How Stockalarm CEO Yahia Bakour grew to $250K revenue and 600 customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is yahya baker he helped create a company called a stock alarm which is reliable stock market alerts at scale is born out of your need to make reliable alerts on time especially specifically taking signals and then producing things like text messages alerts phone calls and push notifications to traders they package complex signals into an intuitive and easy to use ai yaya you ready to take to the top hi nathan great to be on the show and great to you know show off her product you bet so tell us about the company stock alarm.io is it a sas company that you're selling that you're selling to traders or it's a different business model uh no it's a sas company b2c uh we sell reliable stock market alerts with a variety of indicators okay and give me a general sense of what a trader might pay you per month to use the technology sure it really depends on where you're located and what your trading needs are so if you're just a simple trader you know you just started out if you're a simple trader who just started out you probably just want a you know a simple upper lower limit alerts maybe a couple of stocks uh to track a month but if you're someone who's trading internationally the calls will cost more so therefore you'll pay more so our starting tiers have five dollars a month and our top tier is at about 19.99 a month so on average what are folks paying uh the average price across our entire subscriber user base is around 10 a month ten bucks okay cool so this this company and when did you guys launch so we launched around a year ago now and uh initially my two co-founders they started the mvp and brought me on about a month later or two months later give me take got it and so how did you guys have that equity conversation obviously it's a little weird because they go yeah you weren't here on day one so you get less equity yeah so the way it worked was since they started it and they brought out the mvp very quickly um when i joined on they put me on sort of a tier plan so since i'm head of growth the work i put in since we're fairly any people is directly correlated to the amount of users i bring in so they based it off how much the company's worth is how much equity i unlock okay well so i mean but how did they so i mean what does that actually mean so when you join they say you're going to get 10 equity but we take it back unless we hit 5000 users by the end of the month uh no it's based on uh end of quarter so for example when i started there were like 10 paying users so they said okay when you get 50 you unlock you know an extra five percent when you get 100 you unlock this much and then my last year was 500. so how many customers are there right now about 600 give or take so they're about to revamp my plan to expand it to the new tiers and so when you joined what was the max you could earn in terms of equity if you hit all your goals uh around 15 to 20 okay so then what now obviously you've killed your goals over the past 12 months so what do they do now they come back and they can't give you another 50 they can't keep giving you 15 company every time i agree so uh especially since we're also hiring other people obviously you can't scale company just three people you know we have uh our ios app our web app and now we hire two people to do android so since they're joining late they get less equity but for me my new plan will be like an extra maybe five ten percent so how many of you guys are there full time including the co-founders so we're actually all doing this part time uh while putting a lot of hours a week so normally i think i put in like 15 hours on the week weekends to try to build the product but overall we are six people we have one intern doing content two people working on android uh one person doing the management stuff and me back end and another person for ios so for engineers uh yeah yeah wait very vibrant five five engineers okay uh very cool and then how did you so since you were in charge of getting customers it sounds like you came on pretty early when there's only five or ten customers how did you get the first hundred customers yeah so uh i tried to use the power of social media for this especially since we can reuse like we built this infrastructure it has all this data we want to reuse it so we build stuff like an automated twitter bot that tweets out you know earnings that we already have dividends info stuff like that so that started scaling on its own we also did paid promotions with instagram accounts target our democrat specific demographic uh we really put some money into ads there answered core questions so stuff like that and then just kind of grew organically seo also played a major role in it so if you look up stock alerts stock alarm stock alert we are first on every single query how do you get number one uh really just seo optimization techniques like pick up any seo book look up uh different ways but mostly it's just about the keywords like just like all those i i hate the quote of guru but it's basically just about your keywords so were targeting stock alerts stock alert stock line we did our research on those keywords and then we just kept optimizing until we grew but i mean you're beating companies that have way more domain authority than you so fidelity.com you're beating them daytrading.com you're beating them bullish bears seeking alpha vanguard you're beating all of them you come in in second place for stockholders only behind only behind stock twists yeah which and i think the stock which one might be an ad so that's why it's at the top but no it's not it's not an ad it's just i mean they do also