Singlelink revenue, CEO Jim Bisenius, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

hey guys my guest today is jim becenius he's a 22 year old formerly obese college dropout turn founder and triathlete he lost over 115 pounds and completed races up to the 70.3 mile distance while he's currently training for ironman in florida which is 140.6 miles he's passionate about open source startups and pushing himself to the limits currently working on an open sourced link tree alternative called singlelink.co jim you ready to take us to the top absolutely thanks so much for having me man 115 pounds knocked off how did you do that well it took a long time and i lost weight and i gained it back and i lost weight and i gained it back but it took me meeting with nutritionists and figuring out that losing weight is an equation you know you got about 3 600 calories in a pound and i broke it up over the course of about eight months and i told myself if i want to accomplish something that's gonna be crazy uh i've gotta put myself in a deficit every single day up until then and we just did consistent so a little bit of work every single day that's incredible okay so you're managing all this sort of personal you know bound personal health etc at the same time you're building this link tree alternative when did you start writing the code what year so that was last year and around august we built the first iteration of it overnight on wordpress and the following month we decided to take it seriously we rebuilt it in nux js and posted a product hunt in september oh fascinating okay so you launching product time how many hits did you get to your website on product uh product launch day a couple thousand it was really interesting because we saw a mixed variety of people who wanted to see our github and we saw people who wanted the cloud hosting alternative and despite the fact that we were doing no marketing it exploded right off the bat so uh i think we lost a lot of people because we really weren't set up for this to be anything but a sidecar project we'd kind of built this in two or three days but we saw a lot of traction what's a lot of traction can you quantify that yeah so i mean from the gate i we had probably about six seven hundred users in the first month i believe uh or 400 excuse me uh we saw 100 users in the first three days i know that for a fact and since we've maintained 41 average month-over-month growth we just started taking this project full-time in january so you can see we're growing aggressively every single month despite the fact that we're not lending paid ads it's all organic and it's mostly from referrals so how many users have have start like signed up for the application today over all history close to 2500 users wow okay and have you started moving users from free to paid yet we haven't so that'll be upcoming in the next month so fingers crossed here but we're excited to start deploying our premium options okay this is like a beautiful place for a sas company to be the moment when you decide pricing and what to charge and when to turn it on so what's your current thesis what do you charge how many options so currently we kind of have the pro memberships that every single microsite platform has right um those will be launching at eight dollars a user per seat so per month right and then we're also going to have other ways to monetize that other platforms don't have so we have our b to b to c model that seems to be very common in open source you see these white labeled on-premises hosting managed anything that falls into the open source exclusive category we're able to do that because we're open source and we have everything we need to support on-premises hosting and then another thing we're doing that i've seen no other micros platform do is we'll be monetizing our marketplace so we have a creator marketplace where single link users can create plugins soon and they can currently create themes they can publish them and they'll be able to sell those to other users who can buy them little micro transactions etc and we'll be taking a 25 fee of those transactions we're launching a big campaign we love supporting group drop founders assuming you're bootstrapped we're basically taking a bunch of folks that are about to launch their paywall letting everyone compete and then we're just going to write a prize at the end just a cash prize of 20 grand and so that the whole idea is can anyone get to 10k and mrr in 10 weeks um i would love to to put you in and meet the other founders i think you have a good shot there yeah that'd be an interesting discussion i'd love to talk more about that so why open source i mean why not go to linktree route yeah so it's super interesting because originally when we thought about this we were we came into this with a mission to make the world open source we are truly in this belief that pushing your code publicly and creating this transparent relationship with your consumers would be able to help you actually charge more or offer a better product and so we looked at all the industries out there and we were like what is one industry that is just exploding and is in desperate need of an open source alternative and when i say a desperate need um a lot of microsite users they don't necessarily just want to go up and they sign up right some people want it to be super simple and then some people want to be super complex so that sort of modification need was what i saw as a need for open source so that drew us into the industry we were like okay the industry is you know exploding and it needs people are ready to contribute i think that's the biggest thing and uh we wanted to create an open source alternative in that space it sounds like you've set up your life to be able to work on this for a year taking no money because it's not making any revenue so what decisions did you make intentionally before you launched this business to give yourself that kind of cushion um so i dropped out of college uh a few years ago and since then i've been working 20 hours a week uh part-time outside of this as a developer and that