How many customers Stapilo can win, and how we know
How many paying customers Stapilo can win over three years, and what they pay: about $350 a month for the first heavy users, falling to an average of about $128 by year 3 as cheaper entry offers widen the base. It's built bottom-up, from Stapilo's own marketing plan and channel by channel, and checked against the size of the market and how fast comparable companies actually grew.
Model Every input is shown and can be changed below. The three cases (conservative, realistic, ambitious) use the same structure with different inputs.
Part 1
How we count: two points every path leads to
Stapilo will be found through many different doors: a video where Levan simply opens Stapilo and builds a webinar, a free tool like Brainstorm, a single product (only webinars), a masterclass, a course, a guru's recommendation. The doors keep changing, and that's the point. So we don't model each door. That would mean guessing dozens of numbers.
Instead we measure at the two points every door leads to:
This is also what investors check most easily: "this channel brings X accounts, Y% pay, Z% leave each month."
Part 2
The market: how much room there is
Before counting customers, we check the market is big enough that our numbers are a small, believable share of it.
| Layer | Size | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Everyone who could use Stapilo | 3–10 million | Coaches, consultants, course creators, online educators and experts selling knowledge or services online. Our own range, built from several sources: about 123,000 credentialed coaches (ICF 2025) as a floor, 232,000+ coaches in the US alone (Marketdata ⚠), and about 2 million creators earning over $100k a year (Goldman Sachs). |
| Those already paying for tools like Stapilo | 400,000–600,000 | Paying accounts at Kajabi, Thinkific, Teachable, Systeme.io, ClickFunnels, Kartra, Skool, Circle, Mighty, Podia, Stan, LearnWorlds and Kit: about 650,000 together, minus people using several. That's about $0.5–1.1 billion a year spent on this. |
| Stapilo, end of year 3 | 2,625 | The realistic case below: about 0.5% of businesses already paying. |
Upside not counted: HighLevel (about 1 million businesses), Mailchimp (800,000 paying) and Hotmart-style marketplaces would push "already paying" to 1.5–3 million. The market is about half English-speaking. Hotmart and Systeme.io show large markets in other languages too. Details: research/market-size.md
Part 3
How fast comparable companies really grew
Paying customers over the first years, from founders' own figures and company reports. The orange lines are Stapilo's three cases from Part 6.
| Company | How it grew | Pace |
|---|---|---|
| ClickFunnels | Founder Russell Brunson's audience, books, webinars, events, affiliates. He had built the audience for ten years before launch. | 10,000+ paying in year 1 |
| Systeme.io | Founder's audience, then affiliates: 70% of sales came through affiliates. No outside funding. | ~1,500 at 1 yr · ~5,000 at 2.4 · ~8,000 at 3.4 |
| Circle | Word of mouth among creators | ~1,000 at 13 months · ~4,000 at ~2 yrs |
| HighLevel | Coaches recommending it to their students; agencies reselling it | ~1,000 at ~2 yrs ⚠ · 70,000+ agencies at ~8 yrs |
| Kit (ConvertKit) | Demos, moving customers from other tools, affiliates, webinars. A slow start. | ~1,000 at ~2.5 yrs ⚠ |
| Thinkific | Content and a free plan, no founder-led selling | ~10,000 at ~7 yrs |
| Kajabi | Partners, brand | ~56,000 at ~11 yrs |
Details and sources: research/growth-and-funnels.md
Part 4
Why this founder can run this plan
26 years in marketing
Levan Bakhia founded the advertising agency Sarke in 1998. It grew into Sarke Group (Studio, Idea, Consulting, Research, Outdoor, PR), described in 2007 business press as the market leader in its country's advertising industry, with banks and major brands as clients.
A working coach who learned this market
For about six years Levan has run a coaching business on webinars, funnels and courses. He learned this market's specific marketing in practice, and he's a strong teacher. He's also the person who built Stapilo, so he can show it, not just talk about it.
Part 5
The five channels
Each channel below shows what it is, why it works, what drives its numbers, and how many new Stapilo accounts per month it brings in each case. Underneath every channel is the same principle: every video, episode and ad carries a door into Stapilo, but there's no single fixed ladder. A door can be a demo with no offer at all, a free tool, a single product, a free or paid masterclass, a course, or a group to join.
All channels together
New accounts per month from each channel, realistic case. Each channel grows at its own pace: paid ads start first, content and partners compound later.
Part 6
From accounts to paying customers
Two rates turn accounts into paying customers, and both come from research:
| Rate | What the research says | Conservative | Realistic | Ambitious |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accounts that become paying | A trial without a card turns 18% into paying (First Page Sage, 2025). A free plan converts 3–5% ("good") to 6–8% ("great"). Many of Stapilo's accounts arrive warm, from a webinar, a demo or a guru's recommendation, so a blend sits between the two. | 8% | 12% | 15% |
| Leaving per month, first 3 months | Most customers who leave do it early. Small SaaS companies lose about 6.5% a month at the start (ChartMogul). Systeme.io lost about 8%. | 12% | 10% | 10% |
| Leaving per month, after that | It settles near 3.7% as companies grow (ChartMogul). Stapilo's AI agent gets a business live fast, which attacks the early drop. | 6% | 4.5% | 4% |
What each customer pays over time
The first customers are the heaviest users: businesses that run everything on Stapilo (webinars, courses, campaigns, the AI inbox). The six businesses paying today average about $369 a month. Early marketing targets exactly these businesses, so new customers in the first months are modelled at $350. As Stapilo grows, simpler and cheaper entry offers (a single product such as only booking, only the support bot, or webinars plus CRM) widen the base through the list and retargeting. So the price a new customer pays falls steadily, to about $60 by year 3, a mix of single products and small packages. Early customers keep paying what they chose, so the average falls more slowly: to about $128 by year 3. That's close to the long-run average the price research supports (about $110, see the research), and below what Kajabi and Thinkific earn per customer.
The model
The case buttons set all three to that case's values. Move any slider to see its effect.
Part 7
Checks, and what has to be true
The realistic year 3 is about half a percent of the businesses that already pay for such tools. It doesn't need to win the market, only a small slice of it.
The realistic case grows more slowly than Systeme.io and Circle did, because Stapilo costs more. That makes it a conservative reading of what founder-led companies in this market have done.
What has to be true for the realistic case
- Partners sign on in year 1. 3–5 guru partners actively recommending Stapilo is the difference between conservative and realistic. That's the biggest single driver measured in this market (Systeme.io's 70%).
- The content runs for a full year at the planned pace: about five long videos and about 25 shorts a week. YouTube compounds slowly, so year 1 can't rest on it alone.
- An affiliate program exists. Stapilo doesn't have one yet; it's on the build list and part of the use of funds.
- Customers get live quickly, so fewer leave in the first three months. That's what the AI agent is for.
Risks we state openly
- Most YouTube channels grow slowly: only about 8% ever reach 10,000 subscribers (vidIQ, 2026). The plan treats content as compounding, not instant.
- Paid ads cost about $28 per lead on Meta. As a main channel, a customer would cost roughly $1,400. Here they're used to fill Stapilo's own webinars and masterclasses, whose course sales can pay for the ads.
- The local-payment countries channel is narrower than "coaches can't get paid at all": Skool and Gumroad pay out in most of these countries. Stapilo's edge there is being a full platform that takes local buyers' payment methods. Most local processors also only onboard registered businesses. Its numbers stay small for that reason. Details: research/non-stripe-markets.md