How Slidebean CEO Jose Cayasso grew Slidebean to $6.3M revenue and 2.5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is jose callaso he is the founder and ceo of a company called slide bean he's a tedx speaker graphic designer and is transformed into a growth hacker he's also a frequent fire miles hoarder jose are you ready to take us to the top i'm ready thanks a lot for having me again uh nathan how many frequent flyer miles do you have uh piling up on a couple hundred thousand at this point and does it just give you gratification to just hoard them and you're never gonna use them yeah yeah i i try not to use them like if i have money i try to pay for the ticket and then hoard more miles uh you know some family random trip then i spend them just to make sure i do all right last time you were on the show was back in uh june of 2017 at that time you had about two 2 500 customers paying 50 bucks a month doing about 122 000 a month in revenue where are you today um actually not that far from there and it's uh it's an interesting story i was actually hesitant to come back and then say that we haven't really grown uh our monthly recurring revenue too much but uh for the past year or so we've been really focused on uh improving the app itself and improving so many so many holes like so many uh holes in the bucket and the funnel and and and churn um so we kind of you know took an important company decision we we build ourselves to have a profitable team and then not to force ourselves to be in a position to raise money again and then use that revenue uh simply to improve on the product knowing full aware that we were gonna you know that we were gonna stop most of the growth hacking efforts and simply dedicate on building a more a much more solid product to support our users much better well thank you for coming back on i think people that do what you do have to be celebrated because many people think the only thing to celebrate is when you raise the next round of funding which is totally inaccurate so walk me through what you did to right size the business uh first things first you're still out you haven't raised any more capital you still just 850 grand in total that's right okay you had a team has a 22. it sounds like you may have shrunk that a little bit to save some costs what's the team size today we're still we're still 20. so uh not that far from from where we used to be um but again uh a much much larger focus on the product again uh you know when you're building a product so fast and when it grows so fast in our case we grew from you know from zero to 80k revenue in a couple of years um you know you leave a lot of stuff you're talking about 80 000 a month right yeah yeah and you're found and you were founded in 2014. that's right yeah um when you grow that fast you leave a lot of stuff behind you leave a lot of stuff that you that's not relevant enough because if you don't uh improve the servers then the tool will crash in a couple months or uh if you you know some you know some design rough edges that you never have time to polish and it's really hard to kind of look back and see all the stuff that is pending uh that you realize that if you keep focusing on growth and then supporting more customers you're never gonna be able to fix that um that's number one and then number two we had the advantage of running the operation profitable which is something that few companies do right um so if we're profitable we really don't depend on further rounds of funding we rather uh you know improve the way you know improve for example our our margins and then developing the absolute the app and the automation so that we less manual effort is required um and then working towards that so that you know so that eventually when we decide to kind of focus or refocus on growth we can do so with an app that's powerful enough to support where we're going next that's great now last time you came on you said you were burning 10 to 20 000 bucks per month and that was that was net burn not gross so so are you now casual positive we are we are uh we're actually dealing with a bunch of new problems this year like taxes uh on our revenues and and actual margins yeah like like there's actually something hitting the bottom line so you have to pay taxes exactly yeah uh and give me an update on revenue what are you doing per month now so it's still it's still in the range of 100 to 150k uh revenue it fluctuates a lot we you know we run some promos that um you know that spike the revenue up uh we motivate a lot of users to pay yearly and that's something that any sas business should really focus on when a customer pays yearly uh or prepays an annual plan you have that revenue up front and you have that revenue to to invest again in growth or to invest in the product or to invest in the team um you also don't have to deal with churn for for a few months um so we focus on that a lot and then as we change the interface and so on it fluctuates between those now yeah but jose i imagine you probably keep a cash kind of base balance you know p l and also a kind of a deferred revenue one so really rev on a sas company anytime i hear revenues are volatile it sends up warning flags because if you're doing if you're taking an annual plan that hits this month and dividing by 12 and recognizing over 12 months you still should see pretty smooth revenue numbers uh so if you if you give me the monthly occurring revenue number on a deferred basis what are you doing per month yeah and we when i when we talk monthly recurring revenue we always do um we always talk at deferred like we never count so why is it why is it going up and down so fast but the final so monthly recurring revenue which is around the 100k um that's you know that's one number but the actual revenue that we collect in a month it's cash it's cash not revenue right the cash you collect yeah the cash recollect that's right yeah yeah and that's because of annual plans mostly annual plans we've run a couple of promos like appsumo which is a very very powerful platform you know that's we you know we're talking 30 000 of revenue by just right now come on like you're selling