How Storytap CEO Bernadette Butler grew Storytap to $2.9M revenue and 45 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is bernadette butler she has 20 years experience in advertising working with some of the greatest brands of our time with two ads on the world's funniest rio bernat is the ceo and co-founder of storytap a diy video platform for marketers to direct own and micro influence authentic video stories at scale bernadette are you ready to take us to the top yes i am all right what does all that really smart stuff i just said mean all right what my background or the actual platform the platform what's the platform doing how do you make money yeah so so we work yeah we work with we work with brands specifically marketers who want product reviews testimonials content stories and they need them from wherever their customers are so our platform allows them to dive in and literally launch a video campaign in minutes and collect all those amazing video stories that move their business forward uh super fast and high volume so whether it's their content it's going to sell more products on their website etc and what's how do you make money is it is it sas based yeah fast based exactly so we do annual contracts for enterprise and for smb we do monthly monthly contracts and what would you just do just to avoid going on kind of every customer cohort what would you say on average a customer pays per month for this uh i would say on okay so our smb on average is around 500 bucks a month okay um and then most of our enterprise are around five thousand dollars a month okay and would you say break down their revenue for me does like 80 come from smb or and 20 enterprise or vice versa or what um right now we're really kind of i'd say 40 enterprise 60 smb okay we're trying to swing it more enterprise right now of course yeah that's the that's the move yeah that's the move so so if i did wait it kind of do a weighted average across your entire base it's probably fair to say a 1500 or two grand per month kind of average point is fair um [Music] or no you in terms in terms of what they pay on average or you really segment them we really do segment them we really segment them yeah okay very good yeah so give me give me put let's put this on the timeline now so when did you launch this company all right so so the full scoop was we started in 2015 building the tech with a hypothesis and um we did not have the right hypothesis had a massive pivot spent another year fixing that pivot um so really this year january was our first year of sas sales uh so we're in the thick of it so that's great we had a non-diy platform that we just had to hustle and figure out how to sell it and it was really manual and kind of clunky for us to to do it to prove it out but you're talking like it was like professional service agency kind of work yeah like we had the platform at captioning scale but it wasn't diy like the marketers had to work with us like it wasn't as smooth and we needed to prove that out before we invested in this full automated sas diy platform so that we launched that in january okay so been selling now for a couple months how many customers are you up to today uh we've got about i think we just tipped over 45. 45 okay and that's a combination of both smb and enterprise yes okay now assuming those are all the smallest let's say smbs at 500 bucks a month that would put you out about 20 30 grand a month in revenue is that accurate uh well uh monthly month reoccurring we're around 15 right now um but that doesn't include uh enterprise so the enterprise is again segmented differently we've got about five big enterprise right now that are having fun and tons of volume that's good when you said okay so 15 grand a month right now just from the smb space you just said that the smb channel does about 60 so 60 is 15 which means the 40 percent is call it maybe seven ish so all in you're doing what 22 23 grand a month yeah around there yep yep okay and drive talk to me about growth a year ago at the same exact time was it truly zero in sas revenue because you didn't have any we were doing one off so we would basically um send over an invoice that included our time the you know our hard costs and we basically want to see you know how much are people willing to pay for this kind of thing so we get it out last year around 250 000 total and that was really tiny team like me my co-founder and one other person part-time to try to figure it out what do you have today in terms of team we're still kind of small we're five full-time but um and and we're we're bootstrapped so um we've raised a little bit but for the most part we're bootstrapped how much have you raised so all up we've raised around 230. okay and was that like a just kind of a seed or a seed round on convertible node or yeah the the first one was just to get the idea off the ground it was a safe uh a safe mix with common and um and then the other part was just an investment with techstars so we joined the texture oh good great organization which which uh which where are you based which firm did you go with it was a new brand new program called techstars anywhere fantastic virtual slash in person mix for those that are parents like i am with kids or they are unable to travel for the four months so where are you based personally i'm in vancouver canada ah great there's something up there in the water i'll tell you what a lot of great startups coming out of canada yeah we're pumping them out and where's the rest of the team remote all around the world uh no they're all they're all here in vancouver yeah oh good okay so everybody's in canada um what about some other economic stuff here so so what's you know china's critical in a sas business what does your churn look like yeah so we you know ideally we want churn to be around five percent that the problem that we kind of discovered really i'd say three months in is that we've got customers that have never paid fast like monthly for video it's always been here's a chunk of money thank you for my one video and we flip we're flipping that so it's like no no you're getting like hundreds of video for that price and so we're kind of um we did experience a bit higher turn and now we're starting to drive that down by better qualifying who is using our platform um so what was the bad churn historically are they taking like eight nine ten percent a month um the bat the bad churn is we we really we were up to like 20. we're okay you know so we had to fill that bucket back in which is disheartening you know that's and that's logo churn per month sorry that's logo churn per month instead of revenue churn yeah logo logo churn yeah okay individual companies yep and so you're you're focused on driving that down by doing a better job restricting who you let in in the first place is that what i heard yeah like you know we're you know early in january we were just so excited to get this going and people were excited and we just say yeah let's let's get going but we didn't qualify that well and so we now know we only work with marketers and and actually sizes of companies you have to have at least two marketers to actually understand what we're offering and you need to have done video before if you pass that test then you're going to see the value ongoing value for us to pay off that sas platform what are you paying to acquire these customers what's your tack so you know we really acquire customers a couple of different ways one is through events which is we just uh we'll sponsor a marketing event they see our tech they're like wow this is great we are doing paid acquisition but um we're actually not paying for that we have a deal with an agency where they're um they're gonna get a commission off sales from it which is great because we both have skin in the game what's the what's that you're telling 30 a sale what's the commission uh it's a bit of a mix so they get a bit off the first month and then a percentage thereafter so it's 20 thereafter yeah yeah okay so again if it's 20 you know i mean is that fair to say you're paying on average kind of 20 of lifetime value or first year revenue on acquisition that would be fair yes that would be fair yeah okay yeah i mean we're obviously talking about a small cohort here with 45 folks going through so you're probably still fine-tuning some of this stuff but yeah of course yeah if so if you were spending again about 20 of 500 bucks a month so it's six grand a year right 20 of that what does that come out was it like a grant you pay up to a grand new acquire a six grand to your customer that feels a bit rich um okay yeah that does feel uh a bit high but um but you're very much you're very much going kind of on the back of the napkin we are like our paid acquisition literally just kicked off so we're literally like two weeks in after we edit out all of our research what are our target audience look like you know we're really focused on facebook right now so we're just starting that journey with a few in the hopper and we've got to make sure that that performs better for us another thing on our business side is we've got this really sexy platform that directs storytelling but for us we're seeing a lot more...