How Orangedox CEO Chad Brown grew Orangedox to $90K revenue and 300 customers in 2016.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per top 5 and6 million he is help B on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan Latka okay top tribe this week winner of The 100 bucks is none other than Derek rodenbeck he is an artist and he's looking to increase his Revenue if you want your chance to enter and to win 100 bucks each Monday on the show simply subscribe to the podcast iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it again text the word Nathan to 33444 guys if you want an easy tool to use use to book your meetings back to back to batch your calls to make sure people actually show up when they schedule you want to use aity scheduling it's what I use for all my podcast interviews at Nathan lat.com schedu I'll tell you more about how I use it later on in the episode Nathan ladka here this is episode 525 coming up tomorrow morning you're from Ivan mosic with his company Ian a that has hit set 25 Grand in monthly occurring Revenue by helping 1,700 users better manage their tasks inside of Gmail what's up guys Nathan lad here our guest today is Chad Brown he is the CEO and head of product along with a co-founder at orang do.com he's got a strong background in business intelligence and Technology startups and has a passion for business documents and the color orange obviously Chad are you ready to take us to the top indeed I am yeah everyone in Vancouver is always happy you seem like a happy go-lucky kind of guy huh yeah exactly I mean we have uh you know rainy weather for the last month but who wouldn't be happy all right tell us what orange do does and how do you make money um so essentially orange dos uh started as a company that does document tracking and we did that originally on Dropbox but we sort of moved other cloud services and sort of how we make money there is providing you know sort of Premium services on top of a premium product uh so be able to allow people to drill right into PDFs that they share so they can see exactly what pages they're read for how long as we be to brand the interface itself so instead of sending out a bunch of Dropbox files that looks like it comes from Dropbox you can send something that you know comes from what looks like your company and what is the when someone's trying to make a decision between between you guys and say panda do why would they decide on you uh one of the the big reasons why people go with us is because we're tightly integrated with the cloud service that they use so it traditionally was Dropbox we just added Google Drive integration about a month ago and that tight integration means that you don't need to transfer files from your your cloud service uh to somewhere else uh we we integrate directly with with your account uh which also means that you can send the folders of material um you can update those folders just in Dropbox and automa it comes out in our product as well okay got it so it's a theme of integration and what is the price I mean what's how do you make money is it a SAS product yeah s product uh we have a premium model so we provide some limited Services uh with limited number links and things you can share free and then we charge from there uh as well as I said that branding piece is one of the big reasons why like companies pay us so that uh you know investment firm when they're sending out a due diligence um you know package or they providing a data room it looks like it comes from them so it's not you know branded as Dropbox it's branded as whatever investment firm and what is the so how many total free users are you at currently uh we have over 2 20,000 uh sign up for the product okay what was launch date launch year uh we interesting question so we uh we had like a sauce launch we ran some stuff in beta a little bit in 2014 pretty much since 2015 beginning is when we sort of had this type of product available and what are you guys at today November 2016 2016 in terms of total uh monthly customers uh so we have about monthly we should do a weekly uh yeah we V uh I would say 2,000 weekly active users so okay and are well just to be clear are th those seem like weekly active users are those all pay are those paying customers no no no no of course not we actually haven't really focused on paying customers um as much uh we've been trying to find an interesting Market fit for us outside of this sort of feuture based realm yeah you you mentioned that and I'll get into we'll get into that in a second here in terms of where you guys are pivoting to but help us understand kind of traction to date how many current customers are paying you uh we have about a few hundred different P customers that are either you know personal people to business people to Enterprise customers that have multi seats you said 200 uh clely 300 okay 300 and what is the give us a sense of size sometimes these products are you know you know seven bucks a month sometimes they 700 bucks a month depending on kind of the the the space what is the average customer paying you per month uh we are more on the personal use to date um mainly because you know we're attached to things like Dropbox and Google drive but uh we have uh I would say probably an average each customers be paying between $25 to $30 a month okay um but some customers are paying you know a few hundred doll a month or more more for any price is in order to before we talk about the pivot you're thinking about to get current mrrs at simp can I take 300 customers times 25 bucks a pop and assume you're doing some around 7 7500 bucks a