How Upsync CEO Brad Gilbert grew to $30K revenue and 100 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is brad gilbert he was born and raised in new jersey a graduate of amherst college he's the founder and former ceo of people productions a digital marketing agency located in boulder colorado in 1999 he spun off a related sas business called upsing to help their clients distribute track and control the digital content we were creating for them he saw or they were creating for them they sold people productions in 2017 and now solely he's now solely focused on running upsync a mobile sales enablement platform brad are you ready to take us to the top yes all right what does that mean what's the company doing how do you make money so uh we had clients come to us we as people productions and media digital media company we were creating lots of content for clients and we had one particular client a medical sales device company that we were creating numerous videos for and the marketing director said i i need a better way to distribute this content also to track the content to see who's using the content otherwise it just gets thrown out there and i have no idea what's being done with it so originally this was built for a client and at their height they had over 10 000 users over 20 000 assets it was in over 100 countries in 17 languages they're a multinational corporation a global uh 100 company fortune 100 company so fast forward today what does your current company do and how do you make money is it pure place ass so yeah so we i kept the intellectual property rights and then white labeled it in uh shortly in in the early aughts we provide a simple uh mobile distribution platform content management tracking force for small for any kind of companies that can be multi-level or smaller any size it was built for enterprise but it works just as well for a small company it's sort of the opposite of salesforce salesforce you have this whole you know huge you know you have to buy into the whole the whole thing this is a very simple we can get you online in less than a week and and so brad when sorry when customers are signing up for the platform give me a general sense of what they're paying you per month or per year what's an average um for under the 10 users it's uh 25 a month and then it drops down to 19 and then 16 and then it's custom when they get up start getting up into the high numbers 500 a thousand that's good so again i don't want to go down every cohort what's the average customer pay you per month would you say um right now for the smaller ones it's 25 dollars per user per month okay got it so that's a fair average across your entire customer base uh now yes right now yes it's mostly small under 50. yeah and now do you own the code base or are you still white labeling no we own the code base okay so when did that happen when did you launch the company officially um let's see probably 2001 okay 2001 and have you bootstrapped the company or did you decide to raise capital uh i bootstrapped it we tried some capital but it was too much effort and time it was just easier to bootstrap it yeah yeah hey your bet your best you know fundraising are your customers dollars right that's what they say what are you speaking of customers what have you scaled to today over the past 17 years how many customers are now using the platform um now we're down to under 10 probably because we it was originally built i mean when at one point it almost took over my entire company when we had the one main client that was using had 10 000 users they had also 15 apps that were built on top of this it's also a data collection tool so and so sorry brad just to be clear across that cus so 10 customers but i imagine each of them have like there are seats under those customers how many total paid seats are on your platform today today we're probably at uh under 100 maybe okay sorry we're rebuilding okay just to be i want to get this i want to understand this first so 100 seats at 25 bucks a pop you're doing about 2500 bucks a month right now is that right uh yeah okay so i mean walk me through i mean this has been gone for 17 years uh it's it's it's basically you're back at ground floor zero why i mean why not move on and start something new why not why not move on it why not move i mean it's if you know if company's 17 years old and it's still only you know doing two three five grand a month that's a signal to you that there maybe is not a market for it well no it's it's good for smaller users i mean at one point it almost took over my entire i had a bigger much bigger company people productions was a you know we had several million dollars in revenue a year and i switched a lot of resources over to upsync but after a while it reached a point where i was spending my own money not so much not venture capital money and realize that really i didn't want to take down my bigger company just to keep the smaller one going but the the upsync is profitable and as long as it's profitable there's no reason not to keep it going well actually if everyone ever used that logic if you had a dollar or revenue and it profited a dollar a month you'd still spend 40 hours a week building it and you and i both know that doesn't work so why are you using that as your barometer as long as it's profit i'm going to keep spending all my time on it well it's it's it's a virtual company at this point i don't have comp i don't no longer have employees these are all my employees are all freelancers that are working in various places so you're the only full-time yes okay but you must be doing something else so to support yourself i mean 2 500 bucks a month doesn't go a long way well i'm basically retired i sold a very successful media company and did very well over the years so i'm this is just uh something to keep me keep please give me doing something when i'm semi-retired so so you you couldn't just go to the mediterranean coast get a yacht and just float around the rest of your life you had to just jump back in and get your hands dirty on something well it's just fun it's actually i mean we put over over three million dollars into the tool so it's a very cool fun yeah but you can't tell me that bro that makes me that makes me so sick to my stomach because it's doing 2400 bucks a month you put 3 million bucks in it's doing 2500 bucks a month that's not a good that's not a good setup but that three million most of it came from one dedicated client that you know that they helped they really paid for most of the build of the thing but why is it so it's declining like very fast why is it that's what i'm trying to figure out is why is it declining so fast well it was primarily built for one client and then took it