Omer (00:11.360)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talked to Christopher Gimmer, the co founder and CEO of Snappa, a SaaS product that makes it easy to create online graphics in your browser.
Before launching Snappa, Christopher and his co founder Mark built a student only dating website.
Although they got some early traction, the business quickly failed.
Later they built a website to help people find royalty free images online.
They started blogging which helped them get traffic and slowly build an email list.
But they noticed that it was a pain for them to create images for their blog posts.
They sucked at using Photoshop and weren't designers.
They just wanted a simple tool to do the job.
So one day they emailed their list to find out if they had the same problem.
And it turns out that a lot of people did.
So they decided to build a tool to solve that problem.
And that's how Snapper was born.
In this episode you'll learn the full story of how they went from a failed startup to launching Snapper.
Some critical lessons they learned about doing customer development right, a simple but powerful SEO strategy they used to get consistent traffic and how they went from zero to over $45,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
I hope you enjoy it.
Chris, welcome to the show.
Christopher Gimmer (01:48.500)
Thanks for having me.
Omer (01:50.020)
So I always like to ask my guests what gets them out of bed, if they have a favorite quote or in your own words you want to just share with us.
What kind of motivates you to work on your business every day?
Christopher Gimmer (01:58.260)
I'm not a huge quotes guy, but one of the things I kind of live by is this idea of consistent execution.
I find that when you're working on stuff every day or day in and day out, and then you look back three years, you realize how much progress you can make if you just keep at it on a daily basis.
That's something that I try to do where every day I just try to work on stuff that I think will move the needle long term.
Omer (02:28.460)
So we're going to talk about a number of businesses that you've worked on, but obviously your current one is Snapper.
So can you tell our listeners what does the product do?
What problem are you trying to solve and for who?
Christopher Gimmer (02:42.600)
Snappa is a software product that basically helps non designers create online graphics.
And it's really geared towards marketers, small business owners, people that need to create frequent graphics for social media, content marketing, Facebook ads and stuff like that.
And they don't have the resources to hire a full time designer and so they use their software to be able to do that really easily.
Omer (03:10.700)
Let's go back to the first startup you built which was called what Classmate Catch.
Christopher Gimmer (03:20.140)
That was the first thing we ever did yet.
Omer (03:22.460)
So tell me about that.
What was that?
How did you kind of start working on that business?
Christopher Gimmer (03:27.020)
Yeah, so I was working at the government at the time and I had met Mark, who's my co founder of Snappa.
We've pretty much been working on stuff for the last several years and he was doing some development on the side and just kind of working on some side projects.
And when I saw what he can do code wise, I thought, wow, this is awesome.
We should totally team up and launch a business together.
Because we were kind of both essentially tired of the 9 to 5 corporate type of gig and so we kind of kind of had aspirations of starting up her own thing.
I don't even remember exactly why we out of all things, we chose the student dating website.
But at the time, you know, Plenty of Fish was really popular.
This is way before Tinder had come out.
And you know, thinking back to kind of Facebook, how they started out with only allowing university students to use their platform, we kind of thought it would be a cool idea to create this dating site where you needed a student email to sign up.
So we ended up launching that and we live in Ottawa, Canada and so we put it out to the three schools, university and colleges that we have here.
That was the first thing that we had ever launched.
Omer (04:50.310)
So how big did that business get?
Christopher Gimmer (04:53.030)
We ended up getting about over 1,000 users between the three schools.
But we had a lot of issues scaling beyond our local universities.
At that time I really had no background or knowledge of Internet marketing.
So the only thing we were really doing marketing wise was flyering and old school marketing tactics.
And so when it came to scaling outside of our local city, it became a big challenge.
Ultimately why it didn't work out was we hadn't raised any money.
So we didn't have nearly enough people on the site to make money off of ads and we didn't have nearly enough traction to warrant raising money.
So we were kind of stuck in this bad spot where we didn't really have any money to grow the site and we didn't have enough good metrics to raise money.
And to be honest, we just didn't really know what we were doing.
If I could be completely Honest.
Omer (05:56.780)
What was the biggest lesson you took away from that experience?
Christopher Gimmer (06:00.060)
Number one, I needed to figure out how to actually market a business.
And the second thing was there are certain types of businesses that you just have to raise money for.
And there's.
For us to be an ad supported business, you need a ton of users.
And so that's not something that we really thought out too well.
We realized that if we're, if we're going to bootstrap a business, it has to be something where we're making reasonable money from day one that we could actually support ourselves and reinvest back into the business.
Omer (06:34.200)
Okay, and then the next thing that you guys started to work on was a product called Bootstrap Bay.
So tell me about what that was and how you came up with the idea for that.
Christopher Gimmer (06:45.720)
So after the whole classmate catch experience happened, that's when I really started to do a lot of reading a lot of blogs and listening to a lot of podcasts and kind of figure out this whole online business type of stuff.
And one of the things that I thought was really fascinating was this whole concept of keyword research.
And so I thought it was pretty cool that you can see exactly how much search volume different keywords are generating.
And I think at this time I had read some ultimate guide to dropshipping and I thought that could be a cool business to start.
And so we were actually trying to find keywords to start a dropshipping business.
And then somehow Mark had stumbled across bootstrap themes and bootstrap templates.
It was a new framework at the time.
We were doing some bit of web design on the side just to make some extra money.
And we realized there was a ton of search volume for bootstrap themes, but there wasn't a ton of websites or competition dedicated towards these types of themes.
And so, you know, we thought that if we can create our own marketplace, that that could be a decent business to start.
Omer (08:00.610)
And how did you go about building the product and kind of getting the word out about it?
Christopher Gimmer (08:07.570)
Mark basically built the product from scratch.
I think nowadays there's.
You could probably create a site like the same site with WordPress and a couple plugins, but it was, you know, we basically did from scratch.
So as with all marketplaces, you know, you always have that chicken and egg problem in the beginning.
And so our goal from the start was to get enough supply on the website.
And so one thing we did was we actually created the first handful of themes ourselves, but we kind of made it look as though it was created by other theme authors, because it kind of would have looked silly if we had a marketplace and we were the only ones that had created the themes for it.
And then essentially what we did was we just cold emailed any kind of theme author that we could and tried to sell them on.
The fact that we're launching this new marketplace, getting on marketplaces early could be really beneficial if you generate some sales and credibility on the site.
And so if I remember correctly, we were able to get about 10 to 15 themes from day one when we first started.
And then we noticed that because Bootstrap was a new framework, there wasn't a lot of blog content and people writing about it.
So we actually just wrote a lot of tutorials and content about the Bootstrap framework.
And we found that because we were able to get a lot of backlinks and rank for some of this content, it then ended up increasing the domain authority of our site.
And then we were able to rank for terms like our money keywords, like bootstrap themes and Bootstrap templates.
And then once we started ranking for Bootstrap templates and Bootstrap themes on the first page of Google, that's when we really started to see the sales come in.
And that took about at least three to six months before we started to see meaningful sales.
Omer (10:07.230)
And how big did that business get before you moved on to something else?
Christopher Gimmer (10:12.190)
Yeah, so at its peak before we sold it, it was doing about 10k per month.
Now mind you, we had to pay out about half of that to the theme creators on our site.
So, you know, profit wise, it was, it was doing about 5k a month.
So for us it was pretty life changing in the sense that it was the first business we had created where it was actually making money and strangers were paying us money over the Internet.
And I actually ended up taking a year of absence from my job because I figured if we can do this just on nights and weekends, if we spent a year trying to do something, we could probably figure it out and grow beyond that.
Omer (10:56.660)
And why did you decide to sell that business?
Christopher Gimmer (10:59.940)
We ended up selling it because essentially we had started Snappa.
And so I'm sure we can get into the whole story.
But the issue with Bootstrap Bay was we weren't the first marketplace.
We're kind of the second dedicated one that started.
And also ThemeForest, which was the biggest themes marketplace in the world, they caught onto the fact that there was a lot of demand and search volume for Bootstrap templates in particular.
So they ended up creating kind of their own section for Bootstrap templates.
And then they started ranking.
And so we knew for us it was just going to be a huge uphill battle to compete with ThemeForest and Rap Bootstrap, who was the other player at the time.
