How Closet Tools CEO Jordan O'Connor grew Closet Tools to $756.5K revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is jordan o'connor he was born and raised in rural western new york he went to engineering school and worked as an electrical engineer for seven years he started closet tools that's closets dot tools as a way to pay down student loans and transition to full-time founder when it made more than double uh what he made at his full-time job all right jordan you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right how much in debt were you coming out of college uh so combined with my wife is about 200k wow that's incred and what did you study was it electrical engineering yeah so i went for electrical engineering she went for health science but my mine was mostly about 150 i did i loaned out everything housing everything and you know and didn't have any help there so it was 100 loans that paid through college that's i mean so so i mean what are you thinking as you graduate is it a scary feeling were you already married were you already with your wife at that point or your girlfriend yeah so i pretty much got married uh about six months after i graduated and it you know of course the six six months is right about when the loans start being due and uh so i was thinking once i once the payment started coming in and it was like you know 1500 bucks a month or something like that and that was on like the low end that's like pushing out like 30 years or something uh i was like wow this is not really what i signed up for uh put the budget pretty tight for sure and so how did you i mean you took a full-time job though out of college right yup yeah so i transitioned i did a like an internship out of college and i transitioned right into full-time employment um and my wife she actually got pregnant pretty early in her marriage so she just stayed home with the kids so it was just a single income so how old are you today so i'm 28. and you graduated what year uh 2015. so okay so so you said you did electro engineering for seven years so you were already doing this when you were still in college yeah exactly yeah it was the same job but just different label on it basically yep i i see got it so sorry and you said you're 20 how about 20 what today 28 28 today okay interesting and and graduated five years ago so um when did you i mean help me think through the transition of like you're balancing your expenses your student loan debt pregnant wife you have a job right which you know you know you know them well because you already work for them in college i mean what were they what were they paying you a full-time salary right out of college um i think i started at like 72k something like that cost of living is really low here so the salaries are pretty low where are you um uh close to rochester new york um yep so you know it for the area that's pretty average pay um especially starting out just getting to college and stuff like that but um you know the the net take-home pays like you know 4200 a month or something like that um and so between my debt and my wife's debt it was like almost half of our income was going to student loans which was kind of crazy and she wasn't working right because you have the kid right yeah exactly yeah crazy okay so what is closet tools doing when did you launch it so i started that uh just over two years ago it's an interesting story so i actually started it for my wife so she actually started selling clothes on poshmark just as a way to get some additional income and she was doing a lot of manual tasks the way that poshmark's set up you have to share your items and you have to engage with other users and stuff like that and she was spending a lot of time doing that and i looked at it i was like i feel like i can automate that and i was just in the middle of learning some web development stuff and you know learning javascript and so i wrote a little script it automated a few things she was using it her closet was doing really well with it and i wrote a blog post about it uh on my personal blog and then it was maybe a few months later google picked up on it i started ranking in some uh seo for some seo terms and i started getting emails from people saying like you know can i use this like what does it do how does it work um and so that was kind of in the back of my mind for almost a whole year uh before i even started closet tools um i i kind of had that validation of like people want this thing um and and so that's kind of how it got started what how were they finding on google like what keywords were they searching uh so i had written like a like kind of a short blog post like this is a poshmark you know automation script so anybody that's searching that right like poshmark automation um poshmark bot those types of things my my post started coming up in those search results yeah you rank you have one article that brings in most of your organic traffic it's at closet dot tools forward slash poshmark hyphen bot and you rank number one for poshmark sharebot poshmark bots poshmark poshmark algorithm uh and these bring you several hundred clicks per month so this is this was how you got your first customers then um no well so i mean that's today right uh two you know two years ago i i bought the domain right so you don't have all that traffic coming in um how much was that i mean it was just a you know it was like 12 bucks a year or something like that it would you know it's nothing crazy but my initial traffic actually came from reddit there's a poshmark subreddit and they were pretty lacks back then about poshmark bots and stuff like that so i actually was like hey i made this thing uh give me your email and i'll give you the the beta script for free and then you give me feedback and then so i did that and i got about 150 sign ups uh for the free one and then um i took uh about two months and kind of wrapped it around a sas package so you know i did billing and stuff like that and made an actual gui for it and um and then i flipped it on them and sold it for 30 bucks a month and that's and i got i think 10 10 customers the first day of the 150. yep that's amazing how many customers today uh just just about a thousand now wow okay and what are they are still still paying about 30 bucks a month each yeah i i haven't changed the price i priced it high early it was definitely like looking back i never would have charged that but i know like sas advice all along is like charge way more than you think it should be um so i did that i honestly should increase the price a lot today there's a couple features i came out with recently where people are making hundreds of dollars a day using it so i certainly could increase prices but people like that it's you know reasonably priced so so mm-hmm and and so a thousand paying 30 bucks doing about 30 000 bucks a month right now in revenue yeah just about i mean i have annual subscriptions it's 250 a year so i'm at like 28k yeah i mean still impressive and significantly high what is that annually that is about 360 000 annually or about six times your full-time electrical engineering salary out of college yeah yeah uh yeah trust me it's it's kind of crazy and it's been interesting because it's been so uh not slow but just like consistent um and it's because of the seo so that's one thing i kind of wanted to talk about is like how seo has been a main traffic driver um there's a real big stigma against poshmark bots on poshmark a lot of people are against them because it's you know it's automation it's kind of like cheating right um and so if you try to advertise on social media you get eaten up these people are in the comments like this is garbage like you're a bot like nobody likes you but by ranking on seo you're just getting the people that are looking for the thing that you're already offering and so these are the people that are you know incognito mode like oh i want a poshmark but you know and so by ranking for all those terms that's you know that's that's how i've been consistently able to add the right people to the tool and so it's just been growing from there you've also written great pieces like you know postmark selling tips post mark tips tips for selling on poshmark and these do well for you as well yep yeah and so i had studied a lot of seo things um you know years ago and so i knew exactly how to rank for specific keywords and of course nobody else is writing for these things so you know it was very easy to rank for them but i also did a good job to make sure that i was writing the best content so i wouldn't get outranked by some other competitors or anything like that yeah that's right i mean you targeted the volume on all these keywords they're all under 600 searches per month but because you rank number like one or two or three for all of them you're getting like 80 90 clicks like exactly on each of them um and these are long i mean i'm on one of the articles right now i mean i can tell this takes a long time to write nothing sexy or fancy but it's clear there's h1 tags it's clear the h1 tags are...