How Closem CEO Richard Miles grew Closem to $636.3K revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is richard miles he's a serial entrepreneur executive leader seasoned by global experience adaptive controls which sold to ingersoll rand he was vp of sales at polaroid and mag media and then founder of relaunch which he sold to an investor group he's author author of official software channel sales guidebook founder free software club ipo he's a non-profit exec ceo of big brother sister san francisco area very active guy but now i'm building a tool that helps you increase your sales at closeumapps.com that's close mapsmapps.com all right richard you ready to take us to the top sure all right so what tell us what the company does and maybe give an example of a customer that's using you today okay great so we built closum to uh to help especially small businesses solopreneurs entrepreneurs people who are providing services to people and are usually go from feast to famine they're hungry they go out and hustle get some business then they're busy servicing their clients then they're hungry again we wanted to build a tool that was simple easy to use that folks could automate the process of sales follow-up and keeping in contact with all their leads and prospects and customers and things like that um so that's what closum does simple easy to use tool it's a contact manager with an automated follow-up uh messaging platform and so what do customers on average pay to uses per month it's 99 bucks a month perfect simple to the point we love that when did you start building the platform do you remember what year you were at first line of code nothing like launching in the midst of a global pandemic 2020. yeah but actually launching the global pandemic was really cool because uh the pandemic taught us two things taught us how to get really good at zoom and it taught us how to use qr codes right those are both very true right so one of the things that closeum does is it lets you automate the process of sales follow there's a lot of tools that do that they send emails you know email autoresponders there's some that do sms some do sms and email we do sms email and voice and postal mail and that's one of the breakthrough things that's that's really elevated closing for us with our users is the ability to send postal mail with the same interface that you would type a an email or type in sms it's the same interface nothing new to learn no setup fees no minimums no hassle you want to send somebody a piece of postal mail you do it the advantage to postal mail these days is that your inbox is stuffed full and your goal is to get the inbox zero which means delete delete delete delete delete so the average lifespan of an email is 17 seconds so richard sorry just to just because we're short on time you your closing will also help customers send via an api direct physical mail to users absolutely where do you get the addresses from what's the database you sync to well it um it's the customer's database so they have to bring you the physical address if they don't have that you can't help them no okay how do you verify the addresses you're sending to is there a database you're comparing them all to the you know when your customer gives you a list it's our customer database so they have their list of of leads and that they're getting from their facebook lead ads or their lead funnels or their webinar registrations or whatever they're getting and so we have built into the system an email verification so it will you know richard i'm talking about the physical mail so how do you verify the physical addresses before they pay you to send it um we don't i mean if you have an address in that's bad it's not going to get delivered that that said there is an address lookup feature so i mean if you you're sending an address to some place that doesn't exist it won't get sent but if if it was supposed to go to 13 pan oak street and it went to 1301 there's nothing we can do about that oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview yeah yeah no no fair we ship magazines every month and so we are build per magazine shipped and i send via my linkedin ads i send all the addresses that people that purchase the physical address and then smart press who i use to print will tell me which ones are valid physical addresses versus not valid and i can i can go back and do a follow-up to get accurate addresses from people that smart personally were not real i'm sorry yeah we do have that we could have got it that's what i was asking we balance it yeah cool so you get going you write the first line of code in 2020 when you sign up your first customer into 2020. um okay so pretty quick two years ago yeah where did you pre-sell in those early days was it a facebook group or how did you get that customer oh so i have a partner uh her name is laura betterly she's been she and i have known each other since the 90s um she's a very innovative entrepreneur she developed a course called mobile local fusion she has about 30 000 um followers who bought her course and learned how to do local marketing and so we launched soft launched the product to her list i see and so how did people never understand they go soft launch affiliates how's it work so when you say partner what was it an affiliate agreement or she owned equity i don't know she's she and i are 50 50 partners in the in closing in closing i see okay so how many folks were on that list in 2020 the initial send i think it was about 30 000. and tell us how it did did great i mean we didn't help us we look we've bootstrapped this company so uh no richard details details remember open rate click-through rate number of sales from the first email uh from the first email i don't remember from the first time you remember the number of sales that was an exciting time uh yeah we did it well we we we gave it at a really steep discount i think we generated about uh i don't know uh somewhere around 25 30 000 in sales that's awesome from that one email yeah that's amazing okay so how do you go from a partner with distribution one shot sign of a bunch of people you're selling how many customers you have today uh over 1200 wow okay so yeah how do you go from that initial email to how are you scaling today how do you add customers so we uh we we did do a uh a lifetime deal on appsumo ah okay hold on are you counting those in that 1200 number uh yeah okay well they're not paying you anymore right so how many how many are like paying you on a monthly basis they do pay us because we have other other product other in in-app purchases that they that they that they buy you've up sold all the lifetime deals into a monthly record and and you know the appsumo users are a lot of people are just they buy it's fear of missing out they buy it they park it they don't use it they have a lot of active users from...