How Nighteye CEO Stanislav Dimitrov grew Nighteye to $30K revenue and 4K customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is stanislav dimitrov he is building a browser extension that enables dark mode and one of the founders of a company called night eyes one of the founders uh the bra it's a browser extension that works on nearly any website now he finishes masters in marketing in 2014 and headed back home to join his family business at printing house but the family phys the family business wasn't still as a big part of his life but tech in general has always fascinated him and he wanted to start this side venture luckily a couple months after he came home one night he met the current co-founders of his company nidai and they're all around 25 years old looking to build this tech company from the ground up based in bulgaria stan you're ready to take it to the top yeah sure okay so so what is night eye it's a it's a chrome extension uh yes it is a chrome extension but in general it's a browser extension that works on nearly any website and it's available in pretty much all major browsers that are that are out there in the market from chromium firefox safari edge the old edge the new edge pretty much we are everywhere but but um we started with the chrome yeah okay and how do you make money uh basically um we have an annual subscription uh we have uh one time off so it's a lifetime license and yeah and we have a free version called night i light but we make money from the first two of course okay okay and how many customers do you have today uh currently we have around 4 500 customers um and we have around 100 000 uh users okay 100 000 users uh and 4 500 customers up to 4500 customers how many are on the nine dollar a year recurring plan oh well approximately 60 percent go for the nine year uh for the nine dollar and the rest go for the uh purchase for the lifetime purchase okay so about 2500 are paying you sort of nine dollars per year so you guys in terms of just recurring revenue you're doing about 2 000 a month 2.5 2.7 depends depending on the month yeah yeah give me give me the thought process behind offering a a lifetime plan that is equal to about five years worth of your yearly price well there are two main reasons the first one was that um surprisingly some of the users the early adopters actually asked for for that we never planned to to offer it and then we went for uh exactly calculating like we think that the browser extension that you know enables dark mode should be um trendy let's say for about five years so this is how we calculated the pricing for the lifetime in order to serve the people that really want it and yeah but we never expected that many people to go for the purchase because it's a bit more expensive you know yeah i mean you have 2 000 people that paid 40 bucks one time so that's 80 000 in additional revenue correct what do you guys use that money on well basically um we stuck it like we we put it in the bank and uh yeah we don't use it how many how many of you guys are there we are four currently um but uh only two of us work on this side project like part time and we have uh the third member is just working on the safari because it's a completely different story there with the safari extension and the mac os up yeah but mostly we're two people working part-time on it okay so there's two people part-time one working on safari but what's where's the fourth no he doesn't work on the on the project basically our company before launching night i was and still is to some extent uh service company so basically we we develop projects for our customers and we started night i because one of the developers just needed a dark mode extension he couldn't find one that is really really good and yeah we just said okay let's do it and we'll push it to the market and surprisingly took off like what's the website that you guys do agency work through it's razerlabs.com razer labs okay so interesting and and it's essentially a web development agency correct correct razer what sorry is it razerweb.com razer oh labs razorlabs.com great yeah and so how do you split your time between the chrome extension razorlabs.com and your family's business it really depends on the season to be honest because the family business is mostly focused on is mostly intensive between september and december so this is where i put most of my efforts and for the rest of the year yeah nighttime doesn't take that many hours per day probably i don't know probably per week it's no more than 30 hours max which is not that much to be honest with you have you guys bootstrapped the company or did you raise capital yeah we bootstrated that's great so so the money you guys do i mean how do you pay it out right a lot of people build these side hustles they make some money and there's two or three founders and then they have to figure out well what do we do with the money do we just pay ourselves each equally do we leave it in the business what do you do with it currently uh we are living it in the business but probably at some point we will just pay out um we are four equal founders of the company so it's yeah you each on 25 yeah correct yeah got it so for and so how i mean there's one guy that you said is not involved with the company at all would he get part of the payout or she or no sure sure sure um our team has been together for like um yeah five six years already so uh we're perfectly fine with that when did you launch the night i what year basically we launched it in may 2018 uh but we launched it like completely free free free and then we started accepting payments in um beginning of 2019 so basically from 2018 to 2019 we just offered it completely for free so have you had year renewals come up yet or no yes yes yes so what's the retention rate annually how many renew uh basically we see around uh 13 to 14 people are canceling the subscription each year yeah that's a pretty high retention rate actually for this price point you you retain about 86 percent of your customers yeah but it's not that high because it's like nine dollars per year it's not per month which is yeah it's not that high but to be honest with you the extensions people are not really used to paying for extensions and um yeah it's it's quite strange because they would pay like nine dollars for spotify per month but nine dollars for dark mode unacceptable yeah what um i mean it's not easy to get 100 000 users how did you grow the business how'd you get 100 000 users um purely from seo so basically we write articles we research um keywords and we write articles and uh we got a bit lucky with the the trend rising mostly because of the apple that they introduced the dark mode in 2018 so we just wrote the wife the wave so what keywords do you rank really high for like what what is your most valuable keyword well they're changing constantly to be honest with you for probably a year or so we were up top for facebook dark modes but then they launched it internally so they launched it and we just dropped then i think also amazon dark mode ebay dark mode gmail dark mode like pretty much all of them but they change uh depending on the searches and depending on if some of the big media outlets actually write an article about that yeah i mean you get about 12 600 organic clicks from search each month uh your top keyword is amazon dark mode you're in the first position for that you get about a thousand clicks per month from that so so you've essentially written topics on all these now did you actually write or new content for each of these or did you like systematically launch a bunch of landing pages where you just basically plugged in big tech company like amazon plus the keyword dark mode uh we tried both approaches we but uh essentially writing the blog post and posting it just outranked everything else the automatic stuff it didn't work for us yeah yeah so your biggest ones are amazon dark mode google drive dark mode twitch dark mode and facebook night mode yeah yeah really interesting what is your process i mean a lot of people try and do seo very few people do it well what's your process look like on a monthly basis like does your team sit down for an hour each month look at new keywords and like ahrefs and then figure out what to go after or walk me through how the machine works yeah basically i i'm the one who's doing that i'm responsible for the suv for the marketing and for the group um i'm using uh semrush s-e-e-s-e-m rush as a tool and it's fantastic too basically it takes me like i i don't know probably two hours per week to to research the topics and yeah to at the beginning i was writing the the articles but then i started using fiverr to just to outsource them because it's far cheaper uh for me personally so what do you pay for for a seo optimized article uh it really depends on the writer but currently i'm buying bulk so basically i'm buying 25 50 or 100 articles since around five four dollars something like that okay i mean how do you make sure that the writer writes it in a way that matches the keywords you want to rank for oh i have to go through them so basically i i edit them if there is a need for that so it has to completely outsource process yeah i see and how do they make that work i mean 100 articles if they're even 500 words right i mean that is 5 000 words...