How TimeBolt CEO Doug Wulff grew to $233K revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

timebolt dot IO they're adding 10 new customers per day doing 12 500 per month just in recurring Revenue they've also sold almost 300 grand total sales and lifetime sales since they launched in 2019 they help all those YouTube creators businesses on Tick Tock Etc quickly edit videos they save a lot of time a lot of money that's why people are willing to pay them 17 a month over a thousand monthly paying customers profitable today team of two and then lean on five other contractors bootstrap to which we love hey folks my guest today is Doug Wolf He is building time Bolt the world's fastest video timeline Editor to lead dead air and speed up silence instantly and rapidly cut through boring footage the time bolt dot IO WRA tickets to the top yes all right fill in more your history there because time Bolt's not your first gig how many years have you been in startups uh for about 15 years I've been making videos since 2001 so it's been quite some time that I was learning how to leverage video to to sell product and sell software this for my first gig was uh selling squirrel guards that go on substation power lines that co-invented so oh wow is this your first SAS company uh no yes this is my first this is my first SAS startup uh we've I've raised capital for more Capital intensive businesses uh that I that I founded we're a little too early in 2000 14 2015 with the live EDM TV network using robotic camera systems that didn't require a manned operator so we had some of the smartest guys on the planet you know making robotic cameras move like humans and capturing content without actually being there from an iPad 1800 miles away you were early we're a little early but uh what was nice with time bolt we're certainly getting into Enterprise video and how that's been exploding since you know 2017. and I think just like with anyone I was just looking for ways to stand out and and be heard more effectively and I saw this effect on LinkedIn and I may have been in video some level of video for 15 years but it wasn't until I saw the jump cut being used on a video on LinkedIn I was like wow this guy never stops to breathe it's like he doesn't have time to think and it's just like thought after thought after thought that's exactly the way my brain wants it on on LinkedIn and so I I got to um looking at it and doing the same effect and I was like there is no way YouTubers that are doing this effect are doing this by hand because it would take takes five minutes for every one minute video so Doug they're using a lot of your or technology like yours to do these videos are you now sell are you B2B or b2c are you selling to YouTube creators YouTube creators business uh business creators we've got the gaming content creators so 35 of our so what's the what's the average customer pay you then per month so we have we sell a monthly annual lifetime subscription the monthly is 17 a month the annual is 97 a month and the lifetime is a quarter of a thousand dollars I just like okay how many okay give us a Time on here when did you launch the business December of 2019 we launched the business I'm a co-founder I have a technical co-founder I'm in charge of the marketing distribution my partner Quinton pamenta the brains behind the you know technology uh handles all the product developments who owns who owns more equity has that backfired or have you it's worked so far it's it's it's worked so far we're entirely bootstrapped right so we didn't have to bring in an outside investor in order to get the business up and running like I've done and had my soul sucked out of my life you know for for years because when you also my language yeah I mean like for years but you're you know you're at the bottom of the ocean and you're the only only one there and you know it gets more and considerably more expensive to fail each time you know you get older oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview 2019 December you get going you sell this 250 lifetime plan how many lifetime plans have you sold to date um over 1300 wow that's a ton so 1300 times two you that's 325 000 of sales from a lifetime plan yes and we're around that we're around that total sales how do you tell me how you do that how do you go how do you go sell to 1300 people okay but but where where we also we have 900 we have over a thousand Active Pain subscribers as well so monthly monthly and annual correct so we're at about you know twelve five recurring revenue and about 20 a month with the actual with the lifetimes so twelve five twelve thousand five hundred per month they're about 150 000 per year not including lifetimes correct and if you're at 12 500 a day monthly again not including lifetimes where were you exactly one year ago do you remember yeah almost exactly half we've been growing at about 11 month over month when you take all the months consecutive and that's about 11 month over month growth and that's great that's Pro and and that's net profit the numbers that were we're talking about because what's nice about this model we decide wait I don't understand that what do you mean that's net profit how do you pay salaries and marketing I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry that's gross profit I apologize for that okay okay because we're a downloadable software it actually sits right there on your computer so your pot your computer is what's powering all the algorithms so you know we pay maybe seven bucks a month to Amazon you know for Server just for actually downloading the software so the expense of running these high these large gigabit files you know long video files is uh negligible it doesn't cost us anything additional okay and how many folks are full-time today two we just have a team of two and I we of course open that up to contractors whether that's design contractors you know technology creators um over the course of time so we have about four or five of those what kind of contractor did you pay the most money to in November here of 2022 a designer a video editor uh something else something you won't be able to see until another two weeks but what's sitting behind all this is a brand new Brand Story uh new home page we've so designer UI ux person yes and then the implementation of it on the web it's all created now we're just we're filling in a couple pieces where tell me how you found this contractor that you trusted with the whole website or you write that's that is something I've been able to I've had good luck going out to Fiverr and upwork and finding decent designers and it's certainly a level like when you start talking about logos and some of the more specific creative Graphics or typography you know like 45 bucks 100 bucks how you might get something that you really like you don't you know you just kind of come up in your head hey I'm willing for for this type of asset I'd be willing to spend 300 for it you know go ahead and get on upwork and ask three or four people to to do those things um if possible but I have a resource I had