How Convertri CEO Andy Fletcher grew Convertri to $1.5M revenue and 1.7K customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is andy fletcher he's building convertery.com it's the fastest funnel builder out there so he says let's test it out andy ready to take the top let's do it how do you quantify that fastest funnel builder what's that mean uh so to us it's two key factors one is like how fast can you build the thing yourself and we're all about freeform editing so with most of our competitors are blocky based which means you lay your page out in rows and columns and sections which is great until you want to do something unusual or even for most people just like moving their logo from the top left to the top right that's effort whereas with ours you just literally drag it across the screen and it's in its new location and the other half is being like page load speed and we're we're still the fastest loading pages like i think you can beat us like what one agency feed us but like but they spend like 10 grand on a single page um but like anything short of that like you can't beat up page load speeds which is getting more and more important what makes you so fast technology wise you have on your home page that you loaded under 518 milliseconds everyone else is above 1.41 seconds why are you so fast why can't they copy you uh because everything is built from the ground up to be like 100 pre-calculated completely cached the result though like what's unique about your background where you can do that and others can't uh so uh two parts to that one like a lot of the legacy competitors we have like it was just never designed to work that way and making it work that way is just a lot of effort and for a lot of the newer competitors truthfully i don't think they've tried like i mean i i've got a computer science degree i've spent four years up there it's like i've got a heavy technology experience but like caching's not exactly new so like other people could do this i'm sure but they don't seem to do it or don't seem to get it right um i can't really tell you why they don't do it who would you consider your major competitors uh so kind of in two directions there's sort of the more like digital marketing focus guys who uh like click funnels for example who are certainly out selling us uh ebola russell brunson is a phenomenal marketer and business owner uh he's a machine um and then in the more sort of like page builder specific direction is guys like instapage and unbounce and so so which side do you want to go when which side you see yourself competing on uh so so we generally compete on the like better individual page builder uh so people that want to do like best of breed stack whereas for example so against insta page and unbounce whereas click funnels are like more of an all-in-one and each component is worse than a best of breed which i don't think is a like you know it's not like one way is right and one way is wrong like a smaller company getting started might be better off with that all in one thing certainly once you get any kind of scale going people tend to need the best of breed features quite quickly we think so so i mean is i mean you you know that because you look at you just look at your sales do you see people switching to you from click funnels and can you quantify it uh i mean definitely like we built a page importer specifically for that like we get tons of people come over like we can you can point the converter page in portrait just about any page on the internet and it'll import it in you can start editing it which really helps people transfer over from these other other sections where can what's the link for that where can people see that uh i mean it's it's one of many features probably too many on convertery.com uh there's a there's a demo of it uh or should be on the site somewhere i can't even remember where sorry but like why isn't this like convertery.com forward slash import page like website greater hubspot this is like a brilliant marketing thing why wouldn't you put that like front and center on its own landing page ah because you're better at my job than i am well i don't believe that but but seriously is there no easy way for my audience to go use that like right now they have to sign up for an account and do a bunch of work uh what what do you mean by i'm sorry i'm trying to help you out brother if there's someone listening right now using clickfunnels and they're frustrated because click funnels limits them to a box and they want to import their click funnels instantly into convertery what's the link they can go to to paste in the click funnels link and convert it instantly uh i mean it is inside the account you have to create one plus a minute gosh pull that thing out that would be huge that'd be a hit awesome thank you okay so i'm alone if i log in where do i go uh so if you log in then go to like in inside of any funnel click import page and you'll have a box uh you can stick a stick a page link in this reminds me a lot there's a lot of free uh chrome extensions where you can convert like any website into like a figma file and those things kill it for figma for their onboarding for like their new users uh gosh there's a i feel like there's a massive play for you there um super thank you very much well so how's it going though during cove last time we spoke was back early last year and i think you said you had just passed 1700 customers where are you today uh so so we track um we have a bunch of different like deal plans because of our affiliate background i tend not to pay attention to customer numbers i should have had that one ready for you know don't um we're up we're what about 1.3 mil arr last time we spoke and we're at 1.5 now so we're about we're 20 20 bigger than we were last time we spoke um where did most of the growth come from is it still the affiliate model uh honestly it's even more than before it's now word of mouth like we we still like paid traffic never seems to quite take but people love it they keep talking