Easyautotagging Revenue & Valuation (2024)

hello everyone my guest today is gabe solberg he is building something called easy auto tagging helping people save time tracking facebook ads all right gabe you ready to take us to the top yes all right so what is this i mean people that are do not run facebook ads i think are gonna have a hard time understanding this problem is this a real problem well so here's the thing right uh when as a marketer when you're dependent on just using the reporting within a platform that uh there's nuances you don't understand and there's a cross-channel journey that um doesn't really get told within a single platform so if you take facebook and you just rely on facebook reporting you are missing other pieces of the puzzle and what happens is that you can potentially run um ads at a loss and i've seen this happen with an e-commerce company so when they were just relying on the facebook attribution and not really tying in how that was translating in google analytics which has a different reporting system that uh they were actually at the end of the month they were they were operating at a loss and it's understanding what people do over time but also understanding what drives revenue um within that day so it's um what the way i've always tracked um ads was to be super granted in my tracking like the more data i have the more i can make informed decision and to do that properly with facebook was just a pain in the ass right it was it was took a lot of time so how do you i mean how do you build a company around this right you have plans that go from 29 bucks a month up to 225 bucks a month and then enterprise court as well what's the average customer paying you per month to use your tech so like if you have it depends on your ad spend really right yeah yeah but what's i mean look at your entire customer base right now what's just because we don't have time to talk about every cohort right what would you say the average is obviously the average is more in the 99 range okay got it so people spending about 75 grand a month in ad something like that yes okay are these mostly e-commerce brands using you are they sas companies and other people it's primarily e-commerce okay uh that focus on on this product and i mean put this stuff on a timeline for man it sounds interesting when did you launch the company what your direct first line of code uh i started back in 2017 um and i had like a beta product i basically tested it in the field i was um actively running like uh seven figures uh for an agency down in brooklyn and so i was building a product and testing it and um i had like a beta version out in 2017 that was okay it wasn't great the developer wasn't really you know a stellar developer it's someone i could work with that i could afford at the time and so i was able to get new customers on that version but then i rolled out a uh improved version in the end of 2018. so what did you spend on the mvp before your first dollar revenue i would say about 30 to 40 000. and this was just your own money from the kind of the agency salary you were pulling and you're paying a contract developer yeah i basically i was like this sucks and there's got to be a better way i didn't find a tool and i was like hey let me try to build this so um it was a real problem i had uh hands-on and i was like i want a solution for this and i just i found a developer on upwork and uh he wasn't he wasn't like great like i said and then i partnered up with a developer who's super talented um who came in for equity and we rebuilt the platform from the ground up interesting okay so 2017 line of code you spent 40 grand to build a thing 2018 first dollar revenue you've iterated since then how many customers are now serving today uh it's it's a small customer base it's still under 100 so we're still on the so we're still on in the early point of the game you can just give me the number i mean we're talking like 20 customers or 50 or what yeah 20 20 folks okay so 20 folks um and so i mean are you tracking about what is that about two million bucks an ad volume per month through your platform uh yeah it's about two million at the time there's a couple there's like two or three guys that are bigger um so do you take a percent of spend or is it just a flat 99 a month fee it's a flat 99 fee there's no limit on accounts to connect either because then by the way you get into limitations within a tool if you're an agency you're going to have multiple clients so like i was like the last thing i would how many um you know like how many facebook accounts i can have put in there so it's not it's not really restrictive on uh number of accounts okay so there's just one twenty folks paying about a hundred bucks a month you're doing about two grand a month right now in revenue uh yes and where were you a year ago do you remember i had like i had uh i had a year ago i think i had like two and they're still on it's about about 200 about 200 bucks a month a year ago now doing two grand a month what is your team look like is it just you uh there is um i have a ceo specialist that works with me she's part-time i have myself and then i have the developer it's a small team who's uh who's the the one uh main developer who runs the platform so are you putting your own personal money into this still obviously two grand a month is not enough to pay three people or did you raise capital i did not raise capital i don't know if i want to what i did was i actually um hooked up with an e-commerce brand and i'm working closely with them because i learned pretty quickly if i'm not in the field like i can't continue to build this product so i mean is that code for this e-commerce brand is paying you a big consulting fee you use the consulting fee to pay your team to reinvest in the sas product uh it's generally the idea yeah so at the moment it's more about organic growth so it's people that find me organically it's not a huge number of people they keep trickling in and it's just making sure they have a close relationship with each with each individual so like mike my question though is how do you pay literally there's two grand a month in revenue how are you paying three people if you're bootstrapped you have to be putting in your own money but he has equity sorry everybody everybody has equity okay well so different question then how is everyone putting food on the table do they all have like side gig full-time jobs yeah so they have other sources of revenue so this is a project that everybody's working on there's other sources of revenue it's not a place where i can support other people or two grand a month so i mean when are you going to cut your safety nets and go all in on this thing you're you're doing it the you're i would call it the lazy way right now you have a big safety net you're never going to make this thing grow unless you have no other options if i don't have a cash infusion i can't i can't uh do that yes you can look at your tattoos you're creative you'll figure it out so right now right now it is to build uh to there's two there's two things right one is to be in a like to be deep in the field which is working with an e-commerce brand right it's it's it's um cleaning up the product to where it is now and