Order Desk revenue, CEO David Hollander, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2024.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is david hollander he's the founder of orderdesk an app that helps merchants save time on their ecommerce order management he started the company as a side project six years ago and it's now grown into a bootstrap company employing six folks david you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right and how much are you grossing per month hey we're grossing uh 60k per month right now bootstrap gross this is the way to do it man this is the way to do it all right so break down the company for me what do you guys do and is it pure sass yeah absolutely so it is pure sass what we do is we are a connector in between the marketplace like the uh the shopping cart and the fulfillment so the merchants will use us to to get their orders into our system and they'll run their orders through business logic and then send them off for fulfillment so we help automate all those pieces okay now are you tied to any one platform like shopify or fba sellers or somewhere else or you're all over the place not at all we have 230 integrations with different different apis different third parties so we work with all kinds of different carts and marketplaces all kinds of different fulfillment services okay is there a particular platform that most your business goes through hey david is there a particular platform most your business goes through uh i would say we'd see probably the majority of our uh platform goes through shopify that's probably what we see most of it okay interesting okay now what's your pricing model you know there's a lot of companies in this space that are pure sas there's others that are pure percent of gmv are you both or one or a combination or what so what we do is we have a base fee that we charge uh we have three different plans we have a base fee and then we charge a per order fee so our base fee starts at 12 a month for the very small customers that are just kind of almost hobbyists just getting started and then um we have most of our customers are on a 40 a month plan and then they they get charged five cents per order and then we have uh for our larger customers they have a base fee of 100 a month and then three cents an order so it's designed to be something where there's always the base fee and then we just charge us just a small piece of what the order actually is instead of a percentage okay so if you look at last month your total revenue you said you're grossing 60. but what was top line uh so we grow 60. um um and uh we've got uh we're um at about 10k a month in profit right now okay but so i what i'm trying to do is go back to your top one though so 10k profit is amazing i want to dive more than a second but top line revenue is about how much i'm sorry i don't get that so you said you said you just make 10 you make 10 000 in profit profit is after expenses so you get profit by taking revenue minus expenses so my question is what's your revenue the revenue is 60. okay okay got it so top line per month is 60. after expenses you have 10k hitting the bottom got it okay so my question is of that 60 what percent comes from the flat fees you have people paying versus the five cent transaction fees do you know oh that's a good question um so we i would say most of it is the fees i would say um because we have about 750 customers okay so i would say boy i haven't looked at those numbers i would say probably maybe 10k is is is the the service fee 10k is the 10k is the flat sas fee and the other 50k or five cent transaction fees that's right interesting okay so um 750 customers at you know paying on average 40 bucks a month on the flat fee that's i mean that's like 30 000 there in sas is that is that average fee actually less than 40 bucks uh we're actually averaging uh 75 a month per customer okay that's that's sas plus the transaction fee though right that's right yeah so that what i'm trying to figure out is wha if we just look at the sas business compartmentalize if that's doing ten thousand dollars per month the average flat fee is more like ten or fifteen dollars per month not forty dollars a month oh yeah you're probably right about that yeah okay i i like by the way the reason i'm digging into this is because i think some of the companies right now that are just printing money are the ones that combine business models so i really want to dissect what your split is before asking different questions so you got a flat fee of 10 bucks a month right across 750 customers so that's seven eight you know nine ten thousand dollars per month in revenue then you have the five cents per order going through your platform every month now what's the total volume of orders per month going through your platform so right now we're doing about 500 000 orders a month that's incredible okay and can you describe like the average customer or is this like a instagram influencer that's selling you know custom t-shirts or somebody else we definitely have a lot of that um and a big part of what we do is working with print on demand so a customer will have their custom t-shirts or maybe they'll have 10 000 designs and then they send those designs on the fly to the print-on-demand company to be printed so they never have to worry about stock or anything like that so um we do work a lot with with people like that like instagram influencers we also work with a lot of uh traditional retail that is moving online uh uh regular brands that are sending their orders you know as well and we do a lot with multi-channel too so people that work with etsy and wayfair and shopify and and so we can pull all those orders into one single place and then treat them all the same now if you look at your growth i mean this space overall i would say is growing you know pretty pretty rapidly but your growth so if you're doing about 60 grand a month today what were you doing a year ago do you remember a year ago we were doing uh about 38 right now okay good so nice growth now have you done this bootstrapped or did you raise capital it is 100 bootstrapped it started as a side project like