Insight
Cheng: B2B buyers submit reasonable offers under 'name your price' models
“What I find is that while that may be true, if you're running a consumer model but with businesses, you know, businesses have a budget. They have great respect For other tools and platforms and the price requests that come through are very, very reasonable.”
Insight
Ephemeral content formats make hiring traditional video teams unjustifiable
“Something that's changed in the past few years that made the video landscape really interesting is you've got these Instagram stories, Snapchat stories that literally disappear after 24 hours. So you can no longer justify having, hiring out a video team to pro…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lumen5 has reached $100,000 in MRR and a $1M run rate
“We just passed a million when I submitted a request for run rate. So we're about a 100,000 us dollars a monthly recurring revenue.”
Insight
Marketing software benefits from built-in organic distribution by content creators
“Building a product in the marketing industry is really interesting because all of our users and customers also have their own blogs and podcasts, so they love talking about new tools that they've discovered, and so there's a lot of evergreen content out there …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lumen5 has grown to approximately 2,000 paying customers
“We're at about 2000.”
Insight
Founders should launch second products with direct synergy to existing users
“If you previously have a product and you're launching a new product, make sure that there's some synergy between the two. For us, Snipply users were the perfect Lumen five users.”
Disclosure
Lumen5 is bootstrapped and funded by cash flows from Snipply
“Yeah, still bootstrapping. It feels very different running LumenFive now because it's funded by Snipply”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lumen5 achieves roughly $200 CAC and $600 LTV on paid ads
“On, on our efforts with ads, it's about 200 dollars CAC on a 600 dollar lifetime value, but it's also really hard to calculate because we haven't been around that long, so lifetime value just goes up as the months go by.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lumen5 will run growth experiments for six months before seeking VC
“Right now we have a lot of growth experiments that we want to run to come up with that CAC so we can go to investors and say, hey, let's pump a couple million dollars into these three growth strategies. And I think it'll take me at least six months before I ca…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cheng says Snip.ly ARPU is $70 to $80 per month
“I would say that's about 70 to 80.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Snip.ly hits 130,000 users and $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue
“Right now we are hitting about a 130,000 registered users. And so we're looking at revenue about 600,000 annual. So that's about 50,000 a month US dollars.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Snip.ly has 1,000 monthly paying customers as of late 2016
“Monthly paying customers, It sits at around a thousand.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cheng grew Snip.ly with zero dollars spent on paid customer acquisition
“We've never invested in a customer acquisition costs outside of my own time. And so we don't do ads or anything like that. We don't pay for any customer acquisition.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Snip.ly LTV is $700 per paying customer and $5 per free user
“Based on the numbers that we do have, and LTV based on two and a half years, so it's not like the cohort's super long, but it's about 700 dollars per customer, and about five dollars per free user.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Snip.ly generated $400,000 in revenue in 2015
“Total of 20 15 revenue was around 400 K.”
Disclosure
Snip.ly is building an AI tool to turn blogs into videos
“Now we're investing very heavily in a new platform. That's going to automatically convert blog posts into videos using natural language processing and a bunch of artificial intelligence.”
Assertion Partly supported
Snip.ly offers a free tier and paid plans up to $3,000 monthly
“Revenue is for monthly subscriptions. And so it's a freemium model. You can use Snipply for free. It supports up to 1000 clicks per month. So after 1000 people have clicked on your links in that given month, your call to action will cease to show up until the …”
Disclosure
Snip.ly equity is split evenly across its three co-founders
“33% with my two other co-founders.”
Disclosure
Cheng uses Google Translate for Snip.ly's multilingual customer support
“I actually really love Google translate. I've, I provide support in multiple languages.”
Michael Cheng