The Exchanges

Q Can you name one of those pieces of content that sort of does really well for you that you run ads to?

A Yeah. Uh, the newest one that we, uh, one of the newer ones, I mean, the big book of funnels, for example, is one of the ones that we have, or the, the, you know, the definitive guide to abandoned car, uh, the segmentation book that we just released. So we're, we're releasing a lot of these very core focus, actionable, uh, books that we're putting out there. And then essentially what it's doing is we're driving leads at about two, three dollars a lead. That's what we're holding up leads at. And then from there, we're getting about one in 10 as a sales qualified lead. And then, uh, naturally we're bringing one in 10 of those people, uh, 10% of those people are actually signing up for a trial to over, over the 30 day period. And then we're naturally converting about eight and a half percent of those people.

AI assessment note: “the big book of funnels, for example, is one of the ones that we have”

Q Okay. And, and over what period of time do you assume they're going to stay with you?

A Um, we are calculating about average, uh, you know, okay. So it's really funny when you say this because we have two sectors, right? I look at my customers in two sectors that the cheaper guys, the ones who are starting the business, the ones that are paying nine or And then everybody else who's paying 49 dollars and above. When they're paying 49 or above right now, the stick rate is like 18 months. It's, it's really heavy. Uh, when they're under there, that's where all my churn rate comes in. It's like three months. So it's, you know what I mean? So it's really, it's really tough, but that's where we're trying to focus on fixing those people that are nine, 19 dollars, which will lower our turn rate effectively, dramatically, because their turn rate is almost non-existent on anyone who has, uh, pays us 49 dollars or more a month.

AI assessment note: “When they're paying 49 or above right now, the stick rate is like 18 months.”

Q uh, where's ARPU? And I said, oh, we don't have an ARPU on the team. There's no ARPU. I mean, I thought ARPU was like a person or something, right? And I, or average revenue per user. So We're learning together. I'm glad you're enjoying it. 23 bucks, the average customer pays you per month. Let's get more of the backstory here. What year did you launch the company in?

A Uh, we started developing the platform in 2013, and we, uh, and we did not take their first customer till January of 2015. Basically from 2013 to 20 15, we were developing it for ourselves, just to have an internal platform, and in 2014, people started to notice what we're using, started asking us questions. What is that? Can we use it? Can we get on there? And we were like, light bulb. Well, let's go ahead and start something. Let's, let's open the doors and see what happens. And, you know, until, uh, August of this year, so just a couple months ago, I actually didn't take it serious. Probably 20% of my time just growing the company and just working on it and having a team that built it and people managing it, and I personally was not heavily involved in the company.

AI assessment note: “we did not take their first customer till January of 2015.”

Q Do you like this model in terms of pricing or would you make any changes?

A You know, it's simple. I, a lot of our, a lot of our competitors will have that model plus a CPM model plus this model, and they'll start adding a lot. And I understand the business side, but we find that customers just get irritated by most of them. Half the times the The customers do come to us. Like when we take, we started recently taking a lot more on the higher end. So like the Oracle Brontos, the, uh, you know, the dot digital's list track type users, that's literally their pain point that they get frustrated about because they paid this huge chunk of money and they have these CPMs and these caps and they end up feeling really limited on that side. And for us, we own our own infrastructure, so we don't care. It doesn't actually cost us more money to send more emails out outside of simple server usage. So we kind of sat back and said, you know what, we're going to be the unlimited guys and just stay on the unlimited side. And we'll obviously don't want to be abusive, but want to also allow customers not to feel that pain point. So we've kept the pricing simple. I think we're going to continue to keep it simple, but it's something that we're still continuing to be talking about.

AI assessment note: “we've kept the pricing simple. I think we're going to continue to keep it simple”

Q A lot of founders don't understand what it means to take debt as a SaaS founder. Can you sort of educate them at a high level, sort of why you did it?

A Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's very simple. There's two things that come into place. One, the timeframe, right? Like going to raise money takes forever. Doing that can take five, seven days, right? That's the number one. And number two is I feel like people take a giveaway equity too easy and too fast. Uh, it's worth a lot more money than the little bit of money that they're giving you today. For the future of the company growth. So for me, I I'd like to hold back only on big milestones and when we really need to. And I think that's where we think about that a little bit more. And I, I look at it as if I have a plan that I can take that money and make more money than I'm paying on interest rate, then it's worthwhile that way. And it's, it's much smarter in that way, because secondarily, you don't have anyone extra telling you what to do with that money, or you don't have people also looking at that money and trying to figure out exactly how you're spending that and to let you kind of Keep control as well, too.

AI assessment note: “One, the timeframe, right?... And number two is I feel like people giveaway equity”

Q there's a lot of sort of revenue based financing options in the space letter. Capital is obviously one of the larger ones, uh, help people understand how much, like how many months he said, three years, 8.5% to nine percent, et cetera. But there's also usually a repayment cap. So if you take 500 K, you got to pay back some multiple of that. Can you explain how that works?

A Yeah, absolutely. It's obviously it's kind of, I mean, It's, it's a, uh, I think for us, it's like a 1.3 per 1.3 X roughly. So essentially over a three year term, we're going to pay 1.3 times more than we take took in as money. Uh, and it's essentially just spread out over that revenue. So the good thing about revenue based financing that I like is if you do have a rough month, because maybe you're heavy on the front end of the front end of the year or the back end of the year with your revenue allows you to kind of float that money a bit. Obviously there's a catch up period. If it, Becomes a problem, but they're basing it off of your current revenues, which makes it, obviously, if you're growing, you should be able to achieve and grow past that really quickly as well, too.

AI assessment note: “I think for us, it's like a 1.3 per 1.3 X roughly.”

Q Monthly. Okay, good. How are you? Okay, so walk me through tactically how you're trying to drive that down.

A Uh, so what we're doing a couple things. We started putting together smarter help centers, smarter, uh, like onboarding systems, uh, making sure our automation is stronger as far as a following, uh, follow up and so forth. And right now we're testing a customer success team right now where we're basically calling customers and talking to them and getting them in the process because we recognize if someone's set up just like a website or anything, if they're set up and they feel like they've got something tangible, they start realizing they knew they want to pay for it. So We're trying to do different things to try to get people more active and engage with it because the type of market, the businesses we, uh, we deal with more of that starter, you know, the solo entrepreneur, the new digital marketer, new affiliate marketer. So, you know, those people turn a lot stronger.

AI assessment note: “We started putting together smarter help centers, smarter, uh, like onboarding systems”

Q Now this is debt. I mean, you have to pay it back, right? So, so to your point, you have to be smart about where you're investing the dollars because you've got to get a return. Help founders understand if they're thinking about taking debt. I mean, what, how are they going to pay it back over what period of time? What's the cost of the capital typically?

A Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, for us, uh, with, uh, with lighter than we worked with them, it's a three-year term, right? It's revenue based. So it's based on your revenue and it's tiered buckets based around your revenue. And it, Depending on how much you're making, they're taking a percentage up to about nine percent or eight and a half percent of that revenue per month. And then coming down from that, obviously, as you hit milestones, but, uh, essentially you just got to plan better and make sure that you're bringing the cash flow in on top of it. And knowing that you have to kind of look at like how much does that money go as far as paying back the debt and when the money needs to be coming back in. So you've got to be looking at the long scope of the picture of your customer. So if you spend 500 grand here, you've got to make sure that you've recovered your 500 grand. And start making money with it down the line as well too. So, you know, we got, you got to have to think longterm, but you also have to have a plan for it.

AI assessment note: “it's a three-year term, right? It's revenue based.”

Q Okay, Jimmy, let's hard, hard turn here. Let's go to product. Send link. What have you released over the past three years?

A Oh man. Uh, a lot. Uh, we released our V three platform, which was the whole hyper focused on e-commerce. Then we started going really deep into e-commerce. So instead of going wide, where a lot of our competitors are, you know, trying to add a lot of little communication platforms and do things, we went really deep into email. Just my love of email and just being an email marketing expert myself, I could see so many use cases to really drive revenue at the deepest level. So, you know, everything we do is very behavioral. Data driven and, uh, allowing to allowing the merchant to be able to make these decisions and kind of drive everyone down a true personalized experience. So, uh, you know, we take like, for example, you integrate to Shopify right now and you get a hundred points of data on the customer instantly. You can live segments it right on our platform and really drive a true behavior based around the information that they've given you location to revenue, to what they purchased, what category down to, you know, if it was shipped or not. I mean, we, we cover all sorts of different points.

AI assessment note: “we released our V three platform, which was the whole hyper focused on e-commerce.”

Q So break that down. The first sales hire, and especially scaling those early SDRs, those early AEs, there is not ease. You have to, you know, put a quota in place and you're kind of guessing early on. How'd you make that first quota guess?

A Let me, let me, I'll back up and tell you a story real quick. My first sales team completely failed. All right. And when I talk about that is I did launch a sales team. I hired people. I thought like I could bring in the big, uh, logo guy and the VP guy and like really scale this team. And he'd go off and he or she would go off and hire their team and we'd get it going. And then, you know, my quota was based around because that first, before I hired that first salesperson, it was all me, right? I was selling everything. So I assume if I could do this, then 50% is what I would assume A quota should be for a salesperson as they're coming to the company. Well, a lot of the processes, a lot of the things were broken through that, and we ended up having a big layoff of the entire sales team in 2019. And we realized, and I realized that, hey, look, we didn't have a good repeatable foundation process in place. And I realized that that was the problem to begin with. So I actually buckled down from September of last year and essentially became the salesperson With one other guy, we repeated the process and nailed down everything from cadences to, uh, how the process works to how do we find people? How do we outreach to people? And we really laid it down over the last, like, 1011 months. And then we, when we got to a good process, we hired another salesperson. I think it meant, uh, March…

AI assessment note: “if I could do this, then 50% is what I would assume A quota”

Q What did you feel was broken where you felt like you had to make that choice? You know, you did an analysis and you said, we have to specialize in a niche. Let's go e-commerce. But, but what was broken that made you do the analysis in the first place?

A I think, I think the top level is very easy to find a customers. Let's just start at the customer level, what we were serving before, like a lot more of the content creator space. It was just a more difficult mark to find. And we found that the size of these customers tended to be much smaller. So you would have to get more velocity. Under your belt in order to do it. And they turned a lot faster because a lot of them were just starting businesses. They're a little bit more, uh, immature as a business as well, too, a lot of times. And, you know, there was mature businesses as well, too, but a lot more on the lower end side of things as well, too. So that's kind of how it all started for us, kind of starting to figure out that our customer side of things weren't, uh, weren't exactly a fit for what we wanted to do for our future.

AI assessment note: “we were serving before, like a lot more of the content creator space”

Q Touch on SEO for a second, because you've got a great domain rank of 71. How have you grown your, your domain authority?

A Yeah. Uh, complete content marketing focus, uh, really high quality content, uh, really focusing on just getting, uh, great content in the world and then kind of have our little content engine where we're, you know, uh, advertising out with all our content, getting more people into it and kind of putting them through our flow and funnel as well too. So one of our biggest strategies that were really changed was instead of going out and trying to advertise the product or advertise the demo, we started advertising content, really high value, good content, actionable. And basically we were able to drive our cost per acquisition down by Almost three X. So we were able to reduce that by really focusing on the content side and letting the content speak for itself.

AI assessment note: “complete content marketing focus, uh, really high quality content”