How Somecentral CEO Jan Thorsã grew Somecentral to $78K revenue and 100 customers in 2018.

hello everybody my guest today is yan torsu anderson he is the founder of a company called some central swimming central is the first so me tool of its kind and they help companies to work closely together with employees for the purpose of boosting marketing sales or employee branding all right yawn are you ready to take us to the top oh yeah i am okay so give me an example of what the company does and what your revenue model is how do you make money well it's just based on a a regular monthly fee that's that's it basically uh so how much people how much people pay per month on average uh well you can have a free version if you want to but uh it starts off with 65 us dollars a month is that an average though is that what the average customer pays yeah i think around 70 of the customers will be in that that area okay great and and give me an example one of the customers so we can understand exactly why they pay you and what they get well most of them right now is danish because we're a danish company and it could be any kind of we have a company that sells office furniture and they want to promote the the things that happening in in the company uh when they meet customers that are happy when they are making special uh what do you call it in english uh when you actually buy new furniture and and that's a special story in itself it's all kind of different kind of stories that support their social media appearance as well and some of them are also using everything employment employee branding great and then when did you launch company what year uh we launched it last year but the product actually got live in february this year so we're fairly new and how many how many customers have you scaled to today right now we are on plus 100 clients it takes uh more time that we anticipated okay be honest um so 100 100 100 companies paying 65 a month you're doing about 6 500 per month right now in revenue yeah yeah and it's it's expanding uh as we speak more or less how much how many how many how much how much are you growing revenue by each month right now i don't want to go into the revenue right now uh i think it's a thing to be honest maybe it's a danish cultural thing well just be clear i only ask because you say you're growing really fast every month so i'm going to ask you to support statements like that that you make i'm saying we are growing we are growing things are growing slowly because what we solve is actually a thing that most social media people have been taking as a granted as a what you call it uh uh it's now i'm i'm struggling with my english uh but it's a fact of life that they are missing out on photos and videos and they have been turning into canberra where you have stock photos and stuff like that and we are actually changing that because normally the the collection of content has been hard for social media people and they turned into all the kinds of uh doing it themselves so we need to change that and that is actually quite a challenge okay and have you bootstrapped the company or did you decide to raise capital well we raised some capital right now we are on a 1.32 million danish corners which will be around 150 000 200 000 okay and did you is that equity or is that venture debt or convertible note uh it's actually just uh from people in my my network not my what you call full fools friends and family but these guys are actually not family they are people that i know from my business life oh okay very good and okay so you raise some capital there and what's the team size today you and anybody else right now we have three people and we have an external coding partner and it's a danish company based in thailand okay but all the three full-time are all based in our wastewater well we're around uh one-hour drive from from copenhagen which is the capital of denmark yep great so three people based there close to denmark and then walk me through growth i mean you just launched the company there's probably some valuable lessons here how did you get your first hundred customers uh we used uh facebook no sorry we used linkedin mainly my personal account i have plus 15 400 500 connections uh and most of the clients came from there and also from you know friends telling friends that this is a new product and uh we do new stuff actually so so mainly it's from my linkedin profile like you just you just personally messaged contacts on linkedin i no well not not exactly but i i'm trying to before we have the product we actually started to promote but we have made something new which were entirely new to the market and the clients came from there right now actually yeah so i want to really dive here on how you use linkedin to get your first 100 customers because that's what my audience is going to learn from so what specifically did you do on linkedin to get your first 100 customers i i think what everybody else is telling that stop promoting before you have the product and i started promoting it before i actually got what does that mean though when you say promoting what did you specifically do i was actually just starting to post what the product actually could do how they could benefit from it and and simple stuff like that it wasn't actually that high-tech it's just how can we solve a problem that most social media managers actually faces in the day-to-day operations okay so you post some status updates on linkedin uh it gets some engagement how do you then convert that engagement into paying customers well we when we got the product that more or less uh went by itself to be honest we haven't had that much uh time used on visiting customers by customer but every everybody just went on uh more or less like a viral thing okay when i hear that what i think is you actually don't know how you got the hundred customers you got lucky and you're not sure how to scale past that oh we're trying to actually do that because there's a learning lesson in in it all the time and we are actually trying to to uh create less fraction friction on on how to onboard the product we are talking to those people that are actually on the park right now and uh we are planning to have some some campaigns going on to facebook uh as you can imagine that we haven't had that much capital so we are also limited on in that way have you spent any money to date on direct paid advertising yeah but it's not a lot how much it's less than 5000 euros and where'd you spend it which platform uh mainly on uh facebook on facebook and did it work sort of we're not that content with it right now so how much how much were you paying on facebook to get a new customer well i think a new customer will be around thirty dollars okay well i mean why are you not happy with that if you get a customer they pay you 65 bucks per month yeah but i'm also struggling with a really tight budget here so i need to actually uh but yeah your budget doesn't matter if you if you're if you start with 30 bucks let's say your budget's 30 bucks and you put on facebook and you get one new customer paying 65 bucks per month okay now you have 65 bucks you put 65 bucks back in so your budget shouldn't be an issue you only need 30 bucks if those numbers are true yeah that's that's correct but we also i need maybe this is cultural thing i don't know but we also make need to make sure that uh we can pay for for the plans which we have for further development and stuff like that we're just in the really early phase here uh in developing this company but do you understand what i'm saying if you found a growth channel i know where you could pay 30. why wouldn't you put more money into that because i also have other expenses uh to run the company so we actually it's sort of uh growing and learning as we actually expand as well okay makes sense any churn has anyone started paying you and then stopped sorry has anyone started paying you and then stopped they left they quit they cancelled yeah we had one that actually did that it was a project where the the people who actually were supposed to use the product they and they were supposed to visit some of their clients they never got out to visit the client so they actually stopped it okay interesting very good yen let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book i think it's a blue ocean strategy number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um right now um i think one of my favorite is uh josh welch from uh g jack welch number three how many hours of sleep did you get every day sorry how many hours of sorry what is your favorite online tool for building your company my favorite online tool is most likely linkedin to be honest number four how many hours of sleep to get every night how how many hours i what of sleep do you get every night uh around eight hours and try to do yeah and what's your situation married single do you have kids i have kids i'm i'm not married but i have a fiance how many kiddos one one and how old are you i'm 53 my 15. that's and i relocated i relocated to my mother's house so i'm living on a camping bed to make this happening i love it that's hustle yeah okay so you're 53 what do you wish your 20 year old self knew [Music] oh that's a hard one uh i...