We got as far as we could with SEO and not having to put any of our own money in the site.
And at that time we kind of started looking at other opportunities and specifically in the software space, because that was really the business model that we started gravitating towards.
Omer (12:07.530)
How much did you sell Bootstrap A for?
Christopher Gimmer (12:09.690)
It wasn't very big.
It was about low five figures, decent chunk of change, but nothing, certainly nothing to retire off of.
When we sold that site, Snappa was kind of on its way.
And so for us, it wasn't even really the money.
It was just to get it off our plate and not have to spend any mental energy on it.
Omer (12:29.910)
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out the sort of the, the sequence of events here because I want to get onto talking about Snapper, because really that's kind of like the SaaS business and we want to kind of dig into that.
But there was also another business that you worked on, which was called Stock Snap.
When did that come about in this story?
Christopher Gimmer (12:52.030)
While we were working on Bootstrap A, like I'd mentioned, you know, content marketing was, was a really good channel for us.
And so I was on Reddit one day and someone had put a.
A list of all these free stock photos.
And this is kind of when Creative Commons was becoming a thing and everyone was starting these websites where they were giving away seven free photos every seven days.
And the thread blew up.
It had like 400 upvotes or something like that.
And so I thought, huh, this is really interesting.
I haven't heard a lot of these sites and got a good response.
So essentially I just created a blog post on the Bootstrap, a blog, it was super comprehensive, listed out all of these kind of new free stock photo sites and try to make it a really good, comprehensive blog post.
And so when I ended up promoting it on the various channels, out of all places, it went viral on StumbleUpon.
I'm not even sure if that site is still going strong.
And then next thing you know, we started ranking on the first page of Google for free stock photos.
And so we thought that, you know, a lot of these or a lot of the sites at the time, none of them had any search functionality and you couldn't sort or filter through anything.
So it's kind of a pain that you had to kind of scour these 10 or 15 different resources and you couldn't search for anything.
So we thought it would be awesome to do a free stock photo site releasing everything under Creative Commons that actually had some search functionality to it.
And so that gave us the idea to create Stock Snap.
And because we already had a blog post that was ranking for free stock photos, we we just inserted our own site into the list and started building traffic to it right away.
Omer (14:40.160)
And you ended up selling that business as well.
Christopher Gimmer (14:43.840)
So kind of.
One thing I forgot to mention was while I was working on Bootstrap A doing a lot of the content marketing, I found it a struggle whenever I needed to create images for the blog content.
And that's kind of where we had this original idea that it would be awesome if we had a software product that would integrate with all of these free stock photo sites and then with drag and drop, easily be able to add text and graphics and all that kind of stuff.
That's kind of where we thought that it would be a great idea to build stocksnap because we could then use that website to drive leads into the software product.
That was kind of also one of the big motivations for us to build stocksnap and have a lead generation into our main software product.
So you're asking how much we sold stocks now for?
Yeah, yeah.
I can't disclose amounts because of NDA, but it was, for us, it was quite a sizable acquisition.
You know, Stock Snap was a really key ingredient to us for launching Snappa, but we've now been running that for three years.
And so as we've built up our SEO and content marketing and all this other stuff, it started to become a lower percentage of the leads that we were driving.
As with anything, the site did require some maintenance, and we had to spend some resources on it to kind of keep growing the site and keep feeding the site.
And so when the acquirer came on and gave us the offer, it definitely made sense for us to sell it, because, you know, even when we kind of factored in the leads that it was generating for us, the acquisition price more than offset that over the long term.
Omer (16:38.590)
And both these businesses, Bootstrap Bay and Stock Snap that you sold, did you go out looking to sell them or were you approached by people who were interested in acquiring them?
Christopher Gimmer (16:48.350)
Stock Snap, we were approached by the acquirer.
We didn't seek them out.
Bootstrap A was actually funny because we really, actually wanted to sell that.
We just for Whatever reason hadn't really actively gone out.
But so the person that bought it, they're the owners of Creative Tim, and they basically create their own set of Bootstrap themes and they have UI kits and stuff like that.
And we had become friends and so he messaged me and he kind of noticed that we were neglecting the site quite a bit.
