Newsifier Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Gerard Kijlstra. He's helping publishers increase their revenue with his company, newsifier.com. Gerard, are you ready to take us to the top? [00:08] >> Yes. Alright. [00:09] Tell us more about this. What kind of publishers are paying for the tool? [00:14] >> The kind of publishers that are paying for the tool are like commercial publishers who wants to grow their traffic and increase their revenue. [00:21] Can you name some of them? [00:23] Are there are [00:23] there any ones that you can share? [00:24] >> Yeah. They're they're they're all Dutch publishers. We have, like, sports publishers, like football news websites, sites about cryptocurrency, websites about tech, websites about darts, about tennis, like a lot niches. It's like mid sized companies. What [00:44] do they sort of pay you per month on average to use the technology? [00:47] >> On average, they pay us, the average revenue per client is now $3,300, and, like, the minimum they have to pay is $200 or €200. [00:59] Per month? [01:00] >> Per month. Yep. They they pay based on the page views. [01:03] And how do you help them increase traffic? What are they paying for? [01:07] >> They are paying to use our CMS system, and our CMS system is a 100% optimized for news websites. So we have built in SEO features, we have built in live blogs, we have a lot of data, a lot of analytics, so they can see which are the best performing editors. So it's really SEO optimized and has a lot of special features [01:33] >> and publishers that wants to increase their traffic. [01:37] And Gerard, when did you launch the business? [01:40] >> We launched in May 2020, so one off year ago. [01:45] 2020. Very good. This is a COVID project. [01:48] >> 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. [01:54] So And who is we? How many founders here are there? [01:57] >> Me and Eric, my co founder. [01:59] Okay. Did you guys just split equity fifty fifty? [02:02] >> Yeah. Exactly. [02:03] Very cool. And how many people are on the team there? [02:05] >> Is it [02:05] just you two still? [02:06] >> No. We are now five people. [02:08] Oh, wow. Okay. So tell me more about the team. How many are engineers? [02:13] >> We have they're all engineers. I'm the only non engineer. So four engineers, and you do everything else? Yeah. Exactly. [02:21] Are you looking to hire anyone right now? [02:23] >> Well, we actually they always say that you need, like, a hipster, a hacker and a hustler. And I'm more like the product guy and I love organizing the marketing and everything. And I also do the sales. And of course, we have four hackers already, so it would be good to maybe add another addition to Team, would be like a pure hustler that really enjoys sales. [02:51] >> Really is like a sales tiger, as they say. [02:53] And what are sales today? How many customers do you have? [02:55] >> We have eight paying customers. [02:57] Okay. Eight paying. Now, can I take eight times the 3,300 to back into what monthly revenue of $26,000? [03:03] >> Yep. Exactly. [03:04] Okay. That's pretty good. So in a year, you've gone from nothing to 26,000 in MRR. Is that right? [03:08] >> Yep. Correct. [03:09] And where did you get those first eight customers from? [03:12] >> From my own network, because before I also worked in publishing, I was co owning like a publishing company. So that's also where I met my co founder. So from our own network and the rest of the customers, just did a cold sales outreach campaign. I just sent them, sent like emails. And the good thing is I think one out of 11 became customers, so the people we contacted. [03:36] Tell me more about how you found people to contact. [03:40] >> I just was searching for leads on similar web because there you can see, of course, how many how many traffic they have. And of course, websites are always the websites with the biggest traffic. And that's also where we can add most value. [03:55] So okay, but if you want a similar web, there's millions of websites with a lot of volume. How did you narrow down your focus? [04:01] >> Well, first focused on The Netherlands. [04:06] >> So we first focused on that and then we were just looking for niches and looking for their competitors. And later we also used builtwith.com to kind of filter like the technologies that are only used by news websites to kind of filter down. [04:22] What are one of those technologies? [04:24] >> OneSignal, for example, it's like web push technology or advertising networks. [04:31] Interesting. Very cool. Okay. Now did you guys bootstrap this or raise? [04:35] >> Bootstrap. [04:36] Nice work. Congratulations. [04:37] >> Thanks. [04:38] That's exciting. Okay. So fully bootstrapped. And are you guys profitable today? Are you reinvesting everything back in the business? [04:46] >> Reinvesting everything. Well, we we we're making a small profit just to have some skin on the bones. But, yeah, it's 99 percent we're investing back in the back in the business. [04:56] 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 even Yeah, your co [05:05] >> we pay ourselves, it's always a bit of a thing that we pay ourselves really little. The first half a year, I think we didn't pay ourselves anything. So, but now, and then we started with a really small salary just to pay like utilities and everything, and now we are paying ourselves a bit more, but we pay our employees more than we pay ourselves. [05:24] What's really small? What was the first salary you paid yourself? [05:27] >> I think in dollars that was like 1,600 or something. [05:34] Okay. And what do you pay yourself now? [05:36] >> Now we pay ourselves in euros 2,500. [05:45] So like 3,000 US dollars? [05:47] >> Yeah, about that. [05:49] That's great. But you guys are the lowest paid employees on the team. [05:53] >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [05:54] That's how it works. You guys have all the equities that works. Okay, very cool. So this makes a lot of sense. Now, you plan to stay bootstrapped or do you plan to