How Ovationup CEO Zack Oates grew Ovationup to $3.2M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

please welcome sack Oates from Ovation up what's up team okay so I'm going to talk about a little bit how I built Ovation with twenty thousand dollars in marketing budget so um a little bit about me by the way I grew up in New Jersey and yeah they do teach you how to use blow dryers there which is how I became 6'4 so basically what Ovation is is it is a feedback platform primarily for restaurants so we have a little over 2 000 restaurants we work with a little over 2000 restaurants about a hundred retailers and uh one blood sucking lawyer other than that we primarily work with restaurants so I don't know do we oh there we go so um we were doing 40K in mrr we had been around for a little while kind of like slow slow slow slow but the problem was that we were growing fat right we're going out um and then covid hit and just everything sucked and then we were trying to figure out what to do for a little while and then we've eventually kind of like you know hit our straw right um so but before we get into this I'm gonna tell you a quick story so I have a four-year-old a three-year-old and a nine month old and basically um they run around all the time they're crazy so this is this is our backyard and we have our our kitchen table is like right here and they would run around our kitchen table and run around and run around and run around and they would just smash into this glass door just every single day just smash into it and my and they actually uh would escape and so um and this is not a fenced in backyard there's a lot of cows back there they come up like right to this fence so it's a little you know and they would like stick their hand through the fence and try to pet the cows so my wife got a little uh worried and so she put in this lock well as part of putting in this lock she drilled two little holes right there right when she drilled that second hole the whole thing shattered now the reason I bring this up is because think about that hundreds of times my kids pressed against like slammed into it but because there was so much surface area that they were hitting that glass it was totally fine but that one little one little drill bit and boom the glass shattered so we're talking about the reason I bring that up is because one thing that I learned in this whole process of covid is that you can do if if you're doing a lot of stuff for a lot of people you're really doing nothing for anyone if you do something for someone that's what gets you to break through so if you're looking for money forget the Tam Screw The Tam Let It Go focus on what can you do for a very specific group so I'm going to talk about this uh this B2B how to do B2B marketing and it's really focused around being accepted by your Niche doing a podcast who here does a podcast okay everybody should do a podcast and I'll tell you why and then second one is trade shows there's a there's a very easy cheap way to win at trade shows I'm going to talk about that so be accepted by your Niche first of all this is this is the amount of LinkedIn connections I've added new connections per year and in uh 2014 I did an MBA so I got a lot of a lot of connections there and then I started actively Marketing in 2018 looking for people in our Niche and so this is you know if you're adding this many people to your LinkedIn uh per year in a very specific Niche you're gonna you're gonna get to the right people now the reason the thing I call it is I call it pip cats Partners investors press customers advisors thought leaders look for the PIP cats and connect with them okay these pip cats are gonna be what's gonna this is this is how you unlock your business but you you first have to pick your niche then uh contribute with your personality who are you right so this I I like food as you can tell um but you know this is like you know do case studies post personal stuff post thought leadership post things about your company so these are things that as you the more that you post and the more that you're connecting with your pip cats in your niche the more you're gonna be then ask yourself what does your team lack Rory was talking about finding people who had done it before right so find out what is your what is your team lack what do you need what do you need for that credibility so for me I found somebody who is okay uh I found somebody who was five years ahead of me John Moody founded the restaurant 365 found somebody who was extremely respected in in the industry I found somebody who had a lot of credibility in food and beverage and then I found an investor who uh ended up putting money in but there were there they only invest in Hospitality tech companies so as soon as I took money from them all of a sudden we were all over the news about you know these guys invested in us so find these advisors now one thing that I did is have you guys heard of a fast template no yes maybe so use fast template founder advisor standard template so this is uh this is what I used for my advisors to get them on board and how I gave them equity and how I knew how much to give them equity and everything was already kind of decided before we had started working together right because it's already it's already kind of like predetermined what are you going to be in there like how much Equity based on your stage so when I talk to the advisors I you know send them a LinkedIn message um would love to connect we chatted and then I would say usually sometime on that first call I'd say hey you know we are looking for advisors I would love to talk to you about that and then I'd kind of gauge their interest now we had a couple people say no and that's okay um we had a couple of advisors that came to us that really wanted to be a part of it and then conversation two and three I realized it wasn't going to be a good fit for us and so we kind of uh said no um and that's okay but when you find those good advisors they are gold because not only does it does it really solidify you as a key player in that Niche but then they have all the connections they have all the people to go and introduce you to so second thing do a podcast now first of all you don't need a ton of equipment to do a podcast okay go online and get one of these mics it's a hundred dollars if you can't invest a hundred dollars into this then see me afterwards I'll give you a loan very low interest it's not that much money and and the key is just start do it you