How Mylance Reached $480K ARR and 800 Customers Helping Consultants Build Better Businesses (Interview with CEO Bradley Jacobs)

Intro and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, this company mylance.co helps consultants build a better business doing $40,000 a month right now in revenue from 800 customers up from just $8,000 a month exactly a year ago when he placed closed a $400,000 pre seed at a $10,000,000 cap. So very capital efficient here. Team of four now today as they'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

00:19own 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 k a month and 20 using just twenty five hours of his week. He then founded mylance to help you work for yourself, whether full

00:40time consulting or alongside a full time job. It's called mylance.co. Bradley, you ready to take us to the top?

Bradley's Background at Uber and Path to Mylance

Bradley Jacobs

00:46>> Absolutely. Let's do it.

Nathan Latka

00:47Alright. So the real question is, are you still at Uber or did you quit and you're consulting full time now?

Bradley Jacobs

00:51>> I definitely quit. I quit in 2018. I consulted full time and then now I run mylance.

Nathan Latka

00:58That's amazing. Okay. So what were some of the things when you were running your consulting business that frustrated you? Were you like, I gotta build code for this and eventually launch mylance?

Pain Points That Inspired Mylance

Bradley Jacobs

01:05>> 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. 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.

Nathan Latka

01:23Yep. So how do you price today? Is it like a percent of invoices folks put through you, or is it a flat SaaS fee or something else?

Pricing Model and Flat Subscription

Bradley Jacobs

01:29>> It's flat subscription. We don't wanna take a cut of your invoice. We don't wanna take a cut of your project. That's for you. You know, pay us a platform fee, and you can build your business on top of us.

Nathan Latka

01:37That's awesome. Now how do you upsell the platform fee? Is it feature based upselling, seat based, GMV based upselling?

01:43How do you do that?

Bradley Jacobs

01:44>> 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 just one flat fee now. We do have other options. We have a coaching program that helps you add 10 k per month to your consulting business, and we also take over your taxes and bookkeeping right now. So, we get we have additional offerings, but the basic platform

02:04>> is just one fee.

Nathan Latka

02:05That's great. What is the average customer paying per month today?

Bradley Jacobs

02:09>> They're paying on average $50 a month.

Nathan Latka

02:11Okay. Very cool. And, I guess, backstory here, how what year did you officially, I guess, quit the consulting company and go all in on mylance?

Founding Story and Staying in Consulting

Bradley Jacobs

02:19>> So I kept consulting while I was starting mylance 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, yeah, it's been a part of my life and probably always will be.

Nathan Latka

02:44I love that. Okay. So, that gets one. When did you though get your first paying customer on mylance that wasn't yourself?

Customer Growth to 800 and Word-of-Mouth

Bradley Jacobs

02:51>> First paying customer was March 2020.

Nathan Latka

02:54March 2020. Okay. And then fast forward to today, how many customers?

Bradley Jacobs

02:58>> Yeah. We have over 800 customers today.

Nathan Latka

03:00Wow. 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?

LinkedIn Content Strategy

Bradley Jacobs

03:07>> Yeah. Great question. A lot of content for us. 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, have built up a little bit of a following there. SEO has been pretty good for

03:32>> us. But the really the biggest thing has been word-of-mouth. I think anytime 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.

Nathan Latka

03:46Interesting. Yeah. 13,400 followers on LinkedIn. And I guess, are you writing all of your own content for LinkedIn, or is someone else writing this for you?

Bradley Jacobs

03:55>> 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 I'll pluck some content from there sometimes just to help, you if I need to write something quickly. But I love writing. I actually really enjoy

04:17>> it. I carve out time in my day. So I write a lot.

Nathan Latka

04:20I 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.

04:37I'm, like, three weeks back now. You post once every two days almost religiously.

Bradley Jacobs

04:42>> I do. I 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 fifteen minutes? Yep. So I just bang them out every day.

Nathan Latka

05:00Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this, we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

05:23your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:48get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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. 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

06:10not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

06:35going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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

06:57if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into

07:24the interview. What's interesting to try and reverse engineer, like, why some of these do well and get 88 engagements and others don't to only get two. And I just feel like so much of this is is copywriting. You know?

Bradley Jacobs

07:36>> It's the hook, if I'm really being honest. It's that hook at the beginning, and then the content needs to be good from there. But my best ever post was actually a post about, Uber Eats in Miami. I launched Uber Eats in Miami and I wrote what it was actually like to launch that business. I wrote that in ten minutes, like lying on my bed one day and I got 188,000 impressions. It was just shocking to me.

