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...