How Mypancho CEO Uchenna Okeke grew Mypancho to $20.4K revenue and 6 customers in 2019.

hello everybody my guest today is james okiki he's a veteran of creating and managing digital content to build relationships for organizations and individuals he's the founder of myponcho.com one of the leading business video and document template providers in the nation his educational background includes a bsc in management masters in marketing and an mba in international business from bel university in nebraska he's the chief content officer of poncho a web developer a sas specialist designer and marketer james ready to take us to the top yeah sure definitely you told me before you listen to the show right oh yeah i guess this is fine i talked about myself about what we do right i was just gonna say you have no excuses you know what you're getting yourself into oh well maybe i missed the pot pot all right anyway tell me tell us about poncho oh well um well patch has always been a dream of mine it's a company that uh that specializes in templates because i always believe in um you know for folks like us who don't know how to do programming design um i came up with earlier in my career i came up with a great way to utilize templates to speed up productivity for those of us who are not you know techy in nature so that's what pantry is all about from document templates to video templates to um image templates just anything to get you you know a leg up and get you started quicker with your projects that's what we're all about and is it a sas revenue model people pay per month yes okay so what's the average what is the average uh cost per month well typically we go as low as seventeen dollars a month to as high as in the twenty seven thousand months kind of keep it around that you know right about that range and when do you launch the company james uh we started actively right about 2010 11. there are about yeah okay 2010 and how many customers have you scaled to today well um originally when we started uh it was kind of slow as you would expect but then we scale to about a thousand users that's on our on our primary video platform video jack uh where users get access to videos so about a thousand users um video chat but lately we control our revamping and you know moving around so that's dropped up quite quite a bit uh but uh in the next um next week or so we're launching you know hold on james james i think you're beating around the bush so i want to make you comfortable i have no problem with people that are pre-revenue what i have a problem with is when they is when they dance around it so just tell me where you're at how many paying customers today right now we have about uh one wholesale customer and about five paying customers okay so five paying customers at 17 bucks a month so you're doing about 100 bucks a month in revenue right now um no actually we wanted the wholesale customers about a thousand five hundred dollars a month because we have a special you know users where you you buy a license to to resell the videos so that's especially how much are you how much are you doing per month right now about a thousand seven hundred okay a thousand seven hundred across six customers would mean that the average customer there is paying something more like what is that 280 bucks yeah something like that if you will yeah she makes a doesn't matter like that yeah yeah but but it sounds like you have five of them paying 20 bucks a month and then one paying like 1500 a month or something like that exactly yeah exactly and so uh walk me through the kind of how you capitalize the business have you raised capital or no well um no not really it's all been you know it's all being used um customer generated you know we just um we do some marketing but that was in the early stages but most of our revenue comes from um so you're bootstrapping yeah basically yeah okay so how i have to ask you this so you must be a scrappy dude how are you supporting yourself with like only a thousand dollars a month in revenue okay well i do also i do consulting work i do i'm a consultant by nature and a business consulting and i also have um other side um web design other work i do consult services i also offer so that's what i do um why don't you shut those down and go all in on the sas product or shut down the sas product and go all in on the consulting well i'm looking to shut down the consulting and going on all the tests that's what we are looking to do so hopefully this uh next month we're coming full force with it you know putting all my eggs in the basket are you married james no no no not yet are you dating any are you dating anyone oh yeah actually she's behind the scenes right now can she can she come wait get it get her in front of the camera let me say hi is she is she is she nervous about you giving up all the all the consulting revenue to do the sas company well yeah she is kind of like hey you know steady paycheck you know you know women you know they like steady paychecks so she's a little nervous about it but i told her hey um i've done it before i've scaled to a thousand customers before so i know i can do it again and go higher so i'm pretty confident are you comfortable letting her kind of be the breadwinner for a couple of months while you take this big risk well i still chipping gibson i still do mostly i i i do most of the break uh you know i bring muslim brexit i tell you i'll say some of the most successful men in sas they thank their spouse from many years ago when the spouse was the breadwinner while they took the big risk on the startup and so it's totally normal for that to happen i was just curious you know if you're comfortable you know a lot of people they won't let their their ego won't let them say yes i'm letting my spouse be their breadwinner where i take the risk well with me my consultant gives brings a lot of revenue for me so that's that's that's that's helped a little bit yeah that's awesome that's really great well very good let's uh let's rock and roll here with some other questions so do you have you know you've bootstrapped this thing is it just you right now yeah it's just me and i have you know um i hire marketers on demand i use you know like up working freelancers for mac does programmers you know on a new base for them right now and as the company you mentioned you had a thousand customer users and now you're much lower i mean is the company shrinking year over year no actually what happened uh we went through a lot of technical renovations so to speak you know moving servers you know upgrading databases from you know to our ibm server so during all that process we lost a lot of customers during the you know the moon that's uh actually what happened and we're looking hopefully uh to get everything back on track so in your best month over the past 10 years how much did you do per month than just sas revenue uh the best amount was probably when we did the video jack launch that should probably be about about 60 70 000 okay and um and where are you based by the way houston texas oh texas very good houston that's great um very good okay so how are you gonna go from six customers to go get 600 customers what growth channel are you going to test well the growth channel is going to take is basically um right now because like i said i'm bootstrapping this so i'm going to do a lot of jv's promotion deal sites um things like my deals and some of that deals i have um connections with them so that's probably what we're gonna do you know a lot of um joint venture deals with uh people with a lot of users where do you go find a joint venture partner well i use a jv jvzoo.com it's one of my go-to places i don't know if you know it i do but the problem with all those sites all those sites are like these are people that do like affiliate marketing for a living and so they might drive you customers but they're just gonna be shitty customers right like these are gonna be customers that are like jcpenney shoppers they like discounts right they're never gonna pay you a lot of money because they're cheap as hell which is fine by the way it's just i don't shop at jc penney right someone's not gonna pay you a thousand bucks a month because they found your jvzoo right usually those are the customers we use to start because they will buy they usually will sign up for whatever and so you get enough of them to kind of get comfortable you know so you use the revenue to now you know go into more traditional channels that's the the model because those are cheaper you know cheaper to acquire literally free technically what how much how much how much those folks cost you to acquire well um typically it's about uh three four dollars per customer usually it's just that's free though okay but but just be clear though you only have you only have five customers so so you're not you're still testing and figuring out those numbers [Music] yes yes yes yes but i'm going from past and they'll pass um numbers that's where uh i was getting the full the three four okay very good let's wrap up here james with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh well i'll say um how to make friends and buy dale carnegie i love that book how to win friends and influence people number two is there a ceo you're following are studying...