How Fullfunnel CEO Andrei Zinkevich grew to $700K revenue and 8 customers in 2022.

Introduction hey folks my guest today is andre zinkovic he's the founder of full funnel dot io and abm and demand generation training for b2b companies with high acv and long sales cycle he leaves and breathes b2b marketing all the way since 2007 as the author of linkedin content marketing book andre you're ready to take us to the top yes thanks a lot for inviting me again happy to chat with you you bet so just to be clear sas companies can hire you to help like basically spin up sdr reps and close deals yes that's correct but more precisely to land enterprise deals enterprise okay so what does enterprise mean above what acv yeah i saw five six figures okay interesting five six figures and um are there any brands you can talk about that you are that you're working with that are sas companies yeah i mean i can't reveal you know existing customers because of nda but i can share some of the past clients happy you know to discuss like specific use cases but generally speaking uh acre of our clients we have two sub segments uh the one is uh service based companies that are selling high ticket services and average contract value is around 500k in between 500 to 1 million and uh when it comes to b2b tech companies usually uh their acv is in between 100 and 200k okay got it that makes sense now explain how the process works if someone is listening right now that that has one customer paying 200 grand a year they don't want to hire 30 sales reps to do this they want to rely on you to help sell more 200 000 year contracts what would that look like yeah so uh look we have um already like very specific methodology and we usually uh involve just two people one marketer and one sdr to build abmotion inside the organization and why that way because other you know team members are running on different operations something something works for them something doesn't work so the way how we usually start is we start with alignment where when wealth executive sales and marketing and we start talking about goals the bottlenecks the challenges they are currently facing and uh where they want to be right setting up the realistic uh expectations so the next step is we talk to sales and market and dive in different marketing and sales processes campaigns that they have done in the past how the prospecting process looks like uh how well they are satisfied with different you know final stages and review these campaigns the goal is not criticizing the teams but basically understanding what can be done better what should be fixed in their businesses and based on our experience and based on our learnings we create a customized plan for these companies now the next step is basically uh launch and pilot campaigns one of the biggest mistakes i believe these companies are making if when they hear about new you know tactics strategy whatever it is abm demand generation they usually don't have skill set but what they want to do is they won't launch a massive campaigns you know to impress executives or investors with the results and usually this campaign suck why because they are heavily dependent on automation on software on different things but the truth is that they skip lots of fundamental things like marketing message uh talking to their customers to understand the buying process and how to influence the buying process right all of these things that are really really important so this is the way how we start uh launching the campaigns i hope so sorry just just to jump in for a second it was uh so when someone hires you to do this how do they pay you yeah so we usually have uh like two options option number one is uh payment per sprint or per project oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these data are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so so what what why not like pay per sdr uh never consider this option uh for several reasons why because as i said initially we start pilot campaign with just two people one marketer and one sdr right and in this case basically we'll make less money if we're considering you know your offering so uh our goal is to build the momentum and build the trust and get the results fast uh when it comes to the results we usually focus on some leading indicators right that can tell us that we have traction and we can uh we can generate revenue with this campaign if we'll maintain it in the future so the next stage is operationalization and this is where we start bringing more people so in this case it might make sense to share or let's say offer the this pricing like you suggested but so andre when you say sorry paper project what how much are we talking how do you define what the project is yeah so typical uh project value is around 50k for our company okay well yeah but no one's going to pay that unless they understand what it's for so how do you define what the project is so this is why i'm saying that initially we have a low ticket engagement this marketing and sales alignment right and plus auditing and road mapping so it's a 2k activity it's just transparent price we have fixed price model it's two weeks engagement and based on this we create a customized program so every single company knows what exactly we are going to do and how many of those companies are you working with today Currently serving 8 customers with how many companies yeah so we don't take yeah considering our capacity we don't take more than eight clients uh and whenever we have uh let's say empty space so we just involve a new client so in our case for now we are fully booked until the end of q2 of the next year okay and so what does that mean how much revenue will you guys do this year you think uh so this year i believe will be close Monthly recurring revenue to uh i mean projected revenues should be around 700k and what what did you do last year last year it was uh when the chatter visit was 200. yeah that's really impressive growth how many folks are now full-time on your team so two full-time people took part time two okay so four so your team's smaller than last time you had six last time yeah because then at that time we were working on some uh sas project that we post just because we got traction with this uh with this business and what changed what how did you you know what how did you start getting traction with this business did you change your pricing or your model or what uh just basically the evolution so we doubled down on demand generation last year and especially in united states and canada got some really good traction and basically the evolution of clients so more challenging projects more advanced clients and i i mentioned was your typical price but with some of these clients we have