How TrustMary CEO Arttu Haho grew TrustMary to $620.7K revenue and 287 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is arthur haajo he is always curious to learn new things sharing them with his wife and two boys customers and business partners uh he's hooked with so many hobbies that 48 hours per day wouldn't be enough so the limit he includes golf ice hockey fishing every now and then other ball games amidst all that he's building a tool to help improve com conversions with social proof the company's called trustmary.com arthur you ready to take us to the top yes i am okay tell us about this tool i think my audience is familiar with tools like use proof or get proof and fomo and these kinds of tools where do you fall yeah so whenever somebody for example you have reviews you have satisfied customers so then we provide easy tools for you to to really solve them at your website and improve conversions okay that's basically what we do and just for the audience listening it's essentially a pop-up on the bottom of the screen that says you know james just entered his email to try trust mary or samantha just purchase trust mary things like that yeah yeah that's one way of what we can provide and how do you bill for it so what does the average customer pay per month um currently kind of our annual average contract value is uh more than thousand euro per month but uh that's kind of the messy the data we have currently it's because of our story so we started actually as a project business four years ago and uh this software track is very new to us and we in some point we bundled our video testimonial projects with our software as well so but yeah currently if you pay 390 in usd per month then you can get kind of the uh full plan okay and so let's get more of this backstory so you said this started off as a video testimonial business four years ago yeah that's how we started 2016 in june uh so the initial idea was to provide the easiest way to produce authentic customer testimonial videos that's still what we do as an additional service to our software clients because we know how to do it we have done it more almost 4 000 times already with 1500 companies so that's how we started and that's how basically we have uh funded our software initiative so we are bootstrapped to this point and uh yeah that's how we have made money into history and that's our our core so launched in 2016 as the video tool what year did you sell your first software subscription uh basically we launched our software a year ago and first we bundled it with our video customers so that's what's the kind of the quickest way to to get some real clients to use our software and then basically we started to sell it separately only in october or november last year okay and so how many customers do you have paying for the software today 200 okay 208 208 customers paying can i take 208 times 390s you're doing about what is that eighty thousand dollars per month right now in revenue uh it's not that simple since we um in the beginning we sold it only with the annual plan so actually our arr at the moment is 208 000 in euro and we are just uh we just moved here or i moved with my family to us to really ramp up the business here in the us and we are we just launched our monthly plans only two weeks ago so now we also have monthly option to our customers to make it easier to start using okay service so you have 208 customers that have purchased either your video tool or the software or together and all together as a business you're doing about 18 000 per month in revenue or 208 000 in run rate uh 208 customers only in our software so that's like 100 percent software business 208 customers and um in total like like uh in total um we have had 1500 customers using our video testimonial services back in the history but that's the project business that's not the recurring or continues but currently 208 customers using our software and paying for it and and how much revenue is that that's uh or or i mean okay now i miss the numbers 208 000 uh is the arr for those software customers currently yeah and almost 200 customers as an as a kind of uh the number of logos yeah so if 200 customers make up 200 000 in current ar on the software that means on average each of those 200 customers are paying about 90 per month for your software tool does that sound correct yep i see okay and so why not keep building the video testimonial business why did you get into software at all uh it was kind of it was very very hard like when you are doing a project business we bootstrap that from zero to 2.5 million in euro per year and uh it's very like every year you start from zero because you need to sell everything you are you are going to do on that year so maybe kind of we didn't like the business model and at the same time our customers they kept asking us that okay could you provide also these kind of uh reviews and kind of the lighter testimonials for them so that's why we started to develop the software for that and uh that's how we ended up developing this platform and then we got more interested to kind of put more effort on the software side so so last year what was total revenue both the video and the software business combined 2.5 2.5 million in euro i see okay and how many people are in the company full time ah i don't have the exit number but around 30. 30. okay and how many of those folks are writing code they're engineers uh only two since uh the software part is so young so only two like we have like um seven people focusing mostly to the software side at the moment and two of them are um writing code uh and how do you have any quota carrying sales reps or no yes because the sales has been our way of uh growing pretty much so far and um and um so we have around 10 uh focusing on sales at the moment but the until code crisis they were selling mostly those videos testimonial videos and now what we have been seeing during the recent two months is actually that our video business has been decreasing a little bit due to crisis but the software business has been taking uh nice steps forward and we have been also focusing the software aside in our with our sales reps as well on the software side how sticky is the product what does monthly gross revenue churn look like uh we have been selling those annual plans so it's difficult to say what is the monthly turn in reality uh we will start seeing those numbers when we have more monthly users um what percent of the 200 software customers when they signed up signed up on an annual plan do you know pretty much like uh if you have like almost all of them okay because we launched a monthly plan only two weeks ago so and how are we so where are you finding these customers what's your what's your cac currently um the most like uh the most common way of finding those customers is actually that our sales rep is uh making a cold call and then finding a meeting and then making a deal with the customer from the meeting but the currently i don't have the customer acquisition cost uh this like um the whole let's say this whole software thing is so new to us we are not like uh we have not been following two numbers in the right way uh coming from project transforming the software and now like uh hopefully we will get those numbers in place uh in in following months you can also when i put trustmary.com into the tool i use for seo and sem ahrefs i see that you don't currently have any paid advertisements running for the tool however