Salesbolt Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Guys, salesbolt.com today is doing $20,000 a month in revenue, up from $12,000 a month just a year ago and $35 a month a year before that, call it in 2021. He's a one man show with an army of contractors, spends about $5 a month on Formula q. It's a dev shop based out of India, then another 1 or 2 k on fiber engineers. He's got just a bunch of contractors building this thing. He's about breakeven right [00:22] now serving 80 customers, helping them automatically enrich their HubSpot and Salesforce accounts with lead data. Again, salesbolt.com is go to market right now. 90% of his leads are coming from the Chrome extension, but his bigger contracts are coming from the Salesforce app exchange. So we'll see how he chooses to scale from here. Hey, folks. My guest today is Craig Maxwell. He's a sales and marketing expert with nine years of experience in the technology industry. He's the [00:45] founder of salesbolt and has previously held various roles at companies like Epsta, 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 ready to take us to the top? [01:00] >> Absolutely. Thanks, Nathan. [01:02] You bet. Why leave EBSA by the way? I hear those guys are super capital efficient. They've got nice scale. What happened? [01:09] >> Oh yeah, that's an interesting one. So absolutely loved my time there. It was like complete formative years of my tech career. Guy Rube is an absolute legend. And if you ever get a chance to meet him, I'd definitely recommend doing so. It was more a case of my alignment at the time. I was in an SDR role going into an AE role. So I'm doing a lot of three sixty work in terms of sales outbound. And [01:35] >> 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 wanna do a bit more. And from there on, I I just follow that path. Right? [01:57] That's great. What was your what was your quota target at at Epsta? [02:04] >> It was never actually When I was back there, were so young and in this infancy. We never had a hardcore quota. So I think my monthly attainment was around fifteen, twenty k. They best set off like small [02:21] >> transactional deals. Right? A lot of them. [02:23] What does that mean? So in one month you'd need to sell 20 ks of new ARR or new MRR? [02:28] >> New ARR. That was just, yeah. It wasn't huge at the time. We didn't have an enterprise products. I think the primary play then was the Chrome extension for, like, Bullhorn and Salesforce integration back then. Mhmm. Since then, I think they've pivoted. [02:44] Well, you're uniquely positioned to teach your 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 EBSA? [02:56] >> I would say [02:58] >> it was very unstructured. 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 kind of process. I remember putting together my own metrics, of creating my own dashboard in Salesforce, tracking myself. When I really figured out what worked, everything just became [03:23] >> so smooth from there. But I I would say having a process in place like that before hiring your first SDR would be, [03:33] >> yeah, a nice place to start. [03:36] Let's fast [03:37] >> forward to [03:39] let's fast forward to salesbolt 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? [03:48] >> Yeah. So we have two different products. So I kind of split them there. But the Chrome extension, we have integrated LinkedIn with Salesforce primarily by recruiters who are creating candidates, searching for candidates on LinkedIn recruiter, and getting an easy back and forth between two systems so they can add resumes, edit and update fields, and create new candidates as they're working on the fly essentially. The other app we have is on the Salesforce app exchange. And that's [04:15] >> more of a data enrichment app. With that tool we come up against user gems. We kind of compete in that space for contact tracking, [04:23] >> champion tracking. So imagine your champions left one company, moved to another company. You've got a churn risk at company A and an opportunity at company B where if you track that champion over time, you can obviously resell them. They're ready on your product, ready on your value prop. But now they've left a vacuum in that prior account, which may churn out if not dealt with from CS as well. [04:45] How many leads last month in April 2023 did you get from the Chrome extension versus the Salesforce app exchange? [04:53] >> 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 thirty, forty leads a week. So a huge volume you have invested in. [05:08] 40 leads a week from the Chrome extension? And [05:10] >> that's correct. Yeah. [05:12] Oh, what's going on there YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [05:36] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [06:00] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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, 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 [06:22] 