don't need a lot of things if I'll tell you what even if you don't have this microphone I do I do about 30 of my podcasts with my MacBook okay I use the mic that's on the why because how many audio files are there out there like these people that are just obsessed with really good audio quality let me tell you in your Niche probably not that many right so don't unless you're in a podcast Niche then get a really good mic and set up and disregard everything I'm saying um but why you're so now you're connected to your pip cats right you're connected to the to the Press investors Partners customers advisors thought leaders so if you're connected with them invite them on the podcast and I'll I have a template for you to to use to invite them on the podcast but what are you giving them you're giving them content to make them look good right even if you are a nobody I'm a nobody why did they come to my podcast because I created a couple of podcasts initially with really good quality and it's fun and it takes 15 minutes and there's no prep call don't don't don't make them work for it tell them it's gonna be 15 to 20 minutes right so you have a few minutes at the beginning of like oh hey great to have you on the podcast you've done some really cool stuff okay you ready to go then at the end of the podcast what do you say hey thank you oh by the way the last question to ask on the podcast is who else should we have on the podcast right and then you reach out and and who do all these pip cats know other pip cats so then you reach out to the other pip cat to be like hey you were just mentioned the podcast by this guy so would love to have you on and she's like oh cool I'll come on right so now all of a sudden you're getting really cool people on the podcast and then um and then at the end of the call the last five minutes you say by the way do you know what what we do Innovation and they're like oh I kind of checked you guys out yeah you guess feedback for restaurants we're working with these customers do you know what it would mean so much to me if I could just chat with you later on next week and would love to get your opinion on what we do and you know how many dominoes is now a customer because of this right this is how we're able to to build these relationships now this is going to come in handy um yeah so do it cheaply you can find people to edit these podcasts it's very very easy very simple to do that so I have this whole template that I use uh where I take the name the company title anyway I I have this in the in the notes for you guys where this is a temple that we use to uh to edit by the way what do I use to record well you said you haven't you had a podcast Mr Blue what's his name is in there yeah what's your Brian what's your podcast scale up show okay yeah so you're like a big deal see I'm like I do I do like pizza podcasts right um yeah right there we go and um so what what do you use to do your recording oh like what like program do you use Riverside okay okay so again like 29 bucks I can't afford that I pay zero I use zoom see you zoom right like if you can't afford if you're doing like high quality stuff then yeah obviously there's there's better programs out there I'm almost 200 podcasts in I've done every single podcast on Zoom besides the two I've done in person that was very awkward right I prefer Zoom um and so then I have this whole template of how to get people how to invite people um what to send them either you know what to send them in the email and this is actually really good so what I do is I have uh this is my template for every single podcast that I do it's again make it really simple it takes me six minutes to prepare for a podcast because I have the template down I know what I'm going to ask them I know how I'm gonna do it so just make it scalable for yourself because these meetings aren't just it's not just about the podcast it's not about the listeners look at this my first like 100 episodes I had 6 700 downloads you probably get that in the first five minutes when you release a podcast well like but the thing is like I don't care right because I don't care how many downloads I get I get to put this content on LinkedIn my pip cap people that are coming on the show are putting that content on LinkedIn because they look good and so now there's two of us I'm saying oh they think I'm Legit enough to kill my podcast and they're like oh these guys are legit enough that I came on their podcast and now their spheres coming into my sphere and that's how I'm growing in my Niche this is not a get rich quick thing this is a slow grow it's a slow burn but it works so and then you could reuse the the you know uh reuse this content social blog weekly email testimonials I've got 2 000 people with a 60 open rate email and all I do it takes me literally two minutes to write this email because I already had my podcast person create the blog post for it so it's super super quick to send out these emails and now every week two thousand people times point six are like opening my email and looking at what I'm doing and thinking about me so lastly win at trade shows who here goes to trade shows okay every single hand should be open because I don't care how Niche your industry is there is some weird trade show for you okay I literally just spoke at the national Pizza Expo in Chicago like there are there are so many little teeny trade shows um when you go to a trade show do not spend a lot of money do not have swag I know there's companies out here with a lot of Swag let me tell you that's a waste of money why I just took two of those like Divi rockets and I use Divi but guess what that's going to my daughter tomorrow because it's her birthday right and now Daddy brought her a rocket home for her birthday um do a really simple Booth this pop-up Banner this and this all pack into one checked bag okay the floor right here I stole it from someone who uh left it at a trade show in Vegas and I drove it back to Utah I had my wife make a backpack for me and I bring this as a second check bag I fly only Delta with it which means I get first bag free second bag forty dollars so I pay 40 to bring my booth these other suckers are paying 70 grand to have their booth made and guess what I get 800 leads per trade show and they're getting 300 because it's not about the show it's about the hustle so I have no chairs right nobody sits everyone everyone just like lays in bed and groans at the end of the night uh cocktail tables by the way you can get