How Insurious CEO Matt Sweetwood grew Insurious to $16.8K revenue and 100 customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is matt sweetwood he's a serial entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in tech startups as a tech startup founder he's an international internationally known professional speaker author coach influencer however his greatest achievement is having raised five successful kiddos to adulthood as a single dad he's a frequent national tv and publication contributor matt sweet what are you ready to take to the top i am let's go let's go fast fast fast i'll just say five kids and now insurance so your company's called insurance.us what's the business do um we provide equipment insurance it's simple as that think of your most valuable equipment like camera equipment audio visual equipment um you know anything that really is insurable and you take out of the home and what got you into this did you go on a trip to like miami and broke your expensive camera and said there should be insurance for this no actually i came from the photography business ran a camera store for many years and literally every single day someone would walk into the store and say the stuff got stolen i dropped it in the water it got broken camera equipment is the most stolen item that there is because it's an item that you can't like put in your pocket like your cell phone think about it you go out with your camera you're on vacation it gets put down it's a bigger object it's in a bag it's just an and it's very easily sellable on the street so camera equipment for example i mean we cover camera equipment audio equipment your laptop computer all sorts of things like that it's very easily stolen it's damaged and our we offer a very very fast access you basically can get insured in between five six minutes on our site no don't need to speak to anybody just go up there and it's very relatively inexpensive so what do people pay you on average to get insurance uh they pay about a hundred and fifty dollars hundred and sixty dollars a year for insurance and it'll cover up to let's say five six thousand dollars it's a little bit more if you cover more we also have photographers that come on that have fifty sixty thousand dollars worth of equipment or more interesting okay so when did you launch um we launched about five weeks ago we actually launched the website took a couple of months obviously in uh in development but uh we're all we're ready to go we just began our marketing do you have your first couple customers we do we do um typical digital uh marketing you know i also have a lot of connections inside the uh photo industry so i start asking around you know going to photographers strong arming them a little bit we're actually looking for influencers you know we want to have some really good photographers out there that talk it and and do that thing we have an affiliate program so you know that'll really help we believe that'll be at the heart of how uh the program gets promoted so how many customers as of today uh today we have about a hundred a hundred okay that's great so five weeks in 100 customers 14 but what is that 1400 bucks a month an mri yeah something like that exactly and so how do you model this out so someone let's say someone who paid you three months ago comes back in and says my 800 camera got stolen do you have to pay that off directly um no actually we're we're connected directly with uh insurance company the insurance company actually will process the claim for them but it's paid directly from the insurance company we're basically a facilitator we're facilitating the purchase of the insurance we facilitate the customer service and the outreach and we sort of put the product together so that it fits the market you know you think about um you know college students going off to school with their very fancy imacs you know their laptops you know it's a very easy thing to ensure and people want that kind of protection no it makes complete sense so if i'm a if i run a camera shop today you come knocking on my door down there in miami and say hey i got insurance i'd love for you to sell it and i'm saying matt what affiliate credit are you going to pay me what's your response um so they're going to make it's a growing affiliate program so they'll make depending on the cost of the policy they'll make a certain percentage of that and then of course um you know there'll be programs built in because stores typically have um sales people so we'll be able to sort of create this uh funnel effect the funnel effect down but once again it depends on you know the volume and it depends on the amount of policy sold in the dollar volume and so on if i'm just getting started with you what am i going to earn on the first policy i bring you it's like 30 percent i'm like ten dollars as a matter of fact i think if you come on if you just sign up for the program you get uh five or ten dollars if i remember correctly just all you have to do is sign up go to you insurance us sign up they'll be we we will put 10 bucks right in your account so you're paying a flat fee per account i sign up that's correct but it grows the more accounts you sign that five fee goes up and you can collect up to i think fifteen dollars or twenty dollars a policy you know if you really start to promote the uh promote the item so we believe that'll be a really big way to get this out there the amazing thing about this insurance is that it's most people think that their homeowners covers it or even their business and policies cover it in most cases it does not and also our policy is a all peril policy so for example uh if you lose it if it's stolen if it gets water it falls in water if you have a hurricane a tornado an earthquake terrorism nuclear war basically covers almost essentially every power almost everything this this idea is not obviously a new one you have a unique advantage in that you were in the trenches running a camera shop so that's an advantage but how are you who are the big players in the space and how do you beat them um well you see the the way you beat them in this space is you provide the easiest access at the right price so we have what we believe is the lowest cost policy and we have the easiest access there's essentially no place you can go sign up and have a policy in about seven eight minutes right you don't have to speak to anybody you just sign up basic information and you actually get the policy so you can bind that policy really fast so it's easy access and a very low cost and a very very wide level of coverage those are our selling advantages talking about his cox insurance they're obviously a big player in the space they're spending a crap ton on facebook ads how do you compare head-to-head against them um in our case we're offering a more specialized insurance once again they're offering all sorts of different products and it gets very confusing and a lot of those will overlap with what you have this is a very specific product and as a result the premium is going to be extremely low and extremely targeted and once again if you dig into their policies you'll find that they don't cover some of the things that we cover interesting now have you bootstrapped this company are you raised um we're just bootstrapping it for now we're able to the beauty of this product is that we're able to run it with a very very small staff and you know we have many we have tech expertise we're actually running with five people right now that's incredible how many engineers um we actually have one we have one engineer and one outside so really five and a half i have an outside there's one outside tech person there's an inside tech person i'm a tech person um and we have these three three co-founders and basically two other people working in the company and we why did you need why did you need three co-founders why couldn't you do it yourself you know i love that question um so my expertise is in tech marketing and you know in the electronics and equipment industry the other partner is an insurance person he has 20 plus years in the insurance business and the third partner actually runs a master broker agency so that's providing the sort of the customer service background we're going to get very very good customer service very quick response and so on on this i'm a very customer service oriented person so it was a very natural mix of co-founders yeah interesting um and did you guys decide to split it right down the middle 30 30 30. yeah yeah we're all we're all equal partners but i have the loudest mouth so i get my way more often i like let's let's put it this way i like to think so and are you all full time on this or is it still too early um it's still i mean we yeah and essentially we are i mean i'm not full time on anything i do 10 different things no matter what it's not going to matter yeah i'm full time whatever i put in enough whatever time it takes to make this work we're very excited about this because it's a very simple concept it's a very excellent product and really nobody else has it out there so yeah you should do really well we're going to hand on other insurance too by the way this is only sort of the first entry we'll eventually expand the offerings and we're actually working on that right now to you know ahead of the offering um i think the next offering will be some sort of larger policies maybe on property or something like that we're experimenting around we're seeing what's going to fit in if you think about it right for example maybe to be...