How Batchleads CEO Jesse Burrell grew to $30M revenue and 18K customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is evo draganov he is co-founder of batch products five sas platforms that provide data and lead generation tools for users in various industries evo you ready to take us to the top sure all right very good so is this one company or it's it's five sas companies uh so it's actually it's it's four uh consumer facing companies and uh front end uh you know facing companies and we have one uh back-end company that just provides api services to uh various uh industries what do you think for consumer-facing companies so it's basically four separate completely standalone uh platforms but you're not selling to consumers this is a b2b play it's a b to b and a b2c yeah it's it's business to business mostly it's a lot of it caters to smaller businesses so can you share the urls of some of the the b2b brands so batch leads is that the main one actually the io uh batchskiptracing.com batch driven.com and batchdialer.com why so many why so many why not put them all under one uh they just cater to different use cases um in for the other businesses we have consumers that utilize multiple of the products but again those are some consumers and it just depends on what marketing needs they need god and you're catering i believe directly to real estate professionals across all these outlets is that right yeah it's real estate professionals that's kind of our um original niche we are also uh so it's really real estate investors uh wholesalers realtors and then our dollar product and our um the company that i mentioned is mostly just a back-end api um platform uh caters to a lot of other companies like crms we provide basically property data phone number data and um some geocoding services to bigger companies as well what are paying customers pay you on average month to use this technology um and again it depends on which which company but just uh just kind of generalize it um it's a typical paying customer is about 350 a month 350 a month got it and and um how are you getting these customers like taking back to when you launched what year did you launch and how did you get your first 10 customers uh we launched in 2018 in august um and um a lot of our customers are coming through uh just inbound marketing and then a lot of affiliate sales well but be specific your first 10 customers like literally where do they come from uh facebook uh literally just outreach on facebook um just identifying people that needed some of those services and uh just literally just communicating with them how did you how did you find them did you go into a facebook group or facebook groups that um that's how we got started did you build the groups from scratch or were you going into other people's groups they're just public public groups can you name a couple um sure um there's wholesaling houses full-time is one of the bigger groups of probably about 120 000 people wholesaler houses it's called wholesaling houses full time got it so how do the group owners get mad at you when you just go in and start promoting your product no no no i um no i reached out to i i'm you know i just be people asking for questions and you know i just provided some uh solutions and no there were absolutely um wasn't weren't any issues with any kind of promotions do you pay the group owner an affiliate fee uh he currently now has uh an affiliate link correct how many affiliates do you have that have driven at least one sale uh we have about i would say close to probably 500 by now wow okay that's impressive how have you recruited so many affiliates where do you find them uh it's it's basically our um i mean our niche is very kind of um close-knit uh to where um people are basically selling coaching platforms uh it's a lot of just um going to events um you know communicating with people that are coaches and influencers uh and then just providing us showing them what our service is and how our service is better than you know the other services out there and with the affiliates plus the facebook group is supposed to all this growth how many customers are you serving out today uh we have a total of about uh 18 000 customers they're all paying monthly fees uh correct yeah three so three of the companies that we have our subscription basis uh the other ones the the fourth company that's consumer facing is uh pay as you go model okay got it but i mean if i take 18 000 customers times 350 bucks a month on average i mean that's 6.3 million dollars a month we we we do a lot of yeah we do close to that yeah you're doing great on evo you're surprising me here which i love you're doing 6.3 million a month in revenue uh we're not doing exactly 6.3 uh but but it's in this it it's for sure and seven figures uh so a lot of the customers that are on the pay as you go basis are uh don't order every single month and some orders may vary from anywhere literally from 20 a month all the way up to um ten thousand dollars a month i see okay so what are you doing right now like last month how much did you do we uh last month we did a little over two and a half million wow this is impressive and what does growth look like so exactly a year ago how much we're doing in that month uh so 2020 we grew up about 140 percent uh wow by 19. how did you do that i mean considering covid uh well i think kovit's kind of like a blessing in disguise to be honest um a lot of people basically switched to um just utilizing our data and our services and our phone numbers that we provide um even from you know their computers at home uh and it just uh turned into a lot of people actually being more aggressive and trying to find deals and leads which ended up benefiting us um and again we've just focused on providing a super quality product um and i think you know the initial months of covid uh back in march april and may we kind of took a really step back and tried to figure out how do we optimize everything that we have uh everything from team structures and um you know being able to exponentially grow the team size so all those things really just um helped us um the you know the months following that with you know being able to scale and grow we added about 100 we added about 100 employees in about a six-month time frame so that really just um how many total how many total employees today uh about 140 i think a little bit more got it and what was total 2020 revenue uh we had about uh 16 16. i believe million and that's up 140 since 2019 so you were doing about 6 million in 2019 something like that actually a little bit less than that yeah wow less revenue so about five million less revenue yeah right about five and what do you think you closed this year out uh we're projected to do over 30. that's amazing now have you done all this bootstrapped a lot of it has has been uh you know there's been a lot of pieces in the employees and we're in the process of hiring you know some key c-suite positions uh president of operations uh vp of sales um you know a full-time recruiter uh all of those are positions that are really gonna just um you know what people have you raised have you raised from venture capitalist or you're bootstrapped no no we haven't we we're completely both spent and who is we how many co-founders i have uh so i have so it's three co-founders did you guys all just you know split it evenly 30 30 30 or no yep you did really yeah so you guys are best friends pretty much yes i see you