Contentlaunch Revenue & Funding (2024)

hello everyone my guest today is John huibin he's the CEO and founder of content launch he's also the author of three marketing books including future marketing winning in the prosumer age john are you ready to take it to the top Hey all right tell us about content launch what do you guys do and how do you make money yes content launches the content marketing platform built for small agencies and smbs and so the platform basically enables need to plan create and distribute all of your content all in one place okay and I mean so how does it can compare with like a HootSuite or some of these other solutions yeah HootSuite is a social media management dashboard scheduling dashboard app and we're more Street content so content planning like helping with topics I'm actually distributing the content getting it out there whether it's WordPress or HubSpot or Twitter it's not just a social channel but also other places where content needs to go pure place model from a revenue perspective yeah exactly okay and I don't have it on every customer cohort but in general what a customers pay you per month on average 100 bucks per user per month okay that's fair enough that's good and then put this on a timeline for me when did you launch so we were in beta last year soft launch a couple months ago we signed a big partnership deal for a white label kind of partnership a few months ago we're onboarding much--it users there we're doing an official kind of launch with all the bells and whistles here in a couple weeks so we've been kind of doing it in stages so you've launched this year in 2018 oru pre-revenue to date now we're generating revenue at this point okay you are generating revenue that's great so launched this year you have some beta cuffs nerves it sounds like engaged what do you add today in terms of paying customers we have about fifteen paid accounts and we have like I said a big burger ship deal we find where we have seven hundred paid users committed to joining that that account so we're off to the races it took a while that we're finally there okay so 15 folks paying a hundred bucks per month you guys are doing about fifteen hundred bucks per month right now so 15 companies and then additionally at content writing revenue as well so that's another revenue stream for us we're doing about 15,000 and M are are right now okay but is that actual pure-play sass revenue or is that professional services like writing dominant 3 but then we have managed services okay Johnny you cut out you cut out their pure-play sass revenue is what right now pure-play sauce with the white legal partnership we probably have about 10,000 okay but without that I'm talking about just revenue you're already making it sounds like you sign a deal that will be in the future but it hasn't actually they aren't actually paying yet so just paying today is what oh yeah I mean ballpark I mean we're talking so the confusing part is we have three revenue streams I've had this sufficient revenue constant services then and then constant ordering so I'm just talking pure-play sass revenue just the sass revenue actually looks like John come on just to be cut you're just launching as a CEO you're literally refreshing revenue dashboards every morning because that's the lifeblood of the company your tummy right now you don't know how much revenue you're doing on a SAS basis per month so maybe I'm confused by the question so you ask you for just yes pure-play sass revenue not content writing and not professional services i it's not the reason i want to get this numbers because i think you're just starting and there's valuable lessons when you're just starting i think you're you're at like 1,500 bucks a month a hundred dollars a month by 15 customers okay okay well we got confused there and i apologize we have 15 accounts that are they're paying now not 15 users right so some of the accounts we have multiple users we have one agency that's we have ten users so and I don't look at the dashboards every morning because I'm busy doing all kinds of stuff getting marketing campaigns going and now wants to get to 15 20 today now or are then I'm gonna be look at that but probably you're realistically were probably at three or four thousand okay got it that's interesting me so I mean most people weren't when they launched to come I mean I remember when I launched my first company that was like the little sales where the first thing I thought of every morning I was literally refreshing the dashboard you're telling me you have the ability to just ignore that dopamine hit and totally remove yourself from looking at any sales numbers no it's impressive I see it differently than most people I'm a marketing guy right not a sales guy you're the founder though right yeah but we'll slow down slow down one second so so we find this big white label partnership right this third parties and other business application and we have committed guaranteed and agreement you know 700 paid users so I don't you know because we sign that deal a few months ago I see it differently it's not like we're and the other thing is we have agency revenue still so we saw our agency right so that's supporting the business so this is not the end-all be-all to start up this software is just one division of our company so in other words last securing our agency we made thirty five thousand bucks right so so that's why I don't you know it's not the imperative for me to look at sales every morning yeah I do want serious I want an interest of Matt but it's not the end-all be-all I'm looking at I'm the visionary of the company branch I'm scheduling the next phase where we going to get your so I leave all the sales stuff