How Buzzbuilderpro CEO Jake Atwood grew Buzzbuilderpro to $6M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Jake out of what he's the founder and CEO of buzz builder he's also an author and speak keynote speaker who's focused on helping companies discover new ways to attract customers and grow their business he enjoys disrupting the status quo and his ebooks and blogs have been read by more than 500,000 people worldwide Jake are you ready to take it to the top I almost have some fun all right what is buzz builder and how do you make money buzz builder is a tool for sales reps that helps them find new customers so for both entrepreneurs and sales people who don't like to cold-call don't like to prospect are frustrated chasing leads it uses a combination of cold email campaigns and website analytics to help you locate the customers that want to buy from you and then it helps you connect with them and it's just like okay I want to connect with the head of a headed or Forbes type in for calm and you'll spit out all the emails on that domain that and then we help you identify people based on certain trigger events that might have a higher likelihood of meeting your products so if you're a recruiter we can find companies through certain search tools that are currently hiring for positions on indeed.com that you can fill and then we'll give you their contact information and then help you with messaging through various email campaigns to reach out to them and connect and then start the conversation interesting and what's your revenue model is it pure place asks it is per seat and it's basically a recurring revenue model front a monthly basis okay I don't average what do people pay per seat average is about a hundred and fifteen dollars per seat and about fifty one percent of our user base are solo entrepreneurs the other fifty forty nine percent are our small and mid-sized sales teams that's great and how many how many them are you serving today in terms of paid customers we've got about 350 companies plus another 350 or so entrepreneurs okay and so give me that in terms of seats total seats is just over about 1500 seats today got it okay well some pretty healthy business now I mean can I take the 115 times 1500 seats and generally back into them up through current revenue of about a hundred seventy grand or is that not accurate not quite because we we can't publish our exact revenues today because we were after some VC but you know we've got some folks who grandfathered and obviously from several years ago a lower price I'd lower price points of course yeah are you generally can we generally say you're north of a hundred grand a month we're close okay yeah you'll break it this month yes come on Jake yes or no you're gonna bring this mess with you all right break it this month yeah next month in the month after it's good how do you how do you use some of your kind of ebooks and your public persona to drive growth so we've created ebooks around this certain buyer personas while we've actually mapped a lot of our customers to certain buyer personas using a tool called crystal nose and it basically can scan people's social comments their LinkedIn profile and give you a disc personality for each person you're selling to or this Klein allottee so a disc personality profile basically it measures people's personality in four quadrants without going into detail are you more of a get it done just to the point type of person any more of a analytical person are you more of a social person and based on that profile we know number one were to find them and then number two how to communicate with them most importantly interesting what are you growing out right now you're over here so we've got grown by 300% in the last three years so just over you know a hundred percent a year you're over here okay got it so if you're doing around a hundred grand today what you're doing fifty grand twelve months ago and 25 grand twelve months before that about that yeah I mean that's that's that's pretty darn good growth yeah yeah and it's all been from cashflow and it's all been just grinded it out to now we're at the point we're gonna go up to some venture capital why are you boot strapped right now we are boot strapped and you know it's it's not a good thing to be under capitalized and now we've got to the point where we've got the sales model figured out the business model figured out it's time to pour some gas on the fire it's churn under control churn is under control could always be better of course right it is it it's it's roughly we've got about a seventy-five percent retention rate where when you're talking to entrepreneurs and sales reps that's actually much higher than average yeah so you're turning about 2% of your logos every month yeah interesting and why are they turning a number of reasons I mean there's the obvious reason such as I haven't used the tool or my business has changed you know there are times when an entrepreneur might start the program and we give them all their help in the world but you know certain people I think just have a tough time adopting new technologies new ways of thinking mm-hmm and what is you know a lot of people they look at onboarding and churn that they've identified a few things they know they have to get a new signup to do to be sticky what is the one thing you know you've got to get a new buzz builder user to do so they stick the most important thing is they they need to create their first campaign within the first seven days and we know if they built their first campaign the rest is gravy and we help with everything we help with the messaging with templates to make sure they've got their first campaign built and then there's all sorts of places they can grab contact list from so they can then load those in and so the first campaign out so ideally we like to see them launch their first campaign within seven days and what's your team look like today and what percent you know how many people on your team are dedicated to that onboarding so we've got two people dedicated to onboarding we've got a client success manager that handles a lot of the training we've also automated a lot of the training so we do weekly public training sessions we've got a whole video library we've got what's called video or buzz builder University and we launched that recently where it's not just the technical training but what we learned that people need and the number one reason they were failing with a tool like buzz builder just failing to implement it is because they lacked a process and especially a lot of entrepreneurs they really don't have a cohesive sales process and so that was the goal is to help them understand okay not just the content but when do I launch a campaign how many people how do I follow up effectively how do I work through the objections I'm hearing and so forth so what's your total team size today so we've got ten people on the team that are dedicated employees then a number of contractors and and folks we outsource to Dada and year one when do you launch we launched officially the beta went on for a few years actually I was a consultant in 2008 we launched the beta and we officially launched the product four years ago okay got a suit a lunch know what 2013 yeah so what the hell happens between 2008 and 2013 that's like six years yeah so I was a consultant basically I was building the product for myself initially and it was an idea I was a product under the umbrella of a company called ovation and I was a consultant I'd go out and I do a sales consulting job coach them on how to generate leads more effectively and one day I had the idea for the software and I just hired a developer to kind of toy with it and we kind of just kept working on and tweaking it over the years I mean put it in front of a few clients and say okay why do you like it what do you like what don't you like and I really built it through input from clients I learned early on the idea of build it and they will come only works in field of dreams so we wanted to build a product that had a lot of input from clients and then there came the day when I knew that I couldn't be doing the consulting and buzz builder so in 2013 is when I closed on ovation as a consulting business I heard my first official intro we had a consulting business done before you shut it down um I was at about Percy about 350 a year okay and consulting you know that it was just me I was a solo consultant he basically took that to your face that's how you're given up yeah and you know it was a leap I it's always one step back before he can take two steps forward it seems like so now today in terms of getting new customers what's your CAC what do you spending to acquire these guys not much you know the thing is we drink our own kool-aid our cost of acquisition is less than $200 per client okay and because eat know that's per customer so that would be it's it's a little less for going after solo entrepreneurs is more automated our cost for acquisition for entrepreneurs typically right now is less than hundred and fifty dollars and you said you said it's split 50-50 right so 50% of your of your users you which you have let's see fifteen hundred of our solo folks and in the rest are fifty kind of enterprises that pay what could be like four or five seats on average each for it's actually that yeah four to five seats on average last year as a month yeah so last year average customer between multiuser and solos was forty nine hundred dollars ideal annualized yeah yeah so you're getting if...