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, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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 [06:48] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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 [07:09] if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. If Or 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. Alright. Let's jump back into [07:36] the interview. And that that's impressive. See, 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 they 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. [07:50] >> Absolutely. And that leads us into the cross sell of the ISV app where there's a much bigger ticket item behind it. [07:58] How big? [07:59] >> Average. Well, I mean the average sales size in the Chrome extension is skewed because you have single user sign up zero touch, which is great for the kind of bottom line. But that really skews the average deal size, right? So we have people paying $50 a user month up to $20.30 grand a year, right? With the ISV app, the average is a much more smooth because we're paying, they're paying on based on usage. [08:20] Sorry. What is the ISV? You mean the Salesforce app is what you mean? [08:23] >> Yes. The enrichment app. So the contact tracking app, I guess we could call it for better term. That has a minimum price band of 12 ks a year. Now we're tracking 10,000 contacts per month. So every month on the month, we're just saying, here's who's changed jobs, here's where they currently work, here's an email address. We've alerted the owner of the record, update that, send it to a flow in Outreach and far away from there. So [08:49] >> that was something to mid market and enterprise. [08:52] Interesting. And how many paying customers do you have today? [08:56] >> In total across both apps, have, I think it's 80 ish, 78, 80. [09:01] That's great. And is it split eightytwenty? About 80% of those are from Chrome? [09:06] >> I'd say it's heavily weighted towards Chrome. We probably got like 90% on Chrome and less than the rich app because of the later time to market with that. So we only started building that [09:20] >> towards the back end of last year and didn't really release it fully. [09:23] Who's we? What's the team size today? [09:26] >> Ah, good question. I started off myself, then I brought a co founder [09:32] >> back end of twenty nineteen around COVID. [09:35] How much equity did you give him or her? [09:38] >> 50%. [09:39] Oh, you just split it [09:40] >> right down the middle. Yeah, was, well, at the beginning to be fair, was 40, but then I wasn't in such a cash rich position. So it got to the point where we had to rebalance at the cap table. [09:51] And so how much did your co founder put in in terms of cash to get back up to your equity level? [09:57] >> Yeah. I think at the time we were spending about 20 k a month in development. Right? [10:03] Okay. [10:03] >> So I [10:04] >> think he was funding most part of that in the beginning and I was catching up later. Right? [10:10] That Did make you nervous? How much did you guys spend in just cash on the MVP before you had your first sale? [10:16] >> 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 20 ks a month in development for an MVP. I can do things super cheap. And in fact, I have my own like incubator within the business now where we test a hypothesis, we test a feature, we spin it up [10:38] >> as an independent app or independent extension, and then we integrate it and see if it fits. If it does, we increase the product value base. And if not, we have this either kind of half dead projects or a bit of a R and D, but it might come back in the future. We always get requests and it's a fun way of building stuff. [11:00] So how many folks are full time today? [11:05] >> We've recently brought on a strategic investor. So they have some [11:12] >> Oh yeah. That's [11:13] so Craig, just employees. [11:14] >> How many out the co founder. Do we have any employees? Even myself and Yeah. So Look, actually that strategic investor bought out my co founder 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. [11:34] What's the dev shop you use? What's the URL? [11:37] >> So we currently use a guy called formulaq. So formulaqdot, I guess,.com or.io. Let me double check for you. [11:46] Formula q. And and everyone's always asking how do I find a DevShop I can use and rely on and trust for a good price? How did you find these guys? [11:53] >> It was really through referral. So it was somebody well known in the industry who'd worked for a dev shop who'd built some very reliable and well known products. He started his own dev shop, and we kind of took the top developer there and trust him for [12:13] Yep. That's formulaqsolutions.com. And then so what are you spending today, would you say, into your dev shop per month? Are we talking like $5 a month, $10, 20 [12:22] >> It's close to the 5 k mark. Yeah. [12:24] Okay. [12:25] >> We have It depends if we have features to build or just product support, most of that support costs. Then we up and down in terms of flex with various different outsourcing platforms, you know? Yep. Upwork, Fiverr, etcetera. [12:40] Yep. 