How Lightster CEO Sal Avelar grew Lightster to $106.3K revenue and 12 customers in 2024.

it helps companies do research with their community-based they're community-based user approach they pay the users a dollar a minute he keeps the other dollar a minute they're doing fourteen thousand dollars a month in volume today he keeps against seven thousand bucks a month on that hoping to grow about 150 000 by the end of the year today bootstrapped so far with a team of four hey folks my guest today is Sal abalar he leads lightster which up com which helps companies connect with qualified users for input and reward users for sharing their opinions companies can create unlimited communities of qualified users and users will participate get rewarded with cash and perks that is what co-creation is all about that's what lightster is all about salary radio tickets at the top there you go so when I read your bio I like user testing comes to mind right you help me find people to test my product is that is that an accurate comparison um yeah kind of like uh our proposition is slightly different we try to uh uh to implement that idea of like a co-creation like an ongoing process like uh you basically build your communities and you keep in touch your users to a point that you become customers and then friends and Advocates and so on and you keep owning that Community to really co-create your product in an ongoing basis so tell me a story about a customer is paying you right now what they're paying you for specifically yeah so we do have uh different methods of of uh Revenue uh basically the basic one which is the paper use kind of method so everyone is welcome they can jump in for free and really when they need to create a session with users then they pay two bucks per minute so usually sessions are about like 30 minutes and then we do have a couple of uh premium plans paid plans they include a couple of different features like limited chat session recording create your own Community pick your rewards and so on so I I won't actually don't lose people if they go to your website what they'll see is a a website sorry an application that says lightstrip connects customer obsessed companies with a thousand plus communities for Discovery and feedback and then you have a hundred or so companies listed along with a bunch of Partners like 500 startups and Tech Stars so yeah it are you in charge of building the communities on your app as well and if so that's I mean that's a massive Marketplace issue how do you get those people to sign up for communities on your app yes so uh right now we are the ones building the communities and we do recruit users we do invite uh people to join the uh the app and uh and we place them into uh the the communities as they fit some of the communities guys just so you know are called like Toronto Tech or things like that so what are some other names of communities yeah we have like a web tree developers just the other day we created one for parents with children under 18 uh and all sorts of different communities we have back actually progressively building communities pretty much every day as our customers are requesting new types of users new different kind of a custom requirements and so on why how do you incentivize how do you how do you how do you incentivize a busy web 3 developer to drop everything and install your community application when when I mean what's in it for them yeah right now uh there are a couple of ways they're rewarded the basic one is cache so users get paid like one dollar per minute and perimeter of what I don't understand per minute of of session so if they are having a video session with someone providing their feedback they're paid one dollar per minute uh and and then the companies pay us and get a cut and then the users get their payment and then they do have all the forms of reward like we can provide them premium access to uh to the applications or they get paid in gift cards or any other type of reward that their customers can see so do you only build a community if you already have a company that you know is willing to pay for a session for example who's the company behind the Toronto Tech uh communities built no not really no like we keep building communities as new users are coming in and then we we basically select custom requirements to keep building the communities of course when someone has a uh custom request then we build those communities for them let's talk some information about the Toronto Tech yeah if someone joins that and you don't know who's going to pay for the session minutes how do you tell the new community members will pay you a dollar per session when you know there's no company lined up ready to pay that money oh so they are Auto qualified to the session so as the companies are creating the sessions we pick the ones who are good fit for uh for the projects based on what the companies are looking for and then they basically Auto qualified based on on the other 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 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the 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 evaluation 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 evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's 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 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 real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent 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 this 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.