And he said, and he was basically asking me what.
What my plans were for Bootstrap Bay.
And.
And I said, well, to be completely honest, we're just putting it on autopilot.
Why are you interested in buying it?
And then.
So we had worked out a deal from there.
Got it.
Omer (17:36.660)
Okay, so let's get on to Snapper.
So you saw the opportunity for a product like this, but building this kind of functionality in a browser is not the easiest thing to do.
How did you guys get started and how did you sort of figure out what you were going to build?
Because potentially you could kind of set out a goal and say, hey, we want to kind of build Photoshop in the browser.
Christopher Gimmer (18:03.380)
Right.
Omer (18:03.620)
And spent years doing that.
What was the conversation that you and Mark had and how did you figure out what was the right product to kind of ship with?
Christopher Gimmer (18:10.500)
Yeah, so, you know, in order not to make the same mistakes with Classmate Catch, we really wanted to make sure that if we're going to spend several months, as you've alluded to, it's not an easy thing to build.
We wanted some reasonable assurance that people were going to want this product.
And so the first thing I did was I sent out a short survey to the people that were subscribed to stocksnap or stocksnap newsletter.
And essentially I wanted to get a sense of what they were using the stock photos for and also kind of what their job titles were.
And so I realized that sure enough, a decent percentage of the people that were coming on our free stock photo site were indeed social media marketers, content marketers, business owners who needed these stock photos for, you know, marketing and business purposes.
And then what I did after that was for the people who responded that, you know, they were using it for content marketing and social media.
I asked if they were willing to do a quick Skype interview.
And essentially I wanted to figure out did they have the same problem as me.
And so once I had about 15 conversations, it did become apparent that a lot of these people had similar pain points where if they did have in house designers or if they were using, you know, Fiverr, for example, it just took a long time to kind of coordinate with the designer and it took too long to make revisions when they needed to pump out a quick graphic for Twitter.
And then also the people that were using Photoshop or some of these other browser based tools, they just found it overwhelming and too complicated.
And so based on those interviews, that gave us the drive to at least go ahead and start creating like a mvp, essentially.
And then so what we did was Mark locked himself in a basement and started coding the first version.
And then we essentially released a very early version of the product.
And then we started beta testing it with some of those people.
And we tried to figure out what were the actual crucial features that really needed to be included.
And then based on that, we had kind of set personal deadline where once we added these features, we would go live with the product and create a free and paid version of it.
Omer (20:44.320)
When you were doing these Skype interviews, you didn't have a product at the time.
You were really, as you said, you were trying to figure out whether there was people had a similar pain to you and whether it was worth building the product.
Do you think that made that conversation easier with these people because you didn't have anything to pitch and you could just spend the time just trying to figure out what their problems were?
Christopher Gimmer (21:06.710)
Yeah.
So one of the best books, I think, written about the whole concept of validation is a book called Lean Customer Development.
And the biggest lesson that I took away from that book was that you never want to ask leading questions.
And so normally what happens is people will either show them the product or they'll say, this is my idea.
What do you think?
And naturally the person on the other end always says, yeah, that's a great idea, or, yeah, I would use that product because generally they don't want to hurt your feelings.
And so the approach that we kind of took was I asked them, how are you currently doing X?
What tools are you currently using?
And then I was trying to see if they identified themselves that they had a problem or they identified themselves that they had pain points.
So the Skype call wasn't, hey, here's what we're building and here's the product.
What do you think of it?
It was really geared towards finding out what they were currently doing, what their current process looks like, what their current pain points looked like, and using that as a way to feed into our product.
Omer (22:16.460)
Okay, yeah, good.
So that makes sense.
And that's the book by Cindy Alvarez?
Christopher Gimmer (22:21.500)
Yeah, that's the one.
Yeah.
Omer (22:23.260)
Okay, cool.
All right, so you've got some good feedback.
You've kind of identified that there's a problem.
You've kind of narrowed down the scope of a product, and Mark is working on building that and kind of getting it out there.
Presumably you were able to get some of those early beta testers from these conversations that you were having with people.
