How Easyredir CEO William Richards grew Easyredir to $1.1M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is william richards he's a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience in large enterprise systems design and development a software architect by trade he's been building web-based technology since the late 90s and has held senior technology positions in large companies ranging from startups to agencies to global enterprises william are you ready to take us to the top i am all right easy reader people may think this is like a scripted competitor but it's not a reading company what do you do no we do url redirects for business okay so this is like a bitly but enterprise that's right sort of uh the distinction that i would draw between bitly or rebrandly and us is that they teamed they tend to be focused more on the uh on the marketing side of things in that like the short kind of short link stuff easy to create those we're more focused on the i.t side of things just give an example of that sure so what i mean by that is that uh our our our customers tend to be uh enterprise type folks who come to us because they're currently managing some infrastructure around url redirects themselves uh and they don't want to do that anymore or uh people who are launching websites or doing website migrations and they usually stumble upon this requirement at the last minute and they're looking for a solution that is quick but that they can trust yeah and so that's kind of where this came from so william this is like so for me right now i've built nathanwacka.com for 10 plus years i've just launched getlatka.com for a lot of seo terms i'll rank on nathanwlaka.com so i don't want to shut it down and consolidate to get latke.com but i still want the seo juice you can help with that exactly exactly right yeah interesting okay i won't get into all the technical terms of how it actually works but tell me more about the business model how do you make money sure uh very simple we charge a recurring fee on a monthly basis sas is beautiful isn't it yeah all right so what are people paying on average are we talking like 100 bucks a month a grand 10 million a month what is it generally so uh lowest price plans are ten dollars a month highest price plans go to the hundreds of dollars a month uh but it really does depend on the requirement okay um typically we see uh around 30 to 40 would be our kind of average cost per user got it so so this problem seems like an enterprise problem like buying and selling websites acquiring companies you know merging them why do this at such a low price point like why would it consume why would someone pay give me a case study where it's a smaller kind of person doing this i i hate saying smaller but you know what i mean yeah i know i do yeah for sure so i think it's it's an interesting conundrum and i struggle with this a lot we do a lot of talking about this exact point um sometimes you know you're looking at companies that don't have a lot of uh capacity to do this themselves so they're not really huge enterprises so there's actually like i kind of say that any anyone who has a website could be our customer and so you've got the whole gamut of of range of people in there so some of them are quite small mom and pop shops like we have customers who are plumbers mm-hmm like right like single single shingle plumbers tell me the life event that of in that plumber where they're changing their website url what is actually happening so they um probably need a website uh definitely need a website and they're uh and they've gone through perhaps some sort of website migration or a small acquisition we see a lot of work in the mergers and acquisition space people buy stuff sell stuff um so but companies of all sizes do that um but you know we we have that but we don't focus on that where we are focused is in the larger enterprise market obviously there's more money in that there's greater retention in that so there's a lot of reasons why we do focus on that space what is retention today churn's obviously tough for sas companies tell me about how you think in that area yeah our churn is quite good uh i don't have an exact number for you but i think it's you know very low single digits okay and that's annually or monthly uh annually okay so it called annually five-ish maybe two-ish three-ish percent and that's logo or revenue uh that's revenue revenue okay great okay that's very very healthy um walk me through more the growth story here what year did you launch this company in uh launched the company in 2015. okay um started we so we this is all bootstrapped i bootstrapped this myself i love that our growth story is uh slower than you might expect for obviously a well financed company but it's working out for us actually so started in 2015 and we've been slowly adding and growing our customer base and the growth is increasing on a month-over-month basis um and we've had a couple of inflection points where we've really jump-started things uh yeah tell me about the last inflection actually first give me your growth a year over year right now and then tell me about that last inflection point okay revenue i actually did pull up these numbers for you revenue growth year over year is 275 wow okay that's great uh customer growth was 156 so going to show that we are actually making more money um than you know than we have before and what are you at now in terms of total customers you're serving uh total customers are in i'm not gonna get into exact numbers okay but i'll say that they're in the uh hundreds of customers per month that are active current we've done uh thousands of trials many thousands of trials okay but i mean is it fair to say i mean so not more than a thousand but can we put a i want to give you credit so can we say like more than 500 but between 500 and a thousand is that fair yeah okay good let's do that so minimum 500 and and you're growing 275 year-over-year now if i take that 500 times that 30 rp that's 15 grand a month is that about right size-wise yeah okay good so bootstrap the company healthy retention doing all the right things tell me about the last inflection point last inflection point was when we launched a feature that does the automatic ssl certificate management so this is a really big deal for companies especially because now google is saying you know your site should be secure and that that has a seo impact so people are starting to be concerned about that and not only that because people have been doing this for some time they now have links out in the wild that reference https so now they need to support ssl redirects and that has typically been really annoying because you had to manage all that ssl certificate