How Workee CEO Ihor Bauman grew Workee to $1.2M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ihor bauman he is building a very cool tool called worki.net helping freelancers to manage their business online you ready to take us to the top sure okay so how how does this work what are freelancers using you for uh yes so uh before start uh we are helping not all transfers we have specific focus on those classes that have appointments online so you can imagine teachers health experts coaches psychologists therapists those who have scheduled appointments uh in a row like three five sessions where they consult with people working works in two simple steps to imagine uh first of all we have the simplest website builder on the market that goes uh with booking scheduling and payments out of the box so once you sign up you already have your personal website where people can reach you directly and where people can book you can pay for sessions for you and can also buy some services from you the main value from work is that your personal website is connected to back office activities we are helping our users to manage their client management through inbuilt crm system we have to encourage users to send invoices to manage their taxes and to also manage their work management flow together with different calendar sync out of the box so that's how we work do you take a percent of invoices paid through your platform uh good question so far we are not taking any fees you can go uh you can just uh subscribe for 30 days of trial and then switch to paid subscription that is 19 bucks per month and you are zero percent fee from the working side uh we like beating in this way marketplaces because marketplaces as you know they are charging for every match they are making but for our users that are having appointments for them that doesn't make sense for paying for every session because once they matched because they already have a client they already understand that yeah and so how much are freelancers paying on average per month to use your software tools uh so uh if uh taking uh uh into account different softwares that our users are combining uh uh like except of working so our users in most cases are using like zoom currently personal website some crm solution and fees for invoices and payments and roughly uh our users uh right now without working then they can pay something between uh two hundred to four to four hundred dollars per month and what is the average what's the average would you say average uh from 200 to 400 per month so as average i guess would be 300 max per month and when did you launch the business what year uh we launched last year in uh we went public on august last year 2021 yeah and how many customers do you have today uh so far we have uh more than three thousand and five hundred users in the us three thousand what uh three uh three thousand five hundred users from the years i see so can i multiply three thousand five hundred times three hundred dollars a month to get your revenue uh uh yes so uh uh are we charging making bucks per month uh right now at the moment from our users and uh 300 it's how much people you uh have to pay if they are not using work oh i see so i can take 19 times 3 500. you're doing about 67 000 a month right now on revenue uh uh so it's like not in this way because we have a lot of promotions and that's all all trials we have so not all trials are active right now in terms of subscriptions so we are roughly doing something below one thousand products okay so so one thousand customers or one thousand in revenue oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your 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valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview okay so you're doing a thousand dollars a month in revenue how many of the 3 500 trials how many are paying customers uh so far it's uh roughly 50. five zero okay why have only 50 converted we have so far some challenges in terms of their conversion to paid uh because apparently you have on the 30 days of trial and then you need to subscribe and some of our competitors are they have three new models uh so that's why we also considering to launch freemium and then you will be able to upgrade uh to the subscription why premium because we really see from the market the point that we make money only when only when you do that's why uh for now we also want to switch to the premium and then to allow our users to be subscription fee so it's commission free if they're going to subscription so yes so so far it's about about this way this is a lot of signups though so let's talk about that how have you gotten so many signups i know you're on g2 you're on captera what other channels are you using to get customers or trials uh yes so uh so far we've been uh testing different channels like uh paid ads and social media and different social media platforms et cetera so far we see that for us it works the best content marketing we're doing a lot of cell content on the internet like blog we are inviting different experts from the market opinion leaders to write work together together also country we actually working with influencers and bloggers local from the u.s markets that help us to promote workers through their network and also we're doing well with quora marketing and paid solutions in google so that's our the best channels file so far how much are you paying per month to google uh like uh for that uh yeah uh roughly 1000 roughly a thousand per month okay and how are you funding this business did you raise capital or are you bootstrapped you were uh yes so we were strapped uh from the early beginning uh until we joined startups guys uh it's the biggest acceleration program in their europe and uh just recently we announced about pre-seat uh round raised uh by working for six hundred thousand us dollars from a couple of vcs and angel and what valuation did you raise that at uh can this close right now but it's uh some roughly cup of milk something like 5 million oh it sounds quite good most people in the pre-seat are doing a convertible note so it's not actually a priced round did you do a note or a price round uh we do a convertible note and save got it so the convertible note will usually have a cap on it right so you're saying that cap was like four million bucks yep okay into four million or five million uh it's roughly between i see okay and so where are you spending that money where do you think you're gonna make big investments uh so far we are investing into their team uh we're growing as a team we hire a couple of marketing guys we couple uh have a couple of development team uh members as well uh and yeah it's also like increasing badges for our marketing channels uh and uh partnering with influencers and bloggers so that's our like our main uh direction for spending very cool now when people start paying are they sticking around do you have any churn uh sure we have the churn uh roughly uh yeah sure like any business have churn uh our approximate lifetime value is roughly...