the only reason their thing works is because everyone goes wow absolutely's gonna give me a lifetime deal to a sas business that's amazing but that's interesting and and we thought of that and we were super hesitant but we noticed significant spikes in actual cash that comes through our own well of course of course because they're selling a one-time thing and you're gonna and you basically give it to the urge of a 40 or 50 000 one-time check but you're sacrificing lifetime value on all these accounts uh i i will i'll still defend it on the on on two basis one it's these are customers that would probably not discover you otherwise and then two we see we don't i mean we we get the cash from mapsumo like on a deferred net 60 or something but the month the apsuma promo runs because of all the buzz that they generate around the product we actually see an important spike in actual customers that come through the platform directly simply because they heard from somebody in absolutely i don't know how many subscribers they have probably a million emails or something but it is significant and we've you know we haven't done a cohort analysis though on that on the on the adapter look appsumo's like jcpenney they're not coming in unless you give a coupon right and and that's right and and they cancel and they and they don't have no loyalty and they switch quickly and so like what noah has built such a genius i mean such a smart guy because every ceo wants instant cash and he's going fine i'll give you a forty thousand dollar check which is thirty percent of whatever sales we drive you i'll give you that check but guess what you're gonna give me a great deal i'm gonna basically switch your whole model from a sas business to a freaking agency one-time payment and maybe our monthly thing will drive you a couple dozen subscribers each month and you'll use it to validate it but the cohort typically is super high churn they don't stick they bombard your customer support it wastes your time but you get a little cash up front um yeah i mean yes but the reality is okay so many of these customers will go away they'll just give you the money and and so why do you want them that's my point though like why do you those are getting absolute customers is not necessarily good for your long-term health and you're potentially seeing that over the past year right well i'll so i'll give you i'll give you a top of my head numbers i'll say that out of the 100 customers that subscribe from appsumo which is a few thousand um i'll say 80 try a product a couple times and then don't come back uh some pressure on on the customer team the week the promo runs but that's about it um and then the other 20 actually become very active very powerful customers because the appsumo audience will quantify that though quantify that so what what's their what's their what's that cohort's churn it because there's no turn there's there's it's a one-time payment and they'll and they'll never pay again so then what do you mean what do you mean they're a powerful thing then all they do is they pay you once and then you have to support them for life yeah but it's i mean for a sas company supporting customers is super cheap um but they're powerful in the sense that they you know they refer their product they're they're super active and we actually we were hesitant of kind of considering their feedback or the stuff that they use but many many of these have super customers have become some of our power users in the sense that they have discovered every single feature in the app which is something that but not everybody necessarily does they don't it doesn't you're writing a non-profit all right all right no seriously like like i mean i i always wonder about this because again what noah has done is genius i'm not hitting him by the way i mean it's the ceo's urge for quick cash that is the fault of these of like why these work so well but like that's that's just that's why it works they it's interesting to me and the also thing people never consider is you're selling these lifetime plans but you know if in two years you have to shut the company down or you sell the company and the acquiring company shuts it down you know dang well you cannot commit to a promise to support someone for life no sas company can and so by selling it so like i have a big issue and people sell lifetime plans i think it's cheap i think it's a marketing tactic and i think it's totally disingenuous and hurts your personal brand if and when you have to shut the company down or sell it uh i think the sas companies we'll have to see what happens with lifetime plans with sas i don't think that you know no sas company has been here for more than i don't know 20 years and then why would you sell a lifetime plan yeah then i mean eventually i don't know what will happen why not sell a lifetime plan and then and then the next week shut the company down yeah you could do that i guess but do you see my point i just think you undercut i think you undercut yourself because i remember when i when you came on the first show i'm like this is a great tool which we haven't talked about by the way we should talk about what the tool actually does great tool um visual content is in right now so like he this is hitting on like the perfect time perfect market but like you you've you've taken the thing and you've you've gone like doing an absolute deal you've gone like downstream right if you're going that direction you have to go like hootsuite model hi millions of paying customers at a really low price point versus enterprise which is i thought the track you were on last time that's a change and that's that's an interesting that's also an interesting story um so we've you know we kind of like look ourselves in the mirror and we we compared ourselves with compare ourselves with other presentation platforms so it turned out we are the only we are literally the only presentation platform today that's premium only we all we offer on we offer a free trial that lasts about 14 days uh and that's about it but even in the trial you're you you know it's a limited trial uh you you can't present when you're in a