How Discoveroo CEO Joe Ogden grew to $47.5K revenue and 6 customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is joe ogden he's building a company called discoveroo.co it's an international b2b lead generation company his background is in software sales and business development for the likes of autodesk snow software and on behalf of dell boomi joe previously worked as a music agent in london joe you ready to take the top absolutely all right so you did this at autodesk manually you hated it and said i'm gonna build a service to help everyone else do this easier is that right yeah kind of well i actually ended up becoming kind of an advocate for um email sequencing software when i worked at autodesk and that was one of the uh moments that i thought this could be absolutely could become a service that was just provided for sales teams whether it's you know big sales teams in big companies or or you know smaller companies trying to scale what did you end up getting autodesk on which tool we used um outreach they originally used um yesware i think it was but they were moving to outreach as i started working with them interesting okay so tell me what discovery does today maybe tell it through the eyes of a customer story someone who's paying you today yeah yeah cool so basically what we do is we provide done for you email outreach um so we work with you we send email campaigns from your you know as your sales reps we contact ideal prospects we send advanced personalization within that email as well to generate the you know to generate the interest generate the response from the prospect so then when you hear from that prospect it's in response to the email outreach that we've put together for you okay and then so let's say it's an emerge field out to 2000 leads and you do a really good job on response rate well now my inbox is full of like 300 leads i have to manually respond to to get them into like my calendar scheduler right yeah will you handle the reply as well yeah so what we tend to do is we say you know we have a slack channel set up generally with clients who will say hey you'll have seen this email come in this is how we should respond let me know if you agree and we'll send it so we kind of just give the the sales rep or sometimes it's the founder of the company work with um the option of maybe one or two responses they give us the thumbs up we send it the idea being that we're trying to sell meetings in their calendar right so we try to handle that uh conversion aspect of it as well yeah okay interesting and what would brands pay for this if someone's saying right now they want to try this what would they pay you our standard package um is seventeen hundred dollars we actually would charge um fourteen hundred euros yeah about seventeen hundred dollars that's for the standard package which is 200 prospects per month but generally we see clients start on that package and then move up to one of our bigger packages like 400 prospects or 600 prospects per month depending on what they're trying to achieve at this time what is 200 prospects per month and does that mean 200 booked meetings no that means 200 people that we contact for them but we typically get a very good response rate because of the level of personalization in the emails so like the standard response rate to cold outreach is somewhere between seven and eight point five percent um but because of the advanced personalization we get a thirteen to fifteen percent response rate generally well joe let's like use me as an analogy for a second i book podcast guests all the time right high level ceos usually right and so it's it's obviously a process but if i reach out to 200 ceos i might get like 60 respond and i might book like 20 to 30 new podcast interviews which i'd be paying like if you were hanging out i'd be paying sort of 1700 for but for someone else where maybe they that the meeting maybe it's a lower rpoo thing that they're selling it's not autodesk it's 10 grand a year it'd be really hard to make that 700 a month work so what's the minimum price point you really want these folks to be selling for them to work with you yeah it's a great question well generally we see that our clients who are selling products you know three thousand dollars per deal value or more get the best return investment i think anything less than that i completely agree can start to not have that um you know benefit that comes with what we do but i think anything above 3k per deal value you start to see that return investment from what we do did you do any higher volume lower touch campaigns where it's like a mail merge email to 2000 instead of custom to 200 no we don't do that we i mean we're exclusively focused on the personalized outreach uh way of doing things and you know part of the reason that we do that in the uk and in the european market is to demonstrate that legitimate interest that's necessary to be compliant with gdpr and data regulations like that but actually we do run campaigns in the us that are really successful and you know the primary reason we do the personalization is for the results but a byproduct of doing that helps us you know achieve that gdpr complaints in europe to show that we're basically contacting people for a legitimate reason we've done research about them or their organization that we reference in the email and that's what gets people clicking on the email because you know we're like hey we read a post that you wrote recently we've seen an award that you've won uh we've seen something we've read a case study that talks about x y or z we think it's great for this reason we wanted to get in contact and it's that kind of intro to the outreach uh that really gets people's attention i see okay and how many customers are you working with today we have six customers who have active campaigns now and we launched at the end of last year so the sort of q4 last year was uh me leaving autodesk and trying to get customers and we've sort of seen a steady flow of new customers coming in since january this year it's starting to pick up in terms of interest and inquiries it's really great but it's been a it's been a very interesting eight months it's exciting to to be where we are okay so we'll go back to you leaving autodesk that's a big move but six customers at about seventeen hundred dollars per month that means you're doing what about ten