about it um we've got like the reseller deals ramping up really well um clickbank are now pushing us like in their membership area which is really exciting uh that's a big source of new accounts um we got really helped out by uh ryan levasque did uh a big thing about his ask model and like bigged up quiz software we sell a one-time fee piece of software called quiz tree which is like lead gen into convertery we sell liquid tree low price front end 67 one time and then people buy that and we introduced them to convert tree on the back end of that how did you convince ryan to do that oh sorry uh it was he didn't do anything to do with us he was promoting his own like his ask method course and i think it's bucket.io which is like more expensive monthly than we are one time it's clearly like you know it's no competition that's way better software but we've got a one-time price point lots of people take a look at bucky.io go oh i don't know about that that's maybe that's a bit expensive coming by quizzitry and that gives us like phenomenal lead how do they know to how do they go from bucket i o to quiz a treat are you mentioned somewhere or you're saying the google search keywords they just search for quiz builders and they find us okay so quiz builders is the link there that's the search term yeah definitely and it's so it's not like he was you know they were bigging up converter um quizzity at all but like they just made a big thing out of quiz builders so demand for quiz builders happened and you just went in capital i love that you just went cap eyes on that traffic i i would love to say that like you know we did anything intentional there we already had this thing and we noticed sales just started going up we were like hey what happened interesting okay so so you and this is weird so you don't know how many customers you have i guess i'm confused why you don't why you wouldn't know that number that's something i look at like obsessively if i was the founder of a sas company uh because it's um certain like we have a bunch of legacy plans that have all kinds of uh so for example back in 26 july 2016 we sold the one and only lifetime deal for converter we've ever done that was the original launch we sold like three quarters of a million dollars of it in six days when was that so july 2016 and you sold how much and how many days uh we sold 750 000 worth of it in six days and did you use appsumo for that no that was affiliates ah absolute deal terms are terrible if you can get your own affiliates if you can't then it's it's probably a good play if you can it's not great terms and remind everyone how you lined up all these affiliates because i remember this being really impressive and you told me like last time the majority of your revenue to get going up to a million bucks in revenue came from affiliate marketing uh i would love to tell you like i mean i can tell you some of the techniques i use to recruit new people but honestly a big part of it is i've been in the industry a decade i used to run an affiliate network i know everyone um and i realized that's not exactly replicable for someone else listening but that's what network did you run it was called digiresults it was built on paypal's instant pay network which uh did well for us but we eventually got killed by what became jvzoo because they were that was my first like proper business and the guys that ran jvzoo were way better at it than i was yeah yep yep so now a month your current revenue you're doing about 120 530 000 a month in revenue how much are you paying out to affiliates every month uh now not that much probably so of uh of the like 1.5 mail we're probably doing between 100 and 100 so probably between about 10 of the revenue goes out in affiliate commissions okay and you pay that out annually or every month uh sorry we pay it out monthly uh the number i think about my head is annual rather than monthly last month you were like a thirteen thousand dollar check out to affiliates something like that yeah something in that region probably yeah yeah interesting and so their first year commission's higher than it goes off over time so your margins actually increase the longer you build the business it's 30 life of the account okay then why is it uh why would it be lower today than it was a year ago if more affiliates are driving more sales uh so uh two reasons for that one we get more like percentage-wise we get more word-of-mouth like non-affiliates just like hey i love this software you should go and use it but it's not an affiliate link referral um we don't know why people do that there is an affiliate link like right there in their account all they've got to do is copy and paste it but they still love us enough to refer us anyway and the other one is that we've got more resellers rather than affiliates which is a slightly different moderates so with an affiliate let's say you're my affiliate you send someone to me i i collect the money and i pay you uh commission 30 for life yep if you're the reseller then you sell it to your audience as like a co-brand it still has to be like it's still converted everyone knows it's convert tree because you know they're going to log in at converter.com they're going to email support converter.com they're going to go to help.com for the knowledge base etc etc but you get to present it to your audience you collect the money so you can like one of our biggest resellers packages it like accessed with a bigger course he sells uh another one that's like built into his funnel so it's like the third upsell everyone sees um that they've got pretty much freedom to sell it however they like and then on the first of the month we bill people x dollars per every active account um and i can't tell you what x is because that's nba with each person sorry what what why couldn't a reseller just charge way less than you and then you get no customers yourself because the affiliate just it's cheaper than you or the resellers cheaper than you so that they've got to i mean they're paying us