How Kvsocial CEO Neil Napier grew Kvsocial to $420K revenue and 500 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Neil Napier he's a charismatic leader of people currently and leading a company called kV social which will dive into today empowers people to spread their wings and develop all of their superpowers he cares about his customers like nobody else and is available for them more than his wife would prefer he loves the teaching goes the extra mile to enable success Neil are you ready to take us to the top I have indeed and I think my wife is listening as well so go ahead that's good all right so tell us about the company what does KB social do and and what's your revenue model how do you make money sure so we started about five years ago and we started by creating software products for social media hence the name social and we focused for quite some time on creating software for Facebook as well as YouTube and initially our revenue built our business was creating new products every few months and bringing them out to market and it worked quite well for some time but I found that we exhausted ourselves really quickly so about a year and a half or so ago we decided to strategically move more towards recurring business model and we've been focused on that since we are working to grow our latest product for Cavia and that's been the one thing that we've been developing now for more than a year so it's definitely something that's different to what we were doing before so what does that product do so it allows people to help people to build funnels as well as launch membership sites if they won't do email marketing and recruitment manager affiliates all in one platform essentially that's a lot there are huge multi-million dollar companies competing in just one of those sectors why are you trying to do it all at once so yeah I mean we're definitely in what you would call it red ocean and I think this is more of an accidental discovery for us because we have a lot of different tools along with the previous partners that did some of these things and we found that the best way to offer value to people is to bring them all under one roof but not just bring them all together actually make them talk to each other because yeah there are companies out there doing it but they are not their tools by themselves all right but together not smart enough so we're focused on making these tools talk to each other better so that we can automate a lot of things that people without any technical skills would otherwise find difficult to do so instead of you know a clickfunnels plus convertkit for email marketing and just using zapier to connect the two via an api call you're betting on your solution which is all just one product is going to outperform that exactly and I mean let's add kajabi and you know any for any solution like first promoter to the mixer our goal is to kind of provide everything in one place but with better communication instead of using third-party tools and so what's the average customer paying you per month so the average customer at the moment and I was looking at my numbers today before getting on the coal per month it's about seventy dollars okay seven zero yeah okay and you said earlier you launched this product or you were start working a full time about a year ago but when did you launch the company so the company KB so she launched in 2013 late thirteen but the product itself had a soft opening in April last year so it had been in development for longer but it had a soft opening in April last year okay and and walk me through kind of what the company did between 2013 and 2017 I mean you were doing a bunch of different products was at one time sales or recurring or an agency what was it mostly one time sales so the way we work is we would create a product that would be one problem one solution so we've been doing that for a while we had a formula down and we would create a product that would for example help you find viral content on Facebook or help you find tags on YouTube videos and so on from your competitors and again I mean that the whole process worked well between two thousand thirteen to seventeen and it was very profitable it was good for cash flow but it wasn't an exit table business which is why were to move away from that model so what did you grow that joint in the best year what did that model do in revenue to million human okay got it and how many people were you sure at peak when that model was still active we had about 18 or so people okay and now update you go for the transformation you are now only focused on occurring higher margin products what do you had today in terms of team so in terms of team size we actually up to 21 now and have you bootstrap this or raise capital it's absolutely bootstrapped I'm not I love it doesn't it feel good to be bootstraps I really doesn't mean own to tell you what to do when to do yeah did you did you come from a start-up prior to this how to raise capital like do you know what the other side looks like I have no stories but that's that's the best I know got it all right Anne what have you scaled to today in terms of how many customers are using this new product so when we open the back in April we had a lot of lifetime customers joining as well because you wanted to make sure we give people an early deal and we recently also had an absolutely launch so we're sitting at close to 6,000 overall customers at the moment and we have about 500 recurring customers or so right now oh you know some are paying more so bigness got it so so basically five if I take the 500 times that $70 price point gave me earlier they're all paying that but then you've got another 5500 that are kind of lifetime people yeah exactly got it so 500 times 70 is about 35 grand a month is that basically where you are right now it changes month-to-month bed I mean I think for the last because we're in a red ocean market and recently another competitive tool came out so we do see a chairman something like that happens at the chin which is higher than usual but as long as we keep on growing consistently I think we all right what is your turn so Chen at the moment is rather high I mean it's up to 12 percent every month and so I mean that is basically what you were doing earlier which is a one-time sale it's just they're paying you for that one-time sale over eight months instead of paying it all up front why not just do a one-time payment if you know they only have 50 for eight months why not just do a one-time payment upfront which is equal to 70 bucks times eight months I mean we have considered that in our onboarding process we try to get people onto the illy price instead but we just feel on principle we don't want to get committed to lifetime especially if you want to exit out the business because we think that at that point anyone would have an objection to people who have their commitments here for the rest of chronics lives you ever knew you didn't appSumo launch their only reason EPSA mode does well is because they get monthly recurring business models to do a lifetime deal right so you have 5500 people that have bought lifetime so you're already stuck we are but I mean we're working on upselling these customers to monthly yearly as well as much as we can and we also turn them into brand brand evangelists so we just ran a campaign to get them to promote guy view as well I mean if they like enough of course and many did so that's the goal is over Schumer was never really about the money it was about branding because we also in November changed our name from instance we took a beer so we wanted to make sure that our brand name gets out there as well yeah but but you you mean you know JCPenney is famous for putting out deals right and they're known as a deal brand so no one ever buys anything at full price that is wait for the next deal I mean you essentially created the worst deal possible by selling a one time lifetime products and you're now stuck into basically doing I mean have you had meaningful success upselling those folks and the monthly plans we have yes absolutely I mean that as well as as I mentioned turning them into affiliates and brand evangelists so using them working with them to generate case that he's making sure our customers have the best experience so that's something we're working on as well what percentage of people that a sign of the appSumo have you converted or up sold to a monthly plan I don't have this tab but we recently ran a campaign where we had about I think 40 more customers that signed up from that list but again that's just one campaign that we've run so it's not a big number official okay and then going back to product I mean look 12% churn tells me you don't have product market fit I mean have you considered getting more focused only only attacking one of these things versus doing everything yeah I mean so this is kind of the problem that we fell into when we as I mentioned got into the trouble because our goal was to do this in the society but because when the erosion we feel that people tend to move from one throw to the other really quickly and many people Beckham in they feel that they don't want the whole thing they want just one thing so something that we are working towards now is modularization within our platform so that each one application can exist without the other and can still be sellable without the other so that's absolutely been the goal and I mean...