How Intellasphere CEO Bruce Worrall grew to $58.8K revenue and 100 customers in 2020.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is bruce rawl he's an entrepreneur leader and team motivator with the ability to practically identify business opportunities and solve challenging business problems today he's building a business application loyalty marketing platform called intellisphere bruce you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right so what's in telesphere doing who are some of your customers yeah so an intellisphere is basically an integrated easy to use affordable all-in-one marketing system that does it's pretty much a swiss army knife for for all things in marketing you could do social media marketing email marketing reputation monitoring building uh crm analytics integrated suite easy to use very affordable our customers tend to be uh marketers as you would expect agencies as you would expect content creators as you probably would expect um people who who actually do marketing who use these kind of tools and then a number of um small businesses and different are they still all paying you know that average price point of about 80 bucks a month um they pay anywhere from well right now they're paying 49 a month we are rolling out in another um well basically next week we're rolling out a whole dynamic onboarding system which is which is pretty cool and then there'll be um basically six options to choose from three for kind of small mid-sized businesses uh 29.49 and then our series of agency um prices uh 299 and 5.99 i'm just trying to get an average so if you look at your current cost store base on average what are they paying per month currently 49. okay it is 49. yeah okay and last time you came on back in this would have been september-ish 2018 you had about 30 customers how many customers are you working with now well now we have we've signed up um about at the end of last year we signed up about 1200 um customers of which about these are these are trials maybe about 10 percent of them have converted the cost of customer acquisition for free trial about 15 so um we're getting our we're getting our metrics down we're we're starting so on so what's the the question is how many how many paying active customers you have right now i think we have about slightly less than a hundred okay about a hundred uh and and so then let's walk through this funnel you were just diving into so you get 1200 trials you pay 15 to get a new trial yes and intended on average on average 10 of those convert to a paid customer yes and again these are still early day numbers we're still not you know i wouldn't go to the bank with them yet but we're pretty comfortable that we're on the right path here okay and where are you so 1200 trials at 15 bucks a pop that's you know to almost 20 thousand dollars in spend where are you spending that money what channel uh well we've tried a number of different channels um we obviously use our own tools and we do social media we do seo but we've been doing facebook and and long tail google um we've we've found facebook um to be a little bit more effective cost effective than the google long tail okay and last time you came on you'd said again about uh 30 customers paying 80 bucks on average which would have put you about 30 000 bucks in annual revenue now it sounds like 49 is the arpu and you have about 100 customers so that puts you at about 60 thousand dollars in terms of annual revenue run rate is that accurate um yes except for we we also do full service so we are also um just software revenue yeah just software revenue that's right okay and then now let's get into the other part so so what do you add on top of that in terms of services so on top of that so one of the things we've learned is as i mentioned kind of marketers agencies um content creators there are a number of folks who are comfortable doing it themselves there are a number of other folks out there who until kind of the ai really kicks in um want some additional support so there's a group of customers out there who we do we provide our tool set and on top of that we provide basically marketing services okay and and what does that look like so in other words if you if you add up your software revenue plus all your agency revenue in 2019 what did you do um in 2019 we we did a you know a little over a hundred thousand dollars in total again we haven't really we're just really starting to aggressively marketing what's your team and bruce real quick your video froze so go ahead and kill the video then turn it back on to restart it uh while you do that and talk to me about your team how many people are on your team so we have about um roughly 30 to 32 people 34 in india probably about um almost 20 on the development side including four data scientists on the ai side and then we have about 12 uh people in india who are on the marketing side for full service maybe about eight people in the u.s six to eight people and i guess seven people in the u.s okay i mean this would be like this would be like 60 people you're paying with a hundred thousand dollars of revenue yeah no we're so it's not 60 it's about it's about basically it's about 40. in india we have very low costs um and in the us we have you know most of our management team has been working for sweat equity we have a number of other people who are working for very little because they're kind of just believers at the end of the day so our burden is actually quite low so what is your burn well our burn today without since the number