How Omni.us CEO Alex Berman grew Omni.us to $144K revenue and 167 customers in 2023.

guys have good story here omni.us launched by Alex and a partner he met on meet at first principles I split it 50 50 in terms of percentage doing 12 Grand a month right now in Revenue but just launched six months ago 167 paying customers it's at omni.us and Lead shark they help you identify leads and then obviously Omni is what you would use to actually send the leads out and uh and close them bring them in he's got a lot of experience in startup World his first company inspired beats didn't go so well his second one another one tweet Hunter was just acquired for alum list for uh called two and a half million bucks he's now Freebird traveling the world building this new thing we'll see what happens next hey folks my guest today is Alex Berman he's an entrepreneur and YouTuber with over 97 000 subscribers also best selling author of the cold email Manifesto today he specializes in cold email and SAS growth with five SAS exits today including a seven figure exit in 2022. he now runs omni.us where he helps companies book more sales calls with cold emails automatically Alex already takes to the top of course thanks for having me well so before we fill in the backstory here just to be clear so is Omni agency or is our technology here is it SAS Omni success it's automated uh outbound so basically it lets you send cold emails lets you send cold texts sooner to let you do LinkedIn messaging Twitter messaging like basically everything you need for automated outcome and give us the teacher I mean how do you stand out this is such a jam-packed space I mean you have the lemless crew you've got all the duck soups of the world you know Stefan and expandy on LinkedIn specific like how do you stand out in the noise there's a couple different ways so for us we really focus heavily on writing the scripts so you know like you said best-selling author of cold email Manifesto we've seen a lot of cold email templates we've seen a lot of scripts and we can automate a lot of that um so basically getting it going in one click and then on pricing as well like you look at lemless pricing you're paying 49 per seat for a very limited email sending uh for us it's you know one low price for unlimited accounts unlimited sending so you just have so many different accounts studying at the same time interesting innovate on pricing innovate on uh on Service as well so I guess what what is pricing today if someone listening right now they want to sign up and use you what's the cheapest they can get started at right now it's 49 um soon within a couple weeks we'll jump up to 97. interesting a month yeah and if you look at your current customers today what's what's the average customer paying per month today so we have almost everyone's on the we only have one plan so almost everyone's on the 49 a month um we added a new plan this month where basically when you sign up for Omni and you can book a sales call and our closers will will close you um and then those plans are 1500 2500 and 5 000. so just be clear you've got folks full-time on staff at Omni which if a company like a B2B SAS company is a startup and doesn't want to hire their own sdrs they can have they'll teach your team how to sell their product and all the sales inbound calls of your team will handle no no so we don't do the closing but what we'll do is it's outbound so let's say you wanted to add another 30 to 60 appointments per month per rep we'll write the scripts for you or walk you through how you can write them yourself we also have Omni leads which will give you the leads and then you're just you're Off to the Races you know omnichannel uh whether that's cold texting cold email um whatever it is that's and then yeah once once that happens all the inbound stuff you can handle in your in your sales force or your HubSpot or wherever you send them after that and so how many customers paying today right now we have one 67. so we're still we're only a couple months old well I was going to say when did you write the first line of code for the platform uh so I'm not a coder but our team we've been working on this for maybe eight months seven eight months so far okay so how talk me through this you have a great idea as a marketer you know how to do distribution now you can't get 99 000 YouTube subs and write a book without understanding distribution how does a guy like you go convince an engineer to work with you without the engineer going uh this guy's a skimmy sales guy you know he's not a serious dude what are we gonna do here so I was really addicted to Twitter still related to Twitter um and I reached out to uh this guy on meet meta who is he runs a venture fund but instead of investing money they invest uh Tech and I've heard this a million times but these guys are actually serious they're SAS portfolio makes about 6 million a year you know over a couple companies and so um I wanted to interview him so we went down to Bangalore in India right now I'm in Delhi went down to Bangalore and we're at his house on the golf course and he was just talking about like how he wanted to be Sujin Patel and I'm like you know what would make you soojin Patel bro if we had a cold email tool he was just alive and and then we made it happen 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 valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder 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 round 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 what's this Venture Studio name uh first principles first principles so just be clear you found him first on Twitter on Twitter Twitter I sat down for an hour interview and that was that how'd you convince them to let you visit his house halfway across the world in Bangalore so everyone wants to meet that's the thing you know when you have an audience I I think that makes everything a lot easier I haven't had any issue um that's one reason why I love cold email and it's cold texting and cold DMs like just reach out to people and then they meet with you that's interesting yeah he says Venture Studio first principal.com has built things like catch with a K the anti-calendar for Success successful