How Huckabuy CEO Geoff Atkinson grew Huckabuy to $3M revenue and 60 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is jeff atkinson uh he is now building a company called huckaby which we'll talk about huckaby which we'll talk about today it's performance seo software but before that he was senior vp of marketing for overstock.com very leveraged seo to increase growth by 300 million bucks in overstock he managed marketing analytics crm seo and much more in 2007 he was named advertising ages top 40 under 40. jeff are you ready to take us to the top honored to be here let's go i have to get your feedback on this because i was the kind of um i did a panel at um oh the start engine conference uh related to blockchain about a year ago and one of the folks there was someone that was leading the blockchain project at overstock so just quickly bullish or bearish on the project um bullish for sure okay patrick's on to something he's on to something legit fair enough we'll leave that at that okay let's talk about huckaby so what's the company doing how do you guys make money yeah for sure so huckaby is performance-based seo software um we basically translate websites um and deliver them faster to google giving basically google the perfect experience when they come and crawl and they can understand the site better the more google understands the more keywords that they rank for the more impressions the more clicks product really works well for b2b software companies and if you want i can tell you why but um yes we're fortunate to our product moves the needle the most for b2b software companies where the value of an organic search visitor and the value of an organic search lead is you know quite high okay so impres my audience i want you to impress the hell of them real quick what's the number one thing that like all these internal seo people at like grow.com for example think they know but when you take like the first day you look at the back end you go oh my gosh how did you miss this x thing yeah navigation so think of a retail company right you go into overstock and it's all well described men's watches uh patio furniture you go to any almost any other than some of our customers yeah you need to be software company it's like product solutions right people don't search for that stuff so you have to be more descriptive in your navigation around your product and uh the more descriptive you are um you know you can't just just uh hope that you're gonna rank for something you actually have to have a page if you're looking for crm software right you have to have a page dedicated to crm software yeah now we had rob on with grow.com back in november of 2016. he articulated they passed 1300 customers at that point and about 10.4 million bucks in arr were you working with them already at that point no we had been talking to them they were like my white whale here and or one of my yeah yeah we've been talking to them for over a year we actually just signed them uh this past month so we're great really big deal um you know it's on our new product seo cloud and uh you know they're just set up for success we really like we really like that company and uh we have done a lot of face-to-face time which is great they're on the right track yeah what um are you finding that someone like grow might i'm gonna make this up let's say they're spending i'm a 25 a click for the keyword um drag and drop business dashboard or something like that are you finding that they can essentially instead of competing in that hyper competitive on purpose google adsense market they can essentially shift that a little bit of that a fraction of that spend to you you can rank organically for that kind of word and still and get better results essentially yeah you know the value of an organic search click is typically two to three x what it is for a ppc click and with ppc at some point um you lose scale right it just gets too expensive um unless you just keep raising tons and tons of money and just lose you know just spend a ton with organic it's scalable right so you've got it's really a technology problem and if you get it right you know i've talked to really good cmos that you know that i really look up to it concur and new relic and places and they their engine is like build a really good seo channel and your sales team is psyched because they're going to get tons and tons of good leads okay um on average what are people paying you for the software either per month or per year yeah our pricing range is between two and four thousand a month so our average just comes out to be up at 2500. okay about 2500 bucks a month you said yep and and help me understand why someone might pay 2 grand a month versus 10 grand a month what pricing axes are you using to drive up sells yeah it really doesn't depend on the size of the company or or the size of the site it really is just we have two products our first product which is just structured data which is a machine to machine learning language that that allows a website to talk to google that's 2k a month we have a new product called seo cloud that i think is kind of a game changer it's like my perfect world of seo and that product's 4k a month and that's that's in beta right now that's the one that you know sap has bought that product grows brought that product domo's bought that product it's getting a lot of traction so we're really excited about that so just really i've only been selling it for about a month your expansion revenue is dependent on essentially you selling people on like basically it's the same fee on the products but just adding additional products you don't have anything like number of keywords you want to rank for or like or like no no no none of that stuff now at some point we'd love to get to pay for performance because just the roi for some of these companies is just so ridiculous you know if you grow their own granite search channel by 75 percent year over year i mean what's that do to their business right so at some point i'd love to get a little bit more predictable around you know what the growth for a potential customer would look like and then we can put more skin in the game around pricing yeah okay and then put this on timeline for us when you launch man so we started about five years ago but it was a b2c site it was a terrible business model this is what 2013. yeah right around there um it was a b2c model it was an affiliate site i think google shopping meets uh a coupon site right you don't have to go back and forth you just turns out google doesn't like affiliate sites anymore so just uh we were struggling but we built some of this cool seo automation software and people that kind of knew the company wanted to start licensing it and so we did it was the fastest way to revenue and i didn't even understand the value of i mean you're like the king of sass i didn't know any of these you know multiples or like the value of recurring revenue um you know it was a whole new world for me unfortunately got a really good uh sort of angel super angel investor that was uh svp at salesforce that's kind of held by hand and so how much how much raised to date uh under a million oh okay good okay yeah we're in a round right now um but we've raised under a million bucks angel investment money that's great and then how many customers have i scaled to today we have about 60 customers okay good okay so this this is kind of high touch enterprise playbook yeah we're figuring it out you know at first we started would sell to anyone um now we see our our almost our whole sales pipeline right now is enterprise software companies because they you know the return is just they have high domain authority the reason is is that if you think of an overstock it's really easy to understand right for those reasons there's categories the site's structured there's an api going back to google with all the product information they get to us you know google comes to salesforce and they're like they know salesforce is really important but they have there's all that structure goes away and so they really want to understand the intricacies of a sales force or an sap and our product allows them to do that so if you layer our software on top of a site like that high domain authority google really cares the results can get pretty 60 customers paying 2500 bucks a month is about 150 grand and monthly revenue is that about where you're at today uh we're at 123. okay yep okay and where were you exactly a year ago so call it january 2018. jeff man probably 50 oh wow okay okay good so healthy has mostly only been we've really only been selling to be honest with you nathan um this product for about a year and a half um you know before that it was just sort of uh jeff's friends and now we what's the team size today how many folks uh 14 14 and is everyone based in utah uh no uh offices here in park city and uh about half half are in utah and half our our dev team is is uh is remote so um about half remote okay and and talk to me about you said you're raising right now so you obviously want to go into the raise with as much leverage as possible so that you can minimize dilution for yourself and other you know early employees that you incentivized with equity um did you get to a point where you are now break even so you don't have to if you don't want to that's giving you the most leverage um...