How We Generated Over $200K in Revenue Within Just 48 Hours of Launch

Mikael Dia: 00:00:00

So we charged 700 lifetime. And because I had built a lot of goodwill in that Facebook group, because people were using our free mapping tool a lot, um, The 700 was a really good bargain for very, for a lot of people. Uh, we ended up generating just over 200, 000 in revenue in about 48 hours when we first launched the lifetime deal. Uh, and we ended up kind of closing seven figures in non recurring revenue in those first 12 months, uh, using that kind of Facebook group methodology. And, uh, that's kind of how we kind of got things kicked off.

Upendra Varma: 00:00:41

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the B2B SaaS podcast. I'm your host, Mikhail Diya here with us. Mikhail here is the founder and CEO of a company called Finalytics. Hey, Mikhail, welcome to the show.

Mikael Dia: 00:00:50

Thank you for having me.

Upendra Varma: 00:00:52

All right, Mikhail, let's, let's sort of, you know, jump, uh, jump into your product, right? So let's understand what Finalytics does and like why customers are willing to pay.

Mikael Dia: 00:01:00

Yeah, absolutely. So Funalytics, uh, is fundamentally a marketing analytics platform. Uh, what we do is we help businesses visualize their entire customer journey on a digital whiteboard, and then they can overlay all of the data on top of that journey, on top of that whiteboard, so that they can see exactly how people Convert. What are the conversion rates? Where are the bottlenecks? How are people flowing through all the different touch points, um, that they have to try to convert strangers into customers?

Upendra Varma: 00:01:30

Uh, all right. So just talk a bit more here, right? So, uh, I can see your product. You've got nice, nice dashboard and I could see some sort of, you know, maps and all of it, right. And, you know, data flowing through it, right. So do you also help companies run those campaigns or are you, are you just sort of collecting those data and then sort of, you know, showing them like what's, what's working and what's not like,

Mikael Dia: 00:01:49

Yep. So we don't help you run campaigns. We basically help you plan out and measure the performance of those campaigns from a, uh, from a visual standpoint. So think of it as, uh, Miro, which is like the whiteboarding, um, tool meets Google analytics. So the ability to basically look at every single customer touch point, uh, map it on a canvas and basically connect them all together. And then. Turn on data to understand how are people flowing through this. Uh, it's a perfect way for agencies specifically, but marketing teams in general, uh, to communicate both the strategy and the results of that strategy. However, no, we, we integrate with all different platforms. We'll pull data from HubSpot or, uh, we, you install Funalytics on your website as a tracking script. Um, and basically we'll pull data from other platforms and then visualize it on the canvas.

Upendra Varma: 00:02:45

so talk about your customer base today, right? So how many customers are we talking about by using your product today?

Mikael Dia: 00:02:51

Uh, we have thousands of customers using Finalytics, uh, and it ranges across different, um, industries, different types of businesses. So many of them are, uh, agencies. Like I said, they help businesses do kind of performance marketing as a whole. And basically they come in and do this for their clients. And then we have in house marketing teams who, for, um, uh, typically the three core segments are e learning. So. education course creators, um, coaches, that kind of stuff. Uh, then you have kind of SAS people who try to generate demos and, uh, want to get something kind of scheduled in or a free trial. And we have e commerce as well. So those are kind of the three core segments. Where in house marketing teams come in. Uh, however, because we have this really cool mapping canvas, uh, we have all sorts of marketers from newbies to experienced people across all industries, kind of use our mapping tool to visualize their strategy.

Upendra Varma: 00:03:54

So just talk, help us understand, how much does a typical customer or a typical agency pay you to use the software?

Mikael Dia: 00:04:01

Yep. So, uh, it ranges. So our mapping tool is 49 per month, uh, and basically allows you to map all of your strategies. So most people who are kind of just on the mapping level are at that price point. Um, however, for our performance plans, which is the ability to overlay data, It'll range anywhere from 200 per month to, you know, 2, 000 per month. Now on an agency level, it's usually based on a workspace, um, and how many clients they have inside of their, their account. So for, for them, a typical agency will pay about a thousand dollars a month.

