How Boomtime CEO Bill Bice grew Boomtime to $2.7M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think's going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is bill biss he is building a company called boom time he's a hero entrepreneur since age 14 passionate about enabling smaller businesses to more successfully compete with their larger competitors through effective marketing through the years he built and invested over 25 companies but kept finding the same flaws and marketing strategies so as a programmer at heart he founded boom time a company that tackles marketing as a technology problem bill you're ready to take us to the top absolutely okay so tell us i mean is boom time an agency or a pure sas company well it's both it is we use technology to deliver a service so i think the the whole problem with this area is neither approach by itself really solves the problem you've got to have both yeah by the way i don't disagree with that uh but i always mentioned the story of kind of how you what came first so are you technologist heart sas came first or you're an agency consulting at first no i started on the technology side i mean i started my career as a programmer wrote the software for for my first company and so we really started on the technology side and and i desperately wanted to solve the problem purely from the tech side because you know sas businesses are it's a great business model but the problem is we just we couldn't get there we couldn't actually solve the problem without adding the service uh onto it because it you know the whole problem is that the vast majority of businesses just don't have the the resources the expertise to do the day-to-day execution that is required to do this well okay good so when did you start this company what year uh so six years so whatever that translates to call it 2014 to get going and and what was the first product you took to market was it consulting or sas yeah it was sas so we we started by building a uh really a content oriented marketing automation platform and and then when you really get into the problems that companies have in this area it's it's really the hard stuff how do you get that regular flow of really great content how do you solve the problems if nobody really uses the crm system and if we don't actually have an audience that we're building that we can talk to then you know none of this comes together we don't actually solve the problem so what was the what's the pricing today on the sas platform what's the average customer paying per month so our starting point is two thousand dollars a month to basically build the marketing foundation for any b2b high value kind of company you have a bunch of different things so mailbox mining linkedin you know word of mouth stuff like there's a bunch of different plans here which i mean does one of this make up like the majority of the revenue is the one you're hyper focused on yeah so it's it's that sort of mid-level word of mouth that is that two thousand dollar a month price point for 2500 a month we'll also build the website and and maintain it but what we're doing at that core piece is is solving all the basic problems are we really doing a good job of capturing the leads and referrals that are coming in do you have a nurturing campaign that's going out and following up with every single prospect do we have a regular flow of content going out uh you mentioned mailbox mining that goes after a very specific problem which is so many of the leads and contacts that your sales team are making never actually make it into the crm which means we're not we're not following up with them we're not selling to them and yet those contacts are happening they're happening in your email so let's just grab those let's get them into the crm system and and because we've built you know hundreds and hundreds of nurturing campaigns and uh and in regular flow of content we get the the benefit of learning from all that data across several hundred different companies and that that's to me what makes this so much fun right it really is all about the data yep so okay so how many you launched in 2014 how many customers are you working with now today well we have several thousand uh so we've got three thousand clients total but that includes people that are using just the technology piece so in terms of what we really do today at several hundred where we're providing the combination of both the technology and the service okay so what are we talking like 200 300 something like that a little over 300 okay 300. so so i mean can i take 300 times that 2000 a month and basically back into revenue you can okay very cool so that's 600 i mean at 600 grand a month right yes we're we we also got our way there over time so i'd love to say that every client was at that level but uh so we have a uh we have a pretty wide range there so we're doing we're doing uh we're doing about 250 in mrr right now fair enough okay by the way still healthy right so so there are essentially 300 paying that make up uh 250 000 a month in pure sas revenue now is that kind of also including professional services revenue or is there revenue on top of that that's professional services yeah that's all in okay the key to our model though is that the the way you create great content is we built a network of of subject matter experts so we have 300 writers that we use so we don't do any of the content creation internally that's part of the workflow that our platform manages so how do we get great ideas turn that into creative briefs send it out to writers get it edited right for the voice distribute it take the analytics iterate through that process okay so so what's interesting about listening to your story is i've interviewed people that are solely doing one of these things for example scripted right marketplace to go hire writers it sounds like you've kind of built your own little scripted inside of the like embedded into your business and these pricing plans why have you chosen to kind of do a lot of things for for the kind of the small business right or the company that needs your help versus going all in on building like the best marketplace to hire writers well there are good solutions for that but the problem with this from the ceos is which is where i come from what i need is somebody to solve this problem like i i took every method you can think of and the companies i've worked on you know built in the entire team