How Ringpin CEO Jon Stern grew Ringpin to $629.3K revenue and 45 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is john stern he's always been fascinated with technology and interpersonal communications and has been a multi-time early stage sales leader and recently co-founded ringpin with his good friend and business partner brian levine to help companies reach customers in more meaningful ways for more places he's living in sunny san diego with his wife and two young kids john you're ready to take us to the top yeah it's awesome thanks for having me nathan you bet hey so tell us a little bit quickly um what space is ring pin playing in and is it a pure play sas business yeah it is a sas business and um we actually cross into a lot of different industries because we help anyone that has any physical products or location run um you know digital campaigns or provide digital experiences from those physical places so it works a lot in retail e-commerce shipping packaging um so many different uh real estate so we cross over into a lot of different industries can you just try and make that real for for the crew listening and say can you mean can you tell a customer story on how they're using you yeah sure um like we support 40 pizza shops in toronto and they use us on their mailers on their boxes in order to get customers to reengage leave reviews buy more pizzas all that type of stuff we can also work with payment processors so people can take their bills scan a qr code and it can skip all the friction and they can one click pay from there so we make it really easy to drive digital actions from physical products and places did you grow up in a family that maybe had a small business or a pizza shop location or something like what got your brain so interwoven into this this cohort this sector it's funny that you asked that actually my father has been a professor for 49 years but he also had an i.t consulting company on the side and i grew up working for him very young and started my own i.t consulting company right out of college so both brian and i have been helping people solve problems using technology for over 20 years oh wow okay so so there was an agency model here and through the agency you learned a little bit more about the sas you wanted to build yeah it's just um you know working with so many different customers over the years we were able to identify some problems and always interested in remote work and remote communications and then really the pandemic accelerated a lot of the things that were already in place but a lot of the physical places were left behind so we saw a big need in the market to bring all these greatest advancements you know from the digital world to the physical world because you know digital one and uh physical needs to take advantage of all those advancements and what are these customers paying ringpin on average to use this technology suite you've built yeah typically we have a minimum of like 2 000 a month but it really depends because there's so many different um ways that you can use our software um you know you can set it up for communications you can set it up to generate user content um you can set it up to just redirect to another website so it really depends what program our customers um want to use it for and we are usually able to find something that works for everybody and would you say that sort of 2000 a month or 24 000 per year is sort of the sweet spot average or that really a starting point and you have serious you know expansion revenue opportunities yeah um we have expansion revenue opportunities so that's just to get started and then we're hoping to work with um you know some pretty big brands that that's just a drop in the bucket for yeah let's capture more of the back story here so you just touched on it briefly with your dad being a professor your agency business as well when did you officially launch ring pin what year yeah way back in 2016 the very end of it and it looked very different then and um you know it was a side project for brian and i for many years and then last year you know when we saw the pandemic coming we really kind of pivoted hard into this physical the digital transformation um and uh we've been sending qr codes back and forth to each other for years and years and and i told them americans are too stubborn we're never gonna a qr code business it was basically like a dirty word for a long time but um i was in brazil in the end of 2019 and and i was able to order an ice cream cone through a qr code and i sent him a text i was like hey this is pretty cool now you can do something fun with qr and we saw you know the videos and and stories coming from china seeing how people were using qr codes to get access to different areas because of kovid so we knew that the adoption was going to be forced here in the us and we saw it first at you know restaurants for menus and now just uh you know the use has exploded uh even though qr codes have been around for 25 years they're finally just you know picking up in the united states and like a third wave of qr code usage was that your first use case like how did you get first hundred customers was it restaurants and menus we actually kind of have um stayed out of the restaurant um area a little bit just because there's so many people competing for that right now brian and i both have a background in e-commerce and retail so we we started with a few of those but mostly we're going after api partnerships so other platforms that we can integrate with and because we do those integrations we can become available to all of their customers right out of the gate instead of us going to try and find all the customers that's fascinating strategy can you tell me about the first api integration or partnership you guys launched yeah um postal i o is one of the first ones that we did we work really well with them because they do a lot of b2b account based marketing so we were able to um they sent wooden boxes of cookies from noms bake shop and they wood burned qr codes on the lids of those cookie boxes with a personal video from their customer to uh you know the end user and it just got such a great reaction they wanted to start putting qr codes on every package that they sent out so would postal i o then buy a bulk license plan from you guys and white label your qr code product or they'd sell your thing directly to their end customers great question and uh we're still working out postal's one of our best partners and uh you know we just love working with them so we're figuring out the best ways to work together but ideally what's going to happen is that um people are going to be embedding our software into their platforms so then it's just an extra thing that they can sell to their customers and then we'll share the revenue on that do you have brand equity though in other words will end customers know about you or will you really just keep your brand equity to ring pins and then they will mask your service as their own in a white label fashion to their end users great question and i both come but i think both options will be happening we do have customers that we work with directly to build up that brand equity and it also gives us the virality piece that we can have you know powered by ring pin on every page that someone could click on if they thought it was a cool experience to build their own qr code and landing page but we will have some other customers that want to white label it and present it as their own software so when you send me earlier that the starting point is somewhere around 2k per month is that for a partner like postal or an end customer like a postal customer with the qr code on the boxes yeah it would be for either okay so they're they're both paying about two i guess i guess i'm a little bit confused one is if the direct brand is going to pay you to use you and they're not white labeling anything you know you say they can get started two grand a month imagine if postal's working with you it's a very different sort of model there's sort of a deeper relationship there right yeah i mean with postal just to be totally transparent we just started you know to do to prove the concept and we wanted to see how it was going to play out before figuring out the financial pieces behind it but most likely them because we like them so much we will give them the software and then just share the revenue from customers that they sell it to i see um i see but were they i was asking about your first like folk your first hundred folks in using a platform in 2016. postal was your first one launched back then are you oh no no postal has been since sorry since the pivot where we added the barcodes and everything um towards the end of last year i see we'll take you back to the start date what was your initial thesis who were your first hundred customers oh got you okay so way back in the day um we were building an omni channel contact center for this insurance agency here in san diego they kept buying other insurance agencies that wanted to be able to use all forms of communication voice video text and live chat from any device in any location so we started building it for them and they ended up getting acquired by a private equity company before we finish the platform so then we were sitting with this omni channel contact center kind of similar to like a...