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Founder Interview

How Newsifier Reached $26,000 MRR and 8 Customers Since Its May 2020 Launch (Interview with CEO Gerard Kijlstra)

Interview Date
October 21, 2021
Interviewee
Gerard KijlstraCEO and Co-Founder
Watch
Watch the full interview

Company Metrics at Interview Time

MRR (Oct 2021)

$26,000

Customers (Oct 2021)

8

ARPU (2021)

$3,300

Gross Churn (2021)

0%

Team Size (2021)

5

Historical Snapshot

These numbers were reported by Gerard Kijlstra during his interview with Nathan Latka recorded in October 2021 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See Newsifier’s current numbers.

Key Takeaways

  • 01Newsifier reached $26,000 in MRR since launching in May 2020
  • 02The company had 8 paying customers at interview time, all Dutch publishers
  • 03Average revenue per customer was $3,300 per month, with a minimum of $200 (or €200) per month
  • 04Gross churn was 0%, and Gerard estimated upgrade revenue at roughly 25% once Nathan explained the metric
  • 05The team of 5 included 4 engineers and Gerard as the sole non-engineer
  • 06Newsifier was fully bootstrapped; the first hire, now CTO, had agreed to invest his own money in the company, an amount never settled on the recording
  • 07Cold email outreach converted at roughly 1 in 11 contacts into paying customers
  • 08Gerard used SimilarWeb and BuiltWith to identify and filter prospective publisher leads

Company Metrics at Time of Interview

MetricValueSource
MRR (Oct 2021)$26,000Founder interview, Oct 2021
Customers (2021)8Founder interview, Oct 2021
ARPU (2021)$3,300Founder interview, Oct 2021
Minimum Monthly Price (2021)$200 / €200Founder interview, Oct 2021
Gross Churn (2021)0%Founder interview, Oct 2021
Upgrade Revenue (founder estimate, no period stated)25%Founder interview, Oct 2021
Team Size (2021)5Founder interview, Oct 2021
Engineers (2021)4Founder interview, Oct 2021
Cold Outreach Conversion Rate (2021)1 in 11Founder interview, Oct 2021
Founder Salary (first, c. 2020-21)~$1,600 per monthFounder interview, Oct 2021
Founder Salary (current) (2021)2,500 EUR per monthFounder interview, Oct 2021
Year Founded2020Founder interview, Oct 2021

Growth Breakdown

Revenue

Newsifier grew from zero to $26,000 in monthly recurring revenue since launching in May 2020. The average revenue per customer was $3,300 per month, with pricing based on page views and a minimum of $200 (or €200) per month.

Customers

The company had 8 paying customers at interview time, all Dutch publishers covering niches such as football, cryptocurrency, tech, darts, and tennis. Existing customers also launched new websites inside the platform, and when Nathan explained the term, Gerard estimated upgrade revenue at roughly 25%.

Team

The team grew to 5 people, with Gerard as the only non-engineer alongside 4 developers. The first hire became CTO and had agreed to invest his own money in the company, which Gerard read as a good sign: had the developer walked away from putting money in, it would have told him the code was not that good.

Profitability and Funding

Newsifier was fully bootstrapped and profitable at interview time, though Gerard described the profit as small, with nearly all revenue reinvested into the business. Gerard and his co-founder paid themselves below market rate, with Gerard earning approximately 2,500 EUR per month at the time of the interview.

Growth Strategy

Founder Network and Prior Industry Experience

Gerard's first customers came directly from his personal network in Dutch publishing, where he had previously co-owned a publishing company and met his co-founder. This gave Newsifier an immediate foothold with credible early adopters.

Cold Email Outreach

Beyond the initial network, Gerard ran targeted cold email campaigns and converted roughly 1 in 11 contacts into paying customers. He described doing two sales rounds of cold outreach, keeping the effort lean while the team focused on product development.

Lead Identification via SimilarWeb and BuiltWith

Gerard used SimilarWeb to identify high-traffic news websites in the Netherlands and BuiltWith to filter by technologies specific to news publishers, such as OneSignal for web push notifications and publisher-specific advertising networks, narrowing a large universe of sites to qualified prospects.