maybe six years ago it was just me and and i was doing web development on the side and then i realized wow i've really got something here i need to dig in so i fired all my customers and just totally dove in wen went in 100 on this and um made my first hire about three years ago and and so now there's now there's uh i have six employees and uh you know i could never keep up with it on my own anymore so a big part of what we do is support because it's a fairly complicated product so we help out with our customers quite a bit and then a lot too there's just a lot of development because we're adding integrations all the time and what the hope is is that we're adding as we're adding integrations we are able to be continually improving the product and that will continue to grow exponentially as we have more and more integrations that are added so customer support's a big one how many engineers are on the team uh there's two engineers and myself okay so and do you code yes okay so three of you guys and then what about sales motion do you have any quota carrying reps or no nope we don't do any sales at all okay so it's all kind of no touch online that's right do you spend i mean do you know what it costs you fully waited to get a 75 a month customer we don't do any sales so we don't do any advertising so we get all of our all everybody comes through people who are searching for something that we do or they're coming from a marketplace like the shopify marketplace or the big commerce marketplace or it's word of mouth so we're starting to ramp up some sales ideas and some um try you know playing around with maybe doing some ads but it's not something that we've really um attacked yet since we are as busy as we are just through word of mouth yeah but so you're not giving yourself enough credit right you know what what i actually hear when people tell me like we just get customers through word of mouth is like you're not 100 sure like what's driving the word of mouth right or the organic searches or things like that but like you're doing things to drive that stuff right great customer support things like that are you doing any optimization around specific seo keywords uh no we haven't really been focused on the keywords at all um i would say we get we get some through people who come to our site i would say that mostly we get we get a lot of customers through the marketplaces like the shopify marketplace uh people that are looking for something that we do we also get a lot of customers from um partners that we have in place with uh other fulfillment companies so like a fulfillment company will get a customer that needs what we offer and then they'll send the customer to us to help close the loop are you listed in the shopify app exchange and if so under what name we are listed there under order desk oh under order desk okay got it um yeah i mean look optimizing optimize uh yeah this is really weird i can for whatever reason i'm not able to find like i'm trying to search to find you guys to see how many reviews you have things like that i can't find you order desk yeah if you search for shopify and then order desk with a space order space desk uh we'll be there um it's uh we are um we got uh maybe 20 or 30 interview uh reviews yeah here we go five stars except for one guy who wrote a great four-star review for some reason who knows yeah yeah what everybody talks about is our support is great and and and everybody's really really really positive in the reviews we haven't really had any negative reviews yeah yeah but what i was gonna get to yeah so i found the thing right so you have 24 reviews uh five-star average so i mean what are you how many customers would say you're getting per month from shopify this shopify placement um so like like last month we had like 28 new accounts come in that that converted okay new paid paid accounts yes yeah i mean we get we get probably five or six a day that don't convert so that's a real focus that we have is is doing better onboarding we need to do better onboarding so we can keep those that are coming and can't figure it out because you get 40 you get about 140 new trials per month of which about 20 to 30 convert to paid yes yeah and you're and what percent of those you think come from shopify um i would say probably 50. 50 from shopify okay so that's your main that's your main thing so how do you bolster i mean do you do things i mean you only have 24 reviews but you have 750 customers how do you get more of your customers go leave a review so you rise in the ranks you get more traffic from shopify we need to probably really uh email them and ask like we haven't done it yet it just hasn't i mean it hasn't been a focus but it's definitely something we need to do gosh that feels like super low hanging fruit right like uh you know if you get more reviews you show up higher and the ranking on shopify and you could be getting you know you know a hundred a thousand new trials per month from there yeah absolutely interesting okay now once they start paying you do they stick what's your turn over the past 12 months so um turnover uh is pretty good uh it was the train was kind of high last month we had like like almost almost negative churn like like last month we had like 25 downgraded but the thing is that a lot of the downgrades were poor quality customers that were just on starter plans and weren't really using us so measure revenue not logo churn right because revenue is a better indicator of value getting from your platform so what was revenue churn last month do you remember i'm not sure what the revenue churn was what was it definitely less than uh we always go up every month so in the last month we went up about five thousand dollars in revenue well yeah but that could include that's because you're adding new customers david does that make sense what i'm trying to what i'm trying to get out is churn right so churn it does it's great you're going up every month but what i'm trying to get at is you know ignore new customer additions if you just like if you signed up no customers this month what would happen to your revenue would it stay flat would it increase because of