How Miestro CEO Justin Burns grew Miestro to $2.8M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is justin burns he's a serial entrepreneur who with uh with just a few hundred bucks and no college degree got started and launched his second sas platform called maestro an online course platform that allows for course creators to get their course up fast justin are you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right man talk to me about maestro what's the company do and how do you make money yeah so maestro is a sas company uh we make money by charging people per month to uh create their courses and uh pretty much it allows for people to get their courses up in a matter of minutes that's our bold claim so interesting and so what do you on average what do you charge per month for this so on average our average user is paying around 100 bucks a month okay and look i mean so i've interviewed a bunch of people kind of in this space and the problem is always churn because it's out of your control like if people don't invest in creating content to upload to your platform you're screwed and eventually they stop paying you so how do you make sure that doesn't happen yeah so we actually just experienced like you know the turn issue uh so what we're doing right now is we're really trying to tackle the biggest issue that we've kind of gotten feedback from our users which is content right creating content so uh what we're doing is we're creating a set of tools right now to make content creation easier and then we're also kind of really trying to go the kind of service route a little bit not really charging for service but just really helping our students out i'm actually traveling right now uh speaking because we're really trying to get some feedback on how can we make content creation way easier for our users interesting and when did you launch the company what year we launched it last year so it's like a year ago it's great 2017 and how many customers have you scaled to today so we have a few hundred customers right now okay like you're talking like 200 300 yeah 200 around 200. that's great we'll look 200 times 100 bucks a month it's about what 20 grand a month in revenue yeah yeah it's not too bad being a year old yeah yeah so exactly a year ago so december of 2017. you had zero revenue yeah we had zero just just a great company that's great okay and have you bootstrapped this thing or raised capital not raised well we raised a little small angel round so um just very very small small for the company is bootstrap how small actually around 20 000. so it wasn't much it was it's very small rest of it just came from me uh selling off my other assets and and why i mean we we've we've kind of been i wouldn't say close but we've known of each other for many many years and from what i remember about you you've always kind of been in the um um uh like teacher kind of game you people that create content they teach they teach courses things like that did you just realize that you just got sick of the product launch cycle and you said you know i'm gonna build a sas company with recurring revenue so i don't have to worry about driving new sales every month yeah it was more like a you know kind of wanted to grow something even bigger and kind of you know i come from this space so it's something i'm real passionate about i was just like you know i was working with a guy who had a couple sas you know uh he had built a couple sas companies and it was just something i was just like i want to get in this and really do that a guy named mark thompson okay so he actually built a couple sas companies he's the owner of paid kickstart so um yeah he actually helped me and helped me built out um you know just really understand this game of uh sass yeah that's great and um what is the uh by the way mark mark was on episode 1394 if anybody guys want to go here mark um walk me through justin the the process for getting these first 200 customers where'd you find them yeah so we uh the combination of two things so one is uh affiliate relationships which i had before um so we did some affiliate we've been doing a lot of kind of uh you know kind of toying with the fact of like doing like um affiliate marketing like affiliate webinars so we've acquired probably 70 of our customers do that and the other 30 is me kind of speaking at various events because i'm also a speaker so speak about maestro when users join and i sign up so walk me through an affiliate webinar you identify someone like me that might have a you know a big email list of people that you know would be your customers you reach out and what's the pitch sound like yeah so it's just kind of you know just basically saying hey you know we you know we've crossed paths it usually is kind of referral based i asked affiliates that i have you know relationships in the past i say hey do you know anybody who you know you can introduce me to we we get introduced we hop on the phone uh usually it's just like hey i want to see how i can support you you know it's usually giving first obviously most people just kind of say hey i have this great product i want you to you know sign up for it but usually people are turned off by that so we kind of go the route of saying hey i listened to your show like if i was reached out saying hey i'm listening to your show i love it just yeah i love this episode specifically just want to know if you want to just hop on and see if we can create some energy i can you know oh synergy i just want to promote you to my audience and we've been getting some really good you know feedback from that and people just you know love it especially the referral piece is really good and we've been getting really good uh you know pretty good so fast forward you and i you pitched me we ended up doing a webinar together call it you know two months after after you pitched me we do the webinar there's i'm gonna make this up 300 people show up uh which means we had about 900 registered uh let's say 220 make it to the end i put up the offer and let's say 20 of them buy a 100 a month plan what's the kickback you pay me 30 each month in perpetuity yeah interesting so you see the thing i don't the only thing i don't like about that is that basically means no matter what you are always going to have 70 margins or lower because that's really a cost of goods sold yeah yeah i mean the biggest thing with it is we kind of look at it obviously different because we look at it and we've always looked at it this way in the affiliate marketing world is you know you kind of went through you got us that customer so we kind of look at it like that but we are kind of toying with a couple different models right now which is maybe just the first year uh but we always just you know affiliates we want to make sure like they're taking care of more importantly because yeah totally get that i mean one thing one thing that i did it my first sas company and that i recommend others