month in Revenue yeah around that yeah we're under 10,000 mrr right now um and we're we're bootstrap so we're looking to change that with with a bit of a pivot so you want to raise Capital well we yeah yes or no uh we were uh we were looking earlier this year to raise capital and we felt that where we wanted to be is in a position where we knew exactly where we we sat in the market now we have a product now we were looking at it saying you know it's it's a feature based product and we really want to be a product where we can say Hey listen we can be an enterprise-based product that have multi deals with customers rather than just being pushing forward with more of like a personal product that individuals would use so those are like very different things let me ask you question why don't you sell orange Doc and then orange docs and then go launch a new company with the the the focus you're doing why um a couple reasons one is that we're actually baring it's an interesting we're actually what we're doing to Pivot is actually not pivoting completely away from what we're doing okay by any means we're actually looking at our current customer base and that's what we've really done in the last year uh is really looked at exactly what our customers use our product for so one of the things that's uh that's interesting is that because when we would go to investors we would say hey this is what our our customers use and this is what customers do they would want to know exactly okay what is the exact customer who's your TG customer who what's the exact use case and because we were sort of a little over map or like well there's there's personal people going on there to track files they send to their parents and then there's you know Enterprise customers who are using as recruiters and they're sending it to to understand how other customers or potential prospects are using their information um we we realized that there was a commonality with all the paying business customers and that really is they're using in a more like could call account-based marketing approach which is a bit of a new term but really what that is is sales been doing for long time is you know sending material to Market material to prospective customers and then you know in order to gain that particular count and and in doing so what they're really trying to do is drive these sort of product Champions internally in the company so the more we realize that you know there's a commonality there for paying customers to use this product um they don't necessarily call it account based marketing necessarily but that's really what it is so what we realized as we talked to a lot of these customers about what we can do with a product where we're going with it uh more than just tracking we're looking to drive things like customer engagement or providing interface that's much higher engaging it's it's almost turning into like a micro site of content and and second to that it's also driving insights where you can see specifically who in a company is actually consuming the material so if I send it to you did you forward it to anybody else in your company and who those people are and things like that so as we sort of sort of unearth that the direction that we wanted to go anyways we sort of did on this Banner of compy marketing and that really opened up a lot of people's um all lot of our customers to say hey wow we can do this sort of stuff that we didn't think we can do this more so what is the you guys had mentioned your bootstrap what's your team look like today how many how many employees uh so it's me and the co-founder me and my co-founder Chris and we have a couple part-time employees that we uh we H up when we need to okay got it uh so but two full-time right yeah two fulltime and then is it do you guys have a good sense around like gross you know customer turn per month yeah um our customer turn um probably looking at around monthly I would say less than 5% I you right right around fiveish yeah around fiveish yeah okay and um what is the how are you acquiring these customers you mention you had 20,000 users which is no small feat 300 of them are paying how are you finding these folks that's honestly being bit of a Killy feel um you know I'm a I come from a technical background and running another company before this which one um and I uh I had a a business intelligence company a service company that that worked with SIP business object as a partner so it was a service based company before that um that I decided that I got you know decided I don't want to be servic anymore I want to be product yeah whole other world that's the whole other conversation but uh and then Chris he comes from Enterprise sales background so he has the Enterprise sales experience and understanding how the Enterprise sales work U but we've always missed marketing so back to your point um how we actually got our customers originally is purely by Form posting We just posted everywhere people were saying how do I track Dropbox files and we just said we can do that give me a l give me a specific Forum what's the link of specific Forum you posted in um I would say like uh like stack stack exchange is one of the ones that did pretty well for us okay uh so people would ask questions there and again was more of technical nature so they were like hey yeah you you know here is uh how do I track my drop box Val and then you know they would come by and uh be a little Lou here uh they would come by and uh and then say yeah and then what we do is we we'd be able to use that as a getting a higher fto ranking as well interesting so you know