How TimeBolt Reached $150K ARR and 1,000 Active Subscribers with a Team of 2 (Interview with CEO Doug Wulff)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Timebolt.io. They're adding 10 new customers per day doing 12,500 per month just in recurring revenue. They've also sold almost $300,000 total sales and lifetime sales since they launched in 2019. They help all those YouTube creators, businesses on TikTok, etcetera, quickly edit videos. They save a lot of time, a lot of money. That's why people are willing to pay them $17 per month. Over a thousand monthly paying customers profitable today. Team of two, and they then lean

00:23on five other contractors. Bootstrapped, which we love. Hey, folks. My guest today is Doug Wulff. He is building timebolt, the world's fastest video timeline editor. Delete dead air and speed up silence instantly and rapidly cut through boring footage. Is it timebolt.io? Doug, you ready to take us to the top?

Doug Wulff

00:43>> Yes.

Doug's Background and Path to TimeBolt

Nathan Latka

00:44Alright. Fill in more of your history there because timebolt's not your first gig. How many years have you been in startups?

Doug Wulff

00:46>> For about fifteen 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 my first gig was, selling squirrel guards that go on substation power lines that go invented.

Nathan Latka

01:02Oh, wow. Is this your first SaaS company?

Doug Wulff

01:05>> No. Yes. This is my first this is my first SaaS startup. We've I've raised capital for more capital intensive businesses that I founded. We're a little too early in 2014, 2015 with a 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 1,800 miles away.

Nathan Latka

01:36You were early.

First SaaS Company and Early Ventures

Doug Wulff

01:38>> We're a little early, but what was nice with timebolt was 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 be heard more effectively. And I saw this effect on LinkedIn and I I may have been in video, some level of video for fifteen years, but it wasn't until I saw the jump cut

02:02>> 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. And that's exactly the way my brain wants it on LinkedIn. And so I got to 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

02:24>> take takes five minutes for every one minute video.

Nathan Latka

02:27So, Doug, they're using a lot of your or technology like yours to do these videos. Are you now sell are you b to b or b to c? Are you selling to YouTube creators?

Doug Wulff

02:35>> YouTube creators, business to business creators. We've got gaming content creators at 35% of our

Nathan Latka

02:44So what's the what's the average customer pay you then per month?

Doug Wulff

02:47>> 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 $250. I just like that.

Nathan Latka

03:02How many okay. Give us a timeline here. When did you launch the business?

Launch Date and Co-Founder Structure

Doug Wulff

03:05>> December 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, Quinston Pimenta, the brains behind the, you know, technology handles all the product development.

Nathan Latka

03:19Who owns who owns more equity?

Doug Wulff

03:21>> We're it's it's a it's a fair split. It's a fair split between us both.

Nathan Latka

03:25Has that backfired or have you it's worked so far?

Doug Wulff

03:28>> 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'd done and had my soul sucked out of my life, you know, for for years. When you also

Nathan Latka

03:43See my language, baby.

Doug Wulff

03:44>> Know, you're one to follow.

Nathan Latka

03:45My language.

Doug Wulff

03:46>> Yeah. I mean, like, years, but you're, you know, you're at the bottom of the ocean and you're only one there and, you know, it gets more considerably more expensive to fail each time, you know, you you get older.

Nathan Latka

03:57Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:20your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

04:44get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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. 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

Equity Split and Bootstrapping

Nathan Latka

05:06not 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 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

05:32going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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

05:54if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into

06:20the interview. Twenty nineteen December, you get going. You sell this $250 lifetime plan. How many lifetime plans have you sold to date?

Lifetime Plans Sold and Total Sales

Doug Wulff

06:27>> Over 1,300. And

Nathan Latka

06:30Wow. That's a ton. So 1,300 times two fifty that's $325,000 of sales from a lifetime plan.

Doug Wulff

06:35>> Yes. And we're around that. We're we're around that total

Nathan Latka

06:40How do you tell me how you do that. How do you go how do you go sell to 1,300 people?

Active Subscribers and Recurring Revenue

Doug Wulff

06:44>> Okay. But but where where we also we have 900 we have over a thousand active paying subscribers as well.

Nathan Latka

06:52Monthly.

