How Contentlaunch CEO Jon Wuebben grew Contentlaunch to $114.4K revenue and 80 customers in 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...