How Mergify Hit $110K MRR Bootstrapped with 150 Customers (Interview with CEO Julien Danjou)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Mergify launched back in 2018. They work side jobs until 2021, 2022 when they quit and went full time. Julien told me a year ago they're doing $35,000 a month, now doing a $110,000 a month in revenue, all bootstrapped, which we love, serving a 150 customers that pay on average $750 per month. And again, they help you merge your code faster and safer with merge queues, workflow automations, and just a lot of different ways to save time.

00:27Hey, folks. My guest today is Julien Danjou. He's the CEO and co founder of mergify. He's been a free software developer for the last twenty years, contributing to multiple open source projects and publishing several books on the Python programming language. Alright, Julien, you ready to take us to the top?

Julien Danjou

00:44>> Yep.

What Mergify Does and Who It Serves

Nathan Latka

00:45Alright. 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.

Julien Danjou

00:52>> Yeah. Sure. So what we do is we provide automation services for a software engineering team that are using GitHub. So the common problem people have in software engineering team that, I mean, you do a lot code changes, you do a lot of pull requests, but you're trying to merge as, I mean, your code as fast as possible and, I would say, as secure as possible. So, our customers usually, they're having large repositories, a lot of people,

01:21>> engineers working on the complex code and they're trying to make that process of merging the code very fast and available.

Pricing Model and Average Contract Value

Nathan Latka

01:28And so, walk me through, on average, what's what do those customers pay per month to use the technology?

Julien Danjou

01:34>> I mean, we invoice and bill per seat. So, I guess, our average team size would be around 100 engineers. So, I think for most customers, it's around between 500 and €1,000 per month on a subscription basis.

Nathan Latka

01:53Okay. Cool. We'll go in the middle and just go with $7.50 there. So, just to be clear, you charge on that per seat model. Most teams are about a 100. Do you upsell feature sets or anything else?

Plans and Feature Tiers

Julien Danjou

02:04>> Yeah. We do. So we have multiple plans. Right now, we have three plans. Our larger plan is already for people using GitHub Enterprise Server, which means you are deploying GitHub on your own infrastructure. So we do have a mergify instance that you can run with that GitHub infrastructure on your cloud, for example. So that's really like our IT package. Our regular plans, which are basically two, like a basic plan where you have the basic feature of

02:32>> mergify, for example, a merge queue that's going to merge your request. Automatically, I mean, a very simple way, you want to go faster, have more optimization, we have a premium plan, for example, where we're going to add more and more features, like, more advanced features for larger teams, for example. Mhmm.

Founding Story and First Lines of Code

Nathan Latka

02:49Okay. Walk me through some of the backstory here. What year did you write the first line of software for mergify or first line of code? Sorry.

Julien Danjou

02:57>> What do mean? First time.

Nathan Latka

02:59When did you launch the company?

Julien Danjou

03:02>> Sorry, I

Nathan Latka

03:04When did you launch the company?

Julien Danjou

03:06>> Oh, sorry. We launched a little bit five years ago, basically. So the way we started is that we try to solve our own problem. Myself and my co founder, we both are software engineers, and when we started to work on a project on GitHub, we were having this kind of issue where we're trying to automate our work, basically. I mean, we are lazy, so the goal was to, know, a program that does things for you, and

03:32>> 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 where we got our first customers. We both were very in open source communities.

Nathan Latka

03:46You Name a couple of the open source communities that you were in that where you got your first customers.

Open-Source Roots and First Customers

Julien Danjou

03:51>> We started with a lot of the OpenStack projects. We were working back then at Red Hat, which is a major open source project contributor. There's a lot of people working. So, for example, the Seph project, which is a distributed storage open source project that they like to use mergify in their repositories to automate a lot of their work. And that's basically how we started getting first open source project and then our first customers.

Nathan Latka

04:20And Julien, fast forward to today, how many paying customers are you working with?

Current Customer Count and Revenue

Julien Danjou

04:26>> We have more than 150 customers right now. Most, mostly in The US, about three where we find the most companies using GetLat nowadays. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

04:37And Julien, so can I take a 150 customers times the $750 per month average price point? It puts you at about a 110,000 a month in revenue. Is that accurate?

Julien Danjou

04:46>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:47That's great. And if you're at a $110,000 a month today, where were you exactly one year ago so we can understand growth?

Julien Danjou

04:55>> I think year ago, we were a third of that. We basically multiplied by three over the last year.

Nathan Latka

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07:22all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview. And have you done all this bootstrapped or have you raised capital?

Bootstrapped from Day One

Julien Danjou

07:32>> We are bootstrapped since the beginning. So, it took a while, I think, for us to grow, basically because we started with, I mean, our own solution which was, you know, a Python script to automate a lot of our work and growing that to a solution that can accommodate, you know, businesses, large corporations, large teams. It took a few months, few years. Finding the good product market, it's a good Even the good marketing, the good way of

07:59>> selling the product took us a few years, and since we did not raise capital early, which was a choice, we wanted to focus on, you know, building the product and not trying to go on a roadshow or trying to find VC or all that.

