How Vabotu grew to $12.1K revenue and 112 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is vasile tiplia he is running a company called vabotu which helps teams work in harmony it was designed to satisfy the dynamic and demanding needs of digital professionals who needed an intelligent and seamless collaboration tool that enables fluid communication between those who work together on projects regardless of where team numbers are the company brings everyone together to keep things moving forward vessel you're ready to take it to the top yes okay how do you compete in this space when you have companies like monday plowing money into paid and all the keywords and base camp and all these other project management tools i think at the end of the day it's all about a product that provides a quality service um and one of the things that we're trying to do with wabatu is instead of having a professional use several tools and constantly be distracted by changing tabs whether you use slack trello asana or others you can have one product that includes task management team messaging live feedback on designs provided very similar to envision uh all in one product and so that is really our goal is to streamline the entire process okay and and how do you really make that difference because everyone will say like ours is more streamlined it's more integrated it's better really there you you must have identified some little mousetrap that you are better at doing than like again these other project management tools do you know what that is i think so i think really at the at the end of the day the best way to describe it is let's say we look at slack and slack is an amazing product but at the end of the day it's a messaging product that's all it does yeah you can share images and um you can plug in a lot of different products into it to add to the functionality but in its essence slack it's a messaging product when we look at vubato verbati doesn't need any plugins it comes standard with group messaging it comes standard with task management very similar to trello so you can manage all your projects and your entire team and it comes standard with visual feedback very similar to envision so it's all in one product and so we believe that these are the key elements for any professional agency or professional creative for that matter to be able to um streamline work as we call it or to be able to carry out the entire project management uh within one tool yeah okay let's dive deeper here into the back story here um and real quick tell me real quick on average what are teams paying for this per month right now um for the first 100 companies that sign up it's nine dollars per company not per user per company so unlimited number of users so right now your average customer is paying about nine but your average team your average logo is your average company is paying about nine bucks a month yes okay very cool and then put this on a timeline when you launch uh we launched it as of january of this year okay great so brand new i love that 2019 january and when did you start coding it 2016. okay so you wow you've been coding this for why is it taking so long well if you look at our product it's not just a messaging platform it's messaging it's task management and it's got the visual feedback and we now have in the market um the web the native mac and windows applications and in about a week we're gonna have the uh the android and ios apps as well your ui actually looks a lot like uh google's inbox where the kind of the way that the attachments are displayed and things like that they're just now shutting that down is that a bad sign um um not necessarily not necessarily but really when we designed robot2 we wanted to make it feel like home right so if you've used tools like you mentioned google inbox or slack or trello if you're going to jump into bob you're really going to feel at home if you were familiar with those other tools yep yep okay um so good launch 2016 officially getting to revenue here in 2019. how many customers have you scaled to today the first five six months we have about 112 companies and about 225 users active users as of today that's great okay so 112 companies paying call at 10 bucks a month you're doing about a grand a month in revenue right now more or less that's good that's good i love this stage because everyone has to start at zero right so how did you get the first 10 or 20 or well in your case 112 customers what was the growth channel um so we've done several things number one we had a big launch at the web summit in portugal um in november of 2018 so a lot of it was word of mouth there wait but what happened there you didn't have a product at that point and so like how did you what did you actually capture at that launch so we had a beta version ready the product wasn't officially launched for companies actually signed up but we did collect email addresses so we were at the web summit you were able to introduce the product a lot of people submitted their email addresses we were able to follow up with them at that point so that was definitely our first point the second point we do a lot of content marketing sorry hold on real quick before we move on from web summit how many emails did you collect there at the launch um anywhere from 80 to 120 emails okay got it good good okay so really an early adopter group there yes okay and then now you're doing you said content marketing content marketing on and off-site content marketing um we're doing a lot of social so facebook um twitter and instagram and um we had a paid advertisement that was launched in february a show a short marketing test just to see how things are working um via carbon ads yep okay so how did that test pan out what was your customer acquisition cost to get a new 10 a month customer um good question i don't have all of the analytics in front of me right now but it was it was a good learning experience um i would say one thing that we took out of that is um making sure you hit the to the right target target audience is very important i think the the marketing app ran for about four weeks and in the first two weeks we got very very little clicks to the website because we were targeting to the wrong audience who were you targeting um we were targeting professional photographers there was a miscommunication between us and the company that was doing the advertising but as soon as we switched that uh we switched the marketing channels we were marketing and the target audience that has shifted completely so now who are you targeting we are targeting