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...