317: Podscan, 2 months and $1k MRR in
Download MP3Welcome to the Bootstrapped Founder podcast. It's been 2 months of running PodScan for real. So let's take a look at what happened, what didn't happen, and if I already spent all that funding money. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More on that later.
Arvid:1st, because it's quite likely the most interesting topic, let's talk about money. I never disclosed the full amount of what I raised and I likely won't for a while. But let's just say it's a 6 figure number. That's all I can say. It's not a surprise because it's pretty usual for the calm company fund to invest this much into bootstrap companies like mine.
Arvid:But I won't go into the details because I talked to Tyler about this, and I might actually release a podcast episode that I recorded with him prior to me signing the whole thing, the contract about the the deal, you know, and the specifics. We had a a conversation and we chose to record it. So I'll probably release it this week or next week. But, you know, that's that's what it is, 6 figures. And before the Comm Company Fund invested, obviously, I was bootstrapping, then they invested, and then things changed.
Arvid:So did I spend 6 figures on the business already? Well, of course not. I spent around $10,000 or $11,000 so far. And that's all on GPU compute. The plan was to ramp up the computational power behind PodScan's, you know, transcription and AI features much faster than I could have with a purely self funded business that I had before I got that little cash infusion.
Arvid:And that's exactly what I'm doing. So before the funding, I had a smallish main server at Petsnar or something for the app and a single database and around 5 GPU included cloud servers for transcription, core server for my main application, which is hilarious because it's just a PHP app running on 48 courses. It's quite funny to watch. I have a similar 48 core server for the search engine. That one has a lot of storage, like, I think, roughly a terabyte or so.
Arvid:And with the amount of data that I have, it's actually quite needed. So I'm also quite beefy, very fast at indexing, very fast at responding, which also allows me to have full text search, like type ahead full text search that responds within 20 to 50 milliseconds, which is really, really cool. That's always surprising to my users when they start searching. They actually get results, like, in real time from a massive database of millions of records. That's a lot of fun.
Arvid:And paying for a server, I don't know what it is, like $150 or something like a month for such a server to do this. Absolutely worth it. Beyond that, I have 16 cloud GPU servers, just like the 5 I had before, but more for transcription and inference. I have a staging cloud c GPU server for experiments with new features, right? If I wanna build something that I hadn't done before and I'm working with diarization, which is kind of detecting the speakers, like who's speaking in a podcast, and like summarization and all these kind of things.
Arvid:You have a little experimental server to run these things on and figure things out. Now I will ramp this up to 24 or so cloud servers over the next month. Like I said, I'm working on summarization and entity resources. And I'm also maybe slowly but surely adding more of these resources. And it will cost me probably around 15 to $20,000 a month in the end, which means that I have a good year or more of runway just keeping expenses as they are.
Arvid:And mind you, this is all done so I can get through the historical backlog of transcribing all past podcasts. Right? That has an end. Once I'm through with that pretty finite number, it's millions. It's 100 of millions, but I'll get through that.
Arvid:My daily compute needs to be, I don't know, just 10 1 tenth of what it is right now. It's gonna be really, really low once I've caught up with all past things, and I only need to go through the currently released amount of podcasts. Very finite. I think there's roughly 20 to 30000 new episodes in any given day, which is not a lot. I I can do 2, 3000 an hour.
Arvid:So within 10 hours of any given day, I've already worked through all the episodes of that day with my current setup. So I can half that, even like maybe use 1 third of it and still be very much fine. And besides compute, I don't really need to spend the money that I have on anything else just yet. Like I'm not not wasting it on anything. I might be hiring a few experts for like design and user experience work soon, but that will be on a per project base.
Arvid:So I don't expect this to be a recurring expense, at least not for the whole duration of, you know, the next couple months or year. So a year of runway just for my war chest. That's where I'm at. But what's happening on the revenue side of things? Because, you know, runway kinda is affected at least by how much money is actually coming in.
Arvid:So I've just crossed the $1,000 monthly recurring revenue mark last week, actually. And on average, I get 1 or 2 subscriptions a day, mostly on my lowest tier plan, which is $20 a month. Several people buy the yearly plan, which is nice. So there's a lot of, you know, money coming in for the next year or so. Churn at this point is 0%.
Arvid:I mean, I've been around for 2 months. It's funny, but it bodes well for the long term retention cohort graph that I will likely have in a couple months. Month 1 to month 2, 100% retention. That's not too bad. I really like it.
