How Qebot CEO Matthew White grew to $2.9M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is matthew white he's the founder and ceo of keybot helping businesses across the globe access and utilize software in a more productive way before keyboard matthew established a presence in mobile advertising and smb marketing his time with a very predominant marketing agency led matthew to found the company matthew are you ready to take us to the top sure all right tell us about keybot what's the company do and how do you make money yeah great thanks so what we do is we work with a number of different uh business applications uh we integrate the functionality of those tools into a single platform so we have things like a website builder social media platform e-commerce a number of different things you can check our website at keybot.com to see a list of all the products are in there what we do is we work with these these companies that really great applications we take their technology integrated into one platform so that our customers have just a much easier way to access these tools and and discover new tools um we build automation between the tools so when a client comes in they can automatically connect their website to their social media to their email and all that good stuff and it's it just makes technology makes sas tools a lot easier to work and how we make money is we uh we partner with our with these different companies and we do a rev share model uh with you know what they're selling what we partner with and how we resell for them so is your revenue super lumpy or is it pretty predictable like a sas company that's very predictable actually so what we find is for most of our most of our partners we're seeing about a 64 margin to us actually we work out a really great deal because we have scale we can offer them uh we also take things off our partners plates like their marketing expense their sales expense their support expenses so they give us a really great deal on their technology and then we can resell that in a very effective and efficient way can you to speak to a specific example uh like are you know a company you're partnered with and then kind of who you sold it to yeah absolutely so i can't say the names of our partners specifically because we have white label uh ndas association they're all white they're all white label all of them white labels oh wow so they're all labeled into our platform uh they are some of the best they're some of the top three technologies and so our email marketing technology is one of the top three in the market uh and what we do is this week and we take that technology we integrate it and we one of the things we look for is an open api for each one of these tools so that we can connect them to the other tools in the platform a lot of you know our customers come to us saying you know before i was having to use um some third-party system to try to connect all these tools together or when i come to our system they're already connected everything is set up everything is good to go so it's kind of like a business in a box for them on top of that we also offer these tools all all across so our clients come to us instead of you know purchasing from like a hub spot where they have to purchase packages or tiers they come to us and just piecemeal what they need for their specific business together which makes it much more flexible and so when you say 64 margin actually walk me through a sale so i can clearly understand this let's say the email marketing company or partner with they just sold someone or sorry you sold someone on a 100 a month plan like where what does the customer actually see on their screen and what margin t do you take out of that yeah so they actually just see a purchase price so they and our our prices typically come in right at or just sometimes just below what our own partners are actually uh directly selling those technologies for it's another reason we have the white label and ndas in place because sometimes our prices are actually lower than theirs but i don't sorry i don't know what that means so like when you're getting that sign up are they actually going to to keybot.com they're on your email marketing product page and that's where they're signing up exactly yeah so they'll they'll create an account on the keyboard platform and then there's just a list of tools they can pick from tools read about it understand it and they purchase right through us so they're not purchasing from the the end company itself their purchase from us we buy the license from that specific uh partner and then it all flows through our system i see i see okay good so they're on they're on keyboard.com they're on the email page they buy a hundred dollar a month plan you're then paying 36 of the 100 to the partner and you're keeping 64 a month right got it that's what you mean by 64 margin and so what are your what are your biggest costs right now um i would say right now it probably supports is a big one for us because we do have a lot of tools on the platform right so we have right now eight tools that are integrated with another four coming in the next two months uh which obviously allows for us to have a lot that we can actually offer to our clients but it's it's a lot for us to try to support as well so i think that's probably our biggest expense when it comes to actually uh dealing with these tools the nice thing about how we operate is our engineering costs are actually very low because we have the supports the engineering backend of all of our partners they have great technologies integrated us we can focus our engineering resources on like the connections the automation uh you know the the ways these tools work together in a much more seamless way yeah you're like a sophisticated affiliate yeah yeah much yeah and what's your team size today right now we actually sit at nine people internally and then we have a number of outsourced uh resources that we utilize and are they all based in san fran uh everybody we have most of our team based here five of them are based in san francis san francisco a couple in phoenix arizona oh san fran in phoenix very good and give me more the back story here what you're launched company in yeah we launched it officially in 2015. um at that point we were just a like a website builder so it was just a uh a simple easy to use website system uh we started selling that to a few franchise businesses and they started coming to us saying hey and i had always kind of planned this to kind of grow into a more robust kind of uh a platform of different tools i thought we were going to build it internally um they sort of come to us saying hey i need an email marketing system you need a social media system your guys system is easy can you give us a good place to go for this and that's where we started to think okay we're referring these businesses to all these business maybe there's a way we can actually create