Sideby revenue, CEO Wilhelm Rahn, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

hey folks excited for this one my guest this morning is will iran he is a product designer manager hybrid who works with companies to take their digital products from good to great on a mission to find ways to make customer service amazing for companies and want to help companies 10x their support he's an innovation seeker optimist speaks many languages and is now building side by dot io zero set up co-browsing for sas will you ready to take to the top let's go there are so many times where i'm trying to help one of founder a founder i know use my tool founder path and i'm going man if i could just like help them click that button or use this screen i wish there was a way to do that you're solving this problem tell us more we're hoping it basically a cobra housing has been present for a couple of years now but it was mostly big companies business company or financial institutions that were using it uh we're trying to take it to every sas company out there so they can just do that because they actually solve and jump in and solve every every you know issue their customers are having at the time how when did you start like designing the first pixel or writing the first line of code all right this would be surprising but we started it back in april maybe once we are just coming out wow okay yeah so your your site right now is beautifully designed you're building a waitlist how many people right now are on the wait list i would say around 300 and we are rapidly growing that thanks to our cmo which is just trying to community build every single day all right let's dive into more of this you mentioned a cmo you're obviously doing product design ui ux who what's the rest of the team how many of you guys are there all right so the total team web files we have two developers uh i'm back on front uh we have our seo diego our cmo resell and we are very focused we are basically coming out from another project that was also focused on customer success and we believe this is the next step into that direction did the five of you guys just split equity evenly no i'm an employee uh there are three founders and one of the developers or also an employee okay so did you do you have equity i don't have equity well come on man so why are you working discussions i was gonna say why are you working you're young you're handsome you can do whatever you want you're talented why are you working on something where you don't have equity i believe a lot in the project i believe there's a lot to be had into that um you know diego is a nice guy he's open to to discussions uh we have something in mind in the future okay fair enough fair enough all right so there's 300 on the waitlist you got going in 2021 i want to understand how you're building the waitlist because people listening right now everyone's wondering how do we build a waitlist so how did you get the first hundred people on the waitlist all right so um we're basically focusing on building trust a joining community and actually providing value to them uh you know everyone in the team does a different thing i normally just jump into the twitter try to find ways into which i can you know add value to people let's try and be specific so like add value blah blah blah this is like standard give me real tactics right so where did you find the first hundred people specifically what community all right so uh first of all a product hunt we are also going on uh on uh on reddit we are building a lot of uh community on linkedin and a lot of perhaps the the smaller companies that we're getting but the most eager to try it we are getting it from twitter uh that's a combination of things you know i just like to you know engage with everybody leave comments uh send the ends with unrequested advice but you know uh trying to to actually solve an issue if i see an issue or something that can be proved on any website i just jump ahead uh so so when you say when you say you're building community i guess i don't understand what that means do you run a big slack channel with these folks or is there a where do you guys hang out all right so uh at the moment we are just building up uh the the waiting list and there's a couple of uh people in the community that we want to to nurture we are working together with them to co-build uh the products uh we are inviting them into the process to actually build something that will be used uh in a you know in a good way we don't want to develop any feature that's not going to be useful we don't want to uh without any any flaws we want to go straight to what they need and that's where we're going to incentivize these or i mean there's a lot of people listening around trying to build their mvp they'd love to actually get real customers on a zoom call to show them design prototypes and get their feedback but it's hard to figure out a way to actually get those people that could be interested in your tool getting on a call with you to give you that feedback how are you doing this all right so uh surprisingly we're having a you know not an easy time but uh we are finding that people are really eager to try or at least hear about sci-fi uh we have a couple of surprisingly big such companies that wanted to join in the early stages uh what did we well tell me the real story i want to name one of those companies all right so uh we're working in the early stages with dixa.com we are going to uh be testing with them they are a bit of a intercom a acquire competitor i know dick so well so let's keep going down the funnel here so who at dixa knows about you guys who are you working with who are you showing early mockups to all right so we are a past the backup stage we are in um having this conversation with you uh he is the chief customer experience evangelist is that you're going to be selling too mostly or the head of customer experience customer success yes they are the ones that really get the value of a product and they are the one that understands that you know cutting 60 of time on support tickets really make a difference and lets you improve their customer satisfaction and how do you think that this will really take off so like if i'm head of customer experience at dixa if i'm have a customer live chatting me on my page that i can't help via text i'm probably just inviting them to a zoom call and they're sharing their screen and i'm telling them where to click and how to solve their issue you obviously want to replace that and