How Genoo CEO Kim Albee grew Genoo to $1M revenue and 500 customers in 2018.

hello everybody good morning my guest today is Kim I'll be she's the founder and president of a company called canoe their products and services over deliver what entrepreneurs small and mid-sized businesses need to attract leads and grow new customers through a comprehensive software service offering and right-size professional service offerings their customers compete and win the product again is in the MA all-in-one marketing and automation space Kim are you ready to take us to the top sure all right tell us about good new what do you guys do and how do you make money well Janu what we do is we provide marketing automation email marketing solutions in both small and midsize business in the and the micro business or the entrepreneurial space so we have deep integration with WordPress which allows us to have a very extensible stack of Technology if you will that allows people to get almost anything they need to get done done and we make the integration really easy so our customers don't have to bang their head against while trying to get their technology to work and what we saw was a big need in the marketplace for that for both existing small and midsize businesses and then those new startup businesses at a price point they could afford so that's what we created if it's if you're working with these new stars I assume that you know you're kind of a high volume low price point kind of model how low what's the average average revenue and maybe average customer pay you per month um well if they an average customer per month probably pays us around 175 170 dollars a month I would say but on the lower end you can get started for as low as $55 a month if you're just inbound leads you just want to generate your you know build your leads build your list and if you don't do any e-commerce or do you don't have any complex things like need for integrations and things well then it's a lot lower that's great and wait when did you launch company what year we launched janu in 2008 two thousand year to launch a company what happened I know I I seem to hit the mark on those ones every time there's a downturn time to start a new company and were you laid off or something I mean what drove you to start it then no I had another business going on then and um I could finally I always wanted to reach that small market and I my first company I could get to the mid the large but I couldn't figure out how to scale it down and that was when you know on the early mm sass didn't even exist and so there was this whole kind of movement to move to more of an of a hosted sort of solution so when I saw is in 2007 about the end of the year I had this aha moment where I was like oh my god that's how we can do it that's how we can get to the smaller end of the market and so I took that to my developers we talked about it and we started work and six months later we launched into our beta that's great what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers our total customers number probably just under 500 okay so what's smaller in that sense but that's because we take an approach of not just wanting to sell software but also make sure that our customers are successful yeah I know that's great and can we kind of back into revenue here 500 customers at 170 puts you about 85 grand a month something like that yeah we kind of keep that close to the vest so okay just be clear yeah Kim just be clear I'm just multiplying numbers you gave me so are any of the numbers you gave me wrong you can you can cut you can do that you can cuss you can multiply them out okay great I just want to make sure those two numbers you gave me were accurate 170 price put on average and about 500 customers mm-hmm great and where have you driven most that growth from where ever you gotten these customers from well we have a really good niche in the continuing ed market we also have a very good growing faster growing niche in the entrepreneur space we've gotten some very good partners and almost all of our growth has happened through partnership relationships so in the continuing ed plight space were integrated with one of the leading continuing ed registration software a face to that what do you mean by that can you name the company alga soft August is the company and so we work with them they're the number one continuing ed registration software company for continuing education non-credit side and we're integrated right with their solutions so we're the marketing arm of what they offer their customers so we work with their customers and we've built quite a good niche there and really really good results for the customers that we have in the continuing ed space and then we have partnerships on the entrepreneurial side of things mostly with people who offer solutions like you know how to build a course how did you name can you name a few sure success Road Academy okay is one that we have a partnership with we also have partnerships that we're building with others as well mostly in trial stage but we're looking at a good partnership with Bowen College for instance and what was soso bone college walk me through so they have a bunch of students they're gonna drive students to sign up for you when they graduate if they want to start their own company no they work with health practitioners so they work with chiropractors you know holistic health practitioners and they teach them how to market their business I see so they'll sell through your products exactly interesting okay very good and do you pay I mean as an affiliate arrangement you pay 30 percent of monthly subscriptions or what we work that out individually with them depending on how they work with us so if they just promote us right then it would be an affiliate relationship if they bundle us into say their high-end offer their high-end mastermind program whatever then we work out you know how that works so that's a one-on-one conversation and Kim have you bootstrap this company of your raise capital we bootstrapped it oh I love that I'm the only owner 100% and we're profitable that's great and what's the team size today we have seven people on our staff all up there in Minneapolis or Minnesota all around the world actually so we've got yeah so I'm there's only a couple of us here in Minneapolis that's great so profitable and now have you ever considered raising capital there's something you would do or no um we have it's just that I would rather focus on growing the business and working with our customers then I would trying to make a full-time job out of going out and trying to raise money yeah you think it you think that'd be tough um I don't know I I tried really really early on and then I thought I'm just gonna grow the business and so that's what we've done yep yep what did when you tried early on you're talking back in 2008 you tried to raise actually earlier than that with my original company and basically it's a tough it's a tough gambit and if I can bootstrap this without raising money then I have a lot a different possibility in terms of really growing the business but in terms of what's possible so I have a lot of people who have taken money and that kind of creates a certain reality for you yeah so that's one of the things where if I can bootstrap it and we're profitable today we may be smaller than some of our competitors but we're growing we don't have the churn that our competitors have we have one of the number-one inbox delivery rates in the industry and we're completely women-owned what is your turn our churn is less than it's like people who stay with us stay with us for many years so it's not the churn that's really high so the marketing automation industry is a very very high churn rate where a lot of marketing automation I don't know the exact number but a lot of mark animation companies they may their sales teams may hit their numbers but they don't hit their growth goals because they're basically staying even revenue wise yeah their sales teams working but they're also having to drop off on the other side but those are Kim like let's say this month you have I'm gonna make a hundred customers next month if you add no new customers how many customers do you lose it is it five so you have five percent sure or what is it it's less than five okay it's less than five percent yeah okay that's great and and so that's where you kind of back into your lifetime value so I mean look if it's less than 5% and we do kind of 1 divided by 0.05 that would put your months in terms of lifetime value at 20 months I mean it sounds like though you're projecting a little longer than that you use the word years yes I would say that for the most part we keep customers they either churn out superfast or we have them for maybe five to seven years okay some of them longer some of them we've had for almost ten years literally they started with us we started the company we still have them that's great so it just depends but it's very low that's great and walk me through growth rate today so today let's say your call it around 80 85 grand a month where were you a year ago um a year ago we were probably around 60 okay so the healthy growth considering you're bootstrapping that's great and most that growth again still coming through partnerships mostly yes and there's there's inbound I mean there's there some inbound but mostly it's partnerships we do a couple of conferences but we do them on the kind of the down low we don't really have boosts and stuff at conferences but we make a lot there and then we...