How Vidlive CEO Shawn North grew Vidlive to $37.8K revenue and 450 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is sean north he's founder and creator of vid live a micro sas company that helps auto embed facebook live video on your web page in addition to working on vid live he also works full time as a developer for a major auto manufacturer all right sean you're ready to take us to the top sure that's a that you're very diverse auto manufacturing and facebook live videos huh uh yeah development though on both of them yeah my main my main job as a developer for a web applications okay so how did you come up with vid live is there any connection between the auto and the video um not at all it's just um i don't know really it's i i've kind of been interested in uh live video for a while since it you know started becoming popular and um just researching different platforms and stuff i realized that uh facebook um sort of has a missing a missing link in what is that missing link i thought there was an embed code that i could use to do this yeah absolutely they have an embed code but the problem is is there's a new embed code for every live video so each time you're live um you have to take the time to grab that that code and throw it back on onto your website so what my application does it solves that problem by using one embed code and every time you're live it'll be live on your website oh it's super interesting can you feed that link into like obs and the streaming tools and the same link will work yeah absolutely so i have a lot of customers that use obs and they um you know they love it because they just put that one embed code on their site and they don't have to worry about it so every time they go live on facebook it automatically goes live on the on their website yeah that i totally see the need for this especially if everyone being locked down at home everyone's doing more virtual online events have you seen a pop over the past couple months in terms of paid customers oh huge huge when when cobia started and all the lockdown started um my subscription base just went just skyrocketed basically that's crazy so how many paying customers today and how many signed up just in the last two three months would you say um i have about 450 paying [Music] in the last two months i would say half of that wow that's incredible when did you launch the company what year um it was about late 2018 and uh in the beginning i didn't get a lot of traction um i you know i got a few sign-ups here and there um marketing is not my big big forte or just not my strong suit i know how the hell did i get you to agree to a podcast what's that i said how the hell did i get you to agree to a podcast i don't know i got your email i thought it was pretty cool i looked at what you do and thought it was pretty cool so i wanted to do it i love that man okay interesting so so not a marketer but having fun you wrote the first line of code and incorporated you said in 2018 yeah 450 450 customers today of which about 200 came in the past two or three months which is super incredible how are you pricing this thing um in the beginning i priced it at about nine dollars a month and um i realized real quick that that was overpriced for what i was offering i dropped it down to five dollars and then that was i got a lot of got some sign ups but it seemed like it seemed just too low for what i was doing and uh so then i kind of met in the middle at seven dollars seven dollars a month you know it's a small thing it's solving a small problem but it saves people time so um people people like it you know yeah so is it fair to say those 400 today are paying about seven bucks a month on average yes definitely yes so you're doing i mean this is like what three four thousand bucks a month and sort of side income for you yeah that's great really interesting how did you you said with such confidence that nine dollars was too high for what you were selling how did you know that um in the beginning it just it just didn't feel right i don't know i don't know i didn't really know how to price it you know because i thought it was such a small thing you know a small problem it was fixing but i knew you know it was saving people time after talking with some of my customers and stuff it just it seemed like i should just drop it it just you know to that two dollars um really i think it helped out because it really started getting people on but then again when when covet started um i probably could have got away with ten bucks you know easy well walk me through those first few customers though where did you find them from do you remember who they were um i do and most of them were uh from churches that is probably um i would say 70 percent of my clients are from churches um it's a huge need for them to be able to stream online so so my grandma uh runs a church and her and her husband jim uh it was so painful trying to teach them how to use live stream on a facetime call and helping them get all the software to work because you know they're older they don't really get technology like how do you handle support um right now i handle support just via email and through uh facebook uh messenger um i do get a lot of customers like like you're you're describing and uh you know i just walk them through it it's it's really simple um you sign up basically through through your facebook account and that connects to the uh if you're an admin for that page you know your church page then um you're automatically connected and you just throw that throw that code up on your site and it'll work next time you're live that's interesting okay so how is it just you building the company or you have a little team no that's just me justin man this is the best way to do it man a side hustle three four grand a month mostly margin why not yes definitely you have good design though i mean did you pay someone to the designer you put this together i put yourself together myself um you know i i'm mostly a back-end guy as far as building applications so i i uh you know go and find a template and you know put it together that way it looks it looks really great so it sounds like you found this as a template and then you sort of edited the template to match what you need right yeah really interesting okay so how are you how are you signing up new customers today like how are they finding you mostly through uh search to google search um you know i'm trying to add more landing pages for different keywords and things like that and basically just learning how to market this thing it's it's i'm trying to get in front of more churches obviously because they're they're the people that i think are more receptive or most receptive towards it so what is that like you trying to optimize for like uh live streamed churches or what are they what's the keyword you're targeting um yeah stuff like that um uh facebook auto embed um facebook uh live um for your ministry or for your church things like that you know so i'm looking at it it's difficult it's it's almost it's hard to uh put into words what the app does you know i'm looking at that search term right now live stream church has just got a curiosity curiosity to see who ranks for it so vimeo and go tell it dot co are running ads against that keyword and then there's not a lot of competition at all it's it's actually it's actually individual churches like this riverbend church a link to their live stream not a tool for live streaming i mean this sounds like an awkward opportunity for you yeah definitely yeah pursue that have you reached out to like this guy jake at church front his youtube ranks number one for the keyword live streaming setup for small churches yes i have seen that video but do you reach out and try and convince him to link to you in the video i have not and that's a good idea i should probably do that i hear you man i hear ya and so why not i mean how do you decide how much time to spend on your auto gig versus this um well i mean i i work from home with uh my normal job so um the idea of having this this uh application or just my own business i wanted to find something that was small um something that would you know solve a small problem save people time and i wanted low maintenance very low maintenance or very low interaction with the actual application so once a person signs up you know they configure it put it on their site set it and forget it you know that that's that was my goal so i think i'm doing pretty well with that um that way i don't have a lot of interaction with the customers after the fact you know after they're done what do you use to measure things like customer churn or do you measure that at all right now i i kind of look at the charts that are on uh stripe and i use stripe for that so um for the most part my churn is pretty low you know what what does stripe say it is um right now i think it was uh seven percent or something last time i looked that's annually or monthly uh that's annually that's super low seven percent that's really low yeah yeah it's good stuff so i mean why...