Founder Interview
How Phantombuster Reached $50K MRR With 9 People and 7% Monthly Churn (Interview with CEO Guillaume Boiret)
- Interview Date
- July 18, 2019
- Interviewee
- Guillaume BoiretCo-founder and CEO
Company Metrics at Interview Time
MRR (2019)
$50,000
MRR One Year Prior (2018)
$4,000
Team Size (2019)
9
Gross Churn (2019)
7% per month
Year Founded
2016
Historical Snapshot
These numbers were reported by Guillaume Boiret during the interview recorded in July 2019 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See Phantombuster’s current numbers.
Key Takeaways
- 01Phantombuster reported $50,000 MRR in July 2019, up from $4,000 a month a year earlier
- 02The company was founded in 2016 as a developer tool and pivoted to marketers in 2017
- 03First customers came through influencer outreach in San Francisco, including contacts at BAMF
- 04The BAMF Facebook group was credited as the most effective community for driving new customers
- 05Gross churn was 7% per month, which Guillaume acknowledged as a major issue to address
- 06The team had grown to 9 people as of the interview date
- 07Phantombuster had raised capital in France the previous September and was not raising at the time of the interview
- 08Guillaume planned to raise a round of $3 million to $5 million when returning to the US, targeting mid-2020
- 09The company was building toward a workflow marketplace where developers could create APIs for marketers
- 10Reducing churn by promoting long-term workflow use cases was the primary product focus for the next version
Company Metrics at Time of Interview
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| MRR (2019) | $50,000 | Founder interview, Jul 2019 |
| MRR One Year Prior (2018) | $4,000 | Founder interview, Jul 2019 |
| Gross Churn (2019) | 7% per month | Founder interview, Jul 2019 |
| Team Size (2019) | 9 | Founder interview, Jul 2019 |
| Total Free and Paid Users (2019) | 30,000 | Founder interview, Jul 2019 |
| Year Founded | 2016 | Founder interview, Jul 2019 |
Growth Breakdown
Revenue
Phantombuster reported $50,000 MRR in July 2019, up from $4,000 a month a year earlier. Guillaume gave the $50,000 figure himself later in the interview, correcting a higher number from the host's earlier arithmetic.
Customers and Users
The platform had 30,000 total users, both free and paid, at the time of the interview. Guillaume noted that users convert to paid when they understand the value of combining multiple APIs together rather than using just one at a time.
Team
The team stood at nine people as of July 2019. Guillaume indicated plans to double the team in the following quarter, which he acknowledged would shift the company away from its then-current cash flow positive position.
Churn and Retention
Monthly gross churn was 7%, which Guillaume described as a significant problem the team was actively working to address. The planned second version of Phantombuster was focused specifically on improving retention by encouraging longer-term workflow use cases.
Growth Strategy
Influencer Outreach in San Francisco
Guillaume and his team spent time in San Francisco meeting influencers, and when one of them talked about Phantombuster, the company got its first users.
Facebook Group Engagement
The team invested heavily in participating in Facebook groups frequented by growth hackers and marketers, particularly the BAMF (Badass Marketers and Founders) group. Guillaume credited this community engagement as a primary driver of customer growth in 2019.
LinkedIn Community Presence
Alongside Facebook groups, the team was active on LinkedIn, focusing on being present where their target users spent time. This dual social network strategy helped them reach growth marketers directly.
Workflow Education to Drive Conversion and Retention
Guillaume said users started paying once they understood they needed to combine several APIs together, and he saw workflows, combinations of APIs that keep working over the long term, as the way to keep them. The company's next product version was designed to make this workflow concept clearer and more accessible to reduce churn.
Targeting the Growth Hacker Community
After pivoting from a developer tool in 2017, Phantombuster deliberately repositioned itself within the growth hacker and growth marketer community. This focus on a specific, vocal audience helped generate word-of-mouth and community-driven growth.
Best Quotes
“We are automating websites and social networks with little APIs that make some some work, some easy work that you can combine together to create your own growth engine.”
“We launched in 2016, but we were a dev tool for developers at this time and we pivot in 2017.”
“We worked a lot on Facebook and specific Facebook groups.”
“the MRR is is more than 50,000 per month, MRR.”
“It's not that great actually. We want to work on that. Our churn rate is more than 6%, 7% actually every month. So it's a lot.”
“We need to give to our users actionable strategies that works on the long term. Because when you want to, for example, when you want to grow your audience on LinkedIn, you will have to find always to always find new leads to add into your audience.”
