How Walls CEO Michael Kamleitner grew Walls to $10M revenue and 700 customers in 2024.

hello everyone our guest today is Michael comm Lightner he is the founder of the parent company called in 2010 doing agency work and then nascent and then nascent social media marketing space they were the first and Austria to build apps for the Facebook API which is kind of a unique side a few years later they pivoted to SAS and are now running two successful products in the social media marketing space SWAT I owe an enterprise social media management tool and walls I owe a social media hub for all marketing purposes their bootstrap team at 22 based in Vienna Austria Michael are you ready to take us to the top throws are you ready hi Nathan hi everyone all right could be here real quick so I want to focus on one of these companies today which one's bigger in terms of revenue walls or SWAT well but they're basically C equal size but but I would suggest to focus on balls vo since it's a much more internationally targeted product and basically it's it's our our most exciting baby right now okay let's do that so what's the what's the product do and how do you make money as if your place ass yeah it's a pure sauce play it's a social media marketing tool social social media walls is what what we are doing with wall story oh so what do I mean by that well social walls is all about getting content user-generated content from all different sorts of social media platforms the classical ones like Facebook Instagram and so on but also also lesser ones or in essence want once like I don't know ready to flicker stuff like that so we pull in content lets users curate moderate this content and then provide the content on all types of physical displays for example for trade shows for you when you for for for the point of sales or also as a widget for your website for example for marketing campaigns for having a social media newsroom on your web sites what do people pay for this per month on average we do offer three years basically we offer two two pricing plans that's the pro plan that's about 200 euros per per month and the premium package is 500 euros per month I'm sorry I don't have to the dollar price what's the average per month so when you take your total customers well most of the customers are paying the pro plan so that's 200 euros oh and we also offering a free plan since last year okay very good we'll talk more about that here second but buttocks put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the company the product was launched in 2014 so like four years ago okay 2014 and you've bootstrap today correct exactly yeah that's right and what's the team size just on walls our our whole company is 22 and we are about split half half so that's about 1011 people right now so that's it yeah okay and how many customers have you scaled to we are currently at around seven well seven or eight hundred paid walls as we used to say okay so as there are those customers or sometimes do multiple walls belong to same one customer that is sometimes the case yeah I think the customer size is like five hundred to five hundred right now okay five hundred and where are people give me an example of where they might use a wall is it an event kind of thing is it above the kitchen counter in the office where do they put it yeah yeah so our original core used case really was having a social media wall or a Twitter wall as it used to be called at a at an event at the tradeshow so that was the core use case but well that was our first idea but then we learned that customers started to do different things with our product which was interesting to see for example they are really using our product to have social media displays at the at the store for example at the point of stay failed to inspire customers walking by and to see what what kind of user-generated content around their brand is posted and we also have this use case of of hashtag campaign so people doing marketing campaigns around the hashtag on social media and that is usually not done on physical displays that really is mostly done on websites so that is our widget use case and so can I take 500 customers times at $233 that's us it's 200 euro price point you go doing about a 100 grand per month in euros that's not too far off yes and what does growth look like so go back a year from today in September 2017 what we're doing per month then oh well well year-over-year the last year we grew about like 60 70 percent okay that's pretty good so maybe you were doing about 70 grand a month a year ago something like that yeah you're totally right and where's the growth come from adding new customers or getting more revenue from the same customers that is mostly well that is split honestly we do see a lot of new customers popping up we also see well we started in Austria and the german-speaking countries but during the last one year we see tremendous growth coming in from from the from the states actually so so I would say it's mostly new customers and what's the churn look like today well I mean I can't give out any any exact numbers but since we still have a large part of our business being of based in the in the event space sure naturally is relatively high compared to our other product for example because people people used to have one conference a year they're using our product for a few weeks and then they come back next year so there is quite some churn and that is really something you we or I have to get used to that we have this natural churn in the a band space so so we are like I said I don't give out any specific numbers here but it is it is significant we don't just say your number but when you say significant you mean like above 10% logo turn per month well that would be about right yeah okay in that space and so are you are the good news sorry to interrupt you what the good news is that these customers tend to come back at you later once to the conference or the event is repeating well then why don't you measure different I mean so like let's look at the past 12 months you had I'm making this up 400 people do one event how many of them did that same event the year prior in other words if you have 400 one year how many of them come back the next year you're totally right in terms of KPIs we do still have a lot of homework to do so so the next natural step or something we should already do but yeah just didn't have the time to is too more segmentation when talking about to churn we're talking about growth because it's really because it's because it really two kinds of businesses mixed into one right now just event based business is not so much recurring or at least not monthly recurring but like I said before we are of course more interested in more excited about this new use cases which which involve a permanent use of our product like having a display on your shop or having a display at your at your office that is also a use case by the way so so we have one of our latest latest a showcase or logo customers is like Amazon us they are using the product internally and in their offices to raise awareness for social media content and obviously we were very much excited about these use cases because they tend to have to the product and the social media display all year long so this is more the typically recovery the other SAS company that you're running that's about the same size its churn is way lower than ten percent per mo yeah that's quite honestly it's a very much different business so I just slowed down on that why not focus on that well it's it's like like I don't know Nathan do you have kids yeah I have do not have kid Lord I'm mercy I can't keep a see monkey alive okay me neither it's probably true about me as well that's why I'm running two products in one company well but I'm what I'm getting at is it's like like like having two kids and both are super exciting and they're both are developing in two slightly different paths always but I would be quite honest a median founder I could never I could never abandon one of my kids especially since both are doing really fine and our healthy products but that can be that could be like a really bad thing right the definition of insanity is keep doing the same thing over and over without growth or adding value so like I mean how do you know when one of these fails and you should shut one down or sell it well that's that's an interesting question I mean as long as we are growing and obviously we are profitable as being bootstrap there is no other way to that I I don't see any any one of those products failing Fela for me would be like stagnation and no growth growth at all but like I said before we with both products we're seeing great growth so both kids are developing just fine yeah but sure I the kid in algae is tough because I know many people with lots of kids and they all come out great and fantastic it's very different in with businesses right I mean there there are there are people competing with you only focused on hit like destroying one of your businesses so you're literally fighting a war on two fronts and that's self-inflicted so so I'm just curious like if you really care about both of them why not have a hard conversation with yourself figure out what when you care about more and go and try and win that space versus doing both yeah yeah to be to be totally honest that is a...