Episode 722 | Bootstrapping a Vertical SaaS to 7-Figures in 18 Months

Rob Walling:
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It is another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. I am your host, Rob Walling, and today I talk with James Mooring, the co-founder of Astalty. James and his co-founder have a pretty incredible story of bootstrapping a vertical SaaS app to seven figures in ARR in 18 months. A lot of things went right for them, but it’s obvious that James and his co-founder are very smart and executed exceptionally well. I know that sometimes it’s helpful to hear founder stories of people failing, making mistakes, picking themselves back up, and sometimes it’s inspiring and you can learn a lot from the tactics, the strategies, and the approaches that someone used to achieve relatively fast success and quick growth. As James and his co-founder have done, they’ve built an enviable business by all measures. One thing I like about this conversation is it’s not just the headline of how they bootstrapped the seven-figure business in 18 months, but James is very thoughtful about how they did it. 

Sometimes when you talk to folks, they don’t really know how they did it. They lucked into it and they claim it was all word-of-mouth and virality. These things that it’s like, “Well, A, that’s not helpful to me if I want to grow a business and, B, I don’t actually think that’s what happened.” With James, he’s given it a lot of thought. I think directionally, he’s pretty correct with why they were successful, which is even more helpful for you listening to this podcast because, now, you can potentially take some of the learnings from his journey and apply them to yours. With that, let’s dive into my conversation. 

James, welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us.  

James Mooring:
Perfect. Good morning. Thanks for having me.  

Rob Walling:
It’s nice to have you on, sir. So your company is Astalty and your H1 is, “Simplify your NDIS business operations. Ready to take your NDIS business to the next level? Try Astalty, the most straightforward NDIS software with the most advanced features.” 

What is NDIS? I’ve never heard of this. Literally, I had to Google it before this. So if someone does not live in Australia, describe what NDIS is and then what your software does.  

James Mooring:
I think some people that do live in Australia still probably don’t know. The NDIS is the National Disability Insurance Scheme, so it’s essentially a government-funded scheme that provides funding to people that have a disability to go and access supports from service providers for a range of different things. It could be accessing the community, it could be accommodation, it could be assistance at home with self-care, things like that. Our software provides a platform for businesses that provide those supports to those people with a disability to run their business.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. Let’s say Gymdesk is a TinySeed company and their software is like the operating system for a gym. Your entire business runs on it, people check in and out with a key fob to get in the thing and it tracks that they’re there and it does invoicing and billing and subscriptions. Just imagine everything that a gym or a [foreign language 00:03:50] or a yoga studio, a fitness studio needs. So it’s kind of the OS, the operating system of that? Jim, is that what Astalty does for these, they’re not affiliates, NDIS providers?  

James Mooring:
NDIS providers, yeah, NDIS service providers. Yeah. The term CRM is very common here for what we do, but essentially how you’ve described it is exactly what it does. Most businesses will subscribe to Astalty, an accounting software like Xero or similar and then they’ll have their Microsoft or Google to power their email, and ideally that’d be all they need.  

Rob Walling:
And talk to me about where the business stands today.  

James Mooring:
So now, we’re a team of five. We’re doing seven-figures ARR and still growing significantly every month, so it’s in a really good spot.  

Rob Walling:
And this has happened very quickly. It probably doesn’t feel that way. I know your timeline… Timeline always feels really long, but when I actually read through it, because you were very generous to send me the entire timeline which is what we’re going to work off for here, it seems like from actual paid launch until seven-figure ARR was less than two years.  

James Mooring:
I think, around 18 months, we worked it out to be.  

Rob Walling:
Unbelievable. That is so fast.  

James Mooring:
From when we launched our first paid offering to when we hit the seven figures.  

Rob Walling:
Unbelievable. So one thing before we dive in, because… Here’s what I want to cover for someone listening to this, it’s to figure out how you got here this quickly and then to pull out things that you and your co-founder did really well where you were smart and then potentially where there were things where maybe you got lucky, as you and I saw in Atlanta, because you were at MicroConf Atlanta, which is how we met, where potentially… As Ben Chestnut said, they Forrest Gumped their way in. They kind of stumbled. They got a little lucky, and that’s okay too. It’s not 100% luck. It’s that, along the way, sometimes you do things and they turn out really well. Before we dive into that though, Astalty, you told me, stands for a solution that actually listens to you. Is it a dad joke? It’s like it’s not a good acronym. What’s the deal with it?  