Doug Wulff

06:54>> Monthly and annual. Correct. So we're at about, you know, $12,500 recurring revenue and about 20 a month with the actual with the lifetimes.

Nathan Latka

07:02So $12,500, 12,500 per month or about a $150,000 per year, not including lifetimes?

Doug Wulff

07:08>> Correct.

Nathan Latka

07:09And if you're at 12,500 today monthly, again, not including lifetimes, where were you exactly one year ago? Do you remember?

Doug Wulff

07:15>> Almost exactly half. We've been growing at about 11% month over month when you take all the months consecutive and and that's about 11% month over month growth.

Nathan Latka

07:24That's Great.

Doug Wulff

07:26>> That's pro and and and that's net profit, the numbers that we're we're talking about, because what's nice about this model, we decide

Nathan Latka

07:34Wait. Wait. I don't understand that. What do you mean that's net profit? How do you pay salaries and marketing?

Doug Wulff

07:38>> I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That's gross profit. I apologize for that.

Nathan Latka

07:41Okay. Okay.

Doug Wulff

07:42>> Because we're a downloadable software, it actually sits right there on your computer, so your computer is what's powering all the algorithms, so you know we pay maybe $7 a month to Amazon, you know, a server, just for actually downloading the software, so the expense of running these high these large gigabit files, you know, long video files is negligible. It just doesn't cost us anything additional.

Team Size and Contractors

Nathan Latka

08:07Okay. And how many folks are full time today?

Doug Wulff

08:10>> 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 over the course of time. So we have about four or five of those.

Nathan Latka

08:24What kind of contractor did you pay the most money to in November here of twenty twenty two? A designer, a video editor, something else?

Doug Wulff

08:32>> 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, new homepage. We've

Nathan Latka

08:43So designer UI UX person?

Doug Wulff

08:45>> 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.

Nathan Latka

08:50Where tell me how you found this contractor that you trusted with the whole website rewrite.

Doug Wulff

08:56>> 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, at, like, $45, a $100, hell, you might get something that you really like, you don't, you know, you just kinda come up in your head, hey, I'm willing for this type of asset,

09:20>> I'd be willing to spend $300 for it, know, go ahead and get on Upwork and ask three or four people to do those things.

09:28>> But I have a resource, I had a resource that I went and asked and 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 professionalism to to that brand message. They're not gonna come

09:53>> up with some new brand story that's gonna hook and create a category that's not the case.

Nathan Latka

09:58So Doug, do you what do you pay for all of your fixed headcount expenses, including contractors monthly right now?

Doug Wulff

10:04>> What's in both? I'm not sure. I'm

Nathan Latka

10:09You pay yourself?

Doug Wulff

10:10>> Yes. Absolutely.

Nathan Latka

10:11Okay. That's good.

Doug Wulff

10:12>> So my my partner and I basically split we basically split revenue costs, things like that.

Profitability and Salary Structure

Nathan Latka

10:18Are you guys profitable today?

Doug Wulff

10:20>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

10:21Even after paying yourself?

Doug Wulff

10:24>> I I have a a positive bank account. I mean, I haven't always had that.

Nathan Latka

10:28So Let me well, let's just say this. Let's say you're doing 12,500 per month. You each pay yourself $2,000 a month. So there's 4 k of expenses there, then there's other expenses. That leaves maybe, like, whatever, 2, 3 k hitting the bottom line of like business profit after you pay yourself. Are you guys profitable using that sort of strategy?

Doug Wulff

10:42>> Yes. Yes. So we're so we're the investments that we're making, so instead of taking home, you know, 9,000, we each take home $6,000 and pay, you know, the put that other money to work in other ways.

Nathan Latka

10:56But How do you think about that? I mean, one of things that I 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 1,000,000 in ARR, 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,

11:155, 10, 15 million a month in rev sorry, a year in revenue. They re they they know where to take those dollars, put them back into the machine, and build the machine. Have you found that flywheel yet? Are you still working on it?

Doug Wulff

11:27>> We're still working on it. I 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, check. 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

11:52>> 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, that applies to people, you know, that that you don't have to pin put such a specific market in order for it to work, think, is is a holy grail when it comes to content.

