How Orbtr CEO Erik Wolf grew Orbtr to $300K revenue and 350 customers in 2018.

hello everybody my guest today is eric wolf he cooks 30 minute meals and 15 and he runs a five-minute mile faster than you so with over a quarter century of experience gathered over the last 20 years he's decided marketing should be more efficient too as the founder of orbiter he's known as a trailblazer in small business sales and marketing automation eric are you ready to take us to the top i'm we're going straight to the top awesome all right this is a very crowded space smb marketing automation tell me where you play what you do and what's your revenue model how do you make money uh well so first of all how we um how we make money currently is um is based on monthly subscriptions just just like everybody else um we're gonna have a big announcement in a few weeks that's actually going to completely change that or change a lot of it um which we're very excited about but i can't tease that too much right now but um we where we fit in is when you look at the big packages the all-in-one solutions um your companies like hubspot infusionsoft etc etc they make really great software um but it tends to be from a small business perspective very difficult to implement we take a completely different approach to that rather than saying that we want to be an all-in-one solution we take a integrated solution and we work with wordpress we work with gravity forms we work with woocommerce we work with zapier so rather than try to replace all the stuff that you have what we do is we integrate with the things that you already have and make that work better so just be clear like i'm seeing an example on your website is like a contact form widget inside of wordpress i mean is this a good example what you do so we we work with we work with gravity forms and so one of the things that we do for example is is where a lot of tools have dynamic content we allow you to do that right within wordpress and on any page where um we let you manage uh your segmentation and your lead scoring and things like that directly from wordpress and then we integrate with the tools that you're already using like mailchimp and woocommerce and salesforce um by way of zapier and some other integrations and so so you don't have to replace the stuff that you're already using in order to use our solutions you can we basically plug right into what you already have and we make it awesomer got it so eric give me i don't want to go down every customer cohort but on average what's a customer pay you per month for this uh 99 per month um or a thousand dollars per year simple pricing and when did you launch the company what year uh 2013 was our was our first public launch and we were in beta for about a year before that get get me in your head there and that year i mean what was going on did you just leave corporate life or where were you thinking um well actually where where i was thinking is that i um i ran and still also run a digital marketing agency and our clients very much wanted to be able to do more in the the realm of automation they didn't have a thousand dollars a month to spend on software and so we started building tools essentially for our customers we um we addressed what they were saying hey this is what we want and we want it to all work in wordpress because we're doing everything in wordpress and so really that was the genesis of the software and so from that is that agency still running today absolutely why not shut that down and go all in on the software um you know it it's a um it's a different way of helping people and so we we really um and there were there was a time that i really thought about going all in on the software but as i headed in that direction i realized that you know i i missed the ability to to work really closely with the clients and and it was also taking away one of the key ways that we learn which is by actually solving problems and so we decided to to keep you know to sort of keep going down both paths and and have the one side where we help folks and the other side where where we make our tools available for anyone who wants to use them and and very often it ends up being other agencies and so eric what have you scaled the software companies to today in terms of total customers using the platform uh we have actually at this point several hundred folks using um using the platform and um and we expect that to grow by by leaps and bounds based on the um based on the things that we're going to be rolling out in the next month so i mean eric just just trying to be just to try and be clear on that so i mean are you talking like 200 people or 500 people or 900 people uh 500 is a good number okay got it so i mean the reason the reason i'm doing this i'm trying to triangulate kind of growth so 500 sure customers paying 100 bucks a month you guys are doing about 50 grand per month right now in revenue uh we're doing less than that in revenue because of things like agency partners and folks like that that are paying different rates we have how many just before you describe before you describe the channel sorry so how much lower uh we do uh uh probably about half that at this point in in monthly revenue and then so then then tell me more those strategies so a lot of these are through kind of marketing channels where you know you're getting your margins yeah so so we have yeah so we have we have agency partners who are implementing this for their clients we have um we have folks who um we actually still have some folks who are using um a freemium version of the software that we rolled out about four years ago which which is now defunct but there are still folks that have been that have been using it and so um so we've got probably about 500 active users and just be clear though how many paying cut my question was how many active like paying customers not users how many the 500 are paying uh about 350. okay that's still healthy um and then and then what's growth look like so a year ago what were you doing per month uh so our growth has been over the last two years a little bit a little bit flat and it's one of the reasons that we're actually completely changing our model okay so it was about 25 000 about a year ago as well per month yeah okay and and so what this is a great spot to be so you identified a problem the company's flat you got to make changes what what are the tests that you're going to run to try and change that um we're actually doing we're actually about to do something and i can't tell you exactly what it is um in about a month i'll be able to but but we're about to do something that no one else in this industry by the way eric this won't go out until literally like eight months from now so by the time this is out your new thing will be live for six months so what is that news oh is that right no they didn't tell us that that's okay yeah but so what's the new thing what's the test that you're gonna run uh it's not a test actually we're we're about to become a we're actually changing the entire model and orbiter is about to become a charitable non-profit 501c3 okay and what that's going to allow us to do is um is basically make make our tools available free of charge to um to many small business owners including women-owned businesses veteran-owned businesses minority-owned businesses non-profits as well how do you pay the developers to keep developing it and keeping bugs out um well actually in in the new model we're going to be able to um we're going to be able to uh to to raise actually a lot more money um versus going the venture model where we end up uh in our view beholden to other folks so how are you going to raise money if it's a charitable non-profit the way that other charitable nonprofits raise money we're going to get grants we're going to get we're going to get donations from corporate we're going to get donations from individuals we're going to have a lot of our current users that are going to continue paying us um because they don't meet our criteria for for getting our services for free okay so it's not you're just opening up a free tier people are going to keep paying you so you still have 20 25 grand a month coming in so we're going to have we're still going to have revenue coming in we're going to have but our new model is going to be focused on on the people who we have we have a selection of criteria that are going to basically enable you to um to get a to get free license and access to all of our materials we're going to be developing education to to wrap automation around with one of the problems with marketing automation is that you give people a phishing poll and they still don't know how to use it and that's a problem that as soft as a software company it's very difficult for us to for us to solve profitably as it's even more difficult as a marketing agency to solve profitably because margins are way lower in an agency correct and so what we do so in this case what this allows us to do is put formal education programs together we're going to be able to fund those through um through donations through corporate sponsorships do you have any of those lined up eric like i'm curious what gives you the confidence do you have a grant lined up or...