“it's exactly the same thing as asking your intern, for example, to do repetitive simple things. So it's just doing one stuff at a time. And it's simple actions that you can do by yourself, But you don't have your time is too valuable to do it. So we are automating stuff at a human volume.”
What Happened Next
This page captures Phantombuster as it stood in July 2019, when Guillaume Boiret reported $50,000 MRR and a team of nine people. At that point the company was planning a major product revision focused on workflows and churn reduction, and was targeting a $3 million to $5 million fundraise upon returning to the US in 2020. Visit the Phantombuster company profile on GetLatka for current revenue, funding, and growth figures.
View Phantombuster’s current profile and metricsFull Transcript
Chapters
- 0:00Introducing Guillaume Boiret of Phantombuster
- 0:09What Phantombuster Does and Its Pricing
- 1:02Company Timeline and Pivot from Dev Tool
- 1:32First Customers via Influencer Outreach
- 2:09Paying Customers and Total Users
- 2:28Free-to-Paid Conversion Trigger
- 3:00Revenue a Year Earlier and What Drove the Growth
- 3:33Facebook Groups and LinkedIn as Growth Channels
- 4:14Fundraising History and Future Plans
- 6:04Team Size and Cash Flow
- 6:25Churn Rate and Retention Challenges
- 10:56Strategy to Reduce Churn Through Workflows
- 11:42Product Hunt Launch Results
- 13:30Platform Risk and LinkedIn Relationship
- 15:44Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions
Introducing Guillaume Boiret of Phantombuster
Nathan Latka
00:00Hello everyone, my guest today is Guillaume Boiret, he is the Founder and CEO of a company called PhantomBuster. Alright Guillaume, you ready to take us to the top?
Guillaume Boiret
00:08>> Yeah, sure.
What Phantombuster Does and Its Pricing
Nathan Latka
00:09Alright, tell us what the company does and what's the revenue model? How do you guys make money?
Guillaume Boiret
00:14>> Today we are working for marketers and we decided to help them to create leads using social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and mix this data to have the most interesting leads that they need.
Nathan Latka
00:28Okay. And so how do you do this?
Guillaume Boiret
00:31>> We are automating websites and social networks with little APIs that make some some work, some easy work that you can combine together to create your own growth engine.
Nathan Latka
00:43Okay. And give me a general sense of what companies or marketers are paying to use your technology on average per month.
Guillaume Boiret
00:51>> Right now it's more than one
00:55>> one hundred dollar per month.
Nathan Latka
00:57Okay. Something like that. That's great. And put this on a timeline for me. When did you guys launch?
Company Timeline and Pivot from Dev Tool
Guillaume Boiret
01:02>> We launched in 2016, but we were a dev tool for developers at this time and we pivot in 2017.
Nathan Latka
01:11So tell me how much you guys spent building the MVP before you had your first dollar of revenue.
Guillaume Boiret
01:17>> It was something like
01:22>> $50,100 ks.
Nathan Latka
01:24And why was it so expensive to build it?
Guillaume Boiret
01:27>> Because it took a lot of time for us to build the product.
First Customers via Influencer Outreach
Nathan Latka
01:32How did you get the first 10 kind of customers?
Guillaume Boiret
01:39>> We spent some time in San Francisco when we met some influencers. And when one of them talked about us, we had our first You said freelancers?
Nathan Latka
01:49Users.
Guillaume Boiret
01:51>> No, influencers.
Nathan Latka
01:52Oh, who was it? Who talked about you I
Guillaume Boiret
01:56>> talked to Guillaume Caban and Josh Fester, for example.
Nathan Latka
02:02Josh Felcher?
Guillaume Boiret
02:03>> Fester.
Nathan Latka
02:05Which company was he with?
Guillaume Boiret
02:08>> BAMF, B A M F.
Paying Customers and Total Users
Nathan Latka
02:09Ah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that was how you got kind of the first 10 customers. Then how many customers are you serving today?
Guillaume Boiret
02:17>> More than one thousand paying users.
Nathan Latka
02:201,000 paying and how many total free and paid?
Guillaume Boiret
02:26>> 30,000.
Free-to-Paid Conversion Trigger
Nathan Latka
02:2830,000. What's the critical moment? How do you know when to put up the paywall to get people who are using it for free to convert to paid?
Guillaume Boiret
02:41>> Right now, our users are using one API at a time and when they really understand that they need to combine APIs together, they start to pay.
Nathan Latka
02:50And so can I do the math? A thousand customers right now paying on average a $100 a month because they're doing about a $100,000 per month right now in revenue?
