How Consumer Fusion CEO Brynn Gibbs grew Consumer Fusion to $10.1M revenue and 3K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is bryn gibbs she's the founder and chief executive officer of consumer fusion founded in 2013 after she began helping close family friends with fake negative review removal for their businesses brent you ready to take us to the top sure thanks for having me today very frustrating it's like that person that just hates you so they're gonna get back to you by posting like this fake bad online review you help them get rid of that huh exactly so consumer fusion specialty niche in the reputation management space is identifying and helping remove inappropriate illegitimate negative reviews and photos across different directory review sites and social media platforms i love this okay so who is paying your is it companies paying you or is it individuals paying you good question so um our clientele is made up of smbs and also we're heavy in the franchising space so brands will hire us to represent their whole system as a whole i see what are people paying on average to use as tech you know it depends because people have different review volume you have some businesses who get 20 reviews a year and then you have some who get 20 a day so it depends on the review volume but on average i would say our price point is like 299 a month per location for smbs and then brands of course the pricing is different because it's representing a whole brand what's the largest customer pay you per year don't name them obviously but the biggest contract um about 120 000 a year wow okay and so how many reviews and locations are you managing there you know they actually do not have a high volume of reviews but for their industry a negative review is so impactful that they they have stats on how much money a negative review costs their um system overall and the lifespan of one negative review can impact their franchise location up to 300 000 so they they definitely pay top dollar but it is worth every penny for them and put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the business 2013. okay and how did you get those first you know 10 20 customers so i kind of fell into this on accident i was helping a close family friend who's now a retired dentist this was when yelp and google reviews kind of just became popular and he was attacked online by um a vindictive x employee so his new patient drop-off numbers were down for several months and someone finally brought this to his attention and i offered to help him clean it up and that turned into introductions to people in his local rotary group it was a plastic surgeon and attorney and who were dealing with similar situations but with like a competitor so from there it just was kind of personal referrals recommendations and it was a month-to-month continuing service so it just kind of snowballed and grew from there how much revenue sucks consulting revenue did you do in 2013 do you remember oh gosh i mean it was pretty small but i want to say maybe around like it was under 100 000 but was the tipping i was also doing it myself too yeah when did you realize oh my gosh instead of doing this as a service i should hire a developer and start building technology here well so for us mrr is everything and i was just seeing the long-term picture and realizing okay if i want to continue growing the way that we are i need to have a platform a for my back end but also for my customers to use and i always had the vision of enterprise level so like how brands can manage multiple locations at once so it was pretty quick at the starting point where i knew i needed software and i haven't had any outside investments so we're bootstrapped and it's definitely been i've needed to be patient because it's evolved over time and the software has continued to improve year after year but i would say within the first year and a half i knew that i needed to make moves quickly and how many customers today so because we are enfranchising and like one brand could have hundreds of locations i can't give you like an exact amount but we have several thousand users on the platform between smb and franchising how many i guess the right question like let's just be specific like how many unique brands are using a platform ignore a number of locations or stores but how many brands so i would say there's about 40 brands and then the rest are um smbs i see it i i see um i guess give me can you name one of the brands the name of the smb so we understand the difference yeah so college hunks hauling junk is one of our um brands in the franchising space and then an smb is anything from a local attorney dentist plastic surgeon auto repair we're in all verticals okay so how many smbs you know homes hauling junk is in your 40 brands how many smbs use it um about 3 000. oh wow okay guys so you've got like 3040 but paying customers effectively yeah can i take that three thousand number times that 300 a month price point to back into your mrr which would be like a million a month so no it because they're not all at that pricing okay so that's not an average yeah well but if that's an average that would be average across what if it's not an average across of 3 000. well so that would be average for the smbs but not necessarily in the franchising space okay uh but you just mentioned those 3 000 smbs that are paying right yes so can i take that 3 000 smbs times the 299 a month price point is that is that the right average for those smbs you know what no it's not if i'm being honest it's not what would you so so what is mri today we can go backwards from there um i i prefer not to get into those specifics if that's okay but we're profitable and bootstrapped okay uh can you give me a range if you're not comfortable sharing a specific like under a million revenue more than a million revenue it's under a million in revenue yes okay got it uh why is there such a big so so i guess are those three thousand you're quoting are those are those free users like that's a big gap between like three thousand paying 300 bucks a month versus well a lot of it is um just sometimes they don't need our services to a certain extent and their price points can change and we'll do what we can to retain the client on a monthly basis um so it's just more so like say they're part of a spam attack and we have to put a lot of effort into the account at one point but then things kind of like tame down a little bit it's just we see a lot of movement that way so but are all 3 000 like paying per month right now or some of them are not paying but they're still using your free tools um so some of them are we'll like to get our foot in the door we'll do free pilots to help earn their future business some people do temporarily go on hold i don't know the exact number right now for how many are not paying but the majority are paying okay got it so if we take three thousand like paying right and you're under a million revenue let's just assume you're a million and run rate that'd be three thousand by eighty thousand dollars a month they're paying on average something closer like 25 bucks a month that in the franchising space that is the um the right number per month per location 300 a month per location no no you said 25 per location correct so in the franchising space though you mentioned that you so you use two words you use the word brands like hong song there was 40 of those and you used the word smb like dentists and you said there are 3 000 like dentists like smbs what i'm doing is just you said you're under a million revenue i'm just taking three thousand customers divided by a million dollar rate on average twenty five dollars per month would that be about accurate i would have to look into that further for you i i don't have those numbers how many do you know how many just like paying customers you have i mean i assume that's when you track pretty darn close yeah no absolutely um it's just when you look at it from a brand level and an smb it's different [Music] okay but there's only 40 brands and there's 3 000 smbs right so the majority of revenue is coming from those 3 000 s b's if all of those absolutely got it okay cool let's get let's get more sort of the back story here so you've managed to boot drop this which is incredible tell me more about the team that you've built how many folks full time so 22 team members okay 22 and how many engineers six and so we outsource that our development team is over in belarus and they have been with us since day one they're fantastic wow how did you find them are you using a firm like cody toss to find them are you just they're individual people you found so uh the company is called oxygel uh we were connected through um a colleague several years ago and they have just continued to grow with us interesting so there's like a dev shop yeah and are you paying certainly you know most dev shops like sim form coding costs like 35 bucks an hour for development talent is that sort of what you're paying it's a little bit higher than that um lately there is just heavy need for developers so we have seen the rates increase but um it is cheaper for us to have them overseas than domestic and and you are all these 22 folks full-time you know because what i'm trying to back into are any of them working for free because if you're under a million revenue paying 22 full-time salaries would be a...