How Selectsoftwarereviews CEO Phil Strazzulla grew Selectsoftwarereviews 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...