How Growyourbase CEO John Fields grew Growyourbase to $632.5K revenue and 13 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is john fields he is a message architect that loves to invent build and scale big ideas he's got two recent exits ip and one the other one was an acquisition previously an officer in a public company and has helped positions at the white house opic deloitte and barclays john you ready to take us to the top i'm ready all right so i get to be extra hard on you because you said you listened to the show right so i can be really tough i said good things you're trying to butter me up before the thing starts so i'm softer no but thank you for listening i appreciate that all right grow your base dot io is what you're building today help us understand what the company does sure um so this is the team's third project together and which is helpful because we really understand our strengths and weaknesses so we took a deep dive last year in researching market trends and online advertising wanted to understand this social influencing which is really hot and there's a lot of different players involved and what we came away with was you know where are the pain points and the big issue that kept coming up was companies were spending some some large amounts of advertising dollars but trying to figure out what were the results from those dollars how do you audit them and then how do you keep away from the fraudulent activity and i think it's it's very inducing to say you want to spend a six five seven figure whatever it is on a celebrity influencer but you know understanding the stickiness and really knowing what the long-term effect is difficult so we kind of took all that information and research we did and said we want to reimagine how companies connect with their customers so this idea was percolating our head and we did some trial and error and what we did was we designed a really a new platform that allows companies to come in use our tools um on the platform and over a period of time find a user base so john i want to go deep here on one of these things so first off is this a crypto are you guys built on blockchain is a crypto play you know we're not built on um crypto but we are part of our uh in the background part of the mechanism runs on on crypto but we don't we don't lead with it it's just something that actually has a really good use case for what we're doing and so it's it's um that's what we're using it for right now so i want to go deep on your examples you have joe rogan listed on the website right ac well grow your base obviously ties into your parent company ac3 and here's what it says it says joe's logo is there and it says complete the following assignments for the jre podcast download the podcast subscribe to the newsletter and leave a review to earn ac3 tokens and the token is if you do that you get one ac3 break that down for me what's that mean so um what so let me just walk you through how particularly that one would work what people will come on and companies want is different things we thought that a lot of companies would want some really cutting edge analytics what they number one thing they want are followers right so i thought email was very you know 2014 as a as a number one priority it's still what a lot of our clients want so they'll come in and ask to their our audience to say hey would you follow us here would you sign up on our newsletter there and once they do that they they you know are paid instantly so what's really great is what we do is take part of that marketing budget from up front and we distribute that out to the our users we call them earners and we incentivize them then to come back and then purchase or re-engage directly with the advertiser of the company and so that's gold for an advertiser a company because they're getting really you know multiple engagements you know two bytes of the apple now for a podcast there's not a lot of products they have they're really looking for users so there's not a lot to purchase when you have a let's say a newsletter or a podcast um this works really well when there's a product to purchase this example i mean is this working well for his show yeah we've we just launched in february and um all organic growth we've got 2500 active users in the first month and you know we're driving so far for each of our uh paying customers which we have 13 already um anywhere from 100 to 500 authentic real uh emails or users to their platform and those 13 customers on average what would they pay per month for access to this platform you've built so we have a recurring subscription model there's a 500 option and then a 1500 option we have been asked by some companies with bigger marketing budgets if we could put that to work which is exciting um but we're we're not able to digest that yet and we're hoping in q3 of this year we'll have enough users and earners on the platform to be able to digest some bigger budgets so 13 customers 500 rpoo you're doing about 6 500 bucks a month right now in revenue that's right okay and where were you exactly a year ago pre-revenue at that point yeah we just launched in february of this year okay and is that when you created the company or were you coding for you know three four years before that yeah we started in 2017 um uh going down some rabbit holes and trying to do some trial and error figure it out and so last year uh we we got it all together and we started building uh in the summer and then we launched in february okay so first paying customers in february yeah and have you guys raised capital are you bootstrapped oh we we're self-funded okay up to this point and now that we have some users and we have a backlog in the pipeline of of companies to onboard uh we are going to do uh equity raise next month how much do you want to raise ideally um not more than uh half a million dollars okay and do you think you see they're gonna do that on on actual price equity not a convertible note um probably optional but you know we're looking we have a long-term vision we know how business building goes so we're looking for partners that want the equity and grow along with us okay and what do you hope i mean obviously you have to have a negotiation here but what do you hope the valuation comes out to on the 500k that you raise uh we've set a five million dollar valuation okay so you only sell about 10 on a company that's right and with our the this asset that we've created already the the token um it is traded and it's fungible so we've actually placed in the entity which you might appreciate a large amount of those for some investor protection um so there's assets in the company i don't understand you you have to forgive me here john i actually don't understand how that works right so what is the if i add up all your outstanding i think it's like a public stock if i add up all of your outstanding tokens and the current value per token how much value is there right now on the ac3 token or whatever you call it so we don't you know we don't own them all there's some obviously there's some out there in the public um but if you multiply the 550 million that were created we own the bulk of those so that's depending on the current price anywhere from three to four million dollars of value okay so so they're based they're kind of like worth cents each something like that that's that's exactly right um and what they're really good for is micro payments there's a lot of interest and hype um in the crypto space but what we found and we could you know stand up in a room full of experts and say this is a you know a better mouse trap this is a better way to distribute to earners globally at very low cost and very quickly and so that that's what we're we're focused on but at the end of the day we're a growth platform for companies it just happens that we we realized and tested and