How SoloSuit CEO George Simons grew SoloSuit to $799.6K revenue and 400 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is george simons he started solo suit in his first year of law school when he needed an attorney but couldn't find one he graduated with his jd and mba from byu in his spare time and he loves to cook because he loves to eat now helping people fight debt collectors again at solosute.com george area takes the top yeah happy to be here so what does this look like like who is the main sort of consumer you're you're supporting to help fight debt collectors yeah the main person that we we help are people that are that are being sued for a debt lawsuit right so when somebody gets sued for debt uh they get on google or youtube and they search how do i respond to debt collection lawsuit and then they find a solo suit in those search results then we walk them through the process and give them the help they need but is this a particular kind of debt like a home mortgage they're laid on or credit card debt or something else or what uh yeah 10 million people are sued for debt every year in the u.s 9 million of them automatically lose their case because they can't figure out how to respond uh so we're targeting those nine million people and make it easier to respond um that said usually most people that are coming to us uh they're in credit card credit card debt so i guess how do you help them yeah um let's say somebody's being sued for like thirty seven hundred dollars in debt that's the our average is actually forty seven hundred dollars um they'll come to our site they walk through our process they can generate their response document to respond to the lawsuit for free on our website then they pay us to have an attorney review the document and then to file the document for them so without before solo studios being sued they're going to lose their lawsuit automatically because they can't figure out how to respond and when they find solo suit they're able to respond properly uh in their within their deadline and block the lawsuit and then usually um around like 60 even more of the time customers cases get dismissed and they they actually win their case just by filing an answer and so what does that what would i have to pay you to file that and review it uh 197 bucks okay no matter what if it's a hundred grand in debt versus a hundred bucks in debt it's still we just have a flat flat rate business model um price subject change but right now it's they pay 197 fair disclosure i like that that's creative okay when did you when you start cranking on this thing when you write the first line of code uh we officially launched in 2018 uh when i was a law student and then solo suit was just a free service uh for what year in 2018 until 2019 it was totally free and then in 2019 uh still when i was in school we found that filing a legal document is insanely difficult uh people even once they generated their document on our site a lot of people didn't file because it was just too hard to file a document in court uh so we offered a filing service paid filing service in 2019 and then i went full time on the project once i graduated in april uh 2020 right after the covet shutdowns and then so i mean give me a sense of scale right how many i guess lawsuits did you process in 2020 lawsuits processed in 2020. um you know good question i'm not super sure right now we uh let me see at the moment we've done over we've helped over 22 000 people and we've helped protect over a hundred million dollars from predatory debt losses so what does that mean you've helped twenty two twenty two thousand or twenty two hundred yeah it's uh twenty two thousand people have made uh accounts with some suit god i imagine everyone who makes an account though doesn't actually file paperwork how many have you actually like filed and saved 100 million for um i don't have that number top of mind why don't you i mean isn't that like the number one thing you're tracking in terms of success rate how do you not have that number um i have the accounts that we've that people have made accounts that people have made with our with our service and then uh how much money we're saving them on each uh that lawsuit but you don't save them money unless they actually file like you have your review pay you the fee and you help them file correct yeah that's right um yeah like currently we help uh like 400 paying customers a month that's what we're doing oh wow that's a lot okay so you have like so i mean can i take 400 times 12 last year i mean you helped what 4 000 or so during covid you know fight back against debt lawsuits if i don't have the uh aggregate aggregate number top of mind okay but right now your run rate is like 400 400 in october that's right interesting now is there a model here where you can go from i mean obviously getting one you know 197 bucks 400 times a month is what 80 000 bucks in revenue but it's really hard for you to like hire people and build a real company unless you have revenue you can sort of like plan on so is there a model here where it can turn into recurring or no not really um you know this might sound absolutely bonkers these days uh we think recurring revenue is a little bit overrated um and our revenue i think is very predictable people are getting sued at the same rate every month they have been for decades uh so we consider our revenue to be very predictable even though it isn't technically like monthly recurring revenue okay got it so you feel like i mean look by the way the only reason sas is a popular business model is because it's predictable revenue so you can make investments i don't care if it's called sas or not but point being is you can't build solo suit and build all the products you want to build without knowing where your money's coming from next month your argument is it might be a different 400 people but you're always going to have 400 500 600 people coming to you every month that's exactly right interesting how are you getting those 402 is it all in seo play yeah pretty much nearly 100 of our customers come to us from uh seo focus on ranking first on google search and youtube search and what are some of the like your top keyword that brings you the most new customers um you know pretty predictably it's like how to respond to that collection lesson so like if i go well that's a long cert what do people actually type into google uh oftentimes they type in like just that yeah like they respond to debt collection lawsuit or like that collection lawsuit or how to respond uh we focus on like the long tail keywords as a lot of people do um because it's people that are further along in their decision making process that will search like the longer tail keywords yeah that's right now i just i just typed in debt collection lawsuit response and under all the ads you guys come up number first how to answer a summons for debt collection not paid anything for it underneath all the yes that's where we want to be yeah exactly how did you get so good at seo i mean you were like a lawyer um yeah i actually [Music] um how did i get good at seo you know do you hire someone um we we do it uh yeah it's kind of a crazy story during one summer before law school i figured you know i'm just gonna take crazy craigslist jobs and see what kind of crazy job i can get off of craigslist and i sifted through a lot of scams a lot of just like bizarre jobs there's this one lady who wanted help like moving your trampoline and i found a lot of people were were searching for content writers on craigslist um pretty bottom of the barrel content writing gigs i took some of those and got interested in like writing content and then from there i worked with another y combinator company doing content uh for them and i think that's probably where i got most of my um training they had a great uh seo marketing channel and really learned how they were doing it and then from there applied that which channel is that so my listeners can go learn too um the uh the company i was working for was simple citizen they they just have a they used seo very well to drive revenue okay got it but i thought you said there was a channel you watched where you learned um i mean no i mean simple citizens one of their channels for acquiring customers was seo oh i see that one of the marketing tools yeah they don't provide like tutorials or anything so what how many folks are on your team today uh we're just a team of six oh i love that that's very cool okay and so what's a split like what's how many engineers uh we have two engineers and then we have a few people on operations so people that are doing uh like actually like helping file the orders that come in uh and then i'm doing it's not all automated there there's some manual work cool yeah interesting okay and in terms of growth rate i mean if you're doing like 400 new customers a month today do you remember where you were a year ago what was a year ago november uh 2020 um yeah i think we were publicly doing we were on startup we were on techcrunch startup battlefield last year around that time and we were doing 15 000 [Music] no i mean how many do you remember how many customers that you were i mean i guess it's gonna take 15 000 divided by 179 so what is that you were doing like 80 90 responses per month yeah...