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2024 Revenue

$2.4M(Est.)

Customers

100

Funding

$0

Avg ACV

$24.3K

Team

7

Founded

2020

Testimonial Revenue (2024)

Testimonial is a software platform that helps businesses collect and display customer testimonials, operating under the domain testimonial.to. The company reached approximately $350,000 in annual recurring revenue, built largely through a building-in-public strategy on Twitter led by founder and CEO Damon Chen, combined with organic SEO, affiliate marketing, newsletter sponsorships, and automated cold outreach.

The company runs as a lean two-person team, with Damon Chen serving as the technical founder and CEO and Guillaume Bardet serving as CMO. Despite its small headcount, Testimonial has pursued an aggressive multi-channel growth strategy spanning programmatic SEO, Product Hunt automation, subreddit creation, Figma community distribution, and a redesigned pricing page that doubled adoption overnight.

Testimonial invested approximately $30,000 acquiring alternative domain names to reduce friction for prospective customers, a spend that Guillaume Bardet reported had turned profitable within a few months of the interview. The company offers a free plan alongside paid tiers and runs an affiliate program through which a single Medium article generated $790 in affiliate earnings for one contributor.

Last updated

Testimonial Revenue

Testimonial reached approximately $350,000 in annual recurring revenue, a figure Guillaume Bardet attributed directly to Damon Chen's strategy of building in public on Twitter. Bardet stated that this milestone came from Twitter alone, before the company expanded to other channels.

Testimonial Revenue GrowthReported revenue / ARR over time · latest figure estimated$0$600K$1.2M$1.8M$2.4M$3M20202021202220232024$0$132K$276K$350K$2.4MSource: GetLatka.com interview on Mar 17, 2023 with Testimonial CEO Damon Chen
YearMilestoneSource
2024Testimonial Hit $2.4m revenue in October 2024Estimated
2023Testimonial Hit $350k revenue in January 2023Watch[1]Estimated
2022Testimonial Hit $276k revenue in November 2022
2021Testimonial Hit $132k revenue in November 2021
2021Testimonial Hit $132k revenue in June 2021
2020Launched with $0 revenue

The company pursued revenue growth through a combination of organic SEO, cold and warm outreach automation, affiliate marketing, newsletter sponsorships, and a pricing page redesign. A single overnight redesign of the pricing page, which made a previously hidden starter-plus plan visible, increased adoption by 100 percent without shipping any new features or plans. The domain acquisition program, which cost approximately $30,000, was reported to have turned profitable within a few months of the March 2023 interview.

Testimonial Valuation, Funding Rounds

Testimonial is a bootstrapped Enterprise Feedback Management Software startup. Founded in 2020, Testimonial has grown to $2.4M in revenue without raising any venture capital or outside funding.

As a self-funded Enterprise Feedback Management Software SaaS company, Testimonial has built its business with no outside investment.

Testimonial Capital Raised & ValuationCumulative capital raised and post-money valuation by roundCapital raised (cum.)Valuation$0$0$0.2$0.2$0.4$0.4$0.6$0.6$0.8$0.8$1$12020Source: GetLatka.com interview on Mar 17, 2023 with Testimonial CEO Damon Chen
YearRoundAmountValuation% SoldSource

Founder / CEO

Damon Chen

CEO

Damon Chen is the founder and CEO of Testimonial. He is ranked number 15 in the Indie Hackers category on Twitter according to the HiveMark tool, reflecting a sustained building-in-public presence that Bardet credited as the primary driver of the company reaching $350,000 in ARR. Chen has been featured on the Indie Hackers podcast and several other podcasts, including one hosted by Nathan at SaaS Open.

Chen manages product development as a solo engineer on a two-person team, shipping product updates rapidly and logging every update in a Slack channel so the CMO can produce monthly product update communications. He also built internal tooling using a platform called Airplane.dev to allow the CMO to handle live-chat upgrade requests and seat quota changes without engineering involvement.

