How Testimonial CEO Damon Chen grew to $2.4M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hi everyone okay so my name is Guillaume I'm the CMO at testimonial.to 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 so we're going to cover multiple topics and it's only 20 minutes so it might feel like we're going a little bit fast but I have a I have it all set up so you can go back to that information later on so we'll start with cold and warm Outreach cold Outreach 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 dig a lot we looked at different platforms to use and if you're looking to find actually uh 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 use then as we're looking to work with different agencies something because in Legends you can 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 it giving us 7 000 leads so then this is the same thing for zapier for example or webflow so in our case we integrate with the HubSpot so that makes it even more reasons to talk and work with them same thing for webflow for example so then there's AI Tools in our case AI tools are very visuals so they get results 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 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 world of love for different companies so we have different tools that we can go on 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 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 the good visuals of the potential result that you would have 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 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 places receiving reviews so when it comes to the code Outreach we just talked about creative 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 testimony video testimonials that you can capture so in our case being able to sending out different limits emails and we can even see that people are capturing additional testimonials so they'll make them even better fit to potentially upgrade in the future so Damon has this system where he puts every product that they on slack so then it 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 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 the this 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 going to get into my favorite 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 NOAA and now with Damon just by sending code 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 that do not include any links this is just plain text because you want to make sure that your preview message is looking as clean as possible so in this case there is no links there is just a simple intro the little Emoji has been working quite great and you always want to avoid any 10 the fact that it's mentioning a link so what you would do if you're sending a DM on Twitter directly you would want to Exile the thumbnail link 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 they'll tell you the ranking of somebody on Twitter so hivemark will tell you that Damon 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 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 comment 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 they use a much higher chance of receiving a response because they're currently active on Twitter it's here if you just go through somebody's followers it's a metaphor of 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 going to get a lot of traffic you may want to give it 24 to 48 hours so it dies down and you don't miss out on too many Deeds so that 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 a great way to pretty much you can sync up all your inboxes you still need to invite at this point but if you go on Twitter you can find somebody that'll give you an invite pretty easily 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 will help you save a bunch of time okay so that covers LinkedIn so before starting to work on your blog you obviously want to do a lot of keyword research and that's something that we spend a lot of time doing ahead of time you also want to 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 so something that Damon her founder has been doing for a long time and is 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 hiker news and this sort of stuff so this is the traffic that was generated at that time since we started to focus back on the blog we can you'll be able to see this later on if you want to see those charts in more in more detail so that now we'll get a little bit more into building in public this is something that's helped Damon reached about 350 000 and above in annual recurring Revenue just from building on building in public via Twitter not even LinkedIn at the time so that was all from just Twitter but then he started to focus we started to expand on other things that will go a little bit broader so for example he was featured on his favorite podcast in the hikers and then a few other podcasts including the one from Nathan here that From Success open and so something that's a little detail to us that's been actually working quite well is sharing designs on figma so it's uh all three resources that you can find on your own but it's getting a good amount of Attraction people are using it for free and what's great with that is it's covering a lot of keywords so for example if you go on in you look up the 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 that 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 user generated content and this sort of stuff so then we're using everything that I just mentioned to share it on I can use and get some traffic that way or we for example the figma designs we share them on the figma community on Reddit and then we even created our own separated which we're calling SAS alternative what we're doing with this one is we have a lot of competitors that have a domain that's less strong than ours so we don't want to create alternative to Pages within our domain so what we do is we're using the SAS alternative subreddit and it's actually ranking on Google within about 48 hours 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 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 Welsh or the one from Eddie very good copy this has been great because you can also want to build a relationship with them for example Damon is underpaying he's underpaying but about 500 per ad spot for just being a good relationship with them and working with them for the long term instead of just a single ad spot so upsells and super fans so add-ons in the 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 they that's limited to your plan so Damon has it set up in a way with the tool called airplane.dev so it helps me be able to reply to the live chat and answer and handle that upgrade for anybody or the seed quota from just pretty much entering the email and clicking the one that I want to obviously since we're just a small team of two people and still a little bit low on the side of it trying to spend a lot on marketing and stuff like that affiliate program has been very helpful so so far somebody is making 790 dollars from just writing a single uh medium article and having that featured on a pretty sure pretty high on the results of Google so different I would definitely recommend using a tool like rewardful so you can set that up pretty easily you can even then use the tool to actually get as you're doing sponsorships you can simply create a reward for link for them and be able to better track the results that way so Damon had this what might seem to some people to be useful little feature which is you have a 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 side so now you can see it on 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 so then Damon likes to ship as fast as he can and just fix bugs very quickly so in this case it 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 so Damon demon likes to remove friction this is you know everybody there's people trying to find your tool because we're called testimonial that Tio it's not a very common domain name so he spent about thirty thousand dollars 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 up from but it's actually turned into more Revenue already and this is just a couple of months in so if if we keep on doing that and you keep seeing the revenue from that it's actually very useful so in uh 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 for 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 podcasts and they'll see this result so we built a few um fetching tools we call them so this is is for somebody that launched on product you can just enter your link and the people that build the tool and they will give you a whole wall of love so this is something that we do for uh G2 also and for Twitter collections you just enter the link and turn it into a wall of love and finally 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 like growth and so that's uh that's about it when it comes to uh finding everything that I've mentioned and all the tools you can go to testimonial.to slash SAS open you'll be able to find the entire presentation and you can submit a request first to build a wall of love for you or you can find the fetching tools yourself and 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 trying to build great uh videos for your tool and different screenshots like some of the ones that you see you can use screenshot screen that studio or Snapper then airplane Dev was the winner pretty much do a bunch of automated tasks within your system typefully many of you probably are familiar with it is just to schedule tweets and they just made it that you can schedule stuff on LinkedIn also then missive is a great way 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 [Applause]

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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