How Trend CEO Ramon Berrios grew Trend to $16.5M revenue and 60 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is ramon barrios he was born and raised in puerto rico previous owner of socially rich and then took up to 50 000 bucks in mrr when he moved to austin socially rich got shut down by facebook and then he built trend.io within that same year that's what he's focused on now ramon are you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right yeah so you're in a tough space building on the back of a whale like facebook can be good and bad it ate your first business it sound like so what happened was socially rich did it just slowly lose all the revenue or did you sell it off or what yeah we actually lost all the revenue um we figured it was a lot to do there with those clients we had about 5 000 contact information of people that we serve free trials to and customers about 500 active subscriptions or so so there was something to do there but us the time being socially rich i actually became an influencer myself and um i was able to work with agencies small businesses and got to understand the space and notice uh the pain there was in acquiring content and working with influencers uh so so we knew there was some damage to do there so we just decided to move on and focus on something else okay so you basically kind of just shut it down so how'd you get up with the idea with the trend yeah so when working with um influencers we noticed that when we were looking at all these other platforms there was sort of like a database where you would search and find influencers but tricky part is that that is not even a quarter of the whole process of getting to work with influencers searching for them is only the beginning and uh the biggest challenge when using these platforms is that it's kind of odd how the influencers get to propose whatever they want to get paid for a post uh in this so new so we just decided to build a platform where influencers would just get paid with free product uh and there was no platform really that would work like this so we turned the table and built a marketplace where a brand creates a listing and we have a vetted network of influencers so it's invite only um and everyone has to get approved everyone has to make world-class content to be on trend so that's essentially how it works interesting and is it a pure play sas model or is your churn so high it's not really recurring revenue so we've been selling for about five months now and uh this month actually was our first two churn clients uh so we've been months to months so far we had zero percent churn um and then uh this month we actually lost our first two clients okay and how many clients total do you have so right now we have about 20. 20. okay so 220 that's a 10 monthly churn something like that yeah interesting uh and you just launched the company right in 2017 last year yeah last year we used to be free to build up the marketplace um the chicken and the egg problem of course built a sustainable marketplace and uh we actually tried to upsell to those clients and that was such a pain uh we just said let's just invite new clients in and make it seem like this was always um like this and and it worked that's interesting okay so marketplace model 20 customers today on average what are customers paying you per month for this anywhere from for so we've been testing pricing we've only been doing the pricing model for five months so anywhere from a thousand to twenty five hundred a month okay so you're doing north of 20 grand a month right now yes okay that's great um how far north like what are you actually doing per month so we are about 25 right now okay that's great so 25 25 grand a month uh again across uh you said 20 customers yeah so a little north of a grand a month obviously there um and then a year ago so we can calculate growth rate you were i imagine nothing right now a year ago it was nothing about five months ago we got our first client so we've been over 40 percent month over month and then our healthiest month was october to november where we grew 138 that's better that's it now all fairness going from you know five dollars to you know fifty dollars is huge huge huge growth numbers percentage-wise but obviously you're getting you're building though you're building though i love it you gotta you gotta you can't bury the lead it's a good growth number um have you raised capital or are you bootstrapped yeah so we did about a year ago 250 from friends and family and uh we have about 500 notes um okay so about 750 raised to date was the 250 from friends and family equity or was that a note as well it was a note okay so two notes right now that's great and um i imagine you're probably burning capital as you look to build or are you casual positive today so we are about break even um we are adding on and then we catch up catch up to the burn fairly fast i come from socially rich was a completely bootstrap business so uh this is completely new to me um on on how to make the capital the most efficient um i mean there's obviously a diminishing return i wish to add more sales people and all that but um we have to think more about product uh so yeah we're we're about um break even right now that's great now when you say about breakeven i mean how close are you burning like a grand a month two grand a month we're burning around 25 to 30 and we're in 25 mrr sorry your your total spend is about 30 grand in monthly recurring revenue you're making 25 so you're burning about up to in a bad month five grand a month yeah i see i see good yeah i mean that's obviously you have plenty of runway if you have 750 raised yeah that's great what's the team size today so about five five people all in austin all in all um all in all yeah that's cool we are looking to hire one more by the beginning of january uh focus on product interesting walk me through the team you have in austin so so what do they do yeah absolutely so we have uh given that we are two-sided marketplace we have to grow the brand side in the influencer side so we have to do marketing on both sides um and and one doesn't live without the other um so survive without the other so uh we have a brand manager who makes sure that all the brands and all the campaigns are flowing efficiently every day we just hire an influencer growth focused um manager so this person is in charge of scaling and growing our influencer community and then an influencer engagement uh so this person is in charge of keeping the influencer community engaged uh myself and then we have a sales uh sdr well what about code who's developing oh yeah that's a good question so uh we have a remote uh developer uh agency um that that works with us who do you use for the yeah which agency yeah ironforge ironforge where are they based they are based in ohio i believe and you like them i care you like them our guy is in san diego but the agency itself i'm not sure got it are you are you enjoying them either doing good work oh my god yeah that's awesome yeah we have uh ian han who is our ios developer he's developed over 20 native ios apps he's absolutely world class and um wait why do you need an ios app for this for a marketplace yeah it is an ios app why though why do you need an ios app for for this so all influencers are on their phone all the time yeah so um if if if we build the desktop version for starting off it's not the best way to gain traction and have usage on the app i mean there's a lot in the process that goes behind the scenes such as influencers have a busy schedule so the brands have to ship out products to the influencers um and then just just alone tracking the product influencers can schedule the posts accordingly on their calendar they need to know where that product is at all times so we are integrated with usps fedex and ups um and all this is tracked through the app messaging with the influencers just coordinating that posting schedule um is why we built it on ios app and now our next step is to build a desktop version for the brands interesting what is the uh i'm going through your your example page right now just looking at some of these clients walking through the marketplace how many brands have put at least a dollar through you and how many influencers have made at least a dollar since you launched yeah so we have around 1600 influencers are active on the network they've all made at least a dollar they have made at least a dollar i would say probably around 300 of those um have made at least a dollar and we've had 3 000 campaigns created so 3 000 influencers have created post through trend um clients that have paid us are about 25 so far and some of those are some of those companies are lyft um lyft and austin created a campaign with us uh based focus on ut students um we also worked with uh we work with some of my cuban portfolio companies we work with health warrior for uh and some of the larger yeah kombuta has been one of our most successful um clients who had about one and a half impressions and one a million and a half impressions and total spend through your platform so add up all the campaigns you've driven or that you've been directly coordinating how much spend has gone through you so oh okay that's a good question so we're very...