How OpenPhone CEO Daryna Kulya grew OpenPhone to $480K revenue and 4K customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest is the co-founder and ceo at open phone open phone gives entrepreneurs and professionals a supercharged business phone number in an app before open phone she was a product manager at vidyard michael it obviously has been on the show many times she founded product on toronto the first and largest product community in the world started her career at deloitte first in consulting and later in innovation all right during are you ready to take us to the top oh absolutely all right having me tell me about open phones like we've seen like david hauser and grasshoppers come along we've seen other like formations of kind of the business phone number through the through the decades how are you tackling this uh problem yeah so you know we uh we've seen in um so before starting open phone we noticed me and my co-founder that's still a lot of entrepreneurs whether it's startup founders or business small business owners they're still using their personal phone number for business and it's just so limiting and it's it's a bad decision that they make when they start their company and although there are solutions on the market there is still no easy modern mobile first solution um that is really built for you know for how you use tools in today's day and age so we definitely saw an opportunity to build something that people would love and want to use so actually i mean tell me about a customer that recently signed up and how they're using it yeah so um oh i i talk to customers a lot this is uh well specifically if it's an agency owner who uh who wanted to get a business phone number to put on their website instead of listing their personal number um our signup process takes less than a minute it's really 30 seconds so they go on our website they pick their local number um they download the app and that's it so it's really the easiest fastest way to get started with the business phone number on top of yourself okay so this is not a ad model attribution tracking thing where you will generate 10 000 phone numbers for the same business and a phone number per billboard so they can track attribution this is just like get your business phone number so it's not your personal phone number exactly exactly very simple that's it very cool okay put this stuff on a timeline well actually first pricing model so how do you price for this thing is it sas or usage based or combo yeah it's sas we we we have a simple unlimited plan since we're still pretty early we actually wanted pricing to be also transparent simple and something that makes sense it's ten dollars per month per phone number you can have up to five numbers in in your account and you can also have your team members so the key is you start your company you get your personal your your business phone number and then as your company grows you have employees so it's you know ten dollars per month per phone number or per user okay okay got it so you just to be clear what i know you're early but are you betting right now that three four five years from now when you come back on the show you're gonna be driving most of your expansion revenue by driving more seats in the same company or more phone numbers across the same company or some other upsell much we haven't talked about already that's right yeah and that's we are seeing early signs of this we're still early as you said but this is definitely something you know we want to be the phone number you get when you incorporate your company and we want to grow with you all the way to ipo um you know to we we that's absolutely well so so how do you define it i guess my question is how do you i have an agency of 20 people i get a phone number from you how do you define a user yeah that is the person who has their number so user would be you nathan someone on your team who uh who gets an open phone number that would be a user but what it's the same what if it's the same what if it's the same phone number as mine i have one phone number with you for the agency can all 20 use it for 10 a month so i love that question we're building that out right now um we so one of the big and i'm sure you you would ask this one of the big things we're focusing on is allowing for that use case where you have one phone number shared with your whole company so you're only one-to-one you're only one-to-one right now you don't have a one-to-many option that is the case today i see yeah i see interesting but that's a huge as you can imagine that's a huge uh growth opportunity and something we're very excited to build yeah of course okay so then i mean it sounds like it's fair to say than your kind of average customer today just because we don't have time to talk about all of them but it's like on average or paying 10 bucks a month something like that we have quite a bit of customers with multiple numbers uh and we as a as i said we already have customer i think it's fair to just to simplify that would be the case just to keep it simple but we are seeing um and one of the reasons why we're excited to build open phone for teams is because we already have customers in bigger companies where they have a number someone else on the team has a number they have multiple numbers in a company so we're seeing that gross already yeah well i mean i think you should correct me if you're wrong i mean if you see a sweet spot where it's actually average like two seats per account or three seats per account that would be like more like 20 or 30 bucks a month but you're saying you're seeing isolated incidents but it's not big enough yet to be a trend we haven't so it's it's definitely a trend we are the reason why i'm you know not talking about it much is just because we're right now building the product we're building support for this officially in the product we are seeing this uh with some kind of manual work on our ends to support it it's a trend that's that's pushing us forward um yeah but we're still building the products to support that okay got it okay good fair enough cool all right and then putting this on a timeline for me when do you like right guys right the front excuse me when did you write the first line of code two years ago okay so 27 it might have been or even uh maybe two two years and several months ago yeah it was it was probably like spring 2017. the reason i asked this question is i think founders deserve a lot of credit who figure out how to get their first dollar revenue before spending a lot on the mvp so my question to you is how much money did you sink into your mvp before your first dollar of revenue yeah so so it's my co-founder who built um you know who built the vast majority of the product you know from from those very early days um i think that i would i would kind of ballpark it at um you know under 10k yeah okay i mean i consider that pretty effective actually yeah we you know we from from the very beginning we've the one thing about us is from the very beginning we have been using um the the best tools and the best uh tooling to support uh you know to support the product um yeah when was the first so 2017 was first line of code when was the first dollar revenue remember the month of course i remember the person we i would love to give him a shout out the first um it was actually someone from twitter who who was the first paying customer the first dollar was in march late march 20 um this yeah this was already 2018. okay and how did this person from twitter find you so you know we've followed each other for a while and and this is uh kent he runs growth at claire bank uh he's awesome by the way probably someone else who would be great for this podcast he um you know we followed each other i actually just dm'd him because he has um an e-commerce store and we saw a lot of interest among income ecommerce founders getting a phone number for their store um and i just told him hey you know you're someone i've i've kind of been following i just would love to get your thoughts i didn't think oh i want to sell the product i just wanted true honest feedback and he loved it and he absolutely loved it um and yeah you know that that was awesome i uh i love that story expect didn't expect it it would be twitter out of all the places well so okay so he signed out about twitter he's now at clearbank is this kind of a common theme of how you got your first couple customers kind of going down the e-commerce use case yeah so actually a lot of our absolutely a lot of our first customers were e-commerce founders that i found through facebook groups and run it um one of the ways that um so our first customers were you know it's not like people just randomly found us i wish that was wait sorry can you say that a name name a facebook group that you used early on oh there are so many i wish i could there are so many i have to i mean i have i have to probably but you would just type like e-commerce you type e-commerce into facebook search and just go down the list exactly i would join a lot of groups um i joined way too many groups and you know i'm now a part of probably like hundreds and um i joined e-commerce groups and also just groups for entrepreneurs because when we just got started...