The Exchanges

Q Ok, so what happened there? Why do a relaunch?

A Uh, it was more about kind of re re adjusting what our model and what our plan was going to be. We started the business in 2014 basically just like a website builder software and moved that and kind of sold that for a little bit and then start to build up a platform aspect of our business after having some of our clients tell us, Hey, this is what we're really looking for from a platform. Uh, you know, we want all these tools. We want integration. We want something that can facilitate these kind of, you know, Communications back and forth between the tools. So we started building it out. Um, based on that, we kind of relaunched in, I was like early 2018 actually with an actual platform with all these different tools.

AI assessment note: “after having some of our clients tell us, Hey, this is what we're really looking for”

Q And why raise, I mean, you mentioned your thing about raising right now. Why raise right now?

A Uh, because we want to start scaling up. So we've started to launch a lot of larger scale marketing agencies, uh, media companies that are reselling our platform white labeled, which has been great. Uh, some franchises that we're starting to get into and we're starting to build out pretty quickly and it's time for us to continue to ramp that up. We've got, um, some Some new ad campaigns that we want to run that we know are going to be successful based on some of the stuff that our, uh, our resellers have done. We've been able to kind of look at that information. And so it's time for us to take that next step and throw some, some gas on that fire.

AI assessment note: “because we want to start scaling up. So we've started to launch”

Q Got it. That's what you mean by 64% margin. And so what are your, what are your biggest costs right now?

A Um, I would say right now it probably supports is a big one for us because we do have a lot of tools on the platform, right? So we have right now eight tools that are integrated with another four coming in the next two months, uh, which Obviously allows for us to have a lot that we can actually offer to our clients, but it's, it's a lot for us to try to support as well. So I think that's probably our biggest expense when it comes to actually, uh, dealing with these tools. The nice thing about how we operate is our engineering costs are actually very low because we have the supports, the engineering backend of all of our partners. We, they have great technologies integrated us. We can focus our engineering resources on like the connections, the automation, Uh, you know, the, the, the ways these tools work together in a much more seamless way.

AI assessment note: “I would say right now it probably supports is a big one for us”

Q Oh, San Fran and Phoenix. Very good. And give me more of the backstory here. What year did you launch the company in?

A Yeah, we launched it officially in 2015. Um, at that point we were just a, like a website builder. So it was just a, uh, a simple, easy to use website system. Uh, we started selling that to a few franchise businesses and they started coming to us saying, Hey, and I always kind of planned this to kind of grow into a more robust kind of a platform of different tools. I thought we were going to build it internally. Um, they started coming to us saying, Hey, I need an email marketing system. We need a social media system. Your guys' system is easy. Can you give us a good place to go for this? And that's where we started to think, okay, we're referring these businesses to all these business. Maybe there's a way we can actually create a different platform for this. Um, another reason we kind of built something like this is because From my time in marketing, uh, as an agency, we realized a lot of these companies are spending just a ton of money on tools that were really not so built out, not so well done. Um, and I figured we could do it a lot better and a lot more at scale with technology, utilizing the technology that's out there and kind of bringing it all together.

AI assessment note: “we launched it officially in 2015. Um, at that point we were just a”

Q How many people are on the team today?

A Yeah, we only have six right now. So we're able to run very lean as an organization, uh, which has been great, uh, because we have kind of the backing and support of all of our different partnerships and all of our different technologies into the platform. We can rely on their support teams. You can rely on their marketing collateral that they give to us, all that kind of stuff. So we can run very lean, um, which has allowed us to run, uh, a pretty low staff. Now we'll, we'll be ramping up that staff a little bit as we move into this next round of funding. Uh, but we feel we can continue to run pretty lean, uh, as we move.

AI assessment note: “we only have six right now”

Q How do you think about that though? Because most of these marketing agencies are the ones paying, correct? Not the small businesses they serve?

A Sure. Yeah. So we work with a lot of direct small businesses as well. So in franchise businesses, we're directly going after those, those single markets. We work with a lot of marketing agencies as well. We think of the agency as the client in that kind of a, in that kind of a, a system, right? We count each one of their clients as a single business within our platform. Uh, it's a good way for us to kind of average out what, um, our per actual small business revenue is, but then we look at different agencies and agencies just, there's the, the realm is so huge. We have agencies that have 20 clients. We have agencies that have a thousand clients, right? So it's really kind of all, all in between everywhere you can be.

AI assessment note: “We think of the agency as the client in that kind of a, in that kind of a, a system”

Q Why would you go cannibalize what your current reps are doing? Your, your, your affiliates are essentially doing, uh, they're doing that for you for free. You're paying them a kickback and, and then now you're going to take money, get diluted and then go copy their strategies and undercut them.

A Well, that's, I mean, there, there's money that we can make that's going to be higher revenue. Uh, if we go direct to clients, then, then from some of our partners, we give some, um, some discount programs and everything there, but also we want to get into more agencies. We want to get into more media companies as well. And there's some great advertising we want to do to be able to get into that market a little bit more. Um, also there's some conventions and conferences that we want to get into over this next year to really get us Into that market a whole lot heavier. I mean, there's a 120,000 marketing agencies in the US, right? And we need to be able to get in front of a whole lot, a lot more of them.

AI assessment note: “there's money that we can make that's going to be higher revenue.”

Q percent gross logo churn per month. So I haven't heard you say anything where I'm like, oh, that's genius. That's why his is so low. I mean, why have, have you been able to get it so, so low? I mean, small businesses go out of business, right? Which you have no control over, which usually puts churn at at least two percent per month. Why is yours so low?

A Yeah, I think one of the big things for us is again, a lot of our clients come from actually like marketing agencies or they're coming from, uh, from consultancies that have built those relationships over a number of years. So that's, that's really helping kind of protect us and hedge us from a lot of that churn. But I think a lot of it too, is just the, the, the, even the direct clients, they come in and, and our tools are helping them grow. Our tools are actually helping them where we're seeing, you know, because they're actually using technology in a way they should be, and they're being more effective and productive with their, their means. We're seeing their revenue start to increase. We're seeing their, uh, their Clicks to their, to their website start to go up. We're actually just seeing productivity that they're really enjoying. Uh, not only that, but again, when you have a customer that is purchasing now four or five tools on a platform, it's not something that they're just going to kind of throw off pretty fast. So we're not.

AI assessment note: “clients come from actually like marketing agencies or they're coming from, uh, from consultancies”

Q Got it. Yeah. And then give me a general sense though of what each of these customers are paying you per month and, and are they activating one tool or two, you know, all eight or what?

A Yeah, that's kind of the great thing about the platform is a lot of our clients will start with one, two, maybe three tools, and they realize the simplicity of it. They realize the ease of, you know, automation between these tools, and typically they're upselling themselves up to four, five, six tools within, you know, three to four months time. So it grows pretty quickly for us. Uh, we can scale it up and they're asking us for new tools. So that's kind of the great thing about this is we really built our system. Based on what our clients are actually asking us what they want in the platform, which has been great for kind of how we grow our business.

AI assessment note: “start with one, two, maybe three tools, and they realize the simplicity of it”