How MySwimPro, Inc. CEO Fares Ksebati grew MySwimPro, Inc. to $2.2M revenue and 7.5K customers in 2023.

hey guys my guest today is ferris speddy he started my swim pro when he was 23 and since it has grown to over a million downloads named after the year by apple and has grown to seven figures in revenue they're 100 remote company distributed across 10 different time zones ferris you're ready to take us to the top let's do it tell you what man i uh i was living in l.a the past couple months and i was living in a place with a pool and i've never been a big swimmer because i would paddle i'd go too quickly i'd kick too much and i'd paddle too i'd be out of air in like two seconds and then someone said nathan all you have to do paddle less kick less keep as much your body under water and i'm like wow i can swim a couple laps now and not be exhausted would would your app help me realize this or how does it work uh we could do that for sure you know it's funny that you mentioned that i was just at the pool before this call and i was helping like a new swimmer so we helped swimmers from beginner all the way through more advanced who maybe swam through high school or college and now they're doing it for fitness the app is basically like a personal coach so you know if you want to go to a gym and you want to get like a yoga class or a spin class that's pretty easy we created my swim pro because you can't do the same thing if you want a swim workout you know it's very difficult to get that kind of coaching so to download the app and you know to have that personalized training program tell you what to do step by step work out by workout set by set that's really what we deliver through our iphone and android app okay and this is going to sound like a silly question to the audience but i bet the answer might surprise you do you require a pool uh yes and no so you know what's really interesting especially the pandemic you know here in 2020 a lot of pools actually shut down so there's at one point here in 2020 where 90 percent of the world's pools were shut down completely so you actually couldn't swim so we actually pivoted the business and in the app we actually have at home training programs to do without a pool so you can train holistic experience so if you do have a pool great you can obviously go swimming if you have open water you can go in the lake or ocean whatever you have and if you're at home and you don't have access to a pool or you want to complement the swim training you can do that in your house as well ferris let's talk money it sounds like you've had some success here when did you launch the company what was your one yeah year one was 2015 but we didn't monetize until 2016. so tell me about what happened in 2015 sort of how did you get the initial capital to get going and how many users did you get in the first year yeah it was all sweat equity in the beginning so you know myself and my two co-founders we were basically funding it ourselves we launched the app in 2015 on ios and android and we didn't launch the subscription until the following year so we didn't take any investment actually in that first year uh first year and i think we had like 6 000 downloads and it wasn't until 2016 we did a accelerator program we got a little bit of initial investment and i think in our second year when we started monetizing we hit like 100 000 downloads total at that point and uh you know revenue wise you know we're talking we're talking like thousands of dollars yeah yeah yeah so just to be clear 2015 was 6 000 downloads how much revenue did you do that year do you remember we did zero so we didn't even have this subscript that was like we just launched free app get things going and then the next year we launched this okay so tell me about that the first year you had at least a paid option in 2016 you said you hit 100 000 downloads and what was revenue yeah uh first year was like 14 about 20 000 and how did you make the revenue what's the what's the pricing model here yeah so we initially launched with a monthly subscription it was 10 bucks a month and you know it's the app looking back now very elementary compared to what it is today uh and we've made a lot of progress uh there's still a lot more work to go but it was yeah ten bucks a month and then the following year in 2017 we added a yearly subscription option as well why did you make a decision to add a yearly option yeah so actually a couple of reasons but number one the members of our community actually wanted that you know if the people didn't want to get billed every single month for something that they knew that they wanted for a long term which is amazing uh the other thing too just looking at the unit economics when you know if you have something monthly you have to get someone to repay 12 times to equal a year right and so if you can position it where you actually get a discount for going yearly then they save money and it's perceived higher value because it is and you don't have to convince someone 12 times they have a whole year to keep their loyalty and what was that annual price you launched with it was 100 bucks so when we launched it was 10 bucks a month we actually have changed the pricing six or seven times in the last four years just tweaking things so we changed the monthly pricing to 15 a month so you could compare 15 a month or 100 a year so it's like almost like a 50 50 discount at that point what is pricing today it's a hundred and eighty for a full package for the year or thirty dollars a month interesting okay and and so let's let's just take a step back here for a second 2015 get going 2016 you get paid 2017 pricing experiments what is it in terms of total downloads in 2018 do you remember uh 2018 at that point we were probably around half a million okay and i mean this is not easy right a lot of apps on the app store it's this is not by accident it's not just word of mouth you guys are very strategic about this break it down for me how did you get five you know half a million downloads in your first two and a half three years yeah there's a few factors there um the first one is just the category that you're in so for us you know it's a fitness app but it's a fitness app specific to swimming and that subcategory actually isn't that crowded so if you think about like yoga or meditation or weightlifting i mean there's tens of thousands of apps in those categories and there's a few category winners by far in swimming i mean we were the first mover advantage so that helps that helps you get going so i think that's can attribute some of it we were app of the year by apple so we had a little bit more exposure just organically in the app store 2018 we were app of the year in 2016. so 2017 is where we started to see those results because they announced it at the end of the year in december so 2017 2018 we started to see some of that snowballing effect now that's actually not really as significant but at the time when you're app of the year and you get that prominent placement in the app store that's pretty big on the content marketing side uh really ramping things up and now we just have a machine that's pushing things out so that really helps the word of mouth and so i think snowball effect is probably the most fitting way to do it because i always tell people you know year one it was six we were getting like 20 to 30 downloads a day and then fast forward and all of a sudden that's two to three hundred downloads per day and then it's like a thousand downloads per day but it wasn't you snap your fingers and you instantly go you know if you were to spend a lot of money on marketing you could theoretically you know buy you know that exposure but we didn't really go that route it was more organic content word of mouth placement break that down real quick so 2016 was average 30 downloads a day yep and then when you get up to like a thousand or 100 a day so in twenties yeah we'll go year by year so 2015 20 to 30 downloads a day um 2016 to 2017 we we about 10x that over that you know 12 to 18 month window so now we're you know 2017 now we're looking at two 300 downloads per day 2018 2019 we've gotten up to about you know 800 to 1200 downloads per day and the unfortunate thing about the pandemic of 2020 you know with pool access being shut down for 30 to 50 we've actually been uh cut back pretty significantly you know now today in 2020 if we're looking at three to 500 downloads per day just because the pools aren't open and people aren't trying to go swimming right now but i'm very confident that 2021 when the olympics comes back around you know hopefully next year we'll start to see that traffic go back to normal and so today how many paying customers do you have either on a monthly plan or an active annual plan we have about between seven and eight thousand paying uh across both of those okay and how much how many was that last year uh we're we're about flat from last year because of the the pandemic uh but that's where we were last was revenue also flat or have you driven up sell revenue this year across the same base uh it's pretty...