How Postoplan CEO Kate Sukhenko grew Postoplan to $3.1M revenue and 39K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is kate tsukenko she's the cbdo and founder with four years of experience of work in europe and three years experience of work in china with corporate clients negotiating and signing agreements piloting and analytics of marketing and investment projects currently working on a company called hosto plan kate you ready to take it to the top yes i'm ready great so tell us what the company does and are you purely sas business model uh so i hold the position of chief business development officer at poster plan and uh our service is a smart automatic social media and messenger marketing platform and that allows you to create schedule and promote your content so we are like the first one in the world service like that that um invented like launched whatsapp to skate messages on whatsapp is that what most your customers pay you for is your whatsapp feature no of course not so our customers um we have one the most i think the most popular feature is to communicate with clients inside the platform so there we have like social inbox and you would get messages from your uh business pages on facebook oh interesting so how much do companies pay you per month on average you're asking about my salary no how many to come how much do companies customers pay you per month on average oh customers so uh now we have about um 30 000 clients in general and uh paid clients is about six thousand okay and what do they pay the company to use the tool per month what do they pay what price are they paying you to use the tool yeah uh we don't have many like packages uh we have only three and the ap package so the vip package is just for ten dollars okay so do most of them pay ten dollars a month yes yes okay now when did you join the company what year uh i joined the company last year about like eight months ago so yeah our ceo started like two years ago and now we just actually celebrated the birthday of our company 25th so it was two days ago and yeah so launched in 2019 you now have 6 000 customers they pay 10 a month helped me understand the team today how many people total are on the team uh well i should correct you i guess we launched last february 2020 so it has been just a year since we launched okay yeah so now um there are 13 people working in our company and we were all of us we were remote from eight different companies from eight different countries in the world and how many of the 15 are engineers how many are engineers you mean are programmers right yes so currently we have i guess four programmers and we are considering of hiring one more so to improve our poverty now kate have you guys bootstrapped the company or raised capital uh we raised we just raised money in december how much uh i'm not sure i can't tell that right now we haven't we are not ready with our uh press release yet so i'm pretty sure when we do that we can announce the price but yeah okay it was our pre-seed round yeah so this stuff is already public uh publicly you it looks like you guys posted about 446 000 euros is what you raised uh yeah that's about that price yeah because you have to file publications when you raise capital so that's the amount you raised was about 450 thousand dollars or u.s euros a year okay and what do you guys plan to spend the money on uh well uh we plan to develop some additional functions on our service so that should connect with programming we wanna make our platform smart like uh we wanna launch like suggestions so the service would analyze the behavior of users and uh will do the suggestions like when is better time for you to post uh what kind of post was better for your um followers like for which post you got more reactions so we want to do such like recommendations for them so we want to make it like smart and also we want to add the video editor to the service so you know you don't need any other graphic editors or video editors because you can do everything inside the service so and post it immediately and how are i mean you guys are for a year old it's pretty impressive the amount of traffic the website is getting and that you went from zero to six thousand customers in under a year where did you get all these customers from what's the growth strategy well so currently uh our strategy is to uh go to the spanish-speaking countries like spanish spain mexico and argentina so that's the main strategy to cover like more countries more markets and enter different countries well i'm sure you're not the first person in spain mexico and argentina to think about a social media scheduling application so why are you why are you beating other applications in those countries um we can suggest really good functionality for a reasonable price right so i think people would choose us because of that and also that next important point is our support because our customers get a really quick response and they feel like they have been hurt so uh and they feel that their problem was solved immediately so i think in this situation support is really yeah important these kinds of tools especially at this low price point churn is always a real issue what is your guys churn per month so now it's uh seven percent okay and are you are you happy with that uh of course we are working to yeah reduce it well so tell me about that why are people churning and how do you plan to reduce it uh we want to hear like more feedback from customers like why would they do that and try to understand where the problem was so kinda like we want to know what function they're using most of all and we're trying to be like based our work on those functions and if they don't like something we hear our customers and try to change it as fast as we can right and and again a lot of churns sometimes can be dependent on where you're getting the customers from so can you tell me besides just saying spain mexico and argentina what specifically are you doing to get customers are you spending on facebook ads are you doing something else what channels are you using well i would say these are like paid ads and affiliate programs uh to do that yeah how many many affiliates do you work with uh i guess i don't know this for now but yeah currently we are running with uh optimal uh so yeah with what action wall oh you're running an appsumo deal yeah so we're having this absolute deal for now and yeah so how many of the 6000 customers you just told me are actually paying monthly versus they just paid one discounted lifetime value deal from six thousand it's about fifty fifty so fifty percent of them about like forty six uh they paid uh just vap per month right and about 50 of them paid lifetime got it so i mean look when you look at economics lifetime you know someone paying for a lifetime doesn't really help the sas business grow other than a little quick dopamine hit up up front cash because they're not paying you monthly you can't plan on additional revenue coming from them in the future so really what you have is 3 000 customers paying 10 bucks a month right now and doing about 30 000 a month in revenue is that correct oh i guess yes yes what do you mean you guess yes you're the head of business you're the head of business development these you must know these numbers of course that's what i just said so you are doing 30 000 a month no so uh you you probably don't have our presentation so in january we have the revenue for about 20 um almost 24 000 euros got it that's what that's what you did this this this gin this january yes of course so we increased from february starting from 200 euros and each month it would increase at least 30 percent so yeah got it so you're doing about 30 000 united states dollars or 24 000 euros this month up from nothing a year ago that's still great growth outside of the appsumo deal where did you get those three thousand customers paying monthly uh well we use paid ads uh i guess that yes we entered spain and mexico so about 40 percent of our customers are from mexico and spain so spanish-speaking countries how much are you spending uh on ads to get a new 10 a month customer uh you mean how much is it to get a paid client for 10 a month yeah well it's about uh 60 euros to get the paid client okay and what sorts of keywords are you spending that money on uh can you explain the question please yeah when you spend sixty dollars to get a new customer are you targeting certain keywords on google and if so which keywords uh i don't know because i'm not doing that so yes we're using see search engine optimization of course for that and we're developing our blog so our customers can easily find us there also we have included two platforms like g2 and capterra and we are in top 30 so yeah do you pay for g2 and capterra uh no i guess no okay i'm not sure about that but yeah okay what do you do from a business development perspective to get your users to go leave reviews on g2 and capterra don't have that information what do you spend your your head of business development correct what do you spend most your time doing at the company uh well i'm responsible for uh talking with like foreign uh businesses with investors also and i'm responsible for marketing okay i mean wouldn't getting g2 reviews fall directly under the marketing function that's usually a main channel and usually goes under marketing yeah but i don't have this information right now so you don't know how you're getting reviews on capterra which you...