How Rapidvisa CEO Ben Ives grew to $4.8M revenue and 800 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is ben ives uh he founded a company called rapidvisa and here's the reasoning he used the gi bill to earn his computer science degree after his time in the u.s air force and then when he decided to marry his wife uh jocelyn from the philippines he was shocked to discover that there was no online service that simplified the fiance visa process now after doing it manually he realized he could solve this problem for a lot of people today rapidvisa has multiple offices over 50 employees has successfully helped over 49 000 families from 188 countries reunite in the u.s ben you ready to take us to the top i'm ready all right so this thing sounds like it's growing fast is it i mean is it software or is this more like a consulting fee to get the visas approved well it's a little about the software that people use similar to online it prepares the documents is a big support component too we found people always have a lot of questions so we've got seven day a week support to handle that aspect of it okay i mean by support i mean not with the software but more consulting yeah i was gonna say so how do you actually grow the business like predictably because once people use you to get the visa i assume they stop paying so it's hard for you to stack revenues predictably is that right yeah absolutely that is the challenge we have to do a tremendous amount of advertising our advertising spend it it would probably be shocking to to what is it uh because we're constantly having to find new customers but uh well we we do about eighty thousand a month okay good and where's that across linkedin facebook twitter yeah well facebook google being you know in a lot of smaller places uh some some specialty forums and so on and then what do you i mean obviously the economics have to work right so what is the average customer going to pay you right per month to use this technology to get the visas approved about about five hundred dollars okay and there are government fees but that's that's our fee that's one time to get approved or they pay that every month as they're going through your process one time it's a flat rate no matter how many times they call and so on that's nice i mean so how do you i mean obviously you build your economics so you know what it costs you to get one of those new customers how aggressive are you being on fully weighted cat is it like 100 bucks to get a 500 customer or more yeah obviously it varies with the platform but on average it's just just a little south of 100 bucks and there is there is for whatever reason some seasonal variation uh but that's about where it's at yeah so when you talk to your friends your wife especially when you talk about the business do you would you describe yourself as like a recurring sas company or no you're more like a you look more like a consulting agency to get visas yeah we're really a bit of a hybrid you know our goal when we started out was to be software as a service and really we wanted to be to be it to other consultants or lawyers but uh the market took us into retail and that's where we've been successful so um so yeah we we started out thinking we would just be assessed really as fast service but it's evolved into the point where really two thirds of our employees are dealing with customers or yeah now you mentioned you did if you've helped over 49 000 families go through this process help me understand just give me a snapshot last month how many did you help get through last month about 800 or so okay outlooking that's great i mean so can i take 800 times 500 a pop i mean that would mean that was like 400 grand last month in revenue yeah that sounds about right and and and we have so we do have we we do have a few little add-on services where people can you know purchase some extra support or whatever but or if they need a joint sponsor there's additional fee for that but but that's still the average ticket is still around 500 bucks okay i mean that would put you know again 800 a month on average at 500 bucks a pop i mean that puts you somewhere like a four or five million dollar your kind of business is that about what you'll do this year you think yeah that's right you know on the revenue side it always looks a little higher because uh we we're also collecting in many cases people are also paying us the filing fees so that's running through the company but that's you know obviously that's just kind of passed through money so we don't count it as is top-line revenue even though it would show up on the tax return for instance yeah when did you put this stuff on a timeline for me when did you launch the company what year 2009 2009 so you're growing you're spending money hundred dollars get a 500 a month customer adding 800 kind of new essentially per month in terms of visas actually delivered do people pay you only if it's successful or they pay you even to start the process they pay us to start the process but we do have a money-back guarantee i see you know right so but most people are successful i mean even the government's own statistics nothing to do with us just their statistics show that across most of the visa types that we handle the family visas the approval rate is somewhere around 90 anyway just nationwide so um it's not incredibly difficult to get approved and did you build this from scratch did you bootstrap the company or decide to raise i built it from scratch i mean literally even uh even the html pages were just hard-coded pages in the in the beginning so uh yeah it was just something i was doing at home in my spare time so ben even to date you haven't raised any capital oh no no we've never raised any capital and we actually have no debt even our building we paid cash for we've been conservative and we've kind of traded fast growth for more stability just because i see it as kind of a volatile market to be in immigration with the you know we've been hearing for the entire decade we've been in business we've been here where there's going to be immigration reform and things are going to change and so we've taken a cautious approach you know we've been approached many times about about funding you know so far we just haven't felt like it was right what's your team size today we have 59 people uh today right now and what's kind of the split are engineers marketers sales people well there's a yeah it's about of the 59 you get about 40 people involved in uh direct customer support type work or what we would call and then the rest uh would be you know marketing management engineers i see and then you know driving the business growth right where are you getting these new customers is it all this paid spend you've articulated or any organic channels well we we do pretty well organically just in the search engines but uh it is all online now there's of course there's some word of mouth sales but i would say that accounts for maybe only five percent it's a small number so what organic words do you rank for that drive you a lot of traffic well fiance visa spousal visa you know uh and a lot of long tail words like you know how do i bring my wife to america things like that i love that okay so you rank for these words that's driving growth now you're doing about 800 approved per month right now what were you doing a year ago do you remember i was in uh seemed like we were in the mid 600s or so a year ago there is some seasonal volatility for whatever reason i think we did well over 900 back in february uh so so it does bounce around okay what i'm trying to get a sense of um is year-over-year revenue growth so it sounds like last year you did something like three or four million and this year you'll do more like five or six million is that accurate yeah we've been running uh it really over it's been fairly steady between 20 and 30 percent in over the course of the business really and and uh that's pretty constant again and that's us taking a conservative approach to things yeah what you know with having so many people right attached to a 500 sale are your do your margins take a hit what's your margin per 500 sale [Music] well the margin um [Music] you know around 20 percent it's really a moderate a pretty moderate margin in the kind of legal services industry it's uh you know it's a business where you don't get to coast much it's a it's a lot of work and a lot of people and a lot of movement parts uh to make a modest what i would call a modest margin but uh we like the price point we haven't raised our prices in i guess it's been over five years certainly over four years uh there's probably room to raise prices a little but again we uh we try to stay and so obviously you're building this bootstrap you control it it's a great story i mean if someone came in and offered you five million dollars to buy the entire company all cash up front would you sell the company uh probably not for five but they're you know as with most people there's probably a number out there somewhere i'm not shopping it and i love what i'm doing but but obviously there is a point where where it would be crazy not to i suppose what's the crazy number the number when you go until jocelyn that you turned it down she'd kill you uh you know it's probably more like 15 [Laughter] which which you know which is not probably real far off on in valuation uh but uh yeah i would probably have to be around there yeah very good let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book favorite business book well uh good to great uh always sticks with me it seems like i'm always quoting that one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying well like everybody else i i watch bezos real close uh you know it's hard not to admire what that guy's done number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company for building the company well i i have to say it's been it's been google advertising number four how many hours you sleep to get every night i try to get eight uh i probably usually end up around seven and situation obviously married any kids six kids six kiddos holy mackerel you're busy how old are you 56 56 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew huh my 20 year old self was in the military i probably would have gone to college and then the military i did enjoy the military but it would have been better as an officer guys there you have it rapidvisa helping fiances bring in their spouse