How Unicorn Platform CEO Alexander Isora grew to $204K revenue and 500 customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is alexander azora he's a ceo and founder of a unicorn platform the landing page voter for startups and also creator of broadwise.org the startup community community dj alexander you ready to take us to the top yeah i'm ready so i mean of course so the reason i invited you on is we're seeing a trend right now where if you focus on building a great community first and then a software product you really have an unfair advantage so talk to me first about the community that you've built what is the community yeah that's a great question and i agree with this trend a community is often um imagined like a huge crowd of people like thousands and thousands of followers but often and in my case too the very first users of your product the community you have around can be literally dozens of people like 30 or 40 people and that's not too much not it's easy to get such following base and uh if you focus on the quality not on quantity if you know your follower if you're friends with them if you help them constantly will we maybe give you back what does it mean so imagine you have only 30 followers on twitter but you know everything about this audience they are your goal target audience and then you ship something we will be if we are loyal enough we will use your product we will talk about it perhaps we will not purchase it but we will always constantly support you whenever you launch or announce new features and this is a very solid basis fundamental of any sa sas project so alex you're you're communitybroadwise.org when did you launch the community what year it was launched one year ago in 2019 okay and you know the alexa rank isn't that impressive in terms of number of unique visits but you're not necessarily playing for seo you're playing for a smaller group of highly engaged fans and we see that with your pitch your startup idea and one sentence challenge where you have nine replies you know daily activity 182 views help me understand how you measure the success of broadway is it number of active engaged community members or how do you measure that um i would measure it by active monthly active users of course today the community is almost dead i will be honest the biggest challenge in launching a community is you know that very first steps when you don't have content for people and you don't have people who create content and this is the biggest challenge to start rolling this getting this first users the core is what i'm trying to do unfortunately i don't have enough energy at this days because of coronavirus and i will try again when i have more power yeah more time so so i believe you will you tell me what your geology unicorn platform the software product it was launched in 2018 okay 2018 and that year do you remember how much well actually fast forward to 2019 how much revenue did you do in 2019 in 2019 i was doing like one or two thousand dollars per month okay so call it you know a run rate of maybe twenty twenty four thousand dollars per year and what have you scaled up to today uh our previous month was our biggest revenue month it was six point seven hundred dollars congratulations that's great thank you how'd you do it oh there is no magic no secrets we are simply super passionate about the product and we talk about it every day we think we sleep with it and uh always there's a product and people our users feel this fashion and they spread the world about unicorn platform and it's works so how many how many customers are now in order your monthly paid plans we have 500 paid customers today 500 paid and what do they pay per month on average uh the average chip is 18 per month and tell me we haven't talked about the product tell me what they're buying what do they get oh landing page builder is a very simple business model you pay monthly fee and you get unaccessed to your website when you pay your website is online if you stop paying your website is down that's simple should people think of this like a sort of a landing page version of webflow i mean is this a no code tool or do you need to know development to use this yeah exactly it's the business model is the same as webflow but it's much more simpler and easier than the flow webflow is for professionals you need to learn about this tool you'd spend days maybe weeks to master it and then you will start creating beautiful websites very powerful in unicorn platform the learning curve is ready for it once you sign up you are already an expert and this is our benefits what do you think you know when i look at your platform and i see this pattern all the time where i meet just brilliant product builders they've built a very comparable product to a company that's a hundred times their size but ultimately going from where your let's say your platform was exactly like web flow going from eighty thousand a month a year in revenue to 80 million a year in revenue then comes down to go to market and distribution and you're great on product hunt you did one in 2019 got 900 almost a thousand up votes i'm sure you got a lot of traffic from that but how do you go from you know that to getting people paying 100 200 300 bucks a month in scaling this is a great question i don't have an answer but i know what to do what do you what do you tell me what the plan is um that's very simple we don't have plans we don't want to build another unicorn for the fun we're just focusing on what we have today our vision of our product and grinding it every day step by step we have a huge backlog and that's what we do we are not building a multi millionaire million company not building a new uh workflow competitor we are building unicorn platform it will remain small but we are yeah we are artists not businessmen alex artists love people admiring their artwork and so i think the answer you get gave is a little bit of a cheap answer because you just focused on the capitalism side the money side but social capital is a direct precursor to financial capital and social capital is attention and so the more people you have using this art this software that you've built the financial stuff will take care of itself so let me ask a different question how do you go from your current user base to a million people using your platform paid or not um or do you not care maybe it might be something you don't care about i'm i'm scared of such numbers i will be honest i am too scared to wake up one day and see on my phone that i have not seven thousand users but seven hundred thousand views i am not ready to make this crowd happy i know how to make seven thousand people happy i know how to make 20 000 people happy but i not i don't know how to provide perfect support perfect website loading speed all that kind of stuff for huge amount of people and i'm not sure i want to