How Makerble CEO Matt Kepple grew Makerble to $45.7K revenue and 30 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is matt keppel he uh helps non-profits with a struggle to identify the right kpis that enable them to evaluate whether the projects they do are truly making a lasting impact the company suggests kpis to these nonprofits and provides them with the database survey tool analytics platform which lets them track their impact in real time and share their data with founders with funders and donors matt are you ready to take us to the top perfect yeah all right so first off the company today is it a sas company serving these non-profits or do you have a different business model yeah it's that and we felt that that was going to be the best for what we're doing we are providing software charities non-profits pay a monthly fee to use the platform okay and and help me understand kind of size you're working with here so so typical kind of charity nonprofit is paying you about how much per month it really varies so like what's the average um say a mean average might be a hundred hundred pounds a month okay but it goes everything from say 10 pounds a month up to 1500 pounds a month and what do they get if so if they pay less or if they pay more what more do they get so what we did was give them the same product but we tiered it by income because there's in in the uk at least there's 168 000 charities and their turnover ranges from 10 000 pounds a year up to 400 000 let's say like 400 million pounds per year so we decided to tear the price of the product based on the income range of the organization okay um because actually across the side there's only a few things that the really large ones need that the smaller ones don't so that's currently how we structured the process and what did you launch the company in what year did you launch the company in we launched in 2013 um and then we were a slightly different product we were focused more on being a marketplace and the premise was if we could provide a platform where people could discover charity projects to give to and get updates on the impact of their donations we could catalyze more income for nonprofits but what we found was that the nonprofits on our platform really struggled to quantify the impact they were making and that's why in 2015 2016 we pivoted and to being more of a staff platform solving the problem that nonprofits have around how do we really articulate and quantify the impact that we're making and with that pivot what have you scaled to today in terms of total you know nonprofits or charities or customers paying you so we now have about 30 non-profits working with us who are using the platform um and i mean again you're still there and what we've mostly done is just kind of grown that through word of mouth and we're now at a stage where we're just about to hire our first sales person to really begin to like scale things up we had to spend a lot of time getting the product working the way that it needed to because ultimately we were shifting from a marketplace to something that needed to be a strong crm and a strong analytics platform so we're pretty much now emerging from being our beta and now at a stage where because of the deals that have come through we've got that additional capital that we can now invest in in faster growth rather than being as one or two founders picking up deals as we go along have you bootstrapped to date yeah bootstrap today very small investment round um some angels 30 000 from angels okay and then we've had um some convertible loan notes as well about 30 40k as well okay so maybe call you know 70 grand into the company so i mean i stopped to ask you so 30 30 kind of uh nonprofits charities paying you 120 you know it's really 127 i think that's conversion rate united states dollars per month would put you at about right now 35 30 800 per month in kind of revenue is that basically where you're at yeah pretty much pretty much and where were you a year ago so we can understand growth were you pre-revenue at that point no a year ago we were probably about half that um because we still had quite a few pilots on the go we had some organizations that were using the platform but very much on like say a free basis or just for three months at a time while they were evaluating whether to use it so yeah we we have seen some growth there but i i'm much more excited about i guess what comes next because even over the last year we haven't really done that much more on the customer acquisition it's again been stuff coming through gently um you need to now like invest a whole lot more in really growing the number of organizations that are coming through and that what's the team size today how many folks so we've got two in london and then we've got three developers in india and then we're just about to hire another three about what we're currently hiring three more developers in india and looking for another sales person okay well a sales person so in london so matt any of my listeners are basically going to do the math right they're going to be wondering okay this thing was launched in 2013. there's five employees they haven't raised really a ton of capital only 70 grand and they're currently doing about four grand per month how on earth is he paying a team of five people i mean how are you guys surviving well i guess this i mean our team in india don't cost that much to run that's like the first thing um and then in terms of like from there and also whilst we do get that kind of monthly recurring revenue we also do the odd consulting piece of work as well so like we've just taken on like a 40k project for example so that kind of doesn't sit within our mrr but is kind of an additional piece of work that does bring in some additional capital and and so that that's kind of how we work it financially that's great and then that you guys said that the five of you based between europe and india yeah okay very good and then do you know enough yet about kind of you know unit economics related to churn cac ltv or is it too early really because you only have 30 customers yeah it's it is a bit early to work that out at this stage because also with the customers that we have probably only one or two are using a using makeable at capacity in terms of they have other projects that they're not yet using the platform on so in terms of like the lifetime value we're not even fully there in terms of what their like one year value could be there's a lot of growth potential within all the clients that we've got very good well i hope you come back on in a year let you know give us an update let us know how it's going in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um has to be the lean startup probably um it was it was good to read back when i was kind of beginning and it was just good to get a sense of iterating because that's always been my kind of way of working trying to fail fast and just learn quickly and one of the things we've definitely found with the team is because we have like intent to join from time to time is really getting people into that mindset of don't try and get it perfect like out the door get something going quickly that we can learn from that's far more important very good number two is there under the radar ceo that you're following or studying um good question um i i mean one of my good friends yes would come under that guy called james veda founder of student beam it's like a uk company and basically provides discounts to um students at university and i think i've just really been impressed at his complete hustle in terms of being the guy out there selling his business now he's going to like 40 50 staff and various spin-off benches and and yeah i often looked at him for inspiration number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business um there's a toss-up between black and trello um and it's it's it's probably gonna be slack purely on the grounds of um yeah especially having an international team it's so vital to be able to like stay in your time contact with everyone number four how many hours of sleep to get every it's night reducing it used to be about seven and now i'm waking up around about six five last two weeks i don't know why um but it's definitely been reducing all right and matt what's your situation married single kiddos 35 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh definitely to to go for no in terms of i think there was definitely a sense that i would hold back i think on some of my bigger ideas just because i didn't think that they would get the traction that they would whereas i've just learned go for it even if you get like a rejection it's still worth giving it a go to them guys there you have it matt maker bowl helping charities and and non-profits report back to donors and add transparency to the space overall launched in 2013 went through a pivot in 2016 uh now doing uh about again those 30 customers paying about 127 bucks per month so about four grand per month in revenue that's up from 1500 bucks per month about a year ago so again now doubling down and really focused on growth now that he feels like he's got a better product market fit with a team of five people in europe and india matt thanks for taking us to the top you're welcome thanks for having me