like an amount per account per month where they're not going to be able to like cut that much off it without not making any money themselves so they're packaging it with something else like let's say i package your convert my you know nathan's convertery co-branded thing into a thing where i'm selling a pdf my book and a bunch of other stuff for 300 but the convertery thing is essentially free right because the other stuff pays for it couldn't i just undercut you one when everyone come sign up with me instead of you in that case i mean sure but i still get my money off you rather than them so i'm fine correct but it could be at a much lower price point than what you charge on your web you know the 50 bucks a month that you charge it can't be that much lower than we charge because you would bet you'd be paying me more money than you're getting in like the fact that the need to make a profit on it is what like stops you undercutting me that much all right i guess what i'm saying is what prevents people from using you as a loss leader if they're packaging you and selling you with other things they could very easily do that sure like but i still get my money every month so i don't care how do you okay are your resellers getting a discount off what you list on on your own site yeah absolutely got it i guess that's what i'm trying to figure out right is if you're giving them a discount why can't they just charge at cost pay you your cut but but arbitrage all the people paying you you're going direct to converter 50 bucks a month or 60 bucks a month uh sure but i mean if they're i mean nobody has it's not that big a discount okay so you compete with people reselling your product on like cpc like like like google search results and things like that they can't market against you if they're selling your own product no like so that it's got to be like it doesn't have to be like back end back end but nobody's selling this like nobody's just selling convertery this way they're not allowed to do that it's got to be like packaged with something or like uh you know the upsell number two episode number three in a funnel or like part of their webinar package or something like that okay how many how many resellers do you have today that make at least i don't know that pay at least a thousand dollars a month uh it's got uh three big ones and a fourth one coming online next month interesting and i guess these are probably all people that are like in the marketing space maybe other software companies that don't have a funnel builder uh yeah yes uh two well um like an affiliate network one software company and one like info training company and it's another software company next month yeah very cool what about your business still bootstrapped i hope or did you raise nope still completely 100 bootstrap still like you know eating what we hunt have you taken your 100k out you told me in 2016 you put in 100 grand and get it going is that still in the business oh no no i i got that back um early on and like we get a get a salary now you know it pays me money every every month who's we how many folks uh so coal company 20 people um how many folks like that own it i own 75 percent my business partner neil owns 25. yup yup uh that's same as it was about a year and a half ago and how many engineers uh engineers like five engineers one devops engineer okay interesting and how do you think about the business like how's this how does this blend in with your lifestyle in other words if someone came and offered you i don't know 20 million bucks all cash up front to sell it do you take the deal uh 20 million yeah definitely um that's a big enough multiple like i'm not it's growing nice like yeah we're not like unicorn growth rates but we're growing we've been bigger every month for like i think we had the last down month over a year ago uh like we get bigger every month it runs itself more and more like i'm not you know i'm not stressed out by i'm not desperate to sell but i'm also not stupid if someone offers me a decent multiple i'm gonna take it obviously there's some level where it gets exciting for you versus if you should keep running it what is that multiple freeze like 5x would you consider really high you'd have to look at or is 10x the minimum uh uh 5x arr definitely i would i 5x irr i would take it like it would also depend how long they want me to stay around for so if it's like if somebody wants to like invest at like uh and like i've got to stay around and run it like the numbers just higher than like it's a buyout and i'm done in say three months like i'm not just gonna go here you go and run off into the sunset but i'm not hanging around forever for that kind of money so if someone offered you 5x of your 1.5 million run rate today or 7.5 million total sort of cash up front and you stuck around for three months top of the transition and then could go off and do your next thing that's something you can seriously entertain yeah i would do i would do that deal tomorrow yeah well guys there you have it there's a bunch of you listening right now i mean i think your inbox might blow up so we'll see what happens andy uh let's keep going forward here the turn people stick uh yeah in fact we applied your um you know same same thing as i thought about with the page importer from earlier last time we were on the call you were like dude just segment your churn and i was like and you're like okay let me teach you things as yeah we segmented our churn there's this really interesting thing where at the three-month mark it's after people have been on for three months they stick super super well and up to the three month mark they're basically paying us to extend their trial um what is what we've discovered so we we look at that churn post the three month mark and it's low low percent low single digits yeah whereas for more than three months that cohort uh you know over 90 will still be active a year after their first three month anniversary uh 90 might be a bit high for a year later um but it's it's high