08:13>> Yeah, I mean, it took a few years to start, but at the end of the day, we're quite happy with that decision so far because, I mean, we're free and very autonomous in the way we can take our decisions.

Nathan Latka

08:22No, I think that's super smart. Now, you keep saying

08:24>> we, did

08:24you have one co founder at the beginning?

Julien Danjou

08:26>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:27Did you guys just split equity fifty fifty at the start?

Julien Danjou

08:30>> Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

08:31Oh, that's odd. So how do you how do you get over disagreements?

Julien Danjou

08:37>> It turns out we've been working together with Nelly for more than ten years. So before starting the venture, I think we both I mean, we worked, like, for five or six years together on the same cutting project, all of that. So we knew each other very well. And I think we're both alike in 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

Holding Side Jobs and Going Full Time

Julien Danjou

09:02>> lot of time discussing, and so far we never are to, you know, to be in a very large disagreement where we're like, okay, we're blocked or we're It's a risk. I mean, for sure, I knew since the beginning that it is a risk to split fiftyfifty. So, it's very fair, and I know the company will not run without Mehdi, and he knows that it will not run without me. So, we have to work I mean, you

09:22>> have to have this mindset where you have to work with each other, where you can't just get rid of the other one. So it worked very well so far, and it still works to this day. So

Nathan Latka

09:31How did you you launched in 2018. It sounds like your revenue really started sort of the end of twenty twenty one. How did you guys pay yourself between 2018 and 2021, like your house rent and for food and things like that?

Julien Danjou

09:43>> Yeah, we did not actually. I mean, we worked for the first few years. We had two jobs for a while, both Millie and I, and then we were able to switch to that full time. It took care. Mean, the first year were pretty hard. You have two. Which is a good thing, I think, to have because you know that both model and time are very constrained. So you have to focus on the right thing, which, as

10:05>> an engineer, you see a lot of stories of people trying to build products and, you know, never launching and adding more and more features because you're like, yeah, that new feature will bring new customers and you never do anything, whereas where you were in the first few years, we were in the mindset that would be like, we have no time and no money, so, like, we have two hours of spare time this week. What do we

10:26>> do? What can we do? It's only two hours and basically $0. So you think in a different way, which I think helped us a lot over the years to grow in a way where you don't have a lot of resources, basically. You do a lot of things. You try to grow other things with Lidol.

Nathan Latka

10:42When did you guys quit your full, your other jobs and go all in on mergify what year?

Julien Danjou

10:47>> We quit a couple of years ago for many, I mean, a different time for me and many to be able to focus full time on this. And also when we started to hire more people over the last years, we were able to, you

11:00>> grow and So when did you quit your other job?

Nathan Latka

11:042020? 2021?

Julien Danjou

11:05>> Yeah. I mean, yeah, we could have a different job for Mediac. I quit last year, Mediac over a couple of years ago. I mean, as soon as we got money to start paying one salary and then two salary, we then hired more people.

Team Size and Composition

Nathan Latka

11:17How many people are you guys today full time?

Julien Danjou

11:20>> We have 10 people full time now in the team.

Nathan Latka

11:22And how many are doing?

Julien Danjou

11:24>> Have seven engineers right now in the team.

Nathan Latka

11:26Interesting. So is that Who are the other three? Are they in sales?

Julien Danjou

11:30>> Me, I'm doing, I mean, sales and a lot of the things. And we have two people working in the team.

Go-to-Market: SEO, GitHub Marketplace, and Communities

Nathan Latka

11:35Walk me through how you're getting customers today. Is it still open source communities, hacker news, somewhere else? What's your go to market?

Julien Danjou

11:41>> Yeah. So, basically, a lot of open source communities right now, I mean, we're running the service for free since the beginning for open source projects. So we do a lot of word-of-mouth again. People are seeing that on GitHub being used and they are curious about what mergify is, what it does, and they're trying it out. And sometimes they're like, you know, they work on their weekend project, an open source project, and they get back to work

12:05>> on Monday and being like, Well, I'll test it out this weekend on my pet project, and it would be nice to have that work. So that's how often it started for the first customers.

12:15>> We're getting, I would say, more and more mature customers, more and more bigger customers. So it's more like we need a solution to automate our own merge system, you need a merge queue, for example, things like that, so people are looking over the internet. If you know what you're looking for, like a merge queue for GitHub, I mean, we are in the first result of Google, so it's pretty easy to find us. We are one of

12:39>> the only company providing search services. So it's easy to to to to find us and to get started by the client.

Nathan Latka

12:47Yeah. So so there's two things here. People search organically on Google, something like merge queue, GitHub, you'll show There's GitHub, and then there's the GitHub blog, and there's merge merge queue, build kite, python.org and then mergify.com. So you get traffic there. And then you're also actually in the GitHub marketplace. How many of your new sign ups per month come through this listing here in the GitHub marketplace?

