How Justuno CEO Erik Christiansen grew Justuno to $6.2M revenue and 3K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is eric christensen he's the co-founder and ceo of just uno an online visitor conversion suite that helps retailers monetize their current website traffic with lead capture pop-ups visitor tracking and more eric you're ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right man so um give us a quick background here the the company what do you guys do and is it pure play sass um yes i say it like that because we have introduced uh fully managed professional services okay uh joe sununu is a visitor conversion suite uh that at its core utilizes visitor data and analytics to help you capture more leads uh and sales far quicker than ever before uh we are a sas model uh but we do like i mentioned have the fully managed professional services arm well define that for us real quick so like past 12 months when you look at total revenue what percent was pure sas versus professional services would you say uh professional services is still small like less than ten percent yeah okay okay all right that's good and then help us understand kind of small business medium or enterprise on average order customers paying per year per month for this uh full range uh anywhere from what's an average though uh average you know 49 okay get you that i think it's like 53 if you look at you know the whole whole whole picture but you know the 19 plan is our heavier weighted plan obviously because there's more smaller businesses so this is i mean are you playing really in the realm of of kind of like sumo and kind of what they're doing what no is doing with with these kind of javascript insertions yeah i like to kind of put us right in the middle of the whole you know the main matrix if you're going to look at a you know a gartner quadrant uh we provide a a our platform is services on the lower end anyone with our freemium model so what we do is if you have under less than 5000 in monthly visitor sessions you have complete access to our platform so that you know we don't limit our light plan or anything and our belief is that any small business should have access to the same tools that any enterprise business has it's just a matter of how you leverage those tools and so we fully service the smaller end and then on the enterprise level we have our either our professional services or in 2018 we had really strong demand and growth like like most like everyone in the in the e-commerce and sas world we're all growing at the same pace i mean this market's still only eight nine percent of global ecommerce and then you know trillion dollar market yeah yeah so eric just to be clear when you say you put yourself on a gartner matrix that's not helpful because i don't know what matrix you're talking about i mean this is really smb conversion tools think unbalanced click funnels this kind of space yep okay got it yes we service that but also on the on the full high end all the way up to the top because with our platform it's it's it's an open platform where you can do anything any custom integration anything so we're servicing all full high-end so don't so don't name the logo because you don't want to obviously share that but the what the customer paying you the most is paying you how much per month uh we're going up in two to five ten thousand okay got it that helps me understand how like the power law nature of the business um okay when'd you launch the company what year uh december 23rd 2010. that was very specific well i'm running i'm flying to austin tomorrow we're doing our all hands company meetup and i i last night i was working on a historical company dock that's funny how many so how many people total today oh he just broke 40. oh congrats now and mostly austin uh yeah we're doing you know we're 30 plus in austin okay and where's everyone else uh san francisco which is our core where we where we founded and then santa monica okay um so you founded in san francisco and then opened an office in austin why did you identify austin as a hot spot to build the company in my co-founder travis logan he he got married was starting a family and wanted to buy a house and he was looking around at different areas and when he mentioned austin i was like yes perfect because we had big commerce illusion big technology hub and this was don't remember the date maybe five years ago mm-hmm horrible with time these days that's okay yeah um very good and then okay so let me get more the kind of the backstory here so you launched in 2010 um you expand austin because your co-founder is here and how many customers have you scaled to today uh depends at freemium you know we're 90 000 plus including freemium no no pick customers paying customers paid customers uh we broke 3000 in 2018. okay that's great so 3 000 customers and um walk me through i mean you're the guy to ask this question because you're probably eating your own dog food um what's the best way to convert you know 3 000 of 90 000 freemium users into paid what's where does the paywall show up guy you know what's so funny you mentioned dog fooding our own damn product we we as a conversion company we could even do better on our own site you know yeah it's like you know it it it excites me because every time i look at our business and what whatever department i look at i go wow we can improve that so just so just to be clear is really your only pricing axes the thing driving upsells and from free to paid is really once you pass 5000 views per month then you then you have to upgrade uh correct we do have the the full uh two-week trial so people use a product get familiar with it see the success and then want to continue on because it's helping their business but they can keep continuing for free if they have less than 5000 views a month correct okay interesting um see that to me is tricky because you really don't control um how many people like your product doesn't directly help people get more views per month it might help with conversions or exit intent or increase average cart value or things like that but but it must be frustrating for you to see uh your exit intent pop-up working on someone but they cancel because they don't know how to drive traffic yeah that's where the professional service arm comes in uh you know just like any business you hear oh i just don't have the time for it so what is your turn today uh sub five percent monthly what's gross uh that's net gross i gotta look okay so that's five that's five percent revenue term per month right okay um that's interesting so five percent revenue turn now you use the word net which means you must have some expansion to cover up some of the gross churn where's the where's what's the expansion revenue at typically each month uh business is growing um people coming in and increasing traffic and their business grows and we grow with them well so like let's be specific here if you look at the core that signed up of january 2018 they're now a year and a month in to their lifetime value on average what did year one annual contract value increase to by year two like they went from 50 bucks a month to 100 bucks a month or what was the average increase on average it's all over the place to be quite honest and we use chart mogul which is i recommend to every single sas company it's phenomenal when you want to dig in and look at specific questions like like you have if i were to look and pull up that report right now what i can tell you is people come in and uh we'll know in the first month if they're on the correct plan or not because they will go over their plan limit yep and that is where you know we offer them the the option have auto extras so that they can just add an extra few thousand traffic just to get through the month but as soon as they hit three you know it's really like we work with them be like hey we need to get you on the right plan so it happens within the first few months pretty quickly okay so you don't have meaningful after making sure the right plan you don't really have meaningful pricing leverage to drive expansion in years i mean in months you know 9 10 11 12 and onward i see one thing would be the the largest expansion pickup would be uh to be able to work with them to put them on our professional services plan will shin it also be if they 10x their traffic they should also maybe 2x what they're paying you per month yeah no i mean if they're gonna grow rapidly like that they will move up to the correct tier traffic plan that we have well that's my point though if you take the core that signed up a year and a half ago if your tools are working effectively and they're growing their business they should be getting more traffic and you know expansion revenue essentially those contracts are going to double year over year what i'm hearing says i don't maybe that's something you're not tracking not to like where they you know at what point in time they they expand yeah yeah so like if i asked you how long does it take a 5 000 view website to grow to 30 000 views on your platform you you don't know kind of an on on average what that cohort kind of analyst would look like we're not looking at those numbers i see okay um let's go into something you could break that down to pure play versus you know you have some businesses that go out of business depends if they're on shopify they commerce magento et cetera they're it's...