whereas like trial to page churn is 40 50 percent yeah yeah very quiet still around that like 40 50 mark uh yes no i mean like we're because because of how we find people which is again like resellers word of mouth affiliates uh any number i give you for customer acquisition cost is utterly meaningless because but you can't give me a dollar and then i spend it to make two dollars um we continue to like not make those leavers work because well i don't know about that yeah you have a lot of stuff working for you how big is your email list right now just people have signed up for a free trial that's just sitting there uh uh 10 like about 30 000 i think 35 you do anything with that list uh yeah so we we run like frequent reactivation campaigns um and so on we we go back and forth on whether we should like hit the like say you know after you've been churned for three months you've had a reactivation campaign like we've tried a bunch of stuff like should we be dumping people out onto sort of more aggressive just like here's some interesting affiliate offers but it never it never feels like it's going to make enough money to be worth the time and effort webinar tomorrow at 3 pm 4 secret changes the top performing funnel makers make that you should copy tomorrow and then invite your list and then sell them like hell on the webinar obviously it's not your style like coming in as a different that's more of a russell brunson thing but i think you say that but my current webinar is called how to get to 100 bucks a day with no ad budget no mark like we've all got one can you fill that up with a 35k list i mean you market the webinar to the list uh in fact we haven't run that webinar to the list yet that's not like that's on the experiment list for the next month or so um very cool andy well this is exciting stuff let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book uh favorite book is oh oh oh okay so last time it was highly output management by andy grove and i would say that got surpassed a week ago when i read alex uh i can't remember his surname at ginson h his hundred million dollar author's book um no that's a good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i mean honestly at the moment probably russell branstad like you know we're kind of in competition but the guy's amazing like i have much respect number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business oh clearly convertery besides your own um in fact this this will be a good one to answer um currently jira we're hoping like maybe the answer will be active campaign in like a few months time so we're so sick of mailchimp we cannot deal with their anymore um so we're moving to active campaign i love active campaigns check them out number four how many hours i'll sleep to eat every night eight and what's your situation married single kids uh long-term partner never married no kids no kids okay and how old are you i'm 38 i already ate last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh take more risks do more stuff like nobody knows anything um do stuff it'll be fine guys convert tree launched in 2015 the quickest funnel builder out there they did their first 103 000 in sales over six days with affiliates that's because andy the founder comes from running an affiliate network that's how i got those affiliates today they're scaling with reseller partners three big ones who white label the tool and then sell themselves and packages it's uh that's really important co-branded uh they're doing 1.5 million bucks in ar today up from 1.3 million just about a year ago andy thanks for taking us to the top thanks david great to be here one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

hello everyone my guest today is Andy Fletcher he is building a company called convertor II think of it like a funnel builder using a lot of different distribution channels to drive growth including affiliate launches Andy radio takes the top yeah let's do that all right again good to see you as well so so should people compare this to something like clickfunnels or like a web flow but specifically for conversions uh yeah I mean clickfunnels is definitely here we get compared to the most and we're I mean obviously I think our products better right I mean who want reproduce at their on a show okay well I think the competitors doing better than us likes but yeah we'd better they're the most comparable one also like leadpages Unbounce although sort of like page builders funnel builders that that era of stuff web web flows a great tool but it's a little bit more to like techie developer focused or maybe not developer but like some of the way that they do stuff like doesn't tend to appeal to a very marketing centric customers sure when you came on back in October of 2018 you had said that you'd passed about a thousand customers at that point how many customers are you serving today on the SAS product I say about 1,700 on the recurring and another 700 in phase one of our hybrid funnel so let's just focus on the recurring for a second how did you grow over the past 15 months from a thousand customers to adding seven hundred more honestly more of the same where we remain great at like partnership deals affiliate stuff everything involving humans and just terrible at like paid traffic and stuff so tell me tell me about a partnership deal yeah sure so I mean probably there's a couple of really interesting ones we've got our longest-standing biggest selling affiliate is company called videos that's VI d dy o z e who are that they sell an online animation tool like you upload your logo and then it's like 1200 different animations you can pick from they're doing super well and they they refer basically their entire customer base to us like one big promo a year and they'll do other like drip campaigns throughout the year then we've got another another big deal with the guys behind let's down video videos for a second so how did you get that deal and how do you compensate them for that I said we got the deal through God ages majors