a different platform for this um another reason we kind of built something like this is because from my time in marketing uh as an agency we realized a lot of these companies were spending just a ton of money on tools that were really not so built out not so well done um and i figured we could do a lot better and a lot more scale with technology utilizing the technology that's out there and kind of bringing it all together well look and look the numbers will tell the story too so up to me on that right so how many customers have you put through your platform since you found the company yeah so right now we're sending about two thousand uh and and it's growing fast so we're also signing a lot of reseller partnerships we actually white label our platform out to other resellers and we're signing a whole bunch of marketing agencies consultancies media companies uh technology companies right now that are now starting to utilize our platform as their back end as well so just to make sure i understand that 2000 number there are 2 000 people today paying you on a monthly basis for one of your eight product suites that you've got listed on the website of which you take about 64 margin whether it's the advertising tool the crm the e-commerce email marketing social media or website builder yeah exactly so it's 2000 separate businesses uh oh got it okay some of those might be like so we have an agency that has you know 500 clients and that we we consider that because we have 500 different uh actual accounts from them as 500 different businesses got it yeah anything give me a general sense though of what each of these customers are paying you per month and are they activating one tool or you know all eight or what yeah that's kind of the great thing about the platform is a lot of our clients will start with one two maybe three tools and they realize the simplicity of it they realize the ease of you know automation between these tools and typically they're upsetting themselves up to four five six tools within you know three to four months time so it grows pretty quickly for us uh we can scale it up and they're asking us for new tools so that's kind of the great thing about this is we really built our system based on what our clients are actually asking us what they want in the platform which has been great for kind of how we grow our business so so just to avoid going down every customer cohort if you did give me an average and what would you say the average customer is putting through you per month yeah so i would i think right now we're saying about 62 per month okay uh spin summer obviously spend a lot more summer spending a lot less that's excluding advertising spin though too so we have some clients that are spending you know it could be between three hundred and twenty five hundred dollars in advertising yeah but you're not making 60 64 margins on that you got to put it through back to the platforms yeah yeah so that one that one is the one we make the least margin on but we actually make a decent uh revenue on it got it got it so i mean can i take 62 bucks times 2 000 and say you're doing 120 grand a month right now in revenue that's pretty close yeah okay cool and talk to me about growth where are we at about a year ago uh yeah so a year ago we were doing about four thousand dollars a month oh wow so it's this last year especially because we really kind of again dived a lot into the reseller markets and that's been a great place for us because we we haven't raised any funds at this point uh we've actually i've bootstrapped the company i've had some successes in other companies i was able to really kind of bring into this um these reseller markets have been a great avenue for us to drive some significant growth and now we're going to raise our first round actually here in the near future so that we can start to scale up in a much more efficient manner how much of your own money have you put in the company all in all you don't want to think about it uh i mean i try not to try not to keep too much track or it kind of yeah what's the number probably 200 grand okay i mean at least so not a ton but i mean for me it's still like that's a ton for a lot of people um and what are you trying to raise now so right now we're trying to raise our first round we're considering this our basically our seed rounded a million um and i think that's what we're gonna do with that is help really start to build a lot of the automation between the tools in a much more robust way and a lot of that's going to most that's going to go to to growth the nice thing about how we operate is getting new tools in our platform our engineering is almost like a you know a revenue driver because each new tool that they integrate in we start to make new revenue pretty pretty quickly um and growth is a big one for us right now we want to get those numbers up and then continue to scale what are so let's say you have a million bucks obviously i assume some of that you'll spend on on marketing and sales what is your calc today uh it depends on kind of how we look at it because if we go for direct clients right now we're spending i would say right about 35 per uh per client for a direct client um but for like an agency actually agencies they love our platform and they they just they go crazy when they see it so our cost for that is actually lower usually about 25 uh but those have a huge multiplier effect to them so uh that we're focusing a lot more of our time and effort kind of in that direction yeah so on on the 35 cac and a 62 rpu your payback period right now is what less than three months uh yeah yep on most cases yeah i mean i mean really it's kind of about a month month and a half yeah um makes a lot of sense what about churn what's your turn today yeah it's very low so uh i think over the last three months we've seen it it was like .05 or six percent uh very very low churn for us because when somebody comes to us they they buy a number of tools on our platform right so michael sorry what does that mean or sorry matthew what does that mean .06 gross logo revenue monthly annual uh sure and that's clients so uh how many clients had actually turned off of our platform from a revenue standpoint i'd have to look exactly at the numbers uh to see what that actually churn is i don't have it on top of my my head because we've been growing so fast that it just hasn't been something i've been focusing too heavily on and just to be clear though so that's 0.06 percent logo churn per month and is that gross or net uh that would be net okay so you're adding back new customers that month oh absolutely yeah got it got it got it yeah so so yeah that obviously what is the gross number do you know um i'd have to look it up so i'd say in the last month we've probably lost maybe one client so it's it's just been incredibly well um so are you priced too cheap uh i don't think so um i think there might be opportunities in the