those shipped on Amazon 70 ship it to your hotel don't pay 300 to rent it for three days that's crazy do a quick demo have half page Flyers systematize your follow-up trade shows work get a corner Booth these inline booths are terrible no no Elbow Room there you see nobody's even like so we just blocked the hallway and then more people come because it looks like we're doing stuff the other thing to do is now you've had all these pip cats on your podcast you're connected with these pip cats on LinkedIn so what do you do get them to speak about you on stage who's speaking at these things the PIP cats right so what you do is I you know that was I was friends with them now I would literally text him I see you're speaking uh speaking to at this event sweet trying to get some people to check out Ovation if it comes up we'd love you to mention us I'll send you 250 bucks if you do I would pay people to mention me on stage so literally I'm in the audience on venmo and just like hit them up hit them up this is worth it why because who's in the audience the buyers and who's talking about you thought leaders People Press customers you know like investors advisors these are the people that they listen to and so is 250 bucks worth a mention on stage absolutely what is 250 bucks gonna get you on Google nothing nothing gets you customers at trade shows and then lastly get um you know speak when you do a podcast people think that you know stuff I don't know anything but I bring on people who do and then I look smart by association right so so learn to speak make a speaker page if you don't have a speaker page make one doesn't matter just like literally go into a hotel in your area set up a camera and make it look like you're speaking right you don't need to actually have anybody in the audience right I'm the only one looking at you so so go and make it look like you speak um submit to go to speak at events submit to it even if you don't know what it is the national Pizza Expo I spoke last I spoke on Tuesday I found out I was speaking there on Friday because it was just something I applied to I had my marketing person applied to and they never got back to me but they put me main stage speaker two of the entire show and I didn't even know I was speaking until Friday because it just like happens right so the way that it worked is 2019 I spoke at zero things 2020 I spoke at like two virtual 2021 I spoke at like five things this year I'm speaking at like over 20. so speaking gets so much credibility from stage and then who am I especially if you're on a panel she just came to my podcast she became a customer advisor and I don't know who she is but she was really cool um then I he flew out this is my customer from New York City flew out from New York to Chicago just to be on this panel with me and it was just him and me and because of this we closed friendlies and see I have more than Donuts more than pizza shirts that's my donut shirt so the shirts oh um 3 A.M Instagram it'll if you're up at three they will show you weird shirts and then I buy them so keep takeaways be accepted by your Niche pick a niche and go into it find the PIP cats connect with them second do a podcast bring these pip cats on to the podcast and you know become actually build a relationship with them and lastly win at trade shows you don't have to spend a lot of money only the suckers do if you do this doesn't cost a lot of money you can grow your business thank you very much

hello everyone my guest today is zack oates he's an author husband father entrepreneur and hot tub aficionado but not in that order all the time he's voted top 100 entrepreneur rang the nasdaq bell when the world's biggest business competition started three companies received his mba from byu and did cx consulting for fortune 100 company zach you ready to take us to the top yeah man let's do it all right you're now building ovation the url is ovationup.com what's the company doing how you guys making money so we do customer experience and engagement for restaurants and retailers and we do monthly subscriptions sas we have a product that we put in and then we just charge businesses on a monthly basis to use our service and what i mean give me a general sense what are they paying per month on average to use it anywhere between 99 to 300 depending on on the package they got and what do you upsell against is the number of locations or how do you do pricing yeah everything is based on locations and then we give them uh discounted rates for more locations but primarily it's uh rack rates what's nice is that we don't do any contracts for rack rates so keep things really simple and uh keep our customers happy because we we feel like we got to earn their business every month and if we can't then we don't deserve it okay and so what does this mean relationship engagement for physical businesses like name a brand that uses you and how they how they actually use you yeah so there's a restaurant called tucanos they use us they have an ipad at the exit with smiley faces on it and then on the table they have like a text uh text to win or a qr code so all they do is they hold up their camera rank uh rate their experience if they loved it we're gonna push them leave positive online reviews and get them to come back if they didn't love it we allow them to chat with management and then our software stays in compliance with all the policies of you know facebook and and uh google review solicitations people actually do this stuff like over the past 30 days how many people actually submitted a review so we've actually had over uh this year so far we've had a couple hundred thousand people use the system and basically here's what it comes down to is right before ovation they're relying on things like receipt surveys or online reviews the problem is receipt surveys are really annoying for customers to do but they have great business insight online reviews are easy for customers to do but they hurt the business so what we do is we have a system that engages customers 16 times better than receipt surveys and gets people chatting 18 times higher than online reviews so it works so i mean how many customers are using the platform now today right now we have over 300 okay and uh we started off the year with about a hundred so it took us a year and a half to get to 100 and then in six months we've tripled so 300 head count 300 at about 100 a month you're doing about 30 grand a month right now in revenue yep and where were you a year ago uh a year