How Softr CEO Mariam Hakobyan grew to $719.4K revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is maryam huckaby and she is the founder of a company called softer.io an easy to use no code platform for buildings powerful applications on our table in 10 minutes no learning curve no design skills required marion are you ready to text the top yeah thanks a lot nathan thanks a lot for the invite you bet so how i mean this is a very sort of niche that there's no code there's air table were you doing sort of air table consulting or something before this how did you get into it no we weren't in fact we actually didn't start from irritable so originally uh both of the co-founders have been software engineers ourselves so we have been just building software products um for more than 10 years and seen so much repetition in every other company in every other application we've built and we kind of thought why not have a platform where everything is offered as building blocks and then companies and individuals on top build only what's unique to their business that's how we kind of started software in the first version we where we imagined for it to be really a kind of full stack application builder and having the database just inside software but over time like once we started talking to customers understanding their needs we just realized there is huge demand on having some kind of front end for the air table so there is lots of people already using irritable for their operations for their daily use their life even and uh and yeah that's where we started so it's just one kind of one back-end for us it's the way we started but up um for sure we are gonna have other backends like google sheets notion potentially external apis and also our own collections but airtable is really just kind of one first step for us and how many customers do you have today uh well we have uh more than 10k users using the platform um actively and several hundred paying customers um yeah that's that's what we sent currently that's right and take me back to day one when did you launch the company uh we launched actually end of august uh so it's almost like six seven months with the product is out there and the first version even was in the web builder it was just a static website builder and that's that was kind of our first mvp we launched it on product hand we became number one product of the day and uh however we have been building the period this was in 2020 yeah 2020 august 25th so uh yeah in the end of august and prior to that we have been building the product for about one and a half years just bootstrapping and also kind of not working alongside our full-time jobs when you did the product on launch what happened how many used the website how many new signups yeah so we got around 12k visitors i actually have written a blog post about that if i remember the numbers and out of those like we i think we got around 10 paying customers excluding us being on the as on the paid plan but yeah around 10 customers that wasn't that much but it was how many news how many new signups uh several hundreds okay got it so 10 new paid and and what are what are paying customers paying you on average to use technology yeah so on average it's around what's right now is the 79 euro per month monthly plan or for 65 per year um so actually we have just recently it's almost a month that we have changed the pricing prior to that it was a bit different pricing a bit lower end on the lower end but it was also the first version of the product so now we kind of have identified more concrete customer types and really customer uh target groups and based on their needs we have changed also our pricing model and so what uh what last month what mrr did you guys hit so uh let me not mention specifically like the numbers um but uh it's it's more than several thousands let's put it this way i mean you said several hundred customers 300 and you said 79 price point can i multiply those together that would be about 23 000 a month in revenue approximately okay do you think you can break a hundred thousand this year we yeah that's the aim yes how will you do that where are you getting new customers today well uh so far our main like all of this growth has been really organic through word of mouth and through people sharing with their own communities so usually what happens if you search for software in twitter you will see what people talk about software and usually like people we have really huge um community which are really engaged and they build something they share with their own communities talk about software so uh so far most of the growth has been through these kind of social and organic channels we are also now starting a name can you be specific can you name one or two of these facebook groups or slack groups yeah mainly twitter no twitter has been the the biggest audience group for us uh the biggest audience has come from there but right now we are as we expanded towards more smb space as well we have also have lots of customers coming from youtube um people looking for different ways to build something with air table and uh yeah going forward we also are spending like very much routing towards content seo this is something we started um and like more organic so we are in favor of really trying more the organic way of growth of course we are going to experiment with ads etc and different ways of also influencer marketing and other channels but really the organic growth like long-term it's it's a product-led growth type of company and this is this is really at the core of the company now have you guys bootstrapped this or did you raise capital yeah we just recently like recently in january raised the first first round our seat round uh but before that it has been all bootstrapped and yeah we already have so sorry what did you raise uh 2.2 million dollars okay and why do you need 2.2 million dollars to build this why sell a big jump to your company yeah it's a great question so we we have been at some point we have been thinking whether we should raise or not but um as you might know like the knockout space is really booming right there is there's lots of competitors coming up there is the space is really huge and it's moving growing um at an exponential pace so first of all the product itself is really complex pro in order to really build something meaningful so you can cover as many use cases as possible you really have to have a team and it just technically and effort wise it's really something that we realized if we just bootstrap it's it's going to be almost impossible to also out compete the competition and that is the main reason we we decided to go the vc road got it when you guys raised was that a priced equity round or a safe a traditional save it's a price equity round yeah you did decide to price it why did you decide to price instead of doing a save uh well at the time we already kind of were at the stage of similar some other companies like we knew uh like we were able to roughly if a company and um yeah come up with like think where do we see ourselves what valuation we potentially see for ourselves and we just decided to go that truth rather than yeah postponing it because in yeah long term i think that's almost almost similar in in the end in terms of result and so what did you choose to value the company at i can't mention the name numbers specifically but uh yeah it was it's something that i mean just in comparison there were some other companies that kind of were in the market in the similar space for three years like two three years they haven't even launched publicly but within within just um six months we managed to reach already several k revenues and have quite already several thousands of users so we were at a good point comparably with even some other like seed stage companies who had raised money previously so that kind of felt for us that yeah it would be a fair uh kind of valuation and fair price point for us i won't push harder here but can you give us a range is it below above or below 10 million um approximately close close