How Bizversity CEO Dale Beaumont grew Bizversity to $26.9K revenue and 160 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Dale Beaumont he's an award-winning technology entrepreneur international speaker and the author of 16 best-selling books he started his first business on 19 has been building companies ever since one of those companies now a multimillion-dollar enterprise which has enabled Dale to become an investor philanthropist and to step foot in more than 80 countries today Dale is the founder and CEO of biz versity a product which gives direct access to the world's best business training anywhere anytime Dale are you ready to take it to the top yeah let's do it all right so tell us about biz versity at first glance it looks like what might be a udemy or a creative life might look like for business people is that accurate I yeah we we basically started around three years ago I've run it business education company for the last like 10 years called called business blueprint which is based around training entrepreneurs but through primarily live events we run about 60 live events per year so about three years ago we thought how can we build a platform that can provide training to business owners all around the world and we realized the world doesn't need another business training website so many out there but everyone has a mobile phone and so we decided to build the mobile first video learning platform to provide training to business owners we don't have over a thousand videos even the library covering really everything from how to read financial statements to how to hire staff to how to run Facebook ads and we now have a thousand videos that are available through the through the learning platform okay and what's the revenue model are these are is this a recurring size model or one-time pays you know kind of thing yeah for the first 18 months we made the platform free however in the last month we've just turned on notarization and so it's a subscription model similar to again their flex $14 a month and you can access all of the content that you want and also there's a whole bunch of special features that are only available to the premium members such as the ability to download content to be able to watch offline the ability to create your own playlist to speed up playback and a whole bunch of other things that are only available to subscribers so you get in two weeks free trial or you oh you can eat and then you can decide if you want to continue okay and walk with you I mean how many people are now paying for that service yeah so we don't have about 160 people that are paying for that service this is in our first month so it's sort of brand-new in terms of monetization and so now it's just a matter of how we can continue to grow so we'll do that by having those individual accounts every single person either signing up directly what we're now actually looking at talking to many companies as well about getting a company-wide account and also we've had a lot of interest from franchise groups that are looking to provide training to their franchisees because most of them when they buy a franchise they really they they get a product or a service but they really don't get a lot of business training and they come in sort of very very green and lacking a lot of business training so it's a really low cost way to be able to provide a lot of information to especially first-time entrepreneurs so we see that's the kind of way that we'll probably scale faster in the future is buy more of them sort of b2b style transactions okay and give me a sense of before the SAS model so in 28 to 30 2017 biz versity has its own unit how much revenue did it do so business little said last year was all of us was just about building the platform thankfully I've got another company which is my advanced business which is very very profitable sort of fun it's called business blueprint okay yeah business blueprint so that's been around for ten years and it's it's a great great business so I've been able to take some of the revenue and to put it into busy City to this build the platform which we have have done so it's all just been about you know building out the other the software and and now it's really around how do we make you know biz versity start to to pay for itself and then obviously become profitable and then to expand from there yeah yeah okay good so the you are just now really introducing pricing to biz versity and that pricing is $14 a month like Netflix 160 people at about 2200 bucks a month I'm Rev right now correct okay how do you how do you anticipate making people sticky on this anytime some lunch is a Content site or membership site the hardest thing is trying to through the roof especially relative to real SAS companies that are software based how do you keep turned down yes so that's something that we're really trying to attack aggressively so obviously there's a bunch of the things that we're we're looking to do so having intercom built into obviously the website but also the app as well having lots of kind of conversations with with people almost providing like a concierge service so people can just search for what their bigger this problem or challenge is and then we just send in the direct video that solves that problem so by trying to have more of a direct relationship with every single user through through live chat then we hope that that will will help the other thing that we've done is we've built in a bunch of different gamification modules as well we have a badges that people can unlock based on their consumption we also have a new content which is coming out kind of every week and the other thing we have is like a global leader board as well so they're all trying to make the product as sticky as we can but we're still got yeah so we really know that yeah in this area often times the average lifespan you know is three to four months and so we've got and also giving people a substantial discount for doing foregoing twelve months in advance as well there's nearly a four to forty percent discount if you pay upfront so we hope to lock people in for at least the year which is enough yeah you know get people really hooked on the on the product and and then hopefully you know continuing for many years after yeah I mean that's a whole thing I've seen with a lot of these kind of craters is you know they'll use those exact words force them into an annual plan because they know they're gonna turn up for three months if they don't and then what happens is there's just more regret because they don't end up consuming enough content and then it's interesting model go out for him Chris see if you can make it work you know especially just understanding creative lives business model and udemy's business model they're you know they're constantly trying to use pricing leverage to get new people and retain by just like discounting discounting discounting and it's like a race to the bottom yeah and so that's where we sort of believe that the the will will be able to achieve our sort of goals faster is through law of the enterprise plans for four companies as once you know you're a franchisee with a franchise group we're talking to now with 700 franchises and so once a company like that is then sort of on board why would they be on board though daily do you have unique videos specific to their French are like why wouldn't they just sign up to like create their own videos or use YouTube or yes so most of them will have a very basic sort of training like the company that were speaking to at the moment they have about 40 videos that just cover the core sort of aspects of how to how to basically run a gym so they provide training around that area of expertise but most first-time business owners again they really don't understand a lot of the sort of fundamentals whether that be about their time management or how to read a balance sheet or could be around how to you know use social media in order to grow their business how to create a marketing plan that's they don't provide any of that sort of training they just sort of say you know here's a big business model and kind of good luck and so on one of them is the fact that we provide a very broad range of education content covering kind of everything that someone could possibly want to know and then the second thing is everyone is sort of focused on creating great content and I would sort of say that that's a bit of a commodity now there's great content everywhere on every platform well we've tried to do is really focus on how do we remove the friction to actually consuming content and so like for example if you've got content on a website oftentimes it doesn't work very well on your mobile or if it does it's hard to watch videos on a mobile that come through a website oftentimes if you start a video it won't remember your place when you come back you can't speed it up you can't download the videos directly to your device you can't set up terms like playlists or forward videos so we've just tried to make it how do we make it as easy as possible for people to consume anywhere anytime another cool feature that we've created as well within the app is if you're watching a video you can tap a button and it actually goes into like carplay mode and you can listen to it while you're driving in the car while you're going to the gym while you're walking the dogs and then when you get back to a place where you can watch you can another button and it goes back to two or video so we call that come alone switch where you can just kind of learn anywhere anytime either in video mode or audio mode for the same piece of content god it...