How Reeview.app CEO Claudiu Cioba grew 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 do not uh carry a quota we are hiring though so we're establishing a support team over here that's locally uh for me that's easier to manage to provide 24 7 support we're expanding on marketing we're expanding on sdr on sale so the the company right now is expending in terms of personnel um so you know and i think in a month from now it could uh very well double yeah very cool what about churn obviously it's a little early but anyone cancelling i mean uh not the paying customers we haven't had paid customers that have uh cancelled shopify is a high churn ecosystem i mean everyone can open up a store and we've seen so many like irrelevant stores signing up just installing the app not doing anything and then just closing their store or something like that simply because it's so easy to do it with shopify but from the paying customers nobody has has canceled we are actually doing uh case studies with the with the larger ones they're providing us with video testimonials with texas so you know also everything's going well do you have a general sense of what you're what like or what are you comfortable paying to get a new 50 month customer um i think it's too early right now to say uh again we just launched like a month from now i need more data to be able to you know to provide you with an accurate number otherwise i would just throw a number at you and what are you comfortable with though so in other words if you start running experiments and you see that you can spend 500 bucks to get a 50 month question would you keep spending that 500 bucks over and over again no i don't think so i don't think so i try to to scale uh on lower cost and so far i've been able to do that i mean even our cost of of running our app is underneath a thousand dollars you know it's a matter of like hundreds of dollars we don't have any costs uh so in terms of costs everything is pretty low and i try to you know to be a scraper when it comes to that um yeah so i don't know we'll see right now i'm not paying five hundred dollars for a 50 customer no way these are like product lead growth customers you know i'm trying to get a sense of how aggressive you will be are you trying to optimize for a 12 month payback period when you start writing these tests or a six month payback period or you want to get paid back in month one um we shall see i think we shall see uh but it's gonna be definitely you know towards like the six month period i think yeah this is great wait congrats on getting off the ground let's wrap up here with the famous five number one claudia what's your favorite business book um i mean right now i'm reading a lot of books from ryan holiday on stoicism i think that's very you know very important for anyone in the business you know to have a really great writer uh unbelievable he can write out so many topics so deeply it's really incredible ryan holiday number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i mean i'm a designer you know i really appreciate fake mind you're gonna ask me about my favorite apps and one of them being sigma and i definitely appreciate the ceo of my dylan you know he's i mean he's been amazing with the company you know what i want guys so you listen to the show you knew what you were what to expect when you came on right just a bit yeah that's great i appreciate you pushing through i know you're battling a little sickness today so i appreciate it thank you all right so thing what's your favorite tool number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night a minimum of six and i take a half an hour nap every single day for the past 10 years i think and it's been working for me wow i love that what's your situation married single kids married one kid one kid and how are you yeah 33. i turned 33 like five days ago it's nice we're the same age it's great all right uh take me back to your 20 year old self what's something you wish he knew um just get out more let people know what you're doing get out more you know make yourself known in the industry guys review dot app announcing here live they just raised a million bucks or a million one on a five million cap to have initial early traction they just launched a couple months ago already shopify's featured them twice they've got 32 customers paying caught 40 50 bucks a month so caught 1500ish and mrr growing rapidly they've got seven people total on the team five engineers in romania uh claudiu owns 100 except what he just raised on and obviously what the angels were taking there really strategic angel around no anchor vc rather he took strategic super angels we'll see how it pans out of you thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much nathan have a good one one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya