How Botco CEO Rebecca Clyde grew Botco to $1.5M revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is rebecca clyde she's the ceo of botco.ai a startup offering intelligent chat nurturing solutions for health and wellness enterprises with more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry she's passionate about advancing women in tech prior to co-founded a digital marketing agency and managed marketing programs at intel rebecca are you ready to take us to the top definitely hi nathan it's nice to meet you okay tell us about botco who are you so you're selling directly to health and wellness enterprises why that niche um well because they had been severely underserved i've been in the marketing automation space for quite some while and i thought that a lot of the marketing technology that was uh built was really suited more for technology companies software businesses but when it came to the health and wellness space they had some needs that were important to being satisfied things like compliance around personal health information the ability to integrate with um benefits and verification of benefit systems so a lot of these providers use insurance as the form of payment um so they have some kind of unique elements to the way that their business is done that had not been addressed by the traditional marketing automation platforms and so i found that there was an opportunity there to go in with a service a product that could really satisfy that gap love that okay and so what are these customers paying on average per month to use the technology you know anywhere from about nineteen hundred dollars a month to upwards of seven thousand dollars a month oh wow so would it would it fair average be like twenty five hundred three thousand something like that around there okay so you're very this is very much an enterprise motion then were you enterprise from day one [Music] yes always our very first customer was a billion dollar company yes can you name who that was yes so there is our massage envy oh yeah of course yeah so massage envy is one of the largest wellness providers in the us they provide clinics all over the country they have over a thousand clinics that have um massage therapy but also a lot of other services as part of their program and they were one of our how do you land i mean they're you know people listening wait how did rebecca land massage envy on day one how does massage envy look at a you know startup company and say we're willing to bet our hipaa compliant chat on rebecca well to be fair i've been working in enterprise for a long time so you know i mentioned the agency that i had started previously so i already had a lot of relationships in the enterprise space that i was very familiar with the agency has worked with health and wellness so yeah my previous agency yes had a lot of clients in this space um i do a lot of public speaking and actually the way that i met them was through a i was doing a an event i was speaking as a keynote at a conference and talking about the power of ai and being able to automate conversations to scale uh an engagement with consumers and they came up and talked to me afterward it was one of their marketing executives and pretty soon i was in the thief tweet with their entire executive team talking about how we could make this happen so did you this was your agency right previously yeah did you shut down the agency in favor of botco the sas company no i hired a management team and replaced myself with other people and turned over the reigns to my business partners and then started this company did you were able to did you sell something there did you get it was there a cash event for you that you didn't plow that money into botco no no okay so you still have exposure equity upside in the agency or rev share something like that over there exactly i see okay but now you're building botco okay now i understand this is massage envy is your first customer now how many customers are you working with today we have about 30 now 30. wow okay got it and and walk me through how you're getting those customers is it still all from relationships from the agency side are you running some other growth tactics no no no that's just how you usually get your first couple of customers now we have a sales team and a marketing function so you know we hold webinars actually we just had one earlier this week we have a lot of webinars and we'll put on events uh people will either sign up because they're interested in the topic uh we provide them with really useful content and usually becca go deep with me on the webinar for a second very people as well yeah so so let's go deep here i know i'm gonna ask some weird questions but stick with me how many people showed up live on the webinar about 25 or 10 we'll usually have maybe about 100 that will register for the live for the event usually a quarter will show up to the live event and then another quarter will watch it on demand but what's really interesting is the people that show up are super engaged right they really want to learn about this topic they uh are spending you know a good hour of their day doing this so nobody spends that type of time unless they're really really trying to make a big decision and so when we follow up with them and try to you know set up a meeting they're usually very keen so you don't try and close them live you don't say go to this checkout page and pay today like what's the call to action the last three slides of the webinar uh yeah usually it's we'll usually have some kind of program where they can meet with us to put together a demo that's uh uniquely suited for their company and so that's that's the call to action is like why don't you set up a meeting with us we'd love to put a demo together for you to actually show you how this would work for your business and then from there we we uh close them after that okay 100 register 25 show up another 25 watch on demand so 50 percent end up engaging with a webinar somehow then some portion of those likes book a demo go back top of funnel how do you get 300 registered oh yeah a lot of different ways so tons of social media efforts so we share it out with our individual networks which are all organic we don't really pay much for social media promotion we do like a tiny bit maybe a couple hundred dollars but we don't spend thousands on promoting it we just the amenities come from either our shares or our shares of shares right so we'll have people who we know like share it out for us we also have um a really good solid subscriber list you know people who have engaged with our content before how many rebecca our webinars i would say we have uploaded like maybe 50 50 000 people in our database already and you've been building that said yes yeah please tell us more about your products and services so they're all updated um because that's that's great yeah and um so we of course you know let them all know and oftentimes that we'll see that they forward it to their teams or to colleagues um we also get on a lot of podcasts like this and talk about the fact that we might be holding a webinar or have something coming up and so we get new new uh participation that way um i'm very involved in the community so i do a lot of stuff in the um healthcare and technology industry so i tend to kind of be at a lot of events and i just tell people what's going on and that's how they also hear about it so there's a little bit of organic you know social media and then of course just reaching out to our database and letting them know that these events are happening and now rebecca can i do the math here 30 customers at an average of 30 000 a year would mean you're about a 75 000 a month right now on revenue is that about right um probably yeah that would be about right yes okay customers that are grandfathered into our earlier pricing so they're not paying as much uh but the rest uh yeah and maybe closer to like 65 70 000 a month in revenue can you do so you have what do we have we have we have 60 more days left in the year it'd be very cool if we were to break a million dollar run rate by the end of december you guys can do it oh i i don't think so no we're gonna we're projecting that for next next quarter is notoriously slow sales month and so we really only have this month left to spell in the short month cause of thanksgiving yeah and help me understand growth so if you're doing about 60 000 a month today in revenue where were you exactly a year ago do you remember yeah we were uh in arr terms we were at about 150 uh roughly um so it was we've more than tripled our business almost quadrupled our business yeah yeah i mean so you've gone from like 12 grand a month or 150 can ar up to 60 grand a month today that's incredible growth um now have you done all this bootstrap or did you raise yeah we raised money so uh we started the company bootstrapped then our first customer actually helped pay for the product in advance which was very nice how much did massage mvp up front uh i don't think they would want me to share that but nice try though so they they were our first customer and then you know they were willing to pay up front before we even had anything to deliver to them which was really great um so i kind of see them as a little bit of they took a chance on us right um and then we um raised money from angels so...