The Exchanges

Q Interesting. So when I, so when I put Convertree into Ahrefs to look more about, like, your SEO strategy, I mean, you're ranking for pretty high, the first position for keywords like webinar, JEO, uh, and WP commission machine. Uh, was this intentional or those accidental rankings?

A Uh, so, uh, those rankings are Uh, you'll probably notice it's not us ranking for it. It's like a Convertory subdomain. So it'd be like webinargeo.convertory.com. And, uh, so Convertory, uh, Convertory just gets tons of link juice from the fact that by default, we have a powered by badge, which is easy to turn off. But if you don't turn it off, every page published on Convertory has that link to our homepage, um, or the affiliates link link to our homepage. And then we seem to pick up, uh, like, The SEO theory, right, is that subdomains don't get any benefit from that main domain. That doesn't entirely seem to be true in our case, because we've got, we get those rankings for people to just register like productname.convertory.com. We've seen that outrank their, their own domain some of the time.

AI assessment note: “you'll probably notice it's not us ranking for it. It's like a Convertory subdomain.”

Q Then why is it, uh, why would it be lower today than, than it was a year ago if more affiliates are driving more sales?

A Uh, so, uh, two reasons for that. One, we get more like percentage wise, we get more word of mouth, like non affiliates, just like, Hey, I love this software. You should go and use it, but it's not an affiliate link referral. Um, we don't know why people do that. There is an affiliate link, like right there in their account. All they've got to do is copy and paste it, but they still love us enough to refer us anyway. And the other one is that we've got more resellers rather than affiliates, which is a slightly different model. So with an affiliate, uh, let's say you're my affiliates. You send someone to me. I, I collect the money and I pay you a commission for life.

AI assessment note: “two reasons for that. One, we get more like percentage wise, we get more word of mouth”

Q Interesting. Yeah. So when I, so when I look at your domain rank, it's really high. 79 on Ahrefs. Part of that strategy is you have almost a million backlinks. You would credit most of those backlinks to your powered by badge when people install you. Is that accurate?

A Um, I would say, uh, that and the affiliate stuff. So the affiliate link, like, goes to the homepage. Google's, you know, well-renowned for as long as, as long as it's not a scammy affiliate, um, program. Like, they do follow those links, um, and so we've got a lot of people out there sharing their, their affiliate link. That definitely adds to it, but I'm pretty sure the bulk of it is that powered by badge doing its thing. Which, again, flies in the face of so much like conventional SEO theory, because it's all on the same IP address, well, the same handful of IP addresses in our data centers, um, every single one of those pages, but Google seems to love it.

AI assessment note: “I'm pretty sure the bulk of it is that powered by badge doing its thing.”

Q Well, guys, there you have it. There's a bunch of you listening right now. I think your inbox might blow up. So we'll see what happens, Andy. Uh, let's keep going forward here. The churn, do people stick?

A Uh, yeah, in fact, we applied your, um, you know, same, same thing as I thought about with the page importer from earlier. Last time we were on the call, you were like, dude, just segment your churn. And I was like, what? And you're like, okay, let me teach you things. So yeah, we segmented our churn. There's this really interesting thing where at the three month mark, it's after people have been on for three months, they stick super, super well. And up to the three month mark, they're basically paying us to extend their trial. Um, what is what we've discovered? So we, we look at that churn post the three month mark, and it's low, low percent, low single digits.

AI assessment note: “after people have been on for three months, they stick super, super well”

Q Where did most of the growth come from? Is it still the affiliate model?

A Uh, honestly, it's even more than before. It's now word of mouth. Like we, we still like paid traffic never seems to quite take, but people love it. They keep talking about it. Um, we've got like the reseller deals are ramping up really well. Um, Clickbank are now pushing us like in their membership area, which is really exciting. Uh, that's the big source of new accounts. Um, we got really helped out by, uh, Ryan Levasque did a big thing about his ask model and like bigged up Quiz software. We sell a one time fee piece of software called Quizzitry, which is like lead gen into Convertry. We sell like Quizzitry, low price front end, 67 dollars one time. And then people buy that and we introduce them to Convertry on the back end of that.