But I'm kind of curious, like, beyond that, when you try to get to your first hundred customers and sort of beyond, like, how did you do that beyond the beta?
Christopher Gimmer (23:00.440)
Essentially what we did was we had continued to drive leads to Snappa from stock Snap.
And so once we had a bit of an MVP product, we actually just had an open beta so anyone could essentially use the product.
And it was completely free because it was pretty bare bones.
And so, like I said, based on that open beta period, we started learning what was absolutely essential.
So we had launched that open beta in July.
So it took us another couple months to build out what we thought was the necessary feature.
And then at the end of November, we basically did our public launch.
And then we put up a paywall and separated both a free plan and a premium plan when we felt that we had enough to start charging for the product.
Omer (23:56.620)
Okay.
And I know that SEO and sort of content marketing were kind of an important factor in sort of driving growth of this business.
And you did something interesting with creating some core pages that kind of helped to sort of attract traffic.
Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Like, what were they and sort of how did you come up with that idea?
Christopher Gimmer (24:22.580)
Yeah, so when we first launched a site, it was more or less just a homepage.
And what was kind of interesting was there's actually not a lot of search volume for graphic design tool or graphic design software.
And so the homepage itself wasn't really driving a ton of organic searches.
So once we started putting some of our competitors into ahrefs, which is a SEO software that we used, we realized that they were ranking for terms based around the use cases of the software.
So, for example, with Snappa, you could create Twitter headers and.
And there is a lot of search volume for Twitter Header maker and Facebook Cover Maker and all the various use cases that are that our software facilitates.
And so what we did was we started building out all of these site pages for all the various use cases that you can use Snappa for.
And that was a big win for us.
And then in order to rank those pages, what worked pretty well was doing guest posting.
So, for example, if we wanted to drive some links to our Facebook cover site page, we would Write articles about 5 tips to make great Facebook covers or 5 tips for marketing on Facebook.
And then we would link back to these site pages.
Once we did that, we started generating quite a lot of traffic to these site pages, quite a lot more than our homepage.
Omer (26:01.350)
So if I've understood this correctly, when you just had the homepage, you were kind of effectively trying to rank for kind of words like online graphic design software or whatever, which in hindsight, not many people were actually looking for.
But through the keyword research, you were able to kind of go, I guess, one or two levels deeper into say, okay, well, what do people actually use the product for?
And okay, well, they use it to create graphics.
Well, what kind of graphics?
Okay, well, these, you know, Twitter headers.
Did that just come through keyword research again, or was this based on looking at what your competitors were ranking for?
Christopher Gimmer (26:41.060)
Well, initially what happened is I kind of stumbled across this because I had put some of our competitors into ahrefs to see what they're ranking for.
And that's when I kind of realized that they were setting up some of these site pages or ranking for some of these terms.
So then what I did was I started thinking about all the different.
So with Snappa, we basically have like templates and predefined sizes.
So we have templates for Facebook cover photos and Twitter headers and YouTube thumbnails.
And so I, you know, literally started going down the list of all the different templates and sizes that we offer, plugging that into ahrefs to see what the search volume was, and then building out all the site pages based around that.
So for other SaaS founders, I think it's a great exercise to look at all the different use cases or problems that your software is solving.
Put that into Ahrefs or an SEMrush or any type of keyword tool and see if people are actually searching for that and then building out site pages that ranks for that, rather than just your generic overall keyword that you're targeting on the homepage.
Omer (27:59.460)
How many of these kind of use case pages did you create?
Christopher Gimmer (28:05.940)
I think we have about 10 or a little over 10.
Some of these pages will generate like 20,000 hits per month or something like that.
Omer (28:16.050)
How long are they in terms of words?
Were these very in depth articles?
Christopher Gimmer (28:23.250)
Yeah, they're pretty in depth.
And I actually got a.
Because writing copy is not one of my favorite things to do.
So I actually hired a copywriter to create these pages and he did a really good job.
And the one thing too is if someone goes and looks at her site pages, they all have the Exact same layout.
The copy on each page is very similar.
Obviously, the thing that ends up changing is the images on each page, the title tags, the H1 tags, and naturally some of the copy itself.
But once we built out the first page, it was super easy to then add additional site pages.
