Our Onboarding SaaS Will Hit $1.5M This Year

Jacob Appel

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Published: June 22nd, 2024

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Jacob Appel

Founder, Binderr

$10K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Binderr

binderr.com

from Għargħur, Malta

started June 2020

$10,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Jacob recommends to grow your business!

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Notion

Discover what books Jacob recommends to grow your business!

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

I'm Jacob, originally from Denmark. I’ve lived in a few different countries in the past 20 years, but I consider Malta home.

I’m the CEO and Founder of Binderr, which is a client onboarding software for accountants, lawyers and financial services.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

My first business was a food delivery website launched in 2012, which was a relative success in local terms. We managed to grow it to €1m of ARR before turning the focus to my second venture, which was as a franchise owner of Bolt in three countries. We built Bolt into a leading taxi and food delivery company across Malta, Tunisia and Cyprus. The business was sold for 8 figures in 2022, which led me to my latest venture - Binderr.

The original idea for Binderr was an accounting app to serve the thousands of self-employed drivers and couriers we worked with at Bolt. That didn’t work out so well. Charging self-employed people €20/mo for a product that cannot scale across jurisdictions because every tax system is so different is a challenging business model.

So we pivoted. We started selling our accounting software to accountants. That didn’t work so well either. Although there was room for improvement in the accounting software they were using, it was too big of an ask to get them to consider swapping out the software that powered their entire business to bet on some start-up.

From those conversations, however, we learned that they had some big pain points around onboarding their clients efficiently and compliantly, as they had to adhere to stringent rules like anti-money laundering (AML) regulation.

We had a lightbulb moment and decided to tackle that problem. It ultimately took us 4 years to get to market with our client onboarding software, which we operate today, and about €4m of investments, which were mainly self-funded from our Bolt exit.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

When we pivoted to client onboarding software, we worked closely with professional firms to design the product. It took us 15 months to get the platform ready to go to market, with a team of 15, mainly developers and designers.

In hindsight, our biggest mistake in building the client onboarding software was trying to build too many features in one go. We ended up building four half-assed features instead of one or two great ones.

Dev team sent us a nice photo from their vacation

Late-night office fun

Describe the process of launching the business.

There wasn’t a big launch event with press and a countdown. When we decided to go to market, it was more about getting a customer to use the software, receiving their feedback, and then going back to the drawing board, repeating that motion many times.

Trying to hire. Although, we didn’t have any money. Not sure what we were thinking!

In the last few months, the pace has quickened as we have partnered with a company of the Private Office of His Highness Sheikh Saeed bin Ahmed Al Maktoum in Dubai and are officially launching in the UAE and across MENA.

Some recent PR: Seed Group Official, Seed Group LinkedIn, Private Office Announcement, Binderr LinkedIn, MeetInc Website, MeetInc LinkedIn, MaltaTimes.

We have evolved so much as a business from both a team and software perspective in the last couple of quarters. It feels like the pieces of the puzzle are coming together. We have signed up 10 law and accounting firms with good contracts. The average customer value is around €20,000/year.

The product is being continually developed and our customers get to have a say. I know from feedback that many value this approach. We also recognise it isn’t a one-size-fits-all product. We see ourselves as offering a service much more bespoke than a fresh out-the-box solution to client onboarding.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

We generate leads from online channels and our personal networks, and we are starting to see some word-of-mouth recommendations.

As for the online channels, we focus our energy on LinkedIn. We have Instagram and Facebook, but they don’t generate leads at this stage. As we grow, we will look to these platforms and others to increase our brand awareness.

Some recent posts (all images hyperlinked):

We also received 246 website visits off the back of an impromptu meme ad campaign:

As well as attracting customers through social media traffic, we are optimizing our website for search engines to ensure people can find us when they search for things like “onboarding software” or “AML software”. SEO is typically where companies choose quantity over quality, but as an early stage business we have to be creative and tactical with our approach.

We can’t produce 100 blogs per month, so instead of trying to gain 1000 new organic search visitors and hope some of them would like to buy from us, we’re instead targeting the bottom of the funnel and hoping to attract 50-100 high intent search visitors. This gives us a more revenue-focused foundation to further build out our SEO and content marketing from.

It’s important to get hiring right and we’ve worked with recruiters to make sure we are getting this right. Talent is your best marketing resource as your people sell your brand by being ambassadors wherever they go. One of the biggest learnings has been to be frugal with everything except compensation for top talent.

Another way we attract is through good reviews online and existing client referrals,

In terms of retention: We see our customers as fountains of knowledge. Individuals we can learn from, so we are listening to feedback. Not just nodding along, but actually listening, asking questions for clarity and implementing changes quickly.

Our customers are like partners. We have very open and honest conversations with customers and a shared ideology of growing together. Particularly with our early adopters.

The product is being continually developed and our customers get to have a say. I know from feedback that many value this approach. We also recognize it isn’t a one-size-fits-all product. We see ourselves as offering a service much more bespoke than a fresh out-the-box solution to client onboarding. Communication is key. Be transparent about where your product is today. I can’t stress how important it is to manage expectations. It’s a balancing act between under-promising and overdelivering equally with ensuring that the customers see the road mapped vision and value to full potential.

