How Cliently CEO Spencer Farber grew Cliently to $457.6K revenue and 80 customers in 2023.

hello everybody my guest today is spencer farber he helps folks engage your prospects with hyper personalized emails video messages postcards handwritten notes and gifs he helps you create automated flows or send instant actions in under 60 seconds using his company cliently.com spencer are you ready to take the top let's do it all right ma'am so um so what's the company doing how do you guys make money so right now we are a sas plus what we call a credits model so what that means is we have a subscription service to automate the process of sending emails and video messages in what we call flows and then you can really put your flows on we like to say on steroids by essentially adding those pieces you just mentioned in our bio handwritten notes postcards and gift cards for an even bigger impact so you have a base price of 39 bucks per user per month it looks like and then you kind of sell credits now are these credits the 49 dollars per month for 50 extra credits can they use this credits across all their seats or it's under 50 bucks per seat on top of the 40. so you hit the nail on the head the first time so exactly they can mix and match these among different team members and they can also mix and match them with how they use those credits so instead of a lot of other applications where okay i have to buy 100 credits for leads or 100 credits for postcards etc you get to mix and match them as you need them and spread them among your team as they need them as well and what is a credit so i've seen these credit models fail miserably if it's not crystal clear what a credit is so i will say that we are still trying to find a way to better educate our clients on the credits because the long and short of it is that it's actually better for our clients that they can use them for all for everything but it also confuses the process so as far as the credits it is essentially a dollar to a dollar but we do give discounts based on the number they buy so if you see in our plans we've got ones that are 49 99 and 199 and also on annual as well where you're getting additional discounts up to 20 on your credit the more that you buy yeah it's it's um i mean it's confusing pretty confusing to me because like 50 bucks says like accept like 83 leads send 50 postcards and send 100 notes i'm like well where does 83 leads come from that seems like random as hell but what it like like is like one lead or one postcard or one hand written note or one gift card are all of those four things essentially one credit they're not so if you scroll down a little bit on that page that you're probably looking on yeah and i should probably have you come meet me so we can go for pricing and we can get it right but that's a part of that we've been struggling to make it crystal clear clear to our clients so at the end of the day we know it benefits them but we know it's a little confusing until we explain it so we need to find a better way on that for sure that's and yeah man see what i remember when i first hired you on i was so impressed because i'm going i need to do this stuff like i always try and have follow-up sequences for when i have ceos on my show and they go from like sending a magazine to a note to a an email to a postcard but it's it's very difficult to get it all working so yeah i love the tech but uh pricing holy mackerel you guys probably run experiments every every two weeks on this thing we're getting there we're getting there i think what we're probably going to do in the near future is just have our pricing plans 39 49 as we add new features and then let our clients buy bolt on credits however they want yeah so it's not necessarily attached to the plan but yeah it's something that's still a work in progress okay so let's not go down to every cohort here so simplify this for me on average what's the customer who pays you what are they paying you per month all in 200 bucks right now so we and that's another point that i want to segue to is that we're specifically working with small businesses we're really getting into the same space as let's say a sales loft or an outreach and while they focus specifically on salesforce type of clients we want to focus on clients in pipe drive space maybe hub hubspot as well because we have extremely tight integrations that allow you to engage clients directly from the interface within the pipedrive crm as well as being able to see where they are on the flow being able to edit a flow which makes that really interesting and so we want to help small businesses that's really where we want to focus we almost want to be the outreach or sales loft for businesses that are you know in the smb space okay interesting so 200 bucks a month and then put this stuff on a timeline for me when you launch okay so we've gone on a few pivots we've launched you know all the way back in i don't know may 2016 uh we had issues with our tech people loved what we were doing right away but we just couldn't get the implementation right we had a new cto finally come on in early 2018. we've spent the last 10 or 11 months literally building rebuilding the back end you're talking about huey right i'm talking about you yeah yeah yep um we've spent really the last 10 11 months rebuilding the back end of our product the things that no clients can see it's not sexy it doesn't feel like we've done anything but now we have a stable app that really works and with that came some new funding from active capital and that allowed us to get to the point where we've basically started to sell our product again as of march my background is in sales it's in marketing so i've been chomping at the bit for a year uh and finally over the last two months we've had the opportunity to put our product out there uh to a wide audience again and and remind everyone so how much have you raised to date and how how much is the last round from active so the last round from active was five hundred thousand dollars uh and to date we've raised about a million dollars it's come in little ebbs and flows but overall it's we've converted about a million dollars okay very good and i should probably disclose this i don't i don't research legal all the time but i'm i am an lp in active capital so by nature i guess i am a investor and client it's funny i always tell pat i'm like pat listen spencer is like killer sales guy the tech is interesting but the pricing is so freaking confusing like just figure out a way to figure a way to help them simplify simplify simplify um so so it sounds like you're doing that which is nice what so now that the tech is rocking and rolling are you doing i mean is it a high-touch sale on a 200 per month plan it depends on the client so we have two different types of clients right now that we figured out one is very very small businesses that need everything that we do including the lead database that we have so they can literally create some lead generation all the way from finding the contact to throwing into one of our funnels those are a little bit more high touch the other side we have clients that are those 10 15 20 user accounts those are not as high touch because you know they understand sas they have the leads already it's just having something that interacts with in this case hubspot which are the three that we tightly integrate with interesting okay and then since 2016 today how many customers are you now working with so i don't even want to talk about 2016 or 2017 i will talk about what we have going forward in 2019 uh we've added about 50 new clients in the last two and a half months and we've you know basically quadrupled our growth in the last two and a half months because we were literally in a uh just in a hibernation stat for about six months because what activecapital came in and did is they said look we know you guys have a great uh vision but you need to get the product right and so it gave us a chance to stop really pushing our product to the market get the product right which is where we were as of march 1st 2019. okay and so how many customers today are using you uh we have about 80. okay about 80 good okay good yes you've added 50 the past two months up you know 80 total that tells you a lot uh very good now can i take 80 times 200 bucks a month you're doing 16 grand a month right now in revenue we've got a couple outliers out there so we're actually at about 26 26 k right now fair enough yeah yeah the rpoo question is always tricky because it really is an average across your base but you typically do see outliers right you know higher or lower right we have a couple literally i think two in there i removed those when we talked about our mrr because it just they're good but they throw it out of whack yeah okay so about 20 you said 26 per month right now and then help me understand growth so like a year ago where were you so a year ago we were at probably you know 60 or 70 or 80k even but it was a big portion of that was services yeah yeah just give me the sash just give me the sass i mean it's sas if you go back to that period i'd have to look...