The ClickFunnels Killer? 400,000 People Use THIS… | The Growth Booth #60

Aidan

Today I’ve got a special guest on the call with me. His name is Aurelian Amacker. He has found a very, very interesting tool. And by having a conversation with Aurelian, I'm hoping that we can sort of pull back the curtain a little bit and learn how he's been able to found this tool, which you're going to hear about – it’s called Systeme – in just a moment, and how he's been able to grow that to almost 400,000 users, which I think is just amazing. So, Aurelian, welcome to the call. Great to have you with us.

Aurelian

Hi, Aidan. Thank you for having me.

Aidan

When did you build your first website online?

Aurelian

Yeah, it's a good question. So actually, I started blogging I'd say in 2007 with the free blog. And then in 2009, I got my own domain and set up WordPress 2010. I mean, it's a long story. I met some bloggers who were making a living out of it and I started making money with my blog. I started traveling and I built an audience and I started creating courses to share what I knew about how to make money online. And long story short, I wasn't happy with the existing tools. I've tried pretty much everything and I built my own tool that we launched in 2017. It's called Systeme, with an E at the end of the French spelling. And yeah, people love it. That's what we use, actually. We use our own tools to power our entire business, such as sales funnels, blogs, online courses, affiliate programs, marketing, automation, and we do about $500,000 in revenue per month just with our own Systeme material account. We really eat our own food.

Aidan

Yeah, I love that. And you know what? Thinking back to when I got started, it was a similar time to you. It was 2005, I believe, when I built my first website. I was cobbling this website together with Dreamweaver and using FTP to upload the pages. The website was horrible, and I can remember thinking at the time, “I really suck at this, I'm not good at this. I don't know if I'm going to be able to make any website that ever makes me money.” They did make me money, surprisingly, miraculously. I don't know how because they were so hideous. But comparing what we were doing back then, and I'm sure it was similar in 2007 for you to what you can do now, it's amazing. The difference is just huge. We're in a whole different world now where with the push of a few buttons, you can have a website that's genuinely beautiful and not just a website, but an entire funnel with all the bells and whistles, email marketing, the works. I know that system that you've put together is really an all-in-one tool that allows people to do all of this.

Aurelian

Yeah, it's really funny because the conventional wisdom among marketers is like, “No tool can be good at doing everything,” so you should get the best landing page builder and link it to the best email responder and then use the best online course software. I was like, okay, but what if you could have all the features under just one roof? That would be so much easier to set up. Because I'm sure you've been through this, you have to link all these tools together in such a nightmare and you cannot do what you want. And people thought it would be impossible, and it was hard to build, I'm not going to lie. Like software, it's actually really challenging. But once I had the right team and we started building the product, so we started moving my business over to our own software. That was in 2017 because I was selling courses doing about $30,000 per month in revenue, and then we launched in 2018.

It's crazy because, in theory, it's better to actually pick the tools and link them together. But in reality, and I believe that entrepreneurship is about being pragmatic, it's about reality. It's not about the theory. It is so much better to have one tool that does all the things. Look at the feedback from our users. We're a product-focused company. We're really obsessed with the product. We want to improve it all the time. And you look at the feedback and people say it's very powerful, it's very easy to use, amazing customer support. We have great customer support. Oh, and by the way, it's five to ten times cheaper than the competitors. So it's a product space and we're doing great because we're providing so much more value than our competitors.

Aidan

Yeah, I can see that. And just looking through some of the different things that you can do with your software here, I mean, you've got the ability to manage contacts, send out emails, create sales, funnels, blogs, blog posts, provide courses, take in students, build communities, even store files, set up different types of automation, tags, email campaigns, sales, A/B testing. I'm literally just reading down a list here and the list goes on and on and on, not to mention all the different integrations. I've got quite a large part of my business which is around building software tools, and we've got a few different companies with that now. I've got a permanent team of about 40 full-time developers, and I know how challenging that can be.