retainer right and that's different story uh it's usually customized price and so um this is how we ended up where we are now okay this makes sense so four people 700 000 bucks in revenue this year i mean how do you service eight customers though with four people i guess one marketer and one sales person can work up with eight clients at a time not exactly so when it comes to consulting business basically uh let's split this revenue so uh when it comes to this because we have three tiers of clients right tier one clients these are our consultant clients and we generate from consulting if like let's say considering this 700 i believe uh 500k more or less would come from consult and then we have uh what we launched this year for our tier two clients so basically for smaller theorem teams uh so-called live bootcamps these are four six weeks you know group uh training programs on specific activity like abm or demand generation so we expect uh 150k and around 50k will come from on demand courses gotta understand so people can these on-demand courses do you put them in an element like a learning management system where people can pay to put their team members through it exactly okay so you figured a way to sort of scale consulting in a high-margin way yeah exactly and what we are planning to do just to scale our operations and basically diversify the revenue is because we got lots i mean Profits our profitability helps us to uh accumulate some cash that we can uh again reinvest in the sas product that we started work last year right and we chat with you about this so next year we are going to basically double down on it um double down if it will be validated that if it will get traction so that's that's the point and add a new line and slowly moving towards uh sas business model from consulting yeah i mean you're going the opposite way you had a sas company at your agency you shut it down because agents started taking off but you still have that dna of a sas business do you think you'll ever sort of double down and refocus on that next year 2023 yeah we hope to do the because i mean while uh what was our problem we didn't dedicate enough time and that's this this is one of the biggest mistake i realized we made last year so we didn't dedicate enough time you know to basically generate traction for that size product and it also you know impacted the way how we communicated with the development team etc so now based on the feedback and of course we feel market much better and we speak with every single customer launched as you know we have our own community we got lots of feedback how this sas product might look like so we have much better idea what to sell and more or less what would what we are doing now again we are creating a better version of this new product and until the end of the year we want to have like frost paint customers for the better of course collecting the testimonials the use cases so we can you know release it next year and start scaling it okay that all makes sense we're Bootstrapped certainly rooting for you now you guys are still bootstrapped right or have you raised capital yeah we're about trapped i love that any plans to raise or you want to stay bootstrapped um at current point they just prefer to be bootstrapped all right andre i love that let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book a favorite book um if when it comes to businesses a to 20 richard cohen as well 80 20 in sales and marketing by perry marshall when it comes to non-fiction i love um these cyberpunk books by neil stevenson so over here like yeah he's crazy guy number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um so i laughed i told last year i'm following you i'm following casey kraken from creva he's really a fantastic guy so but not that much i must have if i must be following folks from my marketing space we can call chris walter for example from refined labs he is also ceo but still he is b2b marketer number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business oh good question so i would say probably something that is related to my marketing space i love a new marketing automation software in charge i switched from active campaign and this software is dope i would say that they have a bright future if they will continue to grow the product the right way that would be a fantastic market and automation software number four how many are you sleep to get every night um good question african uh can't honestly just think about this if if i can skip it less we'll skip it number last one here what's your situation married single kids it's merits two kids those sons and i think you're what 35 now right yeah very cool last question something you wish you when you were 20 i recently wrote post about 18 things i wish i'd learned when i was 20 but if if i would share just one thing start the personal pregnancy and building the audience as fast as possible and get and read from corporation world and start my own business as fast as possible guys full funnel dot io is an agency that helps you scale your sales and your outbound quickly they did 200 000 bucks in revenue last year on track this year to more than triple that to 700 000 bucks in revenue and with a smaller team so revenue per employee went up because they got more efficient they're recording uh their systems they're putting in a learning management system which you can pay to put your team members through or you can pay full funnel directly to run that abm and set up that abm campaign for you working with about eight customers right now booked through q1 of 2023 you can also listen to andre or and his co-founder on september 1st in austin texas at our event founder 500. we hope to see you guys there and andre thanks for taking us to the top yeah and thanks a lot for inviting us again super excited about their conference and again happy to chat with you 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 and 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 support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is Andre zenovich he's the founder of funnel.io and Roi plan a marketing planning platform he lives and breathes B2B marketing all the way since back 2007 he's the author of LinkedIn content marketing how to generate high quality leads on LinkedIn without cold messaging ads it did very well in terms of books we're excited to chat with him today Andre you ready to take us to the top yeah exactly thanks a lot for inviting me thanks a lot for having me on your show so you bet so let's let's pick one to focus on funnel.io and Roi plan which one of these did more Revenue in 2020 full funnel.io C Roi plan it's still a startup that should be validated this year so we can touch it but let's chat about funnel.io