How Parrotqa CEO Jake Kring grew Parrotqa to $6K revenue and 5 customers in 2018.

hello everybody my guest today is jake kring he is a jack of many many trades a master of couple he's a builder by instinct manager by heart and a marketer by necessity he loves writing code assembling teams and measuring growth he built his current company parrot qa to scratch an itch functional testing is a headache and customers hate bugs there has to be a better way jake are you ready to take us to the top sure yeah all right how so tell us how the the tool actually works people are familiar obviously with other tools in the space like let's call it a user testing or rainforest qa how do you differentiate yeah so uh as far as i know there's nothing else in the space that allows you to do the full test setup test management test running without writing any code uh and it's all cloud you don't have to install anything uh on your desktop you don't have to install an extension uh you actually just you start by just typing in the url to your website and from there you just sort of click through our cloud portal and build uh build tests um as far as i know there's nothing else that offers a totally codeless solution interesting and is this is your business model pure place ass okay great so give me like give me an example what's the average customer pay you per month for this uh hundred bucks 100 average revenue per user we have a 49 tier and a 199 tier and we sort of split between those and then we've got a sort of high touch model but but most are most are in the 49 to 199. tell me i know you're not a sales guy you do because you have to but sell me on 100 what i mean what do i get for 100 uh so there's it's actually isn't a 100 that's the average but yeah there's a 49 and a 1.99 for uh 49 it's a it's a starter pack um and so it's basically you get one user uh one one seat you can set up a suite of tests you can actually set up a couple suites of tests and you can run them once a day but if you're running tests on every deploy if you've got a team um uh it it it makes sense to bump to the 199 tier interesting so when i try to like test one of my sites getlocker.com it says hey it's not available is it behind a firewall it is it does have an ssl security like a certificate on it does that prevent your tool from working uh sorry you cut out for a second that's okay yeah yeah so like i when when my research team was testing this just so i could ask better questions on gitlacka.com one of my sites uh they said they got it basically an error back that said hey that site's not available is it behind and you asked is it behind a firewall um is that is that obviously it's different than an you know an ssl certificate or are they do they both prevent you from working no ssl does not uh but yes uh if it's on a uh private network if it's on a behind a firewall uh as long as there is an easy way to off through the firewall so like a lot of folks will set up a uh like a basic auth firewall in front of their site uh as long as there's a way to get through that we can if it's uh on you know like a um like a private network that you have to tunnel in to get to it gets a little trickier we actually have had customers uh set that up but it takes a little more configuration interesting okay and when did you launch company what year jake when did you launch i was it was uh uh sorry you're cutting out i'm losing you that's okay yeah when did you launch what year uh 2016. 2016. okay cool and i mean give me a little bit i mean where from from a kind of life perspective where were you in 2016 you quit your corporate job or i mean what was going on no i have i it is uh it has always been a side project it has been a side project the the whole time i was building uh the tech so from 2016 until now it was uh i i was actually running a startup at another startup another sas startup at the time and built this uh you know on the side what happened to the other one sold it to a private equity firm uh okay very good what was the name of that company uh scripted.com uh very okay so did i mean did you work uh did you work directly with ryan yeah yeah i know ryan very well interesting okay so he always mentioned kind of the business the other half of his team you must have been like the business guy he was a developer on scripted so yeah so uh ryan and sunil started scripted uh and right around let's see right around the time we sold to private equity you're talking about it to jonathan to xenon yeah exactly yeah uh right around the time we sold uh ryan moved on to to uh to go basically full time on on twofer yep and i went to xenon to run scripted oh interesting okay and then what obviously we just had this the current scripted ceo on actually two weeks ago so when did you leave breaker yeah okay yeah so then i so i left scripted about six or so months ago no earlier than that no because i left in i left in february so whatever that was seven or eight months ago okay and why i mean jonathan's an intense guy is he tough to work with no i think honestly after seven years of working on scripted i just wasn't bringing new ideas to the table anymore i wasn't i wasn't sort of proud of my work um i we had a really good year in 2017 we grew it two and a half x it got profitable under xenon um for really its first time in in scripted's history so i felt really good about the work i'd done but i also didn't feel like 2018 i was going to bring new ideas and continue to solve problems sort of felt a little burnt out on it um and jonathan as soon as he gets the sense that he's holding someone back he wants them to he pushes them out of the nest and wants them to fly on their own and i think he got the sense and i had the sense that uh you know [Music] i was going to flatline even if even if the business was doing all right um well good to go to close out that story yeah doug came on a couple weeks ago and the company's doing well they just passed about between 500 000 customers 250 grand a month in revenue that's almost it's more than doubled from when jonathan bought the company so healthy growth there and churns down to sub 2 so lots of nice changes happening there uh according to doug let's focus back though on on you jake so this was this was a side project you were using it to test scripted exactly that's exactly right okay got it so then you said okay i'm going to leave kind of xenon jonathan it's been amazing i've learned a lot but i'm going to go build this full time that was in 2016. no no so 2016 uh was when i started on parrot uh 2018 is when i left scripted but actually i've left uh i'm still running it as a side project so i i am also running another business uh that has a sas component but is largely e-commerce um and that one i'm running with a friend of mine from high school and i'm you know that's really what i left to go full time on what's that other thing what's the name of the ecommerce site so the ecommerce site is skylightframe.com skylight frame skylight frame and we also have skylight cal we sell the we sell the uh hardware we also sell a subscription software on top of that uh that allows customers to update their frames with videos and and uh do it you know from a mobile app uh so that's a combined e-commerce sas business uh the sas component we just added since i started so that was something i built out with my partner uh in the last couple of months let's let's stay focused on parrot qa it's nice to get context though about these other things that are in your world so you you kind of side project 2016 2018 you really get going here on parrot qa what have you scaled to in terms of total customers just on parrot only five okay five customers yeah okay so five customers paying about a hundred bucks a month you got about 500 bucks a month in revenue here i mean so why not i mean this is a hot space i mean user testing is hot i mean i've had a bunch of these companies on they're all growing really quickly this is i mean this is interesting why don't you have the confidence to go all in on this that's a good question uh well for starters when i left scripted it wasn't making any money so it's it's really in the last couple of months that it has actually you know started to find product market fit and so i didn't have confidence when uh i was sort of making a life choice about what my next role was um and the reality is that the the full-time job now just has so much promise and so it's so obvious that it's uh that it's working at that and that there's product market fit that it's tough to justify the opportunity why is that by the way so like i don't know a ton about skylight i didn't do research on that before this is a new news to me now but i'm doing research as we talk i mean as you see facebook launch portal right and and amazon launched these things with screens to put in your kitchen i mean...