Upendra Varma: 00:04:39

Thousand a month, right? That makes a lot of sense. How much of your revenue does come from agencies? It looks like that's your bigger chunk. That's what I'm understanding.

Mikael Dia: 00:04:46

It's our core customer, our ideal client profile. However, however, um, it's actually pretty much split 30 percent across the board, uh, bigger midsize in house teams, uh, versus our, um, agencies versus kind of that mapping segment. Those are the kind of three core and it's pretty much 30 percent across the board.

Upendra Varma: 00:05:10

Like approximately, right, as a company, what are you doing in terms of revenue? Did you cross that one or two million dollar mark?

Mikael Dia: 00:05:16

we've, we're, we're past the, I don't like to overly disclose, uh, revenue numbers, but, uh, we are past the seven figure mark. Yes.

Upendra Varma: 00:05:23

So yeah, let's just go back. Right. So just want to get a sense of, right. So where you're getting all of these agencies or your marketing teams, right? So where are you finding them? Then just, just talk about your whole GTM strategy. And I want you to sort of start at the top of funnel, right? So where you're discovering what channels have been working for you. I know you are into digital marketing, so I know you, you have a good plan here, right? So what's, what's that plan? And just help us walk through, walk us through that funnel, right? So, yeah.

Mikael Dia: 00:05:47

Yeah. Interestingly enough, uh, it's, it's changed over the years. Um, so we originally started off with the mapping tool being free. And we would advertise the mapping tool, and we would basically use a product led motion to get people to pay for the analytics tool on the back end. Um, and over the years, we've experimented with a few different models, and the mapping tool has always been kind of the core driver for growth. People talk about our mapping tool, share our mapping tool, etc. Um, but we also experimented with a sales led motion on the back end of the mapping tool. And right now we are very much experimenting with a free trial motion on the front end. So all of the people who are coming in, um, and most of our traffic right now is organic. We just have a lot of people coming in organically. Which is great. Uh, and that's a, uh, you know, a function of a few things, um, our, our product itself being great, but also, um, you know, the use and, and the kind of word of mouth aspect of things. So most of our traffic comes in organically. That's our core kind of funnel. We bring in people through a product led approach through the free trial. Um, and really try to dial in that onboarding experience. It's really, really challenging cause our, our product is quite technical and, and quite, um, complex in terms of what you can do with it. And it's not a, a single kind of, you know, connect your Google calendar and here's the outcome. Um, there's, there's a lot of nuances to using our tool. So it requires some, some backend

Upendra Varma: 00:07:30

so just, I just want to sort of, you know, quantify a lot of things that you've just said, right? So I know there are a lot of things in there, right? So let's just stick to the past 12 months, right? So like how many new customers have you sort of, you know, acquired over that, over the past 12 months? What's, what's an approximate range for that?

Mikael Dia: 00:07:44

Yeah, we acquire approximately 50 or so per week, give or take, um, in terms of new customers, in terms of, uh, free trials, we're acquiring anywhere around 200 or so free trials, uh, per week.

Upendra Varma: 00:07:58

And, and what's, what's like, what's that top of funnel, right? So where, where, like, I know word of mouth, you mentioned word of mouth, right? But like. Where else are you sort of driving all of this traffic from, right? Have you been writing any content or is something working for you, right? I mean, like,

Mikael Dia: 00:08:12

purely organic.

Upendra Varma: 00:08:13

okay, so how do you generate like what, like 4, 000 sort of that's like 200 into 50, right? So we're talking about almost thousands of, you know, lead free trials every year, right? So where are we getting all of this from, right? So it's,

Mikael Dia: 00:08:25

Uh, yeah, every, every month. Yeah. Um, yeah, the, the, honestly it is very much a hundred percent organic in the sense that, um, it's not through our blog. It's mostly direct to funneletics. io. And when we look at, let's say, our, um, our, um, self attribution, when people fill out a form and say, how did you hear about us? It very much ranges from YouTube to info, Instagram, influencers, to LinkedIn to. Um, just, it's basically people using our tool, taking screenshots of it, uh, and other people talking about it. So it's less so,