a resource that I went and asked I said hey look I'm you know I don't want Amateur hour when it comes to design what I end up finding out is that you the founder are the one that's responsible for really coming up with the content the flow the ideas behind it the designer just comes in and adds that depth and and professionalism to to their brand message they're not going to come up with some new brand story that's going to hook and create a category that's not this is Doug what do you what do you pay for all of your fixed headcount expenses including contractors monthly right now um what's been off I'm not sure yes absolutely okay that's good my partner and I basically split we basically split Revenue costs things like that are you guys profitable today yes even after paying yourself uh I mean I have a positive bank account I mean I haven't always had that so well let's just say this let's say you're doing 12 500 per month you each pay yourself two grand a month so there's 4K of expenses then there's other expenses that leaves maybe like whatever two three grand hitting the bottom line of like business profit after you pay yourself are you guys profitable using that sort of strategy yes yes so we're so we're the Investments that we're making so instead of taking home you know nine thousand dollars we each take home six thousand dollars and pay you know the put that other money to work in other ways how do you think about that I mean one of the things that I I try and find with clearly creators early on you know Indie hacker creators like you is like are they good Capital allocators so typically a lot of these folks when they're pre a million in AR like you'll just pay yourself a big salary which is great nothing against it love it beautiful lifestyle we all start like that the great ones are that builds you know 5 10 15 million a month in rev sorry a year in Revenue they re they know where to take those dollars put them back into the machine and build the machine have you found that flywheel yet or he's still working on it we're still working on it I think so much we we're in a really interesting space with video and just using some of the features for example we have coming out uncheck okay there's a lot of funny jokes and a lot of satire comedy that can be done with something called uncheck you know uncheck.com and so we just now feel within the last you know two three months that we have really tacked on the additional features to really begin to to work to create our own category and create some category defining video content that's where stuff that gets shared naturally organically that applies to people uh you know that you don't have to pin put such a specific Market in order for it to work I think is is a Holy Grail when it comes to uh content yep that makes a ton of sense talk to me about growth though you never answered how you got a thousand paying customers the the first part was was there were blogs and forms all over the Internet that were asking were that were creators it was just YouTubers suffering in silence in 2019 they were just like is there anything that cuts dead air you know there's just huge forms about these conversations and I knew it's like name one name a big form you got customers from a dope uh adobe's like even on Adobe competitors forums I mean the competitors have are name linked out to time bolt like Camtasia of filmora like filmora has been a fantastic referral source do you pay them or they give you free referrals no that's that's all free so I made sure that I was found by those that were looking for a solution the problem at least would find a link which then obviously helped with my SEO I do have a search engine optimization background uh just like with other like any you know any founder would have that you know had the bootstrap its own companies and create growth how many how many organic hits do you get from Google right now per month that are free so we're averaging between 150 to 200 unique visits a day okay we are uh we've got we're basically selling five to ten on the higher side of that 10 new subscribers a day the churn on the you know you get a decent High churn on the monthly subscribers but what what's funny is you just start canceling them out every time one doesn't uh the payment doesn't go through what we find is there's just payments that are only meant to go through once and what's nice is we've got such a we've got a product that's once they start using it they don't want to stop and as soon as that's gone you know they're resigning back up so we're averaging four uh recurrence uh so so we're averaging about uh four different recurring business days so on Monday through Friday you get 200 hits from Google organically you convert 10 or sorry 10 of those into a paid customer so you're adding like something between 100 and 200 new customers per month and dropping like and you lose because what happens is they end up buying they either do two things one of the they they drop off because of the payment and then come back on and sign on that's why our average return is four uh or they or they just buy a Lifetime right and so we're trying to reach that point where we get up enough recurrent monthly recurring Revenue that we could comfortably you know we could at least live on that and then begin to increase the price of our of our lifetime today yes makes tons of sense man this is quite a story you've got uh you guys can check out timebolt dot IO let's wrap up here Doug with the famous five number one favorite Business book snow leopard number two is there a CEO you're following or studying Scott belski number messy middle that's a good one number uh three what's your favorite online tool for building time bolt besides your own Thrive card and uh number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night seven okay situation married single kids oh it's a mess I can't well I'm a 44 year old dude lives in an apartment right there's there's uh you know I I stay here so I can be with my kids and stay with my kids but I learned a lot of life lessons but I am single to put fully into my company or four kids you said no no uh well I have three one of them is a marine and grown up and oh wow all right so not married three kiddos and you're is it your 40. yes 44. 44 okay last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. if you do startups for too long you are not you are you become unhirable in the marketplace this is very true guys time Vault dot IO they're adding 10 new customers per day doing 12 500 per month just in recurring Revenue they've also sold almost 300 grand total sales and lifetime sales since they launched in 2019 they help all those YouTube creators businesses on Tick Tock Etc quickly edit videos they save a lot of time a lot of money that's why people are willing to pay them 17 a month over a thousand monthly paying customers profitable today team of two and then lean on five other contractors bootstrap to which we love Doug thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for 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