SellerSEO Revenue & Valuation (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 andy arnott he's been an entrepreneur since the age of 19 started and run multiple seven figure businesses now running seller seo his current venture is a suite of sas tools dedicated to helping amazon sellers scale their businesses with seo and paid marketing andy you ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely hells yeah all right this whole amazon spaceman is just hot hot hot huh it's also brutal it's very competitive who do you compete with the most um let's see some of the biggest players in the market are a company called viral launch another company called helium 10. um there's quite a few actually it feels like there's a new one popping up like every week and what do they all do right so what space do you put yourself in um so we are a little bit different in terms of uh what we're doing um most of the tools are you know doing like things like uh you know keywords and um you know listing optimization and things like that we also have those types of tools i would say actually the sourcing tools so getting uh you know this data uh algorithm uh data driven by algorithms to uh show amazon sellers like what's gonna be the next good product you know um but we've seen a huge uh problem with that because the data skewed it's all based on algorithm and so it's guessing because amazon doesn't release that data right yeah they're getting better at releasing that data but um we took a different turn and we're trying to concentrate more on things like off-site traffic because in the last couple of months there's been a huge shift on amazon they're driving less organic more paid and so the cost per click on the amazon ppc uh platform is astronomical so give me an example of a brand that uses you name their product and tell me how they use you um okay um prometheus wellness um they use us for um listing optimization uh which is our listing lightning tool so it's kind of like hold your hand seo like you put in your main phrase and it'll tell you put this in your title put these in your bullet points put this in your description on amazon the amazon description exactly so it's like it's it's like i don't know if you you've done any seo on like wordpress but there's like uh yoast i think is the name of the plugin where it kind of like guides you it's similar to that um so it's it's holding your hand even if you know nothing about seo to get you an seo optimized listing um and then they also use um our we have a traffic titan tool which is spinning up uh campaigns for google ppc but um integrating something called two-step url which um embeds a keyword um in those ads so when you drop on amazon you get some organic rank for those keywords okay so they've got prometheus wellness has a product called the collagen pro of peptides essentially right their their title is like very long and it almost feels like keyword stuffing non-gmo paleo friendly pasture-raised grass-fed these are things that i assume your system is going these are hot things figure out to put them in your title is that kind of what you do yeah exactly so um you know the amazon a9 algorithm is similar to google was like five years ago so they're kind of behind the curve so keyword stuffing is you know even though they tell you you know best practice not to do it uh we've seen over and over again that the companies that are doing that are are the ones who are doing well i always like to use stanley tools i like to pick on them but if you pull up a stanley tools listing you know they're like uh you know four in one screwdriver right and that's it that's all they have in their title and it's it's like on the opposite spectrum of optimized you know so um i mean that's how some of the little guys are competing with these big companies is they just don't quite get it yet um so it's cool to enable these mom and pop businesses to um you know get some traction on amazon how do you know what words are getting the most searches by consumers and amazon search so there's a couple of different uh data points now so they just uh released something called brand analytics that ranks keywords from top to bottom um that's one way um it's not it's part of the the seller suite so we're sellers as well we still sell seven figures every year on amazon that's kind of how we got into the space okay um but uh so we use that and we also use a bunch of other data sources and kind of combine them together to figure out what's gonna work best interesting okay when when'd you launch the company what year uh last year uh we kind of did a real soft like beta i think it was like in april just to kind of get our feet wet see what worked what didn't uh we had a full launch at the end of summer so we're just over a little over a year now okay and what are i mean is this a pure sas model or you take a percent of sales or what uh no it's pure sass at least at the moment we we might be changing that with ppc and things because we're actually underpriced uh for a lot of our competitors so what is promethean and the average customer what are they paying you per year to use the tech um so if they go yearly it's i believe we're at about 870 dollars for our top plan um and then monthly it's 97 bucks 97 a month is a fair average you'd say um our our average is probably like 75 because we have some lesser plans too which we're actually going to phase out because um the tools work together so a lot of people when they sign up for the lesser plans like oh i want to you know get to this end point but then they don't have access to the tools so there's some frustration there so i think we're going to go to a single plan interesting okay so 75 uh launched in 2018 uh take me through i mean how did you get your first customer do you remember um so we were doing um you know traditional advertising um i also started building my social um last year we launched the podcasts uh right around that same time it's a podcast title uh it's called amazon fba seller roundtable and uh we've