trial and you can't necessarily download your presentation when you're in trial um so that's created some you know some issues with our with our free users so you know even today we're subscribing around 30 000 new signups every month so we get 30 000 people who are interested in using slidebean who've discovered it for one reason or the other um and coming to the platform hopeful to try it and and excited about it and then we have a paywall which which makes it disengaging for many of them so we convert an average of the sas uh an average of a sas company which is around three percent uh so three percent of them become paid customers out of these 30 000 people we get around 900 that eventually become uh become paid customers but we you know we've started thinking about the other 29 000 like these are people who were just kicking out the door even though they were willing to try it so it's it's very uh around 10 000 people okay well last so last time you were at 2500 paying customers now you're at 10 000. now let me ask a question that 10 000 number you just gave me does that include the couple thousand that are one-time payments that are not real revenue no no these are these are actually subscribers those are actual monthly subscribers okay so your price point must must have come way way down last time you were at 49 bucks a month what's it at now that's right uh we're our base plan now starts at eight dollars a month interesting yeah so you've really gone into the story you've really gone down market yeah um why why what drove that yeah and so i'll go back to this story so we we were the only presentation platform the only premium presentation platform out there all the others even powerpoint properties a premium product but it comes on your computer right so you almost get it for free uh google slides is free keynote comes with every mac so we you know we realized that we were competing with these products that were very differently priced and then again we were bringing thirty thousand people in every month uh converting about three percent of them and then the other twenty nine thousand losing and you still are today that's that's kind of your rate today thirty thousand and nine hundred that's a rate today so we we've started really considering becoming a freemium product this is very dangerous this is the most dangerous experiment we've considered because we are a profitable company and because we don't plan to raise money uh we're not in a position to rate raise money now um so we get killed yeah you get if you raise money say you'd you'd be a huge down round right right um so we're not in a position to raise money but we want to try freemium so we want to give something so that these other 29 000 people can become users and can and we need to measure you know there's inevitable there are two inevitable curves if we switch to flip and make the product premium which are um conversion rate will go down we don't know how much but it'll go down because people who used to pay no longer have to because they have some stuff that they can do for free and then engagement should or should go up at least a little bit uh now the question is if engagement which is monthly active users organic traffic referrals word of mouth you know how much will that increase and will it compensate for the downfall of conversion rate and it's it's very hard to test this i mean there's there's really no way to know unless we actually do it and test it so we actually started rolling this out in a few countries we um we i can't say which country specifically because i don't want people vpning our our our app i think people care that much to vpn in to save eight bucks i don't know i don't know we'd just rather avoid it but we're very transparent about this whole process i wrote a full blog post on on kind of our thought process behind this um and then that's the idea in these countries where we've launched the freemium version we are testing how much does how much does uh engagement increase how much does organic traffic increase you know one week one month six months after we we become freemium in that country and does that compensate for the conversion rate and is this something that we can roll out worldwide tell me who's not a customer fit for you a customer you don't want um the classic people that we that we kick out the door actually which is a big compared to what we talked about last time is is corporate customers we sometimes get like a like a large company that would come in and say we we we had a situation with with ey for example so they would come in and say um hey we want to use your product someone from the management team someone high up in the company we want your product but we need you to customize this and this and this and this for us um that's not our customer today why because all our focus is on on making this product fit for the other 29 000 right on making on you know and roughing up the edges if we dedicate part at least of our development team to building features that will only work for that company or for other large customers um then we you know we kind of lose track on the other end it's actually not our customer today what we do with enterprise and we have you know we have customers from nike for example um i mean just a name that came up but it's real um but it works the other way around it works bottom up so somebody in the company discovers it pays first live being out of their own card or or with little permission requests and then they start rolling out the product and we you know we see companies that went from one to ten or 20 accounts uh not coming from the management team but for somebody in the company that just discovered it yeah yeah i mean look when you tell me about the enterprise deals you know if your reply back no we can't customize it like that right but we're willing to set up a license for you what would you be willing to pay and if they came back and said 10 grand a month right like you know it's interesting because you cut off those conversations and i just wonder if you know freemium products like i've interviewed a bunch of people that have done this really really