How Instantly AI CEO Nils Schneider grew Instantly AI to $20M revenue and 2.9K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is Rock hian he is the CEO and founder of a company that does cold email Outreach at scale called instantly. a uh he's the founder of multiple failed startups who grew his Outreach software company to $200,000 per month in nine months all right we'll jump into it today ra you ready to take us to the top yeah let's get it all right so you zero to 200,000 bucks in Mr in nine months and just to be clear is this a service model or SAS SAS it is SAS okay because I hear cold Outreach and I hear Consulting but there is software here so should we put you in the bucket with like lemlist and these kind of companies yeah exactly like that amazing okay so you launched nine months ago there's a lot of other players are already in the space what made you go you know what they're already doing it but I'm going to launch anyway I'm gonna win and I'm going to do it better so we had our own lead generation agency and we used all lot tools on the market but as soon as we started scaling our Prices rose a lot just you have to pay per account so every email account you use to send you pay per account for other software and if you scale you want to get more accounts you want to send more emails it just at some point we're paying like thousands a month and they was s like we just should build our own tool because we had a really good developer and that was the main reason why we buildt it for ourselves we didn't do for anything else like we didn't even plan on launching it just for our own agency but when we did it and start talking with people about it then we really saw like we have something it's Unique it's something that's Pro proven but has a unique twist something that's going to help a lot of people like us and we're right so I want to learn more about the agency because that's a secret unlock here in terms of how you grew your SAS so fast but the $200,000 you're making right now per month how many customers is that from uh it's uh 20 2900 2900 okay well this is amazing all right let's go back to the agency what year did you launch the agency so we launched it around July last year okay got it so they this wasn't an old agent so I guess how much revenue was the agency doing before you launched the SAS so yeah so like my background I've done other agencies so it was like more like culmination and like pivoting into lead generation agency I've done like SEO and stuff like that but in July we started lead generation agency and then we gred to around 10 15K when we started building instantly and when we launched instantly publicly the agent itself was around 30 40 Mr then we decided like okay like inet is doing so well we don't want to focus on the agents anymore like the consulting stuff and then we just like offboard all the clients and focused completely on instantly but you're right like the agency was secret Source but made work the first clients that we got for instantly were all the clients that we jumped on a call offered a service in our Legion agency and then used instantly to help them get those leads that's amazing okay and how many customers did you have at the agency before you launched instantly so it was around like around 20 like 22 something like that 22 customers so you had about 22 customers paying like a grand or two grand per month and then you said you know what we're helping them with stuff let's build our own software how many people were full-time at the agency uh fulltime around 4 or five we had like at the core team three people and then bunch of like contractors that we used they weren really full-time okay but one of those three core was the engineer that built the MVP for instantly no he wasn't a part of the agency agency was just like so instant has four co-founders one the developer that built it and then three other guys all marketers sales background like me that were in the agency oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 287 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your founder paath dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from realtime valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22% of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all the recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuations than what you can get now inside a Founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founder path.com products valuations or if you go to founder path.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview okay so the three core folks from the agency are part of the founding team instantly plus this one engineer there's a lot of agency owners that have ideas like you but they can't find the engineer to build it how did you do that that's actually funny story so it was like I think uh two years ago I just uh had another like failed startup and then have I had some success so I posted on Indie hackers I posted on Reddit there just like a full stack Market there looking for partners and this dude randomly messaged me on Reddit who was it uh the developer no what was his name uh Sumit suit okay yeah and yeah on Reddit I just made a post like co-founder subreddit We messaged we talked and we started another idea back then didn't work out because of covid it was like a travel related idea and then we Linked UP last year again around like summer July and yeah that's like how we found like completely randomly but it was like proactive that I messaged and put myself out there on multiple platforms interesting okay so you found him in the co-founder subreddit group um how did you guys I mean there's four of you how did you decide to split Equity so uh in the beginning it was just uh me and the developer and then I decided to bring on board like more were you guys 5050 at the start no that developer had more because uh he had already like built something and then I joined up like a little bit later he actually reached out to me with an idea we pivoted and then we decided to go 5050 and then from my side uh like previously what I've done wrong is I've given like too much equity in like wrong places and focus more on like software like other stuff but I realized like the Marketing sales is so important so I brought on board two other co-founders from the AG side and now we split the 50 part of the sales marketing with those guys got it so the developer still owns 50% of instantly and then the three of you guys split the other 50% yeah I see okay very cool um all right so that that's a really good story so you eventually decide to shut down the agency because you guys are selling the developers saw a bunch of their his software his little MVP that he built and you said let's go all in on this right how much Mr was the SAS doing before you shut down the agency I think it was around like 10 15 Cas I still remember that exact moment when we decided to do it we're walking in Barcelona with one of the co-founders Nils and we had like like why are we doing this like we have something unique like it's growing so fast like even then we felt like like why are we doing like wasting art time on something that's like brings money but it's not like long-term as like doesn't have the potential and then we just like decided like we have to do it...