How Planable CEO Xenia Muntean grew Planable to $42K revenue and 70 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is senya muntan she was born in a family of hustlers but never had the chance to escape the fate of being an entrepreneur at 20 years old she started her first company in digital marketing agency and was shocked in a world transformed by social media technology brands and agencies were still working like they were in the madmen area totally buried in 2016 she and her co-founders uh started plannable to help people behind brands work together in a better way today more than 3000 teams globally use the company for marketing collaboration senior are you ready to take us to the top definitely let's do it all right tell me about planable what's the company do and how do you make money sure so i'm xenia the co-founder and ceo of planoball and it's a collaboration platform for social media teams we are helping brands such as bmw virgin mobile and wendy's simplify their content production workflows so the product is based on a monthly subscription it starts as low as 49 dollars per month and the price depends on how many brands how many clients or workspaces you would need to to to have them plan about what's the average customer what's the average customer pay per month did you say so the it starts at 49 so the average is around 50 dollars per per account great that makes good sense and uh give me more the back story here what you launched this company in yeah so we launched the company two years ago and i i have been an entrepreneur from the very beginning so i like to joke that i never had this chance to escape my entrepreneurial faith because as you mentioned before my my parents were the real the ultimate hustlers and we started the company because like the startup legends you hear a lot we had this problem with collaboration inside the agencies we worked before so we wanted like true rebel millennials we wanted to go against the norms and solve the problems for ourselves and we built plannable to help and support the people behind brands collaborate in this world transformed by ever changing modern marketing and how many customers have you scaled to today so we currently have uh around 70 customers and we also did an amazing launch on appsumo and we have around 3 000 customers from the appsumo launch okay but i'm not going to count appsumo launch because it's all one-time sales and people buying a lifetime plan so it's not real monthly occurring revenue but if we take the 70 people paying monthly times your 50 rpoo you're doing about 3 500 bucks per month right now yeah okay and tell me about appsumo just quickly so how many sales came throughout sumo and how much revenue did it make total and then how much of that revenue were you able to keep yeah definitely so for map sumo i think we sold more than 120k and you know the appsumo take a large portion of that and uh i think we kept around 40k but we're still in the briefcase so we're having some real nice uh recurring revenue from that one as well yeah and we say recurring revenue you just mean new customers coming to you you know every day because it's i mean again i've interviewed a lot of people that have done appsumo deals and these are people paying one time for life it's not true recurring revenue no no for the for the lifetime they'll know but for the briefcase they're using it constantly and they're paying those forty nine dollars to use those products that they activated constantly month by month until they and when they try what cut the 49 bucks a month do you get it's like a dollar or something actually it's a bit more they have a really weird formula so i'm not sure what the right what the exact amount is but it's definitely more than one dollar i think it gets to around ten dollars per month or so how do they do i mean if there's 10 tools in the briefcase and it's 50 bucks they can't pay everyone 10 bucks a month yeah but you have a limit on how many tools you can activate i see what you're saying very good okay let's move back to your your real customers the ones paying 50 bucks a month where did you get the 70 so those 70 actually were about 10 uh before the end of the year in december and after the absolumel launch uh many of the appsumo customers upgraded to the monthly recurring plan because they needed more than they were than what we were offering on the appsumo deal and also it created so much buzz that it brought many other new customers so we we got those uh 60 customers plus 60 customers in the past two or three months okay so 60 how many how many unique sales came through absolutely you said 120 grand in sales but how many customers recurring you mean just just customers how many customers came in via absolutely 3 000 paid on absolutely and then 60 because of the entire buzz yeah so 60 people came in from 3 000 total so so i mean look better than nothing i mean but now that appsumo is kind of a one-shot kind of thing so now what how do you drive real growth so it's all about content as you very well known and it's all about content it's all about establishing a niche presence on what exactly we're doing on collaboration it's about uh establishing those relationships with the bloggers with the influencers like you are nathan and just driving that that content and establishment i'm a nice guy but by the way noah if you're listening i would never take 60 or 70 of of beautiful seniors revenue what a horrible thing what a horrible thing to do no just kidding no is a great guy that that team's good so so okay content marketing is something you're going to invest in what's the team size today so it's five people on the team three thousand three founders and we recently hired two more people bootstrapped or we raised capital we raised uh some capital from i mean we got an investment from an accelerator uh where dexter's backed okay so how much have you raised today including tech stars around 104 so it was this so it was like what we what we sold on up so much the same amount so how long can you guys go if you drive no additional growth i mean how long can you be surprised well that's what i'm curious like how low have you kept your personal monthly expenses so i guess we're under 7k for four or five people around that's that's our monthly burn yep burn rate which is pretty incredible personally personally is this company your guys's only income stream personally uh wait sorry like do people have side hustles to make additional cash on the side no no we're fully focused on the on the company full time more than full time three founders three thousand three founders and uh two more people two more employees so five people being paid out seven grand per month how do you survive off like basically it's 1100 bucks a person it's it's eastern europe baby so it's very cheap what's your exact what's out of curiosity what's your rent what do you pay personally for rent i pay personally for around 400 euros but hundreds this is the center it's the center of the city of the capital no that's from me that's super cheap i'm not saying it's expensive that's so cheap no it is it is cheap i i mean it's it's extremely cheap when you compare it to san francisco if you live there or to london it's just outrageous all right next week the top entrepreneurs come on to you live from romania it's gonna be a good week no just kidding all right very good senior let's uh talk to me about some other stuff here churn have you lost any customers yeah we definitely lost some some customers i think in total we lost about 10 customers since since we we began um we lost some customers mainly because of some of the our limitations we have with with the apis building products on top of our companies is hard and you might know that from hail but um with instagram scheduling that's our biggest roadblock uh that's our biggest bottleneck hands down so why why does a company like later.com have access to that api but you don't yeah because uh they're a bit of a bigger company and at the same time they're uh probably an instagram marketing partner and we're trying to become one uh currently why compete with him though like why why not just like if you like this idea so much why not like join their team or or jump on their boat yeah so i don't see us competing with later later are doing something for individual marketers we're doing it for teams our focus is not scheduling our focus is mostly collaboration and helping people manage their workflows yep i see okay very good um walk me through kind of next step so like what after this call what's like the next growth tactic you're gonna try to drive more growth but like are you writing a blog post for seo or how are you thinking about that yeah so we're actually writing a post about agencies uh we're gonna probably do one weekly article about best agencies in social media and how they're managing social for their clients but also social for themselves so that's something interesting we want to do and probably more hustling uh on linkedin that's something we didn't do a lot but there's a lot of tips and tricks you could you could try on linkedin automated and semi-automated are you are you doing any direct paid spend right now just a bit i guess how much 100 euros a test just to see how it works how like we're mostly doing it to to test the creative and the targeting more than anything else we're not expecting real uh high high rocket okay so you you haven't gotten any customers from your direct paid spend yet then or have you uh not yet because we just started but i i don't expect very much from from this...