How Tribeboost CEO Kevin Strasser grew Tribeboost to $180K revenue and 300 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is Kevin Strasser he's the founder and CEO of tribe boost the first company to offer Twitter audience growth as a service service Kevin are you ready to take us to the top yes sir all right this is a kind of a controversial space we have bots popping up everywhere we have people turning api's access on and off where do you guys fall in this whole equation we try to do things the right way so no BOTS these are all real people we are not over aggressive with what we do basically ideas try to do you would do yourself if you had all day long to try to grow your audience on Twitter and that's kind of been the idea from the get-go although Twitter may or may not see it that way depending on you know who's working there it seems like the the rules kind of shift a little bit like the weather and what's the revenue model you pure-play SAS company or what yes okay so what's the average customer pay per month would you say yeah a lot of what we do is we have our own software but a lot of what we do is also the service of putting that into place so maybe not your typical SAS where everything is automated okay well would you consider yourself an agency though or is there real software here there is a real software yeah okay everything it was all running on our own software okay so what's the average customer pay per month would you say like Dell TV or no that that's that's over the lifetime i mean per month would it like what's your right revenue model average promote well our our standard rates are 148 per month although we do have agency clients that I'll have 20 30 40 50 clients on our platform than the price you know those prices are quite quite a bit different okay and how many and how many customers are on the platform today a few hundred kind of probably but yeah a couple hundred product between 300 400 in general it varies a lot what do you mean it varies a lot Barry's a lot like well actually lately we lost actually due to all this box stuff not related to us but we had a large marketing client where you doing a lot of musicians and bands and they got written about some article maybe in the New York Times or something for something they were doing related YouTube I think so they just are getting all out of social media I guess just out of fear of the identity of the company so so what is your turn today that cost us all in one fell swoop like 60 clients yeah what is your turn today turn is it usually is between about 10 and between 10 and 12 for cinema okay that's a logo turner a revenue churn that's a revenue revenue churn okay so that's obviously super high it means you're more than cycling through your whole customer base ever or your whole revenue base every single year how do you drive that churn down and is it possible in this kind of space I don't know it's just it's been very chaotic to be honest so we are we have been focusing more on lately on LinkedIn which is a little bit less chaotic and more on the content side as opposed to just audience growth so we can't we are definitely in a transition right now from hockey stick growth for many many years the last year we've definitely gone not only sideways but also actually down a bit okay and what is revenue what's revenue today revenue is right now low five figures a month between Fri around 12 K a month down from the high was probably around 25 k months so we're quite a bit down from I was born okay so twelve can month three hundred customers that's about 40 you know each customer pays about 40 bucks per month on that and you said about a year ago you're at doing about 20 25 grand per month yep okay and most that is just because again the bought stuff in the news lately that's what's driven the decline it's probably a multitude of things took my foot off the marketing pedal a bit to build out some new services because I could see around the corner that the whole audience birthing was a very dangerous place to be it's hard to know from day to day what Twitter is okay what you're doing and you know it's just the dangers of having your business on somebody else's platform which is between I knew going into this so you know none of this is a shock but so yeah we're definitely in an adjustment period right now looking to focus on some different things have you bootstrapped the company or race capital yeah it's all bootstrap okay and and so why not just get out I mean why not flash sell it move on to your next idea I'd love to sell it but I don't know if I could sell it in an honest way what do you mean because it is it is it is such a chaotic thing right now I don't know what that who would want to be burdened with it to be honest with you yeah because you could buy the business and then in a couple months you might not even be able to do a lot of things your labradoodle ApS rules keep on changing they just shut down a bunch of things recently that didn't really impact what we do but you know impacts a lot of other people so so when the marketing engine was cranking what were you spending to acquire a customer we never really did a lot of ads to be honest with you we did in the beginning a lot of Google AdWords not a lot of money five hundred or thousand a month okay so again to get a new $40 a month customer what were you paying for that usually a few dollars a couple okay very little yeah yeah but in general in general we grew mostly by word-of-mouth and repeat business in content marketing okay well let me ask you so if you could if you could spend as little as a couple bucks to acquire a $40 a month customer why would you ever stop that it stopped working that when we were doing it with Google AdWords that's about what we were it was costing us and probably really not at a couple of bucks but at that point a lot of the clients were a lot more than a forty dollar options see average goes down because a lot of our clients are marketing agencies that give us thousands of dollars of revenue per month for one client so that kind of tends to bring the average down but when you're getting a brand new individual client it's a lot more than $40 a month okay yes yes put all this on a timeline for me when did you launch 2012 2012 okay so you've been doing this a while what's the team size team is always been between three and ten people right now it's about four people four people okay and where's everybody based we're all over the place we have a database guy in Europe developer and boss and graphic designer in the Philippines so we're all over okay great so I mean predict what happens over the next 12 months to the company in you what do you do um focusing more on probably services and moving more toward the agency model less out of the SAS model is probably we're going and also focusing more on the content curation and content delivery side and less the audience side just because it's it's just not a safe place to be right now all right very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one Kevin what is your favorite business book whoo oh man they're a lot zero to one was great though I like that one a lot number two is their CEO you're following or studying right now I can't think of any minute take you there follow ah different people like Larry Kim a lot it's a friend of mine that I think he's in particular what he does on social media and Twitter's really smart number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business besides your own actually should have prepared that seven time favorite online tool for billing not really I'm not for billing for building yeah yeah building up not a tool but really just a smart content marketing think with thinking very heavily with an SEO focus number four how many hours of sleep to get every night six to seven okay and what's your situation married single kids married with two kids two kiddos okay and how old are you they are no you oh how old am i I just turned 50 I'm old fifty not old last question what do you is your 20 year old self new you can do it have confidence guys there you have it you can do it have confidence coming from Kevin against launched tribe boost back in 2012 guru revenue up to about 25 grand per month and then obviously with all the bots stuff popping up and all the issues right now in the macro trends related to you know you know political campaigns and things like that on social media they've lost a bunch of revenue down to about 12 grand per month right now in revenues that's 300 customers paying about 40 bucks a month ten percent revenue turn per month he's looking at you know moving more towards the agency model to help get away from some of this as best he can team of four based in a bunch of remote locations Kevin thank you for taking us to the top thanks thanks and I appreciate it good talk is here