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? [12:47] >> Just shy of 20 k. [12:49] Oh, just shy okay. Is okay. So one man shop doing 20 k a month. That's not a bad deal. Why did the other guy pull out if you guys are already up to 20 k in MRR? That feels like good growth. [12:58] >> I think he went to focus on another venture that you already had going. So it was more a case of [13:05] >> splitting focus, you know, [13:08] >> not trying to back too many courses. And I think the time that he spent on that other business, I can completely understand why he would wanna double down on that right now. [13:19] Yep. That that makes sense. And then, I mean, how do you feel like you can sort of I've always wonder if someone can take a company to 10,000,000 in ARR 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? [13:35] >> Honestly, I wouldn't want to. No, I think at some point there would have to be some dilution of capital and we have to get some strategic hires on board. The first hire I wanna make is gonna be NCS. I don't necessarily wanna grow this to 10,000,000 as a one man band. [13:55] Busy now if it is. [13:56] >> Yeah. [13:57] I I guess are you you built the initial MVP, so do or I guess, can you code? [14:01] >> I can't actually. So when I started 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 [14:12] That's fair. [14:12] >> I need [14:13] >> to be able to manage other people and other [14:15] So who who else besides the dev shop did you pay in the last thirty days in terms of doing freelance work? You mentioned Fiverr. What what tasks did you put up on Fiverr? [14:23] >> So we have like regular hourly developers that we have on there. So feature requests, for example, from a a large potential client, rather than getting our 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. [14:43] It's nice. [14:43] >> Doesn't it take [14:44] 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 how formula queue is set up? How do you make sure they've accessed all their repos, the GitHub account? How do you manage all that? [14:54] >> They're a full time member in that. 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. [15:01] Oh, I see. So you've got a fiber engineer that's like, I'm making this up. Python on the front end charges you $30 an hour. One month, it might be 10 hours. The next month, it might be thirty hours if there's a feature request. [15:12] >> Exactly. And that just happened organically. It wasn't by design. We originally had them on the project pretty heavily then things kind of pitted down in terms of how we needed to use them. And then we just kind of scale up and down as and when needed. [15:27] And it works really I love 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 what other expense. So you've got Formula HQ Formula HQ solutions is like $5 a month, 5 or it sounds like maybe a grand, $2 a month. Where else are you spending money? [15:46] >> Yeah, if that's maybe infrastructural costs. So Amazon Web Services, the standard things, probably about $2 a month. We have some quite heavy computational costs there. [16:00] >> A few of it's various different API providers to do enrichment and stuff like that. But most of our stuff is proprietary. We've built our own email finder to help keep those costs down. That was one of those pet projects actually that we spun off on the side, leadgo.io. It just finds emails, but they're 10 a penny. So I never found that actually drove its own. [16:20] So legal.io is your software? [16:23] >> Yeah, yeah. So we guess I had that built just so we could find emails of people who've changed role and company [16:29] or [16:30] >> company to be clear of course. But that was Instead of contracting out to hunter. And those platforms. [16:38] What's hublink.io? [16:41] >> So that was something that I talked with around HubSpot integration. So I went to SaaS doc and found that all the new subs in Europe are just using HubSpot. And it kind of bugged me. So thought how difficult would it be to make a quick MVP front end, back end integration HubSpot? Just very similar case to salesbolt. And it took about three weeks, maybe a month. But [17:09] How much did it cost you using the fiber fiber engineers? [17:12] >> Yeah. Not much. Around less than 5 k. [17:19] And who did the design? It's beautiful design. [17:22] >> That was well, I just it's piecemeal. Just, hey. Make this well, the logo, I just used what I use? [17:34] >> Canva. Just tweak the Canva designs and just edit it using [17:39] So I I love this. You're resourceful. So I guess what what's the hell with it? You're doing $20,000 a month. Are you profitable today or are you breakeven? [17:46] >> I think we're just over breakeven in terms of like minimal profits. Also, some founders draw from myself and co