How Logicalplan CEO Jakub Helesic grew to $46.1K revenue and 120 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is jacob hellisitz he is a 30 years old father of two kids graduated in engineering and was a manager in a food store before getting a bachelor's degree in the in economics and then became a military officer ran a digital agency and became project manager when he found out that he truly loved being an entrepreneur now building a logical plan a visual project management tool jacob you ready to take us to the top i am i'm ready you have been all over the place which food store your manager at uh the food store i'm not sure if it's uh in america it's a little do you know were you were you you were managing a store or you were at the cash register or you were stocking shelves or what i was managing the store were you the highest profitability store in the in the chain in your region or no uh no no no because uh i managed it in a smaller city smaller town so it wasn't possible yeah all right so you you then start running you go in the military you run a digital agency um just quickly quantify that so the digital agency in its best year did how much revenue uh we we were a small digital agency is so under million dollars per year and what year was that uh it was four four years five five years ago maybe okay 2014-ish so did you then leave in 2014 and the first line of code for logical plan was written then uh no we [Music] then we we found out that we like to manage projects not not just developing it so we started to focus more on the project development and we started to provide a project management as a service so companies started to hire us as a project managers and then we found out that we need some tool that would help us to manage projects better more simply and we didn't find a proper tool then uh so that was the main reason why we decided to start a coding logical plan because we needed something for our own needs you know okay very good so logical plan gets off the ground first line of code was in 2014 or 2015. uh 20 2016. 16. okay and how much money did you spend on the mvp before you had your first dollar of revenue whoo i don't want to talk about it it was a lot come on give me the number how much you know ah i don't know the exit number in uh in dollars but it was uh more than hundred thousand dollars what was it in your current in the local currency uh for almost three million dollars uh crowns so 2016 first line of code three million crowns when did you have your first dollar revenue what year uh it was uh last year because before we started coding uh logical plan we uh we didn't know anything about sas uh we we read something about it you know but we started uh building a tool before we we asked the customers before before we found the product market fit uh so well you were the first user like you were using this in your agency yeah yeah but you know it seems uh pretty good to us the functionality was great but the user experience was so horrible that no one wanted to use it all the customers told us okay this tool the idea seems pretty great but you know the tool is really horrible so you have you have to build build it much better yeah okay so so today when you look at people that are paying for the tool what are they paying you on average per month uh today um because you know after after this first version we started building it again from scratch but we started with a different attitude we created uh mpv and did a soft launch so we uh found the first uh thousand users um but uh because we wanted to gain as much data as possible what year did you do that soft launch and got first thousand users uh it was uh we had we had a thousand users last year so it was in uh 2018. okay and had it uh um i want to come back down a second but you answer this question i will i will answer arnold so then we switched to uh we started as a premium because we want as much data as possible and then we switched to paid plan and only one percent of them uh continued to using the tool but uh the good news was that we received a lot of feedbacks and right now we are uh launching the new version so jacob sorry do you have any paying customers right now right now we have a 120 paying customers okay and what on average what do they pay per month uh they and on every they pay 32 dollars it's all the small smbs you know got it so so you basically got 120 of the thousand free users convert to a 32 a month plan uh sorry again please you said you had a thousand free users you now have 120 paying customers so you got almost 10 percent of those people to convert to a paid plan i know we continued to uh you know optimize the beginning of the funnel so the marketing was still running and uh we uh we gained more users than than those thousands so how many total tonight users oh i'm not sure about it i'm not sure about it it's around three three thousand i think okay and then revenue wise 120 customers 32 bucks a month you're doing about 3 800 a month right now yeah yeah right now we are doing and where were you a year ago nothing uh yeah yeah we weren't nothing okay that's good so that in infinite growth right that's a good thing i guess all right but right now you know right now our our terminate would be really high we don't measure the return rate uh i think maybe a hundred percent because uh we hold those customers only because they know that we will launch a brand new version of our product okay so when you say 100 churn that means about eight percent are churning every single month uh i'm not sure how much wood would churn uh if we would not uh launch the new version i think that maybe a hundred percent of of them would would churn because they sorry jacob you're talking about like a hypothetical in the future i'm trying to get what your actual churn is right now so last month how many customers stopped paying zero okay what about the month before that uh zero because they uh you know we told them six months ago that we will launch the brand new version and we uh they are more like our you know first adopters and uh we discuss