since the beginning of this year your organic traffic has grown pretty quickly because you started to rank for critical terms like nps walk me through that strategy yeah the recent months why you haven't been seeing a lot of paid activities on the marketing side is that we have been actually a little bit narrowing our focus we we started uh putting efforts on sales and marketing for example in the us uh and into europe uh some were the more effort somewhere in the november december but then we didn't get a lot of results so that's why we have been we scaled that down for a couple of months uh for or maybe for a three month period so let's say february march april and we have been during that time a little bit narrowing our focus with our software product we noticed that it's maybe too generic uh our approach was too generic to read like uh customers for example here in the u.s market so now we are starting to scale up to marketing efforts again and uh we haven't we are kind of in the face of finding the product market fit still that's our main goal for this year to really nail the product market fit and um so yeah that's how can you you mentioned you had 10 sales reps that are kind of cold calling customers but if your software product is a 90 a month product how can you afford to pay sales reps to go close deals that are so small uh currently it's uh 390. what we what we provide for the monthly plan but we just talked about earlier you have 200 customers and about two hundred thousand dollars an arr which means it's about a hundred dollars a month yeah they were they were selling videos at the same time as well so so that's the video was our main thing what they what they sold uh until code crisis pretty much so uh so that's that's how they were selling videos and then uh with some of the customers if they they didn't want the video then they just tried to make deal with the software plan but it was kind of the hybrid they said they were selling both what commission do you pay the sales reps ah i would say it's um uh [Music] it's uh we have kind of the we we have kind of the base salary but then i think it's like 20 percent what we pay for them so if i'm a sales rep for you and i close someone on a 400 a year contract today you'll pay me 20 of the 400 so about 80 dollars uh it was like the 20 percent was like from the total d also until actually i don't even know what is our current salary for for the software sales only because previously we had the video we had the videos always bundled in our sales so that that makes your for example you can get the testimonial video anywhere from europe or u.s for 5 000 each so with that it was like the average sales was quite a lot higher but currently um well what do you pay a sales person on that one what commission do you pay on a five thousand dollar sale uh that was like twenty percent i see and you're not sure if you're paying 20 on the software sales yeah we are kind of uh trying to find what is our way of doing it with the software i see i see is the business profitable today yeah we have been profitable uh from the beginning and all the money we have been basically making we have uh been investing our future so currently it's a software where we are investing most we have been aiming for kind of the zero marching for under this point so trying to invest all the money we make to our future do you have any plans to raise capital or do you want to stay bootstrapped uh we are planning that whenever we are uh finding the product market fit our with our software so uh and then we find our code market fit as well so probably when we are starting the scale up faster then we are interested to get some external funding for us as well how much would you want to raise ah i don't have any any idea for that yet but we are in good shape with funding for another year or something like that so so uh we will see that later have you found ways that you can grow faster i mean it sounds like you're still trying to figure this out um yeah i i didn't have like uh like r2 you must be running experiments right now to figure out how to sell more of this software product what are which experiment are you most excited about currently um kind of trying to utilize our like we have a big network of customers already so how can we utilize that and how can we because we we have been able to deliver through our history like uh above what we have been uh promising to our customers so we have had always really high nps net promoter score so then we i i i'm very excited to find ways how we can utilize that so get those referrals from our current customers and try to build some kind of viral effect but yeah that's still experimenting all of that and not any clear solution for how to do it if someone came and offered you guys three million dollars to buy the company today would you sell 3 million yep all cash up front not for 3 million at the moment do you have a number in mind if you give me 10 then i can i'm ready to do it today why is 10 the right number that's uh that's how we believe what is the potential of our over our uh our company and the team we have here okay got it so how so i mean everyone would sell on potential if they could because you could just make a number up out of thin air so what gives you the confidence that you can build a 10 million dollar company if you choose not to sell um like the start we have we have seen with our uh with our software um we are solid business uh on the video testimonial side already so we are making nice revenue and profits on that side but then like this software track has provided us pretty nice new opportunity what we see very valuable to be in the future very good all right r2 let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book i would say team collins from good to great number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um not really one maybe maybe i mentioned our like board member and actually chairman of the board mikko honganen from vinyl vinyl very good number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company um i would say pipefire at the moment number four how many hours i sleep to get every night i can actually take that quickly from my phone because of ordering but uh i believe it's uh the bedtime is eight and a half hours probably but the sleep time actually is maybe seven and let's say that's seven and seven and a half seven and a half very good and what's your situation married single kids married with uh two active boys two kiddos all right and how old are you how old are you am i i'm 33 33 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew 20 year old ah i would say kind of uh the networks you can create on that age at schools everywhere you are those are actually uh really worth building so uh just to make best uh best you can on that age as well trust mary.com 208 customers on their software product paying 90 a month so about 200 000 bucks in arr that's on top of their video testimonial business which did about 2.3 million so the company doing about 2.5 million in revenue today they're totally bootstrapped 30 people on the team two engineers 10 quota carrying sales reps as they look to scale and sell more of their higher margin more predictable software product that helps you increase your website conversions r2 thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much nathan i would like to do the same to your website as well so to see how we can improve your conversions we'll talk about it okay