Intro CRM Team Size (2022)

hello everyone my guest today is harris kenny he's the founder of intro crm a simple crm for self-employed and early stage founders he's helped grow dozens of hardware software and service companies for over a decade and also hosts the pipeline meeting and hello blink show podcasts harris you're ready to take us to the top let's go all right so very cool first off how's the how's the podcast business going you host two shows i do yeah i host them both on transistor i actually was using another host and i really like transistor a lot for distribution and yeah in general podcasting is going great i like it is it making money for you do you mean you sell sponsors or it's more like growth yes distribution yeah so one of the shows is actually it's honestly doing extremely well considering our number of downloads uh it doesn't have a huge audience but it's very niche and so we've found sponsors who are willing to pay for that it's actually kind of surprising don't tell me the sponsor name but i mean can you tell me what you mean like how many how many downloads in an episode typically um oh i mean we're in the hundreds yeah for the show which like you would think you would say there's no way you'd find sponsor for that type of audience but um it's very niche and so yeah we've found sponsors who love sponsoring it like they don't really they don't mind at all the cost per impression they actually like it yeah you're doing the cpm going and feeling like oh my gosh i can't believe they're paying the cpm it's crazy but they love it because it's niche exactly exactly so what's the thing i mean can i ask you what the largest sponsor contract is that you signed for the show uh sure so we signed so we do quarterly so we had like an 800 uh for a quarter sponsorship which again is like small money but for me it's momentum it's momentum my main business is consulting so it's like hey if i've got this relatively more passive income stream i'm really happy about that and we'll just see how it goes yeah that's great now what's your frequency is it once a week or what once every two weeks once every two weeks interesting okay so you have the podcast sort of a side project you have a consulting business you also have interest crm before we go to enter crm how big is a consulting business uh it's just me it's solo but it's a very healthy six-figure business that it's exactly where i wanted to be like i don't want to hire anybody i wanted my wife and i we just had a four month we just had a baby she's four months and i want to be around for her so it's like the perfect size business for being around and we can travel and we're good um but i don't want to scale the service company basically okay so so did the idea for intro crm come from your service customers like idea from the agency yeah 100 and basically like people these sales tools like hubspot they're just there's too much it's too complicated there's too many fields and the main emotion that my clients feel is like embarrassment and guilt that they're not keeping up with these tools and i think it's because these tools are asking too much of them they're built for five ten hundred thousand person sales teams and you don't need to keep track of that much information if if you're a business with 200 000 in revenue so when did you write the first line of code for intro crm so that's the interesting part is that it's a built-in bubble so it's actually no code i'm actually not a developer that's amazing in june of 2020 2020 okay and how did you your first couple customers so right now because it is really built off my consulting practice i've got clients who are using it and then other folks who have found me through like andy hackers and micro conf and things like that okay can you quantify any of those indie hackers microcom um let's see well indie hackers is definitely a major um driver of traffic for the site what i'm hoping is that these integrations with basecamp trello and asana i'm going to be getting published in their directories over the next month or so and i'm hoping that that's going to be really what starts lifting up traffic because yeah posting in indie hackers is good but it's only going to get you so much traffic and there's a lot of people who are just sort of grazing there not necessarily converted some of those traffic to paid or use pre-revenue currently i'm pre-revenue currently i've offered like extended free trials but i just finished the stripe integration so hopefully by the end of march i'll have people paying how many are on free trials um i had 44 people go through in alpha testing and i've had probably another 10 sign up since i went to beta like two weeks ago and what's your guess i mean what are you going to launch in terms of pricing is it 10 bucks a month a thousand a month how do you decide that good question i have two tiers right now i've got like a 25 a month which is probably high but i'd rather have fewer customers right now and then i've got like a sales coaching versus like a productized version of the low end of my consulting practice where it's like check-in accountability and it starts at 250 and goes up so i suspect that my mrr is actually going to be really good because a month 250 yeah yeah end up so i think i'm probably going to have yeah i think my mr is going to be really good relative to my number of users because i've got a few clients who i think are going to roll over to that interest and how do you make sure you're not cannibalizing your agency revenue yeah so i've basically it's it's sandboxed and these are clients who two years ago i would have said yes to but now i would say hey sorry i'm too busy for that project uh so they're clients who i would basically have said no to and i've created like a productized version where it's a lot less work for me and because they're using the crm it's a lot less work for me to know what's going on with their business like i don't have to get an account you can just view it exactly it's interesting and what so so explain i mean it sounds like the catalyst here really is consulting business right so explain to us more what is the consulting business when did you start it and what are you selling yeah so started about two years ago and i work with technical founders who have been able to get a sense of product market fed on their own because they're often solving their own problem they can get 250 to 500 000 in annual revenue but then they sort of are like okay but now where do i get my next customers how do i get to a million dollars that's the sweet spot i've done other projects with venture back companies and things like that but this is really i think the place where i can help out