How Runcloud CEO Arif Tukiman grew Runcloud 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...