How Clearvoice CEO Joe Griffin grew to $51.7M revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is Joe Griffin he's the CEO of a company called clearvoice which is a Content marketing platform and talent Network that he co-founded in 2013 he served in executive roles at web.com and I Crossing and has founded multiple companies he's employed more than 500 SEO social media and content marketing experts over his career and actively speaks and writes for major media Outlets Joe are you ready to take us to the top yes sir good what' you do at web what' you do at web.com real quick yeah so I uh actually sold web.com come a um SEO agency back in 2007 okay were you there with herun from um oh shoot what was his company uh do you know harun when he he started he he sold his company to uh to to those guys for like 167 million is it Network Solutions or was it register.com oh gosh I don't oh uh This is Gonna bug me it was a website builder a dragon drop website I can't remember anyways you don't know him obviously but so you you sold your agency to them and then did you stay with him at all or went on your next thing yeah did the did the kind of earnout thing with them um was a great experience and those guys are you know worldclass guys love them to death did you get the full earnout I got about 90% of it yep why did the 10% not happen tell us where earn outs go down the tubes yeah because you know you're got to typically do two three years and so I was supposed to do two years I got about 18 months of the way in and I gotta go and I had the performance the performance was there like I was I was way over performance which is how W how was able to kind of negotiate to to get more than 75% so they were really gracious and and taking care of me in that way but yeah that entrepreneurial Spirit man I just I couldn't I couldn't do it man I love those guys to death but it was hard for me all right clear voice what's it do and how you make money yeah so clear voice is a is a talent network uh and a Content workflow platform for Brands and agencies so we're basically powering you know blogs and um lead lead lead generation content marketing automation content so like white papers and emails really the content behind marketing it's you know content marketing uh um and so a lot of direct to Brand work but agencies are a very big segment for us and so a lot of times we're the back office the content and creative back office for agencies and it's because a lot of this is you know going freelance freelance economy we're trying to be there Joe so sorry I don't understand how does content tie into talent management I don't understand that right so when we think about so our definition of talent is writers editors designers right so kind of a and and the reason why I don't use the word Marketplace it is a Marketplace but it's not an Open Marketplace like upwork or something like that you compete with scripted scripted is a Project based Marketplace designed for small businesses so they're really good at turning out high quality $100 articles things like that um we are more of a talent partner so while our our um our Freelancers are going to be still creating articles and white papers ebooks a lot of the same stuff it's a little bit more of an extension of your brand type approach um so a lot more in-depth workflow uh letting the brands upload their brand guidelines you know their their values the mission statement there's a lot it's a much tighter workflow yep the talent the talent in your Marketplace are they staying as when a company starts working with them do they stay as contractors or they actually go on the Bal the p&l of the company that's hiring them they as contractors but that's exactly right there this is these are more long-term engagements okay I see got it so I should think of I should of scripted as a um lower price sry sorry a lower priced less integrated version of clear voice correct okay interesting um and the market it's good for both of us right it's the market needs both of those Solutions yeah why didn't you buy them they just sold um that's a good question I don't know if we're ready for that type of activity yet I think we're get I think we're we're working on it but I don't know if we ready for that one so I want to get more of the backstory here but let me just hone in real quick to understand price differences because it'll basically reflect on the kinds of customers you're serving I mean are we talking on average 20 bucks a month 20 grand a month 2 million a year average contract value for you is what yeah so we're going to be you know 20 plus thousand a year type contract value uh obviously it ranges could be could be smaller than that could be a lot bigger than that yep but 20 plus a year in terms of the any kind of software fees plus any kind of content fees I was gonna say so let's say I pay you 20 grand a year you basically saying you're going to get three 1500w articles per month from these two writers and that's going to go for the next 12 months yeah exactly interesting ex yeah and you have a lot of flexibility you're not stuck to that so you but that we would call that a Content plan but that's exactly right interesting okay take me back uh when did you launch well you launched in 2013 right yeah 2013 and where was your head at that point was that right after you negotiated the earn out at web yeah this was a few years later so uh my business partner Jay Swanson and I we started a company called I acquire digital marketing agency in 2009 and had a lot of fun doing that did a lot of Professional Services work um but obviously you know at the same time we had a really high quality team of Engineers that we were we had inside the agency and a lot of the technology we were building was to be used just for our agency and we kind of got to a place where we felt like we were just dumping money down the drain so we made a really big decision to stop being an agency and really move more into a platform business interesting okay so when you say okay so you move to a platform business then what do you do with that did you sell that company did it shut down yeah so we we were able to Leverage The assets of iire to help fuel the development of clear voice we were able to oh yeah we were able to sell some so we basically sold some it was really an asset kind of play where some assets were sold some assets were retained yeah but you morphed in terms of your team at the agency you morphed that into what is today clear voice correct okay clean cap table or have you raised a bunch of capital uh we we yeah we have some investors got a couple institutional investors ra a raised a seed round uh and then also raised a kind of a small series EG okay so total in the company is how much to date so far we've raised about four million okay and and any lessons you've kind of kind of taken from that so far I mean is this your first company raising Capital do you regret it is it panning out how you expected I think it's good I think um I've learned I learned a lot about raising capital I had I had experience in overall m&a activity mostly with like selling companies or with debt so raising through Venture Capital was a newer experience for me no personal guarantees that's nice right yeah that's a that's a positive yeah yeah I mean I learned a lot about just telling the story um the things that are important obviously to the Venture community and you know that's a I guess the only downside to that is that's another job you know there's a lot of things you have to do as an entrepreneur build a business that's another job you're going to take on so if you make that decision you just have to be prepared to make that happen what's your team look like today how many people yes so we've got about 25 people uh headquartered in Phoenix is everyone there Mo mostly yeah we've got some people in uh California Minnesota Michigan um but primarily Phoenix and then we also heavily take advantage of our freelance Network so a lot of our marketing is powered by our freelance writers our freelance editors strategist designers we really heavily utilize that team how many Freelancers in the past 12 months have made at least 100 bucks from you oh I would say a thousand plus okay is that that like I'm I'm trying to get at is that one of the key metrics you look at what are like the two key metrics you look at yeah we look at um we do care obviously we care a lot about how much our Freelancers are making and we have to be careful not to over have an over Supply because we end up with a case where people aren't getting work so what we care about is making sure we're matching the right Talent with the right customer uh making sure that we we like to set that stage for ongoing work when we talk about like a Content plan we want them to work together you know all the time that's what differentiates us from a Project based Marketplace so that's probably the biggest measurement of success is are these people working together they working together consistently are they happy uh and obviously we're going to be able to support both sides of that process just as things change as things evolve make sure we continue to serve both parties so thousands of Freelancers take me to the other side of the marketplace how many customers have you scaled to today yeah we got about 150 customers okay so you're you're still at the point where you can afford to put pretty high touch on these folks you're not like in the you know tens of thousands right corre um interesting what so the team breakdown the 25 people how many of those are like account folks for onboarding things like that yeah we've got about four people on the account side uh about eight Engineers a couple sales guys uh marketing team you know some GNA type folks eight Engineers surprises me for this kind of business is there is there a hard piece of tech behind this that's complex um yeah there's a couple so one of the piece the tech behind it's pretty complex is a a system we call Voice graph and so and I'll try to keep this try to keep this short but when we set out to really try to identify who all the talent was on the internet that produced this content because we wanted to basically be able to uh I guess selectively find you know the right talent for the right customers there's no place you can just I mean there's some influen or marketing databases and stuff like that but there's no good just list or source of who are all the who's the talent by category so what we did we built an infrastructure that goes out indexes all the major Publishers the top 250,000 Publishers we use some alms to figure out who wrote that content and they would generate portfolios for people and we're actually just about to launch that's a we have a that's kind of V1 V2 actually goes live in the next week which we're super excited about uh and we're trying to create the best portfolios for Freelancers on the internet okay so you'll real you'll scan for like Ron Miller and realize his Tech crunch articles do really well in terms of sharing settings things you can get publicly so you can't get page count I imagine but you can get like sharing signals things like that and then realize when you scrape the web he also writes or Business Insider and one other one you'll create a profile for him and then send him a random message that says hey someone wants to pay you 500 bucks write a 1,500 word article and that's how you try and get him on board that's a really good yeah that's a concise description of what we're doing interesting have 450,000 creators we've mapped and generated portfolios for the vast majority don't know they exist because we've kept them mostly not public yep but once we launch the V2 which again in next week we'll start to allow those in Google's index we'll start to allow those to be sharable and we'll generate a lot of Supply but we're then going to also work with because we we view Freelancers as business people um and we we're going to have we're going to work with them to help them you know get work and also send us customers we want to make this you know as circular as possible let's work together to connect Talent yep a $20,000 ACV comes out to I believe like 1,600 bucks a month multiplied by 150 customers puts you guys north of 240 250ish in Mr is that generally accurate yeah yeah you're in the right ballpark we're getting you know obviously we're we're trying to get close to that $5 million Mark we'll be there this year by end of year okay you think you'll hit it by the end of end of December yeah okay interesting yeah so 250 right now you're at about 3 million in AR so I mean yeah that's that's that's pretty good growth so have you are you doubling your over year right now that's the track run yep okay did you double over the past 12 months yes okay good so call it 100 110 something like that 13 months ago uh keep doubling and where's most of the growth coming from is it selling more content services to the same customer so increasing our po or is it getting new customers there's both increase in R Po from obviously just people you know saturating the product and you know using that Talent more but it's it's a lot of it you know it's mostly new customers it's it's really kind of half and half I mean there's a there's ongoing usage increases from those existing base the new customers and then the agency segment has stepped up a lot for us I mean as we continue to get good at that agency product it it's just it's a no-brainer for them because the thing they hate the most is hiring and firing right they have to be elastic to the needs of their new business their loss customers they're also dealing with the reality of a freelance World creative talents going freelance way over half of them right now are freelance they're dealing with that and their clients are discriminating more than ever clients demand that high quality content at the category level they know you know everyone can and consumers are smart we can smell crap content now and so the agencies are grappling with that we're a really great solution to come in provide that elasticity give them the subject matter experts they need and so that's been a good segment for us so a good way to measure you know how valuable you are is to look at churn tell me about churn in the business yeah so I mean so first of all we're really young and so it's hard for us to get our arms around what is lifetime value what we have been able to identify what where our you know key customer segments are where we can hit that you know kind of 100% retention number annually in terms of Revenue retention there's always going to be cases for us in the content marketing space in particular content is kind of a hard thing to do so there's cases where we're going to get customers that have really big Ambitions for the content they want to do and at the end of the day they're not able to execute on that for a variety of reasons right just it's hard to execute on content those are the types of customers that are going to churn out the ones that are able to consistently execute on that content those customers are getting good results we've really found that the the areas for us that have that high retention are going to be kind of the mid and large Enterprise Brands and then that that agency segment the small businesses are are tough because they've just got owner operators soci propri but Joe if you look if you look at the past 12 months though in terms of Revenue churn what is it I mean and by the way that will take into account small versus large accounts right someone churning who only pays you 10 bucks a month is not going to materially impact that versus someone paying you 100 Grand a year yeah so we're we're we're still trying to get our arms around Revenue turn a little bit because we do have all those different segments and like you said you kind of can kind of add it up but I would say my numbers AR my numbers are are not good enough to share at this point in terms of my understanding of Revenue CH and the reason why that is just to not totally try to dodge that one there I mean what do you think it is though Joe you have a back of the