Julien Danjou

13:11>> Very few, actually. We used to be in the front page from time to time in the first few years. And, no, I think we don't bring enough revenue for GitHub, so we basically put us never in the front page if you look from mergify or merge. You will find us on the marketplace, but that's not something that brings a lot of customers for us.

Nathan Latka

13:28Yep. That makes sense. Talk to me about moving forward. Do you plan to stay bootstrapped or you plan to raise capital?

Plans to Stay Bootstrapped

Julien Danjou

13:35>> We are planning to just bootstrapped right now. I mean, we have enough cash and enough revenue to keep growing on our own pace, which is fine because I mean, we're still learning. I think it's a job of building a company with Mediavine, which is very new for us. So, it's fine growing. I mean, I would say slowly, like, hiring more people and building the team and taking time to develop it. It suits us, I think, in

13:56>> that place so far. We do have a lot of- So, we- I mean, we'll- I think it's staying good throughout at least for this year. I mean, it's hard to say, like, a year ago I had no clue we would be 10 people right now, so it's very hard to predict anything, which is a good thing usually when it's about growing. And in terms of, like, putting new products and we have a ton of new ideas,

14:17>> we do talk a lot to our customers, which are software engineers like us, so it's pretty easy for us to understand their pain, their problems, and then we're trying to solve them. So we're trying to come with new ideas, new products in the upcoming year to address, well, the market problem.

Nathan Latka

14:33Yep. Are you doing any paid marketing or it's all organic?

Paid Sponsorships and Marketing Mix

Julien Danjou

14:37>> It's mostly organic. We started last year to do sponsorship of newsletters, podcasts, things like that. Basically, to try to reach our audience. It's very hard to do marketing with software engineers, so we have this kind of bottom up approach where we try to sell to the engineers the solution, the tooling that we

Nathan Latka

15:00we build. So did you spend Software Engineering Daily podcast, for example?

Julien Danjou

15:05>> Yeah. Exactly. This kind of podcast, this kind of Did it do well?

15:10>> It really depends of the newsletter and the and the podcast. For the part, we did a sponsorship on TLDR, the newsletter. It worked pretty well in our case. I mean, it really depends on you of some podcasts that just was a were a flaw, basically, and no get back. And in some cases, some newsletters or some podcasts were pretty great. I don't remember all the numbers from stuff my average usually Do you

Nathan Latka

15:35remember what you paid to sponsor this t l d r t l d r dot tech one? There's a million readers on this daily email.

Julien Danjou

15:43>> No. I don't know, honestly. It's a few thousand dollar I mean, I know our budget yeah. Our our budget usually is between a few 100 to a few thousand dollars.

Nathan Latka

15:52Yep. Yep. Interesting. Very cool. Well, listen, this is a great story. We're certainly rooting for you guys. I guess last question before we wrap up. If someone came today, you know, you're doing what you're doing, 110,000 a month or about 1,400,000 a year right now. If someone came and offered you guys maybe GitHub and offered you 10,000,000 all cash upfront, would you sell?

Acquisition Hypothetical and Wrap-Up

Julien Danjou

16:11>> That's a good question. I don't know. I mean, we're still growing at a rapid pace. We are happy with what we're doing, so it might be a bit soon to start the business yet. I mean, in the long term, that makes sense to start to a company that is a good fit for us or, I mean, is a good fit for the project we're trying to build.

Nathan Latka

16:28Alright, we'll see what happens. In the meantime here, Julien, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Julien Danjou

16:35>> That's a good question. I think I liked The Recipe the Difference, which is about negotiation. I learned a lot from reading this book.

Nathan Latka

16:42Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Famous Five

Julien Danjou

16:47>> I like Nathan Barry, which is the CEO of convert kits.

16:51>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

16:52Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building mergify?

Julien Danjou

16:57>> Getup, I guess.

16:58>> That's fair.

Nathan Latka

16:59Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Julien Danjou

17:03>> Read it on my kids, but probably seven to eight.

Nathan Latka

17:06Okay. And sorry, what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Julien Danjou

17:10>> I'm married, like, two kids.

Nathan Latka

17:12Two kids. Okay. And how old are you?

Julien Danjou

17:14>> I'm 39.

17:18>> 39.

Nathan Latka

17:19Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old?

Julien Danjou

17:23>> I don't know. So many things. It's hard to say.

Nathan Latka

17:28Alright, guys. There we have it. Mergify launched back in 2018. They worked side jobs until 2021, 2022 when they quit and went full time. Julien 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 per month. And again, they help you merge your code faster and safer with merge queues, workflow automations, and just a lot of

17:55different ways to save time. Julien, thanks for taking us to the top.

Julien Danjou

17:59>> You're welcome.

Nathan Latka

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