to that right around okay fair enough walk me through your team who's building this with you so it's two co-founders uh both of us are technical and product from a technical and product background we have uh engineering theme it's nine people just nine people so far most of most of them engineers um to co-founder and ux person and now hiring also for some more people but no sales people no no it's not like it no i i guess we in the next probably one year for sure in the next years i'm definitely thinking that there might there probably won't be sales team unless we start working heavily with enterprises but so far it again it's it's true growth and marketing channels and it's heavily product like growth really um yeah more more from the content side from social and all of the other aspects other than sales churns really critical in this kind of business people will test it they'll do one air table sort of mock up on the front end and then they'll leave right what is your churn rate today and how do you keep it low yeah so the return rate has been fluctuating so it's changing from month to month to be honest uh it's it's something around five percent which is um which is kind of typical to if you look at also similar companies um however this is something still working progress for i think we have we're very early we still are figuring out like typical customer target group for us and also there are so many holes still in the product and in the onboarding even we just didn't have any onboarding so far we just we are now only working on that so we kind of uh our our goal was really to put out something in the market even the mvp as soon as possible to get feedback to get customers using it and paying it and then really evaluate and validate for us what's the value like this does this work really does this stick and then and then really kind of deep dive and continue building the product got it and i imagine as part of that 2.2 million raised you you said things on your deck like here's how they plan to spend the money to drive growth so one of those obviously is to get new customers so what do you think it's going to cost you your full weighted cap to get a new 80 a month customer yeah um so until so far uh it again it has been just zero zero i'm not counting of course the manual work but um we we do expect to spend some so i can't mention a concrete number but basically we are uh heavily relying on having an onboard having an um growth true content and seo really like organic road but also um spending the money on true ads as well acquiring some customers so it is going to be like in the range that uh we we sell the products for miriam what what what what are you comfortable spending to get an 80 a month customer um well i mean i have to be honest we haven't we haven't tried any started any any marketing i know that i know that we have to experiment right i know my question is because this is this will this will tell us how aggressive you plan to be i know you don't have any historical data what i'm asking is as a ceo as a founder you just raise money you're trying to deploy it what are you comfortable spending to get a new 80 a month customer what would you say well we are going to start spending like five to ten k a month um on ads i assume like and also on all the other channels to experiment and see what works and once we find out something that works and then we're gonna scale that obviously you know i know that but okay so my question is what are you how aggressive are you willing to spend to get a new 80 a month customer are you comfortable spending a thousand dollars to get 80 a month customer do you only want to spend 80 dollars okay i see what you mean no obviously not like we are not gonna like no uh for sure not so we do want to stay on a good rate that we are also at some point we are profitable as well even though that's not really the end goal but um like double or triple or that for the beginning but then at some point we will double or triple what the monthly price yeah got it but at some point 240 bucks 150 to 240 bucks to get 80 a month customers would you be comfortable spending well probably in the beginning but then at some point we want to bring it at the level that it's much much lower than than the price they would pay for sure so we want to have the uh roi positive price that they would pay monthly or annually uh monthly or annually it's it's up to date customer well no but it's very different you're you spending one year of acv to acquire customers very different than spending one month of contract value to get the customer uh can you repeat the question please i'm just trying to get a sense of how you plan to scale and if that's via paid ads i'm trying to understand how aggressive you're willing to be in this space the keyword air table and error table tools is very competitive it costs a lot of money to run cpc ads in google for this keyword so i'm just trying to get into your brain about your risk tolerance are you comfortable spending one year of acv to get a customer up front or do you want to be have not a lot of risk and recover your attack on day one when they pay for that first 80 dollar month no potentially taking the risk and bringing more customers up front and then and then recovering from that yeah really interesting well we'll see what we'll see what happens it sounds like you're also expanding outside this air table so you have other keywords you can go after as well which would be nice yeah very cool okay great um we talked about charm we talked about that we talked about your team talk me about the founding again founders at the beginning it's always difficult to have the equity conversation how did you guys do that or you just split in 50 50. yeah exactly so we always have from the beginning we we do believe we are both contributing equal ways and we just have split the company equally i see very cool well on that note mariam let's wrap up here with the famous side number one what's your favorite business book um um the um crossing the child the why crossing the chest crossing the chasm is a good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying again sorry is there a ceo that you're following or studying yeah uh um um well there are many there's not someone i specifically follow like there are there are many millions you yeah let's move on okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building software we're building software uh i like um well i like mural a lot we use that a lot can you install it company mirror and irritable i would say like airtable yeah that's what we use the tool uh mirror m-i-l-o-i m-i-r-r-o great okay cool number four how many hours of sleep you get every night four or five that's unhealthy well if you have kids that's uh that's usually becoming a norm how many kids do you have two two kids okay and married yes and mary do you mind me asking how old you are well around 30. okay the reason i ask is i want you to take us back to your 20 year old self what's something that you wish that she knew um yeah i guess if i were uh to advocate 20 year old myself what i would do i would probably just right away join startups and just experiment with different companies build up build something on my own i think i i started just jumped into that space much later i would i would change that guys softer dot io a tool to help you take your error table on a no code way generate a website they're moving into other industries as well they raised 2.2 million bucks at around a 10 million dollar violation to build this thing out team of nine merry men are co-founders split the company 50 50 they've got over 300 ish customers say 10 000 total users they all pay about 80 bucks a month to call it you know 10 20 grand a month right now in revenue as they look to continue to scale they'll start turning on paid ads moving additional verticals and we'll see what happens mariam thanks for taking us to the top thank you thanks a lot one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big 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