How Selectsoftwarereviews CEO Phil Strazzulla grew to $5.3M revenue and 24 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is phil strazoula he is a finance nerd turned entrepreneur now phil started investing in the stock market when he was 12 but set aside some starting a company after an internship at a two-person company during college after graduating graduating from nyu he began his career working in venture capital at bessemer before getting his mba at harvard he's a self-taught programmer who started two bootstrap technology companies and now spends most of his time working on select software a site dedicated providing in-depth and unbiased reviews of business software phil you're ready to take us to the top let's do it all right now this is telling an ex-bessemer guy has now bootstrapped two tech companies so so the secret's out the the way to build a company is to bootstrap not raise bc huh um so i think there's like two sort of conflicting things here one is expected value the other is what you are are you more of a king are you more somebody wants to get rich i think the expected value probably the highest expected value is working in venture then it's probably working at google and then it's probably starting a venture-backed business that has the potential for a unicorn outcome um but for me the thing that sort of resonates the thing that gets me up in the morning is being a little bit of a king you know having the ability to do the stuff that i want and so i think that it's sort of the right path for me and i think it's the right path also for 99.99 of businesses there is like the basis point of businesses where it makes so much sense you've got a huge market you can have a high return on capital into sales and marketing etc but for most businesses it makes absolutely no sense to raise venture okay so put you know help us flush out your timeline so when did you leave vc and did you go directly into select software from bessemer no so i worked at bessemer until 2012 went to hbs taught myself how to program graduate in 2014 started a business called next week higher which is a small hr tech sas business um you know really bootstrapped high retention profitable but super small company hired a gm to run that business about a year ago okay and so i had a lot extra time had the startup itch i love to learn i love to teach and a gap in the market that i saw is that most hr teams are not super well equipped to buy software and if you look at the current online resources like the sort of yelp for software businesses there's not a lot of signal there um and i kind of first learned that actually investing and trying to use those online reviews to do diligence and just realize there's there's nothing there that's of value yep so so let's compare what your thesis thesis is for select software reviews to something that more people might know which is you know you know g2 right so what are you doing differently than what someone could usually use a g2 crowd for yeah so if you if you look at g2 crowd the vast majority of reviews on there are extremely positive so another similar example is uh cap tara it's just like g2 right um last week i was on captera and i looked at the applicant tracking system page the first 200 vendors have a four star and above rating so if i'm a head of hr and i go on that page it's like okay am i going to look at 200 vendors to choose the right applicant tracking system what does it even mean to have high ratings like how does that happen and the reality of how that happens is that the head of marketing and all these different vendors pays their customers to leave reviews when they have a positive interaction with their software which they should do right it's like totally aligned with their incentives but for the practitioner for the person actually buying software it doesn't help you in your process so so pull forward so do you envision three years from now select software of you someone comes here and you will basically be the source of truth and say if you're hiring for hr tech you should go use this platform it's the only one with a five-star view everyone else is two three one like like are you gonna give a definitive answer when people visit the website i don't think there is a definitive answer it's kind of like nerd wallet right it's like there are thousands if you want to have no fee on your international transactions or you want to have luxury travel benefits et cetera there's a different card for different people just like there's a different set of hr technologies for different types of companies you might be looking for female engineers versus people to fill out call center uh and so for me i'm just trying to give people the right tool set to better find and vet and buy the software that's good for their business okay so what's the monetization plan monetization is typical cpc um sort of engine it's very similar to google so we kind of have these like organic results which is like in a given category i've done the research and i've identified maybe 10 or 15 vendors that i view are the best and those are sort of like the organic ones that belong in that category and then within that subset there are a couple companies that are going to pay for a trackable link back to their website for a better call to action for uh traffic to be driven to a landing page versus their home page and that's how i make money and i charge on a cost per click basis okay and do you have paying customers to say are you pre-revenue yeah paying customers as of august so i started working on this last year and then in august kind of turned on the monetization okay um so tell us how you got the first customer that's always interesting so i've been building my personal brand in the hr space for a while i do a weekly video series called whiteboard wednesdays i got the whiteboard in the background um so basically i do like a two minute video on like something you probably don't know but should if you're an hr leader and so when i go to a conference people are like hey you're like the linkedin guy right um you probably get the