How Zapable CEO Chris Fox grew Zapable to $157.8K revenue and 1.5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is chris fox he's been working online since 2003. he left school at 16 years old he's self-taught and started working support for sas companies he's now moved on to building his own software with his brother andrew the company is called zappable they launched it four years ago it's 100 self-funded and generated over 2.5 million bucks in revenue since launch chris you ready to take us to the top yup all right what does zappable do and are you guys a pure play sas company yeah well zombo who's a mobile app builder so it's kind of if you're looking at it's kind of like the whip the wix for mobile ops where people can go and it's point and click simple to build mobile apps for their business or for using our reseller program to build it for other businesses that's basically the simplicity of it okay and do you charge it on monthly you mean you guys are pure sas yep we charge and at the minute it's 297 per year that was our first package and then emma's time went on we began creating new packages to sell onto our existing customers so what's the what's kind of the current customer base what's the average they pay per month today the average they pay is it's mainly yearly at 297 dollars per year okay so it's still about 297 per year yep or about 25 bucks a month [Music] okay and when did you and andrew jump into this what year when did you launch it started we had been doing sort of products and before this but we always wanted to get the big one if that makes sense something that we could really sort of bite our teeth into then around too frozen and sharp pain i was just the world was just going mobile everything was going to start being run from people's phones and apps so of course what year sorry what year did you launch we launched in 2015. okay 2015. got it and and then help me understand you and your brother what'd you what have you guys scaled to in terms of total customers today uh we're currently sitting at around 1500 customers okay and i mean that's that's impressive tell us how you got your first 10 customers well that's an interesting one whenever we we had been um working online for a long time so we had quite a sort of network and we've been building this up for the launch and we launched it for the first time in 31st of march and in our first week we've done about 450 thousand dollars when we when we initially launched it to go live this was this was march 31st 2015. yep and what were you selling what were people buying just 297 annual plan and you sold 450 grand worth about seven dollar annual plan and we also had a 39 per month plan but we're fine quite a lot of people just went for the annual plan okay so that means if you'd had if it was a 297 price point you did 450 grand in sales that means you sold about 1 500 new customers is that right sure and was this like an affiliate launch or something yes okay what's the kickback you paid affiliates uh we paid 50 um on the initial payment and then 30 percent in the return in perpetuity forever so your margins are always locked below seventy percent then if you have a third if the majority of your sales are coming from affiliates and you've committed to 30 in perpetuity for them you kill your margins initially yeah but it's your margins are like up but the affiliate traffic means when an affiliate sends you a ceo it costs you nothing for that sale in terms of acquiring the customer and then your costs are more just from the support and so the server management along those lines well you could argue actually it does cost you something it causes you it costs you 50 of year one sales so if you're selling for 300 bucks it costs you 150 bucks to pay the affiliate the difference is though it's a it's a it's a it's a variable fee tied to the sale versus some fixed expense like you hiring employees i mean just just to understand i mean that that is your model today it's an affiliate model you pay 50 year one 30 in perpetuity yeah well that was our model initially and then we expanded into sort of going into patriots and then we also built up a product line that we then internally launched to our own customers okay so now you have 1500 customers paying 25 bucks a month or 297 per year so what you're doing 37 grand a month in revenue um no we're actually we're we're on our own this year we're going to be hitting um i was 650 how what's your monthly recurring revenue i don't like talking about forward-looking projections because anyone could say anything for those so last month how much did you do last month we'd on about 60 thousand dollars six zero yeah and that's mrr correct so if someone paid you 300 bucks for a year plan last month you divided by 12 and that's what you added to the 60 000 right you didn't put the whole 300 there we have our package it's 297 per year and then we have people who bought our package we'd have customers who would pay a one-time fee of 497 which would be for additional serious materials and trainings on how to how to sell ups the other businesses and then we have another higher end package at around um two and a half thousand dollars is the average where that was someone who actually wanted us to build out um a website for them for their agency or to bolt on to their existing agency so chris i love by the way i love the combination of professional services and sas i think it makes your sas customers more sticky when you have them pay a setup fee to build out the mobile app in the first place but for the sake of this interview just your sas revenue j ignore the one-time stuff last month how much just our sas revenue yeah another low um it would be around sort of thirty thirty five thousand yeah yeah that's what i that's what i calculated it's about 35 000 grand a month from 1500 customers paying 25 bucks a month but most of them are paying 297 per year yep yeah um very good and again just the sas revenue where were you a year ago in terms of monthly revenue um we've been sitting around uh a year ago we were actually um around we're a bit lower we're about 30 this time last year would be a buying sort of 25 starting choices okay so we've kind of increased it a little bit it's down from when we initially launched in 2015 which was just i mean you don't but strap a company and all of a sudden imagine the the statistically speaking you don't go and make a million in your first year from a bootstrap company um and then we had a bit of a drop off each year and then the last year we picked it back up again how did you sign up all your affiliates in the beginning how did you where'd you find them uh years of networking going the events speaking to people and just creating relationships which is probably the i'm not just um sort of pick up the phone and say hello but actually create sort of like a network of people like a a mastermind sort of join mastermind groups and get be among the people um so which mastermind which mastermind are you part of that you got the most affiliates from uh we went to it was a man called calm mersey had it was called the billion dollar mastermind and we met quite a few contacts for it okay the billion dollar mastermind and and why do these affiliates promote the product do they all use it themselves or do they just say well our cpc on this or you know our yeah our cost our earnings per clicks our epc when we send an email blast for zappable is six dollars everything else is two dollars so we're going to keep marketing zappable yeah because they it had to be a fit it has to be a fit to their to their product first of all so that's one of the ways and then the other ways they promoted it and it worked so we'd have an affiliate who'd promote in year one and then he'd promote again with a range of time over six months or twelve months down he'd promote a game because he'd be getting new customers as well and we've just continued to do that over the years okay that's great and then um what do you get today in terms of total team size we're currently uh uh five is myself my brother and we have two support staff on our seo staff and where are we where's everyone based awesome uh we're based in northern ireland on scotland an island okay it's all remote okay ireland and remote great and then talk to me about churn turns critical in a sas company so of all the people that signed up you know a year and a half ago how many of them renewed the second year are chinese around 20 percent annually okay so if 100 people signed up a year ago today when they all have to renew only about 80 renew yep okay that's actually not that bad um the people that churn why do they churn uh why do they turn um a lot of the we find the main reason is because most people are joining us in order to build apps to sell the apps to businesses like other agencies online businesses yeah it's like the reseller model and we find the majority of the reason was is that they just weren't it wasn't working for them for whatever reason it happens so now that's when we developed our new product line to go on top because we started speaking to the people who've been with us basically from year year one and we then one of our staff members was one of our customers so we actually brought him...