thousand dollars a month in revenue right now something like that uh yeah actually some clients pay more than that per month because typically people start on the standard package to test us out right i mean we're kind of new in the market so people want to know how you know what what do they get from from doing this kind of campaign but typically clients move on to a higher volume package after they've done that first month or maybe two months so it sounds like mri was higher last month what was it no so mrr range is probably between eight and ten thousand dollars as it stands but i mean that's significantly more than it was kind of six months ago so we're seeing quarter on quarter sort of like a 50 growth rate in terms of revenue so we're hoping for that to continue the forecast is for that to continue to q4 and how many of these six customers are signed up like in the past like two months in other words do you have customers so from like four months ago still with you actively paying today yeah um we have customers who got on board with us in january um who are with us now we have i think the latest one was probably in july that they signed up so we're probably just yeah we're starting campaign two for them now what's your intention though for people listening should they think about using you for two months and then stopping or are there ways people can get value from you over the long term over and over again every month absolutely it's for the long term i think you know some of our clients have been on board since january maybe start to close deals after well i know for sure that one of them in particular starts to close deals after kind of three months in it's just building that pipeline and you know we also do manual follow-up it's a nurture lead uh you know there's so many different facets to it but absolutely it's a long-term approach the idea of being in our vision with this is to whether it's for a sales team or for a founder to just this engine running in the background every day we're researching prospects we're reaching out with that personalization so we're just building that pipeline of opportunities but yeah i mean we don't see any clients who try us out for a month and then decide not to do it i think a lot of the time with our clients they're testing the water to see if it you know to see what the rewards are for them in this what they can get out of this and to scale up from that point and if i sign up with you today do i sign do i sign you up for joe at you know get latke dot com so you're sending those emails as me or is it at discovery.com no so it would be as a member of your team okay yeah and it's white labeled in that sense so basically it can be as you um and we we configure everything we set up a mailbox we warm it up like it's like a dedicated mailbox separate to your main mailbox if that makes sense that's how some clients do it for others of me or one of my team as a member of their team but with their email address if that makes sense it can be done in a few different ways basically if we set up a brand new inbox for you know joe nathemaca.com to do this from don't you have to sort of warm that if you're going to be sending cold emails i want to just land on the spam or the or the promotions folder if it's not a warrant like a brand new inbox yeah absolutely so what we tend to do for the first two to three weeks while we're doing the onboarding we're writing the sales messaging we're building the data we also warm up the inbox yeah so absolutely because deliverability is so key so we use tools to do that and just like through the night and through the day sending uh emails and receiving emails to warm it up so again to avoid going into spam folders yeah interesting okay very cool um let's uh let's bump into team today so how many folks we have two people internally it's myself and my colleague who's responsible for sort of managing campaigns and building data but we work with we work with freelancers in the us and in the uk who kind of the researchers and writers so again the kind of magic ingredient to what we do is that research and level of personalization so the freelancers we work with and we can scale that up and scale it down depending how many campaigns we have um they do that kind of research and we we coordinate the campaigns internally and bootstrapped right or have you raised capital boothstrapped completely yeah great so what's the secret to hiring freelancers to run this system anyway are you you know your real ip really are the systems you've built to manage freelancers to have them understand what to write train them and then get them on client accounts yeah well none of our none of our freelancers really deal with clients we do that entirely internally the way in which we manage them is a combination of google sheets airtable uh we use the you know we use technology like that to just be able to coordinate things and to distribute tasks it's been a learning curve to be honest but it's been really interesting i actually used to do work um last year i did some freelance work for scribbly um and they you know they had a very much a freelance team writing content for them it was a really great business and and i really liked that way of doing things they didn't have a massive team internally but they were you know they had a good footprint in the industry and um yeah i thought they did a really good job of doing that so we have a we have a model that doesn't require us to have a huge team internally and we can just yeah rely on the freelancers we work with that's very cool and uh uh talk to me about future growth i mean you're gonna try and productize this at all or keep it sort of a service service business yeah for now we're gonna keep it as a service business we might expand into um maybe doing some linkedin outreach as well but i mean email is getting such great results for our clients and i think you know stating the obvious but email um you can reach almost anyone an email right so i think it's it's something that's sticking around so we're keen to just grow it as it is to really become the absolute experts at email outreach and that's kind of the track that we're on in terms of growth we're looking for we want to increase to maybe get three new clients per quarter and by the end of 2022 we're aiming for between 40 and 50 clients on the books you have some great