How Selecteev Reached $7K MRR with 30 Customers as a Bootstrapped Side Project (Interview with CEO Alban Dumouilla)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Alban Dumouilla. He's a developer who started his career in The US and discovered the startup world when he came back to France in 2015. He worked in structures that helped entrepreneurs with projects while starting his own projects on the side. One of those projects emerged as Selecteev, that and has been growing organically now for five years. It's now getting a marketing boost to actually grow to its full potential. We're gonna

00:21jump in today. Alban, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. Alright. Five years as a side project. Why didn't you start pouring the gas on this bad boy earlier?

What Selecteev Does

Alban Dumouilla

00:28>> Well, basically, it's it's a pretty long story. It's it's a project that's a spin off from another job, like an older job, and and it's been growing organically. I've got a lot of side projects, and this is one of them, and and it started growing a lot more this year. So we're getting into marketing and and maybe a bit of sales.

Nathan Latka

00:51Okay. And so we wanna jump into why it started growing more this year. But first, people don't know what this thing is yet. How would you describe it? What does it do?

Product Overview and Use Cases

Alban Dumouilla

00:57>> So, basically, it helps, structures like administrations, corporations, or incubators, accelerators, to select candidates. So any type of calls for applications. It can be for events. It can be for specific programs to get in something, like universities could use it, for example. And, yeah, basically, it's anything that's not an HR candidate. We could we could use it for HR candidates, but it's not really made for it. Basically, anytime you need to evaluate a candidate with different evaluators,

01:32>> that's where we came we come in to help.

Nathan Latka

01:35Now you have a bunch of different pricing plans based off number of candidates, how many evaluations, you know, and customization and feature based upselling, chat support, etcetera. But if I forced you to give me an average, what would you say the average customer pays you today per month?

Pricing and Average ARPU

Alban Dumouilla

01:49>> Basically, it's about €200 a month. That's the the standard plan is the is the most used by far. Usually, what the customer, takes is about three to four months for one call for applications, and, usually, they do it twice a year. So it's it's about six six to eight months a year of of,

02:10>> all of pricing.

Nathan Latka

02:12And is it it sounds like the most critical usage metric for you is number of, like, number of candidates processed. Would you agree with that?

Alban Dumouilla

02:19>> Yeah. I guess the main difference between the first two plans are there there's a few options that you can use in the standard plan, like file upload, multi language, things like that. But, yeah, most mostly the biggest metric is is the the number of candidates, or the number of evaluators as well. That that's a pretty big one.

Nathan Latka

02:39And so last

Alban Dumouilla

02:39>> So a lot of yeah.

Nathan Latka

02:41Sorry. Go for it. In in, in April, here of 2020, how many candidates were analyzed?

Candidates Processed and Customer Count

Alban Dumouilla

02:48>> In April 2020 Last month? You mean? Oh, okay. I would say in total on our customers, I would say about 10 to 15,000, something like that.

Nathan Latka

03:00Wow.

03:01Okay. And that's across how many, I guess, you call them evaluators?

Alban Dumouilla

03:06>> That's something I I don't really know because the we we're not our our our heads in the in the platforms because the the customers manage everything. So we're we're a SaaS platform. So I would say less than a 100 evaluators.

Nathan Latka

03:24Less than I I guess, across how many individual customers? Of course.

Alban Dumouilla

03:29>> Yeah. That that would be around 30.

Nathan Latka

03:31Okay. So you're very targeted.

Alban Dumouilla

03:33>> Pretty big customers that have more than, you know, 5,000 candidates for a call for applications.

Nathan Latka

03:39Oh, wow.

Alban Dumouilla

03:39>> That grows in numbers. So is that a

Nathan Latka

03:41good or bad thing to have that kind of customer concentration risk?

Alban Dumouilla

03:45>> It's again, it's a it's a side project. That's so that's why we're searching for more customers because right now, it can't really become a company until we find a lot more, and and and we're going for international as well. We've got a few customers in The US. We've got a few customers in India, Mexico, Germany. But, yeah, it's it's something we we just need to set up a strategy to to go get more, because we actually

04:14>> solve issues for these guys.

Nathan Latka

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06:40the interview. Now what is the I mean, there's a lot of my listeners that are exactly like you. They're engineers that can also market. Right? Maybe a little bit, maybe really well. They have a bunch of side projects. This whole idea of like, Oh crap, one of my side projects is kind of taking off. Should I kill the other babies and go all in on this? This is a big decision, right? So you just use verbiage

When Does a Side Project Become a Real Company

Nathan Latka

07:00like when it becomes or to become a real company. Right? What what does that mean?

Alban Dumouilla

07:05>> It means so I'm I'm in a startup world now. So whenever we go for, you know, fundraising or whatever, you you you look at the size of your market. I'm not sure that Selecteev can go for fundraising, for example, because the market is pretty small and temporal. It's like you need to find the people who will be having a calls for application in the next year or so. That's not that like, it's not that many companies

07:33>> in the world compared to people who need to sell something. And if you if you do a platform that helps selling, then your market is a lot bigger. So I guess that's why for now it's stated side projects.

Nathan Latka

07:45Why do you correlate being a real company with if you raised funding or not? There are way more real companies that are nonfunded.

Alban Dumouilla

07:52>> Yeah. It's it's just an example I was taking just to to to give you a market size, which is which is something that's really, really important for fundraising. I'm not talking about genuinely always fundraising. It's it's just like

Nathan Latka

08:10I wanna know for you, not not not a VC or someone you're trying to raise funding from. For you, what does it mean to be a real company as a side hacker with a lot of projects?

Team Structure: Full-Time and Freelancers

Alban Dumouilla

08:18>> Yeah. I I would say be able to pay people.

Nathan Latka

08:21Okay.

Alban Dumouilla

08:21>> Right now, I'm able to pay one person, not more than that. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

08:25So there's two of you guys full time right now?

Alban Dumouilla

08:27>> Well yeah.

08:28>> And and we've got freelancers, so that that that makes the team to about six people. But, yeah, what I would call a a real company would be, like, six full full time people in one office type of thing.

Nathan Latka

08:44So two full time, four freelancers. Yeah. And, Alban, a lot of folks when they get going, obviously, they keep costs low. They use freelancers, freelancers. But a lot of people fail miserably. They burn through freelancers because they don't know how to manage them properly. Explain to me what those four freelancers do for you and how you get the most out of them, the most productivity.

How Freelancers Are Managed

Alban Dumouilla

09:02>> Well, basically, of them is pretty much on their own space. So we've got one that's doing mostly marketing, like content marketing. The other one is good doing mostly LinkedIn growth. And the two others are organizing webinars, so it's cold emailing. And I'm I'm the one giving the webinars, but they're they're doing the entire, marketing process around it. So, yeah, everybody has this space, and and they decide whatever they wanna do. We just have, you know, specific

09:33>> directions that the company wants to take. But for that, the the the rest of the job is basically, they have autonomy on what they're doing.

Nathan Latka

09:43Not asking What's the difference between the first two? You said marketing growth. What's the difference between the two?

Alban Dumouilla

09:48>> Basically, marketing is mostly around content SEO, how do you drive inbounds traffic. And the growth is more about, you know, reaching out to people on LinkedIn I see. Email, you know, multi multi diffusion. Well well

Nathan Latka

10:04And then start with let's start with the marketing SEO content. How'd you find that person? Did you use a a marketplace or a friend?

Alban Dumouilla

10:11>> Yeah. Basically, a a freelancer marketplace, and I I benchmarked a bunch of people and talked to

Nathan Latka

10:17What's it called?

Alban Dumouilla

10:18>> It's called Malt, m a l t dot f r. Malt. Yeah. I guess it's the biggest French, freelancer marketplace.

10:28>> And yeah. Yeah. It's it's Oh, Malt.

Nathan Latka

10:30M m a l t.

Alban Dumouilla

10:32>> Oh, m l l t. Sorry. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:34Yeah.

Alban Dumouilla

10:34>> It's basically, you you just need to to find a good fit. That that's for me, it's it's the most important one.

Nathan Latka

10:43Now, Alban, you said something very specific, which and this is like playbook 101 for managing freelancers, which is you said, you sort of measure the quality across a bunch of marketers before maybe picking one. So how did you structure that? Did you put together like a one page project and give it to 10 of them and then pick the best one to do full time? Or how'd you do that?

Alban Dumouilla

11:00>> No. I I just had conversations on how they would see the strategy for the actual work, and you can you can tell a lot from that. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

11:11Now did you use Malt to find the growth person and your two webinar people?

Founding Story and Equity Ownership

Alban Dumouilla

11:16>> I No. The webinar people, I think I found through LinkedIn or recommendations.

11:23>> Believe I can remember because it's been a while. But the growth and marketing guys, yes.

Nathan Latka

11:28Okay. Very cool. And then again, to put this on on a timeline, when did you launch? when did you write the first line of code for Selecteev?

Alban Dumouilla

11:34>> That was actually in my job three jobs ago. So two thousand fifth 2017, I would say, '16 or '17, because it's it was an internal project. Basically, I I worked in one of the biggest French startup accelerators, and and we had a lot of incoming startups that wanted to enter, so we had to build something to filter them.

Nathan Latka

11:57Mhmm. And they had no problem with you spinning it out, you don't have to give them a bunch of equity or anything?

Alban Dumouilla

12:01>> No. No. No. Basically, the when I left the company, the product was dying if if I didn't take it. And so the deal was that I would take it, and they would use it for free for life, and then I would do whatever I needed.

Nathan Latka

12:15That's amazing. So you own a 100% equity today?

Alban Dumouilla

12:18>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:19Ah, we love that. Okay. So if we I mean, we can maybe do some math here. Right? You said 30 customers, average ARPU of €200, $230 US dollars. That would put you at around $7,000 of monthly recurring revenue right now. Is that about accurate?

Alban Dumouilla

12:32>> Yeah. Yeah.

MRR and Year-Over-Year Growth

Nathan Latka

12:33And just so we can understand growth, where were you exactly one year ago?

Alban Dumouilla

12:38>> I would say half of that. Okay.

Nathan Latka

12:41Yeah, around And you almost sounded surprised at the beginning of this interview about the growth that's happened recently. It wasn't a result of your inputs, it just magically happened. What happened? Well,

Alban Dumouilla

12:53>> you know, COVID happened, so that's why I'm surprised because we we had a pretty big drop because we had a bunch of customers who had events,

13:02>> and and the events just goes down. So whenever you need to select speakers or or, you know, have a prize or whatever in your event, then you just don't do it anymore. So we lost a bunch of revenue on that, and now it's coming back.

Nathan Latka

13:15Very interesting. Okay.

COVID Impact and Customer Churn

Alban Dumouilla

13:16>> And the no. No. I guess the the most surprising thing is, like, we don't have a lot of churn. So older customers that that stopped during COVID are coming back while we have new customers that that showed up.

Nathan Latka

13:29Oh, I see. I see. Interesting. Very interesting. Okay. So you mentioned, though, that, like, growth so so besides just people coming back, like, the outbound people doing webinars and stuff, explain me. Is that an effective strategy for you? Do you think you can grow to a thousand customers using webinars?

Webinar Strategy and Conversion

Alban Dumouilla

13:44>> I would hope so. I wouldn't think so, but I would hope so. The webinars, usually, we have around 30 people per webinar, so once a month. And and right now, I'd say the conversion rate would be one one customer per per month. So because it's it's very temporal, so that that's a complicated part. It's that the first time they hear about you, they already have a tool or they're thinking about changing or they haven't organized the

14:14>> call for applications ever, and so they don't know where to start. And so from when you start talking to them to when they're ready to actually get started, they're that can be a year.

Nathan Latka

14:27Mhmm. Mhmm. Interesting. Okay. So webinar strategy is working, doing one per month. You sign up 30 people. They're doing outbound to get people signed up for that. And then me, like, the headline. What's the headline of the webinar?

Alban Dumouilla

14:38>> It's basically how to manage your call for applications and simplify your life during evaluations.

Nathan Latka

14:44Interesting. So you have some copywriting skills inside of there. You make it a you make that a sexy title for a tool that some people might find to be very boring.

Competing Against Google Forms

Alban Dumouilla

14:52>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's the goal. Well, it's a boring tool, but it's it's not as boring as an Excel spreadsheet. Right? Yeah. That's how usually it works. It's like our main competitor is Google Forms. So, basically, people get their candidates on Google Form, and then they have this Excel spreadsheet that they have to share to everybody and and manage evaluations by email or PDF or whatever you you can think about. And we're just

15:20>> like, okay. We have this little star system where you click on stars and it grades your candidate and and you weight the answers as you want. And if you wanna do an evaluation funnel, then you can. So it sounds sexy to the people who suffered the Excel spreadsheet, I'd say.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

15:36Mhmm. Mhmm. Interesting. Very cool. Hey. This is a heck of a story we're rooting for yet. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Alban Dumouilla

15:43>> That's not something I have in mind. I'd say something like Steve Jobs, you know, biography.

Nathan Latka

15:52But Number number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Alban Dumouilla

15:56>> Of course, Elon Musk, pretty much everybody else because he's just a weirdo.

Nathan Latka

16:02Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Selecteev?

Alban Dumouilla

16:06>> Online tool.

16:11>> What do you mean by online? I I would say Figma.

Nathan Latka

16:13Figma. Yeah. That's what we mean. Alright. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Alban Dumouilla

16:17>> Eight.

Nathan Latka

16:18Eight. Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Alban Dumouilla

16:22>> Sing well, not married, but not single either. It's like I don't know how you say that.

Nathan Latka

16:27No no kids?

Alban Dumouilla

16:28>> No kids.

Nathan Latka

16:29Alright. And, Alban, how old are you?

Alban Dumouilla

16:31>> I'm 34.

16:32>> 34.

Nathan Latka

16:33Last question. Something you wish you knew back when you were 20.

Closing Summary

Alban Dumouilla

16:37>> How to make money on a website that I had that was really working out well.

Nathan Latka

16:44Guys, there you have it, selecteev.io. It's a tool that helps you analyze and evaluate candidates. Launched back in 2017, spun it out of accelerator actually. His former company was working at. He owns a 100% equity today. It's bootstrapped doing 3,500 in MRR a year ago. Now up to $7,000 a month or about $82,000 in terms of run rate. And he's going, you know what? There might be something here. Let me try and build this. Has one

17:03other full time partner here and then four freelancers currently growing the business mainly using webinars. We'll see what happens next. Alban, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you.

17:13One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM

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