Klean Leads revenue, CEO Daniel Fazio, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

hey folks my guest it is daniel fazio he's built an instagram agency by sending cold emails and then transitioned into an agency that sent cold emails for other people made a cold email course and then made software apps for those who bought the course and other cold emailers daniel you're ready to take us to the top yeah man i got you all right so the software tool that you've built inside of this smart distribution system is called clean leads with a k clean leads.com help us understand if people pay you that sas fee what are they getting so what happens with clean leads is a whole bunch of tools and the most important one is a chrome extension that lets you scrape emails from any kind of linkedin search it works on normal linkedin works on sales navigator so any any of that that's really the main tool of it there's another tool that's extremely useful in that you can take a list of domains and select particular job titles that you want to scrape emails from so you have like a thousand domains that you want to find the direct decision makers of plug that in choose the exact strings of the job titles you want founder ceo owner sped it out click it in and then bam there you go like just spits out the whole csv how have you set up sort of a server and true infrastructure be able to scrape linkedin in this way without setting off their internal red flags so clean leads is a white label and then contact ecom is pre-built like not pre-built we made content we made contact ecom and then we're also coming out with a mailing app and we're making that ourselves too okay to answer the question my question is how are you pulling leads and information off linkedin without setting off linkedin i mean they they probably talk about they don't want people doing this so when people are doing it great if you figure out a good way to do it wonderful but how are you doing it i have no control of the infrastructure of cleanliness i have no idea how it does it's a straight white label oh got it you bought someone else's software and you've white label it yup exactly oh i see got it got it who are you white labeling tell sass sales.com tell us sell it s-e-l-l-s-a-a-s sell sas.com got it so this is yeah i've heard of these guys this is basically they will if you don't if you're a great marketer and you love this ass business model but don't want an engineering team they'll give you a tool to go sell and that's what you're doing yeah but the only problem that is your sale value is going to be a lot lower way lower yeah because you don't but you could if you get enough you know commission revenue take eventually invest and just create your own replica to to this right you've sort of de-risked launching a sas company so let's talk about what i think you're probably really good at which is distribution how did you get your first 10 customers on clean leads yeah so this was super easy because i built this twitter account with 34 000 followers and i had a course but what was happening was i was referring people out to other software apps that i didn't own so i was like why am i doing this i could just make these assets myself so i've been going down the line you need to scrape emails different kinds of niches to scrape emails you need to send emails it's just going down the line and picking up every single function of the entire cold email system when did you launch when did you get your first paying customer on clean leads that was in december we got it so just it's you know 2020 but you know that was at six seven eight months ago basically okay and uh what are you doing today in terms of monthly recurring revenue right about twenty thousand mrr okay wow so nothing to twenty thousand now i imagine churn is crazy high on something like this what is your churn yeah it churns it about 22 percent and so what are your thoughts on that are you actively trying to decrease it yeah so what i've been really focusing on is trial conversion so we did this thing that that's been working extremely well to increase trial conversions and every time someone signs up i have an account manager and he sends them an email says hey what are you trying to scrape i'm going to show you how to do it so they'll come back with a niche and what he'll do is he'll make a loom video showing exactly how to do it so that's increased trial conversion like a lot from 20 to 40 something like that and when you say 22 churn that's monthly churn yeah so you'll circle through your whole customer base basically every five months for the ones that when you sort by the ones that are sticky that have paid you for more than four or five months what are the patterns you see in that cohort well what i've been doing is i recently integrated hi-ros you know what hirose is i don't yeah so high roast is a tracking platform and it lets you look at the ltv of all your customers and every single product they bought from me h-y-r-o-s it's owned by alex becker so now what i can do is see okay you bought my course here and then you bought this software app this many days after you bought the course and then you bought this one and then you bought this one you could basically see the whole journey of each customer mm-hmm okay got it so you're using hi-ros i see alex's ads all over the place on youtube i did not know he was getting into the sas space so this is kind of cool to discover