How AIMI Automation CEO Zachary Hedges grew AIMI Automation to $2.8M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is zach hedges he exhibited a passion pro and affinity for marketing from an early age started his first marketing communications company at the age of 16. by the time he was 25 he leveraged his expertise to build a diverse client list that included many big brands that you know in 2014 transitioned into the sas arena and launched mdc dot an all-in-one crm and marketing automation platform he also earned two patents through that work this led zac in 2018 to develop his most innovative product to date pre-built marketing artificial intelligence the first ever social media marketing technology power that writes your content builds campaigns for you and analyzes the results it's called amysocial.com a i m i social dot com exactly right it takes the top yes appreciate it thanks for having me today is this using gpt3 stuff no actually we launched this company in 2017 uh we created our own uh learning models our own content creation models we launched our first product at the end of 2018 um you know really kind of as a starting point didn't do a lot of marketing didn't try to you know we wanted to bring in some companies learn understand uh what's working and not working we had over about a thousand businesses uh small businesses we worked with on that first version of our platform wait how did you do that how did you get a thousand people on it well we already had as you mentioned in my bio i've been in the software as a service space for over nine years so i already had a core team of outside sales professionals that were already selling other products that we had so when we launched the uh pre-built marketing we transitioned that sales team over and so we used the the val you know the amazing word of mouth right and and social media uh to drive that earlier customer base uh into this new product um and so we you know we leveraged that to bring on those thousand businesses how many sales people was that uh that was about uh started off with a core of 50 grew to about 300 at its highest point were these commission only sales people or they fixed expenses on your on your p l they were actually paid customers who who were also sales folks as well so they were actually people were you paying them like a sales rep because they have a base pay that you were paying no no they were pure commission based so they're affiliates they were peer affiliates referral partners yes we called them around partners um you know now we got it now what did so what did you this is look an affiliate program on day one is really compelling how you structure it is even more interesting how did you structure it what did they earn in terms of percent commission uh they earned it well it was a two-tier affiliate program so we just paid two tiers first tier was around 30 other tier was around 10 percent of commissionable volume uh we also have bonus pools so quarterly bonus sales pools based upon the gross sales of all of all tiers um in there what we did for amy social is we did was uh we put on over 300 people within 72 hours 300 customers within 72 hours using a pre-launch strategy uh for so four months before we launched amy social in january of this year we drove people into a facebook group and we promoted the value of the product and educated them and got them really excited about it what's the name of that group i'm sorry into a facebook group what's the name of the group that's uh well now it's our amy social official facebook group okay got it okay so we use it for all customers anybody that wants to know about the product but prior to launch we use it as a pre-launch group and so we grew that group to over a thousand thousand people who were interested in using the product you know constantly kept you know nurturing them it comes from my my days in the crm marketing automation space lead nurturing dripping on them sharing the value sneak peeks of the app how they're going to use it got them really hyped up to want to use it and then we did is we gave them a pre-launch price for 72 hours before we launched on apple and google we said we're going to open it up and you're going to get this lifetime price we sold it at half price to everybody that wanted to buy it was it it was uh 60 dollars uh we we retail right now for 124 um how do you do this well i mean why do you kill all the the reasonable sass business is that you can have freedom as a human being build a family go on vacation relax but when you sell a lifetime value you now don't have recurring revenue to rely on they pay 60 your biggest fans they pay 60 bucks one time and then if there's not a clear strategy to upsell them to the monthly recurring plan you you know no it's monthly it's 60 a month okay you said pre-launch price for life yeah but it was a monthly price they paid 60 a month for lice got it so this is not a lifetime deal they're paying no i'm sorry maybe i confused yeah i know lifetime lifetime reoccurring like pre-launch price so so we came out the gates with about three 250 people out of that thousand so 25 conversion at that price um and we were already tracking over 20 thousand in in uh you know recurring monthly revenue what were the other eight what were their 750 paying or were they free users they were free because we had a freemium model so they were on the free plan and you know obviously you know the sas game is a fickle business right you never know where somebody is but you know our our at that time our core market was the solopreneurs these individuals one to three man shops you know who have a lot of trouble with social media marketing or content creation in general who are looking for you know something that really took all the heavy lifting and the guesswork out of keeping you know consistency of posts and marketing their business educating their audiences where they don't have to sit there and get into the canvas and figure out what to say i'm a writer am i not a writer i'm a designer what should be my you know how many posts per day what should i say what should i do and so that's what our product does it's artificial intelligence that really creates the complete social media marketing strategies yeah the product exactly the product makes sense to me but but there are hundreds that play in this space some none of them have patents like you do but what really here in my opinion is the differentiator and people that win this space or those that dominate a distribution channel right and so like hearing your distribution strategies is way more valuable to me than under like going deeper on the product because i get the product there's there's a clear need for it what is mrr today um it's it's it's a little over 25 000. okay got it so so you want when you did the amy social launch that was this year you signed up 250 at 60 bucks a month that's 15 000 a month or right out of the gate and you've added about 10 grand more over the past six months uh yeah we actually officially launched february 1st because we launched on apple first in january and then in android and then officially launched february 1st so so we really spent two months out in the marketplace and and you know we're finding a need now for agencies who want to use amy to help take on more clients right they want to customize her so they can automate the content creation for their clients but now we're moving into those models and enterprise models and all kinds of other things as well as you know these things are ever evolving you know what was revenue at the end of 2020 in december 2020 how much did you do uh you know i don't have it on our hands you know we went back into uh you know creation mode we went back into the lab so we weren't we weren't marketing the old product we knew that the the first version of our app in 2020 wasn't what we wanted to scale with so that's why we came back and developed amy social so i really don't have those numbers for it but nothing nothing earth channel what did you in 2017 when you say you launched that was that the early version of amy social just advanced over the last four years yeah so we launched we launched pre-built marketing which was the first version of the app was desktop app only that was at the end of 2018. um and between 2018 and 2019 we did almost 700 000 in revenue in that in that year with those thousand customers yeah they were all paying 127 a month so somewhere in there i don't have the numbers but we realized that we you know you made it you know you make a great point there's a lot of people playing in the space they all do you know little bits and pieces we try to bring it all together under one roof and so we knew that we to do that we need to go back into the lab and that's what we did in all of 2020 literally just you know allowed our a lot of our sales people to sell the original app didn't do any marketing of our own went back in the lab with our team and created amy social and that's what we're going to mass market with that's what we're we're pushing hard out there so how are you adding customers today uh right now it's at this present moment it's through some pr marketing um through our sales team uh through funnels and things like that that we're implementing some some online advertising um last month oh oh well we've had a couple grand i mean we're barely we're starting...