established freelancer creative freelancers that work remotely and small to medium-sized design development and branding agencies interesting and why help me break down you're thinking something in your head why why this shift to agencies so the agencies well this i am the ceo of creative 27 which is a digital agency here in los angeles and so this product was really designed for creative professionals and agencies um and so when you work with advertisers they have their pool of websites where they advertise your product and so at the first two weeks they advertise to professional photographers which was not really our target audience but that's why i'm saying it's very important that there's no miscommunication when you pay for advertisement and making sure that they understand exactly who we're going after yup but kudos for you for at least getting a co or test done so you can figure out if you can probably acquire customers that way that's right um okay very good that makes a lot of sense talk to me about team today how many people so we have a total of 12 people out of those three of them are full time the other one our contract and so we have our product design team that includes all of the ux the ui all of the testing we have our marketing and then we have our engineering and our back-end team okay so three folks full-time it sounds like nine contractors um how do you bootstrap the company or raised um everything was bootstrapped okay so still today no money in the company no money in the company so you i mean you have three people and nine contractors you're paying them somehow are you basically pouring your own money from the agency into the software company that's right how much have you put in today more or less than 100 grand up to today we have a little over half a million dollars invested in does that make you like kind of [��__��] yourself each morning you know um there's a vision and everybody's very passionate about it we believe um there's going to be a huge demand for a product like this we're more passionate than ever but more than that we're not hungry necessarily for money at this point uh what we are hungry for is finding if there's an investors finding the right investor that has the right expertise to take our product from a product to a company we don't know at all but we know how to build good products that's what we do here at creative 27 and that's what we're trying to do with robots as well and right now so obviously you're subsidizing the company out of the agency revenue i mean what are you burning like only fixed costs are we talking like 10 grand a month 20 grand or more um it's for yeah between between 15 to 20 grand a month okay okay got it so that that's i mean and do you feel like how much runway do you feel like you can give yourself like do you feel like you can do that for another 12 months with no new revenue and no new outside investment um that's a good question so on our product timeline we're wrapping up a lot of the features that are in roboto right now um and we're going to move forward for the remainder of the year and just see what the customer acquisition looks like um but yeah we're by the end of the year it's when we're wrapping up everything and then we're going to open it up to investors and move forward from there yeah i mean my my my big thing when my team did research on this before the interview is like you do so much it becomes very tempting to say we do it all you don't need anyone else but the risk in doing that is then there's not a specific use case a specific niche to like dominate because you literally do do it all and even if the tech does actually do it all and has actually more features in slack and trello it's like what's the story you tell the market to get a niche addicted to you and you totally hear which is i'm listen i'm a creative guy i run my own agency i built this for myself this is a better slack and trello for design agencies but that's not what you're messaging on the website says right so the messaging on the website it's hard to explain this product because it's got so much to offer i agree i think it's a massive liability it is it is so the best way to put it it's more than slack more than trello because people are familiar with slack they're familiar with trello so when they hear those two names they get a a slight picture but they won't the problem is they won't believe you they'll go these are billion dollar companies this little brand in la saying they're bigger like this is [��__��] i don't even try they just lost to my trust there's no way they're more than slacking like they won't even if you are they won't believe you i hear what you're saying but i will say this uh for somebody that's been in the design and development industry for the past 15 years designers and creative professionals they are hungry for new products they're always willing to try new things they're looking for the next best thing and so i think there's going to be a huge opportunity for for this type of software for the next couple of years and articles all around the web say the same things that the growth market we're looking at 70 increase um in terms of project management tools etc for the next couple of years so we definitely think that this is a great opportune time for something else well again but why don't you double down that's exact so it's going to get more competitive so the ones who are winning are they going to be ones that go deepest on one specific use case but again i don't see any verbage on the site that says like you don't even use your own i mean by the way i think it's a great asset you built this for yourself there's nothing that i see on here that's like hey designers agencies i'm you i built this for me you should use this tool if you're an agency or designer you're like and you're currently using slack we are a better slack for design teams why don't you double in on that verbiage so we do if you go to our website we have the use cases and the use cases um talk about the different scenarios right like product management we have but you have everything listed here you have you have product management team management agile development client map you list everything here right so let's look at slack if you look at slack you wouldn't say that slack is only for a certain type of company it could be used for a wide range of companies but at the end of the day but vasil did you ever look at their verbage of when they launched um i don't remember what the verbiage is one it was a very soon it was a very very specific use case