Arvid:Apparently, the product when people commit to it is not so bad that they immediately stop purchasing it, which is kinda cool. I mean, I will see churn. It's just a natural thing over time. But right now, I don't have any, which is the optimal situation to be in. And I'm quite happy.
Arvid:So 1 k MRR. Obviously, that's not 10 k like or 11 as much as I'm spending. So PodScan isn't profitable on that end, but it's technically halfway there. Like I said, the post, you know, history catch up pod scan will not cost cost more than like $2,000 a month in pure infrastructure costs. So that's what I'm aiming to get to as soon as I can in terms of revenue.
Arvid:Because then I know that I can just turn off all these servers for, you know, historical catch up and run a profitable business. That's that's the crazy part, right? Imagine, like, you know, if there is a dire situation or run out of money, I can just like more slowly ingest historical podcasts and have a profitable business. All I need to do is double the amount of customers that I have and I already have customers. So doubling is really not that complicated, at least, I guess.
Arvid:So I'm getting better at acquiring customers too. Maybe that's an important thing to mention here. And I've noticed that over the last couple months, I've I've changed quite a bit here. I've been forcing myself to be as available as I can for customer research conversations. Conversations that are mostly induced by customers actually reaching out to me.
Arvid:I put a link to my Calendly, a Calendly link into all my emails that I sent and in most of my communication. It's just, hey, if you wanna talk to me, book a little 50 minute slot. And I've talked about this here on the show already several times. That this has been an eye opening way to talk to customers because it allows them to actually speak to me. It's not just like typing something like writing an email, writing some kind of draft, whatever.
Arvid:It's just going on a call with me 15 minutes, explain to me what they need, explain to me what they what they're doing. And then I get to give them real feedback. I can show them stuff. It's kind of a sales call, even though some of them are already customers. So it's kind of a nurturing call.
Arvid:Like it's it's different every time, but it's extremely valuable to give people the option to talk to me. And I have currently restricted the days on which people can call me because it's been a bit chaotic. I'll get to that in a couple minutes, I guess. But just being open to these conversations and letting people schedule them into my calendar as interruptive as it is has been very, very helpful. I'm now over 20 conversations into learning more about my customers over the last couple weeks.
Arvid:And that can be a lot, but it's been really useful. It's incredibly powerful to to chat with people who have a problem and they know it. And I think this might be a good opportunity to mention how much MicroConf, the conference in Atlanta last week has actually helped me with this. 2 talks from that conference stand out to me. I think I talked a little bit about etalk, last week.
Arvid:But I'm gonna talk about the other ones now. One was by Rob Walling, organizer of the conference. He was diving deeper into Eugene Schwartz's customer awareness scale, which is really, really useful to understand for your marketing and sales purposes. Like how much do customers know about the problem they have, the solutions in the space, that the fact that there is a solution at all, the fact that there's a problem at all, and how much do they know about your product? That's kind of what the customer awareness skill is about.
Arvid:Rob gave us a really nice marketing framework for all the different stages. That was really helpful. And Stephen Steers talk about structuring sales calls was also really cool because I can take all the knowledge about the sales calls that he's talking about and apply that to my customer discovery calls and my kind of sales ish customer discovery calls as well. Because if you talk to a prospect, you're always trying to help them through the trial. You try to sell them.
Arvid:Right? Or you'll be trying to get them to go to a point where they get the solution to their problem. So it is salesy or sales ish. I don't mean salesy in the sense that it sounds like a sales call, but the outcome is that they might be sold on the product. So it's really nice to have these experts share their knowledge and I could take it and actually apply it.
Arvid:Rob taught me that it that it matters what awareness stage prospects are at. Right? Talking to somebody who is completely unaware that they have a certain problem, that's complicated. You have to educate them on the problem, on the solution, on your solution. And the fact that they need it, there's a bit much more than somebody who already knows they have an issue.
Arvid:They know they're looking for a solution and they just try to figure out which one to use. They're much more easy to, communicate with for somebody in my position. And Stephen taught me that there is a way to structure these calls. You can set an agenda. You can find alignment through a certain couple of steps, and then create these situations of genuine connection over somebody's challenges that work out in a positive way if there is alignment.
Arvid:And you can just say stop and no if there's not. Like these things, they don't have to force anything. It's really nice, really helpful. And the video recordings of these talks, they should be out soon, I guess, on the microconf.com website. Highly recommend for you to check these out.
