How Discoveroo Reached $10,000/mo and 6 Customers with Personalized B2B Email Outreach (Interview with CEO Joe Ogden)

Introduction and Joe's Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Joe Ogden. He's building a company called discoveroo.co. It's an international b to b 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. Previously worked as a music agent in London. Joe, you ready to take us to the top?

Joe Ogden

00:17>> Absolutely.

From Autodesk to Building Discoveroo

Nathan Latka

00:18Alright. So what you did is at Autodesk manually, you hated it and said, I'm gonna build a service to help everyone else do this easier. Is that right?

Joe Ogden

00:23>> Yeah. Kind of. Well, I actually ended up becoming kind of an advocate for email sequencing software when I worked at Autodesk and that was one of the 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.

Nathan Latka

00:42What did you end up getting Autodesk on? Which tool?

Joe Ogden

00:45>> We used Outreach. They originally used Yesware, I think it was, but they were moving to Outreach as I started working with them.

How Discoveroo Works: Done-for-You Email Outreach

Nathan Latka

00:53Interesting. Okay. So tell me what Discoveroo does today. Maybe tell it through the eyes of a customer story, someone who's paying you today.

Joe Ogden

00:59>> Yeah, yeah, cool. So basically what we do is we provide done for you email outreach. 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 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.

Nathan Latka

01:27Okay, and then, so let's say it's an emerge filled out to 2,000 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? Do you handle the reply as well?

Joe Ogden

01:42>> 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 sales rep or sometimes it's the founder of the company we work with, the option of maybe one or two responses. They give us

01:59>> 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 conversion aspect of it as well.

Pricing and Package Structure

Nathan Latka

02:07Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And what do what do brands pay for this? If someone's listening right now and they wanna try this, what would they pay you?

Joe Ogden

02:12>> Our standard package is $1,700. We actually were charged €1,400. Yeah. About $1,700. That's for the standard package, 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 the start.

Nathan Latka

02:34What does 200 prospects per month mean? Does that mean 200 booked meetings?

Response Rates and Personalization Approach

Joe Ogden

02:38>> 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 that the standard response rate to cold outreach is somewhere between 7 and 8.5%, but because of the advanced personalization, we get a 13 to 15% response rate generally.

Nathan Latka

02:56Well, Joe, let's use me as an analogy for a second. I book podcast guests all the time, right? I love CEOs usually, right? So 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 handling that, I'd be paying sort of 1,700 for. But for someone else where maybe they that the

03:18meeting maybe it's a lower ARPU thing that they're selling, if not go to a guest where it's $10 a year, it'd be really hard to make that $1,700 a month work. So what's the minimum price point you really want these folks to be selling for them to work with you?

Joe Ogden

03:30>> Yeah. It's a great question. Well, generally, we see that our clients who are selling products, you know, thousand dollars per deal value or more, get the best return on investment. I think anything less than that, I completely agree, it can start to not have that, you know, benefit that comes with what we do. But I think anything above 3 k per deal value, you start to see that return investment from what we do.

Nathan Latka

03:51Did you do any higher volume, lower touch campaigns where it's like a mail merge email to 2,000 instead of custom to 200?

Joe Ogden

03:59>> No, we don't do that. We I mean, we're exclusively focused on the personalized outreach way of doing 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 the primary reason we do the personalisation is for the results.

04:23>> But a by product of doing that helps us achieve that GDPR compliance in Europe to show that we're basically contacting people for a legitimate reason. We've done research about them or their organisation that we reference in the email. And that's what gets people clicking on the email because you know, like, hey, we've read a post that you wrote recently, we've seen an award that you've won, we've seen something, we've read a case to talk about X,

04:46>> 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 that really gets people's attention.

Nathan Latka

04:54I see, okay, and how many customers are you working with today?

Customer Count and Growth Since Launch

Joe Ogden

04:57>> 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 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 started to pick up in terms of interest and inquiries, it's really great, but it's been a very interesting eight months. It's exciting to be where we are.

Nathan Latka

05:19Okay, so we'll go back to you leaving Autodesk, that's a big move, but six customers at about $1,700 per month, that means you're doing what, about $10,000 a month in revenue right now, something like that?

