How Zirra CEO Aner Ravon grew Zirra to $600K revenue and 15 customers in 2017.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per top 5 and6 million he is help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit soul Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top tribe this week's win of the 100 bucks is Rhett Gillan he is a restaurant industry he's in the restaurant industry and he feels stuck he wants to start his own software business so congratulations Rett for your guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday morning simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now in order to enter and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you subscribed all right guys I talked about this earlier but I schedule like so many meetings it would blow your mind I mean all my podcast interviews right hundreds of buch MERS I talk to monthly I schedule and you know what I do it so efficiently I get them all to agree to my calendar so all the calls are back to back to back that means I'm not switching in between tasks all day long I get them to batch so that I can be very efficient it's so critical and I use a tool called Acuity scheduling to do this at Nathan la.com schedu it eliminates the back and forth between me and people I'm trying to meet with it makes it very simple and most importantly they help me keep my noshow rate very low because they send out reminders helps you look very professional so go to naa.com schedu to sign up and you get a great deal you know you guys know this I hit people hard I make great deals and Gavin the CEO has given us a great deal if you sign up like normal people okay on their website you only get a 14-day free trial you use my link na.com schedule to get 45 days free okay it's the best it's free go to na.com schedule right now to sign up and I'll see you there Nathan lka here this is episode 588 and coming up tomorrow morning you'll hear from the CEO of heptio which breaks down why growing kubernetes adoption with $8.5 million raised from Excel Venture capit is so important now if you don't know what kubernetes is you want to tune in tomorrow and learn from Craig good morning folks Nathan lka here our guest today is anur Ron and he is the co-founder and chief product officer of his new company called Zer now Zero's mission is to solve the education and entry pain of the retail investor when it comes to equity investments before this company he spent his time at Celtic as VP of media and head of the business unit an there are you ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely very good so tell us what does zero do and how do you generate Revenue okay so uh we basically step into the void of between data and actual analysis of companies uh we see that retail investors or even not just retail investors people who are looking to invest uh from on behalf of venture capital firms or private Equity firms uh there's a big void between the data collection and the footwork and the actual decision- making uh about the company whether the company is worth investing in and if so under what conditions and we're trying to automate that process and make this process much easier for them so they can focus on their investment decisions and not on data collect for and so give us an example of of of like I'm I'm on the site right now and by the way make sure your microphone is not brushing up against your clothes just so we can make sure we have good audio quality um so so how how do you make money is it a software platform or pay as you go or what it's a well it's a it's a service uh we have a we have a few options uh one is allart it's pay as you go you can order we have two main products uh which we offer one is what we call a spotlight report which is which is a screening report or an investment brief uh we typically charge $49 for it but we also package it with uh with subscriptions uh and then for the more uh I would say uh for corporate investment corporate investors or more or more uh structured customers we also offer uh value packages which are monthly subscription based okay got it and and what do people so we don't have to go into each individual monthly subscription plan the one the people who are paying you monthly what are they on average paying you per month uh Angels pay us uh $99 per month uh and they get up to three free reports uh Plus discounts on our value eded Services uh private Equity firms pay us anywhere between $4.99 and $12.99 depending on the depth of service that they need to receive uh and they get either 10 reports all the way from 10 reports a month to unlimited usage okay again if we just take a quick a before we go back to your story and how you launch this if we just take a quick average across your entire customer base who's paying monthly what is the average customer paying uh about $700 $800 a month okay got it great and then take us back historically so when did you launch the business so we launched uh we started the company three years ago uh we officially launched our uh service that would have been that would have been 2014 correct yes August 2014 to be honest less than three years it felt it feels like 30 by now but it's but it's but it's only two and a half years we launched our service in Alpha mode August last year August of of 2015 not 2016 so that's a year and a half ago and we started monetizing it uh 6 months later we first offered it for free uh and we started monetizing it in November 2015 how did you know when to stop giving it away for free and start monetizing it's it's a funny story we didn't know um and uh there was actually mhid my partner and I were sitting one day and we were arguing she was she was you know she was going let's let's shut the free service down and start charging money and let's see how much money we can actually make how many M when at at that time of the argument uh we had about 150 uh 150 users and we have covered by then about 4,000 companies for these 150 customers some of these customers are actually very large private Equity firms who've been using us pretty pretty pretty heavily like like name name one or two of them just to paint a clear picture uh okay so we had Silver Lake uh a couple of banks uh in Israel we started in Israel we just made the first inroads to US market uh I guess 6 months ago um Microsoft was using us pretty heavily but free but for free and and I was kind of scared about forcing them to become a customer definitely with that kind of you know that kind of corporate um and we just sat there one you know one morning and said you know what we're not going to know if we don't do this and we we just block we just blocked for usage to the service and uh uh happily we were happy to see that most of the customers almost like 8 5% of the customers went from free to paid Services they may not use it as heavily as before uh they may pick their you know they pick the company they're actually interested in uh but we saw a very good conversion from free to premium which for us was a very good indication to the quality of the product so that that day you said you blocked the site to free users what did you do just put up a pay wall that says pick a plan to see this report yeah absolutely uh before that uh we managed the free usage uh with uh with the coupons that we distributed did so we never said uh we never said the service was going to be open forever we basically said hey we're going to charge at some point here are some free free coupons for now or free credits that you can use um and we didn't take away those credits but we stopped renewing them got it so when people when our customers exhausted their credits they got to a pay wall and we basically said put out there like a nice message saying hey you know we also got to eat so from now on it's going to it's going to cost you some money and what did they what did they what did you say pay 49 bucks now to get another report or to get 100 credits what was that first pay wall what it say so we started with uh pay $49 now to get a single report or buy 10 reports at a bulk uh and we offered it for a discount we offered it for $2.99 um and then a couple of weeks later we saw that we were converting some of those uh 10 report vouchers uh but it made much it made more sense for us to start offering a monthly subscription instead and and that's how that's how it stands right now so of your current Revenue fast forward to you know first quarter 2017 what percentage of your revenue is coming from monthly plans versus people buying one off $49 uh uh uh reports it's almost 50/50 um yeah it's almost 50-50 and I we have we actually had a development which I didn't really quite anticipate but we have quite a few habitual or regular users who are not officially monthly subscribers uh but are de facto monthly subscribers because because they order they order single reports in in a rate that is comparable to a monthly subscription that's right yeah so if you just look at the ones who are committed to paying...