How Intellasphere CEO Bruce Worrall grew Intellasphere 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...