Guillaume Bardet, the CMO and the person interviewed at SaaS Open in March 2023, joined Testimonial after sending Chen a cold direct message on Twitter. Bardet previously worked at AppSumo, a role he also obtained through a cold outreach message to Noah Kagan. He has prior experience in music marketing, having worked with artists including Avicii and Grammatic. Net worth for either founder was not discussed in the interview.

Q&A

QuestionAnswer
What's your age?35
Favorite online tool?-
Favorite book?-
Favorite CEO?-
Advice for 20 year old self-

Customers

Testimonial offers a free plan that includes a limited number of video testimonial captures, with paid tiers above it. The starter-plus plan was previously embedded within the free plan interface but was not prominently visible; a pricing page redesign made it surface-level, doubling adoption overnight.

The company uses credit and limit-based email sequences to convert free users, sending notifications when users approach their video testimonial capture limits. Bardet noted that users who capture additional testimonials beyond their plan limits are identified as strong upgrade candidates. Specific customer counts and per-seat pricing figures were not disclosed in the interview.

Testimonial serves 100 customers.

Testimonial Business Model

Testimonial monetizes through a freemium subscription model with paid plan upgrades, add-ons, and seat quota expansions. The company also runs an affiliate program managed through a tool called Rewardful; one affiliate generated $790 in earnings from a single Medium article that ranked prominently on Google.

Newsletter sponsorships are a paid acquisition channel. Damon Chen negotiates long-term relationships with newsletter operators, which Bardet said results in paying approximately $500 less per ad spot than the standard rate. The company spent $30,000 acquiring alternative domain names to reduce search friction for prospective customers, a spend Bardet reported had already turned profitable within a few months as of March 2023.

Profitability at the company level was not discussed in the interview. Gross margin, burn rate, runway, churn rate, LTV, CAC, and net revenue retention were not disclosed.

Testimonial Employees & Team Size

Testimonial operated with a team of two people as of March 2023: Damon Chen as founder and CEO handling product and engineering, and Guillaume Bardet as CMO handling marketing and customer outreach. The company also uses a virtual assistant to build and maintain lead spreadsheets for customized outreach campaigns. Bardet noted that the small team size leads some customers to assume Testimonial is a larger organization.

Testimonial employs approximately 7 people as of 2026, up from 2 in 2023. It serves 100 customers that rely on its solutions.

Testimonial Team GrowthReported headcount over time023568202020212022202320240077Source: GetLatka.com interview on Mar 17, 2023 with Testimonial CEO Damon Chen
YearMilestoneSource
2024Reached 7 employees (October 2024)
2023Reached 2 employees (January 2023)
2022Reached 2 employees (November 2022)
2021Reached 1 employees (June 2021)

Frequently Asked Questions about Testimonial

What is Testimonial's revenue?

Testimonial generates an estimated $2.4M in annual revenue.

Who founded Testimonial?

Testimonial was founded by Damon Chen.

Who is the CEO of Testimonial?

The CEO of Testimonial is Damon Chen.

How much funding does Testimonial have?

Testimonial is bootstrapped and has not raised outside funding.

How many employees does Testimonial have?

Testimonial has 7 employees.

Where is Testimonial headquarters?

Testimonial is headquartered in San Jose, California, United States.

Compare Testimonial to the industry

Testimonial operates across multiple industries. Browse revenue, funding, and growth data for Testimonial in each sector below.

Full Interview Transcripts

Helping a bootstrapped founder go from Twitter only to omni-channel marketing to grow past $1M ARRMar 17, 2023

[00:01] Hi everyone. Okay, my name is Guillaume. I'm the CMO at testimonial.tio. It's actually my first time at a conference, so please be mindful of that. So, testimonial is the platform to help you collect and display testimonials. [00:20] So, we're going to cover multiple topics and it's only twenty minutes, so you may feel like we're going a little bit fast, but I have it all set up so you can go back to that information later on. [00:32] So, we'll start with cold and warm outreach. Cold outreach. [00:39] So, for testimonial, there's a lot of different niche and different clients that we're trying to tap into. So, when it comes to real estate, we dug a lot, we looked at different platforms to use and if you're looking to find actually the email of a real estate agent that'll get into the inbox and that's not forwarding emails, the best one that I found so far has been Keller Williams. It will give you very practical emails to [01:02] use. Then as we're looking to work with different agencies, something because an agency account can actually give us multiple accounts from that point on. So, there's a lot of directories that you can use. For example, the HubSpot one is giving us 7,000 leads. So, then there's the same thing for Zapier for example or Webflow. So, in our case, we integrate with HubSpot. So, that makes it even more reasons to talk and work with them. Same thing [01:29] for Webflow, for example. So, then these AI tools. In our case, AI tools are very visuals. So, get result like this for them to create a wall of love is something that makes a lot of sense for them. So, it's something that we're trying to look for different directories and this sort of stuff. And so, then when it comes to created outreach, we just covered that. So, when it comes to customized outreach, we try our best [01:56] to pretty much customize every message that we send out. So, there's a couple of ways that we can do that. For example, we create a wall of love for different companies. So, we have different tools that we can go on the G2 for example, enter the company name and you'll give us a wall of love for them. So, then we can just actually contact people with a wall of love created for them. My plan is to [02:16] make a bunch for all of you here today and then DM it to you on LinkedIn or Twitter. And that's just an easy way for you to get good visuals of the potential result that you would have. [02:28] So then when it comes to finding new leads, something that we do is we have a product and automation that contacts everybody launching on Product Hunt. So, it's just fully automated every day. It's contacting the first 10 people launching. It's a very easy automation that you can set up on your own and you can do the same for a new domain pretty much registered with built with or you could do it for funding rounds at different [02:50] places receiving reviews. So when it comes to the cold outreach, we just talked about creating customized and automated. For the warm outreach, there's a lot of very basic sequences that you should be setting up like the onboarding flow, churn and reactivation campaigns. But what has been working the best for us has been the credits and limits. So every time that you're running out of for example, it's only two testimonial video testimonials that you can capture. So [03:17] in our case, being able to sending out different limits emails and we can even see that people are capturing additional testimonials. So that'll make them even better fit to potentially upgrade in the future. [03:30] So Damon has this system where he puts every product update on Slack. So then he helps me be able to create monthly product updates in no time just pretty much copy pasting over the information and that's about it. [03:43] So when we have a VA that pretty much goes into a spreadsheet and creates different fields for us. So then, every time that we contact people, it's very customized to what's actually already on their website. So, this has been very useful because people even This is sent to people that already signed up on the platform. So, then we visit the website and try to customize the outreach that way. So, now we're gonna get into my favorite [04:10] section. This is a section that I've This is stuff that I've been doing since I was very young. It's helped me work with a lot of musicians like Avicii or Grammatic. It's also gotten me a job at AppSumo through Noah and now with Damon just by sending cold DMs to them. So this is something that we do, for example, through Damon's account, through the testimonial account, and my personal account. So, you can use messages like this [04:34] that do not include any links. This is just plain text because you wanna make sure that your preview message is looking as clean as possible. So, in this case, there is no links. There's just a simple intro. The little emoji has been working quite great and you always wanna avoid any the fact that it's mentioning a link. So what you would do if you're sending a DM on Twitter directly, you'd wanna x out the thumbnail link [05:01] because then you'll actually show up like this even if there's a link within your text. So then there's a certain Chrome extensions that you can use that'll tell you the ranking of somebody on