How Rutapp CEO Carlos Cabada grew to $480K revenue and 200 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is carlos cabada he's a full stack one man company founder internationally recognized artists that look to empower humans at all levels making their lives easier and more pleasable he's been he's been coding since 10 years old executing businesses since he was 14. carlos you ready to take us to the top yes all right what are you working on now what's talkbot.io and how do you guys make money um talkbot it's a software's a service that makes uh lets people build their own textbooks for facebook so they make uh so their users interact with a robot so they like instead of having to to hire someone that replies for messages they just hire my bot and connect all the sources and things that they have available and yeah that's about it this always sounds too good to be true because we have to train your tool to know how to actually answer our things and the time it takes to actually train your tool even if you say it's easy and you just click a button connect data sources is usually a massive massive pain in the butt so so how are you actually saving people time well it's not that uh it's it's not that really hard it's it's really simple as i'm saying it's just uh it has like two modes where people can actually like add go to code to the bot and they have another mode that they just drag and drop stop and add like keywords and just like connects stuff to one box to another box like like adding buttons and when you those buttons have some outputs and that they trigger some stuff and they have like built-in methods that are already coded in the backend so it's not really that hard just connecting some boxes with other boxes and so what do people on average pay per month for your technology uh i have two mods uh that one is self-managed that it's 10 us dollars per month and i have another one that is managed by myself because i have some clients that they don't wanna even though it's easier they don't wanna really know like anything about it and they just wanted the things to get done on those i charge depending on the custom level around 20 or 30 bucks per month okay and what your launches company when did i launch what year uh it was 2007 2016. okay 2016. and how many customers have you scaled to today i right now well actually the company started being free it was free for about one year one year and a half and right now it has um five thousand yeah five thousand customers five five thousand paying customers not free not paying if they were uh uh free but then when i switches to paying i right now i have roughly around 100. okay so about 100 paying customers paying north of 10 a month so you're doing about what is that about a thousand dollars per month right now in revenue yeah like that okay and what were you doing a year ago nothing i'm sorry how much revenue monthly were you doing a year ago uh a year ago around 5 000 when i started uh switching from free to no my question was if right now you're doing a thousand dollars a month in revenue how much were you doing um about a year ago uh so i was thinking about your lease so that's like 600 bucks a month yeah or 500 bucks a month something like that okay so great so double kind of year over year i mean those are very kind of small numbers to get going have you scaled the company bootstrapped or did you raise capital um nope it was on all done by myself i actually i mean i have a lot of uh basic incomes uh services this is one of them i actually call it like it's a zero employee company because once i deploy it i have like i really uh it's one of them one of many that i have that i don't really touch them i do touch them but not that much okay so it's just you it's bootstrapped uh you have 100 customers paying 10 bucks a month so a thousand bucks a month in revenue this is one of your income streams on this product what is churn monthly sorry what is churn on this product monthly what do you mean return churn how many people cancel oh like five okay so about five percent monthly churn yeah okay that's about 60 yearly so i mean obviously you can't sustain kind of your living expenses on this one product but is this product one you're making the most money from currently oh okay what's what is the project you're working on that you're making the most money on currently it's an art project uh sorry sorry are there any other software products that's making that are making you more money because i have a you know it's something like you know move it what's that just what's your website url it's r a ut p dot mx r u t a p p dot mx and what does that come what does that site do it's a public transportation system for the government here in in mexico i am a mexican it's a system where users uh they we don't have a really good transportation system here in mexico so instead of the company if sorry the government giving us like times where the buses are coming we do it like and the other way around and we put like gps systems on the buses so and we know when the bus is coming and how is the yeah got it it's basically uber for buses and how do you generate revenue from this from directly for from the government and the owners of the bosses so what do you make per month or per year on this tool [Music] i need to do compressor compression between pesos and us dollars it's around 500 000 okay and again just you on this one we are three on this one okay three of you guys and is it a sas model or is it a pay-as-you-go it's a basico okay and so what do you charge against uh the well it's actually like a combination of sas and players you go we charge for the system that gets installed on the buses and then with the government we are having like a they have like their own tool to see where the bosses are working on if they are doing something illegal that's where we charge for the service okay so how many customers are on this platform today and what do they pay per month on average well the customers that pays are the ones that the owners and the bosses are how many how many um roughly around 200 owners of buses okay 200 bucks and if you're doing call it 500 thousand dollars per year i think that comes out to about 40 000 per month which would mean 200 customers are paying about 200 per month for this software is that right yeah something like that okay and when did you launch this company what year it was launched on um december 2018 2017 sorry okay 2017. and so why not double down on growing and building this instead of but you chose to go build talkbot instead as i say i have many like incomes and this one is actually growing at this moment how fast is it growing so if it's doing 40 000 a month right now what was it doing a year ago do you know well it started a year ago so so this time last year what were you doing per month um i'm i'm staying right now at the same numbers so like this is something that is goes like a state by state in my country and it has like it actually it really depends it's really depending on how if the government wants to implement it or not yeah carlos this is a really simple question you're doing 40 000 a month right now in revenue a year ago which was a couple months after launch how much were you doing per month okay so you were doing 40 a couple months after lunch you were doing 40 000 a month already yes because it was a prepaid okay so it's been basically so you grew it really fast the first couple of months right and it's now flat still doing 40 000 a month since this has been flat no growth you went and launched talkbot.io sorry since this is flat with no growth you decide to go and build talkbot.io i talked about io was uh before that and it's it's just to have uh multiple streams of ecoms it's not that i decided yeah but why did you make the decision to do i mean you can you can make more income by building one thing bigger instead of having 10 things that are one-tenth of the size so why are you choosing the strategy to go launch 10 things that are one-tenth of the size of something where you could go all in on and build it you know maybe because i'm just like still deciding where my time should go to okay so you have three people on rut app.mx is the is the company profitable or burning money uh it's profitable okay like signific like 10 000 bucks a month significantly or no or break even you can give me the pesos number i can convert it um [Music] divided it it's like around 100 000 pesos okay a hundred thousand pesos per month okay so it's about that's about five thousand dollars per month profitable a hundred thousand pesos converted to uh united states dollars is five thousand two hundred united states dollars yes so you're profiting each month five thousand two hundred dollars around yeah that's great congratulations um uh it sounds like i mean that's a great company um there's three folks on that um what does churn look like on that business do you know what is what sorry churn okay well i would say zero because like i say it's a government uh it's a service for the government and like they the people that already hired for it they they they are still in it i don't know how yeah yeah they haven't churned it's one customer or two i mean so basically you're telling me of the 200 bus drivers you have been using this no one has left over the past year yeah and and you've added no one either no yeah it's going state by state and and again if i i add another state it's going to just like roughly multiply by two by income and then i will have flat again those amount of customers and they will stay like that until the whole state leaves the service let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book well i i i haven't read one number two is there a ceo you're following are studying um number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company i i like to write everything myself you use no tools to build your company project management tools communication tools no tools luck number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night how many what sorry hours of sleep well i've been really stressing this last day so and i have decided to sleep more around eight hours and what's your situation married single do you have kids single okay and how old are you i'm 28. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh to do to really believe in myself that i can't do anything um if i want to do it guys r u t app.mx doing 500 000 per year right now in revenue they are profitable doing about 5 200 per month in free cash flow team of three really an app built to help uh folks in mexico and bus drivers understand where buses will be at what times they have 200 bus drivers paying about 200 per month to get 40 000 per month in revenue no churn but also no growth he's building his income streams by building additional products like talkbot.io carlos thank you for taking us to the top thank you thank you for your time one more 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