James Mooring:
I think when we came up with it, we had much, much worse business ideas. And a lot of businesses in the space had care or health or these types of words in their business name, and we didn’t want to be that. The whole premise behind Astalty was that we felt that software was built by people that have no idea about the actual business problems that they were solving. At the time, we thought, “Why not try an acronym?” and this kind of came out and then it stuck. We don’t put that acronym everywhere, but it’s a very sticky business name and people remember it, but it does actually drive a lot of our, I guess, culture around how we invest time with our customers and build features, I suppose.  

Rob Walling:
And astalty.com.au, if folks want to check out your website. 

You touched on something right there that I want to dig a little deeper into. You talked about how in… Well, let me just say this. In deep verticals, where there’s a lot of subject matter expertise required to build a good tool, we see one of two mistakes usually. We see a software developer who comes into it and doesn’t actually understand the business problems. So then they build, it can be good software, but it doesn’t do the business any justice. It doesn’t actually solve the problem. Or, vice versa… We see subject matter experts who are like, “I’m in roofing construction and I’m going to hire a developer,” but they’re not a product person. So they have the subject matter expertise of what it should do, but the product sucks. 

You and your co-founder are a developer and a subject matter expert, and that combination is in the top three co-founder combos that we see, right? I’ve invested 191 to companies and the top three, in no particular order, it’s kind of all tied for one in my head, is a developer plus a marketer or a developer plus a salesperson, depending on if it’s a hired low touch funnel, and developer plus subject matter experts, as long as that subject matter expert is willing to do the sales or the marketing. So you and your co-founder… You’re the developer, right? And your co-founder was in the NDIS system. Does he have a consultancy or a software company in there?  

James Mooring:
He has an NDIS service provider business. So, he actually is one of… His business uses our software and we’d been talking about the NDIS for early days. My job was to try and decode what he was saying and think, “How can we solve these processes using software?” And I think that kind of unique position is part of the reason why we built such a good product.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, that makes sense. In a space like this, you would need… I don’t know that you would need a co-founder. It sure help, but you would really want what we call a patient zero, a customer zero who really is on board with being able to advise you, or you’d need an advisor or an advisory board, two or three people, who all had NDIS. You could have done it different ways, but this to me is one of the ideal ways because then he has so much skin in the game, right?  

James Mooring:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
And if he was willing to help with sales and marketing as well, something that… If we rolled the calendar back three years to… We’re recording this in June of ’24. We roll back to June of ’21, you talked about development work on Astalty starting slowly and that you were going to try to do everything that a CRM in the space had to do, but then you realized that you would probably do that quite poorly. So, you instead streamlined to just focusing on support coordination. This is, I think, a lesson that a lot of developers screw up is they don’t want to build an MVP with limited functionality or they don’t want to focus the thing down thinking they didn’t solve a big enough problem. So, I guess it sounds like that was the right choice for you. And how did you come to that? How’d you come to that conclusion?  

James Mooring:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think Jona, my co-founder, when he was explaining everything, I was thinking, “This is fine. We can do this.” And then we started and we’re like, “We need this thing, and that means we need this thing.” And then the waterfall just got so big. And then we wanted to get to market quickly. So what we did is we really said, “Well, where’s the gap?” and we focused on that. And then I’m really glad we did it back then because if we came to that realization 12 months later, it would’ve been an absolute mess. It’s kind of funny because through that process of really focusing on a niche, within a niche, you could say, “We actually built 90% of the functionality that we need to serve the whole NDIS space.” It’s just that there’s one kind of scheduling piece, and that’s what we’re working on building now. So it was just interesting that by niching down, we were still able to build functionality that would help us serve the customers that we wanted to serve initially, if that makes sense.  

Rob Walling:
It does. It does. So your co-founder, you and he are talking through NDIS and he’s probably saying, “There’s no good software on the market.” He’s saying, “There’s a huge gap.” What was his company using before you built Astalty?  