Geographic Focus

Newsifier started by focusing only on the Netherlands, then worked outward from there, looking for niches and for the competitors of the sites it had already found.

Zero Customer-Initiated Churn

One client relationship was ended by mutual agreement: the customer wanted everything custom-coded, and those demands were costing Newsifier more than the contract was worth, so the team told the client it would be better served by a custom development project. Apart from that, no customer left of its own accord, leaving customer-initiated churn at zero. Separately, existing customers launched new websites inside the platform, which added revenue on top of the retained base.

Best Quotes

“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.”
“Per month. Yep. They they pay based on the page views.”
“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 the client initiative, it's zero. It's actually negative because most of our clients, they started new websites within the system, so.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”

What Happened Next

This interview captured Newsifier at an early but promising stage, following its May 2020 launch, with $26,000 in MRR and 8 Dutch publisher customers. At the time, Gerard was planning a push into marketing and sales and had set a goal of $200,000 in MRR within 15 months. Visit the Newsifier company profile on GetLatka for current metrics and updated data.

View Newsifier’s current profile and metrics

Full Transcript

Chapters

Introduction and What Newsifier Does

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, 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?

Gerard Kijlstra

00:08>> Yes. Alright.

Types of Publishers Using the Platform

Nathan Latka

00:09Tell us more about this. What kind of publishers are paying for the tool?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

00:21Can you name some of them?

00:23Are there are

00:23there any ones that you can share?

Gerard Kijlstra

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

Pricing and Revenue Per Customer

Nathan Latka

00:44do they sort of pay you per month on average to use the technology?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

00:59Per month?

Gerard Kijlstra

01:00>> Per month. Yep. They they pay based on the page views.

CMS Features and Value Proposition

Nathan Latka

01:03And how do you help them increase traffic? What are they paying for?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Launch Story and COVID Origins

Nathan Latka

01:37And Gerard, when did you launch the business?

Gerard Kijlstra

01:40>> We launched in May 2020, so one off year ago.

Nathan Latka

01:452020. Very good. This is a COVID project.

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

01:54So And who is we? How many founders here are there?

Gerard Kijlstra

01:57>> Me and Eric, my co founder.

Nathan Latka

01:59Okay. Did you guys just split equity fifty fifty?

Gerard Kijlstra

02:02>> Yeah. Exactly.

Team Size and Hiring Plans

Nathan Latka

02:03Very cool. And how many people are on the team there?

Gerard Kijlstra

02:05>> Is it

Nathan Latka

02:05just you two still?

Gerard Kijlstra

02:06>> No. We are now five people.

Nathan Latka

02:08Oh, wow. Okay. So tell me more about the team. How many are engineers?

Gerard Kijlstra

02:13>> We have they're all engineers. I'm the only non engineer. So four engineers, and you do everything else? Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

02:21Are you looking to hire anyone right now?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Customer Count and MRR

Nathan Latka

02:53And what are sales today? How many customers do you have?

Gerard Kijlstra

02:55>> We have eight paying customers.

Nathan Latka

02:57Okay. Eight paying. Now, can I take eight times the 3,300 to back into what monthly revenue of $26,000?

Gerard Kijlstra

03:03>> Yep. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

03:04Okay. That's pretty good. So in a year, you've gone from nothing to 26,000 in MRR. Is that right?

Gerard Kijlstra

03:08>> Yep. Correct.

Customer Acquisition and Cold Outreach

Nathan Latka

03:09And where did you get those first eight customers from?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Lead Generation with SimilarWeb and BuiltWith

Nathan Latka

03:36Tell me more about how you found people to contact.

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

03:55So 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?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

04:22What are one of those technologies?

Gerard Kijlstra

04:24>> OneSignal, for example, it's like web push technology or advertising networks.

Bootstrapped and Profitable

Nathan Latka

04:31Interesting. Very cool. Okay. Now did you guys bootstrap this or raise?

