How Brightlocal CEO Myles Anderson grew Brightlocal to $32.9M revenue and 6.8K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Miles Anderson he's the founder and CEO of a company called bright local he's worked in the local search industry since 2009 has been and has been a contributor to the local search ranking factors steady he's written a regular column for search engine land and spoken and SEO conferences in both the US and the UK Myles are you ready to take it to the top yeah sure all right tell us about bright local what are you doing how do you make money if the bright local is a SMBs platform we help digital marketers and local businesses and essentially understand how they're performing online and how they can improve their visibility so they can win customers the thing that is kind of like the operator niche of my condom niche that is essentially in sort of physical physical sort of space so we operate a lot in terms of businesses that want to have physical interactions with customers so anything we would give them a call they might walk into the door or they have some sort of physical relationship those are the customers as opposed to let's say a credit card cop like American Express where they're sort of causal relationship is essentially pretty kind of virtual certificate businesses that our customers would work with our solicitors plumbers builders accountants you know that's not necessary small businesses you know kind of single sort of location local businesses it could be large sort of you know kind of enterprise scale businesses like Home Depot for example that well a an enterprise scale business but with 2,000 local kind of locations where they interact that kind of customers kind of walking through the door so our platform is primarily used by marketers either working from selves working agencies or wedding in-house and lot of location businesses and we provide them with kind of data analytics and insight so they know how they can essentially drive more physical customer interactions and one of these customers paying on average per month for that kind of product set I mean we ran SMB platform primary or there we do scale up to kind of enterprise so we've kind of got councils that kind of loosely forward to kind of two brackets we've got customers you can sign up self-serve and use our standard plans and then we have this kind of enterprise customers who we negotiate particular deals with based on what their particular need is we've got around three and a half thousand kind of active kind of subscription-based customers are the mo probably think of a kind of ablative mud for me you know kind of our people customer is around $100 okay a hundred bucks per month yeah okay something can I take that time sorry if I've heard you guys are doing about 350 grand a month right now a lot of but we did 550 grand we also have a service complaint to our businesses well I see the pure place ass business last month though which was that about 350 okay that's great where does the self cert of the professional services side come in are those like setup fees and things like that no we have about 60 of our revenue is 30% is a service base we have a big operation of the Philippines over 85 people over there and they do a very very specific service to our particular niche which is basically helping local businesses get more than speed visibility online by managing their presence on sites like Yelp for example or kind of Google my business and so we kind of deliver that to the service its kind of productize in a way we've put a mole antenna so the software tools that support these sort of physical solution that guys over there kind of deliver but people buy that from us because it's an essential kind of component you're getting good online visibility if you're a kind of local business it's also quite time-consuming and it's quite quite mundane people really like to kind of outsource that to us I kind of get it off that plate and together we can do that in a very efficient method and miles give me a sense of growth so just on this side of things so 350 today per month what were yet a year ago and call it June 2017 oh wow okay that's good so call it what 275 ish something like that about a year ago yeah yeah we've been in business since 2009 you know we were kind of bootstrap but never taken outside funding your draft we're not boost up anymore I mean depends what you've got a definition of sort of bootstrapping is and we're kind of cost-conscious as all kind of good business it should be but you know we have money in the bank that we're able to kind of make the best as we need to make to kind of grow the platform kind of grow the team to kind of support it well so how much have you raised miles we have read lately okay wait so then your boots you usually it's pretty black like your your your bootstrap turvy or you so you are still bootstrapped well my definition abuse apt is that your kind of occur across cultures you can't afford to make significant vessels to cut a great business oh yeah but even company sort of race capital are still gonna be cost conscious they're not just gonna go flush you down the toilet some do but not all do right so so I mean have you raised traditional capital ever you not raise capital okay got it so you put in your own you guys have put in your own capital the founders to put in their own capital to grow the thing yeah we've been profitable since 2012 compared to you just been reinvesting the profits back in the business and stuff yeah that makes great sense okay good and then give me a sense of where work well I mean what were you doing in 2009 how'd you get the idea actually I was I was working for a kind of large sort of another come last understand put up but sort of more kind of consumer rather than sort of business and I just got kind of may have done them and at the time an economy kids and I was thinking you know what this is a really painful experience and not one that I want to go through again and I kind of looked my kids in the eye on Thor I used to be something that gives me kind of security and control and also some of they'll be proud kind of down the line and so I said sort of start laying in business I teamed up my business partner you know he's a kind of very long in the tooth sort of web developer and we start looking around kind of opportunities we collaborated on a local March project before I kind of liked the the kind of industry like the idea about helping local businesses we're really struggling to understand how to use the internet to acquire new customers a lot of those friends of mine were in various sort of businesses from building down in pubs and bars and restaurants for example I really got to focus it on offline to the marketing really didn't understand online and struggling to get their heads around it so there's an opportunity here but given up and a background in my part of Madison web development we decided to pretty kind of quickly and sort of you know sort of agency side what we were doing start going build our own tools looked around there was nothing within the kind of marketplace also spoke to credit contemporaries of ours who are struggling to come and get the data they needed to kind of really grow and so that's what we can start adopting to come at the product side of what we do and then about for about a year into kind of starting the business it became you know kind of 110 focused on the product when did you sign your first customer how long after you quit your job and you've started writing code did you did a ticket assign them you started off actually with that with a priest with a free tool that was designed as a sort of marketing device and a link builder back of the day sort of thing that actually would be considered to kind of you know unacceptable spamming these days but worked worked back then and so you probably it really pretty like that but six months and that allowed us to build a very large list of potentially interested so customers I think we've got our first revenue in the door probably in kind of mid 2010 from the kind of product side and we landed our first significant customer maybe significantly someone who's going to pay us more than a thousand dollars a month probably around the start of 2011 we were very very kind of bootstrap I actually a day job for the first neither the first two years of running this and I used to kind of run by local in the evenings and on the weekends I was working at the crazy kind of 80 hour week do my day job from approach all the income I had from my day job into the business to know Paley and expanding to the field of freelancers and sort of freelancers and developers to come sort of filled with product and so Myles what do the economics look like today churn is critical in this kind of space what's your turn that's gross logo churn per month yeah okay and and that's actually fairly low for this kind of this kind of space SMB space what do you what do you spend to acquire these customers what's your cat coming up so marketing is around 10% of our kinda costs it's around $27,000 at the moment only about 10% of that is spent on paid marketing the residence or salary so a lot of it some kind of content marketing but we probably spend about about a hundred and fifty dollars per acquisition and are you know are kind of LTV is yeah it varies on the kind of type of customer and whether they go through to the service side of what we do but it's kind of north of a thousand dollars got it so if you're spending...