internally used external agencies subcontracted it all out all of those have challenges like to have a decent marketing team to actually execute in all the things you need is you know four to five roles that's that's pretty significant if you don't have a company that supports that um hiring an agency honestly that'll work but a ton of ceos won't keep writing that ten thousand dollar check month in a month out even though it is going to work because it's just hard to see the roi and yet the the number one problem in marketing is is the lack of consistency it's if you don't commit to a strategy and stick with it you're never going to get the you're never going to get the results you're not going to you're not going to see the roi so what you really need is a solution that pulls all of those pieces together that you know that's the unique thing about what we created and i created it to solve the problem that i was experiencing now what does growth look like so if you're doing a quarter million a month right now what were you doing about a year ago do you remember uh it's the the the growth has really just started to take off in the last few months it has taken us the last three years to really get the platform and process down and working so it has been it's been a much harder problem to solve than i thought it would be but that's also made it uh you know really interesting and challenging so going back a year though i mean i understand that what were you talking like you were like basically flat exactly a year ago doing 250 grand a month a year go as well no we had we had okay growth not not nearly as much as as i would like so that has changed a lot in the last quarter but but year over year you know we were we were in the the teens kind of okay okay fair enough so so maybe two hundred thousand dollars a month a year ago now 100 250 grand a month you know teens in terms of growth now have you bootstrapped the company or decided to raise no the there's really a big platform behind this so we've raised a total of of 8 million in bce in order to in order to build this platform now so like see that's more challenging right if you're a bootstrap growing in the teens fine but like if you raised 8 million bucks during the teens i don't want to be at your board meeting let's just put it that way so i mean how are you you know how are you managing these vcs that are saying why aren't you doubling your over a year you should be doubling so i think one of the biggest problems with venture back companies is is not getting the foundation built right to start with so in my mind it makes a lot more sense to take your time and do it well and then hit the gas in order to grow there's so many great concepts and ideas that fail because it is it's the problem with bc back companies like you are pressed to grow no matter what and so it is it is a challenging dynamic to to manage but that's also your job as the ceo is to sort of deal with that conflict well by the way i mean you say the problem with vc back company i mean you are a vc backed company right so so you took the part of the challenge here is like right you took a bunch of dilution when you raised the 8 million based off a valuation that you were able to sell people on which is important to be able to sell that vision as a founder but then if you don't meet those things there all kinds of bad stuff can happen you run out of cash you have to do a bridge round with debt you do a down round you pro ratchet clauses liquidation preferences blah blah blah so my question really is you believe in what you're doing you've got a great company problem is you have these people on your cap table that give you eight million bucks to throw around you've potentially already thrown a lot of that around how do you manage their expectations in 2020 and 2021 to make sure you don't end up in a down round or a bad situation yeah it's it's the right question so we've got some real advantages one is is we're profitable oh nice great and we have a payback time period that that is it depends on the we're averaging about uh about five months and i think we're going to get that to four months very shortly okay right now when you sign a new customer up for like your average customer by the way if you're doing 250 a month is paying about 800 a month times 300. so you're basically saying to get 800 a month customer you're spending about 4 000 bucks to get them yes but our average new customer today is is that 2 000 a month okay and and so we're when you take the the fully loaded cost of acquiring that customer and delivering the service to them we're we're currently at a five month payback and and we see the ability to to get that to four months and it's really because we're using we're using ourselves to market ourselves so our customer acquisition cost is uh is very reasonable today and the big question that is right at the heart of what you're talking about is can we get the growth that that that i think this concept deserves without dramatically increasing the customer acquisition costs that's one of the horrible ironies is is typically as you increase growth your acquisition cost goes up so are we able to to take all the things we've learned and and manage that yeah now were you the original founder here what's the story with with benjamin moore and back in 2006 yeah so the the company was actually run by i recruited in a ceo by the name of mark cannon who originally developed the concept behind what we're doing mark used to run hibou in the uk the yellow pages company there so a lot of what we're doing is all of the challenges that mark faced in doing that at immense scale how do we do a better version of that and that's what really created boom time so when mark retired i came back in as ceo because i just i love what we're doing so much that i that i think it's worth taking it to taking it the rest of the way so when when did you raise the 8 million uh so our last raise was uh what about 18 to 24 months ago okay got it so like the april 17th series b by saba and verge for 3 million was that actually much larger than 3 million it was more like 8 million no that was just the the the be was a little bit more than that but the b gate has got us to a total of it's like 7.8 if i remember oh okay so you had raised uh some some prior to 2017 as well right there's a series a before that oh i see okay got it makes sense i shouldn't serious b series a all right fair