James Mooring:
They were using another software that they actually still use because it does the functionality that Astalty doesn’t quite do. So, they use both at the moment. Yeah, there was just no innovation in the space that we felt, so we came out and surprised… You put a really nice easy-to-use interface on something, you speak the language that your customers speak and you make the product easy to use, which sounds so simple, right? But it’s funny how far that could actually go.  

Rob Walling:
How many NDIS providers are there in Australia?  

James Mooring:
I think probably a few, a couple hundred thousand. Yeah, there’s heaps, and they range from sole traders… They could be sole traders up to the top 10, which might have a few thousand employees. There’s a really wide range of sizes of businesses.  

Rob Walling:
That’s a big market to not have a really well-built tool. When I think of any market in the US that has a couple hundred thousand businesses that would be willing to pay, there are a lot of tools available for them. Many of which are decent, some of which are reviled. But I’m kind of surprised by that. Why do you think that that vertical… There are probably listeners right now, salivating, thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I wish I could…” Only two years ago, there was a market this big that didn’t have software. Why is that the case? Why has no one attacked this?  

James Mooring:
I think there’s certainly a software that exists, but it was built 10 years ago, 6 years ago. They got into the space and they probably solved the problem that existed six years ago and thought, “Great. We’ve solved it.” I mean, this is my opinion anyway. And then I think they said, “Great. We’ve solved it. Let’s just stay here,” and that’s fine. But at the pace that the technology moves, at the pace that NDIS itself moves, you need to be able to iterate fast and change and listen and pivot, and I think that is another huge factor to our success. So there’s certainly a software that existed, but just not up to speed, I suppose.  

Rob Walling:
So as you’re building the… You start in June of ’21 writing the code. Six, seven months later, you’re in January 2022 and you launch a free Chrome extension, which… You talk about NDIS has a price guide and the Chrome extension allows you to search the price guide in real time, I guess, in Chrome.  

James Mooring:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
My question for this one… I have a note next to it, and it says, “Smart or lucky,” because a lot of engineers want to do engineering as marketing because we are builders. If I can write code instead of marketing or if I can write code as marketing, I’m going to do that, right? So what I wonder is if… Were you pretty calculated about this? Like, “Yeah, I’m all in. I’m in on this. It’s a lead gen. I’m going to build this thing. It’s going to do it,” and you were confident? Or was it kind of like, “Well, might as well throw this thing together. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t.”  

James Mooring:
It came about because Jona and I were actually… Because we had to have some of this price guide functionality in Astalty to kind of get your business set up. I think we were looking at the price guide and we were like, “Man, this sucks. I can’t believe we have to search through this.” And then somehow, we got onto the concept of extensions, and I’ve never built one. I thought, “I wonder how hard it would be just to throw this in the browser,” because we use quite a few extensions and they’re just so handy. 

And then, I guess, we were calculated in the sense that we could use it as a lead gen, get our name out there. We were calculated in that way. Did we think it would have the uptake that it did? No. But when we built it and when other people started using it, everyone was thinking, “Why doesn’t this exist already?” So we were kind of first doing that and then we’ve seen a couple of others come along. But yeah, I would say maybe a combination of, “We know what we wanted to do. Did we know exactly what the pathway would be?” Probably, not. No.  

Rob Walling:
Right, so a combination, a lot of things. And then the next month, February ’22, you launched Astalty Lite, which, as you said, is a free-to-use CRM that would hopefully get customers engaged and on the platform. By August of that year, you had 450 users to the free platform and you specifically said, and I like this data point, “Of those, a few dozen were engaging us and providing feedback about the platform,” because that usually what happens. You get hundreds or thousands of free users and there’s 2%, 3% that are likely to upgrade. So similar with this one, you kind of went freemium or free… I guess the first question is, is that still a free plan on Astalty? Or is that just kind of a preview, so you do still have a free plan?  

James Mooring:
We do. It’s not very utilized because it doesn’t have your invoicing, which is such a core time saver that Astalty gives you. We do still have it.  

Rob Walling:
Similar with that, were you smart there to be like, “Oh, if we get this, we get the buzz and we get people in it”? Or did you kind of get lucky because, I’ll just say, most free offerings don’t work. Most people don’t know how to do it and they kind of backfire and you devalue your product and then you have a bunch of… on and on and on. But it seems like it worked… I guess the question is, did it work for you and was it intentional or was a little lucky in that one?  