and only after they dominated that basically it was a tool inside of another company used in a very specific team in that company that they spun out and then other teams like that team that built it for themselves in that company started using it and then a snowball happened and now they're very wide like this is a mistake i think a lot of entrepreneurs make is is exactly that they look at where the company is now and not the story i'm with you yeah i definitely agree with you that whenever you are in a narrower niche you'll be able to hit that target yeah but here's what i think i think with a product like forbade two it's got a lot of use cases but you have to teach your audience how to use the product because at the end of the day it's a tool and so all of these different categories that i'm listing on use cases those are all teams at the end of the day that can leverage the different features that we have for their benefit whether it's a creative agency whether it's a marketing whether it's product development etc at uh creative 27 we're not just a design agency we do all the spectrum from defining the product to developing it to designing it to the marketing of the product and each of those departments use the bottom for its full potential and so i totally hear what you're saying but i think at the end of the day it's important for whoever comes on our website that it is our target audience to see oh this is how i can use this product and this is how it can benefit me yeah i just again well i don't want to beat this in the ground so we'll end with this i just think you can't do all these things at once even if the tool is used across your entire organization you can't own all these keywords you can't go to all these conferences you can't go and do webinars on all these different topics and use cases you know what i mean that's all that's all i'm saying right so so we'll see how we'll see what you do which you execute let's jump into some other economics real quick it's probably too early for churn right do you have any sense of what your churn is not yet yeah and then uh we talked about cac already it sounds like you shut it off and then retargeted it so if someone's gonna come on and pay you 10 bucks a month i mean on your test what was it costing you to get that user um right now roughly about six to eight dollars um per user um but again as this is just for the first 100 paid companies as soon as we reach that the pricing will increase so we're trying to make it desirable and easy to get for anything sorry if i still something doesn't make sense if you're able to pay eight dollars to get a new 10 a month customer you'd put a billion dollars in that channel as fast as you possibly could i'm not following i'm sorry if you can spend eight dollars google ads facebook ads wherever you want to spend it to get a new ten dollar a month customer they're profitable on day one you would plow as much money as you possibly could into that channel because it's profitable and the payback is instant right did were we on a different pages when i asked you what your cac is you said eight dollars your cost to acquire a customer oh i'm sorry yeah we're yeah so i'm not sure what the cost is for that we ran a couple of campaigns but we haven't we don't have all the analytics in terms of that um the campaign you ran though you said you knew that it wasn't working for freelance photographers so you pivoted so you must have looked at numbers that showed you oh this isn't working like was it costing you 600 bucks to get a new 10 a month freelance photographer using you yeah it's a good question so i don't have that analytic but what we did the marketing campaign cost thirty five hundred dollars okay um and so the first two weeks we look at the analytics a lot of the traffic was coming from uh websites where the ad was running that was specifically for professional photographers and we saw that even though they clicked on our site they didn't really create accounts because it's not really for professional photographers but as soon as we changed that and we targeted creative agencies and creative professionals established freelancers that had changed completely we started getting a lot of signups and that worked out pretty well okay but do you have any when you say worked out well it's very hard for my audience to learn from that because we don't know what that means right so when you say worked out well you're saying you started seeing new customers signing up if so how many yeah i don't have those analytics in front of me okay i mean is it a channel you feel like you could put fifty thousand dollars in and it will still hold the economics will still hold absolutely yeah okay so what why aren't you doing that then why aren't you putting fifty thousand in tomorrow um at this point we got a lot of good feedback from the customers that have signed up and what we're doing is we also wanted to wait for the ios and android apps to be out in the market because as we introduced it that's very important for agencies and as soon as we're wrapping up some of the feedback that we receive then we have this product in the market then we're going to dive in back into the market very good all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um the famous business book just one that you read zero to one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i would say dave ramsey number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company besides your own besides my own um i really like product hunt i look at product hunt a lot so i would say that's probably it how many hours of sleep to get every night on an average four to six okay and what's your situation married single kids so okay not married no kids no not very kids and how old are you i am 35 years old 35 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um i would say how to be more patient and how to take more time in doing things guys there you have it of about two again a better slack and trello he built it for himself he's a design agency a creative he built this thing for his internal teams to use they've just launched they've got about 112 customers paying nine bucks a month so over a thousand dollars a month in revenue at this point they are bootstrapped but he's put in 500 000 of his own money into the company between 2016 and today to get to where it's at team of three and in addition to nine contractors working on the product we'll see if they can scale again helping teams work together seal thank you for taking us to the top thank you thank you for the opportunity