well and things like lastpass you know everyone has online passwords things like expensify right everyone has expenses they need to track things like mint right these things work on things that everyone has to do and i just wonder how many people have to do presentations or are there other use cases you've discovered that every person does on a daily basis that they can use slide bean for yeah i and it's something that we that we deal with as well you know most of our churn for example is coming from people that don't need to make presentations on a monthly basis um but that's the reality of pretty much any presentation platform and they've well not you see maybe a freemium model this price point but if you do an enterprise deal where there's a little professional services setup fee actually the lock-in can be very good and and the numbers are huge that's true that's true but you know one other struggle with with presentation platforms that we've covered that we discovered on the enterprise end is you know in the end when people think about a tool to make presentations specifically as much as cool as slipping is and as much time as we save them we inevitably get compared with with google docs we inevitably get compared with powerpoint so powerpoint already came in all the company all the systems that they purchased and it came with office and google it probably comes in with the email that they're using right so we get we don't get that side-to-side comparison we get uh an additional expense sort of situation which makes it which i understand that okay so if you you say you feel like you're completely you're competing with google docs and you're competing with powerpoint no but in the minds of the person who who made send enterprise decision we sort of are so why would you go down market and make yourself more free more like these are the free tools why wouldn't you go the opposite way and say no we're we don't even we're so totally different than google docs or powerpoint that's why we're 10 grand a month here's why x y and z yeah yeah the only the only presentation platform that that does that today is clear slide um they've become kind of like the ultimate sales platform for the ultimate yeah presentation platform for sales well like panda doc i mean i can actually name 10 companies in this space that do presentations for a specific cohort of user some of its board decks some of it are for sales people some of it's managing these things so that when a sales person's on a sales call and they say yeah i'll follow up with slide deck x they can quickly find the slide deck like that know i can name 10 companies that have gone upstream that are doing presentations that are killing it that are not competing directly with these freemium products because see what you're doing is you're basically saying you know what i'm going to pete directly with google docs i'm going to make it free go freemium and try and get more users than google and i just question your ability to execute that you're it is a it is a question and again this is why we this is why we don't roll out free everywhere we we we need to make sure that this will work yeah you know upstream upstream again was a struggle mainly because the way we built sliding we built it as a as a presentation creation platform and you know panda dock as you mentioned or or docsen for example which is another example um they're you know they're built for a specific purpose or you know from the get-go docsin was a document tracking platform so they've you know they have the technology and the analytics and the dashboard to really measure that um all these four years we've spent building a creation platform um that it ultimately also works very differently from from what you see in a traditional software it works very differently it's a very quick learning curve compared to compared to something like prezi um but it is very different so this is what we are experts at and we we realize that we're we're not yet experts at document tracking though we offer that feature um we're not yet experts at i don't know at sales presentation where experts are saving you time when creating decks and and and the reality of our our sort of marketing funnel you know these and we kind of pay attention to these 30 000 people we get every month um we you know if we were to go upstream we we could you know we could say no we're just not going to focus on you guys anymore uh but we have 30 we have 30 000 leads that we didn't have when we get when we got started this is a another story when we at the very beginning and this actually saved our company um we we have you know the closest example to slide bean when we launched was a company called bunker that went out of business uh two three years ago um we had a somewhat similar product uh and they took the the freemium route at that point uh so they were they were free you know they had like a very hidden paid plan but they were just looking for the million and million customers right um they went out of business because they couldn't get to their next round and they didn't have cash to to survive um we were lucky and also made the right decision of becoming a premium product then which gave us the cash and the revenue to support the team and to allow us to continue developing the platform but you know as we've tested the waters and we did for for for most of last year with enterprise and with going upstream and we failed at that for a number of reasons that we can talk about um we you know our next bet was free moon then you know putting ourselves which is what put bunker out of business uh you just said you just said the reason book went out of business because they ran out of runway trying to pursue a free model get millions of users that's right that's right that's what put them out of business but it's also what what has prezi at the point where they are today how much is prezi raised president was raised about 300 million or something because it's expensive to compete with google and powerpoint oh of course it is very expensive yeah so like i'm trying to i'm trying to get in your head i understand why you think you have