Amongst our current customers, there is a sense of community and an equal desire from them to want us to be a success. It feels like a very unique and blessed position to be in. We hope that this ethos continues as we scale.

Looking back, another of the biggest lessons has been to understand your customers well. In previous years, we would get excited and build features without even speaking with customers. I wouldn’t suggest that!

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We are beginning to generate revenue. We still consider ourselves a seedling on our growth mission, but it’s happening - slow and steady.

By the end of May, we will have 15 active customers all using Binderr to onboard their clients. It’s super rewarding to see businesses using the software, being more efficient, growing their businesses all while staying compliant. This is only the beginning for us.

We are a team of 20 with 12 in development and product, the rest are commercial and operations. Most customers today are from Malta, but we have a pipeline that includes firms in the UK and UAE.

By the end of this year, we anticipate €1.5m annualized ARR with a goal to get to €5m by the end of 2025.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

One crucial thing is establishing the right team, ensuring that everyone is on the same wavelength. We hire people who are smart, hungry and humble. When we hire, we give new hires a stake in the business as an incentive. If the business does well, we all do well. It’s not a hierarchical structure, but one of community and collaboration.

When I say wavelength, that doesn’t mean that the minds we hire are all the same. We have brilliant analytical experts, developers and quality assurance experts, but we have a balance of excellent communicators and business development experts. Everyone is so different, yet so similar. Does that make sense? The way we look at it is, if your flight was delayed by say 8 hours in the airport, would you want to be stuck with each other?

And, I would love to be stuck with any of my team in an airport for 8 hours. There are always ideas bouncing around and thought-provoking conversations.

Helpful habits that we have picked up is ensuring that all the team are aware of how each team is evolving. We have meetings once a month, which are hosted by myself and my Co-Founders where we update the team on everything on a broader level.

For example, new hires, upcoming events, new feature releases, client successes or client queries. I envisage that as we scale these meetings will continue, possibly on a regional level, but that minutes will be circulated. Actually when I say minutes, I don’t mean minutes.

Another great habit is recording meetings. All our meetings are recorded and are available for viewing across the company. We want to have an inclusive and transparent team, regardless of the department you are in.

In terms of luck, right now governments across various jurisdictions are clamping down on money laundering. It seems to be everywhere you look, which is almost like free marketing for us.

Examples

I guess we are at the right place, right time and I feel very lucky to be able to help so many firms and bring them peace of mind when it comes to mitigating their compliance risks.

Don't fail due to running out of resources, whether it be financial, mental, or emotional. It's important to manage your resources and ensure you have enough runway to sustain your business through the ups and downs.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

What platforms and tools don’t we use? When we onboard new starters, I think they are surprised by the tech stack we have!

I’ll highlight a few of my favorites: G-Suite is easy to navigate and links well for our Google Analytics to assess metrics. Slack for our internal communication - there are so many API integrations with Slack too that simplify day-to-day.

I mentioned earlier that we record all our meetings. This is done through a software called Chorus AI. It’s a software, which incorporates AI and enhanced analytics to improve how we conduct meetings. For example, it monitors how many engaging questions have been asked and who asked them, it tells you how many filler words you use per sentence, how quickly you speak, it gives you your talk-to-listen ratio and notes if/when you interrupt other people.

It’s brilliant from a personal development point of view as all our staff have access to it and can self-evaluate their performance in meetings. As well as all this, it provides a clear bullet-point breakdown of everything that was discussed and summarizes the next steps, which is helpful when we are following up with customers.

We are using Hubspot as our CRM, particularly in marketing and sales to track the performance of ads as well as progress on active deals.

Notion has also been a welcome addition for us to stay organized and on top of tasks. The tech teams prefer ClickUp. Our design guys use Figma and Canva, mostly Figma for designing the product. I mean the list is endless.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?.

The first book that inspired me to go on a learning journey was The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. A book I found in my father's drawer.

Some of my favorite books include, “How to Win Friends & Influence People” and "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" by Dale Carnegie. I also enjoyed reading, "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" which is a collection of wisdom from entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant. I am a huge fan of anything Stoicism, particularly Ryan Holiday’s, “The Daily Stoic” and his podcasts always leave me pondering too!

A couple of other podcasts I would also recommend are, "Guy Raz: How I Built This" where he interviews successful entrepreneurs to uncover stories behind their successes. Another good one is, "The Twenty Minute VC" (20VC), a podcast hosted by Harry Stebbings.

These are just a few examples of books and podcasts that have molded my outlook both personally and professionally. I’m driven by curiosity to learn new things all the time!

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

My advice is, "Just don't die" – meaning, don't fail due to running out of resources, whether it be financial, mental, or emotional. It's important to manage your resources and ensure you have enough runway to sustain your business through the ups and downs.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

No, not specifically. However, if you believe you can add value to Binderr, I'd love to chat. Please reach out to me or a member of our team, our details can be found on the links below.