How Superlemon CEO Preetam Nath grew Superlemon to $45.3M revenue and 1.7K customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is pre tom noff he is a problem solver and entrepreneur from the heart he's a chilled out guy at a party who will talk about living a good life and building a great business that business is called super lemon dot x y z pre-tom you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right what is super lemon how do you guys make money uh super lemon is a whatsapp plugin for shopify stores it just does two things it adds a chat button to your store so your customers can contact you via whatsapp and it lets you send messages to your customers regarding their order abandoned card tracking information again via whatsapp we charge a simple monthly subscription fee and we also charge per message for the automated messages that's basically it so breakdown what was revenue last month uh this month we have closed uh we are about to close that we just crossed 29 000 last month was 25 500. and where were you exactly a year ago in terms of revenue uh so a year ago was july 2019 and we had just crossed two thousand dollars or 2500. so you've gone from 2500 bucks a month in revenue to almost 30 000 a month in revenue in a period of 12 months yes incredible it's all sas uh so our revenue is split into two components uh the 10 monthly subscription fee and then the message cost that merchants pay for we make a double digit margin on the messages because we have to pay whatsapp uh for every message too it's like an sms model but the channel is whatsapp in this case uh so our revenue is equally split 50 is just from the subscription fee and 50 is from messages so just be clear so who do you pay to access the whatsapp api to essentially facilitate sending them messages uh so you have to pay whatsapp a fee but you don't directly work with whatsapp you work with one of their service providers for example twilio as a service provider so whatsapp has a message fee which is fixed so if i have to send a message to india it's a fixed rate it's another it's a different rate if i have to send it to a us number and then a service like twilio charges a small fee on top of it like point zero zero five dollars per message uh whatever we make after that is our profit do you always just take total costs and double it or do you charge a fit flax a flat fixed fee to your customers uh so our we also charge customers based on the country uh to which they are sending messages and we have a formula which makes sure that we make between around 20 to 25 percent of profit at the end of everything for the messages have you done this bootstrapped or did you raise capital uh bootstrap wow and how many people are on the team it's just me and my co-founders uncle two of us are you guys do you love each other did you just split it 50 50 down the middle yeah that was the plan i mean the plan was to make three thousand dollars a month and have a good like chill life but it just ended up at thirty thousand uh totally unexpected we just kept focusing on building product and making it better for customers this outcome was not expected well i like to say like you you can't just say you accidentally hit 30k otherwise you don't you don't deserve it you have to understand what you did to earn it because that's how you then double it and triple it so you know i understand you're being humble but but help me understand i mean how did you go and add you know well first of all how many customers are using it uh so we have 20 000 users out of it 1700 are paying uh so if i i watch a show so i know the next question the rpo is 17 uh uh but our churn rate is high you listen to the show you're a fan uh i i love the show because i don't find another show where you just take a business and break it down like this it's exciting to look at businesses in a breakdown format where i can know what's really happening uh because i can always hear the founders vision and what they want to do in their life and all that but i want to see business metrics i want to see a business story i love that well you and i are the same then so 20 000 users you've converted 1700 to paid uh how did you get the 20 000 users uh 100 of our users are from the shopify app store uh when we launched uh we had a few people who had already made it big in shopify who mentored us who told us how to do distribution right and to do distribution right you have to basically be the best at customer support so if you if you look at our app listing we are five star rated with 500 plus reviews which gives us a really good ranking in the app store uh we wanted to rank for only one keyword whatsapp so for the longest time until at least last month we were showing up first if you sure if you searched for whatsapp and we got all our users from there uh i we do know that around 20 of users come from our chat widget on merchants websites which has a powered by super lemon uh uh 20 people come to the listing page but we lose them after that we don't know how many actually sign up and pay but yeah i would say that 100 of our customers are from the shopify app store how did you incentivize okay so one of your earlier customers that came on they used you they had a great experience you have to like ask people to go leave a review it's not something organic people think to go do especially a good review because most people if they hate you they go you know piss on you all over your you know app exchange listing so so what did you do what did you just sort of push people that had a good experience to go leave a review uh so there are two ways one is uh when somebody reaches out to us we make sure we give the best best possible customer support like i treat them the way i would want to be treated if i was vip at a party and it just turned out that i'm doing it for a ten dollar product but i would do it for 100 a thousand dollar product too and this formula works and the second thing is when customers have reached a certain milestone inside the app for example they have gained they made thousand dollars plus using our app recover thousand dollars plus cards in a month uh we have set up automated triggers which send email saying your experience has been great if you have some feedback share it with us but we would love it if you write a review for us on the shopify app store so that's when we see really long form authentic reviews come out and the other ones are the shorter support was great the app is looking really good i set it up very easily those kind of reviews okay i'm in the shopify app store i imagine the number of new years you get from shopify will drastically increase if you move from the number two position which you're in right now to number one the problem is the number one spot is by this company called push daddy which looks like they don't even compete directly with you is that accurate uh yeah they have a chat button uh that's it yeah so yeah so you're focused on a specific use case e-commerce brands that that want to solve abandoned cart using whatsapp messages they do not have that same target yeah they don't uh but again uh i i would i would be lying if i say that what we have built so far cannot be replicated by others so our strategy for the last few months and going forward is to build things that competitors cannot copy or build very easily uh and we're working with whatsapp partners closely to build something like that uh but it's not yet ready it will be unveiled in the next one or two months how do you make sure you stay above the people right behind you uh soft push soft pulse info tech they have 472 reviews you have 568 you have a 5.0 rating they're at 4.7 yeah so when we started uh 14 15 months ago they were at 350 reviews so we're not worried about them we're only worried about people like push daddy who game the shopify app store review system to get i don't know how many do they have 1200 reviews in three 1 340 what did they do to game it uh basically pop-up spam your user when you install the app after you activate it saying please ever leave a review we are completely free we don't charge anything there are a lot of apps that are doing this and shopify app developers including myself and my friends we are pushing the shopify team to address this because you don't want low quality apps to flood the system ecosystem because genuine developers will feel like why am i playing by the rules or merchants will have a terrible experience and therefore leave the platform so i know that it's a transitory problem but as of today it's a little best if i just installed a new platform like push daddy and the first thing i saw was go leave the app on the on like a review i'd go well i don't even know the tool yet i'm just gonna give a one star review so you'll leave me alone why don't why doesn't their rating take a hit because they're so aggressive so uh they're not the only ones who do this and i i was very curious at first but i've arrived at the law 4.8 it turns out if you just push people to write a review right after they've activated the app...