How Pqina CEO Rik Schennink grew Pqina to $120K revenue and 500 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is rick shanaki is the founder of a company called kina.nl he's an indie product developer living on a 2d plane people called the netherlands he's a data 2 on a journey to support his family by building and selling highly interactive web companies rick you ready to take us to the top yeah all right so guys if you want to follow along the url is p q i n a dot n l rick what's the company do yeah well like i said i i build uh web components so parts little little pieces you can use on your website little pieces of code that that help you convert more customers or add some interactivity to to your website and is this a sas company what's the business model business model is a subscription-based so you purchase a library a piece of code and then you pay yearly to well to get updates and to receive support so what's the average customer paying per per month or per year uh around 200 us dollars i guess per year for you yeah okay great so call it 17 18 bucks uh per month and then kind of break down the back story here when did you launch the company what year uh i guess it was i think it was 2016. not 100 sure you're not 100 sure this is like a big moment of founder's life you don't remember when you founded your own company i kind of drifted into it like i had a full-time job and i needed i was was building stuff on the side and uh like i needed a company name i'll just so so uh i i needed to put the income somewhere it was just a little bit so so i'm not sure when it was exactly what was your full-time job i was a web developer at a big dodge uh web development agency oh interesting are you still working there did you quit no i quit like two years or like five years ago four years ago and then i first started freelancing doing a projects for other customers and when income from my web components started to grow uh i quit my job and or i quit freelancing and went full-time developing web components and that was like uh last year in uh summer that that's when i let the last client go that's great and so what did you do last year in terms of like if you had all your revenue from last year um around 80k i think 80 000 bucks okay and what do you think you'll do this year well it's uh it was pretty i was projecting it to be around 150 but with the whole covet situation and uh i think it's impacting uh sales so sales are a bit down right now but i'm hoping it'll pick up after summer maybe if things in the u.s get better as well well how many sales have you done to date this year today uh like the total since i guess it's around 300 uh maybe 400 sales yeah sorry so what is total revenue it's like today but january 1st to today 2020. i had to look it up well 400 sales are they 200 each sale they're like one 1 29 for a a normal developer license and 500 bucks for a company license okay so you don't know what you don't know how much you've made this month in terms of top line or this year in terms of top line sales no well i i have a i don't have a number like at the forefront of my but like the the average revenue amount is like 10k 10k so multiply that by six or seven got it changing like 60 50 60 000 a month or sorry so far this year yeah okay where are you so so kind of break break down the transition from this is a side hustle for your full-time job to having the courage to quit the job to go all in on this like are you i see a ring on your finger are you married what did your spouse think about you quitting your full-time job so um yeah i was building uh web components next to my full-time job for a while and inc income wasn't fantastic but there came a point where at my full-time job things were going well it wasn't the best let's say let's keep it at that so at that point i quit and the freelance market in in the netherlands was was fantastic at that point that it still is so that was a bit risky but uh yeah after that point i i we we just saved up a bit of money doing some projects and then we had i could spend more time working on those web components of mine uh and she she's fully supporting me in that so we we have two kids so it's a bit uh yeah it it put it it really puts things in perspective of how uh of that this company has to do is do well so with the cop last couple months like sales have been a bit down it's really stressful so oh yeah but my wife supports me doing this which is lovely and i'm i'm at home i work from home so the kids i see them a lot and uh yeah that's that's great what is your and when covet hit and sales took a hit and you had to have a conversation with your wife and say hey listen like listen sales are taking a hit and it was obviously a very stressful time how did that conversation sound yeah well she's like well we have we have saved up a bunch of money in the in the start of the year so she's fine with it so it's not it's not like it's not like the company's going under or something but it's just like 30 40 uh drop in sales since june so that is kind of stressful but it's still enough to keep uh to support a family and how much have you raised or have you bootstrapped the company it's bootstrapped yeah okay got it and what's your team is it just you it's me yeah that's good that's good okay so you're doing all the design all the engineering everything yeah thing that's great would you ever raise would you ever go raise money for this uh i i had some offers from family members but eventually it just felt good to do it all on my own and i i love to to to build the stuff on my own and yeah and which of your products so you have you have akina right but then you have products under it like file pond does file pond the biggest one that drives the most revenue yeah it's it's completely free so it's it's mostly a marketing product so it's a free free library for developers to use it looks fantastic and and bill sorry the question the question is i'm just curious so which product makes the most money for you under vaquina how do you spell that [Music] it's like the the it's a it's a different product but doga is like a like five point office file uploading and image uploading and then often you want your customers to also allow you want them to be able to edit images as well and then that's where doc comes in and they integrate very easily so like it's a five minute integration so if a customer already has a file bond they'll they'll look at the okay if they yeah so anyone building anyone building an email marketing tool where users upload images and you want them to have some lightweight ways to edit the images you could use doka which is a high performance javascript image editing tool in the browser they integrate it in five minutes and then they use you exactly yeah great and so again let's say i am that use case i am the founder of an email marketing company i want to use doca in my campaign like email builder i'm just paying you one time for a year-long license there's no like i don't have a limit on number of api requests or anything like that no it's completely uh contained like the package runs in the browser there's no server there interesting i feel like you're leaving money on the table yeah i think too so i've been considering offering it like like with the backhand to it that will do image transforms or image storage as well uh but it's that might be a next step how are customers finding you um i think 50 google and and the rest is like uh via filebond uh and other open source uh products that i sell or sell i i have available the 50 that come from google what do they search on google to find you like javascript image editor or react image or stuff like that image cropper so i try to write a lot of articles that that feature those search terms or write articles that are related to image editing then you'll end up on on one of my articles or on the pro page of doka this is a competitive keyword though right i mean you've got photo editor sdk pays for ads for these keywords you rank number one there's also certain github stuff that that is basically free tools yeah but you you do ra you do uh you are ranked number one for that keyword javascript uh image editor yeah yeah this is interesting um was it tough i mean did you come from an seo background so you knew exactly what to write to rank for that or you have to work a little bit i i did a lot of html and css when i worked for the web development company so i had a lot of experience with writing the correct html content and using the right tags did a lot of research as well on what what what to do to to make it better or indexable stuff like that yeah very good all right rick let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book sorry favorite business book favorite business book um i think it's a hundred dollar starter 100 startup number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um no one particularly comes to mind number three...