How Theroishop CEO Michael Farber grew Theroishop to $2.7M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is michael farber he's a sales professional with over 18 years of experience tired of losing so many viable opportunities to the no decision outcome he decided to bootstrap his own company going three years without a paycheck his application enables salespeople to easily build financial business cases all right michael are you ready to take us to the top i am hey how's it going everyone good man thanks for joining up so what's the name of the company and how do you make money the name of the company is the roi shop roi meaning return on investment a lot of people hear the acronym roi but they really don't know where to start or how to even begin creating one so what i've done is developed a very interactive easy to use roi tool for sales people to use during the sales cycle to help sell their product or solution because a company ends up making a purchasing decision for two main reasons one it's going to make them money two it's going to save them money but 95 percent of reps fail to have those kind of financial conversations because they really don't know how to mm-hmm so is this a sas product or can like a consulting tool no it's a sas product okay got it what's the average customer pay per month for access um we have two prices there's a one-time setup fee so that's the implementation building the roi calculator learning about your product and setting up the questions your reps could ask and then there's a annual subscription fee and it's really priced on per user per month okay again so what's the average kind of logo pay per year would you say i'd say roughly between seven to fifteen thousand now we do have others that pay seventy thousand those are our largest and we have some companies just paying two or three thousand and just to be clear that does not include the one-time setup fee correct correct okay got it so call it a 7 000 per year average or about 580 bucks per month just for the staff software side of stuff and then there's a setup fee on top of that to help with your cash flow correct that's great when did you launch the company what year uh december of 2012. 2012 and where were i mean why launched the company at that time all right so the background is so i was a sales professional as you mentioned i worked for a company called concur technologies it was about my second or third year there we they invited us out for sko it was the second day so everybody was natural what's it what sorry what's sko oh i'm sorry sales kickoff got it so a company sales kickoff meeting sorry i'll stop with the acronyms um and it was day two and everybody was still a little hungover you know how those things go when everybody gets together and the company who i worked for was concur technologies um so during the sales kickoff breakout session they hired a guy to build an excel version of an roi tool that they wanted to introduce to everybody uh it was anybody who's ever used a company built roi tool know exactly what i'm talking about it's an excel spreadsheet with about 10 10 bottom so overwhelmingly confusing you couldn't believe it so anyway everybody kind of zoned out during the sko training about two months after the training i was working with a company called bacardi usa at miami florida working with a controller named warren and he's like mike i got to tell you you want to move forward with your solution but we do need a business case so i'm like oh shoot uh we have one of those worn let me see if i could dig it up so after about a couple hours of looking for it and sending out emails i received the the template that was sent to us and it probably took about two or three days for me to really start figuring it out anyway long story short i went down to florida i'm visiting i'm sitting down with warren we're building the business case together it was a little clunky but we got through it and at the end of the day he goes mike i gotta tell you this is one of the better roi tools i've used and i'm like all right i'm no schmuck i'm going to start using this in each and every deal not that i liked it because i'm not really that good of a numbers guy i said this could be a good competitive advantage so probably within four or five times of using it on different products prospects it completely changed the way i sold and i realized there was a huge void in the marketplace so i i soon set out and started my got it and what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers on it we got about 50 customers on it today okay so 50 customers and are most these like past clients you've worked with or how did you get them ah cold calling linkedin messages pounding the streets you name it you know i tried to do it so 50 customers paying caught seven thousand bucks per year on average that puts you at about what 30 grand per month in revenue is that about right it could be yeah around there yeah yeah and what does growth look like so a year ago how much were you doing per month uh probably uh 70 percent of that okay so maybe so call it 22 23 something like that yeah yeah that's good and and most the growth has it come from expanding accounts or landing new accounts all together uh landing new accounts and expansion uh i don't know if you're aware of this but probably a software sales person stays at a job between 18 and 20 months and then they move on so where we're really starting to see growth is reps that have used our tool and then move on to a different company and say hey we really need to look into this solution so it's a lot of word of mouth for the reps who embraced it really have a tough time living without it and have you bootstrapped or raised capital bootstrapped everything love that that's great and what about chern what's your turn look like uh we have probably about a 10 churn okay that's logo churn or revenue churn uh logo per month uh no annually okay logo turn annually that's okay yeah that's so that's not that bad um what's what's making the product so sticky what are people coming back and doing every single month you know as soon as a rep and sales people are very difficult to change and try anything new you know they do things the way they've always been doing it unless it's a mandate um you know some reps just like to stick along the same path but the reps who have embraced it uh once they start using it once and get the feedback of the prospect and see how they interact with the prospect and understand how they can get more discovery out of it um and then see the prospects saying wow this is a really neat tool i've never seen this before they will use it over and over again just like i embrace the xl model very good and when you're landing these new customers you're pounding the pavement it sounds like so you got to obviously factor your time in what's fully weighted cac i'm not sure okay yeah you don't do any direct paid stuff it's all just your time yes yeah well how many new customers will you close in a month on average that's a great question i can i could probably close three or four customers a month where we are as a company is we're backlogged on implementation so we're looking to hire other developers so it's kind of fill up the pipeline i personally help implement them i have more customer success time than i'm spending so less time for selling but you know it's find the customers close them implement them get them up and running then find customers again so literally bandwidth is our issue um and that's what we're working on now and what's your team size today uh two and a half people got okay yeah that would make sense so it's just you and then a developer me my business partner who's the developer and then we have a guy who does part-time work nights and weekends because he has a full-time job and where are you guys based remote uh yes in atlanta oh okay so you are everyone's in atlanta yes oh okay good uh very good all right so how do you scale this i mean how do you get to 100 you know 100 grand a month um working on building our development team so we could implement much faster um have hire an additional person just for customer success so they could you know take that hire somebody specifically for implementations and then of course another sales person yeah that makes good sense a lot of work it sounds like you have healthy growth let's wrap up here though with famous five number one michael what's your favorite business book um you know i like the challenger the sales methodology challenger i like sandler uh the energy bus you know it's not it's just about positive thinking and overcoming negativity which i think is probably the most important thing for any entrepreneur or anybody inside it's called the energy bus the energy bus yes i love that number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um i guess elon musk is one that i'm following number three how many uh sorry what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own i couldn't have found all the leads without linkedin i'm on linkedin every day finding contacts and emailing them and doing whatever i can number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every day uh probably around seven i'm doing all right oh that's good and and what's your situation married single kiddos uh married no kids z okay and how old are you i am 46. 46. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew you know my 20 year...