to my skills guys and you know they got a great sales team so there I've trust them I know they've been there into their objectives okay so a couple thousand cost three thousand per month right now and pure place revenue with your new SAS product line you gotta agency in the past that you kind of spun this out of I totally understand that any of a separate content writing kind of business as well walk me through team size today how many folks on the team in where's everyone based so we have eight people we have people in North Carolina we have people in actually in Eastern Europe some developers there we have operations that I and mine so yeah we have eight in our team right now and we mean we all were a lot of house so what at what point first off a lot of the most successful SAS companies are born out of agencies but some to like where I've seen some work and some not work are people try and do both for too long so neither one of them gets full attention and they just end up diluted where they seem to really work you know the best example I would say is Ryan Holmes at HootSuite you know it was an agency he grew it to about three four million bucks and and just professional service revenue everyone kept asking for them to manage manually their posting so he said I'm I build software for this and then he shut down that agency he totally bashed away four or five million bucks in revenue and went all-in on HootSuite now you know they do over two hundred million bucks a year in revenue so question to you is why launch a SAS company at all and what do you have to see on the SAS side or the agency side to decide to go all-in on that one thing yeah because I had a choice five years ago you like drove my agency and become another agency or the platform that was the choice I had and I decided to build platform I didn't want why choice why would out the choice though I'm getting a bad man it's slow down so the reason I didn't me that decisions because I didn't want to run a big agency I didn't want to run a big agency where I'm managing clients on daily basis I'd already done that for 12 years so so running a software company was the next thing for me right and so I really worked well as software developers I loved conceptualizing things I love building stuff so for me it was needed an easy decision on that side it was a hard decision the fact that I knew it's gonna take all that time and you can see one money but for me all roads were pointing towards building a platform so that's what we did okay you said that was five years ago yep okay but I thought you just said you're just now kind of launching the sass platform so what happened in the four years before that yeah so that's the part that a lot of people a lot of you know sort of entrepreneur just kind of don't understand or don't appreciate is that it's not easy right we had we had an alpha product two and a half years ago it was not ready it was not ready for primetime we went through the whole thing we spent a lot of money we marketed it and it just was not good enough we couldn't compete so we took it down weary our time the entire front end we read it a bunch of stuff on the back end and so what we have now is far away better than we had to connect here so yeah I mean it was hard we spent twice as much money it's like twice as long to do what was the pranic John it was tons it was the same product it was just just didn't do the same thing then what's the saying right so that's the part of the story a lot of people don't know is that that's what we had to go through to get where we are now okay I'm trying to yeah it's always difficult it's always hard but I'm trying to dissect so what I heard you say was it didn't work because it was an architect right and it looks differently now it's architect of the right way and it looks different am i hearing is it accurate completely different products I mean the user experience was substandard with the first product people didn't know where to click where to go users were confused we were in love with our ugly baby right we were we thought it's great and we use it internally it was great but we couldn't get by and we couldn't get people to bought to pay for it so so yeah we had to reinvent it we had to reinvent the platform either you know take a step back and we had to I got rid of my developers Ashton went through a lawsuit with developers one and that lawsuit so that was the mean whenever you start a company there's good bad and the ugly and that was the ugly part okay so back to my initial question which was five years ago you said you had to make this decision and I said why did you do this and you said well I asked myself that when I run a big agency or build software and you said software but you still have agency revenue so why are you holding on to that safety net why not cut it completely unfortunate to go all-in on the SAS product you even said it you don't even think about this a sprocket each morning you know the revenue numbers yeah well that's just been recently so so we did divest it we the reason we did 35k Lester and agency revenues because we work on a big video project that and I came out of nowhere we were expecting it it's clearly not a software kind of project so that still fell under agency quote-unquote type of project and we've done a lot of video in the past for IBM another company so so we're now saying no to those kind of projects and when what we're doing reporting over all the agency flying into the platform and we have about 40 agency clients for last two years we're doing that so now yeah we're all in it's all about software moving forward but but John so I hate to be blunt here and you have to forgive me but you mean you just said