How Mergify CEO Julien Danjou grew Mergify to $1.6M revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

merge if I launched back in 2018 they worked side jobs until 2021 2022 when they quit and went full time Julian told me a year ago they were doing 35 000 a month now doing 110 000 a month in Revenue all bootstrapped which we love serving 150 customers that pay on average 750 dollars per month and again they help you merge your code faster and safer with merge cues workflow automations in just a lot of different ways to save time hey folks my guest today is Julian donjo he's a CEO and co-founder of mergify he's been a free software developer for the last 20 years contributing to multiple open source projects and Publishing several books on the Python programming language all right Julian you ready to take us to the top yeah all right so you're working on mergify.com today tell us give us an example of a customer that's paying you to use the software yeah sure so what we do is we provide Automation Services for step to engineering team that are using GitHub so the common problems will have uh in software engineering team that I mean you developed got challenges you do a lot of cool requests basically you're trying to merge us I mean your code as fast as possible and I would say as secure as possible um so our customers usually uh they're having a large large repositories a lot of um people Engineers working on the on the code and they're trying to make that process of merging the code uh very fast and available and so walk me through on average what's what do those customers pay per month to use the technology uh I mean we are in boards and we will proceeds so uh I guess our average team size would be around 100 Engineers so I think for most customers that's around between 500 and 1 000 Euro dollars per month on a subscription basis okay cool we'll go in the middle and just go with 750 there so just to be clear you charge on that per seat model most teams are about a hundred do you upsell feature sets or anything else yeah we do so we have multiple plans um right now we have uh free plans or larger planets only for people using GitHub Enterprise server which means you are deploying GitHub on your own infrastructure so we do have a modified instance that you can run with that GitHub infrastructure on your Cloud for example uh so that's really like our idea package our regular plans uh which are basically to like a basic plan where you have the basic feature of energy fire uh photographers merge queue which has been to merge you could request um automatically in very simple way if you want to go faster you have more optimization we have a Premium plan for example where we're going to add more features um like more advanced features for larger teams for example okay walking through some of the backstory here what year do you write the first line of software for mergify or first line of code sorry when did you launch the company sorry I I when did you launch the company foreign problem uh by accepting my Governor we both are software Engineers uh and when we started to work uh on a product on GitHub we were having this kind of issue where we are trying to automate um or work basically I mean we are lazy so the goal was to you know having a program that does things for you and there was a lot of missing features in that regard on GitHub so we started that way trying to automate everything and that's actually what we got our practice because first customers uh we both were very active in open source communities that you were in that where you got your first customers uh we started with a lot of the open Stock projects uh we were working back when I thread out which is a major uh open source project contributors uh there's a lot of people they're working so for example uh the self project which is a distributed storage open source project that I like to use uh the emergency file in a very repositories to a tremend a lot of their work and that's basically how we started getting first uh open source project and then operates customers enjoying fast forward to today how many paying customers are you working with uh we have more than 150 customers right now uh most especially in the US that's really where we find the most uh companies using Gita nowadays enjoying so can I take 150 customers times this 750 per month average price point it puts you about 110 000 a month in revenue is that accurate yeah yeah that's great and if you're at 110 000 a month today where were you exactly one year ago so we can understand growth uh I think a year ago when we were a third of that so we basically multiplied by three over the last year 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 evaluation 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 and have you done all this bootstrap of your raised capital uh we all was dropped since the beginning so it took a while I think for us to grow basically because we started with I mean the orange solution which was you know a python script to a tomato for work and growing that to a solution that can accommodate um you know businesses like large cooperation large teams I took a few months a few years um finding the good product Market that's a good even the good marketing uh the good uh way of selling the product uh took us a few years and since we generally raise Capital early which was a choice we wanted to focus on you know building the product and not trying to go on a on a Roadshow trying to find a VCR of that uh to yeah I mean he took a few years to start but at the end of the day we're caught up with the decision so far because I mean we're Korean various Cinemas in the way we can take our decisions no I think that's super smart now you keep saying we do have one co-founder at the beginning yeah did you guys just split Equity 50 50 at the start yeah exactly oh that's odd so how do you how do you get over disagreements uh it turns out we've been working together with Native for more than 10 years so uh before starting the adventure I think we both I mean we work like for five or six years together on the same cutting project all of that so we knew each other very well and uh I think we both alike and the way we think so it's very rare we disagree on anything if we do I think we try to you know spend a lot of time discussing and so far we never had to you know to to be in a very large disagreement where we're like okay we're blocked or we're stuck it's a risk I mean for sure I and I'm using the beginning but it is a race to speed 50 50. uh so it's very fair and I know the company will not run without many and he knows that it will not run without me so we have to work I mean you have to have this mindset where you have to work with each other with you can't just get rid of the other one so it worked very well so far...