How Logsentinel CEO Bozhidar Bozhanov grew Logsentinel to $48K revenue and 20 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is bozedar borjanov he is the founder and ceo of log sentinel he's a senior software engineer and architect with experience in big companies like ericsson and tomtom he's also a former i.t advisor to the deputy prime minister of bulgaria he's a regular speaker on it conferences and a technical blogger along with being a member of the jury of international linguistics olympiad he's also author of the algorithmic music composer all right bozida are you ready to take us to the top yeah all right what is log sentinel and what's your business model how do you support yourself yeah well block central is a software as a service obviously that provides secure audit trail now audit trial is a very specific technical term but it is basically the trace that every single action that happens in the digital realm uh the trace that it leaves so when you click on some button in some system it should leave a trace and this trace should not be modifiable even by system administrators even by internal people and this is yeah and and how do you price so what do people pay on average per month for this well we have very very diverse pricing scheme starting from the free module for the very small startups ranging from 25 to 30 euro for the very small companies for very low volume and increasing to custom enterprise pricing for for the larger enterprises like the banks we are currently working with with two banks so it's very diverse support very well okay what would you just because i don't want to go down every customer cohort what would you say you're kind of your average is it a hundred bucks per month a thousand well currently it's around 200 i think uh it happens that larger customers are more interested into integrating the solution so so we're more to the to the upper bound okay about 200 bucks united states dollars per month yeah and what are they paying for you mentioned volume what volume of what data that they sent to us it is uh mostly based on that how much logs how much events they they send to our service and we secure these logs with using blockchain technology so that as i said even internal p people cannot modify the data this is very important in in many circumstances including for example elections [Music] internal internal actors happened to for example modify in the case of previous u.s elections when they hacked into the particular network they cleared their tracks after that and our service prevents stuff like that when did you launch the company uh almost exactly a year ago so 2017 and what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers well around 20 or 30 right now i said there we are we're still growing the the one of the problems actually with uh software as a service that is b2b is the the larger cycle of acquisition so we are in talks with say 20 companies right now but because they have long decision processes and it takes a while it's not someone just registers and starts using the service they they have to register they have to get internal approval they have to integrate it and only then after three to six months yeah i mean that makes total sense to me if your price point also reflects that but you can't make a six month sales cycle work on a 200 per month price point you are right and this is why we currently target the bigger enterprise companies that we install it actually on premise we have also had that option but also we have custom pricing for larger volumes and larger volumes uh a recent example a financial financial company they they are not that big enterprise but they have a lot of logs uh so we we scoped them a a custom offer and we are actually currently rethinking how our pricing should work because as you said uh these longer cycles don't work with the lower pricing so we want to focus on the higher end customers right now yeah so you have 20 customers today at a 200 per month price point on average you're doing about 4 000 per month right now well yeah let's say that why would it not be that well it's like that but we have some very big customers in the pipeline we have already signed actually contracts that will be paid up front so it might be actually above that but in in the current uh flow you're correct okay and what does growth look like so a year ago today were you pre-revenue uh a year ago today we had nowhere near yeah pre-revenue and have you bootstrapped have you bootstrapped the company or raised uh we had seed investment very small seeds investment from to private investors okay so how much total have you raised uh it's a hundred thousand euro so that in dollars is yeah at 110 000 yeah that's interesting and what about churn have you lost any customers no no no no turn yeah see you're too cheap you gotta you gotta you gotta 10x your price point i definitely agree with you all right and how the first 20 customers you did get how are you getting them this is very interesting actually it's half of them were inbound we we did have some some marketing campaigns but they just googled for exactly the right solution that we had they said okay we we tried competitors but we want exactly that and oh yeah half of the more inbound and we had some outbound sales and personal contacts okay so how do you like predictably scale up to you know a hundred grand a month or 80 grand per month [Music] well we are currently devising our marketing and sales quality we are uh increasing the the market budget so predictably i hope that this would help us uh predictably scale to more customers now obviously that's an easy answer that doesn't always work but but we'll do our best so is it too early to talk about like cac and lifetime value and things like that you just don't have enough data yet yeah yeah okay and what's the team look like today how many people are seven seven and where's everyone based uh in bulgaria well with one exception in munich bulgaria and munich very good all right good stuff here let's uh let's wrap up with the famous five number one uh bozodar what's your favorite business book oh i don't know i'm actually no uh yeah i don't read business books i read the economic books give me your favorite economics book munch nudge yeah okay number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh trivial lansa but bill gates he's a former ceo number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business um and uh number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i try to get eight it sometimes goes down to six and something okay uh number five how many are sorry what's your situation uh married single kiddos waiting for my kids okay so married no not married one kiddo not married and how old are you [Music] 31 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew well i wish i knew all i know now and this is about diverse knowledge about about the world so i couldn't pinpoint a single thing that i wish well probably if i wish i knew that people were not as idealistic as me people not as idealistic all the time watch out a little bit lunch in 2017 log sentinel again helping you understand and trace online signals even if they're trying to be erased his platform helps you make sure you always can follow that path 20 customers right now 200 bucks per month paid on average to do about four grand per month right now in revenue still early no turn about 110 000 raised to date as they look to scale with our team of seven in bulgaria and munich bozidar thank you for taking us to the top thank you