of people haven't been paid for quite a while about 50 about 45 000 a month okay and how are you making up that gap like oh i mean you're not making that much so are you just investing your own money personally or did you raise money for my money my partner's money that we've been putting in okay and how do i mean so talk to me more about this kind of india strategy right again hundred thousand dollars on top on revenue across 40 people across you know 12 months that's almost like 200 per person per month it's um so we're paying in so we have a very advantageous deal in india it's not 200 but it's not there's not much more than that so um in essence my partner is from my original my partner and our cto is from india his brother runs the offshore team we don't pay any intermediaries we probably pay um depending on the the head on average maybe about 500 ahead so which they would normally charge four thousand dollars ahead so we're paying you know one sixth one eighth the the offshore rate um we've been doing that for many years because again we we just go direct and don't have an intermediary in place okay and and so i mean this thing is burning a lot of money if you're doing a hundred grand top line annually and you're burning 45 grand a month i mean you're you're burning through that's very little money in the scheme of things just to be clear right we built a massive platform you couldn't build out for you know less than 20 30 million dollars so we've done a lot with that money um yeah bruce but it doesn't matter if you spent 30 million bucks building something that no one's using you have a hundred thousand dollars in revenue we just haven't started marketing it aggressively yet that's all right well what do you i mean what are you waiting for we're this we we we started the market last year we we actually were getting sign-ups we said we're going to we're going to step back and do this onboarding process to make it a little easier so we have to spend less resources getting people on board that's coming out next week so we're waiting for next week yeah but bruce i mean when you came on almost two years ago you had 30 customers already and 50 30 000 on revenue and now you're up to 60 000 a year in revenue uh i mean i mean you sound like the guy that you maybe you're always optimistic so there's always the next thing around the corner that's going to solve all the problems but how do you know when to stop or like triple down well will so as i said we're gonna we're gonna have a fairly large group of people um working with us on an advisory council we've signed up we just recently signed on to the new chip accelerator program um we are in another program that we're looking at actually a lot of good things are going on right now so bruce who cares about who cares about all of that though if you're not getting paying customers like more paying customers i mean you're you're oh so so hang on nathan all we need is some additional dollars to put into marketing will get plenty of paying customers we just need to raise a little bit of funding which we haven't done and once we do that we'll get plenty of paying customers okay again so why haven't you done why haven't you done that don't come out of thin air so we've we've basically have been you know working to get make sure our product is right make sure that everything is you know buttoned down and and at this point we're going to go and do a raise and we'll we'll get plenty of paying customers how much are you hoping to raise so we're going to raise um we're going to raise 750 000 through convertible notes and that should allow us to get the break even basically okay and you've already raised 1.5 million correct yes so and that was all kind of those were all convertible notes as well uh no those are those are stock grants and and um those those are for stock basically okay so you're gonna go right seven a little bit there's actually there's a little bit of a few convertible notes but most of it was stock okay so you're gonna go to another 750 000 in terms of convertible note right now who do you think will i mean what story are you going to tell an investor to convince them to give you that money you know considering two things one the the slow growth of the company over the past two and a half years compared with what you're burning and to the macroeconomic conditions right now with the virus so the the the conditions with the virus aside so we'll talk about that in a minute the um our view is forget forget the past we we have an amazing platform we're going to get a bunch of people signing up for it very shortly we've proven that we can get 15 you know customer sign up already we've proven that we have you know good conversion rates we just need some money to put you know you know fit pedal to the metal really at this point in time product is built 70 of that funding goes into and basically goes into marketing and sales so it's all marketing sales by the way i think your video froze uh you froze on rn here in studio i mean look i think i think any when you tell someone that you just need more money to put on marketing and sales they're going to go show me your historical data that proves that you know how to spend money and what channels you're going to spend it on so we've spent primarily our own money right we haven't we haven't wasted a bunch of people's money so whether you you know whether you feel like we've uh where we're at where we're at today if you look at the you know if we're doing a a convertible note we're doing a you know 