How Brand Overflow CEO Ahmed Qureshi grew Brand Overflow to $36.6K revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is ahmed qureshi he quit his job to start a martech sas sharp and then survived the kobet recession and raised funds without selling any equity went from two features to 11 within four months and raised enough funds to fund their future without the need of any investors the companies called brand overflow.com an all-in-one seo platform i'm eddie ready to take us to the top yeah sure we started out in 2019. and how much capital did you raise and how did you do this about selling any equity okay uh i raised around 250 000 uh a little over 250 000 uh dollars in 2020. how did you do that without selling any equity by creating future debt uh we sold lifetime deals to our software product okay but doesn't that kill your ability to upsell customers in the future if you let them pay one time for their whole life definitely that's why we created it uh we created the deal in a very isolated environment so that we can uh try to get those super early beta testers that can really uh support our vision because we were we were in a really saturated market we were already up against really big companies that were already dominating that kind of space we needed to create space for ourselves so what was the lifetime deal how much did you charge we charged we had several packages the regular package cost around 299. 299 for for life and how many did you sell we sold around we had several packages so the prices prices may vary we sold around 400 to 500 deals a week okay and which platform like how did you sell 400 how did you get traffic the first uh thing we did we was we went to stack social uh everybody goes to stack solution for the lifetime deals we generate a little bit of everything from there and then we move to isolated facebook groups where there are like hardcore uh sas users b2b users agency owners they're looking for way they were looking for ways to cut down on their costs and there we were so can you name one or two of those groups yeah definitely one of them is digital think okay and what's another one uh alstom elston anthony he was one of the first people that kind of introduced us to these lifetime groups allison anthony's group what's another what's another group give me another example martech martech wise uh one of those yeah i would say these are the three of the biggest groups that i'm so digital digital think martech wise and what was the third one alston anthony it's his actual name yeah that's his actual name so his group was based around him reviewing these uh lifetime products okay so you sold you sold a total of 250 000 worth of the product and lifetime deals yep and how much do you get to keep versus how much do you have to give the group owners or stack social okay this 250 50 000 uh does include the commissions and removing that we are at around 220 to 200 000 so we didn't do it too bad so why do these group owners promote this if you're only paying them i mean less than a 10 commission okay uh well the group owners uh like appsumo charge a lot more they charge a lot more to run these lifetime deals group owners have lower reach than appsumo so they charges way way lesser well but they still have some reach they helped you get 400 customers the point is if they have a niche community why are they why are they i mean why didn't they ask you for a 40 50 cut instead of only a 10 cut because they're up against appsumo they're also competing for better deals to come to them instead of going to appsumo so there's a little bit of exclusivity there as well yeah but now that's a huge difference appsumo takes like 60 percent so they could have came in just underwrapped sumo why go all the way down to 10 because if i go to appszoom i could have generated over a million dollars and out of that i would have paid a lot more and that's just by one deal i'm talking about multiple deals that i've been running throughout 2020 not just one deal at appsumo at appsumo i would have had i would have had a lot more users to take care of with a lot less money what uh well i know that's that's building my point though ahmed that's my exact point is you don't want to pay attention all that money so you go negotiate one-on-one deals with group owners you want that too so so i'm just curious how you convince them to only take a 10 cut when appsumo takes 70 60 cut i did not convince them they are actually trying to get deals into these facebook groups mo the regular cuts there are 10 to 20 percent at most the affiliate cut at normal what absolute pays their own affiliates is around 25 or 20 the most so they act as affiliates they take those small cuts and they boost the deal by themselves they review it themselves they do the live streams themselves they do everything themselves and we have i've done several live streams my youtube channel is uh it's not that big but uh i've uploaded all my live streams there and they have been interviewing me asking me about the product we've been gone deep into every single feature that i have released got it and how many how so ignoring the lifetime i understand how he got up front cash to invest in growing the company um how many cu ignore all those customers for a second how many customers do you have that are paying you something monthly okay that number is really really low like how long that number between 20 and 50. okay and what they pay what they pay per month yeah we never had any money to invest into marketing or get those mri customers i mean how much how much do the 20 customers pay per month they pay around 69 to 150 a month okay got it so so that's something like you're doing like 1400 a month in true recurring revenue okay so how do you make this business sustainable because you've just promised 400 people you're going to be around forever because you sold them a lifetime deal but this business is not sustainable at 1400 a month in rent total revenue coming in at some point what happens all right that's the best part of it we stopped working on getting new mrr customers around february of march 2020 that's when we started pushing out these lifetime deals so it's been around a year since we stopped in that time we started focusing completely lifetime deals get that cash first with the cash that i have right now i have a runway of around two years with my current team that i hired how many how many people are on the team uh four people plus me and and what's your total headcount expenses per month uh it's around a thousand to two thousand dollars a month to pay five people yeah how are people surviving on on i mean you're paying for people on average 450 bucks a month to work for you full time yeah including myself that's what i earn that's what i keep for myself as well where are these people where are they living in the world okay got it so this is trying to make sense right so so if you're living in pakistan you pay them 400 bucks 500 bucks a month where are you living in pakistan i'm in you're also in pakistan got it our living costs are really really low um fair enough the the question then we'll we'll that people will bring up will say well how high quality product can you build with engineers who can only command a 400 a month salary many people would say well maybe they're not great engineers okay then that would go to me i'm the cto i built 99 of the core tech behind this product uh we are comparable to we're almost comparable to hrs and sem rush judging by the reviews that i get by the customers themselves we compare our data with airdrops and semrush we've been featured in hubspot just recently organically completely organic and then why then why do you have then why do you have to do gimmicky lifetime deals to bring in upfront cash why don't just you just close people on monthly recurring revenue or annual upfront cash payments this core technology took time to build and do everything like we finished building our technology back in uh november 2020 so all that time what do we do how do we survive that that was main question all of my emails all of my marketing tactics just failed as soon as code had hit everybody just went into silent mode nobody wanted uh recurring uh subscriptions to seo tools that would like just offer monitoring and keyword research and all those things they wanted to get out of all those recurring expenses it was a very tough time for everybody and how do you do 100 equity in the business yeah okay so what about like osama khan and usmangani and siddharth joffrey on your website you don't give them any equity okay interesting um so what's the next step i mean how do you scale this how do you scale monthly recurring revenue starting february 1st we started working on our mrr cold out cold emails outreach marketing reddit uh advertising new website everything we're working across the board on every single thing that we ignored for the last year my team was hired around six months ago until then i was i was just flying solo okay so how are you going to get a thousand customers paying 70 a month do you think reddit threads are going to do the trick uh it's a starting point it's better than not i'm not doing anything at all uh the first thing that i'm going to do is reach out to all the business owners that have been contacting me during the lifetime deal during the lifetime deal that they did not want access to those lifetime deals at the moment they were just considering it about...