raise? [06:03] >> No, cool thing is that we hired, our first hire was a developer that became our CTO. [06:11] >> And we agreed that he will invest in the company. So I guess that's a good sign, because I mean if I would have asked him to invest and he would run away, I know that code would not be that good, but he has a lot of confidence in his code and in the in the project. He will be the first [06:29] He wrote a he wrote a check into the business? [06:31] >> Yep. [06:32] How much did he invest? [06:33] >> 50,000. Well, we we are aware he's about to invest, but basically, it's 50,000. [06:37] Interesting. And what will you invest that 50,000 on to drive growth? [06:41] >> Sorry? I'm sorry. It's it's it's it's it's thousand dollars. Yeah. [06:45] Okay. What will he what will you guys invest that 70,000 in? [06:50] >> In basically hire more developers and also start marketing and start sales because we didn't do any Well, I did two sales rounds with cold sales emails, but really little. And then we just spent all the time connecting clients and so just marketing and sales. [07:07] Salespeople love it when sales they close stick around, right? So someone listening would love that. What's churn look like today? [07:14] >> Well, it's zero. Yeah. Well, we had one client that's got us built from the start and in the end we told them ourselves that it's better to go for like a custom coding project because he wanted like everything custom and it costing us more than it was gaining us so we ended that well. But apart from that, on [07:39] >> the client initiative, it's zero. It's actually negative because most of our clients, they started new websites within the system, so. [07:47] Do you know what your expansion revenue has been? [07:49] >> Yeah. [07:50] Upgrade revenue? Do you know what your upgrade revenue has been? [07:53] >> What's upgrade revenue? [07:55] A customer that paid you a thousand dollars a month ago or two months ago now pays you $2,000 a month. You upgraded them a thousand dollars Yeah. [08:01] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it must be about 25%. [08:07] Got it. So each year you're expanding, you're upselling by 25%. [08:12] >> Yeah. [08:12] That's great. Nice work there. Now have you tested any paid advertising or no? [08:17] >> No. Not yet. Not yet. No. No. [08:19] Not yet. And how many customers do think you'll add this month? [08:24] >> This month, we have pretty long sales cycle. We start sales in two weeks again, so this month I think zero, but we are planning to move from our current revenue to MRR 200 ks a month within fifteen months. So that's our goal we set now. Within fifteen months, we want to One five months? Yep. Yep. Yep. Exactly. [08:51] Well, hey, we're rooting for you. This is a hell of a story. I appreciate you making time for us to start. Alright. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? [08:59] >> Favorite business book? I think I would say the Rockefeller habits. Yeah. I [09:06] >> love very few CEOs say that, but it was one of the of the books that I read early transformational. [09:10] Yep. Good one. [09:11] >> Yeah. Me as well. [09:12] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [09:16] >> I really like the CEO of Shopify because I listened to some podcasts from him and I invested, I mean, I bought shares in Shopify in 2016. So then from on I always followed them a bit and I really love how much sense it does, what they're doing and it's also a bit of an inspirational company for us, know, because we try to make publishing easier and they make ecommerce easier. Great. [09:41] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business? [09:44] >> ClickUp. We just migrate to ClickUp. [09:47] Tell me why you love ClickUp. [09:49] >> It's so [09:52] >> You can do so much things with it. I mean, it's it's I really like like automating things and you can automate everything with it. So that's what I love most about it. [10:02] So you're bootstrapped, you launched a year ago, you're now doing $26,000 a month in revenue, you just switched to ClickUp. What were you using before? [10:08] >> Asana. [10:09] Ah, okay. And is is ClickUp easier? [10:12] >> No. It's not easier, but it's especially when you work with a lot of developers, it's more extensive. I mean, it has a steeper learning curve, but you can do a lot more with it. So, yeah. [10:23] You're saying ClickUp, yep, it's steeper learning, you can do more. [10:26] >> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Asana is really intuitive, but at one point we were hitting the limitations of Asana. [10:33] So Very cool. There you guys have it. A ClickUp a a ClickUp ClickUp switcher from Asana. Alright, Gerard. Number four. How many hours of sleep do eat every night? [10:42] >> I think about seven. [10:44] Seven. And what's your situation? Married? Single? Kids? [10:48] >> I have I'm in a relationship. Okay. [10:50] Any kids? [10:52] >> No. Not yet. Alright. The newsifier is the only kids until now. [10:55] And how old are you? [10:57] >> I'm 38. [10:58] >> 38. [10:59] Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? [11:03] >> Think maybe I wish that I would have read Lean Startup, because I mean, from 20 on until I read Lean Startup, tried a few projects, but like really the non Lean Startup way. So I mean business wise, I wish I've learned that, yeah. [11:20] Guys, there you have it, newsifier.com helping publishers get more revenue. They went from nothing to $26,000 in monthly recurring revenue across nine customers in under twelve months. It's really impressive. They were a team of five. They totally bootstrapped. Gerard now looking for a rockstar salesperson. We'll see what he does next. Gerard, thanks for taking us to the top. [11:38] >> Thank you. [11:40] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one [12:05] pm Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. Make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [12:27] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. 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