How Revgenius CEO Jared Robin grew to $4.7M revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

what is going on guys my guest today is jared or robin if you haven't heard of this guy you will he's building a very cool community for revenue professionals called revgenius.com he's a 15-year sales veteran that's and he started the business back in the beginning of the pandemic bringing it to now over 15 000 sales marketing and rev ups pros in just under a year time based in brooklyn new york chair you ready to take to the top let's do this this is impressive you've done all this over the past 18 months huh yeah yeah maybe even less more like uh geez last june is when we registered the slack june 2nd uh 2020 and uh it was just galen myself but i i was going at a full time without a job so no no money coming in from the beginning typical entrepreneur story well but that's the start so your start was not a website it was not a facebook group it was you registered a slack community yeah i mean if you want to really go to the start of it it was a chat on linkedin that broke 38 of the first members of rev geniuses linkedin every day multiple times per day until they said jared can you bring us to slack jared and galen can you bring us a slack we're like okay yeah yeah we just need 24 hours i know it takes 15 minutes to register for slack but we need like terms and conditions and rules and stuff because this is gonna get crazy so i took uh i took the night to write that up or or borrow them from somewhere i forget where but you get the idea so what is the product today is it a free slack group free slack group uh the business model is sponsorships okay i mean give me in your head a little bit how do they sell you the last sponsor paid you how much and what are they paying for yeah so so the the typical sponsor pays anywhere from um 9k a quarter to 100k plus a year depending on the amount of programming um as well as exclusivity etc right like category exclusivity or uh or or you know something to that effect and they're paying for events access to our community and you know access to the slack you know the thought process is there's other communities out there there's some great communities and the sponsorship model isn't new and typically they were aligned with events and they still are and we're doing that too but also you know our thought process is when we when we do it by the quarter it builds more trust with our community like we're not just you know having 300 sponsors with 300 events and just and doing that like and it also allows us to see what we can do with our slack group you know see what kind of engagement we can get outside the events because we're talking right now like you know if you're talking about rad product a b or c uh you don't need to go to an event to get an sql right you don't need to go to an event to get something like that so like you know typically and traditionally it's very cut and dry like hey you have an event here's 100 people here's 200 people um here are your leads email your leads not saying that we don't do that but having like a couple events over a quarter um or or more allows the intertwining in the community a bit more and and you know more um you know putting it out there that we're partnered with saskatchewan so jared just to jump in i mean you have tons of partnerships on your homepage gong you know cincari livestorm etc you also do great things like with your shop and swag right so like who do you use with these red genius stickers and the hats and the shirts who who do we use for it uh yeah right now we use right now we use printful for it if you're familiar they haven't been for the integration has been on the show they're doing over 100 million dollars a year in revenue uh 75 million is e-commerce so they have a sas play on the back end as well so go check them out but that's printful now your onboarding for the community is you click a button goes to an air table form and then i assume it goes right into the slack is that is that the flow at most everything happens in slack yeah so so that's the flow it also gets uh onboard into an email sequence uh to help you there uh we we have typeform and airtable you know it's funny that you said uh the air table because we're going all to type form just to why is it on uniform a little better experience that's all i mean from a zapier integration standpoint you know i from from a back-end standpoint we have like air tables our lightweight database we have google you know if you want to go there uh query um you know it's bigger and then that goes into hubspot and all that but uh type is just fluid it's easy to use and it's easy tell me jared a lot of people's events the reor with communities where they struggle are things like live events because it's a lot of work to schedule the guests schedule them get your audience there you don't want to mass email your whole list every single day or sometimes you have july 29th i see three events you can't market all three events with three emails to the same list each day you get unsubscribed so you're using it looks like a tool called lu.ma to manage the events how do you decide who to invite and manage this attendance rate yeah and we also use livestorm uh to manage the events so there's two different things like the sponsored events are on live storm uh luma is an aggregator lu.ma is a luma it's an aggregator for zoom events and things to that effect and we use active campaign