the most we do some basic sales process work i help them with discovery help them with growing their existing accounts we play around with seo a little bit and email marketing and sort of just give them a foundation because they could get to a certain point on their own but then they sort of need to figure out how to build a something that can scale better and have you bootstrapped the business so far or raised yeah totally bootstrapped would you i mean i'm hearing agency no code indie hackers you don't seem like you have vc in your blood would you ever go raise capital i would definitely think about like ndvc earnest capital or chinese seed folks like that yeah i mean totally i mean honestly i'm working i've been working like seven days a week since last february i'm like pretty tired with the baby and everything so yeah if if i could get traction with the business where someone would be willing to put in so i could go full time i would be open to that for sure yeah interesting what do you like about tiny earnest or nd i just feel like they're really founder aligned and like i don't think this is thing i'm working on is a unicorn um i just don't i don't think it's going to be able to maybe but i don't think it's likely and i think they seem like they would be okay with sort of doubles and triples and not looking for a grand slam every time so five years uh you come back on the show and you say hey here's what the business looks like today what are you saying where you're going you know this feels great it was worth it um well i think that this idea of like an introductory product to help people get to let's just say a couple hundred thousand dollars in revenue for their business i anticipate that there's opportunity to help people find those next set of tools not build them but connect people to what's next and that i think is what could really drive the business because i think people spend a lot of time trying to like dig through tools and if you could get money first and not sort of be guessing what you need i think that could really i think turn this into a business that could actually have employees and you know be a decent sas company just you currently yeah just me i've got some contractors who are helping with like bubble and copywriting and stuff like that okay i am i am going no joke i'm going through this right now we are trying to build a bubble version of get lacquer so we can change stuff easier without relying on developers and we we're using this outsource firm called air dev to do it what bubble consulting people are you working with and what's your experience been like yeah i'm familiar with airdev and their templates and i've seen them active on the forums i don't know them but they seem like they know what they're talking about um i'm gonna regret telling you this because she's so good but if she gets booked because of your podcast i apologize forever hate nathan her name is lola ojaba wale her firm is called lunch pail labs they're in atlanta i've been working with lola for a couple months and uh she's phenomenal she's really really good and she's been there's just things that are complicated enough that i don't want to spend time trying to figure out i've been able to get it to a point and then i hit walls and then i was like now i need help and you just basically when you hit a wall you lola jump in yeah exactly and then she does it in like a second and so i've been passing more and more to her because i'm like i'm really not that good at this that's hysterical and do you just pay her a retainer or is it hourly or what we do project-based yeah project-based so basically that's sort of as we and you know she i'm using her notion so i've been learning notion through our work together and say okay here's what's next and usually what happens is i'll put together a wish list of like five things we'll do the first two and then i've learned more over the last month and we'll scrap the next three and i'll put to put another five up front so it's nice to not be like locked in that's smart that's really smart interesting okay yeah i mean this is i think this is sort of the future too is like you know you know guys like us that don't know how to code and gals we want to be able to control things without adding to our full-time developers sprint pipeline who are working on like brand new big features and like this no code movement is great now why did you choose bubble because there's a lot of sort of no code drag and drop sort of things why not like webflow yeah i dug around and it just seemed like the right fit uh the forms are really active and i just started poking around and i don't know just for whatever reason it connected uh it made sense to me and um yeah i think i probably could have done it with other tools for sure but it seemed to make sense and be robust i also like that they were bootstrapped for a number of years so i felt like it was really validated by other people who were building stuff and then they raised a bunch of money later but i don't know it felt more battle tested yeah i love that okay let's wrap up paris with the famous five number one favorite business book don't really like business books but i do like rework uh by uh jason fried number number two is their ceo you're following or studying um yeah i mean i would say the base camp guys i've got i'm integrating my project with them so i would say definitely jason freed number three what's your favorite online tool for building intro crm besides bubble yeah um ahrefs it's been teaching me a ton about seo number four how many hours i sleep to get every night with a newborn uh let's see i strive for eight uh typically lately it's been like up to three in a row then wake up then three in a wake up interesting okay and situation obviously it sounds like married how many kids uh just one okay married one kid how old are you i'm 32. 32. last question what's something you wishing when you were 20 that people who i was working for did not care about me very much and that i wish i hadn't been so married to those earlier jobs earlier in my career guys intro crm pre-revenue but 44 people going through the trial he's launching this out of his consulting business which does over a hundred thousand a year as a sole founder he has soul freedom can do whatever the heck he wants great lifestyle here we'll see what happens as he builds interests here i'm in a no-code fashion all built on bubbles so no full-time developers turning on the paywall here shortly we'll see what happens to revenue as he looks to scale harris thanks for taking us to the top thanks one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe 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