Upendra Varma: 00:09:04

and you haven't put in any effort on those standards to, you know, drive the word of mouth, right? You know, it's, it's people, your users sort of, you know, sharing the content that, you know,

Mikael Dia: 00:09:13

Correct. Now, the interesting thing is that wasn't the case in the beginning, right? Obviously, it snowballed into that. We used a lot of paid advertising in the very beginning to promote our free mapping tool. And that free mapping tool started to take a life of its own, and people started talking about the mapping tool, people started talking about the ability to map these customer journeys on a canvas, and that kind of snowballed into, All of this organic traffic people recorded videos and and posted and and then it just created kind of a lot of organic traffic now that's not to say that that's the best traffic because we get a lot of traffic from South American countries. We get a lot of traffic from all over the world, right? And, um, our ideal customers, the ones who do pay, let's say 1, 000 a month as an agency, they're not coming in, you know, those free trials coming in are not the them, right? So. We need to, um, continue to optimize and figure out how do we get more of those customers,

Upendra Varma: 00:10:16

where are they coming from, which is my naturally next question, right? So where are those actual paying 10, 000 ACV deals, these agencies discovering

Mikael Dia: 00:10:24

current, currently they are still coming in from the organic, but it's a small fraction of the, the bigger pool of people. So, um, for us, in order for us to grow, um, we've got to now figure out, okay, well, how do we, what is our go to market motion for that particular type of client? Because we've been kind of growing through organic. And think of it as a high level top of funnel. So now think of instead of free trials, most people look at free trials as like, uh, a step, right? Well, for us, we almost look at free trials as a lead more so than we look at a free trial as a, um, an actual email address. So people start a free trial. And only a small fraction of the people who start a free trial currently through our organic traffic is our ICP. And now what we need to do is figure out how do we get more free trials from the right ICP using a proper go to market

Upendra Varma: 00:11:21

still

Mikael Dia: 00:11:21

that's something we're

Upendra Varma: 00:11:22

of your ICP is still coming from those free trials, right? That's what's happening today. You

Mikael Dia: 00:11:26

Exactly. There's still a small percentage. That allows us to keep growing, but it's, it's a small

Upendra Varma: 00:11:30

Let's talk about the sales cycle, right? What does it involve, right? For you to sort of close that 10, 000 ACV deal, right? So. Do you do any handholding? I know you must have like, you must figure that out. Like, Hey, this is an ICP for me, right? These guys are going to pay big bucks for me. Right. So do you do anything after that? Or we just leave them to sort of, you know, for that self serve motion, right? Because your product is also not so easy to use. I mean, you need some handholding or at least in the beginning. Yeah. So do you do anything

Mikael Dia: 00:11:55

so, so we have, uh, think of it as a, an SDR process. So they start a free trial. We identify who is the, uh, right person for every trial. We, uh, host, or at least we attempt to host a kickoff call with every one of them to kind of Show them the ins and outs of the platform, even though they can kind of go through the platform themselves, and we have a lot of training and onboarding and all that stuff we incentivize them to schedule a kickoff call, and that kickoff call is really ultimately. A combination of both a, um, onboarding or showing them the ins and outs of the platform for their use case, but also a discovery call to understand whether or not they would be a good fit for our agency level plans and, um, and our higher level plants. So we kind of just use that as a sales process. So basically, anytime a free trial comes in, uh, we use an SDR to outreach as much as possible, get those kickoff calls scheduled, post those kickoff calls, and then identify the right ones and move them down the path.

