How Qebot CEO Matthew White grew Qebot 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...