How Spartanspark CEO Dafne Canales grew Spartanspark to $300K revenue and 50 customers in 2020.

hello everybody my guest today is daphne canales she is a survivor and thriver of a double brain injury obsessed with content marketing formerly a professional belly dancer and now the ceo of a sas company that creates lead funnels by leveraging search engine optimization automation daphne you ready to take us to the top i'm ready all right what does that first off the company's called spartanspark.com what's the company doing how do you make money uh so we speed up page load time and we make money by getting more customers for our clients so we we bring in a lot of customers at the top of the funnel and because the pages load so fast our conversions are really high and it also reduces the cost of google ads because we get a really high quality score so all nerdy stuff to say no but it's all important you know page load speed is obviously critical for conversions what are companies paying on average to use this thing um so we have a full service model and they pay between 5 000 and up just depending on how much they want to use it and some uh the self-serve models around the 500 range okay give me an average though the average customer that is self-serve purely sas what are they paying per month 500 yeah okay and when do you launch the company what year in 2012. 20 we started developing yeah started developing the software very good okay so you have some years of history now how many customers have you scaled to uh we're not scaled that much yet so we're at about uh 25 customers right now okay well nothing wrong that's the 25 customers at 500 bucks a month obviously you know what about 12 grand a month in revenue there yeah and we we just started selling actually in 2017 so it took us that long time to get out what the hell were you doing for five years sitting on your hands actually was having babies how many two okay so one for every kind of year and a half i guess that's fair i did my masters too you know we started off a little slow but but seriously though for those five years i mean how are you putting food on the table how are you paying your bills um so we were just doing it kind of on the side at the beginning yeah and then we just fully started doing it and in 2016 we both um just did it full time and started hiring people to help us out help us scale getting mentors are you bootstrapped you bury yeah okay so you wait you raised or you're not you haven't raised we did uh we just um family friends and family around yeah okay well if you're raised then you're not bootstrapped okay this is very different how much have you raised a hundred thousand okay so you raised a hundred thousand bucks um from a friend's friend and family that's great now what's the team says today how many people seven seven of you guys everyone in alberta no actually we're all across north america so we've got uh one in florida michigan in canada ottawa montreal it's actually really cool because we have our team meetings every single day and everybody works virtually and it's all about quality of life and where so if you're doing 12 500 today what were you doing about a year ago in terms of revenue um so our revenue in 2017 was uh was half a million in revenue okay because because we're not purely sas right so we trying to figure out because what happened was in 2016 i tried to raise money from my angel investors and everybody thought that my project was too kind of out there so i decided to start selling it to the end customer and saying hey we can we can use our software to help you get better leads get you more customers so we kind of had to that's why i feel like we're going a little bit slower than we wish we could because we're in calgary and we haven't moved to the states yet so oh come on that's not an excuse though daphne we are in a very remote world there are plenty of companies based all over the world that are doing very well you being in canada is none by the way i'd say you have an advantage by the way canada gives great kickbacks for your developer hires i think you get back we have lot we've been fully supported by grants the government has amazing as an excuse for slow growth is so you can't been definitely not an excuse it's uh it's more it's more my uh my quality of life family life that has has slowed me down and i'm really happy about making that decision so my question though i'm trying to get revenue growth so 12 500 today so go back a year right so march of 2018 what were you doing that month um in sas revenue yes just sas yeah so i'd say just like a thousand like it was it was tiny we weren't really focused on sas and uh yeah so okay so now you're doing twelve thousand five hundred dollars per month sas 25 customers paying 500 bucks a month it sounds like you have a lot of uh kind of professional services on top of that though so last month how much total revenue did you do sas plus professional services oh hold on a sec um i don't you didn't ask me to come up with my numbers like this so i think um we're we're at about uh 30 000 in revenue on a monthly basis yeah about 30 000 last month yeah yeah uh okay and so how what percent of the custom work you're doing you're doing about 15 grand a month in custom work do all those people then when you're done convert to 500 a month customers no i uh when we when we get the the custom work it's they want us to do it all for them it's working really well we're getting 80 conversions for them from lead all the way to sign ups we've just we just finished a whole bunch of case studies government funded and uh and so they they're like just do it all for us yeah but daphne why when if they pay you what do you pay on average to set up five grand we pay actually for our full service customers it's 15 grand to set up okay so you get about one of those a month mm-hmm yeah okay so let's say i pay you 15 grand this month to sign up you set me up yeah i'm it's converting like crazy three months i'm not going to want you to stop after you do this setup i'm going to keep doing it in the future so why would you not charge a monthly fee to keep we do charge sorry we do charge a monthly fee so we charge five grand a month for the full service customers okay and how many of those do you have uh we have about five of them right now because we just changed our model after the brain injury okay something's not adding up if i have five of them if you have five people paying five grand a month that's 25 grand a month right there you said your total revenue is 30 grand a month you also told me yeah oh yeah so add in the sass you said you had 25 people paying 500 a month that's 12 500 a month plus you just said you had five people paying five okay so we okay so what we've done is essentially what we do is uh we we try to figure out different models depending on the customer's uh income so the way that i've been selling it is i go out and say what's your what's a customer worth to you and then change the model depending on uh how we do that so we have some non-profits which are mostly our sas customers are non-profit because we're able to show them how they can leverage the software and get teams to work on it and we have all these different processes in the background so we have different pricing models for different so we're kind of all over the place with our pricing model as we've tried to figure out what to do do you think that's why you haven't scaled probably yes so why haven't you tried to like get focused on that and stop changing your model for every customer we are working on that so uh so what happens after the brain injury we realized it all went south for us and uh we realized we were kind of all over the place as you can tell and uh and um we didn't really have like a niche that we could focus on and so we went to san francisco to talk to one of our mentors and he was just like you just got a niche like hardcore and so this was in uh july of last year and what we started building is we started uh building up a program that leverages the cannabis industry in canada so lawyers connecting lawyers with the cannabis industry and we have you know started working on that and we just we're about to launch that program and that's what we think is going to be because of the because we reduced the cost of ads and lawyers pay the most for google ads so we thought that would be a really good angle to go after and the new cannabis market definitely just be clear to try and focus this you are selling funnel services to lawyers who want to get cannabis customers yes okay um and that's a big money you feel like that's a big market yes it's yeah estimated to be about a 22 billion dollar market by 2020. what is a 22 billion market cannabis or lawyers for cannabis cannabis uh cannabis but you're not selling you're not selling to the cannabis companies so you're saying to the lawyers so what what like how do you try and quantify i mean i'm all for being niche specific but i'm but most companies that have have started in a niche it's because the founder came from that niche were you a lawyer for cannabis companies...