i then i spent uh you know half a million my own money trying to take it public and you know raise capital maybe one year that was in the early thousands and then after a while i realized you know i'm burning through my money i don't need to do this i have enough money to retire this is just it's nice to have this you know it's a great tool why throw it away we put all this into it as long as it's continuing to work and keep doing it we just added another customer this week and where you know we have some other prospects online so i'm right now i'm trying to rebuild it because i have a lot of free time since i'm basically work you know retired so what do you think you know it's 2500 bucks a month today i mean how fast is it growing per month how big do you think you can grow this over the next six months um i don't know we've got a client it's it's when clients come on board they come on usually with one division and a division may be 15 or 20 people but generally if they have a sales force it's they have other divisions 500 maybe a thousand we try to get from one division we started in one division of our original company you know they only had maybe 50 users went to 300 then to 500 and a thousand then 5 000 and 10 000. so it can grow quickly if you get inside a company that knows how to use it they'll it grows inside the company you know i get that brad but today you're at 100 seats across all your customers that's what i'm trying to figure out is why don't you have a thousand seat account yet especially since you've already done that it sounds like you already had a customer that was paying you three million pages three million bucks like you lost those customers already so what makes you think you're gonna get them back because there's still a lot of people that are using paper there's a lot of people who have not moved into the digital realm there's still a lot of people who are using brochures and because this product works offline there's a lot of people out in the field who could really use a product that you know can be used without having internet connections yeah always yeah but how i mean brad no offense but i mean there are companies that are in this space you know significantly larger than this way better funded i mean what they're going to find those people faster than they're going to find you i mean how are you going to beat those people on distribution i'm no longer i've i've it's we still get a lot of leads coming over the transom over our website we still get leads every week a couple leads every week we follow up on them and if they are if it works out it works out but as long as it's continuing to be in positive revenue why should i kill it off because your opportunity cost on your time we all die at some point and this company company's doing 2500 bucks a month when you could be doing something much more impactful potentially that's why well nathan i also have a house in british columbia and i snowboard all winter and this you know i have i have the freedom to do whatever i want but it's fun to keep you know in in something that i've you know that i built and still and works really well and it's fun to use so this is this is kind of like a playground for you it's not something you're looking to scale to a million bucks a month or anything like that it's fun for you to tinker around with and then snowboard the rest of the time yeah you could just you could just say that by the way yeah and you know i spent 30 years 30 plus years running a digital media company so i've had more than my fair share of work experience yeah i mean the reason i'm pushing you brad so hard on this with a guy with your wisdom and your experience i think there's a big big issue in tech world and in startup world everyone always wants to start a new idea and try and grow it nobody puts parameters in place for one to kill something right and this is like the rationale you just used i think is just dangerous for especially people that haven't had your success right if their logic is if it's profitable if it's making a dollar a month i want to keep doing it i've seen so many smart smart young people stuck in shitty ideas with a ton of funding because it still makes money and it's just it saddens me well i'm i'm also when i i have now have a house in canada and i'm joining they have a startup thing in the town that i'm there so i'm offering my services there to you know as a mentor i've sort of reached the mentor stage at this point you know i've made enough money in my life that i can do what i want but now i would like to help others you know after i have 30 years of experience in you know building and running a business that can help others so i help others in startups which like others help me give me an example of something like when you're mentoring someone starting a company in kind of digital media what's a piece of advice that you'd give them and the reason i'm asking this is because this space is changing so fast i wonder if things you used you know 10 20 30 whenever you used them years ago to build your company are they still relevant can they still be executed on today yeah and a lot of things most people i'm really from the business side i was also the cfo of the company ceo cfo and a lot of people you know generally you meet on the creative side they're on the creative side or they're developers and they all have great ideas or they're very creative but most of them don't have strong business backgrounds so they need people who who can say to them okay is this going to make money what's the what are the numbers here let me see the numbers i'm very good with spreadsheets and and finances so i can look at a business and say well yeah you're gonna is this gonna make money over time and where's the holes here in your in your you know profitability because business is still business you know i i understand that uh but i mean are you typically working with people in the media space and when you talk about is this gonna be profitable you're talking about okay you're selling human time at 100 bucks an hour uh but you're paying 50 bucks an hour a 50 margin per hour doesn't work i mean like what are you actually looking at metrics wise i'm looking at p l's and balance sheets and stuff so one of the reasons i got out of doing upsync is and really putting more money in it particularly in a place like boulder colorado the competition for developers is incredibly intense that everybody every developer thinks they want to be working on the next you know google they want to be on the next hot product and you have to it's very hard to keep a team of developers together good developers because they all want to be working you know they all want equity and they all want to