Arvid:They, I think, are $50. You can still buy the ones from last year. If you do, you'll have a talk with me in it as well. I gave a talk at MicroConf in Denver last year. So that might be interesting too.
Arvid:But, you know, just look at the ones for this year. If you look into if you wanna look into customer awareness and, sales. That's there was a lot of good stuff about sales. And if you're anything like me, then sales is kind of weird and hard and talking to people is hard and you getting them to to open up is hard. These talks will help you.
Arvid:Certainly helped me. So 2 days worth of lectures and workshops for $50, that's a steal. You don't even have to pay for a flight or a hotel. That's quite useful. Anyhow, I'm really getting the hang of talking to my users, which is nice.
Arvid:And I just asked them flat out what their job to be done is. I don't necessarily use that language because I don't know if they understand the concept, but I asked them, you know, what's the outcome of this? What do you need? Like who are you reporting to? Which often is the case in agencies that there's a structure.
Arvid:Who are you doing this for? What do they expect to see? What do you get when you get into the job? And what do you need to present when you come out of the job? Ask for, you know, the workflow that they have.
Arvid:How they accomplish it right now. Whether they consider as a solution to it at all, need to figure out where they are in the scale. And what's still standing in their way of getting their dream results. It's always nice. That is one of the things that I've noticed, Like getting them to explore the perfect state is really fun.
Arvid:Like they they make up all these things, these little things that work so well. Like they they describe to you a state where there's no issue along the way and the the, this is the perfect outcome. It has everything I want. And then they kinda dial it back a little and you see the points of friction. In reality, they often say, well, here's where it gets hard.
Arvid:Here's where there's friction. Here's where I have to take an hour to sift through the AI generated results and remove the weird ones that you see the points of friction and what they struggle with. And you can then actively ask questions about why that sucks. What solutions they tried, what the errors were, what other tools they use, like how yours compares to theirs and all that really, really useful. So that's why I do it.
Arvid:And often these conversations surface some underlying assumption that neither I nor they themselves have ever actively reflected on. I highly recommend recording these calls or these transcribing them as they happen. I use otter dotai and grain, 2 tools for this for post processing these calls. And both of these tools offer action items. That's some kind of AI grabs from the conversation and then tells you what to do next, which is nice because you don't need to take notes during the conversation.
Arvid:The AI kinda pulls it out for you. And that is highly recommended. And I think I'm glad I made my choice for who my ideal customer profile is a few weeks ago, not quite publicly here on this podcast. It's been helping me a lot in figuring out which feature requests and which ideas I say yes and no to and how I prioritize them. I'm doubling down on creating a really spectacular API experience for people who build their tools on podcasts.
Arvid:The PodScan the PodScan podcast platform. Let's just call it that, which then in turn makes it easier for me to build my own features in the alerting and searching sections of PodScan. So that's kinda how this is working. Right? I built a lot of API stuff, makes it very simple for me to then build more features for my agency clients.
Arvid:And what I've noticed is that my customer service load is quite low at the moment. Every other day, sometimes not for 2 or 3 days in a row, I get a message, which I can usually quickly respond to. It's never really a troublesome thing. It's just like somebody had a slight issue with the UI or somebody has a data question or search results didn't come up the way they thought they would. And then, you know, it's just a couple of quotation marks away from working.
Arvid:It's always little stuff and it's really cool to see that most things actually work out well, but I can do more in that regard. I can, you know, start a knowledge base and make it easier, record videos for people to just watch like a 2 minute thing, which really clearly shows how things should work. You know, that kind of stuff. That is that is what I'm gonna do, but customer service load quite low at the moment. It's not a complicated tool.
Arvid:And I think the rest API, the the more complicated technology part, quite literally documents itself at this point. I'm using, Laravel side framework or a certain kind of library, a plugin that does all the documentation for the API for me. And it's always up to date. It pulls data straight from the code. It's quite quite useful.
Arvid:I may talk about this in the future, but it's yeah. It's it's not much in terms of customer service. I talk more to customers in, like, my explanation calls than I talk to them in customer service at this moment, which I wanna keep going for as long as I possibly can. Let me finish this update with a look at my expectations and the reality of my experience, and kinda how they differ. I wanted to get to 1 k MRR within a month from last time I checked in and that happened.
Arvid:It happened just so. I think I hit the goal one day before the month was up. And in a way I think that was a bit too stressful, like setting that goal. It was was quite quite close to not getting it and it probably would have sucked a little bit. So if I set my own deadlines and goals, I might just set them in a way that doesn't induce anxiety in me.