Twitter. So, HiveMark would tell you that Daemon is the number 15 in the Hindi hackers category. So, there's a bunch of different categories that you can use, like the no code one, and you can filter through them and find great leads that way. [05:27] And then, this is this has been my favorite thing on Twitter these days is people putting tweets that tell you to reply with something or to command to access something. What's great with this is this just gave us a whole bunch of leads located in San Francisco. And all those, what's great with those is if you try to DM them afterwards, there is a much higher chance of receiving a response because they're currently active on Twitter. [05:53] It's you know, if you just go through somebody's followers, it's a matter of follow them five years ago, so that's not very useful. In this case, it's people that commented you could do it the day of, you can let it run. If it's something that's gonna get a lot of traffic, may wanna give it twenty four to forty eight hours so it dies down and you don't miss out on too many deeds. [06:14] So, covers about the the Twitter outreach. When it comes to LinkedIn, we have a Slack automation that pretty much gives us a recap of who's signing up on the platform. So, every morning, I go through them and connect with people on LinkedIn. This is something that's actually been working really great because we schedule a lot of demos that way. When it comes to managing all of this, we do it with a tool called text.com. This is [06:40] a great way to pretty much, you can sync up all your inboxes. You still need an invite at this point, but if you go on Twitter, can find somebody that'll give you an invite pretty easily. [06:52] I've not seen many people use this, which is very simple, we'll skip through it quickly but it's just sending a very simple text shortcuts. If you're sending the same text often, it'll help you save a bunch of time. [07:03] Okay, so that covers LinkedIn. So, before starting to work on your blog, you obviously wanna do a lot of keyword research and that's something that we spend a lot of time doing ahead of time. You also wanna look for different niche content that's you know, very specific to your company. So, this is what's helping us get Google snippets for even keywords like Notion. So, if you were to Google this now, you will get this result here. [07:31] So, something that Damon, her Founder has been doing for a long time and he's doing very well is pretty much building in public and sharing what he's doing. So, he decided to stop sharing his revenue numbers publicly. So, he wrote about it and this is the kind of articles that get featured on the hacker news and this sort of stuff. So, this is the traffic that was generated at that time since we started to focus back [07:54] on the blog. You'll be able to see this later on if you want to see those charts in more detail. [08:03] So, we'll get a little bit more into building in public. This is something that's helped Daemon reach about 350,000 and above in annual recurring revenue just from building in public via Twitter, not even LinkedIn at the time. So, that was all from just Twitter. [08:22] But then, to expand on other things that will go a little bit broader. So, for example, he was featured on his favorite podcast, Indie Hackers and then a few other podcasts including the one from Nathan here from SaaS Open. And so, something that's a little detailed to us that's been actually working quite well is sharing designs on Figma. So, it's all free resources that you can find on your own, but it's getting a good amount of [08:49] traction. People are using it for free. And what's great with that is it's covering a lot of keywords. So, example, if you go on and you look up the one over here, social proof and review widgets. If you were to look that up on Google, you'll get results for that. But you'll also find it as you look through the Figma community. So, it's it's just helping us through different keywords and showing up for testimonial reviews and [09:14] user generated content and this sort of stuff. So, we're using everything that I just mentioned to share it on how can you use and get some traffic that way or we, for example, the Figma designs, we shared them on the Figma community on the Reddit and then we even created our own subreddit which we're calling SaaS alternative. What we're doing with this one is, we have a lot of competitors that have a domain that's less strong [09:39] than ours. So, we don't want to create alternative to pages within our domain. So, what we do is we're using the SaaS alternative subreddit and it's actually ranking on Google within about forty eight hours. [09:54] So, then we're going to get into programmatic SEO and ads and sponsorships. So, for integrations, this is, as I mentioned earlier, it's what's helping us get on a lot of Google snippets. So, we're covering a lot of different topics, for example, how to turn a Slack message into testimonials or even WhatsApp messages, little snippets that you get in Gmail. But then, we get even more specific in the tutorials hub. So, that's where it's collecting G2 reviews [10:23] on Shopify. So, this is covering pretty much two good keywords within one article. So, then we're sponsoring different