The Exchanges

Q those two answers. What I thought you were going to say was, um, your affiliate program and product time. Um, so I want to dig deeper here, right? So you saw that natural organic posting like happening, but you then launched your affiliate program. I think fairly early on, when did you launch that? And, and would you consider that a key to going from zero to a million quickly?

A We launched the affiliation program pretty much like I think it was 30 days after we had our first customers, because at the beginning of Submagic, we had zero euros to invest into marketing, and I was used to do affiliate marketing in my first company, where I was myself an affiliate for other, uh, businesses, and so affiliation is amazing when you don't have a lot of revenue. It's super, like, it's a good way to, like, attract people and pay them only if they make sales. So we had no choice to do affiliation. So I started this affiliate campaign and I was just telling people like, if you make a viral short form content talking about some magic and it goes viral, you're going to make a lot of revenue because myself, I did it once and the, the short form went, I think it did like a 100,000 views and it drives like 3000 dollars MRR directly. And I say to my users like, this is the proof that it's working. You should do like kind of content like this. I really literally Teach them how to make viral short form content, talking about some magic. And they just like keep posting content over content over content every day because they were making revenue. The success of a good affiliation program is your affiliates needs to make revenue and needs to make money out of it. So yes.

AI assessment note: “We launched the affiliation program pretty much like I think it was 30 days”

Q it's too long. I don't want to go do the work to edit it down short, but then I saw this extra feature. You, you guys launched recently. It looks like over here where it said, wait, get clips from a long video. So, so I then, I then tested that helped me understand that. Is that, was that just a demand you got from the user base, longer videos?

A Yeah. So we, we started with, uh, we said the captions on some magic. The tool was super focused on one things that we wanted to do it better than everybody else. And it was how to get, we can had like amazing captions on your short form content to make your, your, your content go viral. And so we started with this. We had to be focused on that. And then later on, we had a lot of people asking us like, Hey guys, if it would be amazing, if we could put like our long form content Into some magic and you find automatically like the best, like viral moments. So because we know already how to make a content that goes viral with the editing, we added these tools called magic clips that you're trying to use. Um, and so, yeah, it's, it's amazing. It's great.

AI assessment note: “we had a lot of people asking us like, Hey guys, if it would be amazing”

Q Wow. Okay. August, 20, twenty, three million. And, and what drove most of the growth from zero to 83? If you had to pick only two growth channels, what were the two most impactful?

A I would say short form content. I will explain just after, but I would say short form content and timing. Timing because, um, there is a time to, like, time market fit that I really believe in business in general. Like, we were at the right time with the right product with the arrival or chat GPT at this time. Everybody wants to make, like, short form. Alex or Mozy was Like literally booming online. Everybody wants to like start understanding like, Hey, we should do short form content and we should make caption as well because everybody, like all those influencers are making caption. We should do the same. Um, and then short form because at the beginning of some magic, we had like a lot of like a viable short form content coming, not from us, but from users saying like, Hey, I discovered this new tool called sub magics. They can allow you to make like three clicks Captions super easily on the product, like, and they, they show the product like this, and so many videos went viral, and this two mix was just an explosion, I would say.

AI assessment note: “I would say short form content and timing.”

Q so if that's the case, if 1.8 million of ARR is coming, has, has, is Active today on Submagic and has come from affiliates. Divide that by 12. That's about a 150,000 bucks of monthly revenue. And you're paying out 30, you said 30%, right, to most affiliates? Yeah. Yeah, so what, that's like four, okay, so you're spending out 45,000 bucks a month in affiliate payouts, something like that.

A Yeah. But one thing I can tell you for affiliation, people might see that, oh, it's crazy. You give 30% commission. It's huge. Like, we had a lot of people, like, saying, like, baby, you're crazy to do that. First, we didn't have the choice at the beginning. Like, the company was, like, we had zero customers, and we need to be generous. And secondly, like, people see, like, oh, you're gonna give 30%. It's huge, and stuff like that. But they say, like, you don't see how much business affiliation is bringing to your business Like, without tracking the link. There are so many videos, like, when you make a YouTube video talking about Submagic, maybe, like, a small percentage is gonna click on the link, but a lot of them are gonna see the brand Submagic again and again and again, and this is for free, and this is amazing, and, and you cannot, like, quantify how much is it, so it's, it's great.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. But one thing I can tell you for affiliation, people might see that”

Q of the videos is the bet you're making on the usage metric. And then, but very few of these new AI tools are, are still charging on the seat base. The logic is they want as many team members using it to drive these values as fast as possible. Why did you decide to restrict the Why did you decide to basically restrict both to put paywalls up for both?

A So for the, the numbers of videos you can do per month, this is the only metrics we can like This is the number one reason why people are upgrading. They need more videos. So if we don't restrict on that, it's a way for us to improve the expansion, I would say. Uh, the second thing is that we try to, to divide the, the different plan, different based on the different type of users that we have, the different type of ICP. We have kind of like two types of ICP. We have the people who are using some magic for themselves, for their own videos. Small business owners starting short form contents, don't know anything about it and want to discover it. And then we have the agencies. We have so much marketing agencies, video short form content agencies, and those users have different needs. So we, we, like, we don't want to, we really wanted to try to see like, if you are like this kind of ICP, you should take this plan. This is for you. And so that's why we, like, as a small business owner, you don't need to have like, Five members in your team. It's not useful. No, none of them are like inviting people.

