How Reply CEO Oleg Campbell grew Reply to $8.7M revenue and 1K customers in 2025.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he isent on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit so Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka this is episode 680 coming up tomorrow morning morning I talked to the person I had to dig this person up it's the person that Ty Lopez and Gary Boehner Chuck paid a lot of money for this person to help them grow their Instagram be sure to tune in tomorrow morning to see who it was and what his company is good morning everybody my guest this morning is O Campbell he was born in Ukraine and starting working as a programmer at the age of 19 he moved to Canada when he was 22 and founded his first startup at 24 successfully but stayed his lifestyle business with a lot of passive income we'll talk about that then at 27 he founded reply.io and he's currently living between Ukraine and San Francisco building this company Oleg are you ready to take us to the top hey hello Nan for sure awesome so first off a lot of entrepreneurs uh start off with a lifestyle business to make them money that's how they get their base to then take a bigger risk tell us about that company you started at 24 that turned into a lifestyle business and how did you know it was going to only be a lifestyle business oh yeah it's it's a good question I was a programmer and uh it turned out that I read a a book from Kawasaki um Rich that and Kawasaki Rich that poor that so that I was highly influenced by that book as well I read temp pries on 4 hours work week so I said hey I programmer I want to build some software that will work for me not like not I work in building software and um we found out that it's a lifestyle business once we failed to grow it so we made it to some point and then we the technology was built on top of QR codes so what you've seen the QR codes were popular in the year when we launched the product in 2012 but then it's got like on a descend so the same our sales is and we found we just don't have a way to expand it and where to go and where did what was like the highest revenue you grew that company to I think it was 150 K annually annually okay yeah and then what happened did you just let that kind of fizz out or did you sell it at 27 good question I don't want it to spend time and it's hard to spell sell a business that's isn't growing so I decided to just put it on autopilot I took this money and I invested in the new Venture so before and that new Venture was reply right yeah so before that give us a sense of kind of like the risk you were taking I mean how much money had you saved up was this really a big risk for you or did you actually really plan it out so you der risked it it's a good question so I in my life I almost never save any money so once I started saving money I thought why I'm saving why am I saving money do I need a house no not really do you need a fancy car not really so why I'm saving to investing in business what's the case of saving B money for the business why don't just invested now so and all the time when I was kind of my first startup I in I funded when while I was working full-time so full-time it's like working full-time is like um it's a great investment Source that's not going to end until you working full-time and with like reply probably I invested around like I just took my salary from my previous startup and just be it to my employees um using that and so how much did you put in personally would you say I think I think I think this was around like 20 to 30k probably 30k 30k and how did you find kind of did you build the initial prototype yourself or did you hire developer somewhere no I hir developer right away so two of us started so I hir developer to build a product and myself I started working on marketing in sales okay and so who where did you like how did you hire somebody were they in the US or Ukraine and what did you pay them on average at the beginning yeah good question so they were in Ukraine it's I had I find like developers super skilled with 10 plus years experience and it it costed me only $22,000 per year oh great oh per month per month sorry say per year holy mackerel no no no no per months so you said 2,000 per month and sorry you were looking for someone who is really good at stem is that what you said no no no no I was I was um no I find someone in Ukraine so he was a senior developer with 10 years experience oh I see so it's Ukraine I could get someone like like him for um $2,000 per month now have you ever met this guy or gal in person or you just found him online online I did a job post and and still since we're a remote team I haven't seen many of our full-time employees what what site did you post this job thing on like how did you find these guys yeah it's a good question since I'm from ukine and and all all the websites we have a developers portal in Ukraine there's nothing similar in us or Canada there is one website where all developers hang out wow so I just voted it there okay so let's focus on the business house so reply.io for people that don't know what it does what does it do and with your business model how do you make money yeah so at reply.io we uh we focus on replacing routine sales t with AI and automation right now we automating sending emails and sending and followups as well initiating phone calls that's what we do right now but ideally we I would say this email is just 10% of what's we do and what we want to do um look right now we have strong development team we're building much more feat to features to automate more and more sales task like like booking the meeting getting customer to the demo Etc so we are SAS business okay and uh we have months of subscriptions our plans start from $25 to like $120 per user what like what do folks pay on average would you say uh I would say close to $90 90 per month yeah yeah per months and then if you take us back so you what year did you launch this company in uh we launch in 2015 and then fast forward three years today what's your current team size um currently we at 34 people and 34 yeah okay and what's the split like are most of those sales people in San Francisco or developers in Ukraine or Yeah we actually have a just historically we have uh develop uh sales team in Canada is in Toronto so we have five sales reps over there and um develop development and marketing as well in Ukraine support is to people in Canada and uh I believe three people is in Ukraine uh so I would say um our development team is 15 people so I would say half of our company is in development and the other half is in marketing in sales and support and so if I I I'm doing backwards math here I mean you sound like you're getting a lot of advantage in having a UK or Ukraine based team especially if the average developer is only making kind of two grand per month right that you'd be way more expensive in San Francisco um has that math uh stayed true as you've added additional developers or or if you had to go up and pay more to get more Talent yeah so like that Z 2000 price was an Enterprise right so right now I would say we pay on average close to uh $4,000 per month for developer 4,000 yeah so it's more so we we try to hire like senior guys and like like get really top of Market people yeah I mean junior junior salaries could be much lower Junior could be $1,000 per month we hiring a few of those so I would say um Ukraine Ukraine is yeah it's my competitive Advantage is I have all the connections and I know how to hire and build team and there's a lot of great developers as well we hireing data scientist over there and some of them really good as well that's great and are you so so fast forward us to today again so you're 34 team uh Team folks on your team and how many customers are you serving so around th 1,000 customers right now okay so about a thousand so I mean uh can I just multiply thousand times the $90 RP to get like to kind of back into your monthly recurring Revenue yeah you could do that so I would in terms of number we just hit 100K uh monthly Revenue so yeah you're celebrating ALG right that's a big number that's a good number yeah yeah it's amazing so how do you imagine do doing $90,000 a month with 34 people on your team and let's say you're paying those 34 people across like on average three grand per month right that comes you know well over 100 Grand per month just there have you raised Capital to support yourself a good question we raised uh Capital uh a year ago we very small 400k seed okay and that's a funny story we never looked at for the finances we were was traing it but one of um kind of investors reach out to us and suggest to do this so basically we had investor and he has few portfolio companies that...