each morning you don't even look at sales numbers because you're dealing about the visionary and looking at other stuff and other revenue streams and parts of the company I mean if you were all-in you'd be all-in on the sauce product you're not right now based off what you told me I'm just trying understand why your opinion I'm sorry John sorry I don't want my opinion I want the I want facts so if I'm wrong tell me I'm wrong I don't think you're wrong is the way one way of seeing it you see it that way and I see it different I don't I don't want to get caught up in the minutiae of Oh seems to me last night how many sales maybe last week because I don't think that's a healthy way no John that's not that's not what I'm referencing all I'm referencing is I've seen companies again we've done 3,000 these interviews we can look at some different patterns we've seen patterns that are good bad or ugly and sometimes they're just a pattern and it doesn't mean anything well one of the things for sure is people tend have safety nets in life and some of them tend to be money safety nets and they hold on to the safety nuts on things whether it's getting a college degree or holding on to revenue or corporate job you've got a cash flow producing agency thirty five grand last year it's a great safety net but a lot of times people they will never actually drive and push the software product if they don't cut the safety and I'm just trying to get in your head I'm not saying tell me you're QuickBooks analytics dashboard but you told me that you were not focused exclusively on the software product earlier - in the interview so I'm just trying understand why are you not a hundred percent on that well I think I am maybe I just I'm wearing a lot of hats and and yeah maybe my I still do have one foot made you see well it takes time transition and I'm not we're getting through that I think one of the problems for me here's the honest truth is that we've had for the last few months we've had some bugs and troubling bugs with the platform that you know I'm not a software developer so it's frustrating for me I talk to my team about them and you know they keep happening so we're working through those um so until I had a product that's you know pretty much bug free and it works the way it's supposed to work then I'm gonna be able cautiousness right so I do have to be a little bit hesitant in terms of you know if we've got a bug that can't be fixed in two three weeks we're still having the issue and I don't feel confident enough to like release it widely to a bunch of new new customers but for me that's been a learning experience that's been something I've had to kind of understand get this house offer biltman is by the way Facebook has bugs every day Google has bugs every day it's the nature of software but so that's part of it for me um so yeah I mean I'm probably not giving you the exact answer that you want to hear but that's there are no answers that I want to hear this is about you I mean what I will tell you I try and predict what my audiences thinking my audience here is that what they're gonna think is what you just said it's it's the business leaders role like there's always gonna be bugs and if that business leader never wants to make a sale because they're worried about the next bug they're never gonna grow so right the question to you is how do you do both you have to be able to handle bugs and drive sales confidently at the same time how do you do both pull the functionality application from the word content so that's why we've had to kind of this kind of push pause okay what's what's going on here and just the last couple days we've gotten some resolutions so it's you know there's different levels of I guess bug fixing if you will and so we're going through that we're going through the growing pains just like any new software application does and I'm learning how to be a software company CEO - at the same time does your dev team have equity I mean are they motivated that way or are you trying to keep them as just salaried employees yeah so the CTO does our CTO I've offered equity the developers they weren't real excited about that they wanted it's it's a personal choice most people aren't steamed you have equity but the developers don't yeah interesting okay very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what is your favorite business book probably of Steve Jobs number two is there a CEO you're falling or studying right now you want most number three what is your favorite online tool for building your business online tool on the past has been HubSpot I think currently it's probably our own tool number four how many hours of sleep take it every night six and a half six now okay great and what's your situation married single kids single single no kiddos yet no kids none that none run around me you don't know about No all right John and how old are you 47 47 last question when he was your 20 year old self knew I [Music] wish that I knew then to just take a risk take a risk guys take a big risk earlier from John built a great agency producing revenue but decided about five years ago does not want to be in the agency business long so we launched content launch which is really a software platform has gone through some growing pains but it's now just going through kind of beta launch phase here in 2018 30 customers paying caught you know hundred bucks per month each about three grand for grants like that per month and pure-play SAS revenue as he looks just shift more of his focus more of as energy strictly on the SAS revenue and away from agency or content writing or the professional services stuff John thank you so much for taking us to the top thanks Nathan fishing time