only been around for i think we're close to a year now maybe a little over but uh yeah we've just been climbing the charts destroying it um i think because numbers andy how many how many downloads oh you know i don't track downloads um go to charitable and you'll you'll see i mean we're we're solid um we're beating a lot of the um a lot of the other uh major podcasts in the space so stuff that's been around for a long long time but what do you why so i mean look the the way i think about podcasts it's almost like a daily what if you're it's a daily show it's almost like a daily webinar essentially right if you get subscriptions but why don't you track why don't you care about downloads isn't that enough isn't that a good barometer i mean i mean we will probably soon um it's just we're not we don't take advertisers anything right now so for us that's not really a metric that i want to well but ignore that they're all potential buyers of your software all the listeners right no for sure they are yeah yeah yeah okay well i mean that's fine that's fine well i mean is it a daily show uh it's it's weekly and then we will throw in like something called a quick tip episode which is usually like 5-10 minutes if something big comes out like in the amazon space that people need to know about like just recently amazon rolled out um a feedback a feedback button which sounds pretty basic but on an amazon order now on the seller screen you can hit a button that says request feedback um so that's that was kind of a big deal so i just did a quick episode on that and then we also do um because we record live every tuesday at 1 pm uh pacific time a lot of times um people can't make it like our guests can't make it so then we kind of do an extra we call it which it's just a one-on-one like we're doing now yeah okay so how many customers have you scaled to over the past year so it's an interesting story so we got to about 9 000 uh dollars uh mmr um and then we we had a uh programming uh issue where the cancel button wasn't working on our on our software and with stripe they have a one percent um chargeback rate and then they boot you and so we ended up getting booted from stripes so we ended up having to start over pretty much which was really really frustrating um you know when you port over it's it's really hard to get people to port over um when you're you know spooling up a new um billing system uh so that was a that was a real um issue and a really about 120 customers paying 75 bucks a month for nine grand a month in revenue stripe shuts you down how many have now gone over to your new billing system so we're we're back up to 32 but what we did um because of this it was good in the fact that like i always try to spin negative to positive right so uh what i saw this as a positive is that okay we need to turn off any type of paid advertising we weren't doing a ton already but it was like we need to turn off our paid advertising we need to go back make sure everything works um make sure everything you know the experience is good um look at our pricing look at we kind of just did a self reflection um and then did a relaunch i just turned ads paid ads back on like two days ago actually up to that point um it was all people transitioning over and then um just organic from podcast and social and all that kind of stuff yeah when i go on and look at the work you've done so i use ahrefs to look at everything related to seo and backlinks and referring domains i mean you over the past since august i mean you have essentially added almost 1500 referring domains and almost 123 000 new referring pages this is not something that happened by accident you did this intentionally what did you do and why do it well um you know there's always some tricks in in the in in the in your back pocket that you don't want to share because you don't want your competitors to get a hold of that but i'm a big fan of automation i'm a big fan of uh growth hacking you know i'm an seo guy of course so you know i remember um you're probably too young for this but back when i was 19 years old i was using icq i was talking about chat bots right now i was doing chat bots when i was 19 years old using icq chat bots to uh get referral uh uh uh referral links getting commissions on referral links and things like that so um yeah i'm just i'm one of those guys who turns dials and figures out you know this is a this is a ton i mean did you hire an agency to basically and say go get referring pages and referring domains or did you like auto launch a bunch based off like creative content so i did a couple of things one of the things is we do have an agency that builds us links um uh but it's very minimal actually because it doesn't look natural and then we also have uh va's building links we have uh we just kind of have a system in place to to really ramp up that organic uh traffic yeah i mean that's that's where there's a disconnect though right so like you have like 100 over 100 000 backlinks 1700 referring domains but your organic traffic monthly is actually extremely low it's 20 about 2 300 bucks or sorry 2 300 clicks per month relative to how many backlinks you have which is assigned to me that these are basically trash referring pages and backlinks so some of them are but the other thing that we have not done which we're about to get back into is we really don't post any content there's no like very little blog posting uh so if there's no blog post there's nothing for google to look at um so that's gonna be our next step is to start rolling out more content interesting okay very cool are there any take i mean do you recommend this if there's people listening right now in other industries wanting to drive backlinks should they use the agency that you're using do you recommend the agency or no i i've honestly had mixed results i honestly think the best thing to do is uh follow somebody like neil patel um he's got a ton of articles on how to build backlinks and then hire a va and uh you know make a loom video if you're the expert on