ago we were at about six seven okay good and happy bootstrap the company are raised yeah so we bootstrapped it up until we got into 500 startups and uh and then after that we were able to raise just shy of a million dollars we're just wrapping up our seed round right now okay so a million dollars in the company and what's the team size today right now we've got about 14 we're just on boarding two more today and i imagine you're burning to drive growth how aggressive are you burning actually not that bad we're only doing about 14 15 oh uh a month last month yeah okay that's not bad at all i mean will you ramp that now that you closed the fund or close the round yeah yeah we're gonna get up to probably about 50 60. um but we you know having a background in in uh big consulting financial modeling is like one of uh something i'm really passionate about and making sure that because you know we have a fundamental belief that startups fail because they run out of money or they run out of excitement right and so you know we we have a pretty deep well of excitement so we just want to make sure we don't run out of money yeah and that's good now when did you launch the company what year uh november of 2016 is when we started it we did a year of beta testing and then i went full time about a year and a half ago how much total did you guys spend getting the mvp built before your first dollar revenue uh about five thousand dollars okay so not a not a ton there um yeah and tell us how you got the first couple customers i i mean just dial and smile baby that's what i mean specifically you got online what do you type it yep so we we came up with uh lists of a hub by five different verticals a hundred people from each vertical and we just cold called all those lists and we did that for about a month and we saw who had the most traction and uh where where did we get like the biggest value from it and we found the restaurant retail group was they were just loving what we were doing so like the name a restaurant retailer that was one of those first customers uh so there's a you know mainly mom and pop shops that are local to us so that's we we focus in our local community so we worked with a place called san diablo churros that he does churros and caterina we did a one one-stop brazilian location and where are you by the way location-wise we're in provo utah uh okay so san diego church was interesting okay so you then what were the other four verticals that ultimately didn't make the cut yeah we looked at dentists we look at uh or orthodontists pediatricians uh and we looked at finally and then restaurants and retailers so we focused on restaurants and then eventually we got into retail we had a few huge customers who loved us and just wanted to to jump in so even though we weren't like doing some outbound we had a lot of great inbound and today how are you getting customers especially when you look at like your fully weighted cac what are you spending to get a new 100 month customer mainly trade shows so that's where we're getting a lot of our leads from we just launched a partnership program um but you know either trade shows or we'll actually go and dial people on you know google or facebook and look for their numbers and dial them and chat with them is so fully fully weighted what's it cost to get a 100 customer uh about 250. okay so you i mean you got a two month payback three month payback that's pretty healthy yeah yeah so it's going pretty good right now um churns critical rights in any sas business what was your turn over the past 12 months so we had in total we have a 95 customer retention and uh so that's that's customers who have been with us you know yeah basically uh our monthly churn as far as mrr goes actually net negative so we have more customers upgrading the downgrading give me the gross first give me the gross yeah so we had uh you know like last last 12 months had like 20 customers uh cancel and then we had but of those we had more people upgrade than uh that made up for that revenue exactly sorry yeah what's the re what's the gross revenue churn over the maybe last month over the past year uh so last so last month for example we had like three hundred dollars in uh gross revenue returning okay yeah so sorry on a percentage basis yeah it's about one okay so about 12 annually and then what you're saying is you upsell those same accounts right in that cohort that signed up that month by more than 12 percent yep exactly what do you upsell against typically is it just new locations either new locations or we'll have people who will come in and to to do the customer experience and engagement and then they'll find that now that we we've got a few thousand of their customers in our database now they'll want to text market to them so we'll actually you know we have a texting platform so they can get customers to come back in so they'll upgrade to that and then once they're getting a lot more reviews they'll want to upgrade so that we can actually respond to reviews for them because now they're getting 10 times as many reviews as they used to get they don't have the time to respond to each one individually anymore okay make sense man let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh favorite business book is actually how will you measure my life clayton christensen number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh yes is um stephen covey jr he wrote the speed of trust amazing book amazing guy and also richie norton he's a incredible ceo you know someone i follow all the time in linkedin number three is there a favorite online tool you've got for building the company uh yes we love hubspot we have uh yeah that's good number four how many hours of sleep every night uh five and uh how old are you 33 33 and situation married single kids uh married with two kids okay and last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh to go for it man like don't worry about conforming don't worry about conventionality just go for it why not guys ovation up helping restaurants get better reviews from their happiest customers 300 customers right now 100 a month 30 grand a month in revenue up from six grand a month just a year ago burning about 15 000 a month a million dollars raised team of 14 people net revenue churn of about our net revenue retention of about a hundred percent spending call it two months or three months of first year acv to get these customers as zach looks to scale zack thanks for taking us to the top hey thank you