How Runcloud CEO Arif Tukiman grew to $2.1M revenue and 3K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is a reef took him on he's the co-founder and ceo of runcloud he has years of experience with product management business development and strategy as the achievement run cloud was selected as top three sas startup and got offered for a featured interview on stage at disrupt crunch 2017 at berlin in berlin germany run cloud won regional and startup world cup 2018 and represents malaysia as the top 28 in silicon valley he's also winner of tech sauce global summit 2018 for kale roadshow and judge's choice of top 100 apac echelon 2018 reefer are you ready to take us to the top yeah all right all right tell us about the company what's the company doing how do you make money yeah uh okay thank you thank you nathan for your introduction so i'm alex tuckerman from runcloud so uh rancor is a cloud solar panel that we simplify the onboarding process of cloud so we have silver cloud panel that configure counselors and we manage uh to simplify the saving time up to 90 of the time so uh basically we support um most of the google clouds most of the customers like google cloud um i mean nws digital audience and any other clouds so actually we uh we deserve a web developers as well as digital agencies to use uh our solutions like a drag and drop platform to quickly set up your server configuration yeah yeah it is it's like uh we instead of you need to prepare your own script so we make it our own user interface to simplify everything in place so meaning that um to configure cloud you you need to know a lot of process configurations dependencies security as well as the performance optimization so um manual configurations normally took like uh two hours three hours for beginner maybe a week by connected with front clock so we make it in within 50 minutes all the configurations smoothly done very good including the web departments good okay i think i understand the product now help me understand pricing um what does the average customer pay you per month for this so uh i think we do have um four packages right now free basic pro and business package so our most popular is a pro package which is 15 per month okay is that is that a fair average by the way so if i look at all your customers is kind of on average they're paying 15 a month yes 15 interesting and 150 uh yearly okay and put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the company arif uh we start launched uh in the end of the year 2016 and we start focused uh the business january 2017. okay and um over the past year or two years how many customers have you scaled to after we saw flash we managed to have uh 300 plus signups and right now as for today we do have 15 000 signups from more than 80 countries worldwide okay so just to be clear you have 300 customers and 15 000 users yeah i mean after we saw finance from 300 signups and now we have 15 000 users okay how so i support race how many are paid though how many paid customers a paying customer is about 20 from fifty thousand units okay so twenty percent of fifteen thousand is what about three hundred uh three hundred three thousand yeah around three hundred i'm going to uh around three thousands okay so i just wanna make sure i'm crystal clear here because i don't want any surprises you have 3 000 paying customers right that pay about 15 a month and you've converted those 3 000 customers from a total of about 15 000 free free trials free accounts is that right yeah exactly okay so a couple questions there that's a great conversion rate from free to paid i want to talk about that but if i take 3 000 times 15 bucks a month that would mean you're doing about 45 000 per month right now on revenue is that accurate yeah yeah yeah okay and talk to me about growth rate what were you doing what were you doing about a year ago so i think we we didn't spend a lot on digital marketing and we we just used a free channel facebook group already digital ocean community groups and we managed to to get like 15 on the organic group every month so um on the monthly basis we we get like 1 000 on the signups and fifty percent of the conversion rate so uh so all right sorry michael my question is my question is really simple so today you're doing forty five thousand dollars a month a year ago how much were you doing per month a year ago oh okay all right okay i get it so a year ago we we get a lot about ten thousand to fifty thousand yeah so you've more than four acts year over year yeah and most that growth came from facebook groups digital ocean community groups things like that yeah yeah yeah yeah it's very organic a recommendation from the community to other companies i want to dive into how you're getting such a high conversion rate from free to paid so you said now monthly you're getting a thousand new free signups and you said fifty five zero percent convert to paid yep why is that why do so many convert to paid what's the reason they're upgrading so uh i i think most of the signups is very quality users and actually this by recommended from the users to other users so i would say since we we not spend a lot at a time into uh digital ads facebook google everything's on digital marketing so i think by um recommendation on the solution is very powerful for the to increase the purchasing power to the user well just to be clear word of mouth will drive you new new sign ups new free signups i'm talking about why does someone sign up for you on your free plan and then grow to eight dollars per month you have a bunch of things listed like one click hard disk cleaner um simple and unlimited database creation like what's the yeah what's the feature reason that people upgrade from free to paid yeah yeah all right so um our most popular our most popular features is actually uh 1k xsl um git deployment automatically deployment one click installer and as well as separate test management so that one is not it doesn't have in the free package and by by subscribe to uh proof cache a user can connect unlimited of the servers unlike um free you can only connect only one server okay but on your eight dollar per month plan it's only one connected server correct yeah okay and then you're saying people go from eight dollars a month to fifteen dollars a month the big reason is because you go from one connected server to unlimited interesting and what's the big reason people go from fifteen dollars a month to forty five dollars a month uh for uh forty five dollars a business package so our our most uh features fulfilling in the business package is a team so you can collaborate with with your other team members so let's say you you have a google cloud connected in front cloud so you can uh set up a role for your other team members to join in that server actually say um what does acl stand for acl yeah it says team management with acl what does acl stand for on your phone oh yeah yeah so basically scs 104 is for um basically one is a simple access um role in the in the in the servers so basically that one is the term that you can wait it's a reef