need to go before I even started working on convert rhe a mate of mine called said sha who spotted like the original like white boy Londoner it's like knows everyone was like hey Andy I'm meeting up with these guys called Jamie and David in LA and then you should come out have a beer and I never say no to that kind of invite so like showed up had a beer met those guys they seemed really cool and they were doing great stuff this was before they started videos before I started convert rhe we got on really well like we kind of collaborate stab it they're like I helped them out with some tech problems they helped me out some marketing problems we stayed in touch and then fast forward over time like this was talking about three years later as we were doing the original convert relaunch videos had been launched a year before that and it was just such excellent synergy that was where they like really started getting behind the product so I think they've done for for like really big promos and they've sold over half a million dollars worth of product in that time and so half a million dollars with a product how many new customers is that oh goodness so on the affiliate deal that'll be ah like a thousand odd something like that a thousand customers yeah so into the the front of these so the affiliate stuff sells in what we call a hybrid funnel say affiliates can't sell recurring on the front for toffee like they just can't do it no nobody's got any interest in it they need a one-time or sudo one time they took juice earning earnings per click is really what they measure right absolutely so if what we do is we do a 12-month package but 297 and that doesn't recur automatically which lets the affiliates say you know say it's a one-time price you know they still advertise that it's 12 months but it sells to the kind of customer that's just super nervous about like they probably bought a lot of these tools got dinged a year later so they're really nervous about committing thing to things that Auto recur and then over time we work on getting them upgraded onto the like recurring plans that we have which we do really pretty well on so about 40% of people know whoa sorry 40% of people that take the 297 thing just get onto the 297 thing a year later but that's of people that didn't upgrade in the meantime to one of our other recurring plans which is something like 40% of those people take it interesting so when I saw when I put converter II into a H refs to look more about like your SEO strategy I mean you're ranking for very high the first vision for keywords like webinar jeo + WP Commission machine was this intentional or those accidental rankings I say those rankings are you'll probably notice it's not us ranking for it it's like a convert or e sub domain so be like webinar geoconvert recom and so convert or e convert or e just gets tons of link juice from the fact that by default we have a powered by badge which is easy to turn off but if you don't turn it off every page published on convert or e has that link to our home page or the affiliates link link to our home page and then we seem to pick up like the SEO theory right is that subdomains don't get any benefit from that main domain that doesn't entirely seem to be true in our case because we've got we get those rankings for people just register like product name converter calm we've seen that outrank their their own domain some of the time interesting yes so when I soon when I look at your domain rank it's really high 79 on 8 Refs part of that strategy is do have almost a million backlinks you would credit most those backlinks to your powered by badge when people install you is that accurate I would say that and the affiliate stuff so the affiliate link like goes to the home page Google's yeah well renowned for as long as as long as it's not a scam B affiliate program like they do follow those links and so we've got a lot of people out there sharing their their affiliate link that definitely adds to it but I'm pretty sure the bulk of it is that powered by badge doing its thing which again flies in the face of so much like conventional SEO theory because it's all on the same my beard well the same handful of IP addresses in our data centers every single one of those pages but Google seems to love it mm-hmm ya know it makes a lot of sense okay so that's the kind of the SEO strategy and the affiliate structure you mentioned so just to wrap that up videos if they've driven you $500,000 worth of convert recut you know a thousand customers what percent will you pay him of that is it fifty percent as they get 50 percent of the like 50 percent of everything they sell on the day so that's the 297 front end thing just I just pull this go to feed the things I'm talking about here we're going away literally next Tuesday so that's fine we're changing our prices I just AG I'm sure this show will go out after this so don't want it I can still learn they can still get the same strategy themselves so they may be affiliates someone anyone coming knocking on my door going where's that thing you were talking about because yeah anyway so that anything we stay sell on the day so the 297 on the front end the recurring up sir which is 37 bucks or 97 depending which thing we're selling to a given audience and as agency or Pro they get 50 percent of like for the month one and then anything recurring they get 30 percent of if the stuff that we then sell if we sell somebody on to a recurring plan like nine months later or if we if they don't take recurring on the day and we have to sell them the plan again in 12 months time we don't pay commission on that that's like all priced in at that point sure sure so I've had a high-level anything that video videos drives you and is included in the first cart checkout like the average cart value is 297 plus 37 a month or 97 a month they're getting 50% of or they got percent as that that's correct yeah and then if you upsell them or if they UPS or whatever there's you know up to potentially 30% paid out to that