that make a loom video and show them how to do it and then pass it off to them yeah guys if you want to understand all these economics and backlinks and referring domains and organic keywords that we're talking about i recommend that you guys use ahrefs so you can check them out uh go to nathanwacker.com forward slash seo to give them a try what other tactics are you using andy to drive growth besides seo uh so it's all uh social so one of the things uh you know i realized uh once i because this is my third amazon sas actually um the first one was um a discount club so i don't know how familiar with this but like three to four years ago you could give as an amazon seller you could give a discount um you know like 50 off to some people are giving up to like 99 off uh to get a review for a product so amazon amazon got rid of that which in retrospect i think was a great thing because um you know i shop on amazon like crazy i want real real reviews but anyway when that policy changed it kind of shut my business down so then i went into a launch business um and then the the effectiveness of that kind of changed so then i landed at seller seo and seller seo is different in the fact that what we're doing now is not going to go ever go away i mean you can use our tool to optimize for ebay you can use it for shopify um if you're not an seo person you know that's where it's really gonna gonna work for you okay so you're testing these things you've got about uh uh 32 customers at 75 bucks a month so about 2400 bucks a month in revenue right now have you bootstrapped this or raised capital yeah it's all bootstrapped um you know we like i said we have a seven figure amazon business um so just all bootstrapped um the sas business that was down year over year though because of the stripe thing right so like a year ago today you're doing like eight grand a month exactly yes we are down because of the the stripe issue and and that's a warning to people to really take a look at stripe oh why did you have a cancel button that's what people are listening are going to think well he should have had a cancel button that's his fault no no we absolutely had a cancel button if the code wasn't working so when people clicked on it nothing happened and by the time we were brought you made aware of it the percentage was you know there was like three or four people that had had uh submitted chargebacks and because of the percentage uh stripe just booted us so interesting how many folks on the team today just on the sas side so we have uh three full-time people and then four kind of on contract that just like on demand um you know like people like writers and and things like that so how much are you plowing into the software each month obviously you're burning capital 2400 top line three employees yeah so um we're burning about 2500 bucks a month okay and that's worth it for you guys well i mean we see it as uh it's it's a long game you know i mean software especially in in something that is as competitive as this space um i definitely see the long-term value i mean we're just starting to hit um our stride in terms of awareness i mean there was uh another podcast called seller systems which does uh they just did like a seller poll which is like polling amazon sellers you know in the community you know what software you know that they trust and recommend and we were ranked number five so um that's pretty epic uh in terms of we were above uh you know vc backed companies on that list so um no look it all makes good sense uh ultimately though driving drive i mean the thing for you is you're never gonna build this into a real sas company because you're making so much money actually selling directly so until you kill that safety net you're like i just don't think you'll ever really focus on building the sas business what do you mean safety net in terms of my amazon business yeah like you're already making bank on the like selling like yourself you have no incentive you don't have to make the sas business work well i do in terms of that's what i want to do i mean the amazon business uh is mostly runs itself now so um the the amount of time i have to put into it is minimal yeah okay very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book uh right now i have a ton of course but uh uh clockwork by mike michalowicz is probably my favorite right now number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i don't really follow or study ceos um i i have a love-hate relationship with garyvee so i'm i'm on and off to him uh quite a bit um but uh he kind of but i still think he he's got some good stuff to say number one he's right around my age so i relate a lot to number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company uh zapier number four how many hours of sleep you get every night uh about four to seven okay and what's your situation married single kiddos i have uh i have a wife and three kids below the age of seven hence my uh okay and how are you yeah i'm 41 41 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um a couple of things i know i'm supposed to only give you one but um one would be how to write business systems and the other would be to stay focused yep guys there you have it seller seo helping amazon sellers sell more effectively better optimize their keywords they have about 32 customers right now paying 75 bucks a month so doing 2400 bucks a month in revenue that's down from eight grand a month about a year ago because of a stripe chargeback issue they're now though reshifting this building and he knows what he's doing because he actually sells on amazon over seven figures annually so if you can get the tech working and cranking it should scale nicely three folks on the team they're burning about 2500 bucks per month right now to drive that growth all right thanks for taking us to the top man appreciate it andy hey thank you have a great day 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 subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other ceo interviews right now