How Reamaze CEO Lu Wang grew Reamaze to $3.2M revenue and 10K customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is lou wang he's building a company that's helping folks do multi-channel support especially in the e-commerce space it's called reamaze.com he's also a serious entrepreneur with a lot of experience in helping small businesses lou you ready to take to the top hey yeah i certainly am and how are you doing i am doing well man i appreciate you coming on so a lot of a lot more people think about e-commerce these days since the last time you came on back in 2018 how's it impacting your business yeah i mean the world certainly has changed right i mean almost in a forceful way um you know when the pandemic first happened it was actually tough for us to gauge how things would play out um obviously we have customers in industries like tourism uh certain like sort of hospitality and services and clearly we were affected um as things played out it what basically ended up happening is you saw more and more businesses shifting their business online right people who had a more physical presence now are doing business online in a primary way and that's even true with restaurants if you think about the way we get takeout nowadays is very different than how we might have gotten take out just a few months ago and so e-commerce has really taken off um you can see some of the major platforms like shopify uh even big commerce i think had a pretty successful ipo recently yeah if you look at those companies um and how well they're doing and of course amazon which is the big gorilla in the room when it comes to e-commerce are you are you so on e-commerce like when i go to your website i don't see it there's nothing that says like you know better conversations happier customers for e-commerce brands you really are using branding you know better customer service better customer engagement is this really for anybody it is i mean we do serve for everybody and that's why i said like we have customers from all industries um but about 60 to 70 of our customer base is going to be in the e-commerce space specifically um you know i think this is people who hit product market fit in the e-commerce space if you think about businesses that need to have interactions with customers through like a chat medium e-commerce certainly fits that bill for e-commerce customer conversations happen pre-sales and post sales right whereas for a lot of other businesses potentially chat and support is most of a like a post-sale nurturing type of relationship now when you came on last this was about 28 months ago you said that the average customer is paying about your pro plan which is 40 per per team member per month is that still the sort of average rpoo or has it increased uh yeah we've seen some growth there certainly almost double that in fact if that was the i forgot the last number that i had i had given you but hearing it now two years later we're looking at a lot more of an arpu and obviously a bigger customer base as well and things have gone well for us how many customers are now working with uh we're doing i think just north of uh you know the term that's used often is logos we're doing just north of 2500 logos or something like that it's a little complicated in our case because a lot of accounts actually have multiple brands we have a plan that allows you to bring multiple brand entities so actually the number of logos is higher than that but the number of paying logos is is in that ballpark okay yeah i'm trying to compare that to you you told me 3 600 customers a year and a half ago so i imagine you were giving me a different number than maybe number of seats or number of individual logos or something like that yeah exactly and so i think we're at in terms of seats we're at the 10k range at this point okay got it so you have 10 000 seats across 2500 brands that's right i see so and then 10 obviously per seat average price is 40 bucks per seat not 80. 80 is actually the logo average two seats per logo yeah we're doing uh i think we're doing about 100 per logo so we're doing because we're in the three million dollar revenue range right now so that's that's about 2500 times the 100 per logo that's right yeah well first off congratulations if you're you're so what does that mean you did about 280 grand in revenue last month uh yep exactly we're in the yeah we're in that ballpark range we're actually 250 260. okay yeah 250 times 12 again that puts you right at that 3 million run rate which is great i mean that's almost doubling uh since the last time we spoke where's most of the growth come from um you know most of our growth uh i think the last time we talked uh characteristically speaking we do growth both in terms of new logos but also in terms of the number of seats right and so we've seen growth both in our existing base in terms of staff users added we've also seen growth obviously from new businesses i think part of it again as i mentioned new companies coming online for the first time mom and pop shops certainly for the first time but we're also seeing a lot of growth from non-organic sales meaning sales where we're going out and looking for businesses that would be a good match for our value proposition so that's something new that we probably weren't doing two years ago you know proactively looking for businesses that we can have a relationship with and just so we can understand how much of the growth came in 2020 do you remember what run rate you finished 2019 at uh you know i don't have that number off the top my head but i will say 2020 has been a pretty crazy year for us um certainly faster than 2019 so i would it would be fair to characterize most of the growth having happened in the last six months or so do you know like how much revenue you did in december of 2019 mrr i don't yeah i don't have that number off the top of my head i would imagine it would probably you know just just this is a guess by the way i don't have this number but it's probably around 200 less than 200. got it so you've added about 75 000 in new mrr over the past 10 months i think that would be fair now i mean don't quote me on that but yeah it certainly seems you know back of the envelope calculation would probably put us there and remind everyone what year you started uh 2016 is when we went with revenue uh like middle middle of 2016. so we've done we're about four years in now do you remember what you finished 2017 with in terms of total revenue it was tiny like how small yeah i mean it's uh well certainly less than a million because i think we were we were at just a million ballpark when we were we would talk to you two years ago um so even a year before that we were way under that number um those are the days that we put way behind us and it's actually funnies i don't really revisit where we were those days and maybe we should retroactively look at how far we've come no no i'm just curious i'm just curious um okay very cool i guess the reason i ask is i want to understand like distribution channels right so you've gone from 3600 seats to 10 000 seats obviously some of that comes from expanding old logos but you also have to add new logos where are you getting customers from today specifically yeah so the shopify platform is big for us and so is the big commerce platform so those are two e-commerce platforms that have organically grown on their own or you know organic to us at least um and a rising tide floats all boats right and so we've seen great success uh being able to utilize both the uh shopify app platform and the big commerce app platform as growth channels for us about how many trials does it drive you per month um per i would say per day we're in the like let's say 20 to 30 range now per month you'd multiply this i'm probably probably a little under a thousand i would say um that's again back of the envelope calculation less on weekends more on weekdays right yeah um and how many of those let's say you get a thousand new trials in a month about how many we can work to paid usually um that's a good question i i would have to take a look at that um i know you know usually what we we don't really look at things you know from my perspective i look at things in terms of net growth on the revenue side and some of that happens with new accounts some of that happens in seats we focus on those two things equally like when we have our sales people in our account people reach out to folks we're we're very focused on you know how many number of seats they're going to be able to bring in and less so on whether this is a new account right and because to us an account with one seat you know is probably worth less than harvesting an existing account and bringing them from five to ten seats of course of course it's way way less effort too um what about funding are you still about 500 000 raised or did you raise more yeah we haven't raised anything nice you know we have not raised and uh i think last time i was here with you i don't remember that conversation exactly but i was probably in the same situation where we said you know what we don't have to raise if we don't want to but we are in a position now where we might say hey we've got some substantial revenue coming in and you know more than raising money for the sake of the money aspect like we're not we're not on a burn right now...