How Salesbolt CEO Craig Maxwell grew to $480K revenue and 80 customers in 2024.

guys sales bolt.com today is doing twenty thousand dollars a month in Revenue up from twelve thousand dollars a month just a year ago and 35 bucks a month a year before that caught in 2021. he's a one-man show with an army of contractors spends about five grand a month on formula Q it's a Dev shop based out of India then another one or two k on Fiverr Engineers he's got just a bunch of contractors building this thing he's about break even right now serving 80 customers helping him automatically enrich their HubSpot and Salesforce accounts with lead data again salesbault.com is go to market right now 90 of his leads are coming from the Chrome extension but as bigger contracts are coming from the Salesforce app exchange so we'll see how we choose to scale from here hey folks my guest today is Craig Maxwell he's a sales marketing expert with nine years of experience in the technology Industries the founder of sales bolt to this previous Hill various roles that uh companies like ebsta including SDR AE and SDR manager and in sales operations he's got a proven track record of driving growth and success which you can learn more about on his LinkedIn profile Craig you're ready to take us to the top absolutely thanks Nathan you bet why leave ebsta by the way I hear those guys are super Capital efficient they've got a nice scale what happened oh yeah that's an interesting one so absolutely love my time there it was a complete formative years of my Tech Career uh guy ribs is an absolute Legend and if you ever get a chance to meet him I'd definitely recommend uh doing so um it was more a case of my alignment at the time I was in an scr role going into an AE role started doing a lot of uh 360 work in terms of sales outbound and um I sort of saw my path going a bit more towards products I was really interested in learning to code I started to learn a lot of code and JavaScript and built a few different kind of hacky widgets here and there and I figured this is why I enjoy a lot more than just selling I want to do a bit more and um from there on I I just followed that path right that's great what was your what was your quota Target at uh ebsta uh it was never actually when I was back there it was so so young and innocence we never had a hard um hardcore query so I think my monthly attainment was around 15 20K um like small um transactional deals right A lot of them what does that mean so in one month you need to sell 20K of new ARR or new mrr uh New Era that was just yeah huge at the time we didn't have an Enterprise product I think the primary play Then was the Chrome extension for like bull horn and Salesforce integration back then since then I think they've pivoted well you're uniquely positioned a teacher audience quickly if they're trying to hire their first version of Craig Maxwell how to structure the quota Target right so like what did you like or dislike about how you had it structured at ebsta um I would say um it was very unstructured right so let's just recap on that the good thing is that it was quite flexible I could really do my own thing in terms of what worked for me in terms of tooling or um kind of process I remember putting together my own metrics kind of create my own dashboard and Salesforce tracking myself and what I really figured out what worked um everything just became um so so smooth from there right but I I would say having a process in place like that before hiring your first scr would be um yeah a nice place to start so let's fast let's fast forward to sales Vault then today so what's the company do and what's the average customer paying you per month or per year to use the technology yeah so we have two different products so I'll kind of split them there but the Chrome extension we have integrated links in with Salesforce primarily by recruiters to uh creating candidates searching for candidates on links in recruiter and getting an easy back and forth between two systems so they can add resumes edit and update fields and um create new candidates as they're working on the Fly essentially um the other app we have is on the Salesforce app Exchange and that's more of a data enrichment app with that tool we come up against you know user gems we kind of compete in that space for contact tracking um Champion tracking so imagine you know your Champions left one company moved to another company you've got a chair and risk at company a and an opportunity a company B where if you track the champion over time you can obviously resell them they're already on your product already on your value prop but now I've left a vacuum in that prior account which may churn out if not dealt with from CS as well and how many leads last month in in April 2023 did you get from the Chrome extension versus the Salesforce app Exchange yeah it was about 80 weighted towards the Chrome extension and I think roughly we get like in terms of pure inbound not referral it's like 30 40 leads a a week so a huge value 40 leads a week from the Chrome extension that's tracks yeah oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and that's impressive see a lot of people underestimate Chrome extensions because if I go to your Chrome extension no offense it doesn't look huge right you've got nine reviews now there are five stars which is great and you've got it says a thousand plus users but this is quite a powerful distribution channel for you and that leads us into the cross-sell of the isv app where it is a much bigger ticket item how big average well I mean the average field size in the current procession is skewed because you obviously we use a sign up CR touch which is great for the kind of bottom line but that really excuse the average deal size right so we have people paying 50 degrees a month up to 20 30 grand a year right with the ISP app the average is a much more smooth because we're paying uh they're paying on based on the usage sorry what is the isv you mean the Salesforce app is what you mean yes the image from the app so the contact tracking app I guess we could call it for for better term that has a minimum price span of 12K a year if that were tracking ten thousand contacts per month so every month on the month which saying history exchange jobs his way to currently work here's an email address with alert at the owner of the record update that send it to a foreign Outreach and far away from there so that we're