allows me to make enough money to write just get by and still work 40 hours a week on this so it's kind of a 60 hour a week grind on top of all the training and all that but it has allowed me to make just enough money while also putting my heart and soul into this and i've been working remote for years so and actually working flexible time i work most of my hours after midnight for my side job so it gives me the entire daytime hours to work single length where are you right now i'm based in chatham county north carolina we're not even in a city so super small population no police i'm on 12 acres i'm taking this call over dsl actually but um we're just outside of raleigh north carolina which is the capital of about 30 minutes very cool and so can i ask you you know this is what a lot of founders have struggled with is keeping their monthly expenses really low so they can have freedom to work on their side gigs how low have you managed to keep your like total personal monthly expenses so it's it's tricky because we've had some recent changes in the past year my fiance has come down with epilepsy we've had she's had to leave her job i've actually had to come take care of that um so the past year we've been kind of burning some savings but in general i've been able to live off of this like 20 30k a year at points um you know there was points where i dropped right out of college and i just found you know i was living 400 a month in rent and just living in a side little room and you know i was i was eating out for all my meals but i just did one meal a day go to the dollar menu type stuff mcdonald's and uh it's been pretty convenient to be able to keep our incomes at low um lately we've increased our expenses we have a paid cto now and we've taken an investment to be able to help pay him um just how much we needed to be raised currently it's uh we've raised 100k and we're about to raise a 400k pre-seed round so that would be very interesting and um but we've i'm not taking any payment it's just to pay employees and help cover some of our company cost which i would say we have under a thousand dollars and like monthly recurring cost on single link how many full-time folks are on the team right now currently we have two people full-time one almost full-time and uh so it's been fun we're all three co-founders okay so three of you guys and um did you guys just split equity 30 30 30 nope so it's actually quite interesting because we originally didn't intend them to be co-founders right um like i said earlier i started this as neutron creative not as single link so it's been very interesting as we switch from neutron creative to single link full time and one of our early advice from investors we got from daniel strachman from 1517 fund amazing advice and she was a great investor to talk with is that she you know we were working alongside naveed kabir and andrew boyle and she says these two individuals are incredibly passionate about what you're doing you need to bring them on as co-founders so whatever capacity they had i basically went up to them and i was like is there any chance you would be willing to come on to this really full time let's make it happen let's take it work and uh as they kind of came on we you know they took the work so andrew is investing up to 15 percent now and to be investing up to 25 i've got the rest and uh it makes it safer that way because so currently they're putting in at the same investment terms as our four million dollar pre-see or excuse me four hundred thousand dollar pre-stage raise they're about to so it's a four million dollar cap with a 20 discount safe note okay so the first hundred grand that you raised was at a four million cap with a 20 discount yup yup yup and they're raising at the exact same terms as the pre-seed round we're raising right now so it's a widely awesome why didn't i do that you have more users now you could argue for a higher cap save some dilution every single one of our investors is incredibly passionate about our project there are people i could call on in the middle of the night i could trust them with any part of our project they've given me fair advice from the beginning these are people who are more than investors to me they're team members and that's something i really want to offer better terms at to help attract people that care got it very cool okay so raising now we'll see what happens there um four million valuation that's great what how wherever you spend the money so mainly on our team right so we've gone unpaid for a long time we need to get us paid full time and committed to this project like i mentioned we have another team member who's currently part-time he needs to drop out we're going to go full-time with this and all of us are going to work for the next 12 months we're going to onboard new developers and pay for all of our current costs so that we can monetize over the next 12 months our monthly growth is great we don't need to really improve it by much right i would love to maintain 50 over the next year so we're going to have some semi-organic advertisements but realistically our biggest goal is just building the infrastructure so we could monetize this audience yeah do you feel like you've lost any optionality having raised capital for this vision what if you launched the paywall and no one wants to pay for this thing and you've got to do something totally different i think with the investors we have now they are backing the team with whatever decisions we decide to choose so that's part of the reason we've taken the terms we have um so i would really say no i i i really like the people we're working with and they give us the availability to change directions if we need to yeah jim what's the plan how do you convert you like where do you put up the paywall for eight bucks a month is there a usage metric that people have to hit before they see it or what's the plan so currently everyone's kind of running on this pro version right but we're going to start adding a little bit of branding we're going to allow people to skip the event tracking we're going to add all sorts