have you ever do you regret do you ever regret that decision do you ever feel like you know what i'm doing more i should have 40 percent no not at all no it's teamwork i wouldn't have been able to do it without the vice versa okay so you each own 33 percent of the business you've bootstrapped do you think you'll do about 30 million in revenue this year what would you value the company at today uh that's a good question um honestly i don't have a clear answer to that if i had to guess i obviously have thought about it if i had to guess i'd probably say about [Music] 60 to 90 but again that's a wild guess and i really i don't know why 60 just based on on growth projections and you know you know just some things that i've read based on um you know what companies are selling for based on the revenue and earnings uh and again this is just though i'm not probably the most educated person to like kind of give an exact number on that but probably in the ballpark we've got a lot a lot of very rich people listen to the show looking for companies to go acquire so i'm going to ask this question for them i mean do you think if someone came and offered you 60 million all cash up front would you able to convince the other two co-founders to take the deal or would you have to be higher no it doesn't have to be higher we were yeah see now we change this now we change it as soon as that's higher correct well no i you know like i think what somebody would probably with the company's value today is not gonna be what it's gonna be value in the year um and you know we're um we're growing a billion dollar company brand uh next five years so that's kind of um our potential exit strategy if you want to say and are you making money were you profitable last year oh yeah yeah how how much did 17 million top line how much of the bottom um we're so about 57 profit so like nine points something what did you call that money do you pay as dividends or what no i mean we always get paid and uh we reinvest a lot heavily into our into other products that's so we know we started with one product in 2018 uh we added two products last year which are i mean they're very in the early stages one of them just crossed um a hundred thousand mrr just launched uh in december what's the url of that one uh batch batch dialer that one just crossed a hundred a hundred thousand a month um and it's growing pretty rapidly we had some little setbacks with uh just about launching and developing stuff but uh that's behind us so that's great would you ever set up profit sharing with employees since you have 50 of you know revenue going to the bottom line um that's a good question um we are in the process of giving some small percentages of um ownership in case of like sales to certain key people but we're keeping that to a very minimum at the moment how many engineers are on the team of 140 uh software engineers or software are you including like the quality assurance engineers and developers total of about 50. five zero and you have any quota carrying sales reps let's say that again do you have any sales reps that carry quota oh yeah um yeah we have sales reps how many seven ish and what quarter they have i honestly just very varies on all the products all the products a little bit different even the price points are different um and you know you know one of them for instance has to do 100 000 a month in revenue on let's say the skip chasing side uh on the dialer side honestly i don't have the number found me yeah no that's fine talk to me about getting new customers do you think your channel to grow is going to be affiliates or is it going to be something else affiliates has been the big uh portion of our growth um we haven't uh we're missing a very very like um we're missing a lot of key uh things at the moment with any kind of outbound sales which we're currently not doing at all um and it's just been that's why we're trying to hire some of these key positions with president of operations too sometimes so we have the capacity to um start putting a strategy behind you know outbound sales and uh just being uh more proactive as far as generating leads we generate a lot of leads uh just a lot of inbound and affiliates but again there's a there's a lot of missing uh potential profits in not doing outbound what's the funnel right like right now across all products how many new leads per month uh just out there just um across all products i have so i don't think uh just let's say on on our bachelorette side it's it's i mean uh actually i i actually i know that so for batchly it's 4 300 leads we had from march 1st to up until now and how many convert to like a trial or paid uh so about 10 of them convert 10 or 20 10 to 15 convert to a trial and then out of 30 about 35 of those 35 of those converts to an actual paying customer got it that's what about 180 new customers per month on 40 300 new leads um no that doesn't actually sound right so we uh now and so the leads i think it's uh what do we classify as an actual like lead um i think that's um one of the like the missing pieces potentially but we have about so on the bachelorettes that we have about a thousand um about a thousand customers a month times i have to actually like look at look at our marketing it's okay you added about a thousand new customers oh just last month on batch ladies yeah yeah on 4300 top top of funnel leads correct and i'm just trying to think if those were actual um like trials or they were actually the leads and i think they may have those numbers yeah yeah that's okay but no generally speaking of 4 000 inbound leads a thousand new converting to pay that's 25 conversion rate i mean that's pretty important right it's about and again it varies on the products but i know one of the basically is about a 30 convert 32 conversion would you ever would you ever consider raising outside capital uh i don't see the reason for it to be honest yeah yeah very cool man let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um measure what matters number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um yeah dan martel love that guy number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business um number four how many hours you sleep to get every night uh five and a half to six okay and what's your situation married single kids married with two kids okay have you do you listen to the show you know all these answers so fast uh no i actually listen to the show i have no idea what questions you're gonna ask me i love it this is great okay and how old are you i am 33. take me back to when you were 20. what's something you wish you knew i wish i knew yep uh uh i would have gotten into sas quicker how did you find dan martell out of curiosity uh i think uh youtube youtube that guy's he's so good on youtube guys there we have it batch leads launched in 2018 passed 5 million in sales in 2019 17 million sales in 2020 30 million in sales on track to do this year they did 2.5 million in revenue just last month across 18 000 customers they're selling and catering to the real estate space anything related to call dialing lead generation you name it they're on it called evaluation somewhere between 60 and 90 million bucks but they own 100 business outright across three co-founders 30 30 30 percent 240 people on the team 50 engineers look to continue to scale with new product lines ebola thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a 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