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 so how many total unique communities do you have on the platform today we have more than I think right now well everything we create news about new communities but I think now we have more than a thousand communities and how many individual unique users across those communities yeah we have about 6 000 uh users now users can qualify for multiple communities as as they go fit a okay understood and then how many companies last in the last 30 days have paid for at least one session yeah we got about uh 12 companies uh enrolling now in new new projects like noble here from Toronto uh a couple of other companies from the US uh and some companies they are part of the the per uh deeper programs we have with the the incubators and so when one of these 12 companies pays like a budget to get user feedback through your community what's the average budget what's the average project size usually yeah it's about uh from 600 to 1200 bucks per project yeah so let's just make the math easy let's say a company says Sal I want to spend a thousand dollars getting user feedback can you help me find the right community members you're then paying up the community members a dollar per minute where do you make money yeah we so we get a cut so for the standard plan we're talking about two bucks per minute the users got a buck and then uh we get the the rest of it okay so if someone's gonna pay you a thousand dollars right divided by two dollars that's 500 sort of minutes of time yeah right and you're keeping 500 bucks of the Thousand you get 500 yeah exactly I see so what volume and projects did you over the past 30 days Dollar Wise or if uh lately I think we had about seven Grand uh over the last 30 days yeah Seven Grand wow okay and and I help me understand growth how much did you do exactly one year ago in March oh my God growth was yeah was fast-paced so we launched the app back in September last year uh and then uh after that it was just like trying to pick it up the pace we were generating I think 900 bucks a month to this point now about seven yeah and just be clear the Seven Grand is your cut or you get to keep half of that no is that good so you're actually doing 14 000 in volume you're keeping seven thousand yeah about I see interesting it fluctuates a little bit but yeah okay sure sure yeah I guess tell me more of the backstory here so you get this going in 2022 um how many folks are full-time on the team today we are about four four of you and what are the roles so I am in charge of uh marketing growth my co-founder Pat is in charge of product Dev and overall kind of operations and we have uh two other folks involved in the dev product development and so on but you and your buddy are the co-founders yeah Tech experts yep that makes sense three yeah how do you so so what let's say that uh you have six thousand users signed up today and then a month from now a new company signs up who you know user a is a fit for but that user hasn't engaged in like two months are you sending that user a a cold email a text message how do you make them aware that a company's willing to pay them a dollar a minute yeah so we keep actually sending uh pretty much every week uh a whole new set of questions so they can qualify for new communities that's the way we create incentives of uh you know be qualified be automatic qualified they need to actually submit uh to any new project you are automatically in the community once they can they are in the community and they can receive invitations from our customers uh to participating sessions I see Abby bootstrap the company of your race Capital just bootstrapping completely now I love that that's great okay and so you have 12 customers right now this month that are paying for sessions uh we do have a bit more but the ones are still in the shading sessions uh they're not not fully paying yet do you get do you try and get companies to like commit to like a year-long contract or how do you structure the contracts yeah so as um as I was mentioning like uh just about a month two months ago we launched the subscription plans so there's one one plan that allows them to create different uh uh perks and and unlimited private communities and so on that's a 50 bucks per month plan and there's an older one that includes 150 minutes which is about 200 bucks per minute per month that makes a lot of sense well listen it sounds like you're building a fun here you're scaling nice to your bootstrap which is great what do you think you can grow Revenue to by December of this year yeah so we're predicting about 30 growth month of the month at this point uh what does that mean in terms of Revenue you'll do in December this year well uh well the question numbers yet but I think we are gonna hit uh about 120 Grand hopefully um by by the end of the year uh we don't know yet but that's that's what we can do it that's great well Sal on that note let's wrap up with a famous five number one what's your favorite book uh I've been very hooked up with the um Ray dalio one uh principal principles number two is there a CEO you're following or studying Sal is there a CEO you're following or studying uh uh currently oops nothing like Sal CEO you're following yeah Shane from here like I've been hooked up with him number three what's your favorite online tool for building lightster right now uh a bit of everything but uh we've been relying a lot on uh canva that likes to uh sorry click up Sal you're cutting in and out so I'm gonna I'm gonna wrap the interview up here guys lightster.com it helps companies do research with their Community Based uh they're community-based user approach they pay the users a dollar a minute he keeps the other dollar a minute they're doing fourteen thousand dollars a month in volume today he keeps against seven thousand bucks a month on that hoping to grow about 150 000 by the end of the year today bootstrapped so far with a team of four Sal thanks for taking us to the top one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central 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