James Mooring:
Astalty Lite was very calculated, absolutely. So when we were building, we were thinking… I think, by that time, we were thinking we would have our paid offering out, and that just didn’t happen. I think by the time we got to Astalty Lite being launched, we wanted to have our paid offering out and we wanted to get to the market early and we thought, “The best way to do that is to give people the functionality because we also needed feedback from our potential customers.” So it was a way to provide value, which was good for our engagement, getting a brand awareness, and also good to get people using the product. Did we know that people would actually use it? Probably, not. But even though it wasn’t, I guess, validation, which is something that I didn’t even know at the time or we didn’t know at the time, the fact that people were actually engaging and giving us feedback even though they weren’t buying, for us, was a very good signal that people are enjoying what we’re building. Some of those customers now pay us every month, so it’s great.  

Rob Walling:
What would the signal have been? Let’s say barely anyone signed up for Astalty Lite, because I almost view it as a nice MVP or a validation signal where you were kind of still like, “Well, are people using it?” And when they are, you’re like, “Oh, this raises my motivation,” because that’s what you need as a bootstrap founder is motivation, right? You’re not running out of money, but you’re like, “Ah, should I keep building this?” or, “Is this the right thing?” or whatever. So, it sounds like it was pretty motivating. What would you have done if 10 people signed up and no one used it? Would it have been bail on the idea, “This isn’t going to work”?  

James Mooring:
No, absolutely not. And this is a pretty important point, I guess, for me because I put my whole other software development company on hold and we were going to make Astalty work, period. There was no second option. So if that didn’t work, we would’ve pivoted, we would’ve reached out to people, we would’ve done whatever it took to make that work. I think in your book or on a podcast, you talk about roadblocks versus speed bumps, and this is something that we try and really put into practice that we would’ve just changed. We would’ve pivoted, got more feedback, changed the product, and go from there.  

Rob Walling:
So, that was February of ’22. So then, in August, you essentially launched a paid plan, Astalty Pro, Astalty Professional, 50 bucks a month per user, and you gave a discount at launch. 50 bucks a month per user, that’s decent pricing. Again, a lot of startups when they launch, I’m like, “Oh, they’re 10% of the price. They should be 10x below or 5x below. But at 50 per seat, I’m imagining… You said there are teams of thousands literally. But even if a team of 10, right? You’re talking $500 average revenue per account on that. Did you look at competition? How did you come to that price? Because it seems like you’re pretty smart on it.  

James Mooring:
Lots and lots of hours. People think building software is hard. Pricing is the hardest part of-  

Rob Walling:
Tell me about it.  

James Mooring:
It was extremely, extremely difficult. And I think we did the discount because we thought, “Oh, well, if we launch at a 30% discount and 49 is too expensive, then at least we can kind of revert down to that 30% off.” We did look at some of our competitors and we were cheaper than some and more expensive than some. I guess what was really interesting is the fact that we stayed at 49 and we probably tripled the number, the functionality that you could do through the platform. And our customers, I guess, had that trust in us that we were going to deliver on what we said that we were going to deliver. We got it right, I think, in the end. But yeah, it was lots and lots of time on the phone talking about it.  

Rob Walling:
Obviously, I’ve been thinking about your business for approximately 25 minutes or something. I don’t know it that well, but it feels directionally correct of like, “50 bucks a seat, that’s a pretty good price.” To get a full picture, obviously I’d want to look at all your competition and… There’s a bunch of other stuff, but it certainly doesn’t seem too terribly low. I guess it started paying off, right? Because by December of that year, you launched in August, you’re five months, six months later, is that even… or four or five months later, you’re at almost 9,000 MRR, which is a kind of a Cinderella story, right? I mean, how many people are listening to this podcast thinking, “I’ve been working on this… I’ve been launched for two or three years and I’m not at 9K MRR.” 

Aside from getting the things right that you got that we’ve already covered, was there something else? Are you a good marketer? Is your co-founder doing a lot of marketing? How is there so much interest and fast growth? I mean, you got a couple hundred paying users in that five months. What was the key there?  

James Mooring:
I think the biggest key is that the product was so good, and that’s a combination of Jona, my co-founder, having such a good understanding of the NDIS and being able to translate that into software and the fact that the businesses that use our software essentially charge $100 an hour for their service. So, we only had to save our customers half an hour a month per user to see the value. And our invoicing alone was saving businesses, in some cases, two whole days, a fortnight. So it becomes very easy, I think, for our customers to justify the cost. 

