Crazy Lister

Victor Levitan launched his first e-commerce company and experienced the pain firsthand—selling online was needlessly complicated, especially on platforms like eBay. He realized retailers didn't need to be IT experts to run their businesses; they needed tools that made complexity simple. This insight became the mission for Crazy Lister: make e-commerce selling 100 times easier by liberating retailers from dependency on IT skills.

While Victor registered a company in 2013 with a different product, Crazy Lister specifically launched in 2015. The product focused on the "most broken sales channel" he identified: eBay. Retailers could use Crazy Lister to manage all their eBay operations—creating listings, applying professional templates, optimizing for mobile, and controlling prices and inventory.

When Nathan Latka first interviewed Victor in March 2017, Crazy Lister was doing $300k in annual recurring revenue with about 2,000 customers. The acquisition engine was surprisingly simple: Google AdWords. With a $100 customer acquisition cost on a $33/month plan, Victor achieved a 3-month payback period—extremely healthy economics. The metric Victor obsessed over wasn't CAC-to-LTV ratio, but rather: "During how many months does it take us to return the marketing spend?" He targeted five months maximum, but was hitting three months.

The most important realization came from analyzing churn by customer cohort. Victor discovered that larger businesses (paying $45+/month) churned at less than 2% per month versus 4% overall. This insight drove a strategic decision: go upmarket. Instead of fighting for SMBs, Victor hired three world-class VPs in one month to expand beyond eBay into the broader $8B e-commerce tech space, starting with Amazon. The company reduced gross monthly logo churn to 4%, with lifetime value landing around $1,000 per customer (calculated as $33/month × 25 months, accounting for 4% monthly churn).

By the time of this podcast episode (roughly June 2018), Crazy Lister had grown to $150k in monthly recurring revenue—$1.8M annualized—with 4,600 customers across 150 countries. That represented over 100% year-over-year growth from the $75k MRR of a year prior. Victor had raised $1.2M total, including a $600k convertible note at a $9M cap. He was raising $3M at a $30M pre-money valuation, feeling confident because the unit economics made sense: $100 CAC returned in three months on a $1k customer lifetime value. His team of 20 was distributed globally, with the company based in Israel.