testimonials on your site from tom at a head start and me at flair and sam testimonial hero can you share any case studies where like with the actual results like you generated x demos for testimonial hero um it's a hard question that there's nothing on top of my head but i think we are actually going to try and publish a case study pretty soon with one of our existing clients so uh yeah for the listeners that's something that could be checked out in the next few weeks very cool any plans to raise capital or stay bootstrapped as it stands we're planning to stay bootstrapped yeah but i'm open-minded but i think i've just been i came into it with this very kind of stubborn mentality i think of like no we can do this we don't need any capital but i think obviously there's some drawbacks with that um in terms of you know recruiting if we do want to build the team internally eventually but for now it's working well um but yeah never say never i guess that makes sense and do you think you'll keep focused on sas helping sas companies yeah i mean our client says it stands a sas software one service based uh client as well but i think yeah absolutely i mean anyone out there you know running a sas business between one and 30 40 employees either with some sales reps in house i mean that's the thing sometimes we work with companies who don't have any sales reps yet and they're not ready to do that but they need sales opportunities we work with other companies who have sales reps but uh they're so busy and i've been in this position as well doing new business sales where you're also responsible for prospecting in your territory and so we're there to support reps in that position as well so you know we can work with companies much bigger than you know brand new companies but yeah i think that sort of one to 15 employee size sas software service-based companies we're kind of ideal for and joe just reiterate what was your role at autodesk i was a territory sales rep there um which was so i was south england was my territory um while i worked there it was i mean it was existing customers it was finding new business again i mean it's a pain point for many sales reps uh out there you know but where you're kind of responsible for managing deals right through to the end of course but finding new opportunities managing customers it's uh you know it's a multi-faceted role and something that suffers and i saw it across you know different teams in all sales roles that i've had is that that constant effort to prospect to find new to find new opportunities that that can take a bit of a hit when you're busy doing other things in sales and joe did you discover any problems in your role at autodesk where you wish there was software for like to solve that problem i'd say the biggest problem i faced in all sales roles has been the amount of duplicating of the same information the copying and the paste and into crms into into one note into emails it just it you know it gets to a point where you kind of just bog down copying and pasting it it feels pretty crazy yeah so i'd say that that's the biggest problem that i see need solving copying and pasting guys there you have it you're entrepreneur looking for your next thing go build a tool sell your first customer to joe there you go all right yo good stuff man let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book favorite book um i've read a book recently by malcolm gladwell which is david and goliath and it really um inspired me it's about kind of the underdog sometimes having more of an advantage than the than the big players and yeah that resonated a lot with me so i'd recommend that book to anyone number two is there a ceo you're following or studying actually i mentioned scribbly but the the founder of scribbly danny bell um i think she's maybe i think she's still at the company but she i think she's done a great job of really sort of pioneering content as a service and kind of yeah pioneering that movement really and i think that company's growing really quickly and i think it's really cool number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own um well i'd say the tool that we rely on the most is apollo and that's for data building that's for sequencing and of course we are a outsourced sales agency so that's something we're lying but i think for anyone out there who do doesn't want to do it themselves i'd say use apollo you can use it for a few different things it's really really killer if you use it the right way number four how many hours i sleep to get every night probably seven ish seven and a half maybe not bad in situation married single kids uh in a relationship but no children okay and how are you three four thirty four last question joe something you wishing you when you were 20. um i i've been thinking a little bit about this and i think that something that i i've always been very very ambitious i used to work in the music industry i've worked in software sales and i've always aimed for the top you know it's kind of relevant for this podcast but i've always aimed for like the big names in in the respective industry and actually when i've managed to get there um i haven't necessarily had the best experience it's been a good learning curve but i actually sometimes think that maybe i should have had my eye set i don't mean lowering the bar but i mean maybe not being convinced that i have to work for the biggest player in that respective industry actually i learned more about sales for instance working for a corporate level thousand employee company then i did working for enterprise level companies like autodesk so i think sometimes um yeah sometimes aiming for the top name just for the sake of working for the top name isn't necessarily the right way to go guys there we have a discovery dot co launch just recently less than 12 months ago now doing 10 000 a month in revenue across six customers they are helping their customers do email outreach personalized email outreach to get responses up they can help you get 200 prospects to reach out to 200 prospects for just 700 bucks per month as he looks to scale and learn all the ins and outs of the problems associated with this in his role at autodesk joe thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much cheers nathan 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 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