same thing like you walk around and people like hey lacko what's up dude yeah yeah and so the first couple companies actually came to me and they're like hey phil like we're trying to you know get more demand for our hr chatbot or ats or whatever can you help us and i'm like yeah sure like let's do the cpc thing and i actually did a couple different iterations of the revenue model i did like you know some sponsored videos and likes mini conferences and stuff like that and i just realized that the cpc is like the thing that scales and the thing that is really easy to track from an roi perspective for these demand gen teams that just look at you know we're paying x per mql per sql per you know dollar of new acv okay okay so this makes sense who so who can you share who was the first paying customer um i honestly don't even remember okay well let's skip that then how many customers are you working with now today so now we've got about two dozen okay customers yeah and they i mean is this modeled out like a sas platform is it pretty consistent what they pay you every month it is fairly consistent uh it's not straight sass because it's per click and so my business is a little bit dependent upon the three to four google updates that happen every single day um which is one of the bad things like halloween night like my traffic sort of like dropped off a cliff right and there's nothing really you can do about that um and if i have less traffic that means less clicks and therefore less revenue however if you look at it over longer stretches of time it is very consistent and what's really nice is that the churn is very very negative um and that's mostly a function of it being sort of a new marketplace where your cpc your cpa is much lower relative to adwords linkedin captera g2 sort of all the best alternatives so so what is an average customer right on a cpc basis paying you per month uh for the clicks you're driving them uh it's about 500 bucks a month okay fair enough good good good so i mean can i back can i take the 500 times the 24 to kind of back into your revenue yeah that will overstate it slightly but it's pretty darn close okay so i mean that that would put you i mean i think that's uh what 112 thousand dollars a month something like that yeah okay cool so so let's dive a bit more into how you're doing this right so all the other sites in terms of driving growth whether it's finances online what i mean you know all the you know all the players in the space right there's tons um it's always an seo play okay when i look at your seo play according to ahrefs you you really dominate for some critical terms employee rewards programs best ats employee recognition companies right talent acquisition software all of which drive you between you know 20 and 100 kind of clicks per day or per month right so is that is that is that how you've chosen to go about this is you're essentially going to take critical keywords that you're best known for dominate that that search on google and then that'll be your beachhead into the space yeah exactly that's sort of the best way to do it uh because you need to get somebody right at the moment where they have super high intent and that there's only like a two week window for a given piece of software so let's say like i'm ahead of hr and i buy a new ats every five years there's two weeks in that five year period where somebody's gonna actually convert and so it's kind of akin to like the geico marketing so like if you're a geico like you can do all these wacky ads and like try to build a brand in people's heads but that takes hundreds of millions of dollars and so like what do you do if you're just starting out you gotta dominate your niche um which of course i think is like hrefs uh tagline is like dominate your niche for for search or something like that so how do you rank for these keywords though right so like your domain authority is your new so it's only 35. i feel like someone like g2 or someone else if they wanted to destroy you for this keyword they would just launch a landing page specific to this keyword that's the crazy thing so i am actually beating them on lots of relevant queries and they are targeting the same exact queries and there's basically only one explanation for that because as you point out my domain authority is like a 35 and yours is like in the 70s and it's logarithmic so they're literally like 100 000 times higher authoritative than i am um so the only explanation for this is the quality of the content so i spend a tremendous amount of time to truly do in-depth unbiased research that helps people and so when they go to those pages their average time on a page like that is like 15 minutes which is kind of insane and so because i'm serving up the best content google as well as you know duckduckgo and like sort of these emerging search engines are all ranking me very very highly for these queries yeah and just to be clear i mean you you can tell your landing page for employee recognition rewards recognition um is not kind of auto generate right a lot of the other companies they auto generate thousands of landing pages based off keywords per month but you can tell like you've got bonus league kazoo motivocity snappy and then but when you scroll down under all these there's kind of bullets on the benefits and the rewards and what you should expect from a pricing perspective because you've like done that research right so how do you scale that across multiple keywords go build a you know a 50 100 000 a month company quicker that's one of the things that i'm grappling with right now um so think about timeline in this business i basically started about a year ago started working on it full time last summer and right now it's essentially myself and then some contractors doing stuff that is very easy to automate i've tried to get domain experts to like write stuff um i've spent actually a decent amount of money getting various people to write up these landscapes and what i found is the quality is really low like there's very few people that have domain expertise that can write they can explain