In the early days, we just did everything. We were both doing the demos, we were getting on calls with the smallest users. If it was a five, we would literally be building features to get customers in that it was missing. So, we were just doing everything we had to do to get these customers on board. Like I said, my business partner have such a good understanding of the NDIS. I think we were able to leverage his network and his knowledge of what people are really looking for.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. Yeah, you’ll hear me say is, if you listen to the podcast, “Build your network, not your audience.” So, it sounds like he… You guys didn’t have an audience of NDIS folks, but he did have a network of folks who would be willing to try it to give feedback to potentially spread the word.  

James Mooring:
Yeah, exactly. If you can go to a business and say, “Hey, pay us 50 bucks a month for a sole trader,” for example, “and we’ll save you 10 hours a month,” it’s kind of hard to say no to.  

Rob Walling:
That raises the question, do you feel like you might be underpriced? Could you charge $100 a seat or 150? What is the place where that breaks? Usually, it’s if there’s a replacement, it’s they can either do it with a clipboard, Excel spreadsheet, or there’s other software where they’re just like, “Forget it, I’m not… Even though this is the best tool, there’s an alternative that is good enough.”  

James Mooring:
The pricing scales well for all sizes of businesses we feel. So, we didn’t want to make our pricing complicated, “You have one user, you’d pay this. You have five users, you pay that.” I just wanted the billing to be super straightforward. So I feel like our price point, maybe we could charge more for smaller businesses. But then if you have say 20 users or 30 users, it does start to get quite expensive each month. So we charge the same for all sizes of businesses at the moment, and we’re comfortable with that. Could we charge more? Maybe, but I guess you don’t know until you actually try it, right?  

Rob Walling:
So you end 2022 at just under 9K, you end 2023 at almost 60K MRR, so the story continues. Did anything change? Did you do anything differently during ’23 to get to that? I mean, you’re 6x, you’re approaching a million already. Was it more the same? Or was there anything during that year that just lit a fire under the growth?  

James Mooring:
I think because we had such good word-of-mouth, our reach was kind of exponential. The more users we had, the more people that were talking about our product, the more people that would see that. So, it was kind of like a self-fulfilling hamster wheel in the sense that we just got more people really enjoying using the product and they would tell two people and then they would tell two people each. So that kind of grew, our user base, quite quickly. 

We also did some offers, three months free, we did a Black Friday sale, so that stuff sort of drove our growth. And we always ask ourselves, “Would they have joined even if we didn’t do those offers?” I’m not sure. It doesn’t really matter now. Funnily enough, we only made our first hire in October of that year. I think more people were just talking about the product and, of course, we were adding more and more functionality that we needed as well. So, we were kind of growing the market that we could sell to.  

Rob Walling:
And this is something I want to call out to someone listening. This is the reason that, at the beginning of this year when I made predictions for 2024, I said vertical SaaS and, later added, orthogonal SaaS, which is like role-based or title-based, will continue to be incredible places for bootstrappers. We’ve kind of been seeing that over the past few years but even more, and there’s reasons for this and you’ve pretty much enumerated all of them. One is that word-of-mouth in small verticals is like wildfire, way more than… The examples I always bring about horizontal SaaS are like SignWell and SavvyCal, right? Word-of-mouth can be fine, but it’s not wildfire in those spaces, versus Gymdesk and Astalty where it travels real quick. 

The other thing is the folks in these verticals hang out in the same spaces. They’re in the Slack groups, they’re in the Facebook groups, they’re at the same in-person events. If they have a trade publication, a magazine or something, it goes to 50,000 to 100,000 people. It’s very small in the scheme of things. It’s not so big. In addition, marketing in these spaces usually is either not that expensive or not very well done. You’re not competing against Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Netflix. Netflix [inaudible 00:24:21] an example. But these other companies, if you were building a Google Docs competitor for example, not only does your product have to be incredible because these horizontal products are usually pretty good or have a lot of features at least, but your marketing has to be that. Astalty’s in the NDIS provider space, the space I had never heard of, before looking at your H1. 