a standing chance to do this on a model that is not heavily heavily vc back basically what you've done is you said you know what this is a risky model we've been flat over the past year i'm gonna go cash to a positive which is fine buy yourself some time but like you're just locking yourself into a lifestyle business where you're gonna keep paying yourself 80 grand a year salary stuck with a cap table of vcs that you're going to work for a decade to try and get their 850 grand back when you could be using the years right now which are your most valuable years of your life going and taking a billion dollar risk on something much bigger why not sell this company for a million dollars and get the hell out all right it's a valid point but would you sell four million no percent why not because we you know and you know if i were selling floyd village i'd just rather have a lifetime business see i sold my heyo people don't know this heyo was doing about your size almost exact same story you know what i sold it for i sold for 300 000 because i realized the opportunity cost of being a 24 year old and paying myself 120 000 salary which is what i was paying myself we were venture backed for the next decade was way it was very safe and very comfortable but these are the premium years of my life thank god i sold that company at a huge loss i gave investors back about 80 cents on the dollar and you know they're all i've made them all money i'm now an investor in many of their funds as an lp because of the money i've made doing other software projects i just hope you don't get stuck that's all i'm saying because i think you're talented and i think the way you think about problems is really really important but i also think you have to deal with the other thing which is you raise capital and you feel a little guilty about trying to figure out how to get that money back to them right right and we have the we have the advantage of having um a very good relationship with our investors and they're they're kind of on board with with the plan but uh i i'll i'll take it in and then i'll i really respect your opinion well i'm pushing you not to convince you one way i just want to get more in your brain right you ultimately do your thing but i think you're very talented okay that's fine and again i really i really respect you questioning me i i i you know someone with your experience in the end we we don't get to chat i don't get to chat with a lot of people with your uh background and then you questioning me is enough for me to kind of rethink what we're doing well listen don't people give you advice all day people give you advice all day long so don't let me bounce you around too much and i don't have a ton of experience we're the same age but i have talked to about 3 000 of these founders and tried to simulate patterns and i've i've fired the questions at you today based off some of the patterns i've seen so we'll we'll certainly stay in touch it'll be fun to see we're doing thank you again for coming back on knowing that you're gonna have a conversation like this it sounds like you kind of anticipated it so i appreciate that let's wrap up on a let's wrap up on a much friendly easier note give me your favorite business book um i traction um the the book on the 23 different growth methods as you know i've focused on the growth stuff this is it's really amazing you know to reconsider stuff that you that you've never thought of and to force yourself to think of growth tactics that you that are not in your direct experience so that is my favorite business book still number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i really like uh for i really like uh josh from baremetrics um i like what he does with his blog i think that he sort of he sort of accepted uh that his startup that and started being as a you know as a large uh venture-backed company is becoming more of a lifetime business and that's something that you know the startup billion dollar round story is the one that we all aim for but you know sometimes when when times are rough you have to you know have to deal with the other options which are not bad are super bad when you know when i talk to you and you say hey you want to settle for a lifetime business but uh josh have sort of lived up with that so i i really love his yeah look in a second it doesn't matter if you raise a dollar or 100 million the second you've raised with someone else's money they can tell you they're patient they can tell you they love you but ultimately when their lp's come knocking and saying a decade late and say where's the return and they need that right it's gonna afford it's gonna force action it can't just i don't think you just sit on it now maybe ubc's listening are gonna email me after this and tweet at me and go nathan you're wrong we would sit in a company for a decade right and not and not care but we'll see what happens we'll we'll see what happens number number three here jose what's your favorite online tool uh intercom i think it's the most um it's the backbone of our company in so many senses intercom number four how many hours of sleep to get every night um five hours i would say okay and what's your situation married single do you have kids i'm married and i have a kid oh good how old's a kid uh four and a half oh that's great and how old are you i'm 29 29 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew that you can start your own business and make a lot of money out of it uh i wish i knew that early on you can take more risks more risks when you're younger and you don't have a family to support guys start a business faster that's what he would have told himself building up slide bean presentation software for everybody founded in 2014 now at about 20 people he right-sized the business over the last year they raised 850 grand flat year over year doing about 100 grand per year in revenue but again profitable which is key it's buying him time to run some of these tests that he's thinking through so hopefully we'll have you back on jose you'll give us enough on the test and we'll keep cranking in the meantime thanks so much for taking us to the top thanks