over time that sort of allowed us to to grab a you if you look at trackline Dropbox files we come up as like number one on that list now yep um because of that so that's been our sort of Grassroots Gorilla Marketing approach um and so we you know since then we look at experimenting with paid advertising things of that and uh and going on that route and so right now our Market initial are really aligned towards finding influencers primarily in the account based marketing space and that's our big push one one a time got it what uh so so uh where are you guys based currently so we're in uh we're in M Vancouver um and uh yeah so we're we're down here Ino vancou which is pretty close to the beach yeah I know it's good so what is the I mean something has to give here right so two there's two of you guys you're doing 7500 bucks per month right now after cost maybe you guys are able to you know scrape up 3K each per person I mean are you going to are you going to kind of put more of your own money in the business to to to to get the product at the Enterprise level you want it to be are you going to go try and raise capital for the for the kind of additional functionality what's the plan uh yeah good point so my previous company you know um had uh I used a lot of money for to see this company and uh so we sort of been augmenting you know by having that investment um and so I think the idea really is is you know like I say we haven't focused on a lot of Revenue um for the last while and so now seeing the future and seeing R working with a bunch of Enterprise uh customers right now who are very interested in using us for cbas marketing and those deals are substantially larger than what we've had before um to say the least so that seeing that is something that for us you know we're getting closer just to closing those and I think when that happens we'll be a much better position revenue on so I could easily say within the probably the first quarter of next year we could probably 10x Revenue y um what we're looking to do if people want to follow you as you guys build this and kind of shift your focus where's the best place for them to connect with you online uh probably just email at chat orange.com um or you can find us on our Twitter Orange orange all right guys I talked about this earlier but I schedule like so many meetings it would blow your mind I mean all my podcast interviews right hundreds of buers I talk to monthly I schedule and you know what I do it so efficiently I get them all to agree to my calendar so all the calls are back to back to back that means I'm not switching in between tasks all day long I get them to batch so I can be very efficient it's so critical and I use a tool called Acuity scheduling to do this at Nathan la.com it eliminates back and forth between me and people I'm trying to meet with it makes it very simple and most importantly they help me keep my not show rate very low because they send out reminders helps you look very professional so go to naa.com schedu to sign up and you get a great deal you know you guys know this I hit people hard I make great deals and gatherin the CEO has given us a great deal if you sign up like normal people okay on their website you only get a 14-day free trial if you use my link naa.com schedu you get 45 days free okay it's the best it's free go to naa.com schedu right now to sign up and I'll see you there top D will link to that in the show notes at naa.com thetop 525 againthe toop 525 all right Chad let's wrap up for the famous five these are quick answers you ready go ahead number one what's your favorite Business book my favorite book book uh it was good to great it was um a number of years ago but uh I remember reading that it changed a bunch of things for me number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now yes definitely Drew host CEO of Dropbox number three is there favorite online tool you have like toptw favorite online tool that I have um I would say probably it would be stack exchange and stack Overflow as one of the favorite ones I like using number four yes or no do you get eight hours of sleep every night yes I do very much nice and what's your situation married single do you have kids I'm single so yeah I get a lot of sleep how old how old are you I'm 37 37 all right last question take us back 17 years what do you wish your 20-year-old self neww what do I wish self new um to be more confident that's for sure and also you know when I was 20 I was the the do bust so you know one of the things I never thought about doing what going and doing entrepreneurial stuff so I sort of wish I had that sort of that motivation at that time top tribe there you have it make sure you're moving forward with confidence from Chad Brown one of the founders of orange docs they are totally bootstrapped about 300 customers 20,000 users arpo of 25 bucks a month so they're doing about 7500 bucks in mrr getting ready to shift focus into more kind of the Enterprise space to service some of their customers who are already in that space with their team of two based up there in Vancouver Chad thanks for taking us to the top thanks than if you enjoyed Chad today go back and listen to Eric yesterday Eric's company Podium has raised $4 million they just hit 1 million bucks in monthly recurring Revenue after just 12 months of being in business on track to do over 12 million here in 2016 Revenue okay top tribe I'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning and don't forget before you listen to any other episodes subscribe on iTunes right now for your chance to win 100 bucks every [Music] Monday