How Mylance CEO Bradley Jacobs grew Mylance to $1.6M revenue and 800 customers in 2024.

guys it's company mylands.co helps Consultants Build a Better Business doing 40 000 bucks a month right now on revenue from 800 customers up from just eight thousand dollars a month exactly a year ago and he placed close to 400 000 preced at a 10 million dollar cap so very Capital efficient here team of four now today as you're looking to scale he knows what he's doing built the company out or sorry built out the Uber operation down in Miami before launching his own consulting company so then built this to basically drink his own champagne eat his own dog food scaling fast now we'll see what happens next hey folks my guest today is Bradley Jacobs after four and a half years of launching and scaling businesses at Uber he built his independent consulting company up to 25 Grand a month and 20 using just 25 hours of his week he then found in my lands to help you work for yourself whether a full-time consulting or alongside a full-time job it's called mylands.co Bradley you ready to take us to the top absolutely let's do it all right so the real question is are you still Uber or did you quit and you're Consulting full-time now I definitely quit I quit in 2018 I consulted full-time and then uh now I run my Lance that's amazing okay so what were some of the things when you were running your Consulting business that frustrated you where you were like I got to build code for this and eventually launch Lance you know it was it was more about all the back end for my business it was bookkeeping it was taxes it was health insurance it was lack of a community it was where my next lead came from uh it was having a website it was invoicing proposals contracts I mean I could go on there's there's a lot that I was missing and people need that support yeah so how do you price today is like a percent of invoices folks put through you or is it a flat SAS fee or something else it's flat subscription we don't want to take a cut of your invoice we don't want to take a cut of your project that's for you um you know pay us a platform fee and you can build your business on top of us that's awesome now how do you upsell the platform fee is it feature-based upselling seat based gmv based upselling how do you do that yeah right now it's just a flat fee we just have one tier right now that'll change in the future as we add more features but it's just one flat fee now we do have other options we have a coaching program that helps you add 10K per month to your Consulting business and we also take over your taxes and bookkeeping right now so um we have additional offerings but the basic platform is just want to be that's great what is the average customer paying per month today they're paying on average 50 a month okay very cool and um I guess back story here how what year did you officially I guess quit the consulting company go all in on Lance so I kept Consulting while I was starting my lands uh in 2020 and that way I didn't have to raise a pre-seed round for the company I could pretty much fund my life with my Consulting business and I actually still have a Consulting client on the side today I keep my skills sharp and practice what I preach through Consulting so um yeah it's been a part of my life and probably always will be I love that okay so um when did you the get your first paying customer on my lens that wasn't yourself first paying customer was March 2020 March 2020. okay and then fast forward to today how many customers yeah we have over 800 customers today wow okay so tell me that story I mean how do you go that's that's not small growth how do you go find 799 other people to pay yeah great question um a lot of content for us um there's a huge educational component to how do I find my first client how do I price my services how do I hone my Niche what kind of a contract template do I need and everything in between and so I've been publishing content almost every day now on LinkedIn for the last few years uh have built up a little bit of a following there uh SEO has been pretty good for us but really the biggest thing has been word of mouth I think any time you you create a good product that people like they organically tell their friends about it so we have a referral program but even before that we grew a lot from Word of Mouth interesting yeah 13 400 followers on LinkedIn and I guess are you writing all of your own content for LinkedIn or someone else writing this for you I write all of it I will say that I wrote a lot of it when I when I came up with the original accelerator program so that helps you launch your business so I wrote out pages and pages and pages of content for our customers there and that will go and I'll pluck some content from there sometimes just to help you know if I need to write something quickly but I love writing I actually really enjoy it I carve out time in my day um so I write I can tell I mean you're you're remark when I look at your activity feed on LinkedIn look what I'll say is like some of these posts only get like six likes and two comments but then others really take off and get like 50 likes and like you know 20 comments but the point is when I look at this the time stamps on this you're very consistent you post like once every two days I'm still scrolling backwards I'm like three weeks back now you post once every two days almost religiously I do I actually try