busy people real work a mobile first workplace management Made Simple so he's a pure is it just him is it just one engineer no they have a whole um they might be a team of 100 150 or something it's very India it's first principles not first principle um oh I don't even know if they have an actual website oh I was basically they run a real estate SAS um they run something called lanteria which is a uh basically for commercial real estate they have another one called um uh something for fundraising I'm blanking on the name of it now um but they have a fundraising SAS and then they have a bunch of these other little tiny bits that they work on first principles plural dot Co it's little p is the logo with the teal and a blue part yeah there you go ah amazing amazing okay this is interesting so you meet this guy you meet this team and I assume are you talking about Amit meta and Bangalore yeah yeah uh amazing okay so you visit him in Bangalore so what does he say does he say Okay pay me 10 grand to build the MVP or do you say give me five percent equity how does it work no so we did uh 50 50 partnership stake and then we're splitting the uh the costs 50 50. and now meet was the first like agency guy that I met that showed me the true the true prices and these are Indian prices so like you know you talk to some agency guys and you're like oh yeah we'll build this for you and we'll do it at Cost and it's 50 an hour amit's the first guy that was like yeah dude we'll do it at Cost and it's two dollars and fifty cents an hour and I was like oh okay I can actually trust you just tell me what it's gonna cost here in India that's wild so you're able to find like junior senior front-end Engineers for 2.50 an hour in India yeah well it's based on its salary um but average engineer salary here for somebody fresh out of college is you know eight hundred dollars a thousand dollars twelve hundred dollars interesting interesting yeah 77 people according to LinkedIn so he's building out I mean this is a big this is a it's working um very interesting all right so you split Equity 50 50. um so and then you're off to the races uh I guess how did you get your first 10 20 customers so it took a long time to build it um but then how long you've got the it took months it took so many like six seven months just to get the software into a good spot and you know we're doing it at Cost it still costs probably 40 50 Grand of just was that your fault did you give him a bad spec what advice would you give to someone else working with somebody like Amit in terms of getting an MVP live quickly I have no idea because even when we did lead shark it cost us 75 80k so and by the time we launched it barely worked it finally is working now um and then the one time we did this successfully for cheap was with taplio that seven figure acquisition uh taplio tweet Hunter and that was when the founder was the coder so Tebow was a coder and we were able to do it I don't think we had any Dev costs it was just him building it so that's what I would recommend 50k six to seven months and you only spent 25k right because you two split the cost okay amazing so you're Off to the Races yeah okay sorry I cut you off so then how do you get first customers so I was doing um just a tweet with our audience um I used tweet Hunter which was our other SAS and I just made this Suite that was like Hey want beta access to a new tool to send cold emails like this tweet and I'll send you a link and then they liked the tweet and they got a link that was like Hey sign up here's the link you requested sign up here and a certain percentage of people signed up interesting what percent I don't know the exact percentage but it was doing pretty good every time we posted that tweet up we would get like maybe five six credit cards and the way that I do our SAS I always do um I'm not a big fan of the free trial with no credit card so the way that I always launch our SAS is tap Leo everything before is you get in there you have to put in your credit card in order to see the SAS and then there's a free trial after so I go by um by number of credit cards put in um and most people listening will say well Alex like yeah but the reason we don't ask for a credit card before the for you know to do the free trial is because people forget they gave it and then you auto bill them on day seven and then they get pissed off yeah I haven't found that people get pissed off some people get you know some people say refund them and then we do but besides that it's fine yeah interesting Hunter where can people where can people view these tweets you put out it's at tweet Hunter i o no 200 is the software that I used to send them um I've been just posting on my main at Alex Berman on Twitter oh oh got it on your Twitter account using tweet Hunter I see I do um right now I'm doing a giveaway basically every two days so just random stuff follow-up templates or cold calling scripts or cold email scripts um and I found that that is that is the best way right now to generate free is this is this you and the Packer stuff the other Alex Berman Alex Berman no e a l x a l x for menu okay got it you know this you know this other one because I'm sure people ask you all the time all right so people can go okay here we go yeah Alx Burman so you guys can go check it out and study it this is cool okay but got it oh wow you get a lot of engagement on on these tweets yeah just on the um the giveaways do really well so you can see like the want free leads I was just giving away 379 leads um we have 400 comments in a day and each one of those 400 they get the leads and then the second thing in the in the comment is a link to Omni so it's like here's leads and if you want Omni unlimited sending for 49 bucks you can sign up here yeah this is super cool so guys I'll read the one that he sent out February 19th the Tweet just says want free leads I built a list of 379 startups that raised funding in the last month of January clean verified and ready to send comment Omni and I'll send them over no email or sign up needed in the screenshot which is important for curiosity is basically a screenshot of a big Google sheet and what I see happening here Alex is people typing Omni