do in this exact situation is put a clause in the affiliate contract where you essentially have the right to buy out the next 12 months of what you would owe the affiliate because what that allows you to do is let's say you go to an investor and they're like while your margins are stuck at 70 because you have this 30 in perpetuity they can essentially buy out that affiliate revenue stream and increase your margins by 30 overnight yeah and we've been actually it's funny because i was actually in a um one of my one of my friends actually sold a company to microsoft and he's been uh mentoring me and he says who is that uh guy named mark okay you like marx i like marks like mark but uh he actually sold his company he actually uh mentors me in uh georgia uh where i'm based and so um he said you know he's like dude you got to get rid of that uh the the the recurring you know the affiliate part but we love it you know obviously we have to go out and pay to acquire customers so it allow for us to scale and then we're going to go into paid ads uh very very soon here so what's your fully weighted calc right now is it just 30 bucks on the 100 yeah i mean it's just 30 bucks 100 so what's your team today do you have any sales or marketing yeah so right now we actually just hired our first salesperson so we're going to kind of go into the direction of going after different companies because uh the differentiation with us is we're kind of going to go in the content direction and we're also going to go in the more engagement so gamification sort of engagement tools so with that you know set we can go into kind of the enterprise space so we're we're kind of exploring that a little bit right now so i hire one person we have six other people on our team interesting okay so six people total right now yeah six people totally including you yeah and i'll spread out remote yeah they're most of them are remote a couple of them are in atlanta georgia where i'm based and and talk so talk to me about churn what is your turn per month so return right now is around five percent logo churn or revenue uh revenue revenue churn per month do you only have that one price plan at 100 bucks a month or do you have multiple no so we have a lower price plan which is 30 bucks a month just someone who's getting started and then we have uh a 200 a month plan right now interesting okay no and i imagine probably no meaningful expansion revenue at this point just because you're so early is it accurate yeah yeah no no meaningful revenue right now yeah interesting okay good so so cac is basically 30 bucks you now have a sales person so their salary will start counting towards that hopefully they get up to speed quickly are you burning capital today are you break even no i mean pretty much we're we're a little profitable okay so you know being a year and we're profitable because again it's not really you know we don't have a a lot of you know devs on our team right now but uh we are scaling and we're profitable you're talking like a grand a month two grand a month something like that i mean a little bit more than that okay that's good no no i always look i always like to understand how people decide kind of what they let be profit versus what they invest in additional talent or r d or things like that so that's good yeah yeah yeah all right very good any plans to uh any plans to raise capital in the near future uh well like i said my mentor who's in atlanta he wants me to kind of you know pitch some vc's so you know i just actually finished my deck so we're gonna go ahead and uh not really any future plans i want to see how far i can get with the bootstrap you know sort of thing but come on justin you spent your time to make a freaking deck you're not gonna go through the pain of making a deck if you weren't actually considering raising that's true yeah we'll we'll see what's out there we'll see but come on dude you gotta be all in or all it's gonna be like a yes or no right like are you in or out all right we'll yeah we'll do it i was gonna say you're gonna your show to a vc meeting and they're gonna go okay what do you wanna raise you're gonna say well you know i spent time making this deck i'm not sure but my mentor said i should take this meeting and they're gonna go okay this guy's not this guy's out if you do so if you do raise what's the perfect amount for you to raise right now again like that's i think that's the that's the thing where i'm like i don't know because it's one of those things where i'm not really looking to raise meaning it's more like it's more like kind of a discussion right so i would say you know who knows maybe a couple hundred thousand bucks just to kind of know and that's for me to kind of scale really not really focus on the product because that's what we focused on perfecting right now as a product is more sales and marketing is is kind of the focal point of what we're doing yeah do you um has your mentor talked to you or have you looked or studied a venture debt which is kind of a non-dilutive way to get capital to grow no no we haven't studied that way interesting okay very good let's wrap up man with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book i would say a breakthrough advertising by eugene schwartz marketing book baby that's a good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yeah i love eli musk man i love how he's innovative and love following him number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business i would have to shave in cloud app i love that thing i just love you know screenshotting everything it's awesome number four how many hours of sleep to get every night probably around seven hours and what's your situation justin married single kiddos no kids single okay not married no kids and uh how old are you 32 32. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i wish i would have got somebody who knew what the hell they were doing before mentor forever like in what space like coding or what i would just say business in general wish i had got a you know a business mentor way early on it took me way too long for like six years to finally say all right i'm gonna either reach out to a mentor or invest in a bench i wish would have got one way sooner guys grab a mentor early justin burns launched maestro helping instructors launch their courses faster 200 customers paying 100 bucks a month doing about 20 grand per month right now on revenue 70 of that customer base has come through affiliate webinars where he pays affiliates a 30 kickback uh in perpetuity they're doing again 20 grand a month right now sorry they've raised 20 grand as well so basically boots dropped you know profiting right now call it a couple a couple grand per month they've got six people in remote locations about five percent revenue churn per month as he looks to scale the company maybe go raise a couple hundred thousand grand justin thank you for taking us to the top thanks for having me