and post every day I will miss a day here and there and I don't really post on the weekends unless I get ambitious on a Friday and schedule everything but I do I have it on my to-do list every day it doesn't take me long I can I can write a post in about 15 minutes yeah so I just bang them out every day oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview well it's interesting to try and reverse engineer like why some of these do well and get 88 engagements and others don't only get two and I just feel like so much of this is copywriting you know it's the hook if I'm really being honest it's that hook at the beginning um and then the content needs to be good from there but my best ever post was actually a post about uh ubereats in Miami I launched you reads in Miami and I wrote what it was actually like to launch that business I wrote that in 10 minutes like lying on my bed one day and I got 188 000 Impressions and it was just shocking to me but when I look back at that post the hook was really really strong and the content really resonated so um you still can't dictate what's gonna go viral versus not or what's going to do well but you can at least you know have an idea of what works there yeah talk to me about the SEO strategy right so there are much bigger companies than you that probably dominate like the big keywords how do you find sort of your niche in terms of right to it right what to write SEO content around yeah it's a typical long tail keyword strategy and I I will be honest we wrote content that our customers were asking about I didn't go do all this content this keyword research I just wrote what I'd heard a million times in my customer interviews and my sales calls in our community and then I saw what started to rank uh higher and then we wrote more Rich posts around that content that was already starting to do well um and yes there's there's many keywords that we're nowhere close for that we could be or that are in our Niche um but as you said these big companies they've been doing it for years and so we have a long way to go but long tail keywords are definitely uh the move and then you need those backlinks right so we're actually working on getting a peace and Fortune right now and that should help our domain Authority uh a lot and help us increase up it looks like that you're also doing something smart and that you're doing member profiles um some if you're if you're bragging about someone they're way more likely to backlink to you right absolutely and they'll share it on their LinkedIn and they also the one thing that we did is everyone in my lands gets a Milan's profile and we use the same domain it's mylands.co your name or whatever username you want and so every single one of those is actually a backlink to my limits yeah that's so smart you know I I this is why I love stories like yours it's like you're gonna beat people with your creativity not by throwing money at problems and I wish more people acted like they broke they're broke even if they raised 100 million bucks because they think of creative strategies like this I will say it's the reason I didn't go raise a bunch of money because I think it forces a discipline and a creativity that a lot of entrepreneurs don't have like if I had five million bucks in the bank it's hard for me to imagine having to be this creative frankly yeah or you try and pay someone to do it for you and they're never going to do it as good as you agree yeah yeah so you've I mean looking at your ahrefs profile right now I mean you're you're this is sort of weird why your domain Authority is so I feel like it should be higher based off your attraction so far are you doing anything to try and get your Dr up it's like a 17 right right now it's just trying to get more backlinks for us I will I will be honest that we've been good at writing content we haven't been as good with the distribution and those backlinks yeah that's like much lower than I thought you would have based off the quality on your side I was anticipating you would have like a 40 or 50. yeah we'd be ranking we'd be getting tens of thousands of monthly organic searches if that were the case yeah yeah but you still I mean you're you're at 125 new backlinks uh over the last 30 days so okay interesting very cool so I guess to do the math story we gotta go on a tangent there but 800 customers paying 50 bucks a month what you're doing like 40 Grand a month in Revenue there right about that yeah and so if that's what you're doing today where were you about a year ago oh much less uh we saw a lot of growth in this last year we were probably doing eight or nine k a month a year ago and and what about onboarding new customers right is there a free trial and and the conversion or they got to go right in with a credit card right away so they can get their mylance HQ that's what we call it their storefront is free so anyone can go in there and get that and we actually just gave them a free uh learning track about honing their Niche because that's the first thing every new consultant needs to do so you get access to your website basically that you can use your helping to hone your Niche um and that's all how many have done that all time we've had yeah I'll just say a few thousand have done that a few thousand okay interesting okay so you have a pretty active conversion rate then if you have four thousand have done it you converted 800 to pay that's 25 conversion