and segmentation in there to help target the right audiences at the right time um yeah and we post in our social networks and you know why do you use why do you use live storm for the sponsored and luma for the zoom events because so it's really more like live stream versus zoom and the reason why is it's a cleaner ui it integrates better with all of our systems you know zapier integrations with everything we have a yeah and it's a super clean landing page there and ironically like in some events we need zoom so two main things when we use zoom it's like a round table you can have 10 15 20 25 and you all are speakers there and that's a certain purpose now live storm tends to be more of a presenter type model where it's q a on the right side ask questions share things etc like that so it's it's more geared for a presentation live storm where zoom at least our viewpoint is more geared for a conversation so that's that that's how we differentiate interesting and just to be clear like if i register for this july 28 event which is which is you know today revenue jobs at 6 pm eastern with holly madison chris and you um and i opt in on the luma landing page for this will luma take care of like the auto reminders like hey we're starting in five minutes or do you have to write all those custom yourself so they have a default one so they'll send an auto email what's cool about luma as well is you could put a clubhouse link and have a scheduling platform for that so that's what's really cool uh cool story about luma they turned down y combinator a little quick story uh they just raised three million dollars on their own so they're they're coming up they're also building a community feature functionality surprise surprise and awesome solopreneurs like justin welsh are already on it using it so super cool um and they're and man you know we've explored everything as you can imagine so we've thought that way as well and we're opting a different evolution but luma is great it's great and it's growing yeah this is i'm trying to build there's people listening right now they want to build their own communities that already have a sas business and so i'm trying to reverse engineer your tech stack so luma for events uh live stream if it's like a presenter style event zoom if it's like a round table style event who are you using for your job board yeah so for job board we um we use job board fire so job board fire they came onto our radar because makerpad was using a maker pad since it's turned away another awesome one if you want to talk reverse engineering is palette dot xyz uh the difference is jobs.revgenius.com i have job board fire i can't do that with pallet so i you know we can and one of the benefits of job board fire and i'm giving an awesome plug to uh an awesome founder why not is it it uh it indexes really well on google we get some nice job traffic from google like if you google rev genius or one of the jobs in particular it's it it comes up like really clean like a google jobs thing interesting yeah so like for example one of your listings it's a bdr manager at elite gaming live so like if i was in the market and i searched on google bdr manager a gaming company your results going to come up high and nicely they're doing the indexing for you the question schema for google search it it comes up better than uh anything we built ourselves and we tried to build it on webflow and we did we we we took a model somebody else did we got a quick and easy developer on webflow to build it we connected it with typeform to enter jobs stripe to get payments and uh and it worked well uh we opted for this because it's out of the box and we also didn't want to maintain it right we're a team of four like we were able to build it and we're like oh geez uh maintaining it might be a little bit of a hassle so yeah yeah this makes a lot of sense okay this is really helpful talk to me just about the economics of the business you started this again from your brooklyn like basically spot right like a year and a half ago how many people are now full-time on the team yes we have four full-time so uh i started this from my east village spot since moved in with my girlfriend uh in brooklyn i am in a co-working space now in brooklyn moving on up the world four people team bootstrapped um you know we're making we're making livable wages it's it's still startup but wait jared give me the number there i'm curious i mean in 2020 a tough year for everyone you probably had a lot of partners how much revenue did you guys do total in the year so we're projecting uh this year to be at half a million dollars we just started last year so um i think the number is like 80 to 100 grand something like that but dude the first year for a community that's a big that's a big deal i mean congratulations we only took money the last quarter of last year uh the last half maybe but like the last three months were like when we were consciously taking money and what i mean by that is like others are like oh you do this and that and uh like okay and just to be clear the 500 grand this year that's mainly from sponsors it's free for members yep it's free for members uh we we have we have nominal uh job board charges if you want to have a promoted event uh i'm sorry promote a job we charge 100 bucks for 30 days uh we charge a thousand dollars uh for a newsletter feature for instance for 30 days as well you know how many how many clicks would that like i get all your emails