then the next step is to start uh um going into the marketing side of things right so when you reach out i was like i'm going to talk to you there's case studies i'm building with existing clients so i have a close relationship with each one of those clients so that i can actually build case studies from that and then it's learning who i want to talk to like who else gets the most value out of it because it's not just a facebook marketer that gets the value it's also the uh the business owner of these e-commerce brands right they get the value out of it as well because they can look at the data in a different way so it's funny like the people i need to talk to building the case studies around them with real uh actual examples and once i have those put together then it's like it's growing the brand out from there and using that as marketing material so those are like the next steps moving forward what is churn i mean when people start paying for this is it sticky or i mean how many are you turning per month they they stay quantify it uh i would say like it's like they stayed for at least a year the people that have been on with me they haven't left i've lost uh out of the 20 i've maybe lost um i would say it's 25 so i've lost maybe five customers i mean it's really early on so it's like 20 minutes like 25 annual return something like that yeah five on 25. people for the most part once they start using it like oh [��__��] this saves me a ton of time uh like it's a lot of value it adds a lot of value to me and they stay on how are you getting new customers right now so right now it's either word of mouth or it's um people find me by uh find me online well come on that's that's extremely generic how are they actually finding you online what search term how they i have a so i have if you look at my blog i did write a certain amount of blogs they're not they're not great they're not perfect they can use some help but that's how they're coming in they're coming into each one of those blog like uh blog posts well but yeah but how do people don't just come in through a blog post you have to rank the blog post on google or some other traffic site to get actual eyeballs on it so what search terms are you ranking really well for which of these blog posts does the best yeah i don't have that in front of me right now okay so you're not sure where you're getting new customers from right now i mean these are the kinds of things where if you were a full-time audit you would definitely figure it out because your life depended on it so 90 of my customers are coming from like ninety percent of my traffic is organic traffic yeah but what does that mean though they organic can mean i mean it doesn't just magically happen they're finding you organically for very specific reasons i'm just asking you to try and articulate what those reasons are i don't have that data in front of me so you don't i mean you just don't know yeah i don't i don't i know they come in organically but i don't know exactly what blog post game i just think you're being so lazy i feel like you build a big company here and you but you're just you don't wanna you don't you don't have to you don't wanna take you don't quit your corporate gig you wanna quit the agency you know quit the e-commerce brand and go on on this you would know all these metrics like the back your hand if you're focused on growing this company yeah well you know what my biggest weakness is since we're being real yeah is i don't have a mentor and you don't need a mentor right now you don't need one i mean you have the things it's right now it's a risk profile thing are you do you have kids are you married you have big expenses yeah yeah i do have a kid yeah right i mean look these things obviously affect your risk profile right so single dad right you got a little one that you also have to care for i mean like the these things are things you actually have to think about every day and like figure out how to manage um i always like to dig in on things like this because uh the you know the difference between a a you know two grand a month sas company and a two million dollar a month sas company many times is a founder that um isn't really like can't yet go all in on the sas and so trying to decode how to actually make that happen is a valuable kind of you know thing to go down okay it's fair enough so uh yeah i mean you're calling me out right i i'm not gonna lie to you uh i what i did was i went all in on it until the spring of this year i i spent um i was basically doing this only this by but my my focus wasn't necessarily uh it was it was just like built on trying to create content and bringing people in organically i wasn't growing revenue fast enough i was like my money stream is running out i need to bring an income and i was also like i'm losing touch with the industry so let me get back in the industry but then you know for me to be in the industry that also takes a lot of my time so i haven't uh managed my time it's not an excuse it's just a reality like i haven't managed my time properly where i am uh all in on this product like i should be to grow it i feel like i have a good foundation i have super i have the validation from customers that use this right and i keep getting the validation but i need to i need to grow this to the next step so like i'm not in a position where i can say you know let me quit my job and just do this all in i just don't have the resources at the moment however uh it's not really an excuse to not move this thing forward so you're calling me out and i'm just digging man it's my job to dig not necessarily i'm not trying to say right or wrong it's just to dig and unearth the facts and you're right i should know those metrics out the back of my hand i do if you talk to me about any any company i work with but if they ask me questions i know them off the top of my hand if i can pull them up in a second very good well hey gabe look we're running out of time here so let's wrap up here with the famous five one word answers if you can number one what's your favorite business book uh good to great number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um at the moment no i mean i was a big fan of elon musk for a minute number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company favorite online tool besides your own besides my own i i use so many i can't have a single favorite online tool okay number four how many hours i sleep to get every night uh six and um you said one kiddo single right yes and how old are you 35 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew what's that what do you wish your 20 year old self knew that uh just uh action like sitting down and getting things done and and making everything out second day uh would have been like my prime time at 20. guys easy auto tagging doing two grand a month across about 20 customers up from 200 bucks a month just a year ago bootstrap team of three people again helping folks better track their ad attribution especially on facebook launched in 2017 spent spent 40 grand on the mvp first dollar revenue in 2018 now hoping to scale processing caught two million dollars a month and ad spend through the platform right now gabe thank you for taking us to the top thanks