How Norby CEO Nick Gereard grew Norby to $212.8K revenue and 800 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is nick gerard he's a lifelong creator and builder as well as a former microsoft software engineer and pm heals degrees in music computer science and electrical engineering from the university of michigan where he also launched his first startup while still a student before founding his current company norbi he consulted for numerous early stage companies and helped launch a viral online community at the start of the covet 19 pandemic again now building norbi.live a marketing platform for creators nick you're ready to take us to the top yeah thanks for having me you bet okay so you sound like a triple threat you have empathy for music you can code from computer science you you're in the weeds because you you ran an agency launched side projects so norby's gonna be big huh uh that's the idea um the first startup i ever started actually was a it was a music startup back that was the one i did in college um and we built it for djs and it was about collaborating like building collaborative playlists and playing music together in real time and um the goal for me has always been to figure out a way to marry those two things to figure out a way to build products and services for people in creative worlds and that's really carried me through most of my 20s very cool okay so norbi.live uh is the tool today to help me understand who's paying you and what they're paying on average per month if you have customers yeah so we have two tiers called the creator tier in the brand here the creator tier is a five dollar a month tier and the brand here uh is 20 bucks a month and you can basically think of norby as like if you took link tree mailchimp flowdesk leadpages and community and smooshed them all together all those things that people set up super complicated zapier flows to wire together to build their online presence put all those in one place you brand everything one time it looks right in all the different places everything is built to work together so you don't need to hook a bunch of different services together usually we can simplify people's stack you know take a lot of the daily tax out of their operations and also usually save the money i use a lot of those tools and i'm just thinking off the top of my head my last bill from each of them all together is probably some around a thousand bucks a month i would never believe that you could do everything they do for five bucks a month to the point where i would never even sign up for your tool at five bucks a month because i just i wouldn't think it's possible that you actually can do that yeah well i mean i'm not gonna sit here and pretend that you know our our newsletter and email features does everything that mailchimp does we are a company that is 11 months old um but what we actually found is most people don't use all the features that a tool like mailchimp offers mailchimp is you know an email provider to end all email providers it's trying to be everything to everyone at the same time um and so if you look at the average spend you know most people are spending 65 70 a month on mailchimp um people you know who kind of fall into this category and they're not getting most of that value from a tool like that that's actually why tools like flow desk have started to crop up and take some of that market share away um we learned all of this because we built a community ourselves like the genesis of norbi was myself and my two co-founders at the very beginning of the pandemic uh built an online community that went like semi-viral overnight we had tens of thousands of people uh engaging with this thing and all of a sudden we had to build a lot of stuff and coordinate a lot of things we were hosting events on different platforms and we had email lists and we had sms lists and we were spinning up landing pages and signups and all this stuff all the time and we experienced first-hand what it is like to try to build and manage this kind of operation day-to-day um and so we started out just building tools for ourselves just solving for our own use cases like we need a link in bio we want to be able to do text messages oh we're doing an event collab with you know this other community over here let's like build you know the ability to host events um and so it just started very organically with our own needs building for the use cases that we encountered and then because we were working with other creators other community builders other brands um they started being like hey can we use those tools that you're building because we're doing exactly the same thing and so it kind of just grew from there and so everything that we have built has come from the mouths of our paying customers from day one how many are you having today how many paying customers uh i'm not i'm not gonna get into like all the the details on i'll say that we have hundreds of paying customers uh we'll keep it we have a we have uh thousands of people on our wait list we're keeping a wait list uh we're basically still in beta right now uh and starting to open it up to the world in q1 next year so i mean 200 customers at five bucks a pop i mean you're doing something like a thousand bucks a month right now in revenue um more than that because we also have the 20 a month tier uh i see i see but i imagine there's probably a handful though on that right uh it's pretty evenly split actually i would say we have we have um probably three distinct cohorts we have individual creators and influencers who uh i would actually define separately i think influencers probably make most of their money from brand partnerships and sponsor posts and sponsor content creators are people who are directly monetizing their audience selling subscriptions selling content uh you know tips and that kind of thing so we have those individual creators they're very well suited to our five dollar a month tier uh then we have whatever call like community builders uh you know they may be people with a business objective maybe they have a shop or something maybe they have a paid membership community they might be an activist maybe they have a mighty networks maybe they have a facebook groups uh you know set up maybe they have a slack or something like that and then we have brands we have ecom operations that are you know d2c instagram brands that are uh you know building text message lists and doing promos and they have an email newsletter and they need a link in bio and then they're doing collabs with other brands and they do it a club spaces and that kind of thing so so 200 maybe multiply times like 10 or 15 a month on average instead of five you're doing a couple thousand bucks a month in revenue right is sort of where you're at today and where were you a year ago did you have any revenue year ago or no we did not so we started this we went full time on this at the very tail end of 2020 um myself and my two co-founders and until this summer uh it was just the three of us and we were just you know building these tools slowly you know starting to pick up our uh because we had built our own community we had a great network of kind of early people to test concepts with and get feedback from and get prototypes too um so we spent a lot of the spring doing that and kind of took the wraps off in the summer and uh unveiled our website and started doing events and activations uh with our own customers uh co-hosting things um and then we uh we we raised a round of funding in july and we've been you know building out the team since then uh the three co-founders do i just split everything evenly 33 33 33 at the start uh not exactly um but ballpark yeah and and why not exactly i mean i asked us because it's the toughest conversation you'll have as you're launching a company so tell share with us share what you can why didn't you do it evenly sure um i mean we had a very candid conversation with each other about um what all of our strengths were and what we brought to the table and i think the three of us have all known each other for several years um there's a lot of mutual respect and trust and we bri one of the things that i love about our partnership is how complementary it is we come from very different backgrounds i'm a tech and product person you know i was a software engineer i was a pm i did all the things that go into it you know i've built software i've marketed software i've done product design all of those kinds of things so so you own the most than of the three i i am the ceo yes as as the ceo on the most of the three and yeah well those things aren't always correlated there's just because someone has the title ceo doesn't mean the most so i'm just curious so you own the most because of the skill set you brought to the table the others maybe own a little bit less yeah fair okay cool talking about the round you raised how much did you raise this year uh so we raised just under four million dollars uh in july um and we basically set a cap for ourselves about how much of the company we wanted to give away uh and said this and no further um and what was that cap i mean most people in the seed or pre-seed are selling 20 or so yeah basically that um and we um you know we kicked off we took the wraps off of our product in may uh we started doing as i said a whole...