AI assessment note: “It's now word of mouth... Clickbank are now pushing us”

Q To juice the earning earnings per click is really what they measure, right?

A Absolutely. So what we do is we do a 12 month package for, uh, two nine seven, and that doesn't recur automatically, which lets the affiliate say, you know, say it's a one time price. You know, they still advertise that it's 12 months, but It sells to the kind of customer that's just super nervous about like, they probably bought a lot of these tools, got dinged a year later. So they're really nervous about committing to things that ought to recur. And then over time we work on getting them upgraded onto the, uh, like recurring plans that we have, which we do, we do pretty well on. So about 40% of people, uh, no, whoa, sorry. 40% of people that take the two nine seven thing, just get onto the two nine seven thing a year later. But that's of people that didn't upgrade in the meantime to one of our other recurring plans, which is something like 40% of those people take it.

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. So what we do is we do a 12 month package”

Q So churn is in the double digits and like how high, like 10% or 20% or what?

A Uh, but I, I think about 15, but it's, uh, it's one thing we're finding it quite hard to like zero in on and like exactly what to count. Cause for example, we get quite a few people who, even though it was two and a half years ago, they seem to like, they take the trial, they get billed for a month and then they email us and are like, well, you know, I see it's 69 dollars a month now, but two and a half years ago, you offered it for two nine, seven, Like one time for life. If you give me that deal, I'll stay on. And it's like, well, no. And then they churn, but like they still show up in the stats. So I'm trying to work out a model that's sort of more accurately reflects what's like as if they didn't happen. So it costs me more to acquire the users I have, but I just ignore. It's not like those guys churned out cause they didn't really sign up. If that makes sense.

AI assessment note: “I think about 15, but it's, uh, it's one thing we're finding”

Q I love that. That's the way to do it. Are you reinvesting everything or how much cash would you consider profit?

A Uh, so, so we keep, uh, we've got really lucky in that regard. Actually, um, my business partner and I, uh, have like, we don't, we take an okay salary. Like we don't cash out loads. We have Fair, like frugal for London lifestyles, like that stuff's still expensive, right? Um, Uh, but we've, we've left a lot of money in the company. So at the moment where everyone else is kind of a bit overstretched and like taken maybe a bit too much VC capital, which is fine if you're getting to your next round, but with the world going to hell, it's all, all a bit scary. We're bootstrapped. We've got a big war chest, um, where we match our, like the money we spend on servers, people, infrastructure, ads, like anything that I'm paying Every month, we try to keep that roughly matched against the amount we have coming in every month. And then there's plenty of one time money out of those deals and everything else that Neil and I take some of.

AI assessment note: “we've left a lot of money in the company. So at the moment”

Q Let's down video videos for a second. So how did you get that deal and how do you compensate them for that?

A Uh, so we got the deal through God. Ages and ages and ages ago, before I even started working on Convertory, uh, a mate of mine called Zed Shah, um, who's one of, like, the original, like, white boy Londoners, like, knows everyone, was like, hey Andy, I'm meeting up with these guys called Jamie and David, um, in London, you should come out, have a beer, and I, I never say no to that kind of invite, so, like, showed up, had a beer, met those guys, they seemed really cool, like, they were doing great stuff, this was before they started videos, before I started Convertory, um, Uh, we got on really well. Like we kind of collaborated a bit there. Uh, like I helped them out with some tech problems. They helped me out with some marketing problems. We stayed in touch and then fast forward over time. Like this was probably about three years later as we were doing the original Convertory launch videos had been launched a year before that. And it was just such excellent synergy. That was where they like really started getting behind the product. So I think they've done four, four like really big promos. Uh, and they've sold over half a million dollars worth of product in that time.

AI assessment note: “a mate of mine called Zed Shah... was like, hey Andy, I'm meeting up with these guys”