How Preppr CEO Jurg Benders grew to $72K revenue and 400 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is jurg bender he's a product driven entrepreneur continuously improving products and services through hustling and data analytics he first built and sold a company called quell an online marketplace for buyers and suppliers of custom-made parts currently he's building a sas portfolio company first stop prepper an instagram scheduling and publishing solution powered by ai after that informed dot plus building the world's largest library of medical animations to empower patients you're ready to take us to the top let's go for it okay these are two very different ideas which one are you more focused on instagram or medical uh it's still fun uh instagram instagram okay very good so tell us about the company what's prepper do and what's the revenue model how do you make money there uh preppers has a free instagram scheduling tool uh for now it's a scrum scheduling only and uh it will be a more scalable make marketing more scalable through ai in the future okay and you said it's pre-revenue right now you don't charge for it uh no it's not prove your view we were just uh started to uh to charge so it's uh based on an uh sas model we charge customers per month based on the number of instagram accounts they connect to our tool okay and what's the average customer pay per month right now would you say the average is about 17 okay good okay so kind of very smb focus not enterprise and and put this on a timeline for me when you launch the company uh we launched in the beginning of this year let's say where we built the first lines of code and now we we launched let's say commercially in may this year okay and and kind of get me in your head so like where were you a year ago were you still selling your other kind of old company and you're now focusing on these two new ideas or where are you at lifewise uh livewise i was uh after my ex exiting uh in in quail i did some some investments and and uh did some advice work uh next year where i was running a company called inc 361 which was one of the largest uh instagram web interfaces until facebook blocked the the whole api business and then uh that whole business went to the down the drain and one of the most number one requests we got from customers is to to to help them schedule content to instagram so we start building them and think about it around the time to to make a new service how big was the business before facebook shut it down in terms of revenue in terms of revenue it was about three million dollars ar that's our our yearly revenue uh only based on uh advertising income uh we had uh uh uh 21 million users on the monthly basis on our platform and that was only only advertising based that's incredible okay so went from that to where do you have now today in terms of total customers paying we have about 400 paid customers at this point so that's actually not bad right so so you take you know you kind of harvest who you could from the old idea bring them on to the new sas platform and if i take 400 times at 17 a month the price point that puts you out with like 6 800 bucks a month right now on revenue something like that how sure how much 6800 yeah that's correct yeah and a little bit less it's it's 6 000 to 500 or so okay very good but still your base the playbook you're running right now is kind of take people off the old product put them on the new one right that's correct yeah yeah so the ink3601 still exists and we we we leave them over to prepper what does ink what does that company do though if facebook shut off the api access it's not doing anything anymore but but there are a lot it's just shifting and uh promoting more or less uh prepper in this case yeah i see i see and why like you were doing a three three million bucks in terms of run rate facebook shuts it off you most people would say okay well i learned the lesson don't build something that's reliant on a facebook api and then you go into instagram scheduling which i think still relies on facebook's api why still deal with that risk uh that's a good point because uh uh basically it's it's uh we we love this business uh and we want to solve the problems for our our customers and our customers wanted to have a lot of scheduling uh on instagram so we we decided to build that the obviously there's there's a dependency there on instagram uh where we're trying to to to to uh let's say limited dependence by adding more networks in the in the future and by adding other tools to the platform where we don't rely only on instagram got it okay that makes sense now are you bootstrapping this or have you raised capital no we're bootstrapping and we we uh we finance it based on all the let's say the cash flow free cash flow we have from in 361. sure you save that up and build it now you use the word we what's the team look like today the team of this this point is for including myself there it's uh there are three uh engineers uh and myself are doing the day-to-day business plus the the let's say the marketing and sales stuff and do all four folks have equity uh no there we were three guys have equity and that that's it and then i hired a hired kind of full-time employee yeah correct very good and where's everybody based what part of the world uh we're we're at this point only based in uh in rotterdam the netherlands uh and uh and there's one uh developer uh that is uh located in copenhagen okay very good and in terms of in terms of growing this base i mean you're doing six grand a month right now how do you grow it to a hundred grand per month what's the playbook the playbook is uh based on organic growth so we do a lot of organic efforts plus uh content uh development to uh to uh to attract more and more more people plus uh we do referral marketing fire our current users to attract new users okay what does organic mean by the way people typically say that when they they don't know how to like prove out a paid model they just say organic and inbound i mean what can you actually rely on that to grow significantly it's actually just seo okay so like give me a turn let's be really specific here give me a term that you rank high for uh best time to post on instagram okay okay and are you doing this manually or you have a system an automated system that like pumps out blog posts to rank