newsletters. For example, the one from Justin Welch or the one from Eddie, very good copy. This has been great because you can also wanna build a relationship with them. For example, Damon is underpaying. He's underpaying by about $500 per ad spot for just being a good relationship with them and working with them for the long term instead of [10:51] just a single ad spot. [10:57] So, upsells and super fans. So, add ons and space quotas and all of that is something that our tool can benefit a lot from because you're collecting certain amount of testimonials or maybe you need certain features that's limited to your plan. So, Daemon has it set up in a way with a tool called airplane. Dev. So, it helps me be able to reply to the live chat and answer and handle the upgrade for anybody or the [11:23] seat quota for just pretty much entering the email and clicking the one that I want to. [11:29] Obviously, since we're just a small team of two people and still a little bit low on the side of trying to spend a lot on marketing and stuff like that, affiliate program has been very helpful. So, so far somebody is making $790 from just writing a single medium article and having that featured pretty show pretty high on the results of Google. So, different I would definitely recommend using a tool like RewardFull, so you can set that [11:57] up pretty easily. You can even then use the tool to actually get, as you're doing sponsorships, can simply create a reward for link for them and be able to better track the results that way. [12:11] So, Daemon had this what might seem to some people to be useful little feature which is you have a free plan and you had the starter plus plan hidden within the free plan. But then we started to think about it and I told him that I don't think enough people are actually seeing it. So what we did is we did a quick redesign and just shipped it on the site. So now you can see it on [12:35] top over there. And that overnight pretty much increased the adoption by 100% from just simply redesigning the pricing page, but not actually shipping any new features or shipping any new plans. So, just a simple redesign can actually have a big impact on your numbers. [12:53] So, then Daemon likes to ship as fast as he can and just fix bugs very quickly. So, this case, he gets people to sometimes even talk about us afterwards or sharing online or people that are happy with the results and just think that we're actually a bigger team than we are. [13:10] So, [13:13] Daemon likes to remove friction. This is, you know, everybody, these people trying to find your tool because we're called testimonial.to. It's not a very common domain name. So, he spent about $30,000 buying every other domains that he can think of And just about last week, we finally actually turned that profitable. So, you know, it might seem like a lot of money upfront, but it's actually turned into more revenue already and this is just a couple of [13:39] months in. So, if we keep on doing that and you keep seeing the revenue from that, it's actually very useful. [13:48] So, within intercom, people is always searching for different keywords. So, what we do is we try to include as many of them as we can. So, example, here we're including different integrations. So, this way if somebody is looking for how to turn Apple Podcast into testimonials, they can just put Apple Podcast and they'll see this result. [14:12] So, built a few fetching tools we call them. So, is for somebody that launched on Product Hunt, you can just enter your link and the people that built the tool and they will give you a whole wall of love. So, this is something that we do for G2 also and for Twitter collections. You just enter the link and turn it into a wall of love. And finally, [14:38] Damon, you know, there's a lot of little features that your tool needs. For example, he finally shipped a way for you to change the email on your account. He did that some time ago but this is he's doing that for every little thing that he thinks of just to simplify and remove any friction along along the way. So that was product led growth. And so that's that's about it. When it comes to finding everything that I've [15:04] mentioned and all the tools, you can go to testimonial.tiosasopen. You'll be able to find the entire presentation and you can submit a request for us to build a wall of love for you or you can find the fetching tools yourself. I definitely recommend checking out some of the tools like text.com. It's been saving us a lot of time. Feather is a way to pretty much run your blog within Notion, Rewardful as I mentioned. And if you're [15:29] trying to build great videos for your tool and different screenshots like some of the ones that you see, you can use screenshot as Screen. Studio or Snapper. Then airplane dev dev was the way to pretty much do a bunch of automated task within your system. Typefulli, many of you probably are familiar with it, is just to schedule tweets since it just made it that you can schedule stuff on LinkedIn also. Then Missive is a great way [15:54] to manage your inbox for free and HiveMark to find different collections on Twitter and find different leads that you can work with. So that's about it for testimonial and thank you very much for having me on.

