How HighLevel CEO Shaun Clark grew to $82.7M revenue and 70K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is sean clark he dropped out of college to start the world's largest answering service and then left after 12 years to start an accounting company sold that and is now helping marketing agencies close more leads to customers through automation he lives in eugene oregon married with a six-year-old son shawn are you ready to take us to the top absolutely let's do it awesome all right so the company you sold was i believe invoice sharepoint correct that's correct so is that like a freshbooks competitor no it was uh accounts receivable automation which sounds really boring but basically it just helped small and medium businesses collect money that was owed to them um and by automating all kinds of outreach to the customers and just basically bothering people until they paid their bills and why did you sell it um you know i grew it uh from my kitchen table to about a thousand customers um and i just wasn't sure kind of where to take it and where to go with it and right about that time somebody came in and said hey we'd love to buy you out and it was enough money that i could move on to my next venture but not enough that i could retire on a beach so i said all right let's do it what'd you grow revenue to before you sold it uh it was about forty thousand a month okay so so healthy that's good yeah not not too bad and you didn't use any like you didn't use any of these brokers you had just a strategic or someone reach out direct actually i did i did i got a cold call from a broker and which one was like uh litonas i believe okay um and i thought it was funny because i thought the guy was nuts and i told him you know he just said well just name a price you know and so i named a price that i thought was a little crazy and he came back with a couple offers so wait what was it what was your crazy price oh oh i i i think my crazy price was like uh 400 grand or something and then he actually came back with a couple of people who are willing to pay something something close to that well that's but that's like that's not a time i mean if you're doing 40 grand a month i mean you're doing 500 grand a year that's less than one x a or r that's not crazy actually you know what the heck i was doing as well so for the record i was i was i was probably surprised just due to my naivete not necessarily got it numbered okay yeah so you sell that company uh it was a good education let's talk about high level now what's that company doing is it the sas company yeah absolutely yeah 100 sas okay so walk us through what it does yeah absolutely so um what we do is we basically work with marketing agencies who generally focus around lead generation or just companies who do a lot of lead generation and the whole goal is we help double the number of customers that they pull in from the same leads that they're already generating okay interesting and are people i mean is this a campaign-driven thing people turn it on and the turn it off is your churn high no churn is not high because generally the marketing agencies we sell it to them at an agency level or the or a larger company that's generating a lot of leads so this is something going to be doing constantly and we don't sell it on a per client basis we sell it on the per agency basis so they can continue to use it so long as they're operating and generating as an agency so what is churn like last 12 months revenue churn zero you haven't had any downgrades or no cancellations no no not at all um although we're still really small and we're still growing so i anticipate that that will at some point happen but for for the moment we're delivering a lot of value when did you launch the company uh about six months ago okay so okay very very new 2018. how many customers today uh right now we're doing we only only have two ten agencies that we're working with ten agencies okay and how did you sign up these first ten where'd you find them all just bootstrapping and uh we integrated with a couple of uh software marketplaces as well and they sort of just found us and then we started realizing oh wait a second maybe this is a good market and we started just outreaching to them directly and we just found that there was a really natural fit from what we were selling to what they were what they were needing it was very surprising which marketplace did drove you the most of those agencies uh well actually ironically it was so we were selling to direct customers at the time it was dr corona it was a uh and we had a medical uh a med spa that we'd done business with their agency reached out to us and said hey can you guys do this this and that and we said oh yeah absolutely and they said well if you can do that you know i know 100 other guys who need this and so that really we pivoted at that point and we've just been driving at that direction kind of adding new features as we go but what marketplace you said you integrated with software marketing oh it's called dr krona sorry it's a medically hr i'm sorry yeah they have a developer's marketplace or an apps marketplace that really helped us get some customers early on interesting really interesting okay good and how many sorry what are the customers pay on average per month 300 okay so you're doing about three grand a month right now you got it that's good and zero a year ago obviously right yeah exactly that's great and you you said your bootstrap but i assume you put some of your own capital into this how much of your own yeah it's all self-funded just out of the out of my previous uh sale and as well as my say just personal savings how much have you put in to date uh i would say about a hundred grand so far does that make you nervous no are you married yes does it make your wife nervous no she's she's she's she's uh she runs her own business and she's much smarter than me so with her without me she'll do fine that's