And then pricing’s the other one is usually you can just charge a lot more. If I’m buying Microsoft Word or competing against Google Sheets, you know that the price goes to zero. If I build Microsoft Word for academics who write in Hebrew or whatever, I should charge 10, 20 times Microsoft Word at least. You, in this space of like, “Well, couldn’t someone use Basecamp or Salesforce to do their NDIS?” You know what I mean? It’s like, “Aren’t there horizontal tools?” Yeah, probably, but you should be able to charge… For a specialized tool, you have pricing power because you’re not a commodity. Whether you can charge more or not is one part of the question. But the other one is that you do in fact… Your pricing is not going to zero.  

James Mooring:
Yeah, and there’s two really important things that we did that you just mentioned. So the first one is that we actually go to in-person events, which is probably an important piece that I missed. We were aware of these events and, essentially, the person… It’s kind of like a speed dating setup. You sit down, there’s a circle on the other side of the table and they all rotate. You give five minutes to sell your thing. The customers on the other side were kind of like 80% our ideal customer, and we were thinking, hopefully they’re not listening, “Why none of our competitors going to these things?” So we started going and they have been fantastic because we could actually demo the product right in front of them and our product was the best marketing that we had. So, that was another key to our success. 

And the other thing was around Facebook groups. So, a lot of these businesses do hang out in Facebook groups. I really remember in the early days, people would go into these Facebook groups and we’d search for the keyword software and we’d think, “I wonder if anyone’s asking what software to use.” So many people would be, “What CRM are you using? What software are you using? How do you handle your invoicing?” and they’d be saying all these different companies. And Jona and I said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if that was Astalty getting talked about there?” 

This happens fairly frequently now. Three days ago, somebody asked, “What software should we use?” And I think there was 22 comments, and 20 out of the 22 were Astalty. And not just Astalty but, “Astalty is great. I wish I went to Astalty earlier. I talked to Astalty, the support is amazing.” So all of our reviews are actually more… And if you look at Google as well, all the reviews are really in depth. They take the time, and I feel like that’s a very good indicator that people enjoy being here and just being part of the Astalty community and network.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, and that’s great to have that. Here’s the assessment I asked Jason Fried years ago on MicroConf like, “Why did Basecamp work?” And he said, “Luck and timing were one and two, but we also did a lot of things right.” I don’t think luck and timing were one and two for you actually. I think the fact that you had a co-founder who really was deep in the space and that you’re obviously a gifted product person we’re probably one and two and I think you did a bunch. And there’s luck somewhere in there, and then I think you also did a lot of things right. That’s one of them of you said your support is lightning fast. I think your average response time is 45 minutes or something. You’ve obviously really cared a lot about your customers. 

Someone can listen to this and, any of these things individually, you can’t cherry pick these. You can’t say, “Well, I’m just going to do that one, and I’m just going to do that one and it’s going to succeed.” It’s like you need a lot of these in the same direction. And in yours case, we could pull some of these off and you still would’ve been successful. If your support was not amazing, you’d probably still be winning because I think your incumbents are just not great. I having never used them, I know what type of software that is. So I think some of these you could have left, but I think the combination of all of them is what makes a big difference.  

James Mooring:
I was just going to say on that point, in the early days, these all feel like one percenters and they feel like, “This is making no difference.” When a customer signs up and I call them, that’s not going to make a difference at all. But when you kind of compound that effort over months and years, then you see the payoff, and it’s not that hard to do. While you need to duck out, go to the grocery store, pick up the kids from daycare, jot down a customer’s number and just call them. How many times have you signed up to a software platform and got a phone call, not from a sales person, but just from somebody saying, “Hey, welcome to ABC product. If there’s anything I can do, just sing out.” I honestly can’t remember the last time, if any time, that’s happened to me. And that’s something that we do. 

So a lot of these things, people were just so refreshed because a lot of our competitors don’t have phone support. In the early days, we’re thinking, “This is going to be painful, but let’s do it anyway,” and they are painful in the early days and they feel like they’re not making a difference. But if you stick with it, eventually, if you invest time into your customers, they’ll give it back to you 10x, 100x in some cases.  