founder as well to keep us [17:57] Oh, so even though your co founder pulled out, you're still paying him or her? [18:00] >> 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 third year renewals. So you should see a bit more consistency in terms of cash flow. [18:18] That's great. What about growth? So if you're at $20 a month today, where were you exactly one year ago? Do you remember? [18:22] >> Yeah. I've got the stats right in front of me actually. So one year ago, May we're at twelve and [18:28] >> May before that we're at 35 [18:31] That's pretty cool. So how do you go from 80 customers today to 800 in two years? [18:39] >> Yeah. So there's a few things that I really wanna do, but the main thing for me at the moment is a primary focus is how we get our Richmond app to be more product led in terms of growth. So from a growth hacking perspective, the Chrome extension is a great distribution channel, but we don't I [18:54] know it's just so busy. It's like, how do you get this from nine reviews and a thousand users to like 900 reviews and 10,000 or a 100,000 users? How do you break through the noise? [19:03] >> I think one of the things that we've probably done wrong is not focus on other CRMs. So I mentioned HubSpot as one of the things that kind of bugged me and I wanted to figure out. But if I look at some of the other tools that integrate in a similar way in terms of Chrome extension usage, maybe LeadIQ or something like that, they break into different areas of the market but also focus on a different niche. [19:27] I [19:28] >> think that niche is more around, Hey, we provide you data and we integrate that data into different CRM systems versus what we turn it to focus on right or wrong was, Hey, Salesforce is the top CRM for enterprise clients. [19:44] Yep. We know [19:45] >> that these products are missing these features and we can add them in a particular way. [19:48] We're rooting for you. We hope it works. We hope that strategy helps you grow and you 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. [19:58] >> Favorite book? Oh, that's a good one. I recently Rich and I pulled out a tapestry. It's a classic one. But I've recently read one that one which will be my second, which would be [20:11] >> oh god. Let me pull the title. A super good Psychology of Money by Morgan Hansel. [20:16] >> Yep. [20:17] That's a good one. [20:18] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [20:23] >> Chris Fettysbill. Actually bought your book because of him. [20:26] Oh, nice. [20:26] >> He heard it. [20:27] >> Blackthorns.ai. [20:29] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, oh, Chris. Blackthorn. Yeah. Yeah. The event company. Yeah. Yeah. Oh gosh. So much of what you're doing is comparable to what he's doing in terms of like the using the Salesforce app exchange for all his growth, all that stuff. So very cool. Alright. Chris is a great one. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building salesbolt? [20:48] >> Favorite online tool for building salesbolt? It would have to be Jira right now. I couldn't live without that managing tickets for my dev team. I'm a snip up for your sending messages, but it's necessary. [20:58] And number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night? [21:02] >> Four to six. [21:03] K. And situation, married, single, kids? [21:06] >> Single. [21:07] Okay. No kids. [21:08] >> And how old are you? [21:10] >> 33. Same age. Actually, August 28, I think you're October 3. [21:16] Oh, October 3. Yeah. Yeah. You've done your research. That's impressive. Alright. Yeah. We're about about the same age. That's great. Last question. Something you wish knew when you were 20. [21:26] >> It's not that hard to start and just do it. [21:35] Guys, salesbolt.com today is doing $20,000 a month in revenue up from $12,000 a month just a year ago and $35 a month a year before that call in 2021. He's a one man show with an army of contractors spends about $5 a month on Formula q. It's a dev shop based out of India, then another one or two k on fiber engineers. He's got just a bunch of contractors building this thing. He's about breakeven right now [21:58] serving 80 customers, helping them automatically enrich their HubSpot and Salesforce accounts with lead data. Again, salesbolt.com is go to market right now. 90% of his leads are coming from the Chrome extension, but his bigger contracts are coming from the Salesforce app exchange. So we'll see how he chooses to scale from here. Craig, thanks for taking us to the top. [22:17] >> Excellent. Thanks, Nathan. [22:18] One 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 [22:43] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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 bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [23:06] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign [23:27] up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. [23:47] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.