like your one two days ago it's like aoa ask up to anything or rev ups for the win or everyone can learn marketing so this how much how many emails how does this go out to how many people uh it goes out to our membership and then some so like um geez we we probably have 12 to 15 000 um email subscribers obviously there's some unsubscribers in there and how many will show up like you market in this particular email let's see what are you marketing here at the top you're marketing at the top a round table marketing for everyone which happened on july 13th how many people showed up for that round table yeah we typically get around 200 people um for the events like like 150 to 200 um we're you know we're thinking about you know in the beginning we're like oh numbers are everything and and it sounds great not always no we're going to be focusing in in you know from a metric standpoint making sure we have an icp metric like with that sure there's a numbers like mass numbers but also what percentage are in the icp yeah like how can we help the sponsors really target um their potential users and how many spencers will pay you a dollar at least a dollar this year would you say like a 10 20 50 100 how many sponsors at least a dollar uh 20 plus so like um 20 to 40. uh but but you know we that that's that's the difficult finesse like we want to work with a lot of people but we also want to be conscious um and finesse not have like two competing companies working at the same time as often as possible there's some finesses around that so there are some limitations you know being a sponsor driven model first like an advertising model where you can do programmatic and do all that uh but in time in time jared last question there's a big bidding war for max altucher and the sales hacker community back between kyle porter at sales often manny madina had outreach back when that happened obviously manny and outreach enough winning and that that's who acquired them i imagine like look henry just acquired chorus right uh gong is probably you know one of them is gonna make a community play eventually and you're going to be the one they approach to acquire how do you think about that i'm i'm blessed i'm excited um i'm i'm happy and i think that we have a massive opportunity still ahead of us to execute on so such a good answer you have planned the out of that answer that was so smooth like like as i i i'm a founder man ipo is the goal like no matter how stupid that sounds like that's where we're going and uh and and when you're doing a tam audience just google sales google linkedin sales you have 60 million people like uh like yeah it's so big we have to heads down and go for it and um and and appreciative of the opportunities that come along the way what would you value the business on today 10 million dollars and that was quick you thought of that why is it the right number that's um you know let's look at other other communities in the space you just see uh pavilion did a great job raising 25 million i don't know what the valuation was you could take some educated guesses there revenue all of that um that's not for me to to decide on but fifteen thousand members they're at five six um you see other communities at different numbers and um that plus tam plus revenue that we have plus um are projected next year or you know where i've arrived at that like i'm pragmatic but i also realize um you know there's a little bit of a speculation with that right of course yeah well hey look this is all good stuff man let's wrap up here with the actually real quick podcast how many dollars each episode getting in the first six weeks at five usually we we put table the podcast going out uh because we're just focusing on other things right now so i i don't have those off the top of my head that's not makes sense let's wrap up with the famous five favorite book uh oh my gosh the presence process by michael brown number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i love uh cortland of indie hackers he's awesome number three what's your favorite online tool for building rev genius besides the ones you already mentioned maker pad's been inspirational but i didn't really use it to build it um favorite tool for building i'm gonna say i'm gonna still say maker pattern indie hackers just from an inspiration standpoint number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh believe it or not probably six okay that's good in situation married single kiddos uh girlfriend okay so no kids and how old are you 38 38 jared last question what are you wishing when you were 20. oh my gosh uh not to leave seamless web for fedex i was at seamless web before two acquisitions i left after three months because i hated cold calling and then ironically seven years later i got back into it but yeah guys mark my words rev genius will sell for a very large number in the next two years jared doesn't know it yet but like henry at zoom info and like a meat from gonderick and pete like hell to take or kyle from sales off we'll see what happens regardless though he's got his eyes on the prize he's building a great community working with 20 sponsors 15 000 rev-ops professionals in his community building job orbs building uh great events every single day we will see what happens next jared thanks for taking us to the top thank you thank you for your time one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little 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