How Mywifi Networks CEO Kevin Zicherman grew Mywifi Networks to $1.2M revenue and 400 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is kevin zickerman he helps digital agencies and msps innovate to increase profitability by reselling guest wi-fi marketing solutions kevin is the ceo of my wi-fi network's the leading white label wi-fi platform with social data capture visitor metrics and marketing automation kevin you ready to take you to the top i am how are you davin i am doing well so last time you were on the show man it's been too long i think it was uh april of 2019 you told me you were sitting about 400 customers had just cracked about a million in arr and i love the use case a wi-fi at a coffee shop so that when i check in and sit down to work they capture my email absolutely and uh things were great as you know and then all of a sudden uh come march everything imploded and uh i can actually dive into that so things were rocking we were doing really well uh we were actually slated to be on track for 1.4 this year into january uh things were rocking you know new year's eve party party great you know let's look forward to the new decade and then march 16th you know literally just it's on like right there you're good sorry about that kevin we'll edit that out keep going yeah cool i'll just wait until i'm here by the way just give you context i'm here in la for tech executives and we rented this place and so we're sharing cars and stuff so i had my car keys on this on his table yeah yeah so uh you know everything was great new year's eve hit you know 20 20 20 new decade big big high hopes and everything and we were on track to do about 1.4 and then you know kobe we started hearing some you know whispers about some pandemic happening and we didn't think too much of it to be honest until march 16th and uh i should have actually shared a chart here but it was literally like it you know you you'd think uh you know a bomb went off or something god forbid right like it literally like all the traffic went down 86 percent just like that and this is not just north america this is global we have installations in over 52 countries and we saw just a massive drop in in overall wi-fi usage you know naturally our wi-fi installations are in public spaces where guests gather and dwell and that was almost illegal in most cases uh most countries so um yeah we got hit pretty hard and um you know that has a ripple effect in our business because we don't sell directly to that end user we don't sell to that you know coffee shop or restaurant we sell to the msp or the digital agency that services that restaurant so naturally the domino effect happens where hey they don't get paid they come to us hey do we have to pay our bills and you know we were we were nice and we extended you know three months for a lot of clients extended 50 off for six months in many cases our churn shot up to about 20 like we lost about 30 percent of our revenue alongside our everything else i think it's kind of standard in the industry we were lucky to maintain a lot of that uh we actually pivoted indirectly to do a lot of work with the cleveland clinic a lot of different uh you know medical offices that remained open that had traffic unfortunately uh but we were able to not only offer uh great data but also presence analytics contact tracing so a lot of new applications for wi-fi marketing that's not so much you know the old world is not no longer the current world so we also had to change our product a little bit and how we apply it so give us an update on the numbers and let's dive more into that backstory cleveland clinic etc so so how many customers do you still have today on the platform actively paying so we have about 300 resellers so we lost about 25 or you know 25 of our overall base uh naturally because we're a month to month a lot of our products people can easily drop off and come back the vast majority of everybody that's canceled has said we love your platform we're going to come back as soon as our you know clients can reopen their doors so we're seeing that to happen slowly so it's 300 customers there and are you still charging the 240 a month on average uh that's dropped a bit to about 220 uh but in fact hidden in those numbers are two major deals that we've managed to to work on during covet you know everybody thinks kovid's you know terrible and obviously it is but you know a lot of small businesses had to close their doors couldn't operate but the bigger companies were still operating and you had marketing departments scrambling figuring out hey how are we going to generate data how are we going to like survive and we've actually found let's dive hold on let's let's dive into that in a second i want to like capture the full just covered impact first before talking about sort of how you pivoted so pre-covered you had grown about 400 customers and at one point what 1.2 ish million run rate something like that yeah exactly yeah okay post covet and you had 400 customers postcode or during company you lose about a quarter though so you have 300 customers and and just in case you missed your first episode define a customer for us so a customer is a digital agency or a managed service provider that typically has anywhere between 10 to 50 locations that they manage so they resell our software it's white label so they've slapped their own brand on it and then service their clients with a wi-fi marketing solution is there a hardware you're selling them as well or no there is sometimes hardware that we that we offer it's a low-cost hardware to get our foot in the door and then obviously have those with the monthly fees we service that we offer it actually have one just over here so you know it looks like this it's a really small device and we get agencies that don't know how wi-fi marketing works but the vast majority of our applications are on existing networks like cisco or aruba networks or morag you know cisco meraki is a big partner of ours and we layer on top of that existing hardware so again depending on the install but we do have our own hardware as well can you just hold that up real quick so what does this piece of art what does that cost you to make so our cost of this is 20 landed okay and we sell it for 39 so we don't really make a big margin on this but what this allows us to do is give this to an agency a traditional social media marketing agency that is obviously having a really hard time capturing clients and capturing revenue now nowadays so we tell this agency you need a pivot you need to get your foot in the door take one of these devices simply plug it in you know we have it's usb powered plug it into the internet or even tether it with your phone it'll take the data and broadcast a wi-fi guest wi-fi network at that location and every guest that comes into that location you can capture their data so we're telling a lot of digital agencies now if you've never heard about wi-fi marketing you don't even know where it starts join our wi-fi marketing academy we'll teach you everything you need to know about how to sell wi-fi marketing how it works we have these devices for 39 drops you know shipped to your door free shipping where you can take this and sell it upsell it right away to a client even give it away for free to your local business client to get them to trust you by generating that data and what quickly happens is when they drop this in they start generating big email lists facebook retargeting lists uh you know that's gold right now especially with knowing how many total emails like how many how many devices your own devices do have out in the wild right now we have about 15 000 of our own devices in the wild and we layer on top of i would say that our network of other devices is greater than that and over the past year how many emails have been captured across all your customers uh over 50 million five zero five zero so that's it that's not only email it's it's sorry to interrupt its mac address of the device itself it's gender birthday uh you know a lot of other demographic information specifically mac address because that's trackable and assigned to now a profile a facebook profile in some cases so that's very valuable to to other companies that would look at that and to be honest we're not monetizing that data at all right now uh why yeah i mean obvious players are selling like cookie data to people and you're getting you know retargeting and pixeled and etcetera you're not doing any of that right now why not no we're building a the library for it our focus is 100 on selling to the resellers and having them market there and you know for us it's all about focus we're a small team we're lean bootstrapped uh we have about 11 now so we downsized a bit but we're actually we were replacing a lot of our customer support to be honest like our the lift on net new clients has not been there so we've actually strengthened our development team and we brought on two more developers to help companies how many engineers uh eight now oh you have eight engine okay well so there's only three people and then four people on the team basically that are not engineers correct yeah you see they're at 11 or 12. uh now we're 11. eleven yeah so eight engineers three that are not engineers interesting um okay so so this makes sense 15 000 in the wild 50 million emails sort of captured so last question here before i talk about how you pivot the...