Joe Ogden

05:29>> 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 wanna know how, you know, what do they get 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.

Nathan Latka

05:47So it sounds like MRR was higher last month, what was it?

Joe Ogden

05:50>> No, so MRR range is probably between 8 and $10,000 it 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.

Customer Retention and Long-Term Value

Nathan Latka

06:06And how many of these six customers signed up like in the past like two months? In other words, do you have customers still from like four months ago still with you actively paying today?

Joe Ogden

06:15>> Yeah, we have customers who got on board with us in January 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.

Nathan Latka

06:27What'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?

Joe Ogden

06:37>> Absolutely it's for the long term. I think, you know, some of our clients who've 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 as a nurture lead, you know there's so many different facets to it, but absolutely it's a long term approach.

06:55>> The idea of being in our vision with this is to whether it's for a sales team or for a founder, to just put this engine running in the background. Every day we're researching prospects, we're reaching out with that personalisation, 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

07:15>> 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.

White-Label Setup and Inbox Warm-Up

Nathan Latka

07:23And if I sign up with you today, do sign you up for joegitlatka dot com? So you're sending those emails as me or is it at discoveroo dot co?

Joe Ogden

07:34>> No. So it would be as a member of your team.

Nathan Latka

07:36Okay. Yeah, So it's white labeled in that sense.

Joe Ogden

07:39>> So basically it can be as you and we configure everything, set up a mailbox, we warm it up like a dedicated mailbox separate to your main mailbox, if that makes sense. That's how some clients do it. For others, me or one of my team as a member of their team, but with their email address, if that makes

07:56>> sense. It can be done in a few different ways, basically.

Nathan Latka

07:59If we set up a brand new inbox for, you know, [email protected] to do this from, don't you have to sort of warm that if you're gonna be sending cold emails? I wanna just find in the spam or promotions folder if it's not a warm, like a brand new inbox?

Joe Ogden

08:11>> 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. We use tools to do that and just like through the night and through the day, it's sending emails and receiving emails to warm it up. So again, to avoid going into spam folders.

Nathan Latka

08:31Interesting. Okay, very cool. Let's bump into team today. So how many folks?

Team Structure and Freelancer Model

Joe Ogden

08:38>> We have two people internally, it's myself and my colleague who's responsible for sort of managing campaigns and building data. But we with freelancers in The US and in The UK who are kind of the researchers and writers. So again, the kind of magic ingredient to what we do is that research and level of personalization. The freelancers we work with, and we can scale that up and scale it down depending how many campaigns we have, they do

09:01>> that kind of research and we coordinate the campaigns internally.

Nathan Latka

09:05And bootstrapped, Or have you raised capital?

Joe Ogden

09:07>> Bootstrapped completely, yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:08So what's the secret to hiring freelancers to run the system? Many would argue, 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.

Joe Ogden

09:19>> Yeah, well 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, 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 last year I did some freelance work for Scribbly and they had a very much a

09:45>> freelance team writing for them. It was a really great business and I really like 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 yeah, I thought they did a really good job of doing that. So 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.

Nathan Latka

10:03That's very cool. And talk to me about future growth. Mean, are gonna try and productize this at all or keep it sort of a service business?

Joe Ogden

10:11>> Yeah, for now we're gonna keep it as a service business. We might expand into 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, you can reach almost anyone on email, right? So I think 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

Growth Goals and 2022 Targets

Joe Ogden

10:33>> that's kind of the track that we're on. In terms of growth, we're looking for, we wanna increase to maybe get three new clients per quarter and by the end of twenty twenty two, we're aiming for between forty and fifty clients on the books.

Nathan Latka

10:44You have some great testimonials on your site from Tom at Head Start and me at Flair and Sam at Testimonial Hero. Can you share any case studies where like with the actual results like you generated X demos for Testimonial Hero?

Joe Ogden

10:58>> It's a hard question. There's nothing off the 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, yeah, for the listeners, that's something that could be checked out in the next few weeks.