Nathan Latka

12:10Yep. That makes a ton of sense. Talk to me about growth, though. You never answered how you got a thousand paying customers.

How TimeBolt Acquired Its First Customers

Doug Wulff

12:16>> The the first part was was there were blogs and forums 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 forums about these conversations. And I knew

Nathan Latka

12:33once Like, name one. Name a big forum you got customers from.

Doug Wulff

12:36>> Adobe's. Like, even on Adobe, competitors forums. I mean, the competitors have our name linked out to timebolt like Camtasia, Filmora. Like, Filmora has been a fantastic referral source.

Nathan Latka

12:51Do you pay them or they give you free referrals?

SEO Strategy and Competitor Referrals

Doug Wulff

12:53>> No. That's that's all free. So I made sure that I was found by those that were looking for a solution to the problem at least would find a link, which then obviously helped my SEO. I do have a search engine optimization background, just like with other, like any co you know, any founder would have that, you know, I had to bootstrap his own companies and create growth.

Nathan Latka

13:11So how many how many organic hits do you get from Google right now per month that are free?

Organic Traffic and Daily New Subscribers

Doug Wulff

13:16>> So we're averaging between 150 to 200 unique visits a day. Okay. We are, we've got, we're basically selling five to 10 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, the payment doesn't go through. What we find is there's just payments that are only meant

13:44>> 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 re signing back up. So we're averaging four, recurrence. So we're averaging about, four different recurring business days.

Nathan Latka

14:01So on Monday through Friday, you get 200 hits from Google organically. You convert or sorry, 10 of those into a paid customer. So you're adding like something between a hundred and two hundred new customers per month.

Doug Wulff

14:10>> And dropping, you like and you lose because what happens is they end up buying, the other do two things. One of the they drop off because of the payment and then come back on and sign on, that's why our average return is four, or they or they just buy a lifetime, right? And so we're trying to reach that point where we get up enough recurring monthly recurring revenue that we could comfortably, you know, we could at

14:33>> least live on that and then begin to increase the price of our of our lifetime to it.

Nathan Latka

14:39Yep. Makes tons of sense, man. This is quite a story you've got. You guys can check it out timebolt.io. Let's wrap up here, Doug, with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book?

Doug Wulff

14:49>> Favorite favorite, Snow Leopard.

Nathan Latka

14:52Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Doug Wulff

14:56>> Scott Belsky.

Nathan Latka

14:58Number messy Middle. That's a good one. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building timebolt besides your own?

Doug Wulff

15:04>> Thrivecart.

Nathan Latka

15:06And number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Doug Wulff

15:10>> Seven.

Nathan Latka

15:11Okay. Situation, married, single, kids?

Doug Wulff

15:14>> Oh, it's a mess. I can't well, I'm a 44 year old dude lives in an apartment. Right? And there's there's a you know, I I I stay here so I can be with my kids and and stay with my kids, but I learned a lot of life lessons. But I am single to put fully into my company.

Nathan Latka

15:28Four four kids, you said?

Doug Wulff

15:30>> No. No. Well, I have three. One of them is a marine and grown up and

Nathan Latka

15:34Oh, wow. Alright. So so not married, three kiddos, and you're you said you're 40?

Doug Wulff

15:39>> Yes. 44.

Nathan Latka

15:4044. Okay. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Doug Wulff

15:48>> If you do startups for too long, you are not you are you become unhirable in the marketplace.

Closing Advice and Wrap-Up

Nathan Latka

15:55This is very true, guys. Timebolt.io. They're adding 10 new customers per day doing 12,500 per month just in recurring revenue. They've also sold almost $300,000 total sales and lifetime sales since they launched in 2019. They help all those YouTube creators, businesses on TikTok, etcetera, quickly edit videos. They save a lot of time, a lot of money. That's why people are willing to pay them $17 per month. Over a thousand monthly paying customers profitable today. Team of

16:19two, and they then lean on five other contractors, bootstrapped, which we love. Doug, thanks for taking us to the top.

Doug Wulff

16:24>> Thank you very much, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

16:27One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it. And the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one

16:52p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the 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 SaaS world, whether it's

17:13an 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 wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS 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

17:35are saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have

17:54to counter those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.