rate that's about right yeah yeah right yeah 28 yeah he knows he knows the number okay got it very cool so how do you go from 800 to 8 000 customers yeah it's a great question I think for us it's about going to adjacent customer segments right I think there's you can go deeper in your segment and go as as far deep as you think you can and then that when the growth starts to Trail off is when you need to go to adjacent customer segments so the other thing I will say that we're thinking through is how do we increase the LTV of a customer right so if the average customer is paying 50 bucks a month could we have them paying 200 a month by adding what is your LTV right now would you say it's about a thousand dollars um but again it's a bit of a guess just because we're still you know you need to like really see years worth of churn yeah you're guessing the customer is going to stay with you for for 20 months on average conservatively that's right so and look they do pay for other things we have affiliate links to um you know whether the LLC formation uh health insurance things like that even mortgage lenders and we do have our tax and bookkeeping offering as well yeah um but I think for us it's about adding so much more value that they're happy to pay 200 bucks a month versus just getting that many more customers paying 50 bucks a month and totally bootstrap today right we raise this small Angel round okay when was that about a year and a half ago we raised a few hundred grand interesting okay so call like three four hundred yeah do you remember so imagine it pains me when it happens because I mean you probably sold 15 20 of your business I mean do you regret that I sold five percent of the business oh okay it's not bad and definitely don't regret it I mean a lot of to hire a badass engineer and get a design firm and build the software there's no way I could have built the software but totally so what is that I mean that's like a that's like an 8 million cap right it was 10 million cap 10 million cap yeah I mean yeah so you sold less than five percent of the business um how did you get that valuation with such little Revenue yeah I mean it was my network if I'm going to be honest it's like I had a good pedigree working at Uber I launched a number of business lines at Uber had a good Network and yeah um I set that cap and I fought for it and I had multiple offers for bigger dollar amounts way less at this much smaller cap like six million yeah and I just I just said no I wanted a bigger trunk they said give me 20 I'll give you a million at six or something yeah that's what they want and there's no way I'm giving that you know 20 I'm the same you and I are this cut the same way in that regard yeah all right how many folks are on the team today how many people we have four full-time and four contractors uh I love this your revenue for employees really high too who are the contractors like what do they do they do some of the marketing stuff they manage our website I have a chief of staff who does frankly everything on the back end HR and accounting where'd you find him or her everyone's asking for this yeah she I find her own upwork what did you search an upwork like EA we were looking for an accountant at that time and she's an accountant who loves just to do this this other HR stuff but the biggest value that she adds that she does uh the detailed financials every month she looks at every single line item that we have on the revenue and cost side and breaks it down for me builds out the p l and identifies areas where we can potentially cut costs and it's amazing the peace of mind that gives me as a Founder is unbelievable that's crazy all right incredible story here let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book favorite book never split the difference number two is there a CEO you're following or studying oh there's a lot um she's not a CEO anymore but Sarah Blakely her story is like mind-blowing to me and I think everyone should look into what she's done number three what's your favorite online tool for building my lands honestly it's expandy automate LinkedIn Outreach yeah but they just broke seven Stefan was on earlier seven million bucks in Revenue bootstrapped incredible story and I listened number oh nice number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night eight eight okay very cool and situation married single kids single okay uh and how old are you 32 32 last questions I mean you wish you knew when you were 20. foreign [Laughter] like the structure has been made up and it's been made up by people before you and it doesn't mean anything and there's no one there's no right way to do things guys this company mylands.co helps Consultants Build a Better Business doing 40 000 bucks a month right now on revenue from 800 customers up from just 8 000 a month exactly a year ago when he plays close to 400 000 preced at a 10 million dollar cap so very Capital efficient here team of four now today as you're looking to scale he knows what he's doing built the company out or sorry built out the Uber operation down in Miami before launching his own consulting company so then built this to basically drink his own champagne eat his own dog food scaling fast now we'll see what happens next Bradley thanks for taking us to the top thanks for having me one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry 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