08:00>> But when I look back at that post, the hook was really, really strong and the content really resonated. So, you still can't dictate what's gonna go viral versus not or what's gonna do well, but you can at least, you know, have an idea of what works.

Nathan Latka

08:13Very. Yeah. Talk to me about the SEO strategy. Right? So there are 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 right? What to write SEO content around?

SEO Strategy and Long-Tail Keywords

Bradley Jacobs

08:25>> Yeah. It's the typical long tail keyword strategy. And I'll 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 higher. And then we wrote more rich posts around that content that was already starting to do well. And

08:50>> yes, there's many keywords that we're nowhere close for that we could be, or that are in our niche. 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, the move. And then you need those backlinks, right? So we're actually working on getting a piece in Fortune right now, and that should help our domain authority, a lot and help us

09:13>> increase up up the Google.

Nathan Latka

09:14It looks like that you're also doing something smart and that you're doing member profiles. Some if you're if you're bragging about someone, they're way more likely to backlink to you. Right?

Member Profiles as Organic Backlinks

Bradley Jacobs

09:22>> Absolutely. And they'll share it on their LinkedIn and they also, the one thing that we did is everyone in mylance gets a mylance profile and we use the same domain. It's mylance.co slash your name or whatever username you want. And so every single one of those is actually a backlink to mylance.

Nathan Latka

09:40Yeah. 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 bro they're broke even if they raised a $100,000,000 because they think of creative strategies like this.

Bradley Jacobs

09:54>> 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.

10:01>> Like, if I had $5,000,000

10:02>> in the bank, it's hard for me to imagine having to be this creative, frankly.

Nathan Latka

10:07Yeah. Or you try and pay someone to do it for you, and they're never gonna do it as good as you.

Bradley Jacobs

10:10>> Agree.

Nathan Latka

10:11Yeah. 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 traction so far. Are you doing anything to try and get your DR up? It's like a 17 right right now.

Bradley Jacobs

10:25>> 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.

Nathan Latka

10:33Yeah. 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.

Bradley Jacobs

10:39>> Yeah. We'd be ranking we'd be getting tens of thousands of monthly organic searches if that were the case.

Nathan Latka

10:45Yeah. Yeah. But you still I mean, you're you're at a 125 new backlinks over the last thirty days. So okay. Interesting. Very cool. So I guess to do the math, sorry, we gotta go on a tangent there. But 800 customers paying $50 a month. What? You're doing, like, $40,000 a month in revenue there. Right?

Bradley Jacobs

10:57>> About that. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:58And so if that's what you're doing today, where were you about a year ago?

Bradley Jacobs

11:02>> Oh, much less. We saw a lot of growth in this last year. We were probably doing eight or nine k a month, a year

Nathan Latka

11:10And what about onboarding new customers? Right? Is there a free trial and and then conversion? Or they gotta go right in with a credit card right away?

Bradley Jacobs

11:16>> 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, 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. And that's all free.

Nathan Latka

11:38How many have done that all time?

Bradley Jacobs

11:40>> We've had. Yeah. I'll just say a few thousand have done that.

Nathan Latka

11:43Few thousand. Okay. Interesting. Okay. So you have a pretty active conversion rate. Then if you have 4,000 who've done it, you convert to 800 to pay, that's 25% conversion rate.

Bradley Jacobs

11:50>> That's about right. Yeah. Yeah.

11:52>> I really think 28.

Nathan Latka

11:53Yeah. Yeah. He knows he knows the number. Okay. Got it. Very cool. So how do go from 800 to 8,000 customers?

Bradley Jacobs

12:00>> 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'll say that we're thinking through is how do we increase the LTV of a customer, right? So

12:22>> if the average customer is paying $50 a month, could we have them paying $200 a month by adding

Nathan Latka

12:27What is your LTV right now, would you say?

Free Tier, Conversion Rate, and LTV

Bradley Jacobs

12:33>> It's about a thousand dollars. But again, it's a bit of a guess just because we're still, you you need to, like, really see years worth of churn to to Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:41You're you're guessing the customer's gonna stay with you for for twenty months on average, conservatively.

Bradley Jacobs

12:46>> That's right. So and look, they do pay for other things. We have affiliate links to, you know, whether the LLC formation, health insurance, things like that, even mortgage lenders. And we do have our tax and bookkeeping offering as well. Yeah. But I think for us, it's about adding so much more value that they're happy to pay $200 a month versus just getting that many more customers paying $50 a month.

