How Toofr CEO Ryan Buckley grew Toofr to $157.9K revenue and 100 customers in 2023.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per top 5 and6 million he is held bent on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top tribe this week's winner of The 100 bucks is Jose Aila he is a 17-year-old that doesn't want to go to college and he wants to start his own business for your chance to win a 100 bucks just like Jose every Monday morning simply subscribe to this podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it Nathan lka here this is episode 610 and coming up tomorrow morning you'll learn from Milton Chen his company is called VC which is helping a thousand customers use video to transact information he actually invented at Google and and Facebook Chat and Wei chat and all these things the def facto video sharing standard unbelievable interview highly technical good morning everybody Nathan ly here our guest today is Ryan Buckley he's a Serial entrepreneur and founder and CEO of scripted.com and TW for.com he focuses on solving problems that marketers and business owners deal with on a daily basis Ryan are you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right so we we'll we'll focus mainly on twofer today but you're also running scripted tell us quickly what is scripted doing what's the business model how's it make money yeah so we're a Marketplace that matches businesses with writers we make money on a subscription fee businesses pay to access the platform kind of like a Costco or a Sam's Club membership and then you order writing jobs from our writers on top of that and we take a small cut of that as well so it's kind of a a SAS Marketplace a SAS monel plus a transaction fee yeah it's it's kind of a unique hybrid model uh Marketplace Revenue model mixed in with the SAS Revenue model that's a that's a hot space there's a lot of people looking for those kinds of companies yeah yeah it's and content marketing is is is hot as ever um so we're in a nice position have you raised capital for scripted we have we've raised $15 million for scripted and when did you launch the company 2011 20 okay so what was that about six seven years ago what uh yeah what what did you just send an opportunity and you said you know what I'm going to go win this space or were you like a proficient writer and you loved writing we started in screenwriting software um oddly enough and uh did that when I was in Los Angeles right after college met my co-founder whose best friend was a screenwriter and that's what got us into the writing business what got us into content marketing Marketplace is customer uh pulling customers pulling us that direction um a lot more interest in getting blog posts written than in getting screenplays written so we we just followed the market uh into content marketing yep okay makes good sense let's talk about twofer so did twofer come before or after scripted twer came before actually I was um this was kind of in between the the screenwriting software and scripted I took a job as uh basically an entrylevel sales rep at a at another startup in San Francisco and it was very technical company actually there was email data appending and it was um for various reasons detail like that doesn't really matter it was very difficult to sell kind of all of a sudden um they basically got some C and assist letters so we and the sales team were like shoot what are we going to do we needed to rapidly expand our uh essentially our net and we just started putting together these Python scripts to identif email addresses and put lists together and um started running drip campaigns before it's kind of like in the early days of of all of that what year um this was 2011 as well kind of late 2010 early 2011 um we were using a software called genius um I think maretto was still a relatively new technology at that point um so it was genius plugged into maretto that would help us run drip campaigns and uh and then I that was actually when I learned to program um the first language I Learned was Python and was using Python scripts to scrape websites and guess email addresses and that became those Python scripts although I've iterated on them dozens and dozens of times and twer is not even in Python anymore um that that was kind of The Germ for that became twofer and so how did you make sure that that intellectual property stayed with you versus the company you built it to help you selling yeah well a good question I mean that that company is kind of morphed and and like later on been acquired and it wasn't core technology to that company uh and I think like twer still is like vastly different than those original scripts were so I don't know they've never asked me about it how does it what's the model I mean is this a SAS model or pay as you go or how does tuer make money tuur is a straight up model okay and on average what our customer is paying you per month our our po right now is $180 okay 180 and and again you this was so let's say this was this has been going what for seven or eight years now right uh yeah I think I I put the pay wall up in 2013 um initially so so started doing like kind of learned the process while I was at at this company called rapleaf and then um and then really started to use it in the early days of scripted and it worked really well and my friends were like shoot can like how are you doing that and uh just decided to put it up initially as a freebie for my friends and also so that I could learn website development and how to build web apps so I was just like doing the python stuff and then your audience like knows anything about programming like it's kind of this whole other field to integrate your your like your Python scripts into a website and I really wanted to learn that so twer was kind of an exercise to learn web development self-funded or or have you raised Capital uh completely bootstrapped completely bootstrapped and is this just like what's your team size um well I have a part-time developer now uh on retainer in uh India okay and that's how much is that per month, 1500 oh that's right so I mean you really managed to keep costs low oh yeah yeah yeah I mean it's it's it's just me and him and and that's because with twer now has like multiple servers and um I I still don't enjoy or and can't really do what's called development Ops like Dev Ops which is server maintenance so he's really good at that got it okay and and fast forward us so again launched in 2010 you've got one employee you've totally boot dropped this yourself how much if you had to guess how much of your own money you've sunk into the business into two for how much would you guess of my own money uh is it significant or no I'd say no it's none zero you've just taken kind of cash flow from the business and that's how you pay developers and all that jazz yeah got it how many customers are you serving today q1 2017 about 100 okay 100 so can I do the math can I just take 100 yeah so Mr is what somewhere around 18 Grand yeah awesome and what is the um what talk to in terms of other unit economic so have you lost any customers with gross customer turn monthly yeah um it's still covers around 10% uh last couple months have actually been pretty good like 6 7% range um acquisition so that 18 Grand Mr has actually been relatively flat for the last year okay so that's something that in my not so much free time we just had a second daughter here at the Buckley House congratulations I remember that that's exciting yeah thank you um time is is not uh my friends these days so I have not put like real thought and effort into getting that Churn number down or or increasing acquisition because what two forgets right now is completely Word of Mouth organic I don't spend on AdWords I don't really do anything if you had more time and resources what does your gut tell you in terms of what would you do to try and drive that shurn down and make the product stick here um yeah so I I think the when people leave um there sometimes it is a quality problem or they're going after either foreign or say Just Say Non non- us domains that uh I don't have as good coverage on um or like they I think they also just kind of get confused um like you've identified some bugs Nathan which I do appreciate uh and that can turn some people off um so I think just being more diligent on uh like getting better testing into the app so so we don't push bugs um and uh and then continuing feature development and also just better product marketing I think often people um mostly because there there's there isn't great help resources on twer um are either using it wrong because again there's not great product marketing and not great support in the app itself um so improving that I think would reduce churn um ASW being much more engaged on newsletters and my blog posts and social media and stuff I just I just don't have the time right now to do that and uh and I'd really like for the community to get more active there's like 16,000 people who have registered in tw's lifetime like I said I got a hundred active customers in any given month but like 16,000 email addresses that are are inbounds you know these are like real...