How Reeview.app CEO Claudiu Cioba grew Reeview.app to $19.2K revenue and 32 customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is claudio chioba he's building a company called review dot app he's been a product designer for the past 14 years working as a consultant with startups and enterprise companies such as uber to help them deliver amazing products claudia you ready to take to the top yes absolutely nathan let's go great so if you want to follow along they can find us at r e e v i e u v i e w dot app what's the business do so basically what we do we are an automated platform that find deliver and collect the video reviews for e-commerce stores how do you find these like is this like if i buy a shirt from lululemon and i casually write a twitter post but i don't actually tag them and they have no way to find it you have software that can help you go find it what we do is we current we are currently a youtube partner and we have an integration with youtube so we automatically find relevant product videos uh on youtube so for all of the products in an online store we go to youtube scrape youtube for positive video reviews or unboxing videos or how-to videos and then we bring those back into our application interesting what do companies pay for this on average uh so right now a lot of our companies are free but the ones that are paying they're paying about uh somewhere between 39.99 okay we also have some companies at 299 depending on the number of products and the size of their store and how many customers are you working with today so today we have 88 customers uh out of which uh i think we have more than 30 that are paying or something like that 32 unless i check we just launched i think three weeks from now that's great so 32 paying 40 or 50 bucks a month what it's about 1600 bucks a month in mr something like that something like that yes how did you get the 88 people using it that's always a good story well um this is or all organic serve all organic search we actually had a beta period in january and february so we already had some beta users that were very happy with the app even though we were just testing at mvp and then everyone came from shopify organically there was no marketing outreach i mean we just started marketing about three weeks ago when we launched uh on product con and uh we are we haven't started even our sales our full sales uh process how many websites did you get from the product on launch uh sorry how many websites like clients or how many views did you get the product launch that you uh hundreds in in terms of like hundreds yeah it wasn't like a very big deal what we did obtained from the product launch was partnerships so it's a very interesting partnerships came out of that and disability and the ecosystem yeah yeah okay got it so hundreds of people came from product hunt um did you get any of your paid customers i mean you got it wasn't a huge thing but you were number three on the day i believe and you got about 300 up votes yes we i think i uh i've had about five demos with some large stores during that week because they uh they saw us uh on park hunt we did something very interesting which was almost like a premiere uh with chris messina our friend uh he was the one that hunted the product and along with nicole uh elizabeth de marie i'm i'm seeing nicole because you know her yeah and uh we did a live launch event we had two events design and cocktails me being a product designer and chris being a designer so we spoke about the design aspect of the product being a visual solution and that got people's attention and we posted those live events on social media which was very helpful got it so hundreds of sign ups now are you into call the co-founders uh no i'm just the single founder okay got it but you own 100 business yes okay any plans to raise or no uh well let's make it official right now so uh uh this is the first time i'm talking about it and i'm very i'm being very grateful about it i just closed the seed round of 1.1 million dollars uh last week oh we haven't yet like posted it anywhere uh but it's due to be posted simply because we're redesigning our marketing materials so we want to launch our new blog and everything with with some views i mean look this is by the way that's why people listen to the show you get information and data way before it hits the process or anywhere else so i appreciate that now now why why was it important to you to raise why did why couldn't you i mean obviously you give up a chunk of your would you raise that was it a cap or a price round uh it was it was uh on a cap for five mil yes five mil post valuation yeah so i mean look you're selling 20 percent of business that's a big i mean that's fairly dilutive why was that important for you for well there are two aspects uh for that for me what i noticed early on in this business in e-commerce it's not about what you do it's about who you know for me that would that seem like very important and all of the angel investors that uh are part of the are part of this round uh are pi influencers in this uh you know in this ecosystem i'm talking about co-founders of some of the biggest platforms as well uh i haven't yet checked with them so i can't mention any names uh i hope you understand that no i do but claudia i do want to point out the trend though this is becoming a very popular way to raise capital vcs are having issue getting these rounds because folks like you don't care about the vcs they want to go do a super angel round they want to get five influential people to put in 200 grand each and there's no anchor for me i mean i was very fortunate it was like a snowball i can't mention my one of my lead investors and also good friend ed baker he's former vp of product uh vp of growth from facebook and vp of growth at uber um i was part of his facebook exit 10 years ago i was his lead product designer so that's how i know him and once he started sending out some emails it was like a big snowball effect you know uh in a matter of two weeks i think uh we ended up with close to three million dollars in checks and i uh you know i started choosing people and uh most of them came in with half i think all of them came in with half actually yeah that's great so which don't say who but what is the largest check size of the 1.1 million from any one person uh it's 500k okay got it right yeah and and then we go we're going as low as 20k so i went and as low as 20k simply because of the influence and all of these uh angels they're heavily invested in helping and they're very active this is something that what i noticed you know from uh from vcs they might not be as invested in your company and as helpful during these beginning stages they might provide some intros in the beginning and then they're probably gonna go quiet and you know just rely that you do your own thing uh but i've hand-picked the angels um so it was a cherry-picking process and um i'm very happy with the people that are part of the company right now yeah this thing this makes a ton of sense how many individual lps you were to check um i think it's uh nine i think it's not people on the cap table yeah nine lp's very cool okay well congrats on getting that done um news here on the show which we love uh 32 customers today how do you go from 32 to 3 000 uh well first of all we are expanding on multiple platforms right now we have just launched on shopify we are already functioning on woocommerce and magento but we haven't officially launched simply because it's a big marketing effort so we do want to focus a lot of our energy on each platform one at a time and we are launching uh on all of these platforms in the upcoming months woocommerce is coming in june uh in just a few weeks from now and then we have magento on all of these platforms uh we are already well connected and have very good visibility because of our angels and we will be well promoted even with shopify we got featured twice on the shopify blog in just two weeks from launching uh so by the way sorry when did you launch we're here april april 5th april 5th so yeah this year this year april 5th right so we're fresh we just we're just getting started uh and that's one plan to scale the other plan to scale is through partnerships this is something that i've noticed um it uh it's very easy uh to obtain a lot of smbs through a single partnership through agencies we even have some prolific shopify agencies whose founders are you know our angel investors in our company uh and um with a single agency you can get access to hundreds of paying customers today how many people so it's me the founder of who's handling the design another junior designer then we have five full-time engineers located right here in transylvania even though this is a us company uh because of you know i used to live in the us and now i'm back in romania uh the engineering team is romanian and then uh the marketing uh department we have two people and one on sale so i think that makes it about under 10 right close to under 10. you know two marketing one sales five engineers then you guys um does a sales person carry a quota or no too early no they do not you...