34
42 Comments

5,000 paying customers!

We now have 5,000 paying customers of systeme.io
It's great considering that we passed 2,000 customers in September of 2019
It means a 150% growth in 10 months
I now manage a team of 24 persons in 6 different countries, all remote
We are gonna do $3M in revenue this year, my goal for 2021 is to do $5M (+66%)
Let's keep rocking!

  1. 3

    Wow! 1.8M visits every month (https://www.similarweb.com/website/systeme.io/) How have you managed to reach that number? what is the biggest source of your traffic? Go on share some of that secret sauce for traffic/customer acquisition🤯

    1. 1

      Looks like French traffic is still a dominant source of referrals according to SimilarWeb.
      Any plans to expand to Asian contries such as South Korean and Japan?
      How do you power your website multilingual switcher? Self-coded solution? Tried ConveyThis before?

    2. 1

      This is not true. Looks like they take into account all traffic going to our users pages (they can use a subdomain of systeme.io for their own pages)

      1. 1

        That right there is secret sauce... traffic to the sub domain. Think linktree on Instagram.

        1. 2

          hmm what do you mean? The traffic to our users pages doesn't benefit to us

  2. 3

    Very inspired by the focus of all your marketing and messaging. I literally don’t understand what it’s about but it seems to strike a nerve with your audience very strongly. Great job!

    1. 0

      Thank you for your feedback
      Our new home page says:
      "Sales funnels. Email marketing. Online courses.
      Affiliate program management. Marketing automations"
      Doesn't it explain what our tool does?

      1. 1

        It doesn't show how it does it. Amazed that people sign up without that.

      2. 1

        I don't see any of that. Maybe because I'm in France and get a specific landing page.

        1. 1

          Please change the language to English and you'll get to the home page in English that does a better job at explaining our features
          (we just got a new design and we'll update the home page in French soon)

          1. 1

            Thanks I did. Looks good 👍

  3. 2

    Congratulations! What’s your one piece of advice that is key to this success?

    1. 1

      Honestly it's just impossible to summarize this success to one piece of advice
      I would recommend you to listen to this interview to learn the whole story:
      https://mixergy.com/interviews/systeme-io-with-aurelien-amacker/
      That being said, if I had to recap the main milestones it would be:

      • don't be afraid to dream big
      • find the right developers
      • create a great product
      • create a great offer
      • build your audience
      • build a successful affiliate program
  4. 1

    Out of 19 sales funnels: blogger outreach, SEM, SEO, affiliate, PR stunts, direct sales - just to name a few, which one was the most effective in moving the needle of attracting paid users?
    My understanding is in order to attract 5,000 paid users, you need to attract 500,000 free users signing up for a free trial (100 to 1 ratio). Which marketing source did you successfully tap into in order to bring them?
    In the beginning, press coverage at small niche blogs could yield some sign ups. I get that. That's Phase 1. However, at 5,000 paid users, you're at Phase 3 - the scaling process. Thus, you've already found another effective source of traffic. Affiliate? If yes, would you share any suggestions?

    1. 1

      70% of our sales come from our affiliates

      1. 1

        You pay 40% to your affiliates for lifetime. How do you think to sustain that in the long term?
        Can you elaborate on the team structure to bring in new affiliates? Who does the outreach. How is it structured? You coordinate that?

        1. 1

          I think that the more value we deliver to our affiliates, the more they promote us, so there is no plan to lower affiliate commissions
          In the French market (where we have most of our affiliates) we don't do outreach (it's a self-serve affiliate program). It's all by communicating on our email list and on our Facebook group
          In the English market we have a person doing outreach because we launched more recently and it's more competitive

          1. 1

            I tried to do self-served affiliate programs before, but failed. If you build it, they won't come. You still need to market it.
            Thus, the question, how is your program marketed in order to become so successful? Is it #1 SEO optimized to be #1 on French Google? Is it endorsed by a French president on Twitter? How did you achieve that?

            1. 1

              Indeed if you just build it they won't come. Like any marketing channel it takes time and effort to succeed.
              The key is to get your affiliates to make money, and then they keep promoting you and they tell their friends about it (we have a second tiers, which means that our affiliates are incentivized to promote our affiliate program as well)

              1. 1

                How do you combat fraud?

  5. 1

    First time I’ve logged in for a year - just to say congratulations, well done!

  6. 1

    Great news! Congratulations!

  7. 1

    Congratulations.

    What's the most used feature by the 5,000 customers?

    I know your customers are using all of the features but among all, one feature must be leading the others?

    Sales funnels or Email marketing or Online courses or
    Affiliate program management or Marketing automation?

    1. 1

      Good question! I'd say it's sales funnels, then email marketing

      1. 1

        Thank you for your response.

        How well are people using the online course and e-book selling features?

        I was thinking online course would rank first

        1. 1

          Yes indeed, most of our customers sell online courses or ebooks

  8. 1

    Amazing job. I am going to read all your posts now to see if I can learn something.

  9. 1

    Well done. How did you promote it at the beginning? And how many $$$ you invested?

    1. 3

      The intial investment was around $200k (self funded)
      You can hear the whole story on Mixergy:
      https://mixergy.com/interviews/systeme-io-with-aurelien-amacker/

  10. 1

    Congrats that's really interesting to see, but I found your tool quite hard to use, I have tested it and there's compared to wordpress or any other tool much easier to set up. There need to be easier steps to add stuff and more walkthroughs.

    a bit feedback I hope you don't mind :)

    Anyway again congrats and keep it up!

    1. 1

      I am surprised because the feedback we get all the time is the opposite.

      Just today someone posted this on our FB group:

      "Can I just say after struggling with Kartra for the past couple months, I have taken out the trial with Systemeio and am delighted with it's simplicity so far. Brilliant! "

      https://www.facebook.com/groups/251145835476950/permalink/664307114160818/

      What is the feature that you didn't find easy to use? The sales funnels ? The blog builder ? Another one?

      1. 1

        That's interesting. I've heard about kartra, but i haven't tried it. When you register and login .. you are "alone" have no clue what to click on and what to do.

        Maybe Kartra is even worse, but good example of UI / UX is Thinkfic try to test once you are in.

        You have like green tab, what you've done (green) and grey for other part. Get started 1/4 steps complete.. Launch your new course! The 13 steps below will teach you how to successfully launch your first course.,, and so on.

        ...and on your site you are like BOOM! just click on what ever you need to. Hmmm..

        1. 1

          I think you are confusing UI/UX and onboarding.
          Indeed there is no onboarding in place, but the feedback we keep getting over and over again about systeme.io is "it's very easy to use" and "it's easier to use than your competitors"
          (including Clickfunnels, which is a $120M per year company)
          Yes I know in the future we should add some onboarding but for now we have other priorities (plus if people really need it they can find a ton of resources online: tutorials, Facebook group, customer support, help pages, etc)

  11. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

  12. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

  13. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 3

      Sorry about that. Some of our affiliates are customers, some are people who make money online by promoting products as an affiliate. It takes time to build a successful affiliate program. We launched ours in 2017. The cool thing is that with systeme.io every person on our email list is an affiliate, so once someone is on our list we can send him his affiliate link and entice him to promote our affiliate program.
      If you have more questions just let me know

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 48 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments