How Slicki CEO Thomas Nielsen grew Slicki to $7.8K revenue and 35 customers in 2023.

hello everybody my guest today is thomas nielsen he's a seasoned entrepreneur responsible for a number of startups in the tech industry specifically with gaming gambling and b2b sas segments now building a company called slicky a wiki for slack all right thomas you ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely so um so start off by telling us kind of again what the company does and what's your revenue model how do you make money sure absolutely so um slikki is a bit of a a special case for me we didn't really start up as a sort of a result of a an analysis of a good business case or really something that we identified as a gap in the market but more as a personal need that we uh found out that we had um so we have been using for different kinds of projects i've been using slack a lot and obviously i'm sure that your listeners already know slack as a as a very convenient and efficient force of working to be together as a team um but one of the things that we've found um fairly quickly was that slack really lacks a way of turning conversation into documentation um you can often get really far speaking to your colleagues about stuff but then when you get to conclusions you don't have anywhere to put that information and we really needed sort of a solution for that and there's a lot of different add-ons and and apps that you can add to slack but they didn't really serve the the needs that we had so we went on and built a product ourselves and we quite quickly saw that there must be a an actual market for this and that's when we started um building a more commercial product for it and how do you price it so so on average what's the customer going to pay you per month to use this yeah so our our business model is really simple we charge four dollars per user that uses slack uh sorry slinky okay so what does that mean in terms of when a brand signs up for you are they sending up the one four dollar seat or is it usually team of like 100 at 400 bucks a month so we we uh we offer the first month free so that teams of any size can really um dip their toes and see if it's something for them and then once you've passed that uh that month you pay um you pay for four dollars per user with a minimum of uh of five users currently okay so it's 20 a month to fair average across the base today it is it's mostly small teams that start up but our business model is also based on use really so we don't uh if you have a slack team of of 100 people we don't charge you for for 100 seats because we realize that some of those people could be in administration or marketing and maybe you know less prone to use the features that we offer so we're actually usage based so whenever you actually use slicky um we count that up and then at the end of the month you pay for the amount so four users actually use slicky but a hundred are on the slack channel you only charge for four that use slicky exactly yeah got it is there are there any other upsell pricing axes you use or is it just number of users that use slicky each month at the moment it's just number of users because we think um this is something that needs to be really really easy to digest for the company and to get started with going forward we're definitely going to to see what other opportunities there could be in ensuring that companies can easily find the information that they have stored when did you launch the company what year uh so we actually launched late last year so we're we're still really new and so what was the launch strategy where did you get your first kind of exposure your first hundred customers yeah so um we haven't done a lot of big splash uh stuff really um we've wanted to build things organically not least because i've tried before building stuff that we thought was ideal and then it turned out it wasn't for a number of different reasons so um our first hundred users really came organically um and word of mouth is a very strong i think um instrument in in this business if you can um yeah but thomas it doesn't just happen right you're giving yourself too much credit i think you're sorry you're not giving yourself enough credit here you did things to make it happen so what tactically did you do yeah so uh we went out and we spoke we we talked directly to companies that we knew uh were using uh slack because obviously for slinky um you need to be an active slag user it doesn't make sense how did you find them where did you go find a list of slack users there's uh really a a number of different resources that you can tap into to find uh slack communities uh i i can't on top of my head um there's we've been in touch with probably a thousand different uh communities so they're not usually they're not thomas can you name one just to put a face on what you're describing so we're not talking vague here there must be one of a thousand that you remember uh there there should be um or wouldn't you just google like slack what would someone google if they want to go find a list and essentially find a list of slack users you you would probably um uh you would google slack communities really okay got it so these are like facebook groups for slack people facebook groups linkedin groups yes exactly i got it okay you also launched on august uh last year on product hunt um walk me through walk me through how that wins so so you got 230 uh 263 of votes how much traffic to the site did that drive um it probably drove to 300 team sign ups um when we when we launched with product hunt and i think the the biggest takeaway from us has been that there's a a solid um number of ongoing signups from product hunt um so for us it it gave less of a peak and more of a steady flow of of teams that are coming to our side okay and were they generally uh good company signups have any of them converted to paid yes they have so around uh so we do 50 on teams onboarding at the moment per month and we convert about five percent of those okay so ten percent would be five so you're getting about two to two to three new customers from product hunt every month yeah yeah that's great uh and that's just your product on channel what other channels are driving customers um i i wish i could tell you that but but i i really can't a lot of it seems to be organic from people sharing information about um about the product and and talking within themselves one of the things that we're noticing thomas you're really not giving yourself enough credit here so you also posted about 10 months ago on reddit right this word of mouth doesn't just happen folks there are tactics you do that make people talk about it right so there was a product on launch you posted on reddit 10 months ago got a couple up votes did you see meaningful up uh increase in clicks and signups from reddit or no no we didn't okay and and that's that's you're absolutely right you you should and you can uh cultivate this um we have we've been really slow in um actually or actively um pulling a lot of these levers that we could in terms of getting uh increased social awareness uh because we've been really busy building the product so so so that's why and i'm i'm really also myself a bit surprised that we're getting this we're not getting a huge amount of traction but we are getting quite a lot of traffic and we're even getting traffic from japan at the moment so what have you scaled to thomas you launched a couple months ago right so how many customers are you serving now today uh we've got uh 700 teams uh actively using the um uh the product at the moment okay and how many of them have actually converted a paid uh around five percent of that okay got it so again ten percent would be seventy so about caught five percent you have about 35 yeah that's great and again okay so 35 paying customers at 20 bucks a pop you know you're about to basically thousand dollars a month in revenue is that right that is right yeah and a year ago you are nothing right that's true and we haven't really looked at um building revenue yet um obviously it's not an impressive number in terms of revenue but it's been very important for us to make sure that we have a product that companies can trust because trust is a big deal um in this type of product that we're building have you bootstrapped the company or did you decide to raise no we're we're totally bootstrapped i love that okay and what's the team look like today how many people so we're three we're uh we're myself and we're uh two developers situated in india as well and how aggressive are you being in terms of burn each month obviously you have to pay developers to drive growth while revenue catches up who's funding this thing i assume that's probably what you personally yeah me personally and um i i wouldn't say that we're spending aggressively because uh uh obviously a five uh people uh sorry three people team needs to eat yeah but bootstrapping is great because you can get really really far on on on blood sweat and tears so how much did you personally sink in before your first dollar revenue in the mvp do you remember um probably i would say twenty thirty thousand dollars yeah i always love asking that question there's no data on online about it so i've now asked like three thousand ceos what they spent before their first dollar of revenue and it's...