Bootstrapped and Future Plans

Nathan Latka

11:10Very cool. Any plans to raise capital or stay bootstrapped?

Joe Ogden

11:14>> 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 in terms of, you know, recruiting if we do want to build a team internally eventually. For now it's working well, but yeah, never say never, I

11:35>> guess.

Target Client Profile: SaaS and Service Companies

Nathan Latka

11:36That makes sense. And do you think you'll keep focused on SaaS, helping SaaS companies?

Joe Ogden

11:40>> Yeah, I mean our clients as it stands are SaaS software, one service based client as well, but I think yeah absolutely, I mean anyone out there you know running a SaaS business between one and thirty, 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

12:02>> who have sales reps but 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. We can work with companies much bigger than brand new companies. But yeah, I think that sort of one to 50 employee size SaaS software service based companies were kind of ideal for.

Nathan Latka

12:24And Joe, just to reiterate, what was your role at Autodesk?

Joe Ogden

12:26>> I was a territory sales rep there, was, so I was South England was my territory while I worked there. I mean, it was existing customers, it was finding new business. Again, mean it's a pain point for many sales reps out there, 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 a multifaceted role and something that suffers and I saw it across different

12:52>> teams in all sales roles that I've had is that constant effort to prospect to find new opportunities that can take a bit of a hit when you're busy doing other things in sales.

Nathan Latka

13:02And Joe did you discover any problems in your role at Autodesk where you wish there was software for, like to solve that problem?

Joe Ogden

13:09>> 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 pasting into CRMs, into OneNote, into emails, it just gets to a point where you kind of just bog down copying and pasting it feels pretty crazy. So I'd say that that's the biggest problem that I see needs solving.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Personal Insights

Nathan Latka

13:31Copying and pasting, guys, you already have it. If you're entrepreneur looking for your next thing, go build a tool, sell your first customer to Joe, there you go. All right, good stuff, man. Let's wrap here at the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Joe Ogden

13:42>> Favorite book. I've read a book recently by Malcolm Gladwell, is which David and Goliath, and it really inspired me. It's about kind of the underdog sometimes having more of an advantage than the big players, and yeah, that resonated a lot with me, so I'd recommend that book to anyone.

Nathan Latka

13:57Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Joe Ogden

14:01>> Actually I mentioned Scribbly, but the founder of Scribbly, Dani Bell, I think she's I think she's still at the company, but 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 has grown really quickly and I think it's really cool.

Nathan Latka

14:19Number three, what's your favourite online tool for building a business besides your own?

Joe Ogden

14:24>> Well, I'd say the tool that we rely on the most is Apollo, and that's for data building, that's for sequencing. Of course, we are an outsourced sales agency, so that's something we're relying on. But I think for anyone out there who does 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 in the right way.

Nathan Latka

14:41Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Joe Ogden

14:44>> Probably seven ish, seven and a half maybe.

Nathan Latka

14:48Not bad in situation, married, single kids?

Joe Ogden

14:50>> In a relationship but no children.

Nathan Latka

14:52Okay. And how old are you?

Joe Ogden

14:54>> 34.

14:55>> 34.

Nathan Latka

14:56Last question, Joe, something you wish you when you were 20.

Joe Ogden

14:59>> 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, that's kind of relevant for this podcast, but I've always aimed for like the big names in the respective industry. And actually when I've managed to get there, I haven't necessarily had the best experience. It's been

15:22>> a good learning curve, but I actually sometimes think that maybe I should have had my eyes set. I don't mean lowering the bar, I mean maybe not being convinced that I have to work for the biggest player in that respective industry. Actually I learn more about sales, for instance, working for a corporate level thousand employee company than I did working for enterprise level companies like Autodesk. So I think sometimes, yeah, sometimes aiming for the top name

15:46>> just for the sake of working for the top name isn't necessarily the right way to go.

Nathan Latka

15:50Guys, we have it. Discoveroo.co launched just recently, less than twelve 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 or reach out to 200 prospects for just 1,700 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,

16:11thanks for taking us to the top.

Joe Ogden

16:12>> Thank you so much. Cheers, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

16:16One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 one

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