How Sleeknote CEO Mogens Moeller grew Sleeknote to $3M revenue and 1.2K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is mogens muller he's the ceo and co-founder of a company called sleeknote he lives in denmark with his wife and three kids and besides running sleeknote he's also an international keynote speaker mogans are you ready to take us to the top yeah of course all right tell us about sleep note what's the company doing how do you make money well in short uh we say um say say goodbye to annoying pop-ups say hello to sleeknote so so if you're using pop-ups and you're doing in some kind of annoying way you should be doing it better and more intelligent more personalized then you should use a product like ours and give us an example maybe a customer using you guys of course of course well in in general a lot of people using pop-ups sliding boxes stuff like that will people will normally maybe have like a takeover of the whole page well for us uh we we target e-commerce online stores so normally our customers use popups in order to guide their visitors so that more of them can buy something so help them actually be able to make a buying decision instead of just showing some you know general sign up for our newsletter text so we we kind of help especially these online stores to use it in a more intelligent way so that it's actually getting uh becoming a help for the visitors instead of just being some kind of annoying element got it and your pricing i know you have many different plans i don't want to go down every cohort of your customers but on average what do customers pay you per month average about a hundred a hundred dollars per month okay got 100 bucks per month and put this on a timeline for me when did you launch this company what year four years ago okay so 2014 and then fast forward to today how many customers have you scaled to 1200 1200 that's great and where did you i mean walk me through the growth there where did you find your first 10 customers well actually we we yeah that's that's a bit of a story but i can do it very short um first of all for me it was very important to begin with that we got some proof of concept so so that we we figure out if people actually wanted to buy what we were developing so i started selling this to the first 30 customers without having a product or anything actually to sell other than an idea so so we got a validation for those 30 customers that they wanted this thing that i was talking about and then we began to create it and i also told them that you know they were about to pay for it we could not just develop it and for them to use it for free so so we had them paying something like i think 30 or 40 40 dollars per month for a completely har-coded solution with a very very simple message and very simple they could not change anything that weren't like any system or anything like that so from there we got the first beta testers and from those beta testers we made a lot of business cases uh stuff that we we promoted on our blog and then when we launched when we went into uh like public beta uh we got around 200 customers in a couple of months the first couple of months from there we begin to come become like a real company then we begin to have like segmented pricing depending on how much how big a customer or how big a website it was and then it has been like bootstrapped growth pretty not not hyper growth but but steady good growth around 30 40 per year um and yeah we are a little startup from denmark bootstrap but but are growing pretty pretty good and and uh you know loving what we do and it's it's going good so far and 1200 customers at the price point the average price what you said earlier of 100 bucks that means you're doing about 120 grand per month right now yeah close to okay and if you're growing kind of 30 year over year that means you were doing what about 80 grand per month a year ago yeah something like that something like that where's most of the growth coming from new customers or current customers that start on a cheap plan and upgrade themselves yeah it's a combination but it's i think uh 70 of the growth is coming from new customers and 30 from from existing so so we are working uh quite a lot on on upgrading the customers that we already have normally when they got more visitors onto their website but but most of it is from new customers and for us i think at least from from where we come from here in denmark normally denmark is a small small country 5 million citizens so it's kind of like a test market or it was the first year but after that you you you need to figure out a way to get international and to be able to scale this and and you know now we are we're we're getting there it's not like that we are completely there but now we are in 43 countries uh having customers in 43 countries and two months ago we just actually got a big u.s customer mashable.com and they are using it together with i think it's offers.com and so so it's nice for us to see that we're actually getting some traction also from yeah what are you paying to acquire these customers as you add them what's it costing you that's very hard to say because it's very different from depending from where they're coming but but this customer came uh came from our content marketing so we have a blog that we update a few times a week got a podcast with a youtube channel but so it's it's generally it's it's it's content marketing okay but so obviously you can still calculate cac with your content marketing team so what's your team size today and how many of them are we we we we got a we got a custom acquisition cost but it's just it's just you know it's very very different from customer to customer but in general we got we got right now a customer acquisition cost at i think around seven hundred dollars okay got it and if they're paying you a hundred bucks per month that puts your payback at what seven months yeah something like that seven seven eight months again sometimes a customer like like the one that i just mentioned you know the the payback for them was like one day uh because they they pay a lot more than than a hundred dollars per month uh so so so for very small customers it's around 10 11 months for big customers it's like days or months or something like that when you do spend average when you do spend 700 bucks to acquire the customer where are you typically spending that money um typically we are spending it on facebook and adwords okay and and and then of course the staff the content yeah yeah the content staff we are creating a lot of content and and that requires some some good people what's your team size today our team size is 24 people okay and how many of them are kind of sales or marketing or content uh i think 12 of them 12 30 and then we got quite a lot of developers and then a bit of administration okay sorry you said 12 30. uh 12 13 sorry 12 12 or 13 got it 12 or 13 our content marketing the rest are engineers yeah okay and where's everybody based we're based in denmark everyone uh we also got an employee in us we got one in estonia we got one in sweden so we are quite remote but most of us are from denmark okay so denmark or normal and now look when you look at a sas company especially like this pop-up sometimes can be seasonal churn is critical what's your churn today and how are you driving it down yeah churn is something that we've worked a lot on but but it's not it's something that we can become a lot better at working with but right now we got a revenue sharing we got a net journey at the last six month average is at one point three percent uh monthly journey um that's that's rev that's revenue churn that's our revenue chain yeah for an average of this last six months and you said that was never gross this was this was net churn revenue net churn uh average last six months yep so so for a product like ours uh it's something that is pretty easy to install normally people our customers can install it within a couple of days problem is that that also makes it pretty easy to to you know swap with something else if they don't like our products so it it it does also mean that churn is pretty high but we got quite a lot of things going on there that try to to help us in that direction of making lower churn name one yeah just a recent one is actually that we just this month launched a new initiative called manage solution so a lot of our bigger customers have asked us for the last two years or so for us to be able to help them uh you know in low key work on on how they work with their with with the pop-ups on the website because for example a customer of house they are working in 30 different countries so and they don't have the manpower to update these pop-ups on all those countries so they want us to do that for them and actually we lost that customer four months ago because we were not able to do that we only had the software uh so now we actually decided to make this team we called manage solution where we we are able to sell well consultants hours or we have we kind of plugged in some some some plans or some packages but that's well that's one of the things that we're doing right now in order to keep our customers a bit closer even though you know it's going...