affiliate after the first month yeah that's correct in perpetuity yes interesting that can heat yeah I can eat your margins yeah so it's trading off against like affiliate recruitment spend so it's it works really well for us because basically the big affiliates in that kind of space will look to do one big promo for a given partner every year and it works really well to have those recurring commissions still being paid to them like clockwork every month because then when you hit them up in a year's time you're like we remember making a lot of money want to do it again like the first thing they do is they go and see how it went and they look holy [ __ ] we're still getting paid for that and they're just so much more likely to come and play so what is the average crust we're now paying you per month last time you told me your RP was about 46 bucks it's a good question say we're on we've got far more front door people now which is like 69 a month for the pro plan we did we don't see many people take standard or agency so we model it on that and then a chunk of them are on 97 from the agency offer or 37 from the pro offer and I honestly couldn't tell you what that like averages out to well so if you have 1,700 customers like what what Mr D to do last month and we can divide 1,700 into m RR so we track our we've got a bunch of annuals as well so we track our IRR rather than mrl feel free to divide by 12 yeah at one point like oh five million okay got it got it so that would mean our poo is about 50 bucks on average $50 for 70 in our customers that are a million dollar run rate today that's great so have you have you chosen to raise capital or driving this growth or still bootstrapped I still bootstrapped haven't raised any capital since the first light I put about 80 and okay mo money in day one thing I did although and since then we've just been profitable and growing offer growing off the money we make I love that it's a way to do are you reinvesting everything or or how much cash would you insert our profit so we keep we've got really lucky in that regard actually my business partner and I have like we don't we take an okay salary like we don't cash out loans we have fair like it's frugal for London lifestyles like that's not still expensive right but we've we've left a lot of money in the company so at the moment where everyone else is kind of a bit over stretched and like taken maybe a bit too much VC capital which is fine if you're getting to your next round but with the world going to hell it's all all of their scary we're bootstraps we've got a big war chest where we match our like the money we spend on servers people infrastructure ads like anything that I'm paying every month we try to keep that roughly matched against the amount we have coming in every month and then there's plenty of one-time money out of those deals and everything else but Neil and I take some of yep okay so it's so generally profitable but reinvesting to the extent that you can whether its annual upfront payments or things like that but reinvesting since you can into new product features you know new affiliate deals things like that yeah absolutely like we're not taking taking masses out at this point what's the team session what's the team size to like 20 people 20 people okay so five more from Latimer chatter how many engineers and so like four engineers one dev ox we've literally just hired like three four weeks ago a head of engineering kind of try and take some of that off my desk we're starting to like build out that management team so here's the magic question click fellas has this as a massive issue as well churn so last time you came on I mean you told me your churn was a real problem like should churning you know a large percent to the customer base each year what's your gross revenue turned today look like yes I actually you you really helped me with that last time okay that's good I know I should have charged a consulting fee so yeah at the time I remember we are churn if we because we just we looked at churn across everyone at that point and that turned out to be really dumb so what you basically said is like finer if I find a line after which like churn is more stable so we basically we looked at our numbers and this we took the three month line so a whole tons of people cancel in those first three months and we just treat that money is like they effectively paid us a one-time fee to do an extended trial and then didn't take the product then we look at churn churn as anyone that stayed on after three months and I'm sure there's some people that buy it forget to use it just pay any tax for five months then cancel it but the majority of people if they're still on like a Bastardo month for their invested they build pages they've driven leads and I turn on those is really good like it's like a percent or two a month okay so ii took a survey caught maybe twenty four percent max per year if people stay past that three month mark yeah absolutely as i say it it's some of it is obviously playing with statistics but it's it just seems like a more interesting number like somebody that's used us for six months bill like three funnels driven 10,000 leads and sold a whole bunch of product like if that guy leaves like we screwed something up sure yeah yeah i mean look this is especially when you have a top of funnel model that is that relies on affiliates you're gonna have a lot of churn and that has very little to potentially with your product it just based off the quality of customers that that's they drove you and so doing yeah and so like doing what you did is i think a better way to just measure our attention over time so yeah okay good that's good you know so so that looks like that's improved and then so talk to me a little bit about any other customer acquisition strategies besides the affiliate launches or is that the prime one well say this is the cool thing that's like going live at the moment we've been trialing this for the last couple of years and we're about to roll it out with