okay great and and and what does funio do what's the revenue model so it's a consultancy and uh in the last quarter we also added a subscription um let's say product called Full funel academy by we train B2B marketers with a focus on growing B2B companies with complex and long sales Cycles but basically the key Revenue comes from Consulting projects and how much Consulting Revenue did you do in 2020 uh so you know we have a couple of uh Services um one let's say our key service is partnering with B2B marketing and sales teams where we join that team as team extension or let's say um as an advisers and at the same time we are partnering with Europe European accelerators like IM and Gant or scale up Flanders in ANP in Belgium and basically that's another product where we train the startups you know on these uh areas which belong to our key expertise so uh when it comes to consultant projects we accomplished around um if I'm correct 27 projects last year and uh in terms of uh collaborating with startups from these accelerators uh with trained or coached um let me calculate the right figure so it's like 51 startup in total and Andre what does that translate in terms of Revenue last year on the Consulting basis so uh we finished uh last year almost at 250k uh EUR Revenue spot uh basically for two man band I believe that's a good and when did you launch the software business Roi plan actually I launched it uh last year I came up with an idea so I found a technical co-founder and basically we created an let's say better version of that product last February uh I mean 2020 February and I started to validate the product but uh you know the idea like like uh my my idea wasn't uh that good at least it wasn't you know meeting the expectations of the market so I did around 50 beta tests and collected the feedback from different uh verticals from different job rols and basically figure it out who is our who should be ideal customer profile for MVP product and what exactly MVP should include and basically it took us almost a year to create this MVP which I'm working right now so basically January and February of 2021 is uh exactly the period where I'm focusing on growing our plan got it how much Equity did you give your technical co-founder so it's 5050 okay you split it 5050 and are you both paying yourselves or you both working for free we are we are working for free so it's a self-funded startup uh created on our funds and when do you I see on your pricing page you have your pricing listed at $14.99 per month for RI plan. when do you think you'll get your first paying customer and where will they come from actually we have paying customers Currently serving 3 customers but uh they how how many paying customers so we have three paying customers but they bought lifetime deals actually as I mentioned I was do uh I was doing during last year I was what did they pay for the lifetime deal Andre uh it depends really so the because there were different types of deals for one of the customer I suggested as well on going marketing support so it's a marketing agency from Italy and I suggested like an ongoing let's say one time per month I'm joining their team and help them with their projects they're delivering to their clients so it's they they are paying for Lifetime deal for their entire how much did they pay for that yeah ���50 uh this is the monthly price uh for one Custer Andre hold on sorry is it 150 a month they're paying or they pay one time 150 no no it's ���150 per month but it's a lifetime price for them for all the so they can keep paying you they can keep paying 150 bucks a month but they could also cancel and pay you nothing uh yes yes exactly so I mean this is a lifetime price but at the same time to customers from this beta test bought a lifetime deal just one paid ���150 for better version but you know we had just one feature and and they pay that every month or they just paid it one time no that was a one time payment and then uh on the second round of better tests we had a second customer who paid ���200 and yeah there's a lot of folks listening right now that are dying to get their first dollar of Revenue so understanding how you set up those first 50 beta tests last year is really valuable how did you set them up so basically uh I have uh current assets uh I was running and I'm still running B2B marketers and Founders Community since 2017 and basically the launch was pretty easy CU I was chatting with the most community members and of course I know most of them I was uh I was reaching out to people who can you name Andre to like some of those communities what's your biggest one uh you mean community members no the communities you run the name of the community the B2B marketers and Founders on Facebook and what platform on Facebook okay on Facebook yes how many members are in that group so it's but basically just to give you an idea it's not the biggest one but I believe this is one of the most quality communities just because on the feedback of community members because we don't allow everybody to jump into the community despite its free community uh so we decline let's say 80% of uh inquiries that's why that's why so basically I was reaching out to people with who I have established a good relationship and I knew that companies might be an ICP for ouri plan and that's it just because of when did you launch the group it's at 3,900 members right now when did you launch the group what year so it was the end of 2017 and when did you write the B2B LinkedIn content marketing book it was the beginning of 2019 I see and how did the book do how many copies did you sell um so we sold uh over gum Rod we sold so far 500 copies uh on Amazon we sold almost 3,000 copies and uh before launching this we had a campaign on product hunt but it was you know I can't I can't treat it as a sales revenue cost we did a promotion basically to collect the feedback you know before launching the book and uh we are product hunt we sold uh if I'm correct around 2,000 copies but the price was something around five bucks yeah of the book or of Roi plan of the book so you sold 500 on gumroad 3,000 on Amazon and 2,000 on product so about 5500 total copies sold that's great congratulations thank you so much so so you clearly understand distribution you're approaching us from a Community First mindset um what I would say is I'm I'm shocked you know have more paying customers on Roi plan because you already have distribution why can't you convince more people that have bought your book and that are in your community to pay 15 bucks a month to use Roi plan the biggest problem is that I didn't focus last year on have promote an AI plan CU I was I don't know if it's my mistake uh but I was heavily you know uh involved in the