future for us to increase but we want to also keep it in line with market right so most of the tools on our platform uh are against city and right at or maybe just under the actual cost of our our actual partner or their direct competitors so we want to make sure we keep it at that level uh but the nice thing for us is our overhead is incredibly low so i actually don't have to spend a lot to keep that that revenue generation you know coming in well yeah it's fascinating to me though i mean most companies that have an rpo of 62 bucks so you're catering to an smb space right at that price point you know it's very very difficult to get churned like under like two percent gross soco churn per month so i haven't heard you say anything where i'm like oh that's genius that's why his is so low i mean why have have you been able to get it so so low i mean mo small businesses go out of business right what you have no control over which usually puts churning at least two percent per month why is you're so low yeah i think one of the big things for us is again a lot of our clients come from actual like marketing agencies or they're coming from uh from consultancies that have built those relationships over a number of years so that's that's really helping kind of protect us and hedge us from a lot of that churn but i think a lot of it too is just the even the direct clients they come in and our tools are helping them grow our tools are actually helping them we're seeing you know because they're actually using technology in a way they should be and they're being more effective and productive with their their means we're seeing their revenue start to increase we're seeing their uh their clicks to their to their website start to go up we're actually just seeing productivity that they're really enjoying uh not only that but again when you have a customer that is purchasing now four or five tools on a platform it's not something that they're just going to kind of throw off pretty fast so we're not well it's not about that though right it's about things you have no control over like their credit card expires like they go out of business typically that's going to give you at least two or three percent churn you have figured a way to be way below that and i don't understand why yeah i mean the one we had in this last month they went out of business so that's like that is the the one fear that we're having i mean we have credit cards that don't go through but we have a you know we use a great system that helps us keep up on that pretty easily and we typically can bring that money back within a couple i think also you're kind of there's a shield here right in that you sign up the agency and if the agency signs up 30 clients right if they churn two clients in a month you see no churn because you still own that relationship with the agency is that accurate yeah yeah but even with each agency we're still not seeing a lot of churn per actual uh agency itself maybe we're just working with good agencies agencies don't see typically high churn rates smbs do what you're doing is you're selling directly to the agency so the agencies are seeing the churn they still pay you you don't see any of that so you there still is potentially high churn in the smb space you're just shielded from that because you're selling to a different market yeah that could be a big part of it uh i'm gonna have to look exactly the numbers yeah from our department to see what that's like yeah that would show itself in revenue churn right is if they're losing customers they pay you a little less but they don't actually churn the logo which keeps your logo turn really low um okay cool let's um let me uh let me just jump in here make sure i got um these are their questions down yeah so the growth right so you raise a million if you go out and raise a million bucks do you have any idea what you want to target in terms of valuation yeah so that's that's always the big question right i think that right now we could be worth four to five million uh so i would say we'll put i want to put a pre uh pre-raise at about four million and then have a five million uh all in once the the money is into the account yep yep four million pre-money raise a million five million post money valuation uh it'll be interesting to see and have you actually started that process we have yeah so we uh and it's we're i mean we're pretty preliminary and kind of our raise uh structure but we're set in the meetings now and people have been very excited about what we're doing so uh it's been good that's good we're in a good place that's good matthew all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh that's uh i'd have to kind of i like john woodman's book you know john woodman uh what is the book called he's the owner of content launch what's the last name pronunciation like spell it w-u-e-b-b-e-n good okay good we'll write down john rubin book uh number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um probably right now i would have to say just because he's kind of in my space and he knows what he's doing um the the ceo of salesforce uh mark benioff yeah mark vignette number three number one number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business i would say probably the social media tool on the platform it just works and it gives me the insight i need for not only my competitors but what we're doing sorry name one that is not something that you own like a productivity tool you use to build the business um let's say asana because we're doing a lot of engineering right now number four how many hours of sleep to get every night uh i try to get at least seven to be honest i i have a hard time if i don't get the hours in and which situation married single kiddos married no kids okay and how old are you 34 34. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew oh man um be uh be more positive about what's going on i think i was hard on myself for a while so you know things things will go white right if you uh if you put yourself in a positive mental state guys be more positive keybot launched in 2015 currently raising a million bucks at ideally a four million dollar evaluation helping over 2000 agencies service smb clients ranging from email marketing tools to e-commerce tools to social media marketing tools along with four or five others as they scale all through kind of this white label model which is working well they're doing about 62 dollars in our poo per user per month so it's 2 000 times 62 about 120 grand per month in revenue that's up significantly over a year ago in june 2017 where they did about four grand in that month so again healthy growth now we're multiplying small numbers but still healthy growth right less than one percent gross low co churn per month 35 cac two month payback period team of nine based between san francisco and phoenix matthew thank you for taking us to the top all right thanks so much appreciate it