How Trustisto CEO Wojciech Grześkowiak grew to $237.8K revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is voicia he's an ex-samsung r d developer and team manager he was almost a googler but rejected the offer on the very last moment he launched his first startup in 2012 which is still operating but from 2018 onwards he's been working on this new martech solution called called trustizo all right whiter you're ready to take us to the top yeah let's do this all right so it's it's trust and then isto.com what's the company doing how do you make money yeah so trustisto is a set of social proof based tools for optimizing conversation in e-commerce stores with all kinds of social for increasing revenue reduce abandoned card rate and increase loyalty and who are you selling to typically e-commerce brands smbs enterprise no only e-commerce okay only e-commerce and are you doing you know what's the average e-commerce brand paying you guys per month would you say well the average is like 35 usd but the actual the biggest client paid us 700. okay and so help me understand why would somebody pay you more how are you up selling yeah so uh the price is depend on e-commerce uh so the size of the e-commerce if the biggest size the the price is bigger what do you mean size of e-commerce number of skus number of sales no number of views so so how many people visiting this store okay so give me a sense if someone's paying you 700 per month how many views are they getting like 9 million okay and if someone's paying you 35 a month 35 a month how many are they getting well from zero to like uh 10 000 10 000 per month okay got it now give us the back story here when did you launch this company where i launched it in october 2017 when i was uh and i'm still consulting for uh third-party companies but most of our time is in this company so 2017 is launch date and how did you get the idea well uh i was just browsing booking.com and most of social proof tools are in there in booking so when you scheduling your vacation or a business trip you see all those pop-ups about this is last room and uh something like this so this was just the beginning and uh yeah i just get the idea from there well i mean come on that's everyone views those pages not everyone just says i'm gonna go i see these pop-ups i'm gonna go create a pop-up thing for ecommerce stores i mean what was your experience in e-commerce well i've been creating analytics tool for e-commerce mostly fmcg so fast-moving consumer goods and i know bit of this market and the biggest problem with e-commerce is that most of our clients abandon their cart or just visiting the store and do nothing so i thought that if we show that other people are buying in this store and we present some proof of it it will increase conversion and i was right how many customers are paying for your platform today yeah we've got like 150 customers right now okay 150 customers and have you bootstrapped the company or raised capital yeah the company's bootstrap bootstrapped okay so boots trapped 150 customers at 35 a month you're doing about 5 000 a month right now on revenue 5050. that's great and where were you 12 months ago do you remember well half of it okay where is the growth come from how are you signing up these new customers yeah we do a highly targeted cold email campaigns how do you find emails uh most of so we are focusing on e-commerce platform like shopify magento and so on the first the first step is actually to integrate with this platform and we are super focused on integrating uh in fact 95 of our clients are running trashy stock 10 minutes after sign up so we are very focused on platform then we are using tools like build with uh or web weaponizer or similar to find all stores that are using those platforms okay real quick hold on so built with what were the other tools similar web yeah similar web and so on and what's that what was the third one you named the third vaporizer spell it w-a-p-p-a-l-y-i-zero eyes are interesting okay and so when you go to built with and you're looking up what are you plugging in what technology are you looking for on people's websites okay got it so let's say uh built with gives you a list of 180 000 people that have magento installed on their well on their website then what how do you get the emails so we are we have some uh spider crawler that searching for emails on those websites and most of those emails are contact emails so like contact ad and the name of the company and we are just running campaign on those emails which spider are you using is it something other people can use awesome yeah yeah interesting how did you build that i mean was it tricky to build no no no just one night interesting but what's the technology is it like what's the tech stack on the spider look like uh we use mostly javascript and note okay got it to scrape the website you look for the contact address you then email the contact address and you have some sort of response right there yeah we have uh uh a set of campaigns called campaigns so if their contact is not responding the system is automatically sending the follow-up yeah if you find if you email a thousand people using this process how many will apply within the first week yes so we've got like uh five to ten percent replied right is that good or bad i think this is good okay so you then can work through 35 a month what do you know that you need to get a new customer to do very quickly to make sure they keep paying you that they don't turn well the first is integrating with the with the store with trust distal and this is done by integrating with the platform so we are focusing on platforms not the custom solutions so when we're integrating