How Soloseo CEO Michael Jensen grew Soloseo to $2.7M revenue and 5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Michael Jensen he's an entrepreneur and co-founder of solo SEO the leading provider of DIY website marketing and SEO tools he lives in Washington State and enjoys racing and being adventurous with his kids in fact he just came in Michael you told me from sledding are you ready to take us to the top yes for sure right so would you guys get a big snowstorm yesterday well big is relative but here in Washington we get any snow we try to make the most of it so we've actually went to try to find a sled hill and there wasn't none there wasn't much left so we just threw snowballs that's cool all right tell us about solo SEO what to do and how to make money so so SEO is a set of do yourself SEO tools and we we work directly with customers and we also partner with hosting companies and so hosting companies will sell a resell our art tools as part of the packages that they sell with their hosting and then we work with customers directly to that anyone with a website basically that wants to rank higher in the search engines so we we provide a bunch of tools that help them to do that and what are people paying you on average per month would you say so the plans start from anywhere from $19 a month up to $99 a month for our Pro package so what do you have fair average is a 20 30 bucks yeah yeah about then somewhere in there okay and give you the back story when did you launch company so this goes back to really 2005 my business partner Aaron Stewart and I we we had tried out a few different online companies and done a few things together just you know seeing what would work and we had a real problem getting a lot of traffic you know as anyone and so we started looking into SEO and as we as we dug deeper into that we kind of saw this space where more small you know entrepreneurial business owners kind of like us couldn't afford the big guys to pay SEO you know five thousand dollars a month and up and so we kind of saw this hole there and so what we decided to do then was make a business of that and create these do-it-yourself SEO tools because they were free tools all over the place so we decided to put it all in one system and to make it you know a tool set with a bunch of reports and things that would let just the average you know website owner be able to do something themselves so that was oh five what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using you yeah so you know it started slow of course but we we're now over 200,000 active customers that's great yeah so that's significant so as most of that growth come from partnerships with VIGS of the world yeah yeah most of that comes with partnering with hosting companies but we we do do a lot of direct customers as well yep and I mean am i doing the math right if you have two hundred thousand paying customers at that RP we just talked about I mean you're north of five million a month that means that generally accurate uh well I I don't I don't see all the numbers you know the finance guy does that but um but yeah you can do math so let's say Carmichael you're the CEO you know your frickin revenue numbers that's like an easy number not some complicated payback period equation yeah so so we do fine for ourselves we we keep our operation lean where we're about we only have about twelve employees total so programmers and customer support what's nice with working with the hosting companies is that they handle some of the customer support before it comes to us yeah I just want to make sure I get your your general size accurate I mean some people sometimes give me customer numbers and it's actually free and paid right so I'm just looking for paid customers and I can generally just if that's the case take that 200,000 number times 25 and I mean you guys are about sixty million dollar run right that would be the math is that is it accurate so yeah the two hundred thousand those are all paid customers and so some of them you know are maybe on the cheaper side and and some of the you know there's a there's a revenue share with hosting companies as well so there's some you know there's some numbers to fiddle with there but yeah I mean but even if we go down to your minimum price at 20 19 20 bucks a month that's still four million bucks a month in revenue even if you're paying these guys of 50 or 60 or even even a 80 percent cut it's still a healthy business for you yeah yeah so so can you are you able to I mean how did you land these kinds of partnerships with the big distribution channels because there's a lot of tools like this are you just a better BD guy than any of them um you know maybe I the you know the first one that we landed was with so one of my business partners is Danny Ashworth and he was he started Bluehost itself and then Bluehost got bought out and so the company that bought them out that was our that was our first hosting company that we were in endurance international group yeah yep yep did you deal with Jo barn how her was he the guy that let it I I don't think so okay that was it's a we've had Jo on he was he's been the a guy there at AIG for years and years and then just left after he helped with the Constant Contact acquisition oh okay I bet you buddy knows him yeah I probably so keep going off the story there so your partner Bluehost sold the EIG yeah so I mean that was that was the start of a you know that first hosting company and so and so that that was you know where we got started and we're working with you know a few others that were in trying to get more of course Michael I'm not following there so your partner sold is coming into EIG and you said that's where you started what do you mean that's where you started did he leave the company and enters that's where we started with AIG so he was no longer with you know with AIG and so he joined with us and that's that's where that relationship with AIG started and are you just in their mojo marketplace or do you have a deeper relationship with them that others don't have so we're in their in their reg flow so so that that scales well for us because that's you know right where people are signing up it skills very very nicely I've I've I've interviewed other CEOs that have that have been tested in that registration flow and if you can basically prove over a cohort size that you can add a dollar or even a dollar to average cart checkout size it starts to get interesting and they start to put you in more and more places where it makes sense yeah absolutely it's the same reason why 5-hour energy is on the endcap right before you check out it every register right yeah high price point very small square you know you know whatever they call it retail space taking up it works alright so maybe what's interesting here so I have interviewed a few people in this space kind of domain space domain tool space where they are over aggressive in what they comp the channel partner I'm talking like some of them will pay a hundred percent of revenue every single month and then they have to figure out how to upsell those customers other products to make their own money how aggressive with you are are you on the kickbacks you're paying to channels so we've never had to be that aggressive we we've done mostly 50 50 or even 60 or 40 60 and a lot of the hosting companies they don't want us to upsell the customers because they're they're their customers and so you know if if they wanted less or if they wanted more than you know we kind of have to side with that but we haven't had to do that at this point okay so is it fair so I've asked you what your CAC is I can just take your average price point divided by two assuming your majority cost on CAC is 50% to a partner um sorry I'm not following you there that's okay yeah so if someone signs up with you for 20 bucks a month and I ask you what's it cost you to acquire that customer did you have any other costs besides the cut to the potential partner with the hosting companies no with our direct customers you know obviously there's there's marketing and you know kind of that overhead but but with the hosting company you know it's it's a it's a split and they're of course finding the customers yeah I mean I'm I'm going on a limb here but I imagine most your growth those coming from those channel partners if you have two hundred thousand yeah stars yeah yeah yeah so again Mike my question on those is is it just you know someone comes to you for 20 bucks a month you're paying a kickback of 10 bucks a month to ever brought you the customer or there any other costs and they're associated with getting that customer besides the kickback there's not okay no other than our own overhead but yeah yeah well that way yeah that wouldn't necessarily ack-ack that's maybe like you're talking like sgna stuff sure yeah interesting so tell me more in terms of how you've capitalized this business and grown it it bootstrap for you raise capital we bootstrapped actually okay yep that's oh that's great why do you why do you say actually on the end you just assume everyone raises these days well I do assume that that's cuz it seems like everyone does but but yeah we bootstrapped it from the friendless start so yeah and I I'm...