How Vabotu grew Vabotu 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...