How Better Agency CEO Will Shaw grew Better Agency to $2.9M revenue and 260 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is will shaw he's the co-founder of better agency the first sales driven ams and the industry's top crm for independent insurance agencies they're on a mission to help agents issue a billion in new business premiums by 2024 he's an ex-professional athlete and his playing field is now the tech and software space will you ready to take to the top yeah let's do it what sport did you play uh i played uh i played football so i played with the steelers and the eagles oh very which one was which one you enjoy more uh the eagles because i lasted longer there good answer good answer all right so uh talk to me about better agency a bit here so i obviously love niche specific businesses we've had you on before i'd love to understand sort of growth from then are you still the same product or have you released something major over the past two years yeah so we've kind of grown a lot yes i know we talked previously um you know i i got i fell into the insurance niche because i was customizing tools like infusionsoft hubspot salesforce for the insurance space and what we found was hey we were using six seven eight different platforms to do the same thing wasn't working through antiquated systems and bad apis because nobody's been really focused on the insurance industry so uh towards the right at the end of 2019 we decided to launch better agency which was the first uh crm specifically for independent insurance agents and uh throughout that time we've really grown doing that and then we recently just launched our newest feature which is what we call the sales driven ams so that's actually connecting directly with policy downloads from the carriers that's been something we've been working on for almost a year now um and it's really allowing us to offer a one true system to insurance agents instead of them having to use multi multiple different platforms and you used to be did you have a rebrand you were called marketing connected i think previously right yeah so that was a previous company that i was kind of using as a placeholder um as i was figuring as i was transitioning out of doing custom implementations and into what we launched that better agency i see i see got it okay cool but same story there in terms of that was the you know that was the baby version you now sense change matured etc yep exactly okay very cool um so let's jump into this a bit um on the crm tool today i think when you last came back on i guess this would have been back again 2019 you had just broken i think 100 customers and you were charging at that point i think about 300 bucks a month still the same price point yeah so we our price points gone up uh we're a little over 400 now on our average customer uh we've been able to add some different upsell opportunities so we try to get people in around the 200 to 250 mark and now we're getting our average customer a little over 400 and we think we can get to 500 over the next 12 months and what's driving your ability to get higher price points are they buying more seats originally are you up selling more features on day one what's the story there uh both more seats coming on so as we're able to as we're able to help solve more problems we get more of the team on board to our platform um and the second thing is just adding more features one things we've been passionate about is trying to achieve that kind of net negative revenue churn and that's been kind of helped drive our growth where are you now on that um so i think when we spoke in 2019 we actually just launched in 20 at the end of 2019 in october november time frame so right now we're we're somewhere around 260 customers uh and we just broke the 1 million ar mark oh hey congrats man that's exciting thanks i appreciate it big big deal boots dropped are you raised so we we bootstrapped to this point we are tomorrow actually closing our first round so we've we've got to this far bootstrapped and so we just are closing on our first round tomorrow we love that so you guys listen you listen to podcasts you get breaking news before it happens will how much you guys end up raising so we're going to raise a total of 2.1 million um it's going to be at a 15 million post and um we're pretty we're pretty excited about that so yeah we were able to bootstrap to this point um and so that made fundraising pretty easy and it just made sense for where we were at 15.2 posts so i mean that's essentially 13 pre right or about 13 next your your arr i mean does that feel fair to you or do you feel like it could have driven a higher or lower you know what do you think we could have totally have driven it higher i mean the market you know better than i do the market's pretty frothy right now and we could have driven far higher but we were really my biggest problem with fundraising was telling people no and the reason being is we want to be as strategic as possible we were in a position where we had bootstrapped this we necessarily have to raise money the only money work you know we're burning and some of the original money we put in at this point are saved along the way and we're using that to drive some marketing so we really want to raise money to start bringing our our development talent our our product team in-house because that's been outsourced previously and to grow our sales and marketing team uh and what we're doing there so we we wanted to be as strategic as possible so that meant staying a little bit away from the vcs because we're not going the traditional fundraising route and going more towards angels which is a little bit different valuation so how many how many people are participating in the 2.1 rates so we uh we probably could have got away with doing it with two um but we ended up getting a uh we have about fifty percent from our lead investor and the other fifty percent is divided between insurance specific um strategic investors and the and then the other half of that would be through strategic other verticalized crm founders or some people that we know that you know have gone through whether it was infusionsoft's fundraising or different fundraising events here locally in arizona that's very cool um is uh is clayton put anybody in uh no he's not but i have had some conversations with him nice nice um and then the lead that put in about 40-50 percent did they set the terms or did you let the whole sort of like without a traditional vc or just a wealthy individual so that was an angel here locally so we let them set the terms we thought it was more than fair for playing with the you know staying out of the vc realm and coming and staying with more angels priced round though right not not a credible note yep it's a price range okay and and so you mentioned burn right so before this race like last in june how much capital will you burn uh about 10 or 12k so not a ton okay i mean this isn't that bad that's you know 10 to negative 10 to 12 percent ebitda margins not not horrible in sas and and what's growth look like so so i mean if you're at a million dollar run rate today where were you exactly a year ago do you remember oh man i could look it up but my guess is we were at this time last year we were at probably somewhere between 25 to maybe 30k mrr um so you were flat then because that's what you told me you were at in 2019 or late yeah so well yeah when we talked to 2019 that was more about where we were expecting to get we didn't make our actual we had some commitments that were helping us get there but we didn't really bring in our first dollar until i think november of 2019. i see got it so your pre-revenue up into that point yeah so when we launched because we bootstrapped it we pre-sold quite a bit working with people um and so that's kind of what we were expecting we got to that number it just took us about six months longer than we thought i see got it okay so i got it zero dollars of revenue in july 2019 about 30 000 a month in july 2020 and now today passed a million dollar run rate correct and then we're growing an average about 10 a month and we've kind of been consistent about that since about august of 2020. where's the growth coming from how are you signing up new people when you came on last you said affiliates were a key growth driver for you yeah so about 30 are through our paid strategy um and about 70 are coming through uh either referrals or are organic so we spend a lot of time focus on the blog from the start and we're starting to see dividends from that now a lot of it is our cusp is customer referrals and then we have some still coming in from referral partners on the page strategy how much did you spend on paid ads in june this month um so that would be almost all of our paid budget outside of seo so if we if we burn if we spend 12 grand on marketing in june about probably close to 10k of that was specifically to paid nine to ten thousand probably specifically to paid through facebook or google facebook people interesting and and how many new customers or leads will you get on 10k spend so on 10k and spend we'll get about 25 net new customers so we'll get a bunch of trials and we convert about 70 percent of those trials so that'll equate to about 25 new paying customers that's great what do you have to get a trial to do to...