learn it because when you are big you are getting far far away from being a human then your company your soul is when you're indie you're human and i don't want to become soldiers that's my vision in your product video you've got a custom painting of elon musk floating behind your head with spaceships going around his head he runs three very large companies and are you he's extremely human yes that that's a biggest mystery to me the personality of world mosque why is that because yeah you said he's running three huge companies but he's still human and funny and you know so much of that empathy so much of this comes down the team you've used the word we a couple of times who is we our team is small it contains four people um all of them are passionate experts in what we do we have me and one developer one support engineer and marketer for people [Music] and and so again what i see when i look at a platform like yours is wow this is this thing could be i mean he could be helping a lot of people build landing page faster but it just you're scared of that you don't you're scared of that that sort of success yeah yes um i have a couple of mentors you know guys who have huge experience and background and they tell me what to do with my business and all of them tell me stop the product development just quit it just get your backlog and throw it away and focus on the grower start selling to thousands of people i don't understand how can i do it because uh my product vision is far from what we have today and i just want to make it real to realize what they alex what you do you can't hire me but you hire somebody like me that loves growth and loves doing press and loves being out there and you are what make the whole thing work right you are the you you create this beautiful piece of software art that that marketer and sales person can go sell you don't have to do it yeah that's a great piece of advice i'm negotiating with a couple of people who wants to take this marketing this grow apart from my shoulders and help me growing this well i'm gonna test your product i'm gonna put you in an email sent to my list which will get you about a thousand clicks and i'll see i'm curious how you respond to that we'll send it out sometime in the next couple of weeks okay yeah it was great okay very good all right we'll see how that go and then if it goes well i want to invest okay cool i got you okay good all right so four people on the team one engineer are you the sole founder oh yes i'm the solo founder so you own 100 of the company yes at this moment yes and you're bootstrapped to date yes i'm fully bootstrapped that's great it's really great talk to me about i mean imagine it kills you a little bit when someone uses your platform they're loving it for many months and they stop using it what does your churn look like our churn is quite huge we have about 20 per month of people who cancel the subscription but this is not a problem i i understand that our product is intended for young startups who just started their business and youngster tops often die almost everyone dies and so our customers just die and don't they don't need a landing page anymore but i say goodbye i am leaving for now but when i have another idea maybe in a couple of months i will be back so our churn is it's fine yeah okay that's great now do you do any i mean how do you get new customers you have 500 right now how do you land them how do they find you we have two main sources of traffic the first one is word of mouth our people keep our users keep recommending us everywhere on listings like g2 or alternative to to wear friends and twitter and private spaces and the second channel is of course product hunt it's a huge huge support for us we plan to launch again and again yes why not try some other things similar products to see if you can grow your audience like beta list our beta list gives almost nothing you try to spend some time yeah yes i tried it we got like 300 visits and zero conversions when you did this launch on product hunt back in november of 20. have you done no one since november of 2019 oh we had three launches so far yeah so i have i see your uni your your unicorn platform swag your unicorn platform 3.0 which you got 829 upvotes when did you do that it was this summer okay and how many clicks to your website did you get from that i have a report for the previous launch and it was quite the same let me show you people love numbers so i share as much as i can like this clicks conversion money i'll i'm opening my article and my personal blog and i will tell you the exact numbers in a moment guys the the listing looks great just while you're listening again 829 upvotes launched in august uh was number two product of the day so silver medal there what were the metrics how many clicks did you get so we got uh eight point two hundred visitors and it turned out that three hundred signed up became users and we had 31 sale like 10 of people who signed up purchased a bid plan that's great alex on that note listen we're rooting for you we hope you find a great growth marker so that your software can be used by many more people and maybe you scale up you get a little more capital then you can hire more engineers then you can build your product faster and get to your product vision faster let's let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book oh i'm reading one and i just love it it's critical chain what's it called critical chain yeah um by elia gold threat okay i have to check that out number number two is there a ceo you're following or studying oh i'm following one great guy he's ceo of mater light okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business notion one luck number three or four how many hours of sleep to get every night sleep oh it's eight hours every day and what's your situation alex married single kids i'm i just returned from my wedding she's and they had some kind of for like alternative waiting for muslims and i participated it that's very cool do you want to turn your camera so she can wave or will she get embarrassed no she's hiding so that means no okay so you're married do you have any kids oh no no no kids and howard how old are you i'm 27 27 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. um i've i think spent more time in fresh air guys there you have it we had alex on with unicorn platform a great beautifully built landing page builder they get most their users from product time did about twenty thousand dollars a year last year and revenue this year up to eighty thousand uh the last product launch got about 82 uh 829 upvotes 80 200 visitors to their site 300 new signups and 31 new sales that look to continue to scale this year but not at the not at all costs healthy scaling we'll call it alex 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 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