client projects and basically that was the reason why I rebranded get leader and partnered with my co-founder lad and we launched full funnel and right now we are moving towards product our services and hire two people just you know to scale how many people are on the team right now oh four people we hire people how many Engineers uh for funnel.io we don't have Engineers we just if we need some uh development help we invite we invite sry people from Roi plan def how many Engineers on Roi plan four okay so there's four full team members on Roi plan they're all not fulltime that that's another deal with Roi plan so these are not full-time Engineers basically uh only me and cofounder are full-time but that was let's let's say it's a for last year it was a side project and as I mentioned uh we did lots of these beta test just to collect the feedback to get uh I understand so Andre on on I just want to understand on Roi plan how many are either full-time or part-time currently today so as for full-time we can count only me and my co-founder and for uh part-time in place we have four developers so six total yeah I see okay great and how are you where are your engineers based all in warso in Poland where I am from and and what do you pay a junior engineer in Poland uh you mean the average hour right yeah in Poland uh so for senior or let's say for our senior full stack developer we are paying 40 bucks per hour and for our let's say uh junior uh meet uh Engineers we pay dependent on the scope from 25 to 30 bucks and where are you getting the money to pay for this you're still basically from consultancy yeah okay so Bootstrapped you're using consultancy Revenue to fuel the building of your SAS company have you raised outside capital or are you bootstrapped we are boot trapped we love bootstrap it's tougher it's slower it's tougher it's slower growth but in the long run it's usually worth it okay very cool now do you have any this is why uh not at this point and the reason why because I don't have a pressure and as I mentioned that's why last year I focused on growing full funnel and actually you know uh hit the revenue so we can f a plan and basically we did exactly what we wanted I mean we implemented the features uh we wanted to implement we listen to the potential customers and that's why right now I'm going to monetize it and bring the new customers to this software MH and and what are your total expenses right now for Roi plan uh so in total it's uh I can just open the spreadsheet so five it's like 79,000 loty it's our Polish currency so it's around 20K okay 20,000 per month no no it's just all the Investments and total of CR what did you spend last month on expenses on Roi plan so it's it was like uh around uh 3K okay got it so not too bad um and and when do you think right Monthly recurring revenue now I mean you have one person paying 150 bucks a month that's really your only recuring Revenue right now um I mean what do you think you can grow it to by the end of the year so I feel this year be able to reach at least 100K in annual record and revenue at at the end of the year so at least this is my goal for this year if it will be better I will be happy well we're rooting for you let's wrap up here with your Famous Five number one besides your own what's your favorite Business book Andre uh sorry can you please repeat what is my favor favorite Business book my favorite Business book is uh sorry how it's called 820 in sales and marketing written by Perry Marshall number two is there a CEO you're following or studying so the CEO who I love is casy Graham from uh gra if you know this uh startup company from us basically I love the style what's the name of the website gra gra sell it g i a V W uh y sorry gravy g r a y yeah gray.com um I'm not sure if like just a second I will type [Music] and uh oh you're talking his last name is gray casy gray.com ah you mean I was I was thinking that you're talking about the company Casey Graham G what's the name what's the name of the company Andre that he is building gravy gravy can you sp it g r a g r a v y uh I'm not sure if it's um let me see I'll look him up why do you like him gra pay it's like gravy payments but I don't know if the domain is. so I love uh his leadership style and the way how he built his LinkedIn profile and basically his let's say entrepreneurship Mantra he told like our key goal for all people who we are hired to gravy is basically to make a great career and help them to become entrepreneurs so their goal is to help these people to build personal brands on LinkedIn as well to establish this leip the website is called casy uh sorry gravy solutions. a URL number number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business uh it's it depends because I use marketing tools I use project management Andre pick the tool that you use the most so it would be slack slack number four how many hours of sleep to you get every night uh seven okay and what's your situation married single kids married and I have two kids two kids very good and how old are you uh I'm S4 last question what's something you wish you you when you were 20 oh I wish that uh I should believe more in my myself and started my entrepreneurship career faster because uh I was afraid to do it but uh just uh looking back at my Tis of running this consultancy business if I could started it early I believe I would be much uh much uh more advanced or at least at another Revenue Point than right now guys they here at Andre with full funnel.io it's an agency he did about a quar million dollars in Revenue last year he's using that agency Revenue to build a SAS product called roip plan. to help you create manage and control all of your marketing plans he's got a few customers at 150 bucks a month spending $3,000 total right now per month on full expenses two Founders four developers based in Warsaw Poland average salary there it's called between 20 and $40 per hour no plans to raise Capital bootstrap today looking to scale so that he can potentially go out and hire more Engineers to accelerate his product road map K uh thanks for taking us to the top Andre thank you so much for having me today and plash at the chat for you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 p.m. 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 backend 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 p.m. central additionally remember these recorded found 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 South World whether it's an acquisition a big fund raise 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 la.com 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 and 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' support all right I'll be in the comments see you