Quit $200k Job for $4k MRR Side Project, Can he Hit $100k by December?Jun 9, 2021

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is damon chen he's a software engineer turned into a bootstrapping sas founder from building side hustles to quitting his full-time job to making his current custo company called testimonial.t.o which enables you to collect video testimonials damon you ready to take us to the top yes so oh yes this is when did you have the idea when did you launch um i launched test monitor 2 back in last year right before christmas and it's not my you know i i didn't build testimony.2 from my first product i actually built several products before testimonial so the testimonial is like a pivot so because back last year and you know i you know took some personal leave it's unpaid leave so uh before my leave you know i was employed by cisco and i got my paycheck you know bi-weekly paycheck and i i have no urgency to make any money you know make any revenue out of my product but you know uh and last year i took my personal uh personal leave on pay leave so i have this kind of urgency to make my money and did you quit cisco full-time or could you still go back i like you know i took some unpaid leave uh you know but i'll believe is like you know i have no paycheck but you know i'm still covered by the medical because i have a two-year-old daughter at home so i would think that oh you know what you know instead of you know taking a much riskier live you know quitting uh completely so why not just i take some you know uh unpaid leave in the middle and let's see how things go and you know i can just make use of the armpit you know leave to to to you know put more effort on to building testimonials and see if that you know if that takes off and i can you know step you know take a bit further and you know quit my job and start really full-time working on testimonials so that's me i mean it's a big it's a big risk how much money were you making per month from cisco before you decide to take a break um my you know um total package is close to uh 200 000 us dollars okay i was there you were doing like 15 to 16 000 per month in total income that you gave up yes okay so pressure's on testimonials now here all right so let's talk about testimonial what are customers paying you for how are they using you so my customers democracy is pretty spready so because you think about testimonies if you're on any business right you're running a podcast right so you you want to people to know oh they're you know happy customers you know my listeners are really happy about you know my nathan uh you know nathan's uh podcast and if i think if you're running podcasts then you need some testimonials from your listeners right so and every business i would say if you you know my existing customers are from you know e-commerce uh merchants they're from you know for product uh makers like you right and and some sas founders uh sas products and als also need uh testimonials so i was happy how many how many customers do you have today Currently serving 100 customers that are paying um i have a little bit over uh a hundred active subscribers right now are they all paying um they're subscribers yes they pay monthly or annually and what do they pay per month [Music] the pricing is 60 per month or uh for eighty dollars per year uh this is uh for the uh payment plan i have you know high tier plan what i call the ultimate plan that cost 180 per month or um a thousand four hundred and forty dollars per year and damon so what's the big number what was monthly recurring revenue last month last month was a little bit less than uh Monthly recurring revenue four thousand uh us dollars but this month and you know about two days ago i just crossed four thousand us dollars uh mrr is that is that a podcast is that a nathan like a podcast exclusive that's the first time you've shared that yeah this is absolutely the first time i share it well congratulations this is exciting so so what do you want to grow at monthly recurring revenue to so that you'd feel comfortable leaving your cisco job with a young kid at home i was i actually set my goal to you know a hundred thousand by end this year and hopefully i can grow the business to two hundred uh thousand a hundred thousand dollars per month by the end of the year no no no another recurring revenue buying another say wow you've got big growth over the next five months i think it's a doable plan and you know i don't want to you know set my expectation extremely you know high because you know if i didn't reach the goal and you know just kind of you know disappointed but you know i kind of set the goal you know some to some realistic numbers so that i i'll make sure that i reach it and i think you know based on the current trajectory of the growth and i i i would have high chance i reached 100 thousand dollars you're at four thousand dollars per month right now it's june 9th you've got four or five months to get up to ten thousand dollars per month let's see if you can do it how are you getting new customers today um for now the major i would say the um yes it's kind of like you know i do everything on on twitter and so this is my major distribution channel so i um i actually don't have any other marketing channels so i don't have any code email outbound i don't have i don't run any paid ads and uh this part i'm pretty you know proud of myself maybe i think in future because i for now i have um recurring revenue coming and i probably can't just you know leverage reinvest my revenue into different marketing channels so for now i think this is good thing you know for me because i get most of my customers from twitter and also i would say this is kind of bad thing because it's like a single point video so i cannot just rely most of my marketing effort on just a single distribution