How Zest CEO Yam Regev grew Zest to $3K revenue and 42 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is yam regev he is has 10 plus years of experience in scaling and managing b2b and bdc organizations the former cmo of webidoo which raised 17 million bucks and 80 employees at its peak he's founded and managed compass a large web marketing agency with 11 years of successful operation and now building zest.is knowledge building platform for professionals yummy you're ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right so help us understand what maybe what the company does and give us a customer example yeah sure so zest is a knowledge building platform and actually we unify community content curation with ai to create the best professional knowledge path for each individual user so that way we can build their knowledge you know without any kind of noise um and each individual can just increase his professional knowledge over there um users are the mainly marketers at this point we cater mostly for the marketing vertical so people can just come in sign up being on-boarded by defining their own preferences and then they will get the most accurate content they should consume in order to become better professionals they don't need to go to facebook google or any other kind of places um and thus be swamped by content so this is the place for professionals to grow is sean ellis an investor no very good you just like him a lot oh yeah he's he's on your all over your website so i figured it was one of the two all right what's your business model how do you make money so we're in free revenue kind of status at this moment but then the model that we'll use is subscription based so it will be six dollars per month we just launched a mobile app uh last week we were number one on product and another screen product of a product of the week over there uh we generated some six thousand uh better users that will come and help us to you know create a better product market fit kind of procedure all in all for zest we live for the past we launched sorry for the past in in two years ago we have more than 100 000 users and more than 32 000 monthly active users okay 100k active what is an active user sorry what does 100 000 users mean right so um the main product or the main destination until now was um youtube extension so each time you can install it and then each time that you open a new tab zest will be there so it's like a feed that gets and no get to know you and then building your knowledge accordingly so over there we had the more than 1000 installs um and for active users those are people who opened though the chrome new tab extension and minimum that they did over there is chrome and of course click on articles save articles share articles and everything that you like to consume consuming content so these are active users okay so so how many active users again 32 000 monthly active users okay 32 000 monthly active users and then the 6 000 you signed up last week on product hunt are those kind of new installs or active users what do you consider those people right so those people came in there in the past two months as we created um a pretty bad kind of a campaign and over there we ask people to um to register with the closed beta version for the mobile app that we just launched last week on on product uh we created a viral loop over there so people who registered uh get the chance to sell send the lead to a few more colleagues of them uh the product is free forever for them for those power users that will sign up and those you know just from this campaign where we got um 6 000 registrations we already onboarded 2.5 k and all in all we have 3 000 monthly active users just from this small beta launch so 3 000 monthly activity on the on the mobile app okay okay 3k made um act and now how do you define active on the mobile app so at the moment it's just people who have opened the the app and they at least they scroll a little bit so it's not just like so yeah i'm not not a huge barrier or entry to get someone to go from install to user uh but but this is by the way this is i mean the tricky thing i think with what you're building is it's almost like an entrepreneur.com it's a media organization but you have hardcore tech i'd say more tech than entrepreneur magazine probably has behind it i mean so do you do your just view yourself as a business model that should look more like a kind of a b2b sas company or like a b2c you know you know news aggregation app like an rss feed that's a great question so i'll tell you that um i don't think that b2b or b2c is something that is in our core dna definition at the moment i see it mostly go to strategy go to market strategy point of view and it means that um in most places right now when professionals want to build their knowledge they either you know freelancers or they work in some product based companies or agencies so what we want to do is to get to those professionals as we do today and they will get to us they will um spread the word within the departments that they walk in and then we'll get more and more users this is how we go till till now so we we see this model as bottom up right so we get we if you want to call it in a different name it will be business to professional um and then they will get us into those companies and then of course you know if you want to increase and to upgrade everyone else so we can speak with whatever the cmo just create a seat based kind of model so that's a landed explain kind of methodology okay so of the 6000 you've had no pricing kind of to date except now you're charging six dollars per month on the mobile app six thousand have installed it via the product launch 3000 have now activated defined by they logged in and scrolled a little bit how many of them have converted a paid what's that again have any of them converted to paid oh we have um a few dozens of them but nothing really you know we just launched it no no but what's the number this is a great moment you're turning like 36 ish oh we have around the 42 last time that i uh checked i love yama by the way i love this moment because this is the stage where like you're refreshing every like two hours to see to see like okay 43 44 45 you know all use all concurrent users and all that well the geographic they're coming through i'm just addicted you know you cannot you cannot stop do do the refreshment over there what are you learning i mean what are you learning so 42 people paying six bucks a month is 72 dollars per month you're just now kicking us into a high year what are you learning from these first 42 signups i'm getting there first of all we're um connecting them manually with each one of them just to make sure that we know them who they are what is the jargon that they use what is their lingo what they expect from that was it by mistake or not uh we created in zest because we have a community-based kind of product so we have a big uab which is a user advisory board we have 64 people over there from from the chrome extension days that we had so people are really involved with how things have been modified at zest and our content is being approved um so we really love to be without any kind of automation and do things that don't scale so i know it's a huge cliche but this is how we build zest and this is how we are achieving product market fit we just understood that those professionals want to feel the warmth of our hands on their shoulders not in a creepy way but they just want to understand that there is there are people behind the product that you want to listen to they want to be part of the whole movement that you're creating is the chrome extension dead with all the new rules google has released around the approvals and paying third-party you know parties to validate these apps um not at all um and you know it's a huge real estate there is only one new tab extension that the user can have right it's not like a mobile app that you can have multiple apps you have only one over there so that's a huge real estate for someone like us that want to not just to know what is good content or knowledge as we call it but also how professionals are interacting with the knowledge so to be on your chrome or your browser teach us a lot how you consume your content how much how deep you scroll where you're highlighting and all that there are a lot of benefits for that on the other end a lot of disadvantages because a lot of early users can say that it's too intrusive uh for instance so this is why i believe that we got more than 100 000 installs and again we just cater for the marketing vertical and that we have some 32 percent who became monthly after do you actually have the hundred thousand installs the emails so you can remarket to them or no what's that again the hundred thousand people that have installed the chrome extension do you have their emails so you can remarket to them and reach out personally to try and onboard them or no no but if you um want to suggest content on this so other community members can consume it or it will go through the distillation process or if you want to follow save and whatever whatever other kind of action you need to connect with um either linkedin or some other social network...