a whole bunch of different partners so we've been trying it with the guys from they're cool they're six figure mentors digital business laughs what is it so they've recently launched a social networking site for no no what what's the thing you're testing with them so it's a reseller deal where basically they get to put us in their funnel but it's a it's a co brand it's not a white label deal so people still log into a buck converter calm the knowledge base is still helped on commercial comm people still email support convert or comm for help but they get to collect the money and then remit to us like invoice marketing basis then waste out what's the URL of their website so they're if you go to mentors comm this is the main thing that they're but they've integrated us into you got it so if I buy I'm on mentors come right now if I bought it says coming said wait so it's not wide that says coming September 2020 yeah I think that's a little bit of like make you want it more strategy like there's a back door somewhere I can't remember where it is okay but I log in and purchase what you're saying is I will see converter e somewhere as like hey if you like mentors buy convert rewrite now yeah so like a lot of our training is in like the training area then we're like the the only approved funnel builder flipper system is like you know you're welcome to talk about click funnels in the group if you want but we use this you should go and buy this and like get it get it through our setup so when you when you buy through them you get some like a bunch of their training products conversed into funnels in convert tree like just kind of waiting for you Sam same model you're gonna pay them 30 or 50 percent upfront and 30 percent perpetuity that's NDA I'm afraid I can't tell you that it better better or worse deal than the regular fee sorry that's I'll tell you like 98 percent of my numbers that's NDA with everyone we've signed it and by their request not ours so yeah I mean I would argue probably what happened there is they got a better deal than other folks because it's they have larger a larger audience than your potential other affiliates in the last thing you'd want is your other affiliates to start asking for a larger cut as well so so mental like one thing I can say is mentors become definitely got the best deal yeah because they've been trialing in that other company for the last two years so like they got it cuz they got him first everyone else that's taken is all the same yeah but I can't tell you what that is that's okay um have you looked at doing are looked at raising any sort of even if it's not equity but like raising any sort of capital to fuel growth and just drive growth faster or no honestly we'd like about twice a year my business partner Daniel and I sit down and talk about it because it's like you know who doesn't want more money right yeah but at the moment we're sat on I think we've got about 700 K in the war chest yep so like we could probably like with somewhere between like a seed and a series a I don't quite know where like I'm sure we could raise a million or two if we wanted to fit well with pre-pandemic we definitely could have good news things all the markets like at the moment well the bigger question is what would you do with capital to drive growth if you had it not how much could you raise and and that that's the that's the key thing that like we're we're super good at turning elbow grease into deals into like affiliate partnerships reseller deals like we we were good at that going in that's what like let us start the company we've got really good at it as a business over time I still don't have a magic box that I can just put money into and get more money out of yeah how many affiliates are you currently working with in other words you pay them at least a dollar and Commission each month uh if the bar is a dollar then God dozens over 100 goodness knows if the bars like two dollars it goes down cook well it goes down pretty rapidly okay it's Jamie nning for affiliates do you have each month you're paying okay interesting alright let's wrap up here Andy with the famous five number one favorite business book ah favorite business book at the moment goodness the column the name of the book the Andrew something the CEO Intel wrote like he's won an only book management book I can't believe I hadn't read it read it recently was amazing and I'm bummed like I should remember the name of that damn book high output management that's the one thing yeah yeah with any growth number two is there a CEO you're falling or studying this Jason Lemkin count of course sure no three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh JIRA number three or four how many hours of sleep eat every night uh that's good and what your situation married single kids I long time okay no kiddos running around no all right how are you thirty-seven last question anybody was your 20 year old self Neil uh take more risks like and just the I think I said this last time even like nobody knows anything like twenty-year-old me was convinced that other people had it all figured out and I need to know what they did 37 year old baby knows we're all making this up as we go along guys there we have a so can virtually guy that might see not there you go guys there you have it convert RIA final build or they've passed a million dollars in terms a run rate up from half a million just about a year and a half ago they're also profitable in bootstrap seven or thousand dollars sitting in the bank nice warchest to work with here during the virus obviously can do to be profitable twenty people on the team five engineers churn it's on a twenty four percent annually they've improved that year-over-year they're number one go to market strategies paying affiliates a lot of affiliate deal is where they'll pay fifty percent up front and then thirty percent in perpetuity for all those customers the affiliates close Andy thanks for taking us up cool thank you very much for having me Nathan you have a good day