Gerard Kijlstra

04:35>> Bootstrap.

Nathan Latka

04:36Nice work. Congratulations.

Gerard Kijlstra

04:37>> Thanks.

Nathan Latka

04:38That's exciting. Okay. So fully bootstrapped. And are you guys profitable today? Are you reinvesting everything back in the business?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Founder Salaries

Nathan Latka

04:56Gerard, 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

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

05:24What's really small? What was the first salary you paid yourself?

Gerard Kijlstra

05:27>> I think in dollars that was like 1,600 or something.

Nathan Latka

05:34Okay. And what do you pay yourself now?

Gerard Kijlstra

05:36>> Now we pay ourselves in euros 2,500.

Nathan Latka

05:45So like 3,000 US dollars?

Gerard Kijlstra

05:47>> Yeah, about that.

Nathan Latka

05:49That's great. But you guys are the lowest paid employees on the team.

Gerard Kijlstra

05:53>> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nathan Latka

05:54That'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?

The CTO Investing in the Company

Gerard Kijlstra

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

Nathan Latka

06:29He wrote a he wrote a check into the business?

Gerard Kijlstra

06:31>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

06:32How much did he invest?

Gerard Kijlstra

06:33>> 50,000. Well, we we are aware he's about to invest, but basically, it's 50,000.

Nathan Latka

06:37Interesting. And what will you invest that 50,000 on to drive growth?

Gerard Kijlstra

06:41>> Sorry? I'm sorry. It's it's it's it's it's thousand dollars. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

06:45Okay. What will he what will you guys invest that 70,000 in?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Churn and Expansion Revenue

Nathan Latka

07:07Salespeople love it when sales they close stick around, right? So someone listening would love that. What's churn look like today?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

07:47Do you know what your expansion revenue has been?

Gerard Kijlstra

07:49>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:50Upgrade revenue? Do you know what your upgrade revenue has been?

Gerard Kijlstra

07:53>> What's upgrade revenue?

Nathan Latka

07:55A 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.

Gerard Kijlstra

08:01>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it must be about 25%.

Nathan Latka

08:07Got it. So each year you're expanding, you're upselling by 25%.

Gerard Kijlstra

08:12>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:12That's great. Nice work there. Now have you tested any paid advertising or no?

Gerard Kijlstra

08:17>> No. Not yet. Not yet. No. No.

Nathan Latka

08:19Not yet. And how many customers do think you'll add this month?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Advice

Nathan Latka

08:51Well, 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?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

09:10Yep. Good one.

Gerard Kijlstra

09:11>> Yeah. Me as well.

Nathan Latka

09:12Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

09:41Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business?

Gerard Kijlstra

09:44>> ClickUp. We just migrate to ClickUp.

Nathan Latka

09:47Tell me why you love ClickUp.

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

10:02So 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?

Gerard Kijlstra

10:08>> Asana.

Nathan Latka

10:09Ah, okay. And is is ClickUp easier?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

10:23You're saying ClickUp, yep, it's steeper learning, you can do more.

Gerard Kijlstra

10:26>> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Asana is really intuitive, but at one point we were hitting the limitations of Asana.

Nathan Latka

10:33So 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?

Gerard Kijlstra

10:42>> I think about seven.

Nathan Latka

10:44Seven. And what's your situation? Married? Single? Kids?

Gerard Kijlstra

10:48>> I have I'm in a relationship. Okay.

Nathan Latka

10:50Any kids?

Gerard Kijlstra

10:52>> No. Not yet. Alright. The newsifier is the only kids until now.

Nathan Latka

10:55And how old are you?

Gerard Kijlstra

10:57>> I'm 38.

10:58>> 38.

Nathan Latka

10:59Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Gerard Kijlstra

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.

Nathan Latka

11:20Guys, 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.

Gerard Kijlstra

11:38>> Thank you.

Nathan Latka

11:40One 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

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12:49up for that at nathanlatka.com slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. If you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people.

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13:15See you.