say just use site like co-browsing why is co-browsing a better way to do customer success and support versus just getting on a zoom call with the person all right the main thing is that we are allowing the agents to jump in click on the stuff and do the process that's why you know either while chatting or while having a you know a video poll so we are not completely replacing at the moment any video holds so if our customers are using screen sharing to to to be called with anybody they can also use a browsing to finish processes quickly you think what's going to happen is this if if a support ticket gets escalated and they have to jump on a zoom call they might then use side by on the zoom call so that like if you're the customer and i am the person giving you support i could you could share your screen and then i could actually control your screen myself on the zoom call that is correct and in the case of dixa there's no zoom needed because they do offer you know videos trade on the website so we are trying to complement that for the moment so that's why we are trying to do something that these big players are not doing at the moment and we want them to use a sci-fi to actually do that something that we're not doing before and in respect to having just vehicles uh doing co-browsing that's something we're working on to make it a native part of sci-fi in the near future when are you launching uh for like out of beta profess we are aiming for a september launch but you know anything can change so we are trying to release it when it's actually ready we are just trying to make a solid product and coming it will launch it when the right set of features can help the most people out there well sure but you could then be in beta for years uh that doesn't work because you can't live for free so how are you guys all paying yourselves pre-revenue all right so um our company raised a first rate in some you know aspiration capital so we have a little bit of a runway to operate and focus on building the product how much did you guys raise around 200k got it so how much runway does that give you uh possibly you know we have a very small team we are based on in spain so the because of limit gear is not as high so we you know we are in the in the comfortable spot that we could be running for a year or so but that's not really the plan we plan to really release and get out of beta this year uh you know we don't want to extend it a lot more than that added curiosity when you guys raise the 200 000 obviously you're pre-revenue free product but it sounds like really great team what valuation are you guys able to raise that with just your team hey that's something that our ceo knows hey i i cannot tell you do you know i have a rough idea i don't have the number in front do i have a document here with the things that i want to remember during the interview but that exact number i don't have it okay got it so you guys raised 200 000 uh free revenue you're hoping to launch in september pricing is critical what price point do you think you'll want with good question yes so we want to remain competitive and we know that our customers you know they mostly work on a on a seed-based pricing right now what we're offering our early adopters is to have it free until mid-september and if you know we are offering a 50 down for life to join before that period and the prices we are is just 39 uh us dollars per month per 80 per month per seat so if they join today they can get it for 20 per month per seat hey that's great interesting okay how'd you come for that price point uh a lot of market research um we actually just straight up ask everybody what pricing that we're comfortable with what we watch what was standard in the industry and it's a price point that's good for us we believe is will allow more such companies to to access the product we don't want to be out of range for the people we can actually help who are you right now who are the biggest who are the people doing the best co-browsing right now uh there's probably i would say the the best people in the industry would be surfing definitely say it again surfly surf link no sharply s-u-r-f-l-a-y l-a-y surf play interesting okay how big are they they are huge they are pretty much the main player in the industry uh how much revenue do they have i don't have the number right now huge how do you know they're huge what are you basing it off of all right so one of our tactics to to see how the competitors are you know are operating and where they are operating you know you might sound simple but we were just using common tools like fill with to to know which websites they were working on so you can just you can just know how many installs a sas company has on their homepage because they crawl the web so you can see that thing so how many insects i don't have number here sorry um let's see i i didn't know that was going to be asked this question sorry sorry sorry i will be no it's okay you just know that they're big i understand it's cool so look you'll launch with pricing in september you're building your waitlist right now using product hunt reddit and twitter um we'll see how launch goes you have to come back on in six months give us an update will but in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book my favorite book um probably talk about by said coding number two that's quite a number two is there a ceo you're following or studying nathan from almanac number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business for really a business um i would say linkedin i know it sounds weird um you're a product designer what's what's a tool you use for like product design ui ux etc oh right so my main tool would be definitely enigma okay number four how many hours of sleep to get every night uh lately around six or seven and what's your situation will married single kids engaged ah congratulations how old are you hey 35 35 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 um i really wish that i knew how to manage my time better when i watched twitter guys there you have it side by a good co-browsing experience they launched this year 2021 they're building their wait list right now 300 people on it they're launching in september they raised 200 000 in revenue hoping that sorry and funding hoping that can get them to launch they're going to launch the 39 a month price point if you get in now on the waitlist it's half price we'll see what happens at side by dot io will thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya