Sniply

Sniply is a content marketing platform built around a simple idea: people share links on social media, and those links should be able to generate a return. Its core feature lets users attach a call to action to any link they share. When someone clicks, they read the article and also see the sharer's branding and message, along with a button to take an action.

The company launched about two and a half years before the October 2016 interview, around 2014. Its early pricing experiment was a "name your own price" custom plan form. Michael Chang described it as a first-of-its-kind approach in 2014. The company kept it because it gathers data on requested features and willingness to pay, and it helps capture customers who fall between plans and nonprofits that can't afford the smallest tier. Standard plans run from $39 a month up to around $3,000 a month for enterprise, and the company receives one or two custom requests a week.

The founders also chose to bootstrap from the start. Chang said this gave them the flexibility to pivot as the industry changed, and that the team of four core members, split evenly between design and software engineering, stayed lean.

Sniply spent nothing on customer acquisition outside of founder time. It did not run ads. Instead, it cultivated relationships with bloggers, which Chang classified as earned media. The key driver was evergreen content, with more than 300 blog posts mentioning Sniply. Because many marketers are also bloggers, marketers who liked the tool tended to write about it, and other marketers read those posts. The company's testimonial page reflects this pattern.

The target user was the social media team that curates and schedules content through tools like Hootsuite or Buffer. Customers included companies such as Dropbox, Outbrain, and Autodesk, and brands like IBM, Salesforce, and Greenpeace had used Sniply links, which generated over 150 million clicks.

The main strength was low acquisition cost. Chang estimated new customer growth at about 5% of the roughly 1,000 paying base each month, or 50 to 60 new customers. Monthly churn was also about 5%, which the company wanted to reduce. Chang estimated average revenue per user at $70 to $80, and calculated lifetime value at roughly $700 per paying customer.

Churn was the open problem. The team was focused on fixing it, and it was building a new platform to convert blog posts into short videos using natural language processing, aimed at Facebook reach.

As of October 2016, Sniply had about 130,000 registered users, around 1,000 paying customers, roughly $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and about $600,000 in annual revenue run rate. Chang said the company was still owned by three co-founders at 33% each. He also said they had received an offer of $4 million but would not sell if it meant delaying their video product by two years.