How Upcontent CEO Scott Rogerson grew to $1.5M revenue and 250 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Scott Rogerson he spun out a b2b SAS a technology company up content from a content marketing as a service company Scott's focusing up content central in the formation of lasting relationships with customers and partners he is a lead scout helping to find team priorities to best serve the current and future needs of their customers right Scott are you ready to take us to the top I am this is great ok so I want to talk about the spin on first but I want understand your current role so you're not CEO what walk me through what your role is today I am CEO founder as well it's it's a you know what CEO means that a company in our stage is a lot as I say so lead scout what does that mean lead scout is we're you know we're discovering the best fit for up content in terms of customers partners both agency wise and technology wise and we kind of fill a very critical role but a small role in the overall marketing journey okay and so you spun the company out in what year about a year and a half ago okay so call early 2017 and why do this spin out we kind of felt that we were growing in two different directions right we had a services company that was doing well cashflow positive continuing to grow we liked what that model was looking like we created up content to solve an internal problem for us originally and then started to see more traction more people interested in using it and actually to be frank a larger problem that needed to be solved and that could only be solved by focusing full attention on it and that's when we decided to spin out so tell us what the company does and how you make money yeah so up content focuses on building trust and deepening relationships between individuals and their audiences whether that's an internal audience of employees external audiences cost current customers prospective customers and we do that by helping you not talk about yourself but show the insight that you have in a certain industry so content curation that is a process that people do often manually either it's siloed across organizations so they're spending on average 10 11 hours a week per person finding reading and then hopefully doing something with those articles and we found that there were three main problems they're finding the articles we have our own crawler that goes out and finds that information on average finding about 40% more using the same criteria than your leading search engine because we're looking at blog chuckles industry trade publications as well not just the macro publishers we then help those individuals collaborate inside of the tool leave notes for each other process through workflows identify hey this article is great for email this one's great for our website and then distribute and that's where a lot of the scouting that you mentioned comes in we finding those technology partners whether it be HootSuite or buffer or sorry I sorry I don't mean to call you up but just be clear so if ima if I'm a company like I mean is it like Pepsi or something yeah I might use you I'm confused so I would use you to curate things about Pepsi related to Pepsi or ingredients and then if I want to send out like a blog post that someone else wrote a third party about Pepsi ingredients I could email that to my list yeah that's certainly a piece of it it's less of the brand listening site often that we see our customers use and more around the themes and the areas that they want to be seen as knowledgeable in so one of the things that Pepsi is a more difficult one it's more b2c user-generated content tends to be more powerful there we focus mostly on the b2b side particularly professional services organizations who have deep expertise in certain areas accountants lawyers taxes those are those are beautiful areas for us health care education where I don't need to just understand yeah you have classrooms and you have professors but what are you all about when I need to know what you're all about the best way for me to start learning that is not by reading your own content but reading what you're reading and that helps me understand your perspective and then I will move into reading and it's a sat if your place s company right what what's the average poster paying per month so it's a huge range as you would expect we've got our contracted values annual contract values of 2500 up to 15,000 a year depending on what you're using how often you're using it how big your team is and how many connections you're setting it up just to say just to save us time no from going on every qohor though I mean what would you say an average is three granny or five grand year probably in that range for sure I'd say 3500 year and growing in terms of the larger customers that we're starting to bring on you're moving upstream correct all right and we're yeah I'd say in terms of total customers so we've got about 250 paying customers it's a freemium model as well we still learning a lot and collecting a lot of data off of those customers so monthly active users is couple thousand again we've only been out into the market for a little over a year now yeah that's great look 250 folks at that price well you just told me of 3500 bucks per year I mean I think that puts you at what like 70 grand a month or about 870 grand a year in terms a run rate is that accurate yeah that's certainly where we're going I wouldn't say we're there now when we first launched we were starting at much lower customers to understand what our fit was so we do still have a number of 10 or $15 a month customers and looking at that 3500 those were you know annual contract values as well okay fair enough so what it what was last month's monthly recurring rabbit if it's not so we're right around 9 K or so okay across the board okay guys okay so that that average you gave me earlier was was very I mean that's like where you're going is 3500 right that's average of if you look at the contracts we've been bringing on in the last 30 days or so that's the average contract value that we're bringing on yes we have a fairly low churn rate as you would expect hello sub one