proved that the the crypto coin the token is a really efficient way to do um global get the global payments thing i'm just curious like how it holds the value if you're holding the majority of them like it like there's not a high velocity of trading every day so the last time that price was reset i mean it's not reset every second like a public stock right i'm just curious how does it hold that value so the companies that come in they purchase with usd so we actually have a uh what a lot of companies are looking for a way to get um non-crypto people into the system and they purchase uh a tranche of our um tokens with a subscription they don't touch them they don't deal with you talk about the 500 per month they pay you that's right yeah so that's actually going towards buying you know whatever you know 10 000 ac3 tokens that's right yeah and then you distribute up the tokens to people who earn them so it's like instead of going and using you know power to go like down a hashing thing right they could basically earn by doing the action that's right that's right so it's interesting so before 2017 when you wanted to get crypto you would mine it yeah 2017 2018 was really about buying it on exchange or an ico and we think a big part of the future is um really earning it so you've seen uh coinbase earn come out which is really earn to learn which i think is really clever and really needed to help educate uh different people on that platform we're really earned to engage it's it's a good way to to incentivize users to engage with companies and we want to have multiple campaigns so over a period of time they keep re-engaging with the companies and at the end of let's say six months um they've either connected with that company use the product uh want to continue on their own to support it or they'll move on to another company and product on the platform so you're slowly converting the whatever it is the 550 million ac 3 tokens you have today every new subscriber you sign up the joe rogans of the world that pays you or the brands of the world that pays you 500 bucks per month you are essentially giving them a portion of your 550 million tokens valued together at three to four million dollars so you're essentially basically spreading out like you're decentralizing again where those tokens are kind of coordinated you're essentially converting to fiat though right your own yeah that's right so it's a it's a good way for deployment as opposed to what a lot of companies did and we had the option to but you know to exchange them up front to uh people that want to really are speculators and which never made a lot of sense to us because we said well we want people to use our platform totally yeah so it's not you know we can't do it all at once and we don't want to do it all at once we want to do it over a period of time like you've identified as people come into the the ecosystem they'll own a tranche of those and once they recapture them if somebody buys them from them they can use them for a another campaign so what is the relationship between the cap table where you're trying to raise 500 grand on today and the 550 million tokens you're holding currently valued at between three and four million are those tokens part like if i buy equity in your company do i also now own a essentially a portion of the 550 million tokens you have you know because there's a lot of it's a great question there's a lot of gray area in this regulatory environment we separated the platform out because the platform has revenue but we've also put in the in the the entity uh a tranche of you know an assignment of tokens so that there would be assets in there but not all of them but a large how much like a million worth uh yeah more than that actually okay okay that's essentially like you it's kind of like when a bank gives you a mortgage for your house the collateral is your house you're essentially saying here's our collateral we'll put a million or two million you know dollars worth of tokens in the equity entity that's right yeah interesting okay um talk to me about uh team size how many people today uh we have four full-time um and then we have a three part time so like a graphics person would be part-time and uh you'll help but be part-time too early to talk about churn and expansion revenue uh yeah i mean but we're ramping now and that's that was uh we're a little ahead of schedule in terms of doing a raise we thought that would be in the summer but we just uh the story is resonating with uh this this idea of of having people be able to find um authentic pre-vetted uh users to to check out their product and their brand what is it costing you fully weighted cac to get a new 500 a month brand signed up with you you know my partner steve mcgarry is um really savvy with social influencing and i am that that's his domain so we've been fortunate we haven't had to spend any any dollars yet um because but but we have an advantage with his abilities to understand how to reach out and and network and he's built a base over a long period of time he's a social influencer um we plan to uh in the next couple months to start testing out some different ads instagram facebook linkedin are you are you burning capitals today uh well just on development of course we're yeah we spend a lot on development but but my point is like you guys are bootstrapping this so you and your co-founder are putting in your own money to drive this thing right so so like what are you like total expenses per month right now are about what um including development everything yeah yeah that's between 15 and 20 000. okay so not bad and you guys are just essentially writing checks each month to to fund this unfortunately that is yeah yeah sometimes you gotta you gotta do it in the short term that's part of the risk right yeah all right john very good now a quick question here touching on the white house did you do a bunch of crypto stuff at the white house like what got you into this you know i was uh when i was young i was obsessed with politics um just really interested and then i met my wife in 96 and she said you know we could be together and get married eventually if i would if i didn't become a politician so i moved away from that and got interested in capital markets and advertising and marketing and i didn't realize it but i was a closeted marketer i love writing uh copy and just understanding the whole ecosystem very good all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh famous business book uh i don't know if it's a business book but um i read deep work by cal newport i don't know if you that's good yeah number two is there a ceo you're following or studying ceo i follow um i read everything warren buffett says he's kind of folksy and and it seems simple but when you peel back the layers it's really brilliant and really keeps me engaged and number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company favorite online tool is one signal it's mobile push notifications and for what we're doing it's it's perfect how many hours of sleep are you getting every night john seven hours okay and what's your situation it sounds like married single how many kids uh married uh two kids and how old are you 45 45 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh that good is sometimes good enough guys good is sometimes good enough his company grow your base are helping uh influencers right uh earn to engage and it really is a marketing platform focused on the social influencing space looking at raising some capital here shortly currently 13 customers paying 500 bucks per month they've got a team of four people burning about 20 grand per month as they sell fund totally bootstrap looking to potentially raise 500k here uh in the next in the next couple months john thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan really appreciate it