in the chat and what you're saying is tweet Hunter is what automates the process of then dming those people a link yeah fully automated interesting does it does it so like David at inbound typed Omni someone else didn't write exactly Omni well Tulsi Prasad who wrote a big a whole sentence not just the word Omni still get the DM yeah it's not that smart okay so it's like anyone who comments basically will get oh very cool wait so why isn't tweet Hunter I mean does it do a couple Grand a month in revenue or what's that doing tweet Hunter we sold for seven figures tweet Hunter is uh doing I think 130 000 a month top Leo good 50 000 a month oh you exited it okay interesting we sold to Lim list actually oh interesting when did that happen mid-2022 and then we weren't allowed to talk about it for months and now recently in the last couple weeks we've been allowed to talk about it wait why was that so important to the level speaker that you couldn't talk about it I have no idea there was a six-month uh time period where I guess they wanted to keep growing with us as the founders interesting and how many Founders were at tweet Hunter how much did you own uh I owned I owned like maybe 10 13 something like that okay a lot of Founders uh me Tom Tebow JK Molina and Robert indresch so interesting Five Guys so you get you get that done um with lemlist you said it was more than more than a million bucks a million dollars exit yeah it was uh two point something in all for Tableau tweet Hunter and then there was an earn out interesting top of it um very cool do you think you guys will actually see the internet or announcer notoriously tough to actually get I don't know I'm not involved in the earn out process I took the just the cash oh so you took a lower amount of all cash up front just to be done move on yeah interesting I don't wanna I don't want to work you know I don't want to work in someone else's company I want to grow my own yeah that's great but I mean you know 10 of 2.5 million so you're I mean you have a little Nest Egg that's why you're in Delhi is traveling the world you make 200 300 Grand on this and you take your next swing at Omni right yeah it's a little bit of cash um I love that I know this you don't all have a you know Rosy stories on all your startup Ventures because the last match on the show is probably four years ago you're at a company called Inspire beats what happened there Inspire beats was it was a lead generation startups to give everybody a little backstory where we were selling leads every month um and that was doing really well it was over a million a month um very very quickly we were getting like all these companies in Silicon Valley um the problem with it though is it wasn't a SAS right it was an agency which required a lot of work on the back end to fulfill um and I wrote about this in a book actually the founder uh that was running everything you know because I was a minority partner I had 10 of this company the founder was handling the accounting he was handling the books he's handling the production he was handling even a lot of the sales stuff he went fully like fully insane uh to the point where he was committed to a mental hospital and uh two three months of nobody running the company and me not having access to bank account to refund customers oh wow access to anything um would be enough to basically ruin the company's rep and and shut it down so well since you couldn't run refunds and he was out of commission I mean did you guys get sued by customers who paid you 100 Grand I don't know I wasn't involved in any of that I hope so interesting so you just left basically it just yeah that would he wasn't worth anything you just walked away yeah yeah interesting okay so back to Omni you're scaling now you've got 167 customers the Tweet strategy is working nicely how do you go from it sounds like 167 times 50 bucks a month you're doing about eight grand a month right now in Revenue yes eight grand and then lead shark which is part of omni is also doing about 4K a month what's lead shark lead shark is the lead generation database so Omni handles all the sending and then lead shark is where you can buy the leads interesting how do you how do you build like an emote around a company like lead shark doesn't everyone just sort of buy Zoom info buy eye contact buy clear bit data and it's it's really a repackaging game who packages it the best in uh in your space in our space Maybe in the SMB space though people are down to spend the 49 bucks or lead shark used to be nine bucks a month just to get access um so it's really more of an SMB play and then um any sort of martech any sort of marketing technology just comes down to sales like you said you listed like three of them what's the difference between clear bit and zoom info you know they both have everyone buys everyone's data yeah it's just who can package you better and who can sell it better yeah which sales person do you like better which sales person is a better closer and we can play that game the same as them yeah we'll book it will book a call with your team the same way and we'll try to close you I mean I guess if they were on right now take all markets yeah you know I agree but if they were on right now and they were going to come to the point what they might say is well we spend 10 million a month buying the best data Alex can't afford data as good as what we have oh and I would counter with have you seen Zoom info's data because I I would try to download data and I I last time we used zoom in folks we were Zoom info customers um we had a very hard time finding up-to-date data regardless of what they said because they'll spend their 10 million a month and they'll update data that's completely different from anything that you need yeah so whether whether it's constantly refreshed data or not uh the odds that it's your data that that gets refreshed is very low did lead shark us it was all that also helped built by a meet you guys own both together uh they ended up buying meat shark uh as well that was one of the four or five Acquisitions that we had oh so oh acquired by left no no lead shark was acquired by first principles to become Omni leads now and said oh oh oh I see