How Webhookrelay CEO Karolis Rusenas grew Webhookrelay to $120K revenue and 500 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is carolyn russenas he is building a tool that helps you debug web hooks sort of at scale he's an entrepreneur full stack engineer with extensive experience in compute infrastructure networks kubernetes and developer tooling the website's webhookrelay.com careless you're ready to take us to the top um yeah uh hey everyone okay so explain explain this tool simply for us right people understand a web hook they understand they build a tool it has to connect to stripe and it uses web hooks to do that where does your tool come in uh so many use cases when you want to receive one of the book and then fan out into multiple destinations for example if you're integrating it with segment uh hubspot like sapir like many tools so it can do that then it can also forward it to your internal networks so main use case usually is just uh some service in your internal network like on uh like office network or some cloud provider that doesn't have public ap they can receive those web books without getting exposed to the internet like for example jenkins ci that's like very powerful but if someone hacks it then they have access to your whole infrastructure so so careless explain this to a non-developer for a second right so why is it important to be able to test a web hook without being exposed to the internet uh mostly because your computers for example don't really have access to the internet like from outside like internet cannot access your laptop unless you configure your router configure it and also some internet providers don't even give you public id addresses and also some services require https so you'll need to like get a valid certificate for your laptop if you want to test something out and then uh if you want to like retry or see what kind of requests there was and what kind of response you received like it really helps with that got it and i mean is this a big problem do you have customers that are paying to use the tool oh yeah uh quite a few so i initially built it because i had this problem i was building a web book integration uh for one company that i worked before storage us and at that point like i thought that like there must be a similar way uh and yeah i started uh doing that and here we are i think the years after so how many customers are you working with today uh so currently uh there are around uh 10 000 users uh like really active ones i would say uh around 2000. okay so 10 000 users 3k are really active but how many are paying uh 500. around 500 okay and how how did you launch pricing i know you're an engineer so you probably hate thinking about pricing but how did you think how did you think about pricing um i think i looked uh into like different size systems i saw like how how they like provide pricing because obviously it's like a very difficult thing to get right and probably i didn't get it right so i was just rolling with it uh so there were some changes but i pretty much tried to create these bundles uh where there is like a basic plan uh that's usually used by like solar developers or non-technical users that have for example some home assistant deployed on there um like raspberry pi's and then like there's starter plan proclaimed for like companies that start integrating it into their systems and then i have some customers who are live on custom plans completely uh so they've been not restricted for like uh normal invoicing so what is the average what's the average customer pay per month would you say i would say around uh 20 to 50 uh like there's just quite a big range like some iron thousands and a lot of them in just four and a half dollars okay and when did you launch the company what year uh so i launched it quite uh a while ago uh i think 2017 uh but for a long time it was really like very small side project that i would spend only a few hours per week uh so later on and really notice that you if your landing page sucks like you really can't move forward like uh so i iterated a lot on documentation on landing page and i think first users started coming a year and a half ago like i noticed that uh there is an uptick and yeah i just tried to like provide more content like more blog posts more tutorials and have you bootstrapped the company or did you raise capital no not just bootstrapping i love that so you're profitable every month huh yeah yeah that is like absolutely not like scary uh burn down rates or anything like that so how many how many people are on the team uh it's just me just you i love that okay so one one personal engineer and i mean so can i do the math can i take 500 customers times 20 bucks a month you're doing like 10 000 a month in revenue yeah something like that and it's just a single project i have a few other projects and i also do uh consulting on the side um so yeah it's just one stream of income that's great so what we're just looking at web hook relay if it's doing 10 000 a month today what was it doing exactly a year ago um probably a thousand oh wow so a lot of growth yeah yeah and it's pretty much no marketing as well um yeah so how are customers finding you uh so i only write some uh tutorials and blog posts on medium depth um i also wrote some twitter bots to like help like with followers and i have some automations uh but yeah i pretty much try to like get users through content um like i did uh try to do some uh ads on facebook and google but yeah i think like the quality of users that came for just wasn't good enough tell me about what you did on twitter so you have 4 700 twitter followers right now you're saying you built sort of a tool to get more followers and then you converted followers into web hook relay users yeah so mostly that so yeah i was um i was running this uh bot that would like look for our engineers trying to follow them and so on uh but yeah twitter bang me maybe three times i suspended my account uh so i had to change my tactics so where where do you put up most of your content now uh so mostly just on weblook really blog and most of the new users actually coming from google search where they are looking how to like test like strikeout books or set up their jenkins uh testing environment the company it got it so the the the jenkins search is a good one for you you get a lot of users from that yeah yeah because i think it's like a real pain point um lots of corporates don't really want to expose their drinking service to the internet so a lot of corporate customers are coming through through that it's just like that sales cycle with corporations it's just so slow and it's a lot of hand holding uh so yeah it does take a lot of time sometimes and and and do your talking about churn once people start paying they stick what's your turn look like oh yeah it's uh very sticky yeah um so what percent insurance every month um around five percent okay so four percent monthly churn that's on a revenue basis um not not really sure so if you're if you're doing if you're doing if you start the month with ten thousand bucks a month you'll lose four hundred dollars a month in churn revenue oh but uh the growth is always also every month it's uh it's around um someone's like during corona virus uh it's a bit lower like seven percent uh but create prior to corona it was like 15 to 20 percent in terms of churn or growth yeah yeah so ignore growth for a second just look at like lost revenue from the prior month you'll lose like 400 bucks a month or about four percent but you'll grow like 15 or 20 so net you're at like 15 growth yeah so it's it's difficult to say like with trying like as i said like someone's it's zero percent someone there are some uh so like with the last few months uh there was a churn because some of the companies went past yeah unfortunately are you spending any money today on marketing like what's your cap so it's just your time and writing yeah i just see that it's like the best option at least for me at the moment um yes it cost me a time which is probably worth more to me but as i said that i tried to run ads and i don't know why but most of the clicks actually don't really go anywhere like i remember like uh even though i would have like thousands and thousands of clicks like there would only just be a few registrations and then those education have to be converted into like paying customers and just i didn't happen well very good i love a bootstrap to 10k a month that's great a very niche specific tool for developers careless let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book i have to tell uh lots of as a custom of uh science fiction books um i can't really say pick one uh actually maybe a chinese author a three-body problem um he can do i can't pronounce his name but what's the book title free body problem three body problem yeah number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh i like elon musk uh but really not following number one number three what's your favorite online tool for building your uh platform um have anything i just build my own things you must use some sort of online tools github uh let's say uh i think that just helped me a lot what's it called spell it uh gke so it's uh google cloud manuscripts it's like a platform where...