And from the outside looking in, it seems simple. “Oh, you could add a simple A/B split-test tool,” that requires a whole level of thought and development to actually roll that out, not to mention the testing and everything else. I'm really interested to hear a little bit about the team that you've got working for you behind the scenes there that make all of this possible and allows you to do the kind of things that you're doing.

Aurelian

Yeah, today we have a team of about 80 people and we're all remote. It's a completely remote company. We have team members in many different countries. The developers, we started with three developers. It's a good number to get started because you can really achieve quite a lot with three really good developers and move fast. Today we have nine developers, but we need to scale big time, so the goal for next year is to double the developer team, which requires changing the way we work. It's quite interesting, but it's needed because as you add more features, you have more features to maintain, and more bugs to fix more technical depth. So, yeah, it's very challenging, but it's exciting. It's literally building from the ground up. A company that serves customers everywhere in the world. It's really cool.

Aidan

Yes, hundreds of thousands of users. It's amazing. Did you say that you've built this with nine developers? You're running it at the moment?

Aurelian

No, we built it with three developers, but today we grew the team to nine developers. But we had three developers for a long time, like 2017, 2018, and 2019, I think we hired the fourth developer maybe in 2020.

Aidan

That's really impressive. When you talk about the team that you've got, in general, 80 people that are helping run this, what are the different roles? If you could sort of, in broad strokes, explain to people, what do these 80 people do? I mean, some of them must be customer support, and some of them might be sales.

Aurelian

Yeah, so we don't have many salespeople. We have only two or three because we sell high-end coaching, but only in the French market. But we sell our software and our courses in many different countries. I mean, we support. Our software is available in English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and German. I'm pretty sure I forgot one. We have team members in each different language. We have quite a few people in customer support, as you can imagine. We provide really good customer support. We answer to our customers on average under 2 hours, seven days a week during working hours.

And surprisingly, we have a lot of people actually migrating customers over to our platform, because if you get our most expensive plan, it's $97 per month, which is called Unlimited because you get unlimited everything, unlimited contacts, unlimited MSN, unlimited hosting, unlimited everything. Our customers get a free migration included. We have a team of about 20 people working full-time, just migrating customers over to our platform.

Aidan

That's really interesting. How have you been able to acquire a lot of your customers and your users with almost 400,000 people using the platform? Has that gone viral and exploded through word of mouth? Has it been through advertising campaigns?

Aurelian

That's a great question because there was nothing viral. I wish there was, but there wasn't. It was constant growth. We've been growing all the time since we launched. So in the beginning, because I was selling online courses, I had a list of about 26,000 people in the French market. That really allowed me to launch the product at the beginning and get the first, I'd say like, 400 customers, I think, which was great. But then it kept growing from there. We also benefited from the COVID crisis because people were stuck in their homes trying to launch an online business. People doing live courses had to do them online. So for us, it was a huge growth. It was a really weird time period. But then we kept growing and then we launched. At first, it was only in the French market, even though the app was available in English. Then it was in English as well. When I say English, I mean all the English-speaking countries.

Aidan

Right.

Aurelian

And so the biggest driver of growth for us, it's always been our affiliate program because we're not good at running ads. We did it, and we are still doing it, but that's something we're really not great at. So we have an affiliate program where we pay 50% affiliate commissions and lifetime commissions, and we have a lot of affiliates promoting our tool.

Aidan

That's fantastic. I really love what you've done there and am super impressed by it. A couple of other questions, I imagine that with such a user base, and obviously there are a lot of paying users in there, I see you've also got the free plan which allows people to get started. It must be costly to have a lot of free users. Just wondering how you manage that. Or maybe all those costs are easily offset by the paying users. I'm not sure. Just interested to learn about that.

Aurelian

We have 13,500 paying customers at the time, so it brings in about $400,000 in revenue per month. Then we get like $100,000 out of our courses and some coaching that we sell in the French market only. So yeah, the cost of so many users, it's not that much. We have our own email servers. We pay quite some money to Amazon AWS each month.

Aidan

I imagine.

