How Hiplead CEO Conor Lee grew Hiplead to $3.7M revenue and 110 customers in 2020.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is connor lee he is building a company called gopersonas.com formerly named hiplead helping sales and marketing teams scale the top of their funnel connor you're ready to take us to the top ready to take us to the top all right so talk to me first about what the company does and then why the name change from hip bleed to personas yeah absolutely so um so at percentage we basically help companies scale their sales so we provide them a platform a software tool for them to use to run uh outbound sales and build basically custom growth engines for their companies and um and we do that um you know primarily through our own application on a self-serve basis and we actually will go in with larger businesses enterprise companies and help them to build out um using custom versions of our software package their own custom growth models and about i'd say about six months ago we we we started to move over to a new name personas from hip lead and the reason why we changed names is basically because um our application um one isn't just focused on on on data on lead data um it's focused on automation automating you know the b2b sales and marketing processes um and i and personas is really our focus so we believe that you know people are most uh when you're running a sales marketing process what you want to do is you want to start by by focusing on your audience first who you're actually talking to and that's and that's the kind of the center of everything if you're going to make um you know with b2b especially if you're going to make uh sales marketing work it's going to be focused on your audience what they care about their pain points um and slicing and dicing it and making the most of it now you got this going back in in 2012 and when it came on the show back in i think it was july of 2018 you'd share that you'd scale at that point about 50 customers on the hip lead product where are you at today how many folks are using the product um where we have let me see we have about uh on the hip lead well on the persona sexual tool we have roughly 100 110 okay and what is the breakdown between like if you look at total revenue last year are you doing any i mean consulting here makes complete sense to me on top of a sas product do you have i mean are you doing both or is it all strictly sas no consulting so we've kind of mod we do do a little bit of consulting but what we've done is we kind of have two distinct products now we have our enterprise plan um and and rather than doing consulting uh in the past we actually build tools that that our clients use um so we'll help them to build out that tool so so it's it's less about us you know writing content running campaigns more about taking the software that we have and building custom versions of it um kind of like a lego block how do you manage all that though i mean then you're dealing with a bunch of different code and you have to deal with bug tracking on seven different you know code bases doesn't that drive your dev team crazy well we actually we so you know we started out you know being a consultancy we we we basically built um a back-end that that can support a lot of this different functionality um so one of the things that that we're that we're that we've been successful we've done is we've kind of turned a lot of our infrastructure into an api so um we can take parts so what the core is is an api and we can build little modules kind of like building blocks on top of that and pull them in and pull them out so kind of like like a set of lego blocks or like an erector set right you've got one piece that grabs data from say their their crm our clients sales force and then it filters it and then it's then it has logic that then would go and say okay well based on what's in here um what's the business logic and they would pass it into another system all those are these individual parts um so yeah it's more like plug and play not full customization yeah exactly i see i see okay all right so 110 customers and are you still kind of in that sweet spot of you know three four thousand bucks a month on average or have you moved up or downstream um so if we've moved downstream in in our services or we're closer to around sorry in our in percentage product um we're closer to an average of a thousand okay um um and uh but our enterprise um business is is is a little bit different we have um so we're doing roughly 130k in the app uh on mrr and about 180k in our enterprise um what's the difference uh the enterprise is so the persona's app is basically um it's it's you know what you get you log in so it's it's like a regular standard sas application you log in you use it the enterprise is basically we've taken um elements of our consulting business and then built the custom code for our big clients we have we have about six um pretty large sas clients um that that are that are paying us 180 k a month in total so so what like if someone asked you what is your total monthly recurring would you take the 130 a month plus the 180 a month yeah okay got it so yeah 310 310 yeah yeah okay that's interesting so so and that's by the way nice growth again last time it came on was about 18 months ago you're at about 150 000 a month did you raise a bunch of extra capital to drive that growth are we able to do all that with no extra yeah all that without actually we yeah we've been around for a while so we've got a lot of software we've got a lot of process a lot of people um yeah and so all that's been our growth has been really driven by um by just kind of listening to our kind of going after these bigger clients that that um you know bigger companies have complex organizational needs and they're willing to pay money a lot of money to solve these complex organizational needs that you can't just um that they can't you know throw their own developers at or can't um you know can't throw you know sales operations or marketing options okay so still just about 200 000 in equity raised yeah yeah we have we've raised zero now you uh i'm going off i'm trying to remember email threads did you decide to use debt or not uh a while back yes so we use lighter capital okay um yeah we even our loan was uh 150k in actual loan and we had a 50 interest paid over over three years so we paid 225 uh okay 75 000 you know in in in fees and and whatnot uh so it was uh it was but it was a good experience we enjoyed it and um and uh and in general i we haven't done it yet but there's where um there's a lot of people um i'm not sure when this is going to air but there's um a lot of resources around covid small business association resources that um that a lot of companies you know are a good way to to get really cheap damage yeah so we're going to put this out fairly soon so let's talk about that tomorrow april 3rd is when the the actual the federal government has said okay you can now apply now there's some caveats here especially where in san francisco a lot of my audience is vc backed one of the issues is it's called the affiliate clause essentially in the contract would basically potentially makes it impossible for vc-backed companies to apply for this now would this apply to you do you consider yourself a ec back because you raised 200 000 no it was it was debt is fully paid off um oh that 200 grand was an equity yeah there's no equity at all so we have some friends and family that that have done safe notes but not not not a not a significant amount so there's no actual like you know true equity on um on our books oh i see i see okay so yeah then you're basically bootstrapped so you're good to go but like some things that people should know about rake related to this is you know essentially you take your total payroll expenses excluding contractors so don't include 1099s you can include pay to founders and owners defined as more than 20 you know more than 20 of the company and you do that between essentially the prior 12 months to applying for the loan tomorrow so call it february 2019 through call it february 2020. um and you cap these the tricky part about this is it's only up to the first hundred thousand dollars in salaries per employee so you might do you have people you pay more 100 grand anybody uh yeah yeah we do okay so like how walk me through the application process how are you applying for this uh so well we are we we haven't fully decided to apply yet but um we've actually built a resource site cova.gopersinus.com and uh and what it is is um it's a bunch of...