percent a month in terms of and that's a logo turner revenue term per month that's revenue sure okay and net or gross that's gross gross okay great and then um so look 9,000 bucks a month 250 customers that puts it about each customer paying about 36 bucks a month right now sub 1 percent revenue term per month walk me through growth rates so a year ago when you spun it out did it have any revenue no it was an internal tool so we had to spend the first I'd say eight months at least translating it from an internal tool with hotkeys and us figuring how to use the crawler into something that was commercially viable to the end-user and we've been spending the another six months making it viable to the larger team and the enterprise user have your ace capital or bootstrapped we're in the process of our first raise right now hopefully when when we when audiences hear this podcast will be past that point and growing the team how much are you raising a little under a million okay and how'd you come up with a number so it's looking at kind of what we need to get ourselves to focus on the long term and long term for us right now is 12 months of focus without having to worry about monthly revenue growth and looking at some of the larger opportunities that we have through our partners and really activating and supporting them in selling our product that's where scale is going to come from for up content okay and what what I mean is convertible note you're doing or equity its equity it is equity okay so what I mean what valuation are you targeting you know two and a half pre money is the goal okay that's not that's on look I mean right now it's tricky cuz you have such little revenue you're really still selling a vision not a revenue multiple that's that's absolutely right it's all about steam and grit and where we're going we do have some great partners who have given us that not of we're going to sell your product on your behalf that obviously has not happened yet right what that is what the funding is being used for what's the team says today right now it's to use myself and a full stack developer who's focusing on that aspect so having a few more hands wouldn't hurt as well hundred percent equity no I do not have a hundred percent we have other team member and we did spin out so we have some individuals who are equity holders from the managed services company who are also equity holders and up content as they hope to incubate the idea with us and that's deserving you got more than fifty percent right around there right around okay but are you it like are you in control you're driving yes yes I would say that I'm driving with maybe it's not necessarily objectively if you look at the numbers of Scott can just make whatever decision he wants and cram it down people's throats which would be the goal anyway but I think there's faith and comfort from the other equity holders given what we did on the services side that we know where we're going and it was what's your CAC today what are you paying to acquire customers it's it's fairly low almost non-existent a couple dollars I would say maybe a dollar fifty per customer on this on the lower end on the upper end of you include time I'd say we're still under our fifty to a hundred dollars to them yeah and and when you are spending actual dot beside your time where are you spending that money most of it's more of your standard inbound content marketing we have dabbled we have an integration with Wix and we're doing some digital advertising for that is that's an easier market for us to target we're still learning right at this stage of who our best customer is where we want to target a lot of experimentation is going on and now we have hopefully with this new capital the Machine put in place to really start scaling from here we've learned a lot over the last year and where are you guys base we're all in Pittsburgh good old Pittsburgh so you have to come out sometime it's a great spa great talent great place to grow a business I've heard great things about it often what to make that happen very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book the hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz it's a good one number two is there a CEO you're falling or studying Scott you Joel from buffer is one of my favorites you just came out with a great blog post recently they've been the most transparent and seeing them move up and down it's been great to stay number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company oh that's a good one we are intercom users tried-and-true we've enjoyed utilizing that to help on the customer support side I believe customer experience and customer service is the PR and marketing for us and we can start to grow with that foundation how many hours is he breaking every night how many hours of sleep yeah we have two little ones as well so I'm gonna try at six to seven is the goal goals are rarely met consistently so I say you know we're trying to get around that point my average is probably at six six okay good and to kiddos and you keep saying we so assume you're married yes okay married two kids in how old are you 33 33 last question why he was your 20 year old self new you know what entrepreneurship really meant it was never necessarily the vision had the strategic plan to do that it's been a lot of fun and I think understanding that when you have the will there's a way to get things done is something that you don't necessarily learn when you're 20 guys there you have it from Scott part of an agency for many years then in 2017 spun out up content just now recently turning on revenue have about 250 customers paying 36 bucks a month so doing about 9 grand per month in revenue churn is healthy sub 1 percent revenue churn per month that's on a gross basis spending anywhere between caught 50 and 100 bucks in terms of fully diluted kak that includes his time with his team of two people based in Pittsburgh getting about a three month payback period there again on that kak currently raising out a million bucks at a 2.5 million dollar pre-money valuation Scott thank you so much for taking us to the top thanks so much great conversation appreciate it