Aurelian

Yeah, but it's totally okay. It's not a huge cost. It's just like we're paying some strategy PayPal fees. That's the cost of running a business. It's not overwhelming.

Aidan

Yeah. Obviously one of the great things that everyone who starts the software business is hoping for is to be able to hit that critical mass where the cost of adding a new customer is almost negligible. So clearly it looks like you've hit that critical mass. One thing that does jump out at me, and obviously there are a lot of different tools out there nowadays which can do bits and pieces of what you do in your platform, maybe they can't do everything, but there are some big-name ones that everyone is familiar with, like ClickFunnels and LeadPages. And again, they don't necessarily do everything that you're saying, but what's been your decision or thought process on pricing? Because I can see that you're a fair bit cheaper than some of the other options out there.

Aurelian

Yeah. When we launched, I wondered about the price. In the French market, you had [Clicks on Earth] that were very popular. That was at $97 per month. And then you had a French copycat of ClickFunnels that was priced at $97 per month. I was like, “Okay, I'm going to make something a lot more affordable so we can help more people.” So we priced our first plan at $27 per month. And yeah, actually I think it was over 15,000 contacts. Then you would pay more than $97 per month as you get more contacts. We changed this about one year ago, and we moved the $97 per month plan to unlimited everything because it was just more simple. So we lose on upselling the existing customers to move them up to higher price plans. But this allows us to be very competitive because someone using ClickFunnels pays $300 a month and having a list of maybe 30,000 people. Using Active Campaign, this person is going to pay close to $1,000 per month. And with us, she's going to be paying only $97 per month, and we have amazing customer support and free migration.

It's funny because, from outside, people think, “Okay, so it's a cheaper alternative to ClickFunnels,” and everybody who's not the customer is going to think that. But if you look at the reviews online, you can go to websites like Captera, we have more reviews than ClickFunnels on Captera. We have like, 640. You look at the reviews, people say, “Hey, it's easier to use, it's faster. It does many things. It's very easy to use great customer support. Oh, and by the way, it's a lot cheaper.” So, I mean, we're a product company. I don't think that our competitors are as obsessed as I am with their products. Like, I'm actually the head of product, the head of marketing, and I'm also the CEO, founder of the company, so I know marketing. I learn about products.

Aidan

It's amazing. We're two from here for Systeme, obviously, you've built an amazing tool. I'm sure you've got ideas about things that you want to add in the future. Anything you can share with us?

Aurelian

Yeah, so we're always trying to add more value to our customers, to our users, something we're working on that I feel really excited about because we have some workflows. You can create some simple automation rules, but you can also create some entire workflows. If a contact is added with this tag, then send him an email, then wait five days. Then if he has purchased this, whatever, so you can do some workflows like this. People always complain about the cost of Zapier, so they try different alternatives. But I would love to be able to offer some basic similar features to Zapier. Of course, we won't be able to integrate with like 4000 or 5000 apps, but if we could integrate with a dozen apps, like the most common ones, Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Zoom, then it would be great. So that's one of the things we're working on right now.

Aidan

Well, that's fantastic. And I'm really inspired by your story, and I think it's just amazing what you've been able to deliver for people. You've built this in remarkably, I think, a short space of time. You've gone from an idea to building something out which is helping hundreds of thousands of people around the world. And man, your software certainly packs some punch. I like what I see.

So if you want to check this out, if you're listening to this and you want to check this out, you can head over to systeme.io. I will also make sure that we include a special link as well, along with wherever you're listening to this show, so you can go and check that out for yourself. We may even be able to include some other different bells and whistles that we are starting to use ourselves with the Systeme as well, such as different templates and bits and pieces. So you'll find out more about that by looking in the show notes, and as always, by getting all the information from the podcast section of TheGrowthBooth.com. So Aurelian, thank you so much for being here with us today and being so open about the journey so far. I'm sure that many of our audience are going to love diving into using Systeme.io.

Aurelian

Thank you very much, Aidan.

Aidan

Thanks. That's a wrap, guys. See you on the next episode of The Growth Booth.