have the next hot thing so i really i want to get out of the development business how do you build a product especially a sas product without understanding how to motivate developers well i built i had a team for a while you know a long time for you know we spent a lot of time and money built the thing and now it's just you know fine-tuning it works it's a very stable platform i mean it ran 10 000 users on it you know with over 20 000 assets and they run they ran apps on top of it 15 apps on top of it cost analysis tools quote builders things they built it was it was built for enterprise so now to be scaled down to smaller companies we don't have to do a lot of work on it yeah but sure you do i mean they're a company okay so let's look at just quotes like for small businesses i mean i can name off the top of my head 10 companies competing heavily in that space freshbooks is probably the leading one and quickbooks is maybe after that you're telling me you feel like you can compete with them without having a dev team that's constantly pushing the envelope adding new stuff adding more integrations things like that we built it was a very this is a very robust tool when you have over 10 000 users that's not that many though by the way that's not a ton of users relative to freshbooks and quickbooks and yeah yeah but i'm not trying to play in that in that league you just told me quotes for smb well i'm saying you could you we can we have things that are already built that can be easily adapted for a small business there are a lot of small business small to medium-sized business out there who are not heavily in the digital space and have not yet converted to mobile and stuff and then this is a simple what we look at as a simple fast easy solution not you know you know a sales force where you're going to have to move everything into there no i get that brad but how will they f okay so i'm a small business that haven't moved hasn't moved digital maybe i'm running a restaurant i say you know what all my friends are talking about these amazing things online i need to do this thing in the cloud i google search small business quickly create a quote or an invoice why are they going to find you instead of a fresh books or quickbooks or many of these other tools competing for the same business well they're we're in the sales enablement space not so much in the content you know relationship spaces sales enablement if they're looking to go mobile and they want to have you know what started this was really the ipad when the ipad came on and then all of a sudden all these people have this incredible tool they could use and they already had it it was easy just to add it to their you know list of uh things they could use yeah but brad i mean come on you know there are huge companies competing for all these things with huge developer teams today what i heard you just tell me was you feel like developers are hard to keep together but you don't need developers to keep your platform competitive that's what i heard you say did i mishear you the guy who built it is a freelancer now and he's come back to work on it he likes working on it and it turns out a lot of the stuff that he learned he's used in other companies so and look i'm not looking to make millions of dollars anymore i've i've had my i've worked ran a business a big business for 30 plus years now it's just you know it's something to do and it works and it's fun why not why kill it off when it still works and it's pretty elegant so you're just you're just filling your time that's all you want to just just kind of fill your time and snowboard when you can i chase powder all over north america yes all right all right brad let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book i don't read business books what's your last book that you read oh i read tons of fiction i'm more of a i was an english major in college yeah so what's the what's the last book that you read i just finished reading calypso david sedaris's uh stories uh the other day number two i read the business you know new york times every day the business section every day i keep in touch the local business journals in town here just to you know see what's going on and stuff but number two is there a ceo you're following or studying or really respect no i'm not chasing business anymore i've watched enough you don't understand the question is simply is there anyone you respect what you're basically when you say no to that answer what i hear is there you feel like you you've learned everything about the space there's no ceos that you're learning from that that's what i hear no i read i just thought i followed you know i read the business section i read the stuff articles that are interesting to me you know there's a lot of bit going on in the cannabis space in colorado obviously and in and in canada they're just in october it's becoming legal so is there an is there any ceo that you think is really doing a great job in that space ushering it in um that you mentor no i haven't okay number three number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business besides your own building your business uh i don't know i'm not big in this in the into using twitter and linkedin and all those other things no i said to build your business not not consumer social media apps but do you use any tools to build up sync it's basically the web you know just using um you know it's just how do you how do you manage how do you manage your product cycle with the developer do you use asana or jira or monday or base camp or i let them deal with it they don't okay so no number four how many hours of sleep to get every night eight or ten eight at least and what's your situation married single kiddos i'm single i have a son in college as a sophomore in college and i'm living a beautiful place boulder colorado and i have a house in canada and i like to snowboard it is it is beautiful out there i i do love boulder and brad how old are you today i am 59 59 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew what was my 21 year old what was that question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um um man you're gonna get older take advantage of everything when you can guys there you have it take advantage of everything when you can he had some success early on in life now he's enjoying tearing up the powder doing this side project called upsync that he still enjoys it's about 2500 bucks per month has a couple freelancers building it really hoping to help smbs that haven't found the web yet uh when they do find the web uh jump on his platform i guess but he's enjoying it it's a testing ground for him and meanwhile he's just enjoying life brad thank you for taking us to the top