we do the trial period 30 days and we are showing the results uh most in google analytics and show how the conversion increase using our tool and you know you've got the proof that this tool is working so most of our clients just uh see the report and say okay so the rate from trial to paid is like okay so 30 to 50 percent okay and how many new trials are you signing up each month 50 5-0 yeah okay got it and we already know how you're getting those trials you're then saying between 20 and 30 those 50 new trials convert to paid yeah no no 50 tries and from from that half of them are are paid customers yeah it's just a 20 to 25 open work to paid what's your team look like today how many how many people yeah we are just two so me and my uh my colleague martha did you guys just split the equity right down the middle no no i'm i'm fully in control how did you how did you manage how did you negotiate that well i was uh running the the company myself for a while and i found martha in co-work and i like her how how she uh connect with clients and i just offer her a job and pay the full salary oh great okay so she don't doesn't have any equity you're just paying her a full salary okay there's not a lot i mean you're doing you're growing but you're doing 5 000 bucks a month i imagine most that it sounds like it's probably going to marta and marta's salary then right you're not making any money from this right now well uh no i i i putting all the money back in the company so i do consulting on a on myself and just say you know bootstrapping so keeping money in the bank and looking for other uh employee yeah what does churn look like three percent three percent per month yeah and is that on a revenue or a logo basis this is on uh user based user is it the same when i guess probably it's the same on an rpoo basis or revenue basis right yeah on river you may be a a bit bigger it's like five to six yeah so 10 churn on 5000 a month would be something like 500 of lost revenue so you know half that or 3 would be something like you're losing like 200 to 300 a month in terms of churn yeah but hopefully you had that back yeah so every month we've got we got new clients so every month is on plus what does it cost you you're fully weighted cac to get a new 35 a month customer yeah so this is interesting because we are not doing any paid campaigns right so the only thing is a salary for marta to contact with customers and when you count this and you do you do the math it's like 100 bucks per paid customer okay so 35 bucks a month cost you 100 your payback queries there are three or four months all right are you launching any new paid experiments growth experiments over the next couple months or no well yes because social proof is so much more than just a notification and we now are running just a notification and we've got uh plan for free additional projects tools inside trustisto to increase revenue our revenue and revenue of our clients right so those tools will be praised much higher than an adjustment application how higher well two to three times two to three times okay and what will the tools look like again so right now your sort of reviews if people go view a shoe on your ecommerce store your reviews can it's a review plug-in what's your next product well so we are planning to run three products first is like a tool for increasing view in social media so ecommerce stores we are using this tool to increase the visibility of their products in and their products in social media like instagram insta stories facebook and so on and the other two will will work with emails so we will like returning back uh to back all the customers to the stores and those mismatched with social proof will have significant uh effect in uh the revenue of those stores portrait you're based in poland there's a lot in warsaw i believe there's a lot of american companies trying to spin up developer teams in warsaw krakow poland etc what should they be willing to pay could you probably know the local market what should they be willing to pay a junior developer there well this is tough question because in poland you you can get a very talented engineer paying like uh 4 000 bucks per month uh but i think the good price for a polish engineer is like uh six seven thousand per month okay great let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book so predict predictable revenue by iron rose number two is there a ceo you're following or studying well i used to studying steve jobs and even write a paper on it but now i'm finding just elon musk number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company aws and uh how many hours you sleep to get every night so four hours without the kids and three hours with kids which is like one hour so oh my gosh okay so like five or six hours yeah so what's your situation married single and then how many kids yeah married two boys two boys okay and how old are you 34 34. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 i wish i knew i would have time for business so uh i will travel around the world guys there you have a voice check voiding trustizo.com helping e-commerce brands right now with notifications and social proof they have 150 customers paying 35 dollars per month so about 5 000 a month in revenue they are break even is reinvesting everything back in the company but they are bootstrapped team of two right now as he looks to continue to scale wojciech thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 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 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 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 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