How Upsync CEO Brad Gilbert grew Upsync 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...