do you know what acl stands for it's on your pricing page i figured you know what it stood for wait wait wait wait okay i'm not sure which one that we are referring to but the bottom of your pricing page on every plan it says team management with a c l all right all right all right sorry about it reef do you know what a i'm just asking you do you know what what does acl stand for i don't know what it stands for my audience won't either what does it stand for oh sorry sorry wait my a reef sorry are you do you know the answer to my question or hello hello hello arif my question is what does acl stand for oh okay sorry i have a few formulas okay so i see oh sel in the business package okay so um sal sal is the it's the privilege uh you you can set your own privilege and your team members so meaning that as actually is um i forget i i forgot okay it doesn't matter let's move on my point is though you're saying the reason people pay for your business account at 45 dollars a month is because of auto auto atomic get deployment and team management with acl but you don't know what acl means yeah yeah yeah i i forgot that they did them how are you how can you price around something that you don't know what the hell it means no no sorry sorry sorry i wait i don't know what you're saying sorry for is it just you just you just forgot or or you don't know what it means or it's an acronym that's complex that doesn't matter yeah yeah i i forgot the i i i totally it's okay if you're having a it's okay if you're having a brain fart that's fine okay so yeah it's no problem let's move on talk to me about funding have you raised capital are you bootstrapped uh we we have been distributed about nine months so we get awarded a grant from our country how much about 70 70 70 to 70 72 000 okay and and then we just close our seat sit round 500 000 okay so you raised 570 000 total 70 of which was a grant yeah yeah okay so are you guys burning cash today or are you break even i would say that we already break even in our first uh our second year so are we operational positive and then i think uh we start to win uh this year so how much are you burning per month today um in us dollar is around [Music] 25 000 okay 25 000. and where is most that money going is it sales and marketing or engineering or what engineering mostly under union what's the team size today uh 80 members including me full time 80 members yeah all the full time how many so 80 members eight eight okay eight got it and is everyone remote or are one in there in malaysia uh most of our developers uh remotely in malaysia and we do also have a same old in base in mumbai india actually by the way those goats or sheep that i'm hearing in the background are those like outside are you on a farm yeah yeah yeah wait a nozzy my background i'm not sure but are they are they are they outside though do you live on a farm no i'm not sure guys those of you listening to a podcast there's like a it sounds like there's like wait a reef what are those or is it like it's like a goat noise are you stupid yes no i don't hear it anymore but what was it i think the one is um human voice or something okay i don't know if you had like a pet goat or a pet sheep or something i don't know all right tell me tell me more about churn what's your turn today uh our chin rate is uh on the average is uh eight to nine percent per month yep okay that's really high how do you get that down yeah yeah so we try to we try to minimize it by uh engagement through our email marketing and uh tracking and right now is we are we're currently doing a very proper tracking as well as engagement to our current users to keep engaged to use our solutions and give a certain i mean certain promotions to upgrade from the current package to to other package and right now we also have our own add-on package that we can give benefits to our current users added value let's say we we have our cloud backup so our current users can do a breakup straight away from the run cloud panel let's say you have 100 100 websites deployed on your cloud so you can directly do your own backup by using background instead of you need to register or you need to sign up so you're adding additional feedback so you're adding these features to try and reduce churn yep okay and yeah last few questions here because we're out of time what are you spending what's your cac to get a new 15 a month customer um on the average is eight dollar okay eight dollars so you're getting paid back basically in a month yeah where are you spending eight dollars like ads um actually we did uh we did micro sponsorship to the community as well as um uh like what price what cam you know um and talk and tech talks in our community and i i actually we do also have our own ambassadors globally ambassador from us uk india australia brazil indonesia malaysia so uh we appoint them and they volunteered to to represent cloud and talk about it okay very good reef let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book my business i would say uh ellen moss just ellen musk yeah okay number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um ellen muss i would say number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business uh as for right now it's a trek ready what is it track ready dot com it's like uh you're tracking every keyword in the reddit track reddit very good number four how many hours i sleep to get every night actually how much sleep do you get every night um i start to sleep late how many hours and like five to six hours okay and what's your situation married single kids you're single okay no kids and how are you yeah how are you 20 this is 20 28 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew yeah what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 uh i i wish i i i started the business very early and i i i could very early stage so i i think i want to do a lot of good business like software edit so the question the question is what just what is something you knew when you were you wish you knew when you were 20. if i'm 20 right yeah when you were 20 what is something you wish you knew i i i wish i could i knew about uh wait well i still thinking i wish i knew about maybe a sas business is very so at that time guys he wishes he knew a little bit more about the sas business model now yeah building run cloud or easy server configuration has about 3 000 customers paying 15 bucks a month so 45 grand a month in revenue up from 10 grand a month in revenue just a year ago healthy growth year over year driving that growth from facebook groups to delusion communities each month getting a thousand new signups 50 convert to paid uh which is obviously healthy conversion rate has a team of eight 570 thousand dollars raised 70 000 of which was a grant burning 25 grand per month right now as they look to drive growth eight percent logo churn trying to drive that down with new features spending eight bucks to get a new customer which is obviously 15 bucks a month so less than a month payback period as they scale our reef thanks for taking us to the top hey thank you