for keywords no we do this do we do this manually we create content that that that that's interesting for our audience based on certain areas and then we uh we will make sure that it will rank uh well okay yeah so that keyword i just looked it up best time to post on instagram like the top spot goes to your you know beautiful competitors at later who we've had on the show and then there's like hubspot expert voice sprout social ad espresso share this and then prepper i see there so you're four or five down how many how many kind of clicks per month will you get from this article do you know the top of your head uh clicks uh i think we have about 1600 clicks per month on that okay okay so that's pretty healthy and that's all free and it looks like you had a lady name what's her name the author lona if toad yeah correct yeah yeah she wrote the article yeah very good so she is she your only kind of full-time content person right now no it's freelance she she works freelance for us and gets and the rights of content we we tell her to write oh i see okay good so you guys come up with a headline the targeting and then you pass it to her this is something by the way in this case we do a lot of research yeah so we did a lot of research and gave her all the results and she rewrote it into something that's readable yeah this is something by the way a lot of early founders are trying to figure out is how to scale content marketing like do you hire someone full time and let them figure out the keywords and terms or do you figure out those yourselves give them guidelines and just have them write out something you already thought it sounds like you guys are going with the latter yeah we do the ladder we do a lot of research on to see where's the volume where where are our where the spaces where uh our competition lacks and then we we we we do a bit of research to that and then we give it to uh to a writer to tell them what to what to write about it yeah 400 customers means you have kind of a bit of a cohort you can look at now what does your churn look like on that cohort the churn is uh 5.8 percent okay that's logo churn per month desperate per month yeah uh per month but on a logo basis or a revenue basis uh on a revenue basis okay revenue churn per month and that's net or gross uh that's net okay so you're adding back any expansion yeah yeah do you have a lot of expansion revenue yet or is it too early uh no it's too early to tell actually yeah yeah what what what are your variable price points so like what's your cheapest what's your most expensive and why do people go up or down uh our most er the cheapest one is is is is a plan of nine dollars a month the most expensive one is uh uh let me see is about 78 dollars a month and we sell both our monthly package and on yearly package and our our challenge is more to get people more to the to the yearly uh plans instead of only sticking to the to the monthly plans sure but why so what's the difference why would someone pay 78 is it number of social profiles connected or like what are the what are the pricing axes yeah it's it's only all the all the functionality is across all plans the same it's only depending on the number of social accounts you connect to the tool okay got it got it and talk to me about cac so what's your fully weighted cac right now your cost to acquire these customers we we uh pay about 17.80 per customer okay so you get paid back on average kind of in a month or two months uh yeah correct yeah that's great and where are you spending most that money we're spending most of the money on salaries yeah okay yeah okay but at this point it's uh it's it's a content content marketing and uh that's where we're apart from some tech some technical development it's it's in on the under the growth engine it's only on marketing and it's content marketing so just be clear this is like your fully weighted cac 17 bucks includes the salaries of your content people your sales people et cetera there's no direct paid like facebook ad stuff in there yeah that's correct so this is fully fully cached very cool any plans to raise capital or you want to stay bootstrapped uh we have plans to to to to race but it will be uh somewhere in the beginning of the of the new year that we will start up the process at this point we'll will stay as as is and uh we'd like to continue let's focus take the business a bit further before you go into raising capital yeah york makes a lot of sense man let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book i don't like i don't like a lot of business books uh but so i thought my favorite book is into thin air for john krakauer it's it's it's it's about climbing um but if i need to pick a book it would be uh let's say principles from ray dalio or uh what else do we have uh uh the the let's say the hard things about the the hard thing about hard things yep those are both good number two is there a ceo you're following are studying right now preferably one that the rest of us don't know about poor uh no no it's it's again this case uh ray dalio okay good number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business uh besides prepper it's uh it's uh it's uh it's slack so yeah sorry i i think you is probably the first time you're here so now slack yeah oh yeah what's what's slack to do yeah no no that's good it's good this helps us understand kind of getting your head a little bit more here so number four how many hours a sleeper i get every night uh eight seven eight okay so healthy and what's your situation married single kiddos married to two kids that's great and how are you i'm 44. 44. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh keep it simple and don't worry guys keep it simple do not worry again this one from a guy who's talking about do not worrying who built a three million dollar platform on top of facebook loses api access now shifting completely to prepper which is instagram kind of automated scheduling using ai they've got four people currently about 400 customers 17 rpo so 6 grand a month right now on revenue bootstrap 5.8 monthly churn that's on a revenue basis and net uh they're spending about 17 bucks to acquire a customer so about one or two month payback period there again founded uh just about four or five months ago here in 2018. york thanks for taking us to the top you're welcome thank you