How Leaddyno CEO Brett Owens grew Leaddyno to $1.1M revenue and 2.4K customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is brett owens he's co-founded and successfully bootstrapped two software service companies that are growing and profitable today he's currently the marketing director and co-founder at lead dyno an instant affiliate marketing solution for small businesses brett are you ready to take us to the top i am yes sir all right so you said you listened to the show you're loving it why do you love it well i like the specifics you're pretty hard-hitting and uh so ready for that uh and uh yeah i like the nuts and bolts i like the nuts and bolts uh story of how people built their companies and i guess why they do what they do well so you know what i usually ask so save me some energy tell me what you can right now about the company and then i'll dive into some stories that i think might be valuable for my audience for sure so we did we started leap dino in 2012 we launched the product in april of 2013 so we had a pretty quick uh turnaround in terms of getting something to market so that uh first year of despair that i know you love we closed the year with a whopping i think we had three thousand dollars in recurring monthly revenue twelve or thirteen three one two three sorry twenty twenty thirteen was that yeah that was twenty thirteen yeah thirteen grand you said three grand three grand three three three co-founders so we had a grand each of revenue never mind expenses um so needless to say uh we worked for free for a few years we did we did bootstrap as you said uh in the in the intro so uh worked our way up and today we have uh feeding ourselves and other miles to feed overall we're at about 10 or so people in terms of full-time uh equivalents here and uh doing uh larger revenue we're above seven figures now in terms of annual uh revenue numbers that's great and how many customers are you serving now and we have uh 20 oh we're nearing we're over 2 400 on the customer side of lead dyno okay and then we also have an affiliate network that we launched that plugs in with it you don't have to be a lead dyno customer to join that but many of many of them are lead nano customers or they join and then see how awesome league dyno is and sign up but we have 1800 merchants on that side as well that we're supporting okay and those are separate so lead dyno there's 2 400 plus another 1800 on the affiliate side yeah so call it about maybe just call it over 3000 maybe or so okay so so tell us what lead dyno does what are you doing obviously it's a sas model yeah so lead dyno and i know you've talked about affiliate marketing before and you know uh amazon's probably the classic example everyone's familiar with so you can get an amazon link if you want to promote uh a link to a product get some sort of commission from amazon you're gonna link to that what we do is basically help somebody who sells direct they have their own online website they have their own online store and they want to launch their own affiliate program uh that's what we're helping them do so a plug-and-play and especially convenient for people using shopify bigcommerce other e-commerce platforms we have apps integrations that they can just click and plug us in there and what are people paying on average for this thing per month on average so our pricing is between uh it starts at 29 a month and then it goes up to 249 a month actually up to 349. uh but we're under 100 a month in terms of what they're paying and i've just in my experience found that to be a pretty good sweet spot for small business where uh under 100 is a i would say a good price point for a serious yeah well so if i take that 2400 times the 29.00 that puts you about 70 grand a month in revenue but you're north of 88 per month right now right that puts you above a million in arr and what does growth rate look like right now year over year uh growth rate i believe we grew about 30 year-over-year uh last year so 26 2017 over 2016. that's great so yeah so you're doing about what 60 grand a month 30 about 13 months ago something like that uh yeah that sounds right yep grown 30 so first off that's great for bootstrap company 30 year over year where are you getting the growth from how are customers finding you combinations so uh we're kind of just visible out there when we started uh the company one of the things that we we figured we would do i mean i guess we had nothing to lose because we were new um is a lot of the classic affiliate systems kind of sort of the who's who that was out there uh they're kind of behind sort of veiled gardens where you almost couldn't get a demo without talking to a salesperson and we said well hey we got nothing to lose let's just i'll do these demos we'll put them out there on the website sure competitors can also view them but we'll just kind of get that stuff out there so that's what we do we're really active where we're posting stuff on our blog we send out newsletters every day featuring affiliate programs in our industry just sent out the adult newsletter today with valentine's day coming up um figured that would be appropriate um so we so we get some good organic visibility and then also through app stores that's a good source from integration partners as well so from the shopify as i mentioned big commerce wordpress woocommerce those types of those types of app stores cool and i will add a note for anyone listening going wait did he just say valentine's day you're oh you're hearing this probably in june july probably an august time frame i just want to let you guys know that because we have a huge waiting list for the show i only release one a day on the podcast but if you want them all immediately you get them basically the day i record them at getlatka.com so brad i want to put that out there in case people want more of you sooner that's why they need to be on your list all right good so um why would somebody use your affiliate solution over like a share a sale so one of the big benefits and we do have um user we have customers who use both they've used a share sale for many years and and and of course a very good product comprehensive product um but with that it's got it's got 20 years of features in it and uh their big focus today is they've got uh the influencers they work with and especially kind of the hot term now for 2018 is almost more micro influencers where they're turning these folks who have uh and they often times their customers are there so they're taking folks who have i mean everyone has a social media following today they've got a facebook uh following they've got instagram followers they've got you know family or following them or friends so turning these people and helping them share their experience their link onto social media but stuff has to be really easy for them to share so that's where we've got a very simple affiliate dashboard that does everything we've got a little one click so you feel like you're easier yeah okay easier to do so you just hit the facebook button for example pops up facebook has a post all ready to go you hit it one more time and it shares tell me about churn oh churn uh yeah so turns a good question so churn is in the high single digits our turn is actually i would say high for assassin's creed monthly uh yeah monthly okay so call like eight percent logo churn per month something like that yeah i would say that's uh i would say that's fair and why is it so high uh it is high because a lot of uh and i think you see in e-commerce there's just high turn in general um in the e-commerce world i don't know what shopify is shopify's published so they might have the turn um numbers my sense is that their turn would be on the higher end as well you um we'll see it was something that we kind of beat ourselves up about for a while where companies uh you know people sign up and then they leave and you feel bad and you find that the reason that they left is oftentimes they shut down their online store um so that's just kind of i think comes with the territory um in terms of small business so what we try to do is just help the serious people as much as we can we do try to help the dreamers get traction we do our best that that was a big motivation for us launching the affiliate network but yeah there's um there is just seems to be a high churn in this type of uh especially when working with small business rounding out the unit economics what are you paying to acquire new customers um and then to acquire a new customer i'll tell you what i'd be happy with because i don't actually know what we're paying uh our number's actually probably pretty good because we get so much more organic but i would say i rule a thumb i'm happy if i if i about a year's worth so let's say well let's call it six months so if i can spend 300 or less to acquire a customer i would be i would be happy with that yep and that that you equate that to about six months of revenue yeah about six months sure yep and then do you do projections and calculations like what do you assume the average customer stays with you in terms of months and dollars yeah that's why um it's very binary where we've got folks who are some folks with us stay for a while or forever if they're serious about it and then you do get...