Rob Walling:
Before I move on to what I think will be my last question for you, I did want to call back to… You and I were just talking about in-person events and you were mentioning how valuable they were, and that would have been my guess actually. I don’t think it was in the timeline. You and I hadn’t talked about it, but I would’ve guessed for this business, negative churn, which you have, and in-person events. So I have these things, I call them the big five, B2B, SaaS marketing approaches and its content, SEO, cold outreach, integrations, partnerships as one, and ads. So I haven’t written on this thing, I refer to it all the time. But my next five depend on the type of business and it depends on the lifetime value and all this stuff. My next five are in-person events, free tools, so like engineering and marketing, podcast tour, affiliates, and Capterra or G2, and I separate those from ads even though they’re kind of same thing. 

The events one, when it works, it really works and it works usually in tight verticals and you need a high enough annual contract value to make it work. So, it definitely fits my kind of mind map of your type of business, of this vertical with a 50, $60 per seat price point with all that. It’s not surprising to me at all how valuable the in-person events have been for you.  

James Mooring:
Jona, my co-founder, he’s actually working really hard. We’ve just launched a partners and affiliates program as well. So we have a lot of consultants in the space, as you can imagine, being a complicated area. So now, we’re engaging with consultants and other businesses that have similar customer base and trying to partner with them. And we’ve got an affiliate program, refer a friend, we’ve got ongoing commissions where we’re kind of doing all these things now, which is again just kind of compounding on everything else that we’re doing, which is fantastic.  

Rob Walling:
I want to leave us on this high note of you did a very clever price increase, and I don’t even know if you would call it a price increase. The way you described it to me was I was like, “I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone do it this way.” I want to bring it up so that someone listening might think about doing it the same way. So we talked about how you had Astalty Pro or Professional, you still do, that is a tier of the software, $49 a month, and that’s how you’ve been for two years. 

So just a couple of months ago, in February of ’24, you launched Astalty Premium that was an early access, new price point, $64 per user per month, and you had built a bunch of functionality. You didn’t just want to throw it in the 49, so you built Premium. So not only did you get a bunch of people upgrading from Astalty Pro, but you said… If you go to the pricing page right now, it’s kind of hidden, it’s that you say, “We kind of hide Professional,” so you must be able to click a link and get to it or something so that actually most people are signing up at $64 a month and getting full functionality. Did I summarize that correctly?  

James Mooring:
Yep. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, and I think when we launched… Within the first week, 30% of our existing customers upgraded straight away.  

Rob Walling:
Interesting. So if you had gone in and just said, “Hey…” This is the hack, this is the cleverness, is you could have put all those features and all that functionality into Pro and then said, “By the way, we’re raising your price to 64 because we launched this stuff,” and guess what? Some people would’ve been cool with it and some people would’ve been really pissed, but you actually launched a separate plan that’s too close. $15 is too close. If you told me I was going to do 49, 64 as my price points, I’ve been like, “No, no, no. Move them far apart,” but you were kind of going for a incognito price increase. This sounds like it was pretty deliberate.  

James Mooring:
Yep, and the price difference was also very deliberate. We wanted it to be a no-brainer and Professional’s actually now $59 a month for new customers, so it’s only $5 extra, and we gave everybody on Professional a four-week trial. The Premium features are pretty sticky. You can generate contracts, you can send things for e-signing, you can track documentation. There’s a lot of things that are built in that are super, super valuable. And we said, “Well, let’s just give everybody four weeks to give this a go.” It’s kind of like once you get a taste of it, you don’t want to not have it. And then we kind of changed our pricing page. I think 98 or 95% of new customers signed up to the $64-a-month plan, which is fantastic. So, yeah, we kind of did a price increase without doing a price increase.  

Rob Walling:
End of this year, are you doing 79, 79 a month for Astalty Gold? Is that where we go next? Astalty Platinum?  

James Mooring:
79 was actually going to be the price point of premium and we thought, “Let’s bring it down and try and go for more volume,” and I’m very glad with did because I think 79 would’ve been a little bit too… Once you kind get up around the 7s, 8s, 9s, those numbers start to look a lot bigger, especially for bigger teams. When we launch the kind of next functionality, which is scheduling and rostering, we will actually have a cheaper price point for that because the user type is different. They’re only going to be on the platform a few hours a week, things like that. But it’s all about for us trying to make Astalty, not just the software, but through our partners, through our resources, through the software itself, through the support, just a place that you want to be. 

