How Outleads CEO Dorin Rosenshine grew Outleads to $1.6M revenue and 45 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is dorsen rosenschein she's the founder and ceo of out leads a microsoft accelerator company at leads enables brands to engage customers with online advertising and relevant content based off off-site and offline data she has over a decade of experience in optimizing the digital presence for firms in a variety of industries from consumer electronics to home improvement doran are you ready to take us to the top yep let's do it very good okay so what's the company do what i miss in the bio and what's your revenue model how do you make money yeah so we basically enable companies to run online ads to you based off of your phone call activities so if you're calling up a bank and you're talking about a mortgage we enable the bank to then show you ads online based on the fact that you called and you spoke about that mortgage okay and how's that tech work what's the tracking obviously it's not a cookie it is sort of a cookie so basically what we do is we connect your online presence with the phone call that you make so if you're on a website and then you transition into a phone call we have technology that basically follows you around and connects the phone call that you uh just placed to your online session and appends the data from the phone call back into your online session then enabling companies to advertise to you based off of that okay but if all that originated from a website visit am i aren't i already able to be you know retargeted from that website visit regardless if i called or not uh so i missed what you said because the you broke off a little bit you asked about sure what i was saying is can't i still be retargeted since i visited the website regardless if i called or not oh yes but your calling is a much more a much stronger indicator of your interest right so if you're on the website and once you call right you've left the website now without connecting your phone call data to your website activity the company has no idea if you left because you called or if you just left because you weren't interested how are you connecting how are you connecting the two though right so what we do is once you're on the website we generate a unique identifier to you and we append that identifier to the phone number so once you dial as soon as the call connects that code it's like a numeric code it's being dialed immediately as soon as the call connects and it's being picked up by the call center okay so hold on sorry i don't understand that i go to dropbox.com i want to buy dropbox they're using your technology i then grab my cell phone that's sitting next to me and i dialed dropbox how on earth are you gonna connect the two right so if you're on a if you're on your mobile phone and you're so there's two scenarios right there's a scenario where you're browsing on your mobile phone and then you're clicking the click that you have the link that you have on the website on the mobile phone and you're clicking the call but in that case we generate a numeric code and we append it automatically to the phone number as soon as you click to call okay so and then once you call in so you actually will see like your phone number with a comma and a and a number like a two i totally get i totally understand that use case right if you're on a one computer and you're calling from another device right so what we do is we generate a numeric code that is displayed on the web page and then you're being prompted for it once you call so you actually see so when you're browsing on the website you see the phone number and then it says extension so and so so for you would be let's say extension one if i visited the same website as you would be extension two and so forth so we and then we re-use those codes all the time i do have to say that because of the growth of mobile activity most of the uh most of what most people do is you use they they'll um they'll browse from their phone and then they'll dial in from there they'll click to call and then dial in like that so what's the is this like an eco i mean i would say i follow that buying behavior on like if i want to buy a book off amazon but if i'm making a decision about buying a piece of software for my business to use it's not going to happen on my phone it's going to be on a computer yes but a lot of times so you'd actually be surprised at how much the mobile share of traffic has grown and it's it's nearly uh it's nearly equivalent to the desktop traffic on and actually it's even surpassing it if we take tablets into account even on b2b websites uh that you know the traditional b2b websites that you think so people like i totally get the traffic and i totally believe that i've seen the stats i'm talking about a buying decision though like even if i browse maybe i want to buy manny's you know company outreach i want to buy a license for my thing i might browse outreach.io on my phone but still when it comes in to put a thousand dollar a month credit card in i'm gonna do that via like a computer and what you're saying is when people do that the way you're tracking is with these unique identifiers the extensions yes and and also there's the right this there's different stages right so you can be on your computer trying to decide if you're going to buy it or not but when you want to dial in it's much easier to just open the website on your mobile phone and click to call rather than open the keypad i've never i've never done that i go to the website i look at the call and number in the upper right and i pick up my phone and call it i've never opened the thing on my site and like click the thing this is why i'm pushing you by the way because my audience will go well whose use case is more right what am i more likely to do doran's or nathan's right right well i mean so also leah there's a lot of other industries that are more like b2c that are using our uh our services so anything from travel and insurance to healthcare education you know a lot of these industries that are not b2b they're actually very much b2c uh are gonna are a lot more like mobile based and more tablet based yeah that's why i was pushing that by the way i was hoping you would help us get a better identity of what your customers are so it is more b2c it's more consumer companies it's definitely i mean yes and if you look at the verticals it's definitely we we have a lot of clients that are b2c so like anything in auto as well real estate you know those and those are all b2c companies they're not b2b b2b it's actually not a very uh strong vertical for us not that strong i wouldn't say that it's non-existent we definitely have clients that are b2b but a lot of the vertical the verticals that we serve are b2c okay enough of that i totally get the product now um how do you make money is it a sas company or what it is a sas company we charge a flat monthly fee so what the the one thing that i do want to emphasize is that we don't actually serve the ads we just connect the data we take the data from the contact center and push it into online advertising and analytics platforms so then it's up to the market or the digital marketer to decide what they want to do with that data and how they want to utilize it yeah so for if because of that reason because we don't actually serve the ads and we don't guarantee any uh any results because it really depends on how the client is using the data because we don't guarantee any results we just charge a flat fee and what i don't want to go down every example every pricing option you have but on average what's the customer pay you per month it uh it really depends we it really could vary a lot because we have clients that are like enterprise enterprise-sized i totally get that totally i'm just the smallest uh the smallest clients pay usually about 500 a month uh and that's you know that's a client that usually gets uh something roughly a thousand phone calls a week okay that's helpful and would you say that's a fair average 500 a month uh no that is not that is the smallest dad the average is probably around uh wow you're really catching me off guard here but it's something like 3 000 maybe that's okay yeah i'm just i i'm sure you have all of the cohort analysis going on i just i don't want to spend time on all that i'm just curious quick quick overall okay yeah i would say that's that's a quick gauge okay and and put all this on a timeline for us when did you launch the company what year 2013 2013 okay great and have you bootstrapped to date or have you raised we have bootstrapped uh you know 2013 when i say 2013 that's sort of when the idea was conceived at the time i was working full-time i had a full-time day job and i was just putting a couple hours a day into this in the evenings and on weekends so it took took about two years until i had decided that i'm gonna leave my my day job and then i did it gradually so it took after that another year to until i left my day job completely and just uh what do you mean you were like consulting or something yeah so exactly i was actually freelancing consulting uh and i just uh kind of let go of my clients one by one...