Nathan Latka

13:09And totally bootstrapped today. Right?

Bradley Jacobs

13:11>> We raised a small angel round.

Nathan Latka

13:14Ah, okay. When when was that?

Bradley Jacobs

13:15>> About a year and a half ago, we raised a few 100 k.

Nathan Latka

13:18Interesting. Okay. So call it, like, 3, 400 k?

Bradley Jacobs

13:20>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

13:21Do you so imagine I it pains me when it happens because, I mean, you probably sold 20% of your business.

13:26I mean, do you regret that?

Bradley Jacobs

13:27>> I sold 5% of the business.

Nathan Latka

13:28Oh, okay. It's not bad.

Angel Round, Valuation Cap, and Equity

Bradley Jacobs

13:29>> And definitely don't regret it. I mean, allowed me to hire a badass engineer and get a design firm and build the software. There's no way I could have built a software with totally

Nathan Latka

13:39So what is that? I mean, that's like a that's like an 8,000,000 cap. Right?

Bradley Jacobs

13:42>> It was 10,000,000 cap.

Nathan Latka

13:4410,000,000 cap. Yeah. I mean, yes. So you sold less than 5% of the business.

Bradley Jacobs

13:47>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

13:48How did you get that valuation with such little revenue?

Bradley Jacobs

13:50>> Yeah. I mean, it was my network. If I'm gonna be honest, it's like I had a good pedigree working at Uber. I had launched a number of business lines at Uber, had a good network. And

Nathan Latka

13:57Yep.

Bradley Jacobs

13:58>> 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 6,000,000. Yeah. And I just I just said no.

Nathan Latka

14:09They wanted a bigger chunk. They said, give me 20%. I'll give you a million at 6 or something.

Bradley Jacobs

14:13>> Yeah. That's what they want. And there's no way I'm giving that, you know, 20% of that.

Nathan Latka

14:17I'm the same. Well, you and I are this cut the same way in that regard. Yeah. Alright. How many folks are on the team today? How many people?

Team Structure and Contractors

Bradley Jacobs

14:22>> We have four full time and four contractors.

Nathan Latka

14:25Man, I love this. Your revenue per employee is really high too. Who are the contractors? Like, what do they do?

Bradley Jacobs

14:30>> 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.

Nathan Latka

14:38Where'd you find him or her? Everyone's asking for this.

Bradley Jacobs

14:41>> Yeah. She I found her on Upwork.

Nathan Latka

14:43What did you search in Upwork? Like, EA?

Bradley Jacobs

14:46>> 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 is she does, 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 and L and identifies areas where we can potentially cut costs. And

Nathan Latka

15:04That's amazing.

Bradley Jacobs

15:06>> The peace

15:08>> of mind that gives me as a founder is unbelievable.

Nathan Latka

15:11That's crazy. Alright. Incredible story here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Bradley Jacobs

15:16>> Favorite book, Never Split The Difference.

Nathan Latka

15:18Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Bradley Jacobs

15:22>> CEO following or study?

15:27>> There's a lot.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Bradley Jacobs

15:31>> She's not a CEO anymore, but Sarah Blakely, her story is, like, mind blowing to me, I think everyone should look into what she's done.

Nathan Latka

15:38Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building mylance?

Bradley Jacobs

15:43>> Honestly, it's Expandi, automate LinkedIn outreach.

Nathan Latka

15:46Yep. And they just broke seven Stefan was on earlier. $7,000,000 in revenue, bootstrapped. Incredible story.

Bradley Jacobs

15:51>> And I listened.

Nathan Latka

15:52Number oh, nice. Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Bradley Jacobs

15:56>> Eight.

Nathan Latka

15:57Eight. Okay. Very cool. And situation, married, single, kids?

16:00>> Single.

16:00Okay. And how old are you?

Bradley Jacobs

16:02>> 32.

Nathan Latka

16:0432. Last questions. I mean, you wish you knew when you were 20.

Advice: The Structure Is Made Up

Bradley Jacobs

16:10>> I would just say that the structure is bullshit.

16:15>> 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.

Nathan Latka

16:23Guys, this company mylance.co helps consultants build a better business doing $40,000 a month right now in revenue from 800 customers up from just $8,000 a month exactly a year ago when he placed closed a $400,000 pre seed at a $10,000,000 cap. So very capital efficient here. Team of four now today as he 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

16:42own 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.

Bradley Jacobs

16:50>> Thanks for having me.

Nathan Latka

16:53One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

17:18Central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

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18:03for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

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