selling some mid market and Enterprise interesting and how many paying customers do you have today title across both apps we have I think it's 80-ish 7880 that's great and is it split 80 20 about 80 of those are from chrome uh I'd say it's heavily awaited towards Chrome right we've probably got like 90 on Chrome and less than the rich chat because of the later time to Market with that tool we only started building that um towards the back end of last year and didn't really release it who's we what's the team size today ah good question so we I started off myself then I brought my co-founder um back end of 2019 around covert how much equity 50 oh you just put it right down the middle yeah it was well at the beginning to be fair it was 40 but then I wasn't in such a cash Rich position so it got to the point where we had to rebalance yeah the cap table right and so how much did your co-founder put it in terms of cash to get back up to your Equity level it yeah I think at the time we were spending about 20K a month in development right okay I think he was funding most part of that in the beginning and I was catching up later right so did that make you nervous how much did you guys spend and just cash on the MVP before you had your first sale that's again a bit of a nuanced one so I started the MVP myself right so I already had paying customers before I met my co-founder so I spent very little and I would never advise somebody spending 20K a month in development for an MVP um I can do things super cheap and in fact I have my own like incubator within the business now where we test the hypothesis we test a feature uh we spin it up as independent app or independent extension and then we integrate it and see if it fits if it does we increase the product value base if not we have this either kind of half dead project or a bit of a r d but it might come back in the future we always get requests and it's a it's a fun way of building stuff so how many folks are full-time today um we've recently brought on a strategic investor so they have some um oh yeah correct just just important we have any employees even myself yeah actually that specific invests to pull out my co-fanner last week so it's just me currently at the moment and that strategic investor in terms of employees and we have offshore developers in terms of our Dev shop which what's the dev shop you use what's the URL um so we currently use a guy called formula queue so formula Q Dot I guess.com or dot IO let me double check for you formula and everyone's always asking how do I find a Dev shop I can use and rely on and Trust for a good price how did you find these guys it was really um through uh referral so it was somebody well known in the industry who'd worked for a Dev shop who built some very um reliable and well-known products he started his own Dev shop and we kind of took the top developer there and trust them for now yeah that's formulaqsolutions.com and then so what are you spending today would you say into your Dev shop per month we're talking about five grand a month 10 grand 20 grand it's closer to the 5K Mark yeah okay I mean we have it depends if we have features to build or just product support most of that support cost then we up and down in terms of flex um with various different Outsourcing platforms you know upwork Fiverr Etc yeah and and what so if we take those 80 paying customers it sounds like we've got a big range of price points but what's total mrr today uh just shy of 20K oh just okay this is amazing okay so one-man shop doing 20K a month that's not a bad deal why did the other guy pull out if you guys are already up to 20K and mrr that feels like good growth uh I think it went to focus on another venture that you already had going so it was more a case of uh splitting Focus you know um not trying to back too many courses and I think the time that you spent on that other business I can completely understand why he would want to double down on that right now yep that makes sense and then um I mean how are do you feel like you can sort of I've always wonder if someone can take a company to you know 10 million an AR as a one-man shop and just rely on an army of contractors I mean do you feel like there's a real shot at you doing that honestly I wouldn't want to no I think at some point there would have to be some um dilution of capital and we have to get some strategic hires on board you know the first higher I want to make is going to be in CS I don't necessarily want to grow this to um 10 million as well man band yeah yeah I guess are you you built the initial MVP so do I guess can you code I can't actually so when I start to learn to code I realized that I could be very good at coding or very good at selling or okay at everything and I decided to go with the latter because that's fine to be able to manage other people and other so who else besides the dev shop did you pay in the last 30 days in terms of doing freelance work you mentioned Fiverr what what tasks did you put up on Fiverr um so we have like regular hourly developers that we have on there so teacher requests for example from a large potential client rather than getting a full-time devs who know our products inside and out we've got some strategic guys who've worked on features so they kind of understand the backbone of what we do I can grasp new feature functionality pretty quickly so it doesn't take a lot of work though for you to give them the spec and then make sure that they have a local environment set up you know relative to our formula Q is set up how do you make sure they've accessed all the repos the GitHub account how do you manage all that they're a full-time member in there we Flex up and down on a fairly regular basis it just helps keep our regular costs down rather than having them the full time oh I see so you've got a fiber engineer that's like I'm making this up python on the front and charges you 30 bucks an hour one month it might be 10 hours the next month it might be 30 hours if there's a feature request exactly and that just happened organically it wasn't by Design we originally had them on the project pretty heavily then things kind of Peter down in terms of how we needed to use them and then we just kind of scale up and down as and when needed and it works I love that I love that you're like the definition of a great Indie hacker here talk in terms of keeping costs low and still getting sales which is great talk to me a little