How Smartlook CEO Petr Janosik grew Smartlook to $11.8M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is peter yanasek he's building a company called smart look which records users on websites and an ios and android apps with features that allow you to find useful information even in thousands of recordings in no time peter you ready to take us to the top okay so talk to talk to us about the product this sounds a lot like hot jar how are you differentiating yourself from other tools like hot jar this is a good question because it's the most common question people ask us that very often basically what we do we are combinating two markets we are combinating session recording market and uh event tracking market and we can do both into one solution so you then you are able to filter uh session recordings through events uh you can filter uh session recordings through in you know in funnels or or in your uh cohort retention code and so on so it's much better when you want to analyze your user behavior and so i have a bunch of questions about this but i want to understand kind of a backstory and traction here first so what year did you launch the company we launched company in 2016. okay basically we raised just small amount of money uh in 2016. how much but it was to 250 000 uh us dollar okay and is that all you've raised to date sorry how much total have you raised to date that's it okay just 250. yep all right so here's the big question then how good are you with investing that money to drive growth what's revenue today we have 2 million another one right we grew quite well uh we started with small customers in the beginning uh but then into it was like after one year and half we launched smart look we changed our strategy we are going up market so we are focusing on bigger customers right now and uh that was good decision because we are growing quite a lot like it's around seven eight percent per uh month over month so let's break this down real quick you're at a two million run rate today how many customers are you working with it's uh 2 000 customers okay 2 000 customers and what do they pay on average per month 2 000. what do they pay on average per month it's around 80 80 okay yep that works so 80 obviously times 2 000 puts you 160 000 a month or about a 2 million run rate now where were you exactly a year ago do you remember how much revenue you were doing then oh basically we are doubling uh almost every year it was like 90 percent grow so this is like last year it was 70 uh around 70 000 mrr last year and now and now you're up to 160. it's now it's february so uh like this december 2019 it was 140 uh december 2018 it was 75 something like that got it yeah it's about doubling your rear so this is a great story so i love that you've done so much with such little capital this is like my favorite kind of entrepreneur to interview so thank you i appreciate you coming on so walk us through the magic right how did you get your first hundred customers basically by the way entering a market that a lot of people would say hotjar is already dominating oh yeah we when we started in 2016 it was for free for 10 months we launched it as a simple recording tool for free it was unlimited uh you could record everything and for 10 months uh we offering it completely for free uh there was no pricing it was uh there was just free package okay but how did you know how did you eat the first hundred people to view the website and try it for free uh because it's not our first startup we also had another startup before uh which is called smartsup it's livechat so we saw in google analytics where our customers are coming from so we were able to predict that it can be the same uh so we uh target uh the same uh channels or are we trying to be visible on that channels we were visible with our previous project okay so you let me just break that down you had a prior company you had a prior company with a bunch of users it was it was a chat product and your intuition told you that those same customers would be interested in this new product line so you basically looked at what channels were driving your old company traffic and you went to those channels for this new product and that's how you got your first 100 customers for smart look yeah is it going like that i see okay so you're free in 2016 how many free people signed up before you launched a paid option oh it was after 10 months we have uh 100 000 sign ups because it was for free so it was kind of a wireless a lot of customers uh or a lot of sign ups recommend us because it was free then after a couple of months uh david from hojar called me and asked me like what are you guys doing it looks pretty good so we already know each other like we discuss it with uh david from mojo did he try and buy did he try and buy you uh not yet so what was he calling for then two years ago oh it was like it was in 2016 so it's it's uh much sooner but uh he was just wanted to know uh why we launched marlux what'd you tell them i don't remember exactly but we used the session recording feature in our previous project this is live chat so we wanted to help our customers to see what customers do when they are chatting with them so basically we started uh building this feature in uh in our previous project uh but then we just take the feature and build it as a separate project so that's how it started uh so this is this is what i told him uh like it's uh we are just trying to see if customers are interested in uh this feature as a separate project and it seems that they are interested because we had a lot of signups every month so you had 100 so you had 100 000 signups after 10 months is that when you launched your pricing plan it was 10 months in uh then yeah after after after that we decided to launch punch pricing because we already had a lot of infrastructure costs so we decided we need to know like if if we are able to monetize that or not what was your what were your total costs per month when you were still free do you remember we used uh in 2016 we used a lot of facebook marketing uh paid facebook marketing like uh performance uh marketing on facebook and we get like four sign ups we paid like five seven euro maybe something like that to get one sign up mm-hmm okay well so how much did you spend on facebook marketing that that year uh whole investment like it was like two thousand two hundred thousand dollar dollars okay so you didn't tell me this when i said what was your growth channel you said it was your prior company no your real growth channel was you spent a quarter million dollars on facebook ads paying five to seven dollars per sign up uh sorry i i didn't hear you like in a couple of seconds yeah i was just saying your big growth channel in 2016 when i asked you earlier you said it was your old company but really it was you spent 250 000 uh to get signups at five dollars a pop like you you asked for first 100 custom customers so first 100 customers was from organic channels but then we realized that let's try uh performance channels yeah like facebook google ads and stuff like that and we saw that facebook was great for us uh but then after a couple of months we realized that there are just small customers they were churning a lot so we cut that channel and uh we don't use it anymore so 200 000 divided by five is about 50 000 sign ups that you got of which a lot of those customers were very small they churned a lot but some of them told their friends and you had some viral growth and some of them were also potential enterprise leads that right in the beginning it definitely helped us a lot uh i don't i i see that i would do that same again if i'm in 2016. uh it was a good decision uh we find some first customers they are small they help us to grow but now we have to focus on bigger customers what was your product what was your price point your first price point that you launched it was very very cheap we started with uh i think it was 10 or 15 15 per month okay for like unlimited everything that was your only option oh no there was i think 100 100 000 sessions per month [Music] and so what did you grow revenue to when did you launch that pricing was that 2017 now it was uh in december 2016. we launched it in february 2016 in december after 10 months we launched pricing okay and then what was your total revenue in december uh sorry in 2017 uh for whole year yeah not sure i would have to check that let's say yes probably 40 or something in the end of the year in december 2017 it could be something like 40 mrr 2000 okay so you maybe you did like 300...