How Standuply CEO Alex Kistenev grew Standuply to $154K revenue and 700 customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is Alex keaston Ave he has been earning money online since he was 16 and at 34 he hasn't ever worked for anybody in 2014 he moved to the south of Russia to open a co-working space near the sea later it became a school of robotics for children in 2016 he co-founded stand aply one of those popular slack BOTS that's all talked about today Alex are you ready to take us to the top yeah all right let me get let me get one thing straight first stand up Lee is this a side project you know it's a slack bot or are you actually making money on this well first it's a full-time project for me and I've been working on that for last few years and recently it became profitable so I can name it was a new business that's great that's great okay so you founded it in 20 you said 2015 16 2016 okay and you said it's profitable so that's great tell us what it does and and what people are paying for sure so then that leaves a slate both tourists and up meetings and team service and it's very trendy for remote teams because I went in agile team to a stew room scheduled a stand-up meeting sometimes they face troubles meeting at the same time on skype we can get getting in the room and so using stand-up Lee where you can get a stand up meeting my synchronously lastly and we found that it's really it's really painful in behind that service and we are seeing dozens of team signing up for that every day and we on a mission to be the digital scrum master based on stand ugly between kind of scrum process for agile team in the world and what are people paying on average for this per month so we are purely subscription service and we charge from two to four dollars per month okay got it so and and do you charge do you sell directly to the user or do you sell to the head of the team so it's self service and team so much from 16 people successful sorry okay and put them up in terms of that's great so today obviously your two three years into it how many seats are paying for the platform um it's a good question I was thinking about our metrics and I don't have any counts from in terms of C's I can tell you about our customer base so many customers so far okay 700 customers and you said each customer has at a minimum six seats correct yeah starting from but whenever it shoots like from seats okay well if I take 700 kind of companies and six seats per company that's forty 200 seats x obviously x then your your $2 sorry not 40 200 seats that would be 700 times 60 out 4,200 that's right 4200 seats if I multiply that times your $2 price point per seat it puts you at about call it eight or nine thousand bucks per month is that accurate so let me tell you more accurate data our burner is eaten Kate and so from each profitability we had 25k in waving you in mail okay sorry you said your current is fifteen but last month year 25 like our mr is a bit different from reading you because some customers pay for any subscriptions so speaking of the monarch it's about okay but we counted 25k meaning ensoniq on a cash basis because of annual payments okay very good that that's great so fifteen thousand dollars per month and where were you a year ago what was your what's your growth rate well actually a year ago we were at zero let me tell you where we were in December 2017 we like to ask about the same way I remember so in December we were at freaky in morale and so we go by five times this year and are you bootstrap turvy raise capital yeah we have booster ok how much of your own money have you put in because we put our money with my co-founder to make sure our programmers have ramen to eat a small less than less than $100,000 a small amount I think more than that okay more than that all right all right fair enough talk to me about churn what's your turn today so our every turn is about three percent but it's including all our customer segments and we have a customer segment that purchasing a very small basic length or let's say three users and a journal and other customer segments that are our best customer segments they churn about one person okay but a way to ignore whether our customer pays a lot or a little is to talk about revenue turn instead of logo churn what is your revenue churn or any children's about about about okay it's okay so no revenue churn eeeh each month it's above zero sometimes sometimes we got it depending on depending on if you drove upsells or things like that that's great okay very good and where it where's most the growth coming from how are you getting new customers new customers from slack up director it's an amazing - Aris like a builder because you be listed there and your customers can find it there also we do a lot of content marketing and we are launching stand-up in beacon various versions some product on solidified nine launches and protocol in 18 months and people and what's your team size today people seven people God are you guys all based there in Siberia or your remote so our main was here in Siberia but some part of our team even more okay good just seven people between Siberia and remote and besides the slack Channel as an acquisition kind of channel what is your fully weighted customer acquisition cost you know it's not a wee question which I don't have any answer on that because we didn't we don't spend money on paid ads we spent like and that's per month in 18 months we cool yeah that's the reason ask fully weighted right so a lot of people will say well we have no we have no cost we don't spend money on Facebook ads but then they have you know three salaries they're paying for content marketing well that counts right so how many people on your team are dedicated to something related to sales marketing content or onboarding it's one it's me zero okay so so you're doing all over content marketing right now well you do have a salary you're just choosing not to pay yourself so how are you surviving well like their savings from my businesses and that's what I'm using to survive until I think enough money won't stand up with the payments oh I see I see is your co-founder also not paying him or herself well he's paying from self a little bit but he's the same way okay why does he give money and you don't get money we decided okay very good very good all right let's uh Alex let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book that's that's tough one because I have a huge list but the ladies book I mean it was utility how to make up and how to make a marketing useful for your customers number two is their CEO you're following or studying right now I like what what we Campbell is doing in terms of education companies Patrick you fuck-you Campbell no problem well yeah yeah good number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business it's workflowy it's good on number four how many hours of sleep to get every night okay and what's a situation married single do you have kids married Oh congratulations that's good so no kids yet huh all right and Howard are yeah I'm okay Alex last question here what he was your 20 year old self knew well I was doing a lot of things at once and later understood our focus is important so and you get from this this is nice anyway guys there we have it from Alex focus on one thing with his team of seven in Siberia he's building this tool called stand-up Lee which is essentially a scrum bot for slack helps you manage kind of your you know your two-week Sprint's your stand-ups all that stuff obvious like found that in 2016 they're now doing about $15,000 per month in revenue they get that revenue because 700 customers or logos pay him for about six seats six seats each each seat is a minimum of two dollars in terms of the price plane that goes up to 3 or 4 bucks per seat but scaling nicely 0% net revenue churn per month Alex thank you for taking us to the top