Upendra Varma: 00:13:00

that makes sense? Or let me guess. So let's just sort of go back right to when it all started, right? So what's the backstory there? And like, how did you get your first, how did you get your first five, 10 customers? Just help us walk us through

Mikael Dia: 00:13:11

Sure. Um, yeah, so I, I did it very unconventionally to get, um, customers. Um, I, I built originally Finally, this for myself as an, as an agency owner. Uh, and I, it was just a tool that I wanted. I, you know, Now, I was extremely naive in terms of the complexity of what this tool required to build and to kind of, you know, get to where it is today. Um, it's been a, a journey and a half to say the least in terms of building this. Uh, however, I really wanted this tool for myself. So what we did is Uh, at the very beginning, because again, the, the it's called funnel lytics, right? It's funnel analytics. It was always about the analytics and always about the data. However, the way we visualize the data is through this mapping canvas. So at the very beginning, I was speaking to a friend of mine, and he shared the idea of how of saying, Hey, this mapping canvas is really, really cool. Why not give away this mapping tool for free and then just sell people on the backend on, on the analytics side, um, while you continue to build this. So that's exactly what we did. We basically went and, uh, started advertising the mapping tool. So I used some of my income from my, my agency to advertise the mapping tool. But what I did is I pushed everyone who signed up to the mapping tool to a Facebook group and we started building out a Facebook group. And, um, then in order to launch the analytics, uh, I called it Funalytics Pro at the time. And we did it through a kind of founding members round and it was a lifetime deal. And basically, uh, in order for me to generate some customers, uh, I knew that From a a churn standpoint, like our, the analytics wasn't even close to ready. It was, it was barely a prototype, let alone something usable. So instead of charging people 99 a month or a hundred, you know, whatever, um, I figured, okay, well, based on what it is, we could probably, you know, it's probably worth about 700 lifetime. You know, now we charge 500 a month for our product. However, at the time it was nothing. So we charged 700 lifetime. And, um, and because I had built a lot of goodwill in that Facebook group, because people were using our free mapping tool a lot, um, The 700 was a really good bargain for very, for a lot of people. Uh, we ended up generating just over 200, 000 in revenue in about 48 hours when we first launched the lifetime deal. Uh, and we ended up kind of closing seven figures in non recurring revenue in those first 12 months, uh, using that kind of Facebook group methodology. And, uh, that's kind of how we kind of got things kicked off.

Upendra Varma: 00:16:06

And have you raised any external finding post that, right?

Mikael Dia: 00:16:09

I have, yep. I've raised a VC funding, uh, in, in it, the first round was in April, 2020. Uh, and we kind of have raised, uh, we've raised about 3 million in terms of funding and, um, It was interesting because a lot of that funding was used specifically to rebuild the platform. Again, I didn't know what I was building, right? This is something I want. And I hired a developer. There was no structure. We were planning as we were building, so we were

Upendra Varma: 00:16:45

how much did it cost you to sort of build that first version back then?

Mikael Dia: 00:16:48

Man, maybe with the developer that we had, maybe the first prototype and then the two years of investing, I had about three engineers on it, um, full time for about two years. Uh, so I don't know, do the math of that. And then one engineer part time for about a year. So, you know, and again, we were using kind of the lifetime deal revenue to kind of fund that. But again, we were building as we were going. So in other words, we're like, Hey, you know, what would be cool, this feature. So we build the feature. And then it's like, Hey, you know, what would be cool, this feature. And we would stack another feature and then realize, oh, wait, these two features don't talk to, don't connect. And, you know, And it was poorly designed and all that stuff. So it ended up being a non scalable product. So when we raise our first round of funding, we used a lot of that money to rebuild from the ground up.

Upendra Varma: 00:17:45

So Mikhail, like what's, what's the vision here right now that you're on that VC path, right? So where do you see your company in like next three, four years, right? So what are the next big milestones you're aiming for and like, what's the big vision here? Thank you

Mikael Dia: 00:17:56

Yeah, good, good question. Uh, so ultimately we see Funalytics as a platform that can be used by really any digital marketing team, uh, all over the world. So we have a, you know, a, a universal language with our products. Canvas. Everybody loves to look at pictures and everybody knows they need data. So we're continuing to build that vision of just creating that command center for all the digital marketing teams in the world. Uh, our goal is to kind of get to kind of the series A. We'll probably raise a series A round, um, at some point, but we're operating profitably. We're growing. So. We're not in a rush to kind of raise, um, however, we'll probably at some stage raise the next round and, and take it to the next level.