Omer (29:03.850)
And in terms of the guest post, you said you were kind of like taking like related content ideas, guest posting about those, and then making sure that you had at least one backlink in each one of those guest posts to the relevant kind of use case page.
Christopher Gimmer (29:22.490)
Yeah.
Cause it's really hard to build backlinks to commercial pages, at least based on my experience.
And so I found the only really successful way to to build backlinks to commercial pages is to do guest posting and then to link back to them.
And even then, some people still don't want you to do that.
And so we found for us, that was the most predictable way that we could generate backlinks to some of these site pages.
Omer (29:53.000)
How many guest posts did you do typically for each of these pages?
Christopher Gimmer (29:58.200)
So with these pages, it wasn't like super, super competitive because as you can imagine, there's only so many tools that are targeting or that you can use to create YouTube thumbnails and whatnot.
So if I remember correctly, we tried to get at least about five links to each of these pages, and that's usually all it took to be able to rank them at least within the top five search results.
Omer (30:24.680)
And have you had to do anything to kind of keep that ranking or has it become less important now as the business has grown?
Christopher Gimmer (30:33.240)
Yeah, definitely.
As the business has grown and we've just naturally generated more backlinks overall and have a higher domain authority, we haven't had to do much with those site pages to keep our rankings.
Omer (30:48.720)
Have you done anything else apart from those use case pages?
Christopher Gimmer (30:51.760)
So another thing that worked really well for us is on this sort of related topic is we realize that a lot of people are searching for the different sizes for these graphics.
So there's a lot of search volume for things like Facebook cover size, YouTube thumbnail size, Twitter header size.
So for each of the types of graphics, we kind of did the same thing where we plug those in ahrefs and see how much search results they generated.
And then we built these really comprehensive blog posts about the Facebook cover size, Twitter header size, and those rank really well for us.
And naturally, the people that are searching for the size of the Twitter header, there's a decent percentage of those that are looking to actually create Twitter headers and Then so we kind of promote our tool within those blog posts.
Omer (31:44.110)
Yeah, I think I've probably done that at least once or twice every year when the, you know, the sizes keep changing.
Lately, I think more and more you kind of see like Google kind of giving you kind of like these instant answers.
So you can kind of type in like Twitter header size or something and it probably shows you the dimensions without you even having to click on a post or a link.
Although interestingly enough, I just tried that with Twitter header size.
And Snapper's post is still, I guess, this number two there.
So I guess that's still working to some degree.
Christopher Gimmer (32:19.130)
Yeah, definitely.
Like Twitter is a good example.
They tell you what the size is, but what they don't tell you is that the top and the bottom of your header doesn't end up being visible because of the follower count and that kind of stuff.
And also there's obviously a spot where your profile picture kind of hangs over that.
And so a lot of people end up clicking on the articles because they also want to know, like, how can they optimize their header image?
And that's kind of the type of information that we put in our blog posts beyond just the one line of what the size is.
Omer (32:59.380)
What are you guys doing in terms of revenue at the moment?
Christopher Gimmer (33:02.020)
So right now we're doing over 45k mrr per month.
Omer (33:06.340)
Okay, so that's over half a million a year.
Are you making a profit?
Christopher Gimmer (33:14.120)
Yes, we are.
We're a pretty small team and so, yeah, it's a pretty profitable business.
Omer (33:20.360)
Okay, I was looking at your pricing for Snapper and beyond the free plan, you've kind of got like two plans there, and one is $10 a month, which gives, says here, gives people access to over 500,000 HD photos and graphics and unlimited downloads.
And then there's a team plan which is, you know, 20 bucks a month and you've got five users there.
And again, unlimited downloads on those 500,000 images.
How much are you having to pay in terms of royalties with these 500,000 graphics and then giving people unlimited downloads at 10 bucks a month?
It doesn't sound like there's a lot in terms of a margin there.
Christopher Gimmer (34:11.940)
Yeah, so for the photos, we actually integrate with free stock photo providers.
You know, we're really selective about the partners that we work with, so they're really high quality photos.
And what we learned from our beta period was that even with people with Photoshop, for example, they found it such a pain to have to scour the various free stock photo sites and download them and then upload them into our software.
