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...