How RevGenius Turned a Free Slack Community Into a Bootstrapped Sponsorship Business (Interview with Founder Jared Robin)

Introduction and Background on RevGenius

Nathan Latka

00:00What is going on, guys? My guest today is Jared 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 fifteen year sales veteran that's and he started the business back at the beginning of the pandemic, bringing it to now over 15,000 sales, marketing, and rev ops pros in just under a year time based in Brooklyn, New York. Jared, you ready to take us to

00:21top?

Jared Robin

00:22>> Let's do this, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

00:25This is impressive. You've done all this over the past eighteen months,

Jared Robin

00:31>> Yeah. Yeah. Maybe even less. More like geez. Last June is when we registered the Slack, 06/02/2020. It was just Gail and myself, but I was going out of full time without a job, so no money coming in from the beginning. Typical entrepreneur Well,

Nathan Latka

00:50but that's the start. So your start was not a website, it was not a Facebook group, it was you registered a Slack community.

How the Community Started on LinkedIn and Slack

Jared Robin

00:58>> Yeah. I mean, if you wanna really go to the start of it, it was a chat on LinkedIn that broke 38 of the first members of RevGenius'LinkedIn every day, multiple times per day until they said, Jared, can you bring us to Slack? Jared and Gail, can you bring us to Slack? We're like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. We just need twenty four hours. I know it takes fifteen minutes to register for Slack, but we need, like, terms

01:24>> and conditions and rules and stuff because this is gonna get crazy. So I took I took the night to write that up or borrow them from somewhere. I forget where, but you get the idea.

Nathan Latka

01:35What is the product today? Is it a free Slack group?

Business Model: Free Community, Sponsorship Revenue

Jared Robin

01:38>> Free Slack group. The business model is sponsorships.

Nathan Latka

01:43Okay. Mean, get me in your head a little bit. The last sponsor paid you, how much and what are they paying for?

Sponsor Pricing and Sponsorship Structure

Jared Robin

01:51>> Yeah. So the typical sponsor pays anywhere from

01:58>> $9,000 a quarter to $100,000 plus a year, depending on the amount of programming as well as exclusivity, etcetera, right? Like category exclusivity

02:12>> or something to that effect. And they're paying for events, access to our community, and

Quarterly Sponsorship Model and Community Trust

Jared Robin

02:21>> access to the Slack. 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, our thought process is when we do it by the quarter, it builds more trust with our community. Like, we're not just having 300 sponsors with 300 events and just and doing that. And it also allows us to

02:50>> see what we could do with our Slack group, see what kind of engagement we can get outside the events. Because we're talking right now, if you're talking about rad product A, B, or C, 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

03:13>> a 100 people. Here's 200 people. Here are your leads. Email your leads. Not saying that we don't do that, but having, like, a couple events over a quarter or or more allows the intertwining in the community a bit more and and, you know, more, you know, putting it out there that we're partnered with SaaS company, a b or c.

Tech Stack: Onboarding, Email, and Events

Nathan Latka

03:35So, Jared, just to jump in, mean, you have tons of partners just on your homepage, Gong, you know, Sin Cara, Livestorm, etcetera. You also do great things, like, with your shop and swag. Right? So, like, who do you use for these RevGenius stickers and the hats and the shirts?

Jared Robin

03:47>> Who who do do we use for it? Yeah. Right now, we use right now, we use Printful for it, if you're familiar. Have a nice integration.

Nathan Latka

03:55Super Print print Printful has been on the show. They're doing over a 100,000,000 a year in revenue. 75,000,000 is ecommerce. They have SaaS plan on the back end as well, so go check them out. But that's Printful. Now you're onboarding for the community is you click a button, goes to an Airtable form, and then I I assume it goes right into the Slack. Is that is that the flow at most everything happens in Slack?

Jared Robin

04:13>> Yeah. So so that's the flow. It also gets onboarded to an email sequence to help you there. We we have Typeform and Airtable. You know, it's funny that you said the Airtable because we're we're going all to Typeform just to Why is that? Uniform. Little better experience. That's all. I mean, from a Zapier integration standpoint, you know, our from from a back end standpoint, we have, like, Airtable is our lightweight database. We have Google, you know,

04:38>> if you wanna go there, query, you know, is bigger, and then that goes into HubSpot and all that. But Typeform is just fluid. It's easy to use,

Live Events: Livestorm vs Zoom vs Luma

Nathan Latka

04:49and it's an easy experience. Jared, a lot of people's events, the rigor 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. Don't want to mass email your whole list every single day or sometimes you have July 29, 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

05:08using, it looks like, a tool called l u dot m a to manage the events. How do you decide who to invite and manage this attendance rate?

Jared Robin

05:14>> Yeah. And then we also use Livestorm to manage the event. So so there's two different things. Like, the sponsored events are on Livestorm. Luma is an aggregator. L u dot m a is Luma. It's an aggregator for Zoom events and things to that effect. And we use ActiveCampaign segmentation in there to to help target the right audiences at the right time.

05:37>> Yeah. And and we post in our social networks and, you know, mess Why do

Nathan Latka

05:41you use why do you use Livestorm for the sponsored and Luma for the Zoom events?