Guillaume Boiret
02:59>> Almost, yes.
Revenue a Year Earlier and What Drove the Growth
Nathan Latka
03:00Okay. And what were you about a year ago? Do you remember?
Guillaume Boiret
03:04>> A year ago, we were at $4,000.
Nathan Latka
03:10$4,000 a month. Okay. So that's nice. That's obviously nice growth year over year. What changed? What did you guys do to drive the growth?
Guillaume Boiret
03:18>> We talked to our users and we decided to be very
03:27>> active with the growth hacker, growth marketer community. How did you do that though, specifically?
Facebook Groups and LinkedIn as Growth Channels
Nathan Latka
03:33What websites did you engage with?
Guillaume Boiret
03:35>> We worked a lot on Facebook and specific Facebook groups.
03:43>> Yes, and it was, and LinkedIn too. So we were where our users are, and it's on social networks and Facebook groups. There is a lot of people here.
Nathan Latka
03:57So which Facebook group was the most effective for you in terms of which one gave you the most new customers?
Guillaume Boiret
04:03>> It's hard to say.
04:07>> Would say BAMF, the Badass Marketers and Founders group, Facebook group. Got it.
Fundraising History and Future Plans
Nathan Latka
04:14Is Josh an investor in the company? Nope. Okay. Have you bootstrapped to date or did you raise capital?
Guillaume Boiret
04:20>> We raised capital in France, 100 ks last
04:27>> September.
Nathan Latka
04:28And are you looking to raise now?
Guillaume Boiret
04:30>> Not right now. We want to finish the second version of PhantomBuster and we will raise money when we come back in The US,
04:42>> maybe in the middle of next year.
Nathan Latka
04:45And what do you think the right amount at that time will be to raise? You're talking like $3,000,000, $4,000,000, $5,000,000 or what would you target?
Guillaume Boiret
04:53>> Something between 3 and 5.
Nathan Latka
04:55Okay. And what would you... I mean, why do you need to take that dilution? Why can't you kind of just grow the company based off revenues?
Guillaume Boiret
05:02>> We
05:05>> can do that, but it's not the same company. We can grow slowly but surely, but we want to create a workflow marketplace where developers will be able to create new APIs and marketers will be able to create new external strategies. And that's a lot of software, so we need a lot of engineers and we want to grow fast because the competition is here. We to...
05:40>> There's Zapier, for example.
05:44>> This is possible to combine APIs together on on Zapier. This is very powerful, and we definitely definitely want to do the same thing with scraping based APIs, but also with with more classic APIs. So we need to grow fast.
Team Size and Cash Flow
Nathan Latka
06:04And what's your team size today? How many folks?
Guillaume Boiret
06:07>> Today we are nine. Nine. We're nine.
Nathan Latka
06:11And are you guys... I mean, you burning capital right now to drive growth or are cash flow positive?
Guillaume Boiret
06:16>> Right now, today, today, we're cash flow positive, but we want to double the team in the next quarter. So that will... That would change.
Churn Rate and Retention Challenges
Nathan Latka
06:25And and are the customers... I mean, they sticky? When you look at churn over the past month, what's it been?
Guillaume Boiret
06:31>> It's not that great actually. We want to work on that. Our churn rate is more than 6%, 7% actually every month. So it's a lot.
Nathan Latka
06:48So so annually, you're churning about 84% of the base. And do you have any expansion revenue? Like, you upsell people or do you not really have any upsell metrics right now?
Guillaume Boiret
06:59>> Yes. We we... Sorry. Can you repeat the question? Because
Nathan Latka
07:03we Are have the are you upselling people at all? Do you have any things to upsell customers or no?
Guillaume Boiret
07:08>> Yes. Yes. We we we do. The... When we we are able to explain to our users that they can use more than one API, they upsell.
Nathan Latka
07:19So you lose, call it 7% a month, but how much do you expand by not new customer additions, upselling old customers?
Guillaume Boiret
07:29>> 80%.
Nathan Latka
07:30Eight zero?
Guillaume Boiret
07:33>> Eight zero.
Nathan Latka
07:34And that's annually?
Guillaume Boiret
07:34>> No. No. No. 18. 18. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Was sorry. 18%.
Nathan Latka
07:38One eight. And that's annually or monthly?
Guillaume Boiret
07:42>> Monthly.
Nathan Latka
07:44Okay. That would mean that each year your expansion revenue is almost 216%, 18% a month.
Guillaume Boiret
07:53>> Yes. 18% a month. It's a yes.
Nathan Latka
07:58Okay, so 18% expansion minus 7% churn, right? Would mean basically you have what is that 12% a month in net revenue or 112% net revenue retention per month?
Guillaume Boiret
08:11>> Yes.
Nathan Latka
08:13Okay. You understand why that math doesn't make sense, correct? Yes. Do you understand why that math doesn't make sense?
Guillaume Boiret
08:21>> Sorry. I have the connection. The math doesn't... Okay. Okay. Just... Okay.
Nathan Latka
08:30Yeah. Guillaume, I'm I'm not saying anything. Okay.
Guillaume Boiret
08:33>> Sorry.
Nathan Latka
08:34The connection's The
Guillaume Boiret
08:36>> the the MRR is is more than 50,000 per month, MRR.
Nathan Latka
08:44What is your MRR today?
Guillaume Boiret
08:48>> 50,000.
Nathan Latka
08:50Okay, not a 100,000. So you have a thousand customers paying on average $50 a month for $50,000 a month in revenue.
08:58>> Is
08:59that correct?
Guillaume Boiret
09:01>> Yep.
Nathan Latka
09:01And a year ago you were doing about $4,000 a month.
Guillaume Boiret
09:07>> Yep.
Nathan Latka
09:08Okay. What I'm asking about are your churn metrics. Right? So you said you're churning 7% of your revenue each month. My question was expansion revenue. Do you know what your expansion revenue is? 18% doesn't make any sense.
Guillaume Boiret
09:27>> Yeah, sorry about that.
Nathan Latka
09:28Yeah, it's okay. Sometimes it's just how we measure stuff, right? So like if you look at the customers you signed up exactly one year ago and you look at, let's say it was ten thousand dollars a month in revenue is what you signed up exactly a year ago. What you're saying is you'll churn
Guillaume Boiret
09:42>> Actually, I'm not really
09:47>> comfortable to share those numbers, so I try to make something in average and the math didn't work.
09:56>> Do I have to share those numbers?
Nathan Latka
09:58No, no, don't. The problem is you already, I'm just only asking questions about numbers you already shared. The numbers you shared don't make any sense. So you're saying you're just made the
Guillaume Boiret
10:06>> Because I made a mistake because I wanted to make some average numbers and it was not.
Nathan Latka
10:13Fair enough. Let's just stick to, you said 7% churn per month. Is that accurate?
Guillaume Boiret
10:20Yes. Okay. We just won't talk about Yes,
10:23>> it is. And it's an issue for us to have this churn and we are working very hard change that. That it will be, this is a lot of work that we had to change for the new version of PhantomBuster. So we are focusing on the churn for the next version.
Nathan Latka
10:41How do you think you drive churn down? I mean, problem is, look, I use PhantomBuster, so I will use it like one month on a campaign and then I cancel. Like, I have no need to keep using every single month. I imagine a lot of customers are like that. So how do you make it more sticky?
Strategy to Reduce Churn Through Workflows
Guillaume Boiret
10:56>> We need to give to our users actionable strategies that works on the long term. Because when you want to, for example, when you want to grow your audience on LinkedIn, you will have to find always to always find new leads to add into your audience. And that is something that we need to push because right now a lot of our users just, as you said, need to extract some data from LinkedIn and that's it. So our
11:29>> work right now is to explain that we need to create workflows and a workflow is a combination of different APIs that can work for you in the long term. This is this is the the purpose of PhantomBuster.
Product Hunt Launch Results
Nathan Latka
11:42You had some success on Product Hunt back in February with 1,400 upvotes. Help me understand how that worked for the company. So typically, when we interview folks and they had a successful Product Hunt launch, they'll see anywhere between five and ten thousand website hits that day if they ranked number one. How many hits did Product Hunt drive you when you ranked really high?
Guillaume Boiret
11:58>> Not that much actually. It was more something like the, like
12:06>> the awareness, but
12:09>> we didn't have the peak of subscriptions during this campaign.
Nathan Latka
12:16How many hits did it drive you in February?
Guillaume Boiret
12:21>> Sorry, how much what?
Nathan Latka
12:22Yeah, Guillaume, when you launched on Product Hunt on February 13, all I'm asking is how many website hits did it drive that day?
Guillaume Boiret
12:32>> I don't have the number.
Nathan Latka
12:33Okay. Do you have a general estimate? I mean, we talking like thousands or tens of thousands of hits?
Guillaume Boiret
12:40>> More than a couple of thousands.