of new features like um one-click export so you could take your site export it custom domains all sorts of new things so it's really a bunch of small power small little add-ons for power users which is a tremendous portion of our audience people who really use these microsites they host their full website on a microsite so uh again people who take their microsite and do way more than they should with this what's the utility-based upsell i understand people paying to remove branding i understand them paying people to export the code but what's the thing where they hit x amount of website views to the micro site or leads opt-in or clicks generated what's the utility-based upsell so we we currently don't have any of that i mean i think that's the best part of open source is i mean if we had that people would be just going and self-hosting this we have to have competitive pricing with our self-hosting audience and we're building a relationship with them that you know we understand that especially for us a lot of these sites that we are able to export them to static so there's not actually an increase in price for us to have a difference between a million clicks and two so you know as long as we're about to cost it's about the value back to them i think a lot of founders they they undervalue what they've built and and i hear you using some of the same language that others have used i mean if someone's getting a lot more traffic and a lot more leads from what they built on your thing shouldn't you try and capture some of that value absolutely but i think that's the way that open source value capture differs from closed source value capture right in closed source you try to capture as much value as possible of the little value you create in open source you publish code it affects millions of people across the globe almost instantly and you try to capture as much value you can of that but you're always going to be able to capture less value if that makes sense so i just think it's one of those limitations of open source businesses that's just always going to be there if that makes sense yeah look building potentially of course building on open source you're in a very unique spot where you have to keep the community on your side you want to keep people contributing code to make the value there you can go listen to my episode with sit at git lab or even matt mullenweg at automatic who built on top of wordpress both open source platforms and they talk about this story in great detail it's not an easy thing to balance love it absolutely i will thank you all right all right man and that's for you guys listening in too that wasn't jim it sounds like you're already on the right track but that's for anyone else listening wanting more of jim's sort of style but jim in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book favorite business book uh how to be a capitalist without capital uh that got me to know you and i gave it out to my whole team when we read it first so oh that's amazing you read it yes absolutely how did you find it uh i found it on product hunt when it came out i bought it instantly very cool and you can look back up i even emailed you for the bonus that's amazing i love that yeah it was really hard to go with a title that didn't seem like a get rich quick book so you've read it what would you tell people to say i'm not buying that it feels like a get rich quick thing i the lessons in it are really true uh they're fundamental business lessons especially like copying other businesses being able to do so and not worry i wouldn't be here today without that advice you know building an open source link tree alternative it's following that advice so uh it's just fundamental business advice that everyone could use especially somebody like me use a dropout i love that jim all right number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i think elon musk i'm a big tesla fan i'm wearing a tesla shirt right now his decisions confuse me a lot but i'm trying to learn along the way so he's a great person to follow number two besides your own what's your favorite online tool for building the business favorite online tool for building a business that's interesting i think unconventionally twitter twitter is very easy to start building a business on top of even if you don't know it so uh just start building a community on twitter and it can very easily turn into that business jim how many hours of sleep are you getting every night uh i i love to say eight but it's probably closer to four or six okay and situation i married single kids i think you mentioned you had a girlfriend i have a fiancee we were about to hit five years together it's uh it's been great we're trying to get married soon but kovid's kept this uh the whole ceremony off yeah and no kids no kids yet so and pretty soon but not yet how are you i'm 22 and she's 22 as well so it works out all right take us home here what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. i wish i knew that you can fail and learn from failing uh traditionally in school i always learned from succeeding right you you feel like you were only able to do better if you kept studying and you kept getting a's as a founder you learn through failing you fail and then you learn oh that's something i should not do learn from failing failure is entirely okay don't be afraid of it guys single link dot co is a open source link tree alternative they signed up many hundreds of users a hundred years in the first three days when they launched on product hunt over 400 users in month one today were 2600 active users launching an eight dollar paywall in the next month or two we'll see how it works they raised a hundred thousand dollars to get going raising another 400 000 right now on a safe at a 4 million cap 20 discount we'll see if jim can get it done with his team of three jim thanks for taking us to the top thanks so much for having me it's great seeing you 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 2pm 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 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