Jared Robin

05:47>> Because so so it's really more like Livestorm 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 and it's a super clean landing page there. And ironically, like, in in some events, we need Zoom. So two main things. When we use Zoom, it's like a round table. You can have ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five, and you all

06:19>> are speakers there, and that's a certain purpose. Now, Livestorm tends to be more of a presenter type model where it's q and a on the right side, ask questions, share things, etcetera, like that. So it's it's more geared for a presentation, live storm, whereas Zoom, at least our viewpoint, is more geared for a conversation. So that's that that's how we differentiate.

Nathan Latka

06:45Interesting. And just to be clear, like, if I register for this July 28 event, which is which is, you know, today, revenue jobs at 6PM eastern with Holly, Madison, Chris, and you, and I opt in on the Luma landing page for this, will Luma take care of the auto reminders like, hey, we're starting in five minutes, or do you have to write all those custom yourself?

Jared Robin

07:03>> So they 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. Cool story about Luma, they turned down Y Combinator. Little quick story. They just raised $3,000,000 on their own. So they're coming up. They're also building a community feature functionality, surprise, surprise, and awesome solopreneurs like Justin Welsh or Ariana using it.

07:33>> So super cool. And they're and and and, man, you know, we've explored everything as you can imagine. So we've thought that way as well, and we're opting in a different evolution. But Luma is great. It's great and it's growing.

Nathan Latka

07:47Yeah. This is I'm trying to build there's people listening right now that wanna build their own communities that already have a SaaS business, so I'm trying to reverse engineer your tech stack. So Luma for events, Livestorm if it's like a presenter style event, Zoom if it's like a roundtable style event. Who are you using for your job board?

Jared Robin

08:01>> Yeah. So for job board, we we use job board fire. Okay. So job board fire, they came onto our radar because Makerpad was using them. Makerpad since it's turned away, another awesome one, if you wanna talk reverse engineering is palette. Xyz. The difference is jobs.revgenius.com. I have job board fire. I can't do that with Palette. So I you know, we can we get

Nathan Latka

08:26You can't do a subdomain.

Jared Robin

08:27>> Right. And and one of the benefits of job board fire, and I'm I'm giving an awesome plug to an awesome founder, why not, is it it it indexes really well on Google. We get some nice job traffic from Google. Like, if you Google RevGenius or or one of the jobs in particular, it's it it it comes up, like, really clean, like a Google jobs thing.

Nathan Latka

08:53Interesting. Yeah. So, like, for example, one of your listings, it's a BDR manager at Elite Gaming Live. Like, if I was in the market and I searched on Google BDR manager at gaming company, your results are gonna come up high and nicely. They're doing the indexing for you, the question schema for Google search.

Jared Robin

09:09>> It it it comes up better than anything we built ourselves. And we tried to build it on Webflow, and we did. We we we we took a 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 it worked well. We opted for this because it was out of the box, we also didn't wanna maintain it. Right? We're

09:36>> a team of four. We were able to build it, and they were like, Oh, geez, maintaining it might be a little bit of a So, yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:44Yeah, this makes a lot of sense.

Jared Robin

09:45>> Okay, this is really helpful.

Nathan Latka

09:46Talk to me just about the economics of the business. You started this again from your Brooklyn, like basically spot, right? Like a year and How a half many people are now full time on the team?

Team Size, Bootstrapping, and Economics

Jared Robin

09:55>> Yes, we have four full time. So I started this from my East Village spot since moved in with my girlfriend in Brooklyn. I am in a coworking space now in Brooklyn, moving on up the world. Four people team, bootstrapped.

10:12>> We're making livable wages. It's it's still startup. But

Nathan Latka

10:17Wait, Jared. Give me the number there. I'm curious. I mean, in 2020, a a tough year for everyone. You probably had a lot of partners. How much revenue do you guys do total in the year?

Jared Robin

10:25>> So we're we're projecting this year to be at $500,000.

Nathan Latka

10:29And what'd you do last year?

Jared Robin

10:30>> Sponsor revenue. Oh, we just started last year. So I I think the number is, like, 80 to $100, something like that.

Nathan Latka

10:37But, dude, the first year for community, that's a big that's a big deal. I mean, congratulations.

Jared Robin

10:42>> We only took money the last quarter of last year. The last half maybe, but, like, the last three months were, like, when we were consciously taking money. What I think about that is, like, others are, oh, we could do this and that and wait, okay.

Nathan Latka

10:56Just and just to be clear, the $500k this year, that's mainly from sponsors. It's free for members.

Jared Robin

11:00>> Yep.

Job Board, Newsletter, and Additional Revenue Lines

Jared Robin

11:01>> Yep. It's free for members. We we have we have nominal job board charges. If you wanna have a promoted event I'm sorry. Promoted job, we charge a $100 for thirty days. We charge a thousand dollars for a newsletter feature, for instance, for thirty days as well. You know,

Nathan Latka

11:18And how many how many clicks would that like, I get all your emails. Your one two days ago, it's like, hey. About anything or rev ops for the win or anyone can learn marketing. So this how much how many emails how does this go out to how many people?