channel i should do more i should leverage you know you know why why do you believe that though i mean if twitter's working for you you know everyone believes you always you need to do more and do more and more channels and more spend but if one channel is working for you why not just triple down that one channel and get more from that same same strategy i would say that uh the recurring revenue is still you know pretty small it's a small number four thousand dollars and you know but i would say most of my big customers uh for testimonial if they send off the ultimate plan the the most expensive plan are from sas uh companies and i would say you know apart from twitter i would say linkedin is another big uh distributing channel i should really you know spend more effort and explore a little bit more so for now i just you know because i'm a solo founder i'm a bootstrapper and you know my time is pretty limited you own 100 right now right um i got a tiny uh investment from earnings capital and but i still um um i'm not sure if i can discuss that number but is it's a small number and i just you know sacrificed a little bit of my equity uh to earnest so that's that's all i can say well um why wouldn't you be able to share it i mean it's your company i mean is it less than a hundred thousand dollars it's that's not a hundred thousand dollars okay okay got it why'd you decide to do that like did you actually need outside capital to to do this i don't need any capital i don't need any money monetary you know fundings but all i need is the resources as i said i'm a solo founder and my background is technical and i'm totally new but i'm totally newbie for marketing and sales and for now i'm still watching you know go to youtube answers oh how to do marketing 101 and i'm still watching those kind of videos so i need resources and more than the money so i think ernest capital has a great you know has has a really large pool of you know really successful entrepreneurs founders and so that whenever i need any help whenever i need you know any you know resources you know some warm intro to my target audience if i need any i think you know earnings could have a lot have they helped you at all to date outside of the money have they emailed you to their list for example or things like that yes yes and how did that did that drive in new customers i think that yeah it did drive new customers that's great well then there's good value add there now would you ever bring in a co-founder co-founder i actually thought about that but you know i'm doing a progress you know getting a partnership but i haven't found any co-founder yet but one one lucky thing that i did in the past month is that i found a really good friend of mine from twitter and uh he agreed to be uh one of uh the advisor on board for testimonial did you give them equity i go paying equity okay okay so how do you do i mean that's the smart strategy right it's a good way to get people close to you without you know paying them a bunch of money uh what did what did you ask him to do for you in exchange for equity um i would sync up with him uh every uh especially his early state rights he just on board and uh he will have a single meeting with me every week or bi-weekly and he will lay out i mean he he's he's a marketing genius and he won a multi-million dollar uh business uh in uh england and i think you know he he runs the marketing you know uh platform and uh i think it would do a really good job uh to laying out a marketing strategy for me on testimonial who was this um his name is uh darren westall okay and what was his company his company is pager.co and and it's a platform for marketing agencies uh recruiters to um you know get their business yeah so it's not it's not i i would say it's not a it's not really a big um business it's you know multi-million dollar dollar business and uh but i think that's exactly what i need so i would say in future i i have confidence that i bring testimonials to multi-million dollars in next you know i would say three to five years and uh you know i need the person in front of me you know three three to five years in front of me instead of you know he he's a founder of you know nasdaq listed companies and gave me advices that and those advices are not really you know hands-on advices so so i would say you know i need you know darren's advice i mean he probably a few years of in front of me and he he survives would you know i can take him to take his advice into my you know real execution and if i execute it well and probably you know in the next three to five years and i could bring testimony to multi-million dollars uh on june 8th he tweeted about ranking high for a certain keyword on google right for the word testimonial and you're now getting organic inbound how did you do that um there's actually no dedicated um you know content i didn't really wrote any testimony related blog posts i would say one big advantage for testimony is that you know if you are one of my customers and you use testimonial and you will for sure send the link to your existing customers and they will just open the testimonials link to record uh their video testimonial or they can you know if they're shy they can send a text testimonial and that drives you know definitely drives traffic to testimonial site right another thing for testimonial is uh people can embed all testimonials uh to their website so the embed um is kind of like you know what was the embeds uh or videos from testimonial and that would definitely you know um i'm not sure i'm not a ceo guy and i i think you know that if they embed something from testosterone to their side and uh i'm not sure if it's that that that's a that qualifies for exactly just to give you credit you're getting backlinks right because you have an embed tool so your vowel questions is high right and also your time on site's probably really high if people are sending a link out like their e-commerce brand is sending a link out to their buyers to record a testimonial and that buyer clicks the link and records the video they probably spend two three four minutes on the testimonial link google right totally yeah this is why you're out ranking hubspot right for the word testimonial and you're a startup with four thousand bucks an mri i mean this is obviously super impressive so kudos to you thank you is the traffic converting well how many new customers are you adding per month um new customers i was a new subscribers last month i added uh 30 news active subscribers and this month till now i added uh um 11. that's not great any plans to raise more capital maybe more from earnest or somebody else or you want to stay bootstrapped um i have no plan as for now um but i think once i lay out you know i you know together with my advisor we lay out a good marketing strategy and also you know lay out the roadmap for new features and i'll you know re-evaluate to see if i need external resources for now i can just you know if there's some um you know too much work to do on some new feature investment a new new future development i'll just you know get on to upwork to hire some freelancers uh to do the work so how much money have you how much have you spent so far building a product like on upwork developers and designers etc i spend zero okay so you don't use upwork to to hide so the funny thing is that i i did use upwork for my past um products but you know my past products are pretty much uh you know all related to uh video video stuff so so i have upwork freelancers on doing some uh front-end um you know ui design stuff for my past products for test model i didn't use any because i can just you know re-use their existing work for my past products so for testimony i didn't use any uh upwork resources and um yeah and funny thing is that i've worked suspended my suspended my accounts uh for the whole year i mean for for for 2021 and i don't have any access to to access my off work accounts but but recently that they just unblocked my account so i can continue uh to use my fork to do more yeah we're running we're running short on time here so last thing i want to give you opportunity to talk about there's a lot of people that don't understand how earnest capital works okay so explain can you explain to us in case of people want to use earnest how does earnest money work um they invest let's say they invest uh a hundred thousand u.s dollars for let's say um six percent equity and uh you know you probably get a term to say in the next a few years if you generate revenue and you just return three x of the uh a hundred thousand dollars which is uh three thousand three hundred thousand dollars you know just returned back to earnest and it's like it is also buying back your equity from sixty percent to you know let's say in the end you just need to give them two percent so this this this is how they they play uh the uh you know the the investing in and they would get a 3x return but still keep essentially two percent of the company for giving you the upfront cash yes yes yes so they they still get a tiny uh portion of the equity which means that you know they invest in you and they you know they have the motivation to further help you um you know go going going beyond very cool all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book my favorite i i don't read too much book but you know i recently the most recent book i read is zero to so obviously you know you heard about it from ricard and i bought his second book uh embedded interference and i'm reading it right now good number two is there a founder you're following or studying the founder i'm following one of um i would say um knit castle is my favorite uh founder i'm following and um he's doing he he he started from a gas station worker to a really successful entrepreneur and uh what company is he building hebrew sleep dot so it's a platform for sleep s l i p dot s o and it's a platform for uh developers to sell their you know courses number three what's your favorite online tool for building testimonial um for testimonial uh all videos and hosting are hosted on max mux and uh you know i pretty much use mugs for every uh of my video related products number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night last last night i slept i went to bed to uh at 11 p.m and i woke up eight a.m this morning so i slept nine hours that's great and what's your situation married single kids i i'm married and i have one kid one young one and how old are you uh i'm 32 years old 32. damon last question what's something you wishing you knew when you were 20 i wish i you know when i'm 20 and all i want is you know to get my get a full-time job for my dream company which is cisco and i landed at a job at cisco but i wish you know there are actually quite a lot of other opportunities like you know building side houses right i wish i knew knew more about you know building some houses and all this kind of you know passive income or you know not you know the incomes the money that are not offered from uh employee so i wish i knew more about that guys testimonial dot to 100 customers four thousand dollars a month in revenue about fifty thousand dollars in annual uh recurring revenue right now his goal is to break a hundred thousand dollars an ar by the end of this year he gave up a two hundred thousand dollar a thousand salary at cisco to take unpaid leave to see if you could build this got a little extra help from earnest we'll see what happens next one man show right now damon thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan dot laca.com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this 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