Arvid:So I'll skip setting a new MRR goal for the next month because why would I need to? And instead make it about something else, make it about getting several, maybe 5 really amazing customer testimonials. Like just people telling me in video or in writing what they like about the product and that they like it. That's what I want. I wanna build a product that's so good that people are willing to publicly commit to using it.
Arvid:And those testimonies I could put on my landing page, can print them out, hang on my wall, and use them to fuel my motivation when I need it. Think it's much better than an arbitrary number to reach because that's also very internal. It's about, oh, yeah, I got to that number. But they liking my product, talking about it, that's a better goal for the business. One thing that was a bit underwhelming this month was my experiment with cold outreach.
Arvid:I'll have to talk about this in a future update, but let's just say I tried to find podcast booking agencies and send them personal emails with kinda cold, didn't go far or not far enough. I still struggle with attribution at this point, like understanding where my customers come from. And that's also something for MicroConf Asia, Arangio taught me that's that that is required and really really important to to really understand, like, where your customers come from. Again, get the get the talks, get the videos. And attribution is on my list of things to fix.
Arvid:I need to know more about where my customers find me, where they find the business, when they make that choice, and then what kind of customers make which kind of choices. So segmentation and attribution arising on my priority list. And I also expected the business to be a bit calmer than it is right now, to be quite honest. I guess it's unsurprising that spending a week in Atlanta with my SaaS founder nerd friends caused a few things to pile up on the coding side and on the, you know, the product side. And even this week, I didn't get to do all the things that I wanted because of the calls and recordings and podcast related stuff that I also didn't really prepare for.
Arvid:It's gonna it it took a whole week to go to a 2 day conference. So with calming and cooling down and recovering and all that. As an introvert, those things usually take quite a toll on me. And so I'm kinda out for 2 or 3 days after. And then there's travel.
Arvid:So I I should have structured this a little bit better, particularly with the podcast that always requires a lot of my attention that I did not prepare for. So next time. I only need to create more time for these things prior to and then after to get back in my flow state. Particularly with PodScan, I really wanna be my coding flow state and that is hard to reach if I'm not prepared for it. If other things are piled up and they kinda, you know, gnawing on my attention.
Arvid:But, hey, things are going great, and I'm excited to tackle month number 3. I'll be working on new AI features this month. Like, there's gonna be summarization, entities extraction, all that stuff. I'll streamline UX, start working with experts in that regard. I'll update my landing page, do more marketing, create videos, start a knowledge base that's also, on the menu for me, and so much more.
Arvid:There are many things and I cannot wait to share them all with you as usual here on the pod, on Twitter, and all over the place. So let's get back to work, and that's it for today. I wanna briefly thank my sponsor acquire.com. It's always a pleasure to work with the people at at Acquire, and they've they've been so helpful. I talk to so many people at MicroConf about acquisition and acquire.com always comes up.
Arvid:Not just because they have a really good team that helps you with getting your acquisition figured out. They're just very present in our community. And that is, as somebody who's building in public, I really admire that. Because there are so many people who are building businesses, who they don't really think about the happy path and the sad path, right? Like what might happen if I become super successful?
Arvid:What am I going to do in 2 years? Is it going to be something that I'm going to sell? Is the business something that I want to be acquired with? Or might I lose interest at some point and then I have to sell it? What can I do to prepare?
Arvid:Well, that's what the people over at Acquire can help you with. And they have helped 100, if not 1000 of people at this point set their business up for a successful acquisition. The best part about this is you don't need to want to sell your business right now to get started setting it up for a good acquisition. Right? It's it's all about preparation.
Arvid:It's about documenting the things you need to document, setting up standard operating procedures, getting your affairs in order, having a p and l ready for whenever you might need it. All of these things and way more than what I just said. They know how to do. They know how to teach you and then you will have it for whatever contingency might happen along your way. So go to try.aquire.com/arbit and see for yourself if aquire.com and selling your business all in itself is the right option for you, either today or in the future.
Arvid:I bet it is. So why not check it out? Thank you for listening to the Booster Founder today. You can find me on Twitter at Avidkar, a r v I d k e h l. And you'll find my books on my Twitter core set too.
Arvid:If you wanna support me on the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel because that exists. Get a podcast, this particular podcast in your podcast player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com/founder. It makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds. And that's why I would love for it to be. Any of this will help the show.
Arvid:Check out PodScan dot f m if you want to. I appreciate that too, obviously. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.
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