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...