AI assessment note: “This is the number one reason why people are upgrading. They need more videos.”

Q Okay. Well, cool. Well, let's fast forward. So May, 20, 23, you launch at your first million of revenue in August of 20, 23, a couple of months later, and then about a year ago and recording this of June, 20, 25, so call it June, 20, 24. Um, you talk about hitting your one millionth user. Walk us through this milestone. What drove most of this growth?

A Yeah, man. This was an incredible milestone. For me, one million users is much more incredible than one million error, um, because it's a one million period, and I always, like, imagine myself like, uh, a stadium, 8000 people, multiple by 12, 13, like, I'm like, wow, it's huge, and they, they try my product at least once. Um, I think it's a mix of the time to market that I told you, the good marketing that we did since At the beginning of Submagic, we push super hard on the brand and on the marketing through affiliation, SEO, paid ads, influence marketing, and there is this kind of, like, word of mouse that have been driven a lot of growth for Submagic. We, we are super focused on the customer experience, and as a bootstrap company, like, the best marketing we can, you can have is, like, word of mouse. It's free, and so we really get inspired by Brian Chesky from Airbnb about this ten-star customer experience, how you can give, like, an amazing experience to your users. And so we try to do, like, super, like, incredible things with our users, creating WhatsApp groups with them, building the product directly hand-to-hand with them. I take, like, approximately five to six calls with users every day since the beginning of Submagic. Like, everyone can book a call with the CEO of Submagic every time they want. And because I want to get, to be super close to the users, and every time…

AI assessment note: “I think it's a mix of the time to market that I told you, the good marketing”

Q love. Let's, you told me it was really important. You got to give some love to your team. I mean, you guys are eight million of ARR. You are 13 people. I mean, so you're cranking 700,000 dollars of revenue per employee, which is really impressive efficiency. While I play this awesome reel that you made on your team, walk us through your org chart today. What's it look like?

A So, okay, so the, the team is divided in three. We have the product team with the tech guy. We have the marketing team And we have the customer experience team. These are, for us, the three most important things in a, in a, in a software company. Um, and so we have, uh, very atypic people in the team. Like, everyone is, is, is atypic. We have the average age is 28. I'm 28. Um, 70% of the team doesn't have any degrees. Uh, we all are driven by the same stuff. That is, like, we want to deliver value and learn from our experience. So we love learnings and, um, and yeah, it's, it's amazing. We are all remote. Uh, we met once a year in a seminar, like, so it was this year in Thailand two months ago. It was amazing. So this video is part of the trip. Last year we were in Tuscany in Italy and, um, yeah, it's, it's great. We, we, we work with just the top of their field. They are really like top notch on, on what they are doing. They are super, like, open to discuss, so if anyone wants to learn from, like, experience, they love, like, exchanging their learnings, so we, sometimes, Antoine from The Growth will contact other growth managers to discuss about what they learned the last two months and, and try to find, like, yeah, Ellie is a legend, is our, is our CMO, and...

AI assessment note: “the team is divided in three. We have the product team with the tech guy.”

Q and community. The first thing that I hit once I launched a paid panel was a pop-up where you said, hey, join our Discord community. Um, and so you have Discord here. You just mentioned WhatsApp as well. You got seven, 600 members here. Walk besides the strategy for other founders listening, saying, Hey, make sure you invite people into a community, any tactics for how to manage this effectively?

A Managing the community is very hard. Uh, I would say we are not the best today on this card. On WhatsApp, we tried to do something very, very, uh, uh, it was especially on the beginning. What I would suggest to any founders is like the first hundred customers of Submagic, I took on Stripe the information. I reached out to them. I say, send me a text message, please. I will give you like a discount for the next month, but please send me a text message. I need to get your number. And those people, I put them into a WhatsApp group. And I built the product with those a hundred people. I was super close to those people. They were like, we say like, why does he say like, find a hundred people that love your product? And I would try to do the kind of the same thing. And this is free. And you will understand that those people will become your best product manager ever, because they will tell you what features they want and how we should do it. Like it's so like super, like people try to, Find solution to coaches, to online, to whatever. The solution of your business is in the answer of your customers. Talk to them. Be close to your customers. They have the answer. Um, it's a, it's a, it's a,

AI assessment note: “those people, I put them into a WhatsApp group. And I built the product with those”

Q Uh, it's insane. Well, what are you using? Are you, are you building agents in N-A-N or Gumloop? Or what are your, can you maybe share? Do you, what are your backend tools you use for, for. This stuff.

A Me, me personally, I use a lot of, I use a lot ChatGPT. I use ChatGPT for everything. I talk a lot to ChatGPT myself, like with voice notes. I explain a lot of the context of what I do. So he had, he helps me much better with the context. Uh, my co-founder in technical part, I couldn't speak for him, but I know that they use cursor. They use Clouds for zero. Uh, they use some stuff like this. I, I don't want to go too much into details because I might say some stupid things, but I know that they use AI a lot. But just by using GPT, you can, you can like scale so much. It's so useful.

AI assessment note: “Me, me personally, I use a lot of, I use a lot ChatGPT.”