I use this analogy of not choosing the least worst option, and I think about tools like Slack as one of those. You choose Slack as the least worst option to solve that problem for you, right? And then, I don’t know if you know a tool called Linear, which is an issue tracking kind of like Jira. Whenever I use Linear, I think, “I enjoy using this software, I want to use this software,” and we want people to feel the same way about our software. And you can’t do that just through product or support or resources. You kind of have to have everything, “Come to us and we’ll look after you, whatever you need. If we can’t do it, we’ll let you know about somebody who can.” So, we’re just about providing value and I think people really appreciate that. It’s quite refreshing as well.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. James, big congratulations on you and your co-founder’s success. You’ve built a heck of a business. I hope, as listeners have heard this, that they take a bunch of things away that you did a lot of things right and that you and your co-founder made smart choices. There was probably some luck involved in a few of them, but I think you would’ve succeeded with almost minimal luck because of all the things that were in place, like your founding team construction, I already talked about, developer plus subject matter expert. You backed off on building an entire CRM and instead you built just the support coordination piece of it. You limited the scope you marketed before you were coding, right? You built the Chrome extension. You built Astalty Lite as marketing. You picked what sounds like a market with kind of a big hole in it. You built vertical SaaS. You increased your prices multiple times. You priced well from the sell. You did a lot of things right.  

James Mooring:
I just want to kind of point out the other thing about doing things right. If you’re not (beep) things up along the way, you’re not going to get there. It’s more about being able to not be afraid of being wrong. If you get it wrong, change fast. And the speed of being able to iterate is super, super important. The quicker you can eliminate the wrong things to do, the faster you’ll arrive at the right things to do. So I think it’s kind of nice that we get to this point and everyone’s like, “Well, you did all these things right.” Now, sure. But when you’re going through that process, you do do a lot of things wrong, and that’s absolutely fine. If you’re not doing things wrong… That’s where you learn what’s not going to work. So, I think that’s just an important point.  

Rob Walling:
I like that a lot. That’s something Einar and I tell to our TinySeed companies all the time of like, “You got to move fast. You’re going to make some bad decisions, you’re going to make some wrong decisions, but you need to do a lot of things such that you work mostly on the right things.”  

James Mooring:
Like Ben Chestnut says, “Stab in the dark, but stab very fast.”  

Rob Walling:
Exactly. Super impressive, man. It’s a great business you built. If folks want to see what you’re up to, they can go to astalty.com.au. And is there anywhere else online that you hang out, to look for? I don’t think you have a Twitter account, but is there anything that… Is it LinkedIn where people could maybe keep up with you?  

James Mooring:
Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place. I’m kind of on Twitter, but not super active there, but certainly on LinkedIn.  

Rob Walling:
So folks who want to find you on LinkedIn, you are James Mooring, M-O-O-R-I-N-G, and you live in Australia. I don’t know how… On LinkedIn, what if there’s 25 James Moorings? How are they going to know it’s you? Oh, Astalty, right? That’s going to be the… You need one more piece. When I search for people’s names in Google and I’m like, “James Mooring Twitter,” and there’s like 20 of them, so then I usually throw in the company name and that gets me there. 

So James, once again, thank you so much for joining me on the show today.  

James Mooring:
Not a problem. Thanks. Really appreciate it.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to James for joining me on the show, and thanks to you for joining me this week and every week. I did a call for more advanced questions because obviously a lot of the questions that I get on the show are from folks looking to validate ideas, are just very early stage, and that’s fine. But I know that there are a lot of listeners to the show that are doing 10k, 100k, 300k a month or more. There are folks out there right now thinking, “Yeah, I’m doing a lot more than that.” And I don’t want to give the impression that this show is only for new folks just getting started. There’s so many people doing seven and eight figures in the MicroConf community, in the TinySeed community, and even in the Startups For the Rest of Us audience. 

So if you saw my question on Twitter, thank you for responding. I’ve got 10, 15 really good questions that are for folks who are building great businesses and not just about early stage stuff. And of course, I will continue to accept those and answer them in future episodes. You can always submit questions by going to startupsfortherestofus.com. Hit Ask a Question in the top and ask them there, or you can respond to me on Twitter. Thanks so much. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 722.