napkin but you're not confident in the inputs right now I think we're under you know we're under 20% that's pretty that's not bad yeah we you're you're three in you know year three in Commerce you know I think we'll you know we're going to get to that gross or net revenue turn that is yeah so add back when you add back your expansion Revenue that would be net does that 20% include the gains under 20% net under 20% got it that's Health 15% net yeah that's that's healthy and last yeah that's good it's a good I mean that's healthy that's not bad at all um last few economics question before we wrap up here uh CAC what are you spending to acquire these guys it depends on the segment um I could tell you that our our CAC to L our LTV lifetime value to CAC ratios are three plus in terms of our our ability to acquire but but what do you assume lifetime value is that's also back than appin kind of math but what do you assume it's definitely greater than right so we assume that the customer is going to stick around for four or five years at least so obviously if youve got um a customer spending $20,000 a year you're going to be in that you know 80 to $100,000 a year range so you know to acquire those customers we're under 20,000 you know to acquire those customers probably closer to 10 yep but you know one of the reasons why again I'm not trying to dodge those questions but most of our acquisition activity is not done through paid media it's done through organic and earn media and so you know the traditional way that you would measure those you know obviously I can just look at marketing cost and how many customers did you do acquire so that's pretty straightforward but we're really focused on the organic and on the earned media even on the earned right that's a little more complex because it's not like a Google ad spend kind of but you take you know you take you know salaries of all your writers right divided by how you know what you pay them per month divided by how many new customers per month and you can kind of back into it but those are healthy economics I mean right we know what our marketing and you know we know what our monthly marketing cost is we know customers we're requiring so we can obviously do that math but um I would just say that again like the way that we're approaching this is not through that traditional means so it's not like I'm running huge ad dollars and you know now we we've tested a lot of that we kind of know where where things don't work we kind of know what works a little bit better but what just works for us is good content marketing so that's where focused yep Joe let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's the last Business book you [Music] read I just read extensionalism extensionalism not extensionalism sorry what not extensionalism what is it called um I can't remember the name of it it's uh Greg essentialism sorry oh essentialism Greg Macau yes exactly number two it's a good book number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now I'm a big fan of what the HubSpot guys are doing y you know both dares and Brian hallan tend to be uh people I really look up to yep you're doing 3 million in AR right now if they offer you 3x AR do you sell the companies so N9 million bucks no no number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business it's a good one um I'll just put clear voice aside we'll put clear voice aside your own uh I would say um I really like sem rush I think it's a really great tool good yeah number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night I don't sacrifice in that area too much I'd say six and a half that's good and what's your situation Joe married single you have kids yeah married two kids two kiddos and how old are you I'm 36 all right last question what do you wish your 20year old self knew yeah I would I would say [Music] um just you know be be be able to take time off when you're transitioning whether it be between careers whether it's going from one project to another find some time to just take some time off like that's something I just I've never taken like a one month sabatical or like not worked for at no point in my life since I was you know 16 years old have I not had a job for more than two weeks you know and I wish I had done that and I had some some exits where I you know came and you know did it okay financially and you know I wish I'd said let me just take off two or three months and just take a step back and I just haven't done that I would tell myself to do that there you guys have between those transitions take some time go go to you know go to Bali for a month and hang out in the monkey forest and go work at the co-working spaces with the sugar filled coffee right all right there there you guys have it from Joe launch clear voice back in 2013 started as an agency which he kind of pivoted into what it is today again helping do content at scale with about 150 customers paying on average 20 grand per year that's ACV so doing about call it 200 250ish per month right now hoping to break that 5 million AR Mark by the end of the year growing over 100% year-over-year C LTV is really healthy paying less than 20 grand to acquire these customers who stay and are worth well over 80 grand to him so payback is also healthy at less than 12 months with his team of 25 based there in Phoenix Joe thank you for taking us to the top thanks aan