have an ad but they also have organic placement number one yeah so what we did was try to build our backlinks up and at the same time when we launched our web app as you know we have like 12 13 000 supported tickers so each one of those became its own page with its own seo also linking to our marketing site so just start boosting everything up so we get weekly updates on how our rankings are doing so it just kept rising us up pretty much so what you took like amazon and apple and tesla and a thousand other big names you launched their own stock pages for each of those and then that all backed link to your course site pretty much what every brokerage does if you go to robin if you look up robinhood apple you'll see like at the the top link will be their page for apple so for us it's the exact same thing but with 13k tickers yeah interesting um and then how do you make sure your tickers beat out other people tickers like robinhood you have to get more backlinks on all those 13 000 pages right yeah that's a problem and it's done right so when you look up stock alerts you get us first if you look up apple stock alerts we might not be first so that's something we're working on right now because you know beating out uh something like robin hood where you have thousands of backlinks linking to that one ticker is a little bit harder how do you do it um right now we're just trying to scale our seo up as much as possible get backlinks uh just get users to go to the site to raise our domain authority for the most part so so 600 customers 10 bucks a month you guys are doing about six thousand dollars a month right now in revenue yeah we just hit 5.5 if it fluctuates a little bit but we just hit 5.5 okay and have you guys dropped the company or raised no boots dropped fully that's great love that and then why did you decide to do this i mean you're doing that part-time however i mean how are you making enough money to like pay for your rent and your food um i mean i work a full-time job we all work full-time jobs and we're all the engineers also work as engineers um in their full-time jobs so basically what we do is just unless there's a fire during the week we just do management stuff sending out newsletters things like that and on the weekend we do sprints where we build new features new triggers uh we we found our we think we found a good product market fit so right now we're just expanding our trigger selection we're working on the android app uh trying to gain one-to-one parity between the web app and the ios app so that's been pretty much it what's your churn look like on these folks each month yeah so our retention is about 75 percent it fluctuates between 70 to 80 so sure and fluctuates 20 30. you're talking about annually uh monthly oh holy cow that's a lot of churn yeah i mean it's 20 to 30 churn per month that's you can't build a real sas company without much turn that's the problem so it is a lifestyle business and people they go through trading sprints so you know one month you might trade actively one month you might not so we see a lot of customers like deactivate their subscription for a month then come back so to combat that we're actually working on creating annual subscriptions now which should help bring that down a ton because we've also gotten requests for it that's right yeah yeah so i mean when you back into your fully weighted cac to get a new 10 a month customer what would you say your cac is including things like ceo and sorry your seo and content person salary things like that sorry can you define cac for me customer acquisition cost over okay so right now we're going very low on marketing so including all our costs i'd say for a 10 customer we pay maybe three but yeah mostly it's because as of today uh 70 of our customers find us organically we found that metric off our app store so we can see the number of organic downloads so people search for us and then download it very cool all right man let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book ah favorite business book i guess i read a lot of stuff by robert kiyosaki so anything pretty much by him i enjoy number two is there a ceo you're following or studying oh i mean i definitely this is kind of the typical response everyone finds elon musk interesting but i find him especially interesting just his background in growing up number three how many hours or so what's your what's your favorite online tool for building your company oh i've got to say firebase just because it scales uh incredibly well there it has its own architecture and design issues but yeah number four how many hours of sleep breaking every night seven and yeah you what's your situation married single kiddos uh single no kids all right uh and how old are you i am 21 21 last question take us back a year what do you wish you knew when you were 20. um honestly i've i'd like to say i have no like regrets i don't really need to wish anything yeah it's not about regret it's just something it's just something you wish you knew oh uh honestly when it comes to our business specifically i wish we'd implemented pricing tiers from the start the second we implemented it we doubled our mrr almost instantly so that was kind of huge if we did it from the start we'd have a lot more cash right now guys there you have it stock alarm dot io tweets texts phone messages push notifications to stock traders about critical updates in the market 600 customers paying 10 bucks a month somewhere between 5 500 and 6 000 a month right now and revenue churn is way too high but they're working on figuring out how to bring that down with annual plans yahya is running all their growth yaya thank you for taking us to the top thank you nathan appreciate it