How Newsifier CEO Gerard Kijlstra grew Newsifier to $1.2M revenue and 8 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is gerard telstra he's helping publishers increase their revenue with his company nusafire.com gerard are you ready to take us to the top yes all right tell us more about this what kind of publishers are paying for the tool um the kind of publishers that are paying for the two are like commercial publishers who wants to grow their traffic and increase their venue can you name some of them are there are there any ones that you can share yeah they're all dutch publishers uh we have like sports publishers like football news websites sites about uh cryptocurrency websites about tech websites about darts about tennis like a lot a lot of niches so it's like it's like uh mid-sized mid-sized companies meanwhile what do they sort of pay you per month on average to use the technology on average they pay us the average revenue per client is now uh 3 300 dollars and like the minimum they have to pay is two hundred dollars or 200 euros per month per month yeah and very cool they pay based on the page views and how do you help them increase traffic what are they paying for they uh paying to use our uh our cms system and our cms system is 100 optimized for news websites so we have built in seo features we have built in live blog we have a lot of data of analytics so they can see which are the best performing editors um so it's it's really seo optimized and has a lot of special features for uh for editor for editors and publishers that wants to increase their their traffic around gerard when did you when did you launch the business we launched in uh may 2020 so one-on-one here ago 2020 very close this is a covet project huh yeah yeah we are middle of the pandemic we were starting so it was kind of a good period you know because there was nothing else to do so and who is lee how many founders you are there uh me and eric my co-founder okay did you raise a split equity 50 50. yeah exactly very cool and how many people are on the team today or so just you two still no we are now five people oh wow okay so tell me more about the team how many are engineers we have uh they're all engineers um i'm the only non-engineer so four engineers and you do everything else yeah exactly are you looking to hire anyone right now well we actually um they always say that you need like a hipster a hacker and a hustler um and i'm more like the product guy and i love like organizing uh uh the marketing and everything um and i also i also do the sales um and we of course we have four hackers already so it would be good to maybe like add another additional team would be like a pure hustler that really enjoys sales like that's really um yeah that really is like a sales tiger as they say and what are sales today how many customers do you have we have eight paying customers okay eight paying now can i take eight times a thirty three hundred to back into what monthly revenue of twenty six thousand dollars yeah exactly okay that's pretty good so in a year you've gone from nothing to 26 000 an mrr is that right yep correct and where did you get those first eight customers from uh from my own network because before i also worked in publishing i was co-owning like publishing company so that's also where i met my co-founder so from our our own network and uh the rest of the customers we just i just did a cold sales outreach campaign i just sent them he sent like emails and the good thing that i think one out of 11 became a customer so uh the people we contacted so tell me more about how you found people to contact um i just was searching for leads on similar web because there you can see of course how many how many traffic they have and uh of course the news websites are always the websites with the biggest traffic um and that's also where we can add the most value so okay but if you want similar web there's millions of websites with a lot of volume how did you narrow down your focus well we we first focused on um on the netherlands um so we first focused on that and then we were just looking for niches and looking for their their competitors and later we also used buildwith.com to um kind of filter like the technologies that are only used by news websites to kind of filter down what are one of those technologies uh one signal for example it's like a web bush technology or uh advertising advertising networks interesting very cool okay now did you guys bootstrap this or raise uh business nice work congratulations thanks that's exciting okay so fully bootstrapped um and are you guys profitable today or are you reinvesting everything back in the business uh reinvesting everything well we uh we're making a small profit just to have some skin on the bones um but uh yeah it's 99 we're investing back in the business gerard every startup founder goes when do i start paying myself you must be thinking about this right now you have some money to play with how do you think about paying your co-founder yeah we pay ourselves it's always a bit of a thing to pay ourselves very little the first half a year i think we didn't pay us ourselves anything so um but now and then we started with a really small salary just to pay like utilities and everything and now we are paying sales a bit more but we we pay our we pay our employees more than we pay ourselves what what's really small what was the first salary you paid yourself i think in dollars that was like 1600 or something okay and what do you pay yourself now now we pay ourselves um freaking euros in years two thousand uh five hundred so so like three thousand us dollars yeah about about that yeah that's great so but but you guys are the you're the lowest paid employees on the team huh yeah yeah yeah yeah that's how it works so you guys have all the equity so that that works okay very cool so um this makes a lot of sense now do you plan to stay bootstrapper do you plan to raise no the cool thing is that we hired our first hire was uh was a developer became our cto um and he is just uh we disagree that he will invest in the company so uh i guess that's a good sign because i mean if i would have asked him to invest and he would run away then i know that that code would not be that good but he has a lot of confidence in his code and in the in the project so he will be in first year he wrote a check into the business yeah how much did he invest uh 50 000. we are where he's about to invest but disagrees 50 000 so interesting and what will you invest that 50 000 on the drive growth uh sorry it's it's set it's it's set it's 70 thousand dollars yeah okay what will he what will you guys invest that 70 000 in um in basically hire more developers and also start marketing and start sales because we didn't do any well the i did two sales rounds with called sales emails uh but we're really little and then we just spend all time connecting clients and so just marketing as sales and sales people love it when sales they close stick around right so someone listening would love that what's churn look like today well it's zero um yeah it's well we we had one client that's got us built from start and in the end we told them ourselves that it's better to go for like a custom code coding project uh because he wanted he wanted like everything custom and and it was it was costing us more than it was gaining us so so uh we ended that well but apart from that we um on the client initiative that zero it's actually negative because most of our clients they started new uh new websites within the system so do you know what your expansion revenue has been the upgrade revenue do you know what your upgrade revenue has been let's upgrade revenue a customer that paid you a thousand dollars a month ago or two months ago now pays you two thousand dollars a month you would upgrade them a thousand okay yeah yeah yeah um i think it must be about uh 25 got it so each year you're expanding you're up selling by 25 yeah that's great nice work there now have you tested any paid advertising or no no not yet not yet no yes and how many customers you think you'll add this month this month uh we have pretty long sales cycle and we start sales in two weeks again so this month i i think uh i think zero but uh we are planning to uh move from uh our current revenue to uh mmr 200 uh k months within 15 months so that that's our goal we set now within 15 months we want to one five months yeah yeah exactly well hey we're rooting for you this is a hell of a story i appreciate you making time for a start all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book favorite business book um i think i would say the rockefeller habits uh yeah i love very few ceos say that but it was one of the one of the books that i read early on it was very transformational yep good one yeah me as well number two is there a ceo you're following are studying um i really like the ceo of shopify because i i listened some podcasts from him and i invested i mean i bought shares in shopify in 2016 so from then on i always followed them a bit and i i really love how much sense it does uh well what they're doing and and i mean it also...