Jared Robin

11:31>> It goes out to our membership and then some. Like, geez, we we we we probably have 12 to 15,000 email subscribers. Obviously, there's some unsubscribers in there.

Nathan Latka

11:43And and how many will show up like you market in this particular email? Like, 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 13. How many people showed up for that round table?

Jared Robin

11:55>> Yeah. We typically get around 200 people for for the events like like one fifty to 200. We're, you know, We're thinking about,

12:07>> in the beginning we're like, Oh, numbers are everything. It sounds great.

Nathan Latka

12:11Not always.

Jared Robin

12:12>> No, we're gonna be focusing from a metric standpoint, making sure we have an ICP metric. With that, sure, there's a numbers, like mass numbers, but also what percentage are in the ICP? Like, how can we help the sponsors really target their potential users? How many sponsors will

Sponsor Count and ICP Metrics

Nathan Latka

12:31pay you at least a dollar this year?

12:33Would you say, like a ten, twenty, fifty, hundred? Many How sponsor will pay at least a dollar?

Jared Robin

12:39>> 20 plus. Like 20.

12:41>> 20 to 40. But, you know, we that that's that's the difficult finesse. Like, We wanna work with a lot of people, but we also wanna be conscious and finesse, not have 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 versus like an advertising model where you can do programmatic and and do all that, but in time in

Nathan Latka

13:13>> time.

13:13Jared, last question. There was a big bidding war for Max Altschuler and Sales Hacker back between Kyle Porter at SalesLoft, many of did not outreach back when that happened. Obviously, many and outreach ended up winning and that's who acquired them. I imagine like, look, Henry just acquired Chorus, right? Gong is One of them is going to make a community play eventually, and you're going to be the one they approach to acquire. How do you

Acquisition Potential and Long-Term Vision

Nathan Latka

13:35think about that?

Jared Robin

13:38>> I'm blessed. I'm excited.

13:41>> I'm happy. And I think that we have a massive opportunity still ahead of us to execute on. So I'm It

Nathan Latka

13:50was so such a good answer. You you have planned the shit out of that answer. That was so smooth.

Jared Robin

13:55>> Like like, I I

13:58>> I'm a founder, man. IPO is the goal. No matter how stupid that sounds, that's where we're going. And when you're doing a TAM audience, just Google sales, Google, LinkedIn sales, you have 60,000,000 people. Ugh, like Yeah. It it's so big. We have to heads down and go for it and and and appreciative of the opportunities that come along the way.

Nathan Latka

14:24What would you value the business at today?

Self-Valuation at $10M

Jared Robin

14:26>> $10,000,000.

Nathan Latka

14:27And and that was quick. You thought of that. Why is it the right number?

Jared Robin

14:30>> That's you know, let's look at other communities in the space. You just see Pavilion did a great job raising 25,000,000. I don't know what the valuation was. You could take some educated guesses there, revenue, all of that. That's not for me to to decide on. But

14:51>> 15,000 members, they're at five, six. You see other communities at different numbers, and that plus TAM, plus revenue that we have, plus our projected next year or or, you know, where where I've arrived at that. Like, I'm pragmatic, I also realize

15:20>> there's a little bit of a speculation with that. Right?

15:22>> Of course. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

15:23Well, hey, look. This is all good stuff, man. Let's wrap up here with the fact that, actually, real quick, podcast. How many downloads each episode getting in the first six weeks of five usually?

Jared Robin

15:32>> We tabled the podcast going out 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

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Personal Life

Nathan Latka

15:39Makes sense. Yeah. Let's wrap up with the famous five favorite book.

Jared Robin

15:44>> Oh my gosh. The Presence Process by Michael Brown.

Nathan Latka

15:47Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Jared Robin

15:52>> I love Courtland of Indie Hackers. He's awesome.

Nathan Latka

15:56Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building RevGenius besides the ones you already mentioned?

Jared Robin

16:02>> Makerpad's been inspirational, but I didn't really use it to build it. Favorite tool for building

16:11>> I'm gonna say I'm gonna still say Makerpad or Indie Hackers just from an inspiration standpoint.

Nathan Latka

16:16Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Jared Robin

16:20>> Believe it or not, probably six.

Nathan Latka

16:22Okay. That's good.

Jared Robin

16:23>> And situation, married, single, kiddos?

16:26>> Girlfriend.

Nathan Latka

16:27Okay. So no kids. And how old are you?

Jared Robin

16:30>> 38.

Nathan Latka

16:3138, Jared. Last question. What do wish you knew when you were 20?

Jared Robin

16:36>> Oh my gosh. 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.

Nathan Latka

16:48Guys, mark my words, RevGenius will sell for a very large number in the next two years. Jared doesn't know it yet, but like Henry at ZoomInfo and like Amit from Gong and Pete like hell to take or Kyle from SalesLoft. 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 boards, building great events every single day.

17:12We will see what happens next. Jared, thanks for taking us to the top.

Jared Robin

17:16>> Thank you. Thank you for your time.

Nathan Latka

17:19One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, 1PM

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