enough uh so i'll just be clear all those investors are still on the cap table today yes okay great so driving growth um where are you finding new customers today so our primary route is the same thing we do for our clients which is expanding our audience on linkedin so if you're in b2b you know linkedin this this is like facebook was in b2c 10 years ago i mean it's just a it's an open area the growth is tremendous you know it is the place to be if if you want to grow and be to be yeah okay good so i mean tell me how you're doing that are you you're scraping illegally i mean what are you doing on linkedin uh we're not scraping illegally we're running connection campaigns that i mean the beautiful thing about linkedin it's it's the ideal networking event right you get to meet exactly the right prospect you don't have to eat horrible of food at the same time that you're doing it and so we get connected to exactly the people that we are a good fit for and and we use we use those same techniques for for our clients it's the best way to grow your audience we want to convert as much of that as possible to to email but in the end you know you can create real growth out of just three channels in b2b you've got your website linkedin and email you tie those together understand the customer journey you've got the the whole model of what you need in order to to grow your business very good okay makes sense now what about churn right turns critical in a sas company so what's gross revenue churn over the past 12 months i should know that off the top of my head but uh but i don't the we we have moved from covering sort of everything to focusing on b2b because the things we work well work best in that area so we have churn in our history from sort of moving from the from uh from b to c to focusing exclusively on b2b so our our turn has dropped dramatically in the last 12 months now that we really have that that focus okay fair enough so so kind of still trying to figure out a measure that on the new model yes to me what's important is is separating out the that history versus the the clients that are who we're really who are really focused on today well yeah but that's a little bit unfair when you're trying to measure churn which relies on history you have to have a 12-month cohort to measure churn exactly yeah what's a team size today how many people 35 35 okay so 35 folks how many engineers uh we've got six or seven on the development team oh fair enough okay now is this a price point i imagine it is where you can support a full-time like full-time sales reps with quota oh you can the the key though is is that we we've got to have good lead inflow in order to to make that model work right so just pure outbound sales is not going to work at this price point so how many sales reps do you have uh we've only got three people on the sales team three okay so six engineers three sales 35 total where are the other 15 25 people so it's it's the it's really the service component it's marketing strategists and engineers who are actually actually delivering the end result i see okay so so you're back to profitable uh you're growing you're hoping this year will be healthier growth in the past 12 months are you currently raising a new round of funding we're not if if we're right about our strategy we're not gonna we either won't raise money or we won't raise money for a couple of years until we really have this proven out and have a really nice growth path behind us very good all right let's wrap up here with the famous five bill number one favorite business book uh it's got to be the challenger sale because so much of what we do comes out of the concepts that are in the challenger sale number two is there a ceo you're following or studying well there's there's a bunch i'm i'm going to use uh so clay christensen just just died a couple of days ago not really a ceo but it feels that same role for me so so much of what i have done comes from the concepts that come out of you know the innovator's dilemma and so on yeah great great great guy that we lost unfortunately um number three besides your own what's your favorite tool bill online tool for building your platform uh just growth hackers like there's whatever marketing you want to do somebody's already done it they've already run the test so why not learn from somebody who's already been there already spent the money and just do the next better version of that and and all that sitting out there in uh in resources like growth hackers number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i i get eight and a half every night that's good night in a night out and what's your situation married single kids married four kids wow you're busy how old are you uh 51. 51. okay last question why do you wish your 20 year old self knew christ everything that i know now like i mean that's the classic story back to high school um so when i i started my first company when i was 18 and i thought i knew it all and so i didn't accept advice or mentorship from anybody and now i really have a clue about how little i know and so i always try to find somebody who's already done what i want to do right it's such a much more intelligent way to figure out how to get there like it took me forever to build that first company because i just wasn't open to advice yep guys there you have it boom time again helping smbs understand go to market strategies uh not only just on a sas side but also on the on the services side team of 35 people six engineers as they scale serving 300 customers paying on average 800 a month historically so 250 grand a month right now in sales their new customers though being onboarded at closer to 2000 a month price points they look to scale they are profitable today they've raised 8 million bucks slow growth in the teens over the past 12 months but bill predicts that's going to pick up here in 2020 bill we're rooting for you thanks for taking us to the top i appreciate it thanks you guys know i fight like heck to get these data points for you from these ceos that rarely do these kinds of shows if you want more shows like this make sure you subscribe right now we're trying to get 10 000 youtube subscribers by the end of september here 2019 and it would mean the world to me if you clicked now to subscribe additionally i've got two more great interviews for you if you want more data points from the world's leading sas ceos click and watch one of them right now