stuff yourself and now we do it entirely for you completely automatically it takes zero work interesting and what is the i mean why do you define that as an inflection point talk like metrics to me that's so when we launched that feature you could you could see in the in our analytics that conversions and signups trials everything the whole world just went boom it was a huge growth point um did conversion rate hold in other words pre that launch you were converting 10 percent of child as a customer did you keep it at that high percent even with more volume coming in the top yes that's great that's really great okay how are you getting these customers what does your cac look like um so okay so where they come from let's talk about that we have really pretty good seo we've been working on that really hard so our seo is doing quite well we used to spend more on on kind of cpc like how much ppc um we're spending very little now very little like less than 500 a month how much were you spending oh uh we were spending thousands oh wow okay so i mean a pretty significant portion of your revenue yeah and you should get it so we don't do that anymore you shifted that spend to hey let's get a seo guy in here let's optimize some seo stuff and now you get the traffic for free right we so we've spent a lot of time building blog articles um so we've got like a lot of thought leadership posts we've tried we've done some uh a guest post with ns1 um where we've kind of co-branded that um and and we've got we've established some good relationships with players we have a really good relationship with hubspot right now they refer us a lot of customers ns1 refers us a lot of customers um and you know we treat their customers really really well so i think that they're happy to continue doing that and what's the team size at today uh we're at about five people uh in some sort of capacity of direct connection and then we uh you use a number of subcontracting companies for various things on a sort of project by project basis full time though what two or three yeah three three people okay full time and where are you guys all based uh currently we're all in calgary just because that's where i know everyone but we are all remote we don't have uh we don't have uh an office we all work out of our own place and and i want to continue uh growing the company as a remote company yeah it makes it it adds a lot of freedom if you can figure out how to get your kind of virtual infrastructure set up to allow that to work um so going back on the cat question it sounds like i mean you really minimize spend here but you're spending 500 bucks ish a month right now what's it spending you do or what's it costing you to acquire a new customer um i don't have that exact number uh but not a lot okay um i can tell you that we have less than 30 bucks oh yeah okay so you're getting your pay if people are coming on and your average price points 30 bucks a month you're getting paid back in less than a month easy oh yeah yeah interesting so why not do more paid spend that's a quick payback period you know it's we're looking at it we're trying to find the vehicle that works we've tried a lot of different things and i don't know nothing's just really clicking for me on that um you know obviously we're gonna continue to iterate on that and probably pull in some people who are frankly smarter than the rest of us to uh to help us figure out what that solution should look like this is interesting so you're i mean you're in the early days you've bootstrapped this you've had a few exits in your past right what's that you've had it sounds like you've had some success in your past right in terms of exits uh i haven't done an exit yet thus far but this is not my first startup that's for sure okay so you've got so what i've learned a lot i was gonna say what did you learn like at the last one that you've implemented in this one oh man uh what did i learn at the last one uh concentrate on your business so my background is technology so you know that's where i i used to focus a lot of effort and so i focused all of my effort on the business and this and not only that the other lesson that i learned is iterate iterate iterate do tiny little things and test them yep there's a big belief that i've got you know malcolm gladwell wrote that book about 10 000 hours i think in our world for a software person's brain it's the first person to 10 000 tests win and the higher velocity tests you can do at scale i mean look at amazon facebook they're running hundreds of millions of tests annually yeah so what infrastructure have you set up to run these tests um so we've got great analytics so i've really focused hard on analytics um and uh so that's giving us a ton of data that comes in all the time now it's figuring out okay what is meaningful in this um and and then using that to make decisions and test further theories yep that makes good sense will let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's the last business book you read uh the last one i'll talk about my favorite one okay uh and my favorite one is rework i'm a huge fan of the guys at 37 signals base camp now um and they're just general strategy on business so that's that's one for me number two is there a ceo that you're following or studying there in calgary uh no well i really like toby from shopify yeah i really like the way he speaks i like the way he talks about his company i think shopify is a great company number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business hands down intercom number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night lots like nine that's great what's your situation married single you have kids i'm married no kids no kids and how old are you i'm 42 42. okay last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew what do i wish my 20 year old self knew worry less about the details and be better at as being a generalist interesting less about the details more about being a generalist coming from a guy with a tech background i like that piece of advice uh he's learned a lot of lessons at his last startups he's now building again easy reader uh launched in 2015 team of three full-time five uh full-time and part-time contractors obviously uh helping companies really get their redirects down whether it's enterprise or a plumber that just bought a smaller plumbing company that needs a redirect working properly they saw a big point kind of change in terms of customer growth when they introduced ssl redirects they're serving 500 customers today paying on average 30 bucks a month for 15 grand a month in revenue growing about 275 year-over-year right now will thank you so much for taking us to the top thanks for having me