bit about about what other expense so you've got formula HQ formula Q Solutions is like five grand a month fiber sounds like maybe a grand two grand a month where else are you spending money uh yeah if that's maybe infrastructural costs so yeah Amazon web services the standard things uh probably about two grand a month um we have some quite heavy computational costs there um a few other various different API providers to you know do enrichment and stuff like that but most of our stuff is proprietary even built our own email finder to help keep those costs down that was one of those pet projects actually spun off on the side um leadgo.io it just finds emails but that's henna penny so I never found that actually drove its own so legal.io is your software yeah yeah so we just had that built just so we could find emails of people who've changed role and Company um well company to speak uh clear of course but that was um instead of Contracting out to hunter.io and those platforms right what's hublink.io uh so that was something that I toyed with around HubSpot integration so I went to staff stock and found that all the new startups in Europe just using HubSpot and it kind of bugged me so I thought how difficult would it make it be to make a quick MVP front-end back-end integration HubSpot just very similar case to sales bolt and it took about three weeks maybe a month but um How much would it cost you using the fiber fiber engineers yeah not much uh around less than 5K and who did the design it's beautiful design that was uh well I just it's piecemeal just hey um make this or the logo I just used um what I use uh canva just tweaked canva designs and just edit it using a so I love this you're resourceful so I guess what's the holiday you're doing 20 000 bucks a month are you profitable today are you break even I think we're just over break even in terms of like minimal profits obviously there's some Founders draw for myself and co-founder as well to keep us um oh so even though your co-founder pulled out you're still paying him or her uh historically yes but I mean in terms of going forward cash flow that obviously won't be the case which would be nice so it should be more profitable moving forward and we also have loads of big clients who are just coming into their second 30 minutes or so you should see a bit more consistency in terms of cash flow that's great what about growth so if you're a 20 grand a month today where were you exactly one year ago do you remember yeah I've got the stats right in front of me actually so one year ago May we're at 12 and the neighbor for that we're at 35 dollars that's pretty cool so how do you go from how do you go from 80 customers today to you know 800 in two years yeah so there's a few things I really want to do but the main thing for me at the moment it's a primary focus is how we get our enrichment app to be more product LED in terms of growth right so from a growth hacking perspective you know the Chrome extension is a great distribution Channel but we don't know it's just so busy right it's like how do you get this from nine reviews in a thousand users to like 900 reviews and ten thousand or a hundred thousand users how do you break through the noise I think one of the things that we've probably done wrong is not focus on other crms so I mentioned HubSpot is one of the things that kind of bugged me and I wanted to figure out but um if I look at some of the other tools that integrate in a similar way in terms of Chrome extension usage maybe lead IQ or something like that they break into different areas of the market but also focus on a different niche I think that Niche is more around hey we provide you data and we integrate that data into different CRM systems versus what we tended to focus on right or wrong was hey Celsius is the top CRM if Enterprise clients yeah we know these products are missing these features and we can add them in a particular way we're rooting for you we hope it works we hope that strategy helps you grow and give us an update in a year but for now Craig we're out of time so let's wrap up here with the famous five number one your favorite book favorite book oh that's a good one I recently um originally I pulled out a tap to say it's a classic one but I've recently read one that one which will be my second uh which would be um oh God let me pull the title a super good psychology of money by Morgan Hansel yeah that's a good one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um Chris fettersville how she bought your book Because of Him oh nice you heard it yeah yeah um oh oh oh Chris uh Blackthorne yeah yeah the event company yeah yeah oh gosh so much of what you're doing is comparable what he's doing in terms of like this using the Salesforce app exchange for all his worth all that stuff so yeah very cool all right Chris is a great one number three what's your favorite online tool for Building Sales Bolt favorite online tools like sells well uh it would have to be chair right now I can live without that managing tickets for my deaf team just sending messages but it's necessary number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night four to six okay and situation married single kids uh single okay no kids and how old are you exactly actually August 28th I think October the third I have October 3rd yeah yeah you've done your research that's impressive all right yeah we're about the same age that's great uh last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um it's not that hard to start and just do it guys sales bolt.com today is doing twenty thousand dollars a month in Revenue up from twelve thousand dollars a month just a year ago and 35 bucks a month a year before that caught in 2021. he's a one-man show with an army of contractors spends about five grand a month on formula Q it's a Dev shop based out of India then another one or two k on Fiverr Engineers he's got just a bunch of contractors building this thing he's about break even right now serving 80 customers helping him automatically enrich their HubSpot and Salesforce accounts with lead data again salesbowl.com is go to market right now 90 of his leads are coming from the Chrome extension but as bigger contracts are coming from the Salesforce app exchange so we'll see how we choose to scale from here Craig thanks for taking us to the top excellent vaccination one more thing before you go we have 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