um how did you get those first hundred customers you said it was easy i had thirty four thousand people on twitter okay that's not easy right so like how did you build the audience on twitter all right so twitter is really interesting in that so you start out with zero followers your first function is to do russell brunson's little dream 100 thing you need to post a lot of value have threads make a giant pinned thread on your profile just give an absolute ton of value and now what you're doing is you're finding other big accounts that also post value and you're liking their stuff and you're commenting on their stuff and you're retweeting them and you're sending them a dm occasionally you're trying to make friends with them because what happens is they start interacting with you back and then their followers see it and then you start growing and compounds and so what is your account on on twitter what's username it's black hat wizard with two d's got it okay got it um wizard cool so so you use this and this is where once you sign the deal with sell sas and got clean leads set up what did you do how did you tweet something was it an email blast what no so what happened was i just put in the course so as you're getting the course buyers and they're going through the course then they'll just see oh you have to use clean leads to do this and so let's go now into the course right so how much was the course cost course is 215 and when did you launch the course in may of last year so it's been about a year okay how much total sales just over half a million okay 500k there and how much of that do you pay back out to affiliates to drop traffic affiliates aren't really a huge part of it it's primarily all driven by me so it might be like it's probably like ten percent of total sales or something to affiliates okay what was your cost on the revenue are you running ads or how did you sign up how did you have a million in sales no no no ads that's entirely from twitter all half a million of that is from twitter okay um people won't believe you oh when they hear you say that so be more be more get more specific otherwise people are gonna go this guy's full of i don't believe these numbers okay if you go if you there's this guy in gumroad top core seller named chris johnson he posts his sales numbers if someone doesn't believe me people understand the sheer buying power that people have on twitter this guy makes 200 000 a month from his courses i've made half a million and it dude 34 000 people on twitter you only need so you get 3 000 of them to buy your course that's a ton of money that's that's not an unrealistic i'm just going through your twitter right now and i do not see you posting your sales metrics anywhere with a screenshot why haven't you done that i feel like that's kind of a scummy way to get sales for it and this is the first time i've ever actually revealed the amount of money the course has made and and why is that scummy you've retweeted other people posting their screenshots of their sales revenue like you did with twitter user j underscore alexander 96 called who would you like me to send you a screenshot of my no but i want to understand how you drove the revenue because i don't believe you just put up a tweet and it came out i think you're doing some very tactical things that i want to learn so how did you actually drive those bales okay so here's what happens when you say you get a course buyer right some amount of people are buying your course and now what drives all of the sales are testimonials exactly like what you saw right there like i just retweeted that guy he posted his revenue that he made so what happens is you need to get all these testimonials and just pump them out so what you do is you email your list and be like hey if you've got success from this course could you please post a testimonial in exchange i'll give you something of value whether that be like a consulting call or another course for free and then people you have this flow of testimonials and you keep retweeting them over and over and over again now you leave your course link in the bio of your twitter so got it so just to be clear most the sales all the sales that you've gotten the 500 000 if i click that bitly link in your twitter profile it's called cold email mastery on gumroad you have a bunch of different pricing plans they've all come through here is that right yep okay got it and explain to me how you structure the pricing 215 for full email mastery you add on some scraping emails from instagram now it's 285 and then you upsell from there yep so it used to be just an e-book and it was like 30-something dollars and the whole function of it was to get agency clients for done-for-you cold email and then what happened was people were buying it just to do it themselves which is fine and then they had questions about particular things hey how do you do this so i add a video and then raise the price then add a video and raise the price add a video raise the prices keep going over and over and over again yeah and so how many total people have bought just over four thousand okay over four thousand interesting i mean this is i mean clearly you i mean you must understand that this is unique and interesting especially for sas founders that maybe don't understand marketing they're going this guy used twitter account to get 500 grand of sales and 4 000 people purchasing um just be clear you did not spend any money on ads driving traffic to this page only retargeting ads and that's at ten dollars a day and i didn't start doing that until three months ago does gumroad let you where are you pixeling the user you in gumroad you can go into the settings in advance and then you can put a facebook pixel and google analytics tag i didn't know that okay so gumroad enables you to cookie the user okay why only 10 bucks down retargeting i imagine there's like room to scale that and still get a positive return on ad spend yeah but the like the 60 day the amount of people you can pixel now with ios 14 it's not a lot so it might be like oh i can get an audience of like 3 000 and then the frequency is going to be at like seven a week or something like that you gotta want to make the frequency too high because i'm just annoying people yeah and you really increase the pricing of this because if i take 4 000 sales divided into half a million that's an average ticket price about 125 bucks there's nothing near that right now on the pricing so you drastically increase these prices yeah absolutely what did you start at what was the cheapest option at the start it was like 30 dollars something like that okay so look i i like this right i mean this is the whole approach of like it's you're not paying for distribution you've actually made a business out of the distribution channel so what is the point where you say okay i'm now introducing clean leads i'm introducing a software product so this is this is at this point i was sitting here in like december and i was like you're referring out all of these people to these other companies and they might give you really shitty affiliate deals and i've structured this entire funnel just like russell brunson so it's like i said russell brunson earlier with the dream 100 i'm just doing exactly what he does okay the dream 100 as described in his books is you go follow the top hundred people in your space on twitter instagram linkedin wherever you want to build an audience you engage with them to build audience that doesn't answer the question of where in your sales process after you sell a course do you introduce the paywall to go purchase the software okay so it's videos in the course and they might organically go to it and then i send emails after basically saying like hey here's all the resources that are in the course i see okay and how many folks on your email list today that's just over four it's like 4 400 or something 4 400 okay so just basically the sales yeah i don't like i don't like getting i don't like giving like free stuff and getting getting like a free lead magnet or something because then you have an email list of people who don't buy anything like if you're gonna if you're gonna make some kind of magnet and it's like you might as well like make it like five dollars because now you know they're buyers are you doing any other gold email and using your own tool to sell your own course what's that are you doing any cold emailing to sell your own course no no i that's a strange way the only the only thing you should send called emails for is if you're selling some kind of high ticket b2b service that's the only reason you should send cold emails interesting okay very cool um so what are you more excited i mean talk to me guys in a month right so we know what you're doing on the satellite in a month about 20 grand in mrr what will you do the next 30 days or what do you do in the last 30 days on course sales the last 30 days the course has done like uh 20 24 000. now the next step is coming up with the mailing app and i've been working on that for like four months that's mailchimp or active campaign no like mail shake or a limb list so a tool specifically email tool specifically for cold email mm-hmm what is and cleanly you clean leads is not built into that no no cleanliness is just for scraping emails and so is contact econ so when are you going to hire your first developer so you can own more of the economics right build your own thing that you own 100 of and build real evaluation or you know real enterprise value yeah so i have a cto and he just manages the dev team so he owns 30 of contact ecom he's going to own 30 of the mailing app as well and then he manages the whole dev team and i just do the marketing how many people are working i mean but you don't need a depth amount cleanly it's correct because it's white labeled so where is the developer or the developer spending time right now they're all working on the mailing app right now and there's five of them right now okay will the mailing app replace clean leads no no the melee app is just for sending emails so it's like a whole vertically integrated ecosystem of cold email stuff you know i understand that but one of the parts of that ecosystem you do not own uh i'm wondering why you didn't rebuild that first before building the mail sending tool what which which part which part to talk about what do you pay sell sass to white label clean leads oh 20 okay that's my point right there's 20 margin there on all those sales right so 20 grand a month in revenue there 10 is two so there's four grand a month in revenue that you could claim back if you built your own tech that replicated clean leads or the version from cell sats i'm wondering why you're not doing that first that's just sheer mental capacity it just takes time so like for instance i have this whole dev team working on working on the mailing app and it's like that's what we're going to focus on right yep does sell sas not have a mailing app that you can white label too no they do but it sucks i hate it it's absolutely miserable so if you send cold emails it's a very particular way it needs to be set up and the way the one they have is just dumb like it sucks interesting okay so 20 thousand bucks in mrr and how many customers are on the on the just sas platform right now um clean leads to 200 something contact ecom has like i think it's close to 200. okay so 200 customers paying about 100 bucks a month is where twenty thousand bucks a month via cleanliness revenue comes from okay and we already talked about churn numbers now have you done all those bootstraps with course revenue you just reinvest it yeah all of this is bootstrapped absolutely all of it that's great love that and how old are you i'm 23. what do your parents think they love this stuff they think it's really interesting i was always selling stuff when i was a kid too so it was just the natural progression of what would happen that does not i can just feel your hustle honor that does not surprise me at all um got it okay cool so you're building the additional application we've understand this business you're pouring all the course profits back into the new dev team um what anything else that i should have asked that i haven't already um in terms of other sas founders growing their sasses i feel like a lot of them will spend an absolute ton of time making these giant support articles and all these videos when you guys could just package this up in a course and use that as a front-end offer and then maybe break even say it's like a 50 course you get 50 purchases now that just paid for your ass but now you get free users i don't know why no one else does that that's what russell brunson does just copy that it works let me ask you another question um if you add up all the refunds you've processed in the past year what's just the total number of refunds on the course it's got it's it's extremely low it doesn't happen a lot and i give refunds for absolutely any reason so i'll say like i'll say on the page 60 day refund if you don't get a sale but if someone asks for any reason whatsoever i'm just going to do it and that's for every single product that happens because what will happen is you don't give someone a refund they might get mad at you and then they hate you and it's just like that energy so if someone asks for a refund it's like here's a refund bro yeah yeah yeah and then are you having to go in and update this course like every month with new content to keep keep it fresh yeah yeah all the time i always got to go and change back pages and that's the annoying thing about having a course and then i'll have other people come on too and talk about their tactics so let me i mean look i'm just going to post them here right guillaume already has a great community at lemlist uh you know you've got soojin with three kiddos running around down here in austin and beautiful cars and male shake he does not have a strong community as lemlist why don't you just approach sujin and say let me basically run community but i'm going to get great economics i'm going to bring in basically my course into you these tools into you and and go together and then it's you guys versus versus guillaume and lemless that would be smart that that's that's an angle have you talked to sujin i've talked to him about affiliate deals i have an affiliate deal with milkshake right now i don't know if he knows i'm making this one he's probably seen on twitter because he follows me yeah i mean dion might hear this and say i i want to do this but guillaume is very good at building community so um interesting this is great cool listen rooting for you this is a hell of a story i mean i'd be very curious to see like how you know if you end up moving more exclusively in the sas space where the economics are better churn hopefully it gets lower over time we'll see what happens but in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five daniel number one favorite business book um jordan belfort's way of the wolf wow i'm surprised it was not export secrets number two is their ceo your following are studying oh gee number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business hi rose real quick on on g and lemlis would you have taken the 85 million dollar deal yup absolutely number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night seven and a half and what's your situation married single kiddos single okay and you said you were 24 22. no i i just turned 24 i don't know why i said 23 i'm just stuck in that 23. you're good man hey happy late birthday thanks uh what do you wish you when you were 20 ah i wish i knew about this i wish i read russell brunson stuff earlier i wish i read it guys this is the perfect example of building a distribution channel first making it profitable and then backing your way in a low cost way into sas business first by just white living someone else's tool and then basically investing in your own tool over time we will see can daniel convert from one time course sales where martin's obviously slimmer and it's a one-time deal into a sas play with a huge community that loves him and pays him every month and never churns daniel thanks for taking us to the top thanks man appreciate it one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a 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