750 000 6 million dollar cap that's like an early stage company that's just getting started we're not valuing this thing through the roof it's an amazing opportunity actually why well because people go to market and they have an idea and they're getting you know four million dollar valuations with a you know powerpoint right we're we've got a we've got a product that's a solid proven product that does no but bruce it's not proven the reason people can raise so much with just an idea of pre-revenue is because people are betting on the story the growth story they're telling you're almost you're weaker than that in a sense because you've been around for three years and you haven't driven the growth it's almost like you have to convince people that what you did over the past three years was wrong that's why you didn't get the exponential growth you're now trying to sell them to take seven or four thousand dollars more of their money on a commercial note we what we did was not wrong we built out the platform we've been trying to build out we are now ready to market the platform you know whether whether you agree with that strategy or not we are well it's not but what if nobody wants to use it that's the problem you have 100 paying customers that then you do 60 000 a year and total revenue and you've burned it's a 45 grand a month in net burn for the past whatever two three years again we've built out a platform that we feel we'll get plenty of customers on very shortly and we'll prove that yeah well i guess what i'm saying is why don't you take some of your personal right now and try and prove that before going and taking 750 grand from from somebody else to double down well we're we're we're about to do that as well so but we still we still need to raise money so we need to get the fix time right so i would say in 30 days we'll we'll get you know we did in november we signed up over 800 you know businesses we'll sign up a bunch of businesses now in um in in april and and we'll see how it goes you signed up in november 800 businesses and 10 of them converted so 80 converted to page well so we had it was a mix of free we started free because we want to get we're going to want to get sign ups and usage right so we were we started with free and near the end of november we said we needed to move to the 40 you know we needed to switch over so we wanted to get traction we wanted to get feedback we did we learned a bunch of stuff um we've incorporated those learnings into the product and now we're we're kind of going back to you know back to the market again well i wish you the best i hope you're you know you get that story done and you do the raise um talk to me about the virus i mean you you do you see capital markets tightening up right now yeah well i you know we've been impacted by a number of scenarios that we've been talking to people on so um we we had some strategy we had basically partnership discussions that have you know kind of been put on hold um it's clearly not any easier in this environment um to to raise money but you know as long as it's not end of days i think we should be okay yeah yeah we'll have to see well on that note bruce let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book um from good to great number two is there a ceo you're following or studying well everybody kind of follows a little bit of elon musk so i i'm a fan number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company outside of our own tool we use we use facebook advertising i guess as though number four how many hours of sleep to get every night still five all right and situation married single kids um yeah all married with kids how many kiddos two kids two kids okay and how old are you so um i'm in my upper 50s uh one of our kids actually works for me who's graduated from school is doing some of our marketing and the other one is in college very good okay take us home here what do you wish your 20 year old self knew 20 year old self i wish i um i think i wish i had started entrepreneurship earlier where it wasn't quite as risky as as it is at the moment um and uh but at the end of the day i think that you know the most important thing is is to just stay with it and um if you have a vision try to bring it home that's what we're gonna do guys in telesphere a loyalty marketing platform doing thirty thousand dollars a year about two years ago now up to sixty thousand dollars a year they look to scale they finally got the product built out now looking at doubling down on marketing they're spending about fifteen dollars to get a new trial they've set up twelve hundred trials converting about 10 percent into new paying customers that pay between 29 and you know significantly more than that per month 29 per month as they look to scale they have 1.5 million dollars raised kind of raised between raised in stock grants and things like that looking to raise another 750 000 right now to help drive and fuel some of the next uh spend in terms of marketing and distribution bruce thanks for taking us to the top all right thank you you guys know i fight like heck to get these data points for you from the ceos that rarely do these kinds of shows if you want more shows like this make sure you subscribe right now we're trying to get 10 000 youtube subscribers by the end of september here 2019 and it would mean the world to me if you clicked now to subscribe additionally i've got two more great interviews for you if you want more data points from the world's leading sas ceos click and watch one of them right now