things and so that is that is like the key question right like how do i scale this beyond sort of my best efforts and to be quite frank like i haven't figured out that formula over time you know that becomes like a barrier to entry um assuming this is an interesting enough niche for other people to try to compete with me against um but it is really really hard to develop that content especially in an unbiased way yes you have 11 folks on your expert council right martin burns chris skaggs and that carol some other folks are these your writers so you've essentially hand created your writers you say hey i'll put your face on the website if you write some of this great content for me um i've actually written everything oh wow okay yeah so they are and to be honest i got to update that page but there's like a bunch of people who i ping and i'm like hey what do you think of this what do you think of that and it could be a tool it could be the way that i'm thinking about the return on investment for a category just to get their advice there's like a a one percent sort of of hr leaders who i look to for their advice to make sure that i am putting together content that i feel good standing behind mm-hmm okay that all makes good sense now you're doing 12 000 ish a month today in revenue where were you a year ago zero i was zero yeah yeah yeah okay good so 12 000 and then flesh out your team for me today is it just you or you have a developer what's the team look like no so i'm a full stack engineer as well it's essentially me plus a ragtag crew of contractors that are helping out with various things that i've sort of like automated for for a better uh for lack of everybody put it yep these companies that have started paying you at least something over the past couple of months you said that the net churn isn't really negative another way say that is that they've expanded every single month you're driving them more clicks they're paying you more cost per click so so what has expansion been like month over month or or if you i don't know if you have a year of history yet but what's expansion like um so there's not a ton of data because we just started monetizing it in august um basically the things driving expansion are one super high intent leads that convert down the funnel really fast to my own personal brand and sort of the content that we're putting out there that is just like really good thought leadership that also helps their buyers go through the sales cycle faster and more confidently and then through the growth of the traffic on the actual website if i were to guess um probably you know annualized it's probably like a negative 30 or 40 percent net revenue churn yep and now have you bootstrapped this or did you decide to raise yeah uh it's totally bootstrapped no intention to raise money um i've you know got some cash that i've made from investing as well as doing some advisory work and so and using that to fund the business and i guess my lifestyle guys there you have it xvc now bootstrapping i love it he's fully converted phil let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book you know i hate to be cliched i think it's the snowball uh the warren buffett biography it's like somewhat authentic and it just like gives you a lot of insight into the brain of somebody who has become amazingly successful number two is there a ceo you're following or studying so i know you just released that interview with chris savage he's somebody i look up to especially being a local boston guy um jason freeman from base camp also said something super interesting the other day about not tracking metrics uh and actually chris had something similar you asked him like what is your revenue at the beginning of this year and he was like i don't know uh and i think that's really interesting because chris is like an amazingly smart guy and he's like a very sophisticated operator he doesn't know for a reason and that's because like he's focused on building a brand and an amazing product and i think coming from the vc world it's hard to let go of that stuff but it's very interesting for your mental health and your focus as an entrepreneur to not think about those metrics number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company so i i came across this business called focusmate um that basically matches you up with another person working remotely so when i work remotely from home or wherever it matches you up for 50 minutes with somebody else usually they're like a phd or something you spend the first 30 seconds being like what are you gonna get done you work you're on video you're on microphone the last 30 seconds you say what did you get done and it's like a really weird hack that uh allows you to be amazingly productive for 50 minutes interesting okay very good number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night eight and a half that's good and situation married single kids girlfriend girl okay good so not married no kiddos and how old are you 34. 34. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh i think just that it's gonna be okay you know like i think most like high achieving people have a lot of worries about what the future holds and it's like hey man it all works out you know like you got i got laid off my first job out of college in the recession and i thought my life was over um it wasn't over you know i i came back got the job at bessemer went to hbs blah blah blah guys there you have it phil select software reviews serving 24 customers that came on a cpc basis but it's pretty consistent doing about 12 000 a month right now just launched last year prior to that hbs prior to that bessemer but he's bootstrapping this company ironic but i like it uh launched launch full-time early in 2019 hoping to scale nicely as he focuses on critical keywords that also associate directly back with his brand phil thank you for taking us to the top thanks these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want to do it more so if you want to get more of this stuff make sure you 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