and the two of you guys own Omni 50 50. yeah so now we own uh two no so his company in my company so our yeah combined 12 Grand a month in Revenue so what do you think you can grow to by the end of this year uh I would love to hit like six million a year because you can see like 12 Grand uh in Revenue but now that we're selling the uh the annual packages uh this month we've collected 24 000 in cash most of it came in the last two weeks um just selling these five thousand dollar deals six thousand dollar deals so it's like everybody that comes in to Omni um you basically have to put in your phone number and you can get a free call uh as soon as you sign up so those like to a lead up sold yeah so it's like an agency um fast hybrid model and I think the secret our secret sauce is going to be pushing that so you think you can grow from 12 million 12 k a month right now to 4.8 million a month by December this year I think so I think it's just going to be a numbers game it's like how do we get the word out to enough people how do we open up enough channels and how do we make it happen um we're scaling our cold email right like we are a cold email tool so we can scare scale out our cold emails um right now our goal is 60 000 emails sent per month um we'll scale up to 150 000 emails set per month how many are you sending right now we're sending ten thousand I think that's just for you trying to get your own customers that's not how much your customers are sending yeah no no that's interesting for us and then we'll scale up all the way um 150 000 a month we got Twitter going uh we got LinkedIn going well LinkedIn will soon be going YouTube's going as well um and I think it's just layering these social media channels and then using um using the influencers as well because what I found is we can basically hire these influencers uh to use their channels to talk about us um and that worked really well at tweet Hunter as well one of the main cause one of the main Partners at Tweed Hunter JK Molina was a known Twitter ghost writer and basically throughout the course of tweet Hunter he went from 40 000 followers to like up to 120 130 000. and a lot of that growth just came from him tweeting about it and so we're doing similar at Omni now we've got a couple Partners um that we're just bringing on a bunch of people we're promising them Equity that they can earn based on the amount of Revenue that they're driving and just hopefully we can create a snowball with that that's amazing I love this story very cool man well um as we wrap up here where can folks find you online what's the best place to check out easiest place if you want me to write your cold email scripts going over to omni.us otherwise go to YouTube youtube.com Alex Berman awesome on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book favorite book still four hour work week number two is their CEO you're following or studying I love Howard Schultz former CEO maybe currency of Starbucks I love his currency he's always in and out you never know number three besides your own tools what's your favorite tool for building Omni favorite tool I really like the HubSpot automations that we set up there's a lot of money to be made just in getting your HubSpot emails set up correctly number four how many hours of sleep actually do you use an agency to do that and if so which agency do you use uh we hired these guys called sales momentum I again another one without a website uh former guys who used to run connected uh which was a LinkedIn Outreach tool their Wholesales team left and started their own sales agency and they've been good for you so far yeah I love I think we spent 20K just to have them do everything interesting who's that what's the person's name you work with there uh Aaron Aaron interesting uh look them up all right number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night try to get eight hours okay that's good as you're traveling the world uh number uh and what's your situation married single kids uh single dating okay serious so hopefully hopefully uh they travel with you or no yeah yeah is that like a tough life or no it works no I've been traveling for seven eight years now I'm traveling with this anymore like how do you do that with a part I just I don't know man I would be like every place to eat for dinner it's like where do you want to eat and then you have to debate where you want to eat and it's like let's just go eat I'm hungry yeah you have to make your decisions and unfortunately with a partner you have to get higher quality places because they'll complete and it's not just my it's not just my girlfriend it's every girl I've dated it's amazing and Alex how old are you I'm uh 31. last question something you wish you when you were 20. okay I wish I knew how easy it was to just clone a business that already existed and just do that like I would never come up with an original idea if it was up to me I would just be like all right what are people paying for it now let me a MailChimp all right let me do like a MailChimp and then I just do MailChimp that would be my one advice for anybody that was 20. I love that guys have a story here omni.us launched by Alex and a partner he met amine at first principles I split it 50 50 in terms of percentage doing 12 Grand a month right now on Revenue but just launched six months ago 167 paying customers it's at omni.us and leadshark they help you identify leads and then obviously Omni is what you would use actually send the leads out and uh and close them bring them in he's got a lot of experience in startup World his first company inspired beats didn't go so well his second one another one tweet Hunter was just acquired for lemlist for uh called two and a half million bucks he's now free bird traveling the world building his new thing we'll see what happens next Alex thanks for taking us to the top thanks David 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 buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central 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 SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 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 got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya