifted out from under me and so that was the perfect excuse to just go start doing my own thing i um so i felt pretty lucky that i had some savings built up and i was in a place where i was just ready to go and try it at the very worst i would go and find another job and uh and so that was you know it was a mix of like really scared but also like what's the worst that can happen and it kind of gave me the kick that i needed cam how old were you in 2019 when you when you that you lost the job i guess i would have been 31 31 okay so this is like a key thing which is anytime you want to leave a full-time gig into your own thing you try and build a cash buffer to give yourself some runway right until your new thing starts making money how did you think about that you had some cash saved up i mean do you mind me asking about how much you've saved or how much like life runway you had yeah i don't remember exactly because like between investments and such but uh let's say like i don't know between 40 and 60 grand canadian uh and then i also knew that i was gonna get uh some freelance work that was gonna be coming in and so that really like helped me to know that i was gonna be able to keep you know cash flow positive as opposed to just going into burn mode yeah and another you know the key thing is how much you save but it's also how much you keep so it's about keeping your expenses really low as an entrepreneur especially an indie hacker how low up there in canada were you able to keep your total living expenses per month back back in 2019 so i don't track like super closely on this stuff but i do um share uh i was sharing a one bedroom apartment with my partner and uh and it's around 2k per month and then you know maybe would spend another thousand dollars or or so on top of that um but you know sometimes that goes another like two thousand dollars a month but yeah i do try to keep my expenses uh low in comparison to like even while i was built while i was salaried i would try to keep my expenses fairly low and stay in a relatively affordable place that may sound expensive in some parts of the world but um in toronto that's kind of like entry level for a one bedroom so um so yeah i was trying to just keep it low and i still continue to do that and um and just especially now yeah without consistent income it's important to just uh to keep chugging along at a good burn rate well yeah i mean 40 50 000 saves spending between like two and four grand a month you have plenty of runway into the life expenses i mean what i'm excited for is i'm waiting for you to put up that tweet maybe later this year or early next year that says making more from my side project than i did at my full-time job in 2019 like that's the magic tweet yeah and i'll say this like in terms of you know when i quit like i have much more runway now because of freelancing and doing some contract work as well which was kind of unexpected i wanted to just like you know have it float my side project but it's gone above and beyond with that and working about half the year on my contracting freelance stuff uh...