So they get a lot of value, just the fact that we integrate directly with them.
So it saves them that extra step and that extra hassle of having to scour all these different sites for these photos.
And we also allow them to favorite their favorite photos and stuff like that.
So it also saves them from having to save their their favorite photos and folders and stuff like that.
The graphics one we do pay royalties for, but it's a flat fee, and so it doesn't really cut into our margins too much.
Omer (35:13.180)
So with the photos, like, what's the incentive for those providers to partner with you and make these photos available if they're not generating any revenue from them?
Christopher Gimmer (35:21.820)
Yeah, sorry.
So the photos, we also pay like a monthly fee to use our API.
So for both the photos and the graphics, we essentially pay to use our API, but it's a flat monthly fee as opposed to like a royalty per photo or per graphic.
So when you factor in the amount of customers that we have, it ends up being pretty high margin for us.
Omer (35:44.380)
Okay, got it.
That makes sense.
I often hear that it's really difficult, if not impossible, to build a SaaS business.
It's particularly a profitable one if you're only charging people 10 or 20 bucks a month.
What do you say to that?
Christopher Gimmer (36:03.590)
I say they're right.
So, just going back a little bit.
We originally had this idea for Snappa.
We knew that unless we could generate a significant amount of traffic, it wasn't going to be profitable unless we can do that.
And so that's why we built stocksnap, because we knew that if that site was successful, it would give us enough traffic in the beginning to at least make some meaningful amount of revenue.
And so to the people who say, is it impossible to make a profitable business?
Of course the answer is it is if you don't have enough traffic.
And so for us, you know, we've been fortunate in that we've been able to generate a significant amount of traffic through SEO and these organic sources that we have been able to make it into, you know, a profitable business for the size of our team.
Now, if you were to start a CRM tool and you're charging five bucks a month, I'd say that's probably not going to work out very well.
Omer (37:11.350)
I'm curious, have you tested higher pricing?
Like the team plan for five people at 20 bucks a month seems like a little too cheap to me.
Have you tried testing higher pricing?
Christopher Gimmer (37:23.830)
It's been on my list of things to test for a long time.
Now just pricing is one of those things that's always tricky to test, but I think at some point we probably will have to do that.
So one caveat with the pricing is the $10 and $20 is on annual plans.
So on a monthly basis we charge 15 to $30 a month, depending on the plan, which again, isn't still a huge amount of money, but on a percentage term it is a bit more than the yearly plans.
Omer (37:57.690)
Yeah.
What's the size of your team?
Christopher Gimmer (38:00.740)
So we have four employees and then one contractor.
Omer (38:04.980)
Okay.
And kind of while I was doing research on you, it's kind of interesting to kind of talk about these, these other businesses that you had worked on.
And, and the reason I kind of wanted to spend some time at the beginning was because I thought it was relevant to telling the story of Snapper and also some failures and, you know, successes you had along the way and sort of the lessons you learned from that.
But I thought kind of okay, at this point, you know, you kind of had either sold those businesses or kind of shut them down and were kind of focused on Snapper.
And then I came across a business called Stock Fox and I thought, is he working on another business as well at the same time?
Christopher Gimmer (38:52.810)
So are you.
So Stockfox is essentially going to be a side project, at least in the beginning, and then we'll see what happens from there.
But it is something we're kind of working out on the side at the moment.
Omer (39:08.330)
What does your typical day look like?
Because I'm always curious when people are kind of working on multiple things or have multiple plates in the air, at least for a certain period of time.
I'm kind of always curious about like, how do you do that and how do you kind of stop yourself from kind of going crazy.
Christopher Gimmer (39:24.240)
So for the first two years of Snappa, I mean, I was really head down like the entire time.
And so I was doing like, when we first launched, it was just Mark and I.
So I was doing all the support, I was doing all the marketing, basically everything that was encoding.
Our first hire was a developer.
So again I was basically doing everything that wasn't coding.
And so for the first two years, my day to day was essentially answering customer support, writing blog articles, building backlinks, landing guest post opportunities, prioritizing feature requests, essentially everything.
