How Discoveroo CEO Joe Ogden grew Discoveroo 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...