expansion revenue or would it decrease because your gross turn's really high uh it would it would it would probably stay flat because uh the customers that we have are always seem to be getting more orders so because our order volume especially this time of year so what happens in q4 because we're very very seasonal q4 our numbers go through the roof we actually get our i don't know like 60 in q4 it's just it's ridiculous so um that's that's that's something we try to take into account as we're looking at month over month so this time of year it tends to start getting very busy and then in december it just peaks like crazy david if you look at last month and all those downgrades don't ignore how many customers downgrade but add up the revenue if add up like one downgraded by 10 bucks a month one downgraded by 100 that's 110 of downgrade revenue what was your total downgrade revenue from those customers that churned or downgraded so i don't have that number but what i can say is that the majority of the customers that left weren't actually doing any volume at all well i know that's that's why i'm asking this question because if they're low numbers that means they're not doing a lot of volume right if they're small revenue downgrade like you think it's less than give me a range less than five grand in in downgrade lost revenue yeah yeah yeah so if we lost 25 i mean 25 let's say they were an average of you know 30 bucks a month so that's like 600 700. yeah yeah so look 700 on churn on a 60 000 base right that's less than 10 churn per you know i mean it's it's not a horrible number yeah um i guess i mean i guess my question to you would be you know when they are not processing a lot of order volume what value can you add so that they don't churn right analytics tools crm related things for their orders things like that because actually i'm doing math now i mean nine percent churn per month is actually really high that means you turn to almost 100 more than 100 of your customer base every year yeah i would certainly oh do we do that much it doesn't feel like we do that much but you're right i need to get better numbers on that yeah yeah so um one you know the people that leave tend to be the people that were the wrong customer to begin with and the customers that aren't actually using our system the way it should be used yep maybe they were stubborn and or ignoring what we were saying to do maybe they just never put in the work to figure out how to make it work yeah so i think something that we could do is probably uh do a better job of onboarding and a better job of getting them into the system and using it yeah and sorry david i misspoke too sorry if you're turning 700 of revenue per month on a 60 000 a month basis sorry that's only like that's only like one percent term per month there's 10 churn annually not monthly so i said that wrong gotcha that probably sounds better that probably feels more realistic to in terms of what's actually happening definitely good all right uh good stuff here now any plans to raise capital or no no no i'm very happy to bootstrap um i'm pretty risk-averse and to me raising venture capital feels pretty risky i would much rather grow the company slowly at the risk of growing fast i'd rather do what's hopefully for the company and not focus so much on growth yep so if you're good if you're gonna have to worry about i mean on the flip side of raising so you're doing 700 000 in terms of run rate right now i mean if someone came in and offered you you know four or five six x i mean would you would you sell the company for four million bucks today no why not you said that so quickly i'm not in it for the money i'm i i i mean the money great i i i i don't believe you i don't believe you by the way because in your bio you put uh you led with you led with the money which was you said it's grossing 60 000 per month so you're very proud of that i am i am so it's exciting and i love being able to but but what i'm excited about is being able to build something that makes money and just taking money for it isn't that exciting well you're you're you would be making money you would be making four million dollars right now you're making 10 000 per month yeah but it's killing the golden egg or if you sell to shopify it's potentially drastically expanding the golden egg yeah but then i'm out of control but you have four million dollars yeah so you're a control freak that doesn't mind staying a little poorer as a result yes a 100 yes you got it i'm titling this episode that i love all right let's let's wrap up david with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book i've been reading um atomic habits by james clear lately it's a great book number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now [Music] yeah i uh i really like um nathan barry who runs convertkit yep number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company [Music] slack number four how many hours of sleep you get every night uh eight and what's your situation married single kids i'm married and i have five kids oh my that's a lot of tax deductions that's good and how old are you david i am staring down the barrel of 40. okay and last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew [Music] i think that i think i would have told myself don't be afraid to learn the hard things or to study the stuff that seems really hard because it's not actually that hard yep guys there you have it uh ordermark again helping folks save time especially for online merchants serving over 750 customers today doing caught sixty thousand dollars per month in revenue grossing bottom line ten thousand dollars every month profitable bootstrap that's up from thirty five thirty six thousand dollars a month just a year ago so healthy growth team of six people today three engineers uh and no salespeople they're scaling organically through word of mouth seo search and the shopify app exchange david thank you for taking us to the top thanks so much do you guys know i fight like heck to get these data points for you from these ceos that rarely do these kinds of shows if you 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