with them how the new version should be like so they are all waiting for are they while they wait yeah yeah or they are paying i mean how did you convince them to do that they're you still using the old plan yeah they are still using the old phone okay so they're still so they're still managing their projects on your old platform and you're just saying hey don't churn yet wait until you see our new stuff coming out in a month exactly i see okay so you have like zero turn then right now yeah sounds good yeah yes it doesn't sound like you have a lot of confidence though about about the new thing coming down the pipe if you think turn's gonna be 100 uh i i hope i think that this uh this new version will be a breakthrough for for our project how many people are on the team today building this uh 12 people we are three co-founders and uh we have nine uh nine people working on the project how many engineers full-time engineers five okay and how many are sales people or marketing um marketing we have one guy managing our you know marketing one person for content and uh that's all all our stuff we do or on our own that's great okay very good um what about uh capital have you guys bootstrapped this or raised capital uh we bootstrap it we finance it from our positive cash flow from different projects that we are we are managing and running the agency uh yeah the agency as i said the project managers as a service so how much are you burning right now just in the software business how much per month uh per month uh it's uh i'm gonna have to count in uh dollars you can give me two millions grounds uh five uh you know five no 500 100 yeah 500 500 000 crowns or dollars per house sorry sorry crowns yeah so 500 000 crowns burned per month would be about 21 000 a month the united states dollars exactly what is so expensive a lot for a bootstrapped kind of team of five people full time where's most that money going uh the most of the money are going to engineers developing the new projects and we are also developing a mobile application because uh it's you know it's not a pure sas but we uh we have free deals with mid-sized enterprise companies so we are developing our tool also also for them so so that's the reason why we invest so so much into development right now going back to your first thousand free users how did you get them where did you find them uh we uh did it through facebook facebook ads yeah we ran we ran facebook ads and then we talk with each each customer you know we we have a low traffic so we was able to afford it how much did you spend uh for a new user uh i think right now uh or the 600 and uh almost seven seven hundred dollars per per user for a free user uh no no for for a paid user how much total do you spend on facebook ads to get the thousand users who i don't know i don't know right now like a range you're talking like five grand or 50 grand uh totally in crowns is fine in grounds who i really i really don't know but i know that uh the the current uh return of on investment uh is more than 20 months okay wait so you must have something a range is fine i'm just trying to get a sense of what you spent to get the first thousand users on facebook give me a range you must have some sense of range i mean it's your money you spent uh it's uh maybe around 300 000 crowns okay 300 000 crowns which would be about 13 000 united states dollars on facebook ads yeah okay so 13 000 on facebook ads a thousand users right so you base i mean you basically spent 13 bucks to get a new user um yeah i can i can maybe check it or i can send you send you the exact uh data later i mean did you it doesn't sound like you made more than 13 000 from that ad spend so it was bad ad spend essentially except that you learned which is you know there's upside there but is that i mean i assume that's why you stopped it it was too expensive yeah yeah exactly as i said the return of investment was more than 21 months so it didn't make sense but the main cause of it uh is the you know the current version of our tool yeah all right very good jacob let's wrap up here with the famous five books yeah there's a right answer for this one especially because you told me you just you just finished mine uh what's your favorite what's your favorite business book definitely how to be capitalist without any capital no no in all seriousness how did you how did you find it oh i really i really i really like it i uh you know i read all the emails from you because i also love data and uh when i saw that you wrote a book i i bought it and i it's really it's a really great book yeah i like good i'm glad you enjoyed it if you said anything bad i would cut you off and edit an only good thing so all right number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh yeah i'm following uh roy mann the ceo of monday or competitor number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company a favorite online tool uh our tool logical plan and beside that uh i don't know google sheets i i use them a lot number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night uh six six to seven it depends on how our kids are how they are how are you uh they are no youngest me i'm pretty and how many uh so it sounds like married how many kids uh two kids two okay great last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh i would say to myself to start with uh with this sooner much sooner guys logical plan competing the project management space they have about 120 customers paying 30 bucks a month so about four grand a month right now in revenue from nothing a year ago they just launched about three weeks ago with the big beta list of almost called two three thousand free users they're burning about twenty thousand dollars a month as they look to grow funding this fight from their agency which does over a million dollars per year they raise no money for this team size of 12 five engineers full time as they look to continue to scale in the space and try and find profitable places to spend money to drive new customers jacob thanks for taking to the top thank you thank you very much