How Ppcscope CEO Brian Johnson grew Ppcscope to $317.8K revenue and 646 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is brian johnson he leads an amazon advertising analytics and optimism optimization company and he sold physical products online for 12 years in 2015 he developed a consulting practice specializing in amazon's pay-per-click advertising platforms brian founded the amazon ppc troubleshooting community community amazon ppc consulting association along with many others before launching his current company ppc scope all right brian you ready to take us to the top you bet i am all right so you you you kind of basically locked up these distribution channels first in the form of communities and forums and consulting and then you saw this idea for the sas play when did you have the transition where you said oh my gosh i've got to move away from the agency and go all in on the ppc scope sas play well it was really it was a blue ocean so that's kind of why i started the community as well is um i didn't have the answers i needed nobody else did either so i started the community in order to collaborate with others and uh one thing led to another people started asking me for more and more advice um and after a point i started it's like okay i need better tools to do what i'm doing um so i started poking around and um you know looking for for programmers to help me and start putting it together and the first version was as about as ugly as you get yeah yeah what year did you launch ppc scope that was uh 2015. okay and it is pure play sass right yep so on average what are customers today paying you per month for access to the technology uh today i mean our average revenue per user is um it's about 41 dollars per month okay and what walk us through kind of what they're getting for that okay so um ppc scope is a essentially it's an analytics platform for uh ppc advertising for on amazon so those brands who sell products private label products on amazon they want to advertise they're going to use the pay-per-click advertising this software helps them translate the the data a lot better than what amazon provides and it also allows them to manage their ad campaigns both creation and optimization right within the software so better view better analytics better profitability metrics um just all around a better view of what their advertising is doing for them brian will this tech only work well for kind of physical products going through amazon or what work for kind of for example books yeah so um no it doesn't it doesn't really work well for books primarily because the the ad platform amazon has a couple of ad platforms and the one that primarily is used for books um is they don't have any kind of technology interface to it and so it's really limited it's a very manual process still interesting so this is primarily for you know physical products and so oh you launched in 2015 you were four years later today how many customers have you scaled to um we're at uh let's see last time i checked here we're at 646. you're looking at a dashboard or something aren't you well i'm actually i i took some notes at it so yeah 646. have you have you listened to the show of course okay good so you're you were ready for it huh i hope so that's good why do you like one thing i'll forget yeah out of curiosity why do you listen to the show you're a busy guy um you know what um you know there are certain shows that i like to listen to i certainly like yours i like the fact that you uh you know you hit everybody hard with numbers and uh hopefully i'm prepared enough no you're it's good so far 646 customers times the 41 price point you're doing about 26 grand a month right now and just this sas where was it a year ago um it was actually a little bit a little bit lower we had mainly because we did somewhat of a pivot um but we actually had a lower average revenue we were down about 34 per month per user but we had about 700 users so we had a little bit more users but we changed the type of users that we focused on okay so 700 times 30 would be about 20 grand or 21 grand in revenue about a year ago per month yeah 20 23 on average yep okay interesting um so so kind of slow patient growth it looks like nothing crazy but slow and patient can can win a lot of win a lot of board games um walk me through how you got the first 10 customers i assume you probably used your communities i did yeah so it was it was just kind of an extension of that as i tested the waters and said okay you know if if i built this thing would you actually use it and the first uh you know the first version of course it didn't do much at all really it was just more like oh hey i can visualize a line chart of the the data that amazon won't tell me that was enough that was enough to to get um probably two or three hundred users within the first um i don't know probably six months i think you know so but it was just it was a whole i mean i looked back at that first version it was horrible of course but what did you actually do though so you have the community i mean walk me through which community did you post in how did you post it what was the call to action in the post well part of it is um because there's a number of um there are a number of amazon seller related communities on amazon as far as facebook groups for instance um is that where the amazon pc troubleshooting community is it's a facebook group it's a facebook group yeah exactly yeah so when i started i started it just so i could try to you know talk to other people and i literally called it amazon ppc troubleshooting specifically just to you know talk about that one very niche topic right it wasn't about selling you know all the other topics that other authors and and uh podcasts talk about it was strictly just the advertising and it was strictly just the troubleshooting but it was such a big problem that it just people gravitated to it from you know to get some help look at this i go there now there's this big beautiful eye kind of this good looking bald guy with a big old white smile so there's 14 000 people in this group now huh 15 15 000. yeah this is great interesting and so you've your only monetization strategy here is really upselling the the sas product or do you monetize this other ways well yeah so i actually um because i rolled it out again it was that blue ocean gap of knowledge and tools that was available so um you know it started out with a community rolled into the software rolled into a couple of different like professional training courses that i developed and then finally into my my ad agency yeah so it's all been it's all been very specific you know staying in my lane if you will yeah so let me brian let me ask you i mean there i just saw an article the other day press come out saying something like amazon's ppc business is going to like 4x year over year and it's really now competing with even facebook and google the two big ad players i mean if i'm reading those headlines and i'm a guy like you i'm going wow i had great time in getting in in 2015 and i better go all in on the sas product today i could essentially build the amazon version of google adsense like why aren't you all in on ppc scope why still do the other stuff well i mean lack of focus probably helps um you know it's part of it is i was trying to support over support the community i think you know i was extremely accessible and so i got diversified um it certainly helped with um you know speaking engagements and you know conferences and it's for to have the the course out there because nobody else had the course again blue ocean that's taking advantage of it um but it's easy for you a guy like you to make yourself famous doing this it's much harder to get rich true true but i think each of the areas is certainly uh provided um more than what i would have expected you know it continues to grow each year because of all these different things now for me my focus is is primarily on my ad agency and then second on um on the the sas product yeah um how much volume do people actually process spend through you or it's only an analytics tool well it's an analytics tool yeah it's pure analytics well i mean we can actually manage we can make changes to their advertising through the tool okay you know as each user does so does amazon product have a pretty healthy ads api um yeah i mean it does what they did in 2017 is they rolled out a whole new api prior to that it was a lot of manual you know go out and grab the reports manually so um you know we came in in 2015 again there wasn't any solutions out there that were focused on this um we were proud of being the innovators but it was it was a hard game yeah because we had to basically manipulate the technology in 2017 they retired the old technology opened up the new api that's when the flood of competition came in and so that at that point we had to start pivoting who's your biggest competitor in the space um you know i mean there's there's several of them out here um you know certainly back there's different types that are available um you know certainly uh celex out of germany is is a great uh direct competitor for us um locally i would say like how big do you think celix is what would you guess their revenue is i would say that they're...