And then once I hired Nick, who's now handling marketing and support, I wasn't as much involved in the complete day to day.
And then I was focused a bit more on the strategy and I was able to delegate a bit more of the day to day type stuff.
Now, three years later, Michael, who's our developer, and Nick, who's handling marketing support, they're doing a really fantastic job of continuing to do what's still working as well as, you know, finding new initiatives for growth.
And so Mark and my time has freed up a little bit in recent months.
And like with any entrepreneur, you, you're always thinking of, you know, what you want to do next.
And for us, one of my biggest passions is investing and the stock market.
You know, it's something I spend a lot of my personal time on.
So Stockfox is essentially the kind of product that we wish existed.
And so we want to put it out as a side project and just see what happens.
Omer (41:11.980)
Interesting.
Watch this space.
And you didn't raise any money for Snapper.
Has it been totally bootstrapped?
Christopher Gimmer (41:18.780)
Yeah, Snapper is completely bootstrapped.
Yeah.
Omer (41:22.060)
Cool.
All right, let's.
It's time to wrap up.
So let's get on to our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Yeah.
Christopher Gimmer (41:32.680)
Let's do it.
Omer (41:33.400)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Christopher Gimmer (41:38.200)
I think the best business advice that I've received was the idea of validating your business before starting, at a bare minimum, just having some sort of idea of how to get customers.
I think that's super important.
Omer (41:53.800)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Christopher Gimmer (41:57.330)
So one book, which I've talked about already was Lean Customer Development and then covered why.
Another one that I think is really great in terms of being actionable is Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares.
Because I think it's a really good book for developing a growth mindset and understanding all the different channels that are available to you.
Omer (42:19.970)
Gabriel's been on the show and he was a great guest and also.
Yeah, I love that book.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Christopher Gimmer (42:29.610)
I think the most important thing is someone who's resourceful and someone who's willing to do whatever it takes to succeed.
Omer (42:38.730)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Christopher Gimmer (42:43.210)
My favorite tool is Trello, and my favorite habit is planning out the three tasks that I want to get done for the next day.
So when I fire up my laptop in the morning, I know exactly what I'm working on.
Omer (42:58.960)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time and you don't have to answer this because we already talked about Stock Fox.
Christopher Gimmer (43:07.440)
That would be the answer.
Omer (43:09.120)
All right, what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Christopher Gimmer (43:13.520)
I started DJing while I was in university, and I did that for about seven years.
Omer (43:19.540)
Cool.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work, other than investing?
Christopher Gimmer (43:26.180)
Definitely.
Big into travel.
Omer (43:28.020)
Yeah, that kind of circles back to the beginning, I think, because I think I read that you were kind of happy in a 9 to 5 until you did some traveling to Asia and then kind of had a different perspective and outlook to life, and that's kind of maybe how you started on this journey.
Christopher Gimmer (43:42.500)
Yeah, just having the freedom to travel more was one of my biggest motivators for starting a business.
Omer (43:50.880)
Cool.
Chris, thanks for joining me and taking the time to share your story and some of the things that you and Mark have done to build and grow this SaaS business.
If people want to find out more about Snapper, they can go to snapper.com s n a p p a dot
Christopher Gimmer (44:10.350)
com
Omer (44:12.450)
and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Christopher Gimmer (44:17.170)
I have a Twitter account.
Although I'm not Super active, it's CGimmer.
And if someone wants to reach me directly, my email is christophernappa.com awesome.
Omer (44:26.930)
And one thing I didn't get a chance to talk to you about was there was a post I came across that you'd written on how you guys ended up paying $40,000 to acquire that domain.
Snapper.com.
Christopher Gimmer (44:38.630)
yes.
Omer (44:39.190)
I thought that was kind of a fun read.
So I'll include a link to that in the show notes as well when we publish the episode.
Christopher Gimmer (44:47.190)
Cool.
Great.
Omer (44:48.150)
Well, it's been a pleasure.
Thanks for joining me.
And I wish you and the team at Snapper all the best.
Christopher Gimmer (44:55.030)
Yeah, thanks for having me.
It was fun.
Omer (44:57.110)
Awesome.
Cheers.
