Student Developers Bootstrapping with a Paycheck, Then Growing to a Million Users: Ben Spring, CEO of TryHackMe (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was happening with the business? Were the conversation rates increasing? Was the number of users increasing and how?

Ben Spring: It was completely organic. We were incredibly lucky. It was just word-of-mouth. We really tried to make a great user experience and understand the user’s problem. At the time, I was constantly iterating on the product and speaking to users. The conversion was still fairly low. I was going into my old job and I just couldn’t stop thinking about TryHackMe. I’d go out on my lunch and I’d be writing emails and doing stuff on the side. I took the jump to leave.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of the course content, were you delivering all of those courses?

Ben Spring: We were lucky to have a huge community behind us. As TryHackMe grew, people were uploading their own material independently. We also had one person making content full-time. Then Ashu and I were also making content.

Sramana Mitra: There was community-generated content as well.

Ben Spring: Yes, it was difficult to vet. We ran into problems in ensuring they were QA’d.

Sramana Mitra: How much were people paying?

Ben Spring: It’s $10 a month if you’re not a student and $8 if you’re a student.

Sramana Mitra: What was the next inflection point in the business where things change somewhat?

Ben Spring: It’s difficult to identify the inflection point, because we were snowballing and getting more and more users. We decided to grow different parts of the business. We hired based on what would deliver the most value. We figured we needed more content, so we hired content engineers to make this great training content. In terms of return on investment, that was relatively quick. More people would see new content and they would continue to subscribe. Lifetime value and conversion would increase.

Sramana Mitra: This is 2019?

Ben Spring: It must have been towards the end of 2019.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do revenue-wise?

Ben Spring: I can’t remember. It was probably below $150,000. In 2020 to 2021, we hit our first million. The next year, we grew 2x. Then this year, we’re growing 3x.

Sramana Mitra: You added more content. Organic was just going. What else did you do to improve the metrics?

Ben Spring: We ran a couple of events. They were community events. Every single day, someone could come on the platform and solve a Christmas challenge. On the first one, we had 30,000 users. More people came on to the platform and did these challenges despite TryHackMe taking a significant loss in running this event. Post-event, we saw a large number of them convert.

Sramana Mitra: 2020 was when subscribers kept coming and that’s what got you to a million in revenue.

Ben Spring: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2021?

Ben Spring: More of running experiments and making sure that we can increase our retention, conversation, and activation. We brought more people into the business. In the last 17 months, we were just a handful of people. We are now at 35.

By the end of the year, we’ll be around 60. We’ve scaled especially over the last couple of years. In terms of what we’ve done, it was just expanding our content portfolio and ensuring that user onboarding and activation are aligned to the people that are signing up. For the complete beginner, the onboarding is very different from someone who’s really experienced.

Something that has helped us scale this year is we opened up B2B. Because a huge portion of users is championing TryHackMe, they’re now going to their businesses and saying, “TryHackMe has got this enterprise package. We should get our whole team signed up.” We’ve got this management dashboard and an enterprise plan which is helping us get additional revenue by catering to businesses and schools.

Sramana Mitra: This started in 2021?

Ben Spring: 2021.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Student Developers Bootstrapping with a Paycheck, Then Growing to a Million Users: Ben Spring, CEO of TryHackMe
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