How Pixelme CEO Tom Benattar grew Pixelme to $132K revenue and 300 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is max bertillo he's the ceo and co-founder of pixel me at night and product manager of growth at buffer during the day he started pixelmatic side project with tom and jeremy as co-founders in september 2017. they're at six grand per month right now i'm more than 120k in revenue thanks to an incredible promotion that they ran max are you ready to take us to the top sure let's do it so where are you spending more of your time right now buffer or pixel me um so uh i would say a half half buffer of peaks on me but i decided to move on buffer and do full time and picks on me so it just raises okay so hold on so your full time on pixel me and part-time buffer uh yeah that's that's that's almost correct okay well so i mean let me just ask the direct question right why are you holding on to your buffer safety net why not quit and go all in on pixel me that's that's what it is just i did i did that two weeks ago so i'm still helping buffer a little bit for a couple of weeks and then i yeah i'll be free time and pick something up very good okay so let's focus on pixelmate what's the company do and what's your revenue model how do you make money ah yeah so the company is like um a link shortening and unlike a bt we do like we add a retargeting pixel into the redirect so it's super useful when you like uh like uh depend on like a third-party platform um so let's say you're an amazon seller you have a shop and you send traffic to amazon you can't install a retargeting pixel so you missed a lot of traffic and with pixelm you can put your pixel and retarget all the people who click on the link so that's what we do and like the revenue model is so we sell like a subscription plan we have monthly and yearly plans and based on the number of clicks you get on the the links and yeah we have three hundred playing two single now three yeah 300 paying customers and like um almost 10k in revenue that's great so 300 customers at you said 10k and mrr yeah is that right yes what each one's paying about 30 bucks a month yeah it's like the uh the rpu is like around 20 29 or something like that yeah very good and um and put this on kind of a timeline for me so you're obviously driving growth at buffer when did you launch pixelmate when did you start working on it yeah so we launched pixelm in september 2017 um and with my two friends and we worked on it like for like a couple of like weeks before and just like lunch uh on in september 2017 had some like pay monthly paying customers in september and then like uh did a great absolute promotion uh in october and then like yeah started to to grow the revenue and in october like the big thing with appsumo is like they're basically undercutting your ability to charge every month because they're typically selling a lifetime plan it's a one-time revenue bump and then you're screwed because you have to deal with all those users that aren't paying you monthly anymore so if that is that the case with how you ran your promotion if so how do you convert one-time payments into you know monthly payments so it actually is meaningful so that's that's i think that's not the goal if you are planning to do so with yes the maintenance is like you're getting like we've got like 5 000 customers in one room um so and we have a product who uh i like social users it was like incredible to get like the feedbacks you know the product then the market they know everything so they compared all the tools so it's super interesting to chat with all these people and the second thing is like we are using like them for the affiliate program they are like super happy to support your tools so in different world and like it's worth moving it's like um affiliation stuff like that so that's how we are like um like leveraging like all these users that pay one time okay you cut out there in the middle so sorry you meant you said you're using them as an affiliate program yes we do we do uh sorry uh we we use an affiliate program and so the idea is like leveraging like all these users so they share they spread the word and they they they spread the word about pixar me so then we get like monthly recurring revenue from those users what i don't understand though about this model is the big assumption you're making is that every customer is created equal and the genius behind what noah has built is these are jcpenney shoppers they they shop on discounts these are these are groupon shoppers there's a reason groupon's like out of business livingsocials like out of business so like why do you want those kinds of customers we we don't really want them but i think that's great to start it's a great start so it's like put some like uh dollars in the machine at first the engine and then you like use them you spread the word it's content on the website on the web so people find you they talk about your product things to them and stuff like that so i think that's not the type of customers you want to have for your on a long time but at first it's like help you kickstart like the product so that's really cool i think did you correct me if i'm wrong were you at buffer when buffer was just launching didn't i think buffer did an absolute promotion back in the day did they yeah i i yes they did but i wasn't there so i have no clue how they we we don't we we almost don't have any abstract buffer anymore so i was just going to say if i asked the current buffer team if those customers stuck around and were valuable customers what would they say and i think you just answered it with the fact that none of them are really there anymore uh so and i think we we you we managed to like convince them on the low plans like the ten dollars a month which is like 15 now so because it was like also like the first plan was pretty cheap solar like in the long term and we lost the other thing which is amazing yeah max i know you're early but do you have any sense right now for what your churn is yeah solution uh is like so the customer churn is like 4.5 something like that 4.5 and 3.5 depending on the month and like yeah so but the yeah and the the net revenue turn is like um like uh around zero so we managed to have like negative uh net margin last month and like yeah we're playing with that so that's cool got it so net revenue churn right now is zero percent that's on your monthly cohort which means you expand customers enough to make up for any lost revenue yeah because we changed the pricing model like uh four months ago and now people upsells to like more expensive plans so that's cool and what pricing axes are you using to get people to pay more is it just number of clicks through the link is it number of seats what is it yeah no it's like only the volume of clicks under on the links like through the links here that's that's like because usually when you start you start small and you have like a small like number of clicks like a low traffic and then you increase the traffic and that's cool because you still get the same value so you are expanding your usage for pixel media yeah and and walk me back to the top of the funnel so if you're if you're crying these customers are paying 29 30 bucks per month what are you spending to acquire them fully weighted yeah so we we don't spend um we do some testing on like a paid acquisition like facebook ads and stuff like that but it's very like small like most of the acquisitions come from like uh inbound is like content um and uh the affiliate program and then we had some like pr media and stuff like that so um yeah so that's the the three main uh channel of acquisition for us so it doesn't cost like i mean i'm writing the content and like we're sharing that so is it just you and your three your two or three co-founders right now what's the team size yeah it's three only the three four fingers three of you guys okay and then real quick on your on your affiliate model what's your kickback what are you paying for to affiliates oh it's 30 um on every sale so every month as long as someone is still paying peaks on me we still like giving back like 30 percent on the plan and um yeah so that's that's the model and sometimes we do like we increase that ratio like with like some like influencers yeah people and that just to be clear though that's forever ah that's forever as long as someone is painless yeah yeah um makes good sense uh where's everybody based so are you guys all all based uh in the same office are you spread out everywhere no no i i uh so i'm living in paris now tom is living in montpellier in the south of france and one of the other guys like jeremy is living in um around paris like 50 kilometers from paris it's a small city there very good and and you've bootstrapped the company correct i thought yeah bootstrap and uh you usually like to ask about growth rate so if you go back a year ago today how much were you doing per month in revenue but were you launched at that point yeah we launched in september 2017 and we grew the revenue from zero to 10k in 12 months so it's like yeah got it so you're basically you're basically zeros you're gone from nothing...