How MegaLeads CEO Jim Alamia grew MegaLeads to $3M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is jim uh mia he's the founder and creator of megaleads.com he's worked with smbs and enterprise companies for such as auto match komodo cyber security momentum solar and others is it bs and mathematics from pace university in new york city jimmy you ready to take to the top i am and it's great to be here thank you for having me domain name megaleads.com yes what do you guys do what are you doing you know i'll tell you my story quick um i'm 48 right now i started marketing on the internet actually in the late 90s but i do date back to computers back into 1980 something as an only child i tinkered with computers and you know i cracked my apple 2e and i learned how to get into the kernel and i did a bunch of stuff to keep myself occupied with electronics and computers and lo and behold that stuff became very popular as i got older into college and um you know my first job i remember i worked for citibank as a management associate and sort of every couple years i would pop around and you know go to a different financial institution down on wall street here i live in northern new jersey so i commuted in and a lot of my friends were very fascinated on trading and the money side of the business i was more fascinated on what were people doing on these different screens and what was happening and how did the stock market work and i had a lot of questions it really dated back to my kind of ingenuity as a child and testing and wanting to understand how things worked and reverse engineering things uh as a young age so you know i knew i was really good at numbers i went to pace university i got the bs in mathematics i went to stevens institute of technology uh pursued a master's degree in technology management and um you know i really enjoyed working with technology and you know i got into i would say affiliate marketing bulk email back in like 99 and i was like wow this is pretty cool stuff i was like i had the full-time job and then i would race home to work on the mailers and get the mail out right we were we were sending out a lot of unsolicited commercial email back in the day it was the internet pirate ship and i was learning a lot and i love the fact that there was no like senior person telling me the way it used to be you know as a guy right they're pretty damn independent so what year did you launch mega leads i you know i launched mega leads in 2011 it was a culmination of all the sas products i built in the early 2000s we really pioneered that search widget being able to ascertain a list count uh email distribution affiliate marketing but i had all these different automated systems that we built you know the ability to tap in to get a list count i had this automatic email appender i had this kind of people finder uh system and i brought them all together under mega leads i remember i was consulting um for a pretty large cyber security company at the time in jersey city and i was like i got to reinvent my my systems right and so i was looking i was driving back on route 3 in jersey city and i remember looking up at the mega million sign right right through the holland tunnel it said mega millions and then i looked and there was one of those big blue mega buses and i was like wow what a cool name i was like let me see if mega leads is available and they're ready i paid a thousand bucks for it and i built it and you know nine months later how much revenue in first year do you remember 2011 oh you know i i my goal was to have 100 customers and i got 100 customers pretty quick um and then it was you know ever changing right i'd have new customers come in customers remember that first year how much revenue um it it it was many hundreds i would say the first year 100 couple hundred thousand you know jimmy a couple hundred thousand in first year yeah probably a little bit more than that back when it was a decade or so what you would remember if you broke a million bucks in your first year did you break a million in revenue that you're one break a million dollars my first year everyone remembers that moment okay so a couple hundred thousand i do remember i do remember the moment i go to the cpa and i was like where am i he's like you're at a million twenty thousand and i was like i had an amazing feeling like holy cow i started this business with 800 bucks you know and it was really the blood sweat and tears and i just wanted it so damn bad jimmy fast forward to today because we've got a lot to get in here in the next 10 minutes right what are customers paying you on average for this lead service so i have some services that are out of the box on mega leads i've got only 39 only sas sas i've got the 39 um we get a thousand credits which affords you a thousand downloads these are c-suite executives accurate data accurate email accurate phone numbers you get a thousand credits a month for the 39 on the silver plan i got the gold plan uh which is 159 a month you get 5 000 credits most people are paying is like about 150 months something like that yeah yeah i would say everybody falls in around 150 170 somewhere yep and who are the customers you're serving who are the buyers of this usually i would say a lot of them are going to be smb customers uh looking to light stuff up they're doing cold email they're doing outreach they've got their own dialer on hand they've got a couple people on the phone they're doing appointment setting um i have you know small shops i've got you know medium shops i have a lot of people in specialty finance i have a lot of um um you know uh sales professionals um you know marketing directors uh all different i would say you know around the smb how many how many total customers are you serving today again just on the software side of things there are there there are more than a thousand customers on my systems what what do you need to do to get up to you know 10 000 customers where is growth coming from uh you know push out more distribution more marketing um you know tick by tick uh more backlinks better content like growing it um a little more strategic as as time goes on i've got a whole new mega leads uh website coming out i call the mega i call it mega leads rewrite um you off but i just want to get a lot in here are you building this yourself or are you or you have a team i project manage it so i act as almost the uh thought leader pmba behind the things and then i also get involved with the testing pretty heavy and then i've got a development crew that will you know put together my vision and uh i stick with them throughout the whole development life cycle how prospects are on that team eight people are on the technical side of the company right this is great so you basically managed to avoid any fixed head count expenses you're the only one really that's getting a fixed salary from this bad boy and then you pay contractors and you have for the past 10 years to really build up the technology clean the leads things like that i actually manage i've actually built a lot of the programs myself that deal with the data hygiene programmatically okay being though you're the only full-time employee at the company then you have contractors for the rest that's right i would say that yeah and i have uh some better than sales people i've got a couple like right hand man women type of thing helping me but yeah i mean it's a business with low fixed costs with uh high profit potential you know it's the date of business and um raise capital it's all my own money and then i do have a uh a silent investor okay got it and are we talking like millions or like hundreds of thousands sort of raised hundreds of thousands okay did it make you nervous i mean i imagine you put a lot of your own capital on early before you had revenue did it make you nervous putting a bunch of your savings in no because i knew when you know i did things in measurable manageable pieces over time you know i'm an entrepreneur i know how to put irons in the fire i know when the door opens up i know when to take a shot you know i mitigate my risk especially now being 48 years old i'm a little more cautious than i was doing this stuff you know in my 30s you know and um yeah it's measured wrist it's it's it's measurable manageable pieces and what is it i'm not going to go crazy i'm going to do it in time i'm going to do it over time i'm going to i'm going to beat them organically you know what what is first off who who do you want to be is there an enemy you're trying to build or big better i don't have enemies you know i mean you know i'll go back to the godfather you know what i'm saying so you know everybody's a friend so when you say you want to beat them organically who are you referring to uh you know i have competitors out there in my you know b2b sales lead sas space that are out there that name a couple of those i'm not familiar uh you know i you know i'm not that guy you know i don't i don't really like to talk about other companies who's in your space you don't have to talk negatively about them i'm just curious who else is in your space um you know there's going to be companies like uplead there's going to be companies like sales fully you've got your you know traditional info usa um you know all your kind of enterprise types of solutions that are out there um mega leads places somewhere like in the middle of page one organically for a lot of the money keywords jimmy what are some of those money keywords uh i rotate a rot around like business leads sales leads type of thing uh email list email addresses i try to use action words in there like buy purchase type of thing and i'm very good at strategically putting together that array of keyword iterations and you know being able to kind of uh you know build backlinks and content and that stretches back to my early years or internet you know i would always focus on various keyword iterations and actually build different websites to to cover you know those different search terms and then mega leads you know brought everything together but uh there are many you know there are many ways that people refer to data and i try to encapsulate that in my thought process and my seo practices yeah one it sounds like you've got a nice following right so you said you have about a thousand customers and you said they're all paying you know on average that's your middle plan here about 150 bucks a month correct yeah yeah and i invite more to come and we're all about educating the clients quality data so can i multiply a thousand customers times 150 a month and say you're doing about 150 a month in revenue yeah we're doing pretty good you know we're doing pretty good you know mega leaves is a strong company and um you know we could tell you that is that accurate a thousand customers 150 months you did it over 1500 about that you know i don't look at the numbers every day but you know i know that we're on track for for our goals and our growth what is your goal for the end of this year um i'd like to you know acquire you know a hundred new customers a month on the system okay and how many did you have what what improvement would i be over last month how many you had last month uh we came damn close to the hundred we really did now in your space one of the tricky things is people sign up they download a bunch of leads and they leave churn is a massive issue how do you get people to stay sticky well you know you know there are certain uh spaces that are out there that continuously buy data they have call centers they they need to keep data in the system an average call center rep on a predictive dialer is probably going to go through about a thousand plus names in a day so you know a lot of our customers are pretty big call centers um that you know um you know buy a lot of data and you know we have contracts with them they give us the disconnects so as an entrepreneur i'm very good at like um cross-pollinating and understanding you know other things i'm doing with technology and trying to connect them in that type of you know hey give me the disconnects and i'll give you this type of thing and help me keep the data and it's all about the cleanliness of the data you're going to have you know more people coming back if you've got a quality product just like anything else how do you personally manage your capture capital allocation if you're 150 grand a month and you're a one-man show with eight contractors i mean imagine you're very profitable how do you decide what to reinvest versus what to pay yourself out as dividends you know i've been doing this for 20 years so it's like i could walk into a trade show with technology and i could see how things are metamorphosizing i could see how the markets are changing i could see how businesses come about and i could see who's going to last and who's going to fail and i've got a very good perspective and should i say uh projection on what the future will hold and what what do you do with profit what i'm asking is as a capital allocator right allow us build companies to to have more freedom in life do what we want and it's always a question of do we reinvest profits every month in the business or do we take them out as dividends and go by real estate or something else how do you think about profits i think of profits i think of long term i don't think of anything like quick hit so you reinvest investing i think of diversification i think of i've got a certain amount in the market i've got a certain amount of properties i've got a certain amount of cash i have a certain amount of insurance types of vehicles i have a sure a certain amount of things that i take a shot on i like baseball cards i like coins i like fishing got it i need to go with friends that i know about that's right we're running i don't even keep cutting you off i promise but we like to keep it's really short and sweet we're about out of time here if someone came and offered you 1.8 million bucks all cash up front to sell the business today would you sell i have to see i'd have to see it's gonna definitely go to the right person right um so i'm not just all about look years ago i was all about the money right everything i do it was all about that and i'm not saying that it's not i'm just saying that when i got into my 40s i became more altruistic and i understood more about what marketing is it's the bigger purpose it's it's the things that i do to change people's lives and how they're going to change others lives i don't count everything the way i used to i put out more than i did before and more comes back if people want to follow up with you and follow your story online where's the best place for them to find you they could go to megaleads.com and check out my site i do have a pretty popular youtube channel which is called jimmyleads.com we're also very heavy in the residential solar space you can check out my agency at inventionsolar.com and um or you can send me an email to jimmymegaleads.com touch i'll spend time with anybody that has questions and i'm here to help guys megaleads.com over a thousand customers paying 150 bucks a month he launches back in 2011 did a couple hundred thousand bucks in revenue now over 1.5 or 1.8 million bucks in terms of ar 150 grand a month nice growth he's done this basically himself with a team of contractors and a right hand man or woman here or there but again playing in a very fragmented hyper-competitive space doing well jimmy thanks for taking us to the top you got it anytime i look forward to it i'm gonna watch your show when it comes out thank you again 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 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