Nathan Latka
12:43Couple of thousand. Okay. And was that a meaningful group in terms of actually converting them to paid or did you not see a lot of paying customers come from Product Hunt?
Guillaume Boiret
12:52>> No, not that much.
Nathan Latka
12:53And why do you think that is?
Guillaume Boiret
12:59>> I don't know.
13:04>> A lot of people who talked about PhantomBuster were already users and some paying users, because we talked, we made some campaign to our paying users, so it can explain that
13:24>> we didn't have as much as we thought the new paying users.
Platform Risk and LinkedIn Relationship
Nathan Latka
13:30I think part of the issue with this is exactly what Ubert, a Product Hunt commenter said, which is people can abuse this tool, right? And then, you know, from an investor perspective, they're going to ask you questions like, will LinkedIn shut you down and things like that. So while the tool is very valuable to people who use it responsibly, how do you deal with irresponsible users or potential platforms shutting you off from leveraging your API inside
13:54of them like LinkedIn?
Guillaume Boiret
13:57>> That's a very interesting question. First of all, we ask our users to
14:06>> their social networks carefully. And we say, okay, you can automate stuff, but you will not be able to do
14:18>> more things than what LinkedIn allows you to do. So there is rate limits and you need to be lower than those rate limits. So our users are taking this advice and they are doing the work well. And about what we do, we're just automating stuff and we are not selling data or sharing data.
Nathan Latka
14:47Yeah, but like LinkedIn, for example, I mean, you had any contact with LinkedIn? Have they asked you to shut down?
Guillaume Boiret
14:53>> No.
Nathan Latka
14:54Okay. Do you think that they like that you enable people to essentially connect with up to 200 people every day hitting their rate limit basically at scale just prospecting?
Guillaume Boiret
15:05>> It depends on what kind of stuff you're doing on LinkedIn.
15:14>> But no, I don't really understand because it's exactly the same thing as asking your intern, for example, to do repetitive simple things. So it's just doing one stuff at a time. And it's simple actions that you can do by yourself, But you don't have your time is too valuable to do it. So we are automating stuff at a human volume.
Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions
Nathan Latka
15:44Let's wrap up here Guillaume with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Guillaume Boiret
15:52>> Have... Me...
15:55>> Don't have...
Nathan Latka
15:57Okay, none is fine.
15:58>> Number two. It's cheesy, right? A Lean Startup.
16:01Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Guillaume Boiret
16:07>> Yes. I really like to follow what Algolia's CEO is doing.
Nathan Latka
16:12Yep. And guys, if you want to see more of the Algolia interview and how they hit $40,000,000 in ARR, you can go listen to that interview back five episodes ago. Number three, what's your favorite online tool Guillaume for scaling your company besides your own?
Guillaume Boiret
16:28>> I really like lemlist, of course. I think there is a lot of stuff to do on Zendesk. We are working a lot on Zendesk and understand what the customer success is because it's very important for us.
16:50>> Day work.
Nathan Latka
16:54Great. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Guillaume Boiret
17:00>> Eight. I need to sleep a lot.
Nathan Latka
17:01And how old are you?
Guillaume Boiret
17:03>> I'm 32.
Nathan Latka
17:0532. And which situation? Married, single, kids?
Guillaume Boiret
17:09>> I am kind of married. In France, is something like PACS, it's kind of married.
Nathan Latka
17:14Okay, not married. Any kids?
Guillaume Boiret
17:17>> No. No. Not yet.
Nathan Latka
17:18And last question. What do wish your 20 year old self knew?
Guillaume Boiret
17:24>> What my what?
Nathan Latka
17:2520 year old self knew.
Guillaume Boiret
17:30Something you wish you I knew when you were wish
17:36>> to be a very powerful developer, but I changed the way I worked and now I'm a CEO and I'm not a developer at all. But when I was 20, I really wanted to be a very great engineer.
Nathan Latka
17:52Guys, PhantomBuster serving a thousand customers paying $50 a month doing $50,000 a month in revenue up from $4,000 a month just a year ago. Spent about $500 to build their MVP and today have raised $600,000 They are profitable, team of nine people. Churn is a major issue, 7% churn that's monthly. So 84% annually, they are working on bringing that down by making, giving more use cases to their customers to stick over longer periods of time, hoping
18:14to raise a 3 to $5,000,000 round and call it Q2, Q3, twenty twenty when they're back in The States. In the meantime, Guillaume, thanks for taking us to the top.
Guillaume Boiret
18:22>> Thank you very much.