funny all right uh what's the team look like today so we've got uh myself uh another dev i'm a software developer i've got a software developer partner who's living in qatar right now and then we've got a couple of contractors that are doing things like design and front-end work and so so forth okay so two remote and then uh and then everyone else's contract you got it that's awesome okay very good and then uh churn it's too easy to talk about those cohorts uh i mean how do you how do you go from 10 customers to 100 what do you think where do you think they're going to come from i really think it's going to be through the affiliate model so somebody that i really um admire from a so a couple of people you've had on um uh brendan king from vendasta and also um i'm gonna i don't know i can't remember his name the gentleman from clickfunnels yeah um thank you very similar models very similar customer base um so we're gonna work with those agencies um we help these lead generation agencies actually raise their retention because we're able to help them actually close a lot of the leads that they're bringing their customers whereas right now a lot of those customers those leads just kind of die on the vine because the customers don't do a good job actually following up on the leads and we automate that whole process and so as a result we're a huge value add to those agencies yeah that's interesting um good and so these agencies i mean how many customers are they typically using your software on generally it's about it's it's anywhere from 10 to 20 i mean every agency is different sizes right and we're we're early on so we're starting small and so the agencies we work with you know again are going to have a stable of 20 customers but we generally are for the agencies that we target we're really targeting people who are not necessarily the business of creating a beautiful website or beautiful facebook page or whatever they're about driving you actual leads so we have really good coverage in those agencies and we generally can take about 80 to 90 percent of their customer base and do something pretty awesome for them interesting you had a lot of options kind of what you could do after you sold invoice sharepoint why i decided to get into this space you know i worked with a lot of small businesses every day and i was and they i heard a lot of different pain points i had and one of the things was always about marketing and sales and um i naively thought i could go into the marketing space and sell direct to to customers and and i found that to be really tough sledding comparison to my previous business um and so when i you know i just love the idea of helping small businesses grow and if i can do that in any kind of way that's what i want to do yeah so you've got so high level it looks like you do like a lot of things like reviews text message customers scheduling like there's a reputation management product and it's really grown into more of like this yeah so we've got the review side of the house the booking the booking widget sort of side of the house but the whole idea is leads come in we automatically do multi-channel drip out to them and what that means is we send automated emails text messages phone calls and voicemail drops and we engage those leads until they respond and at that point we bring the sales teams in and then we give them all the tools they need to do things like manage the opportunity book them in for appointments send out the the reminders and then even do the reputation and the reviews on the back end and help them just do a better job on the seo side interesting very cool i see you have the magazine behind you you're getting the magazine how are we doing is that the second is that the second issue of latke magazine or third um i'm not sure because it's the first one i've gotten but um what do you think i love it i'm a huge fan of you and i've listened to you for years now it's it's an honor actually just to be talking to you so it's very cool well i'm thrilled that you're coming on it's wonderful yeah the magazine is a big test but i there's something nice about holding something physical with a ton of sas data in it and so we're going to see gq to me which i love um it's kind of like the gq of sas i feel like yeah so if you're if you're kind of a business nerd like me then it's it's a cool thing to have that's awesome you know that's that's my new that's my new tagline the gq of sas right that's that's i i feel like that's kind of your mo as it is i like it i think it fits awesome sean let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh uh good degree number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um yeah probably uh brandon king from vendasta number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company um i would say besides my own tool yeah besides your own yeah definitely probably like slack is great okay and number four how many hours of sleep to get every night uh six and a half good and uh what's your situation well i know you have a wife so married how many kids any kids married one child's uh boy six years old okay and how old are you i am 36 36 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh start start earlier um go go harder guys start earlier go harder sold as first company now building high level to help small businesses with reviews text messaging and even appointment scheduling they now have about 10 agencies using them paying 300 bucks a month those agencies sell through to smbs doing about three grand per month right now i got his first couple customers by integrating with the software marketplace dr chrono which is a medical hr kind of developer marketplace he's bootstrapped the company off uh money he made from uh called a 400 500 000 sale of invoice sharepoint team of two right now i'm building the company uh in a remote location zero churn so far sean thanks for taking us to the top absolutely anytime thanks nathan