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Verblio is a platform that connects businesses with freelance writers, offering a wide range of content creation services. Clients can submit writing requests and choose from a pool of skilled writers to produce high-quality blog posts, articles, and other written content. The platform aims to streamline the content creation process and help businesses enhance their online presence.
Last updated
In 2024, Verblio's revenue reached $150.6M. The company previously reported $102.7M in 2023. Since its launch in 2011, Verblio has shown consistent revenue growth.
Verblio is a bootstrapped Other Agency startup. Founded in 2011, Verblio has grown to $150.6M in revenue without raising any venture capital or outside funding.
As a self-funded Other Agency SaaS company, Verblio has built its business with no outside investment.
| Year | Round | Amount | Valuation | % Sold | Source |
|---|
CEO
Steve Pockross brings more than 25 years of startup, Fortune 500, and nonprofit experience to his role at Verblio. Steve previously served as VP of Business Development and Strategy for Marketplace + SaaS pioneer LiveOps, as well as leadership roles at Tendril, Western Union, and HSBC. Steve received his MBA from Kellogg and his MA from Wesleyan University.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What's your age? | 51 |
| Favorite online tool? | - |
| Favorite book? | - |
| Favorite CEO? | - |
| Advice for 20 year old self | - |
Verblio serves 1K customers.
Verblio employs approximately 286 people as of 2026, down from 323 in 2023. It serves 1K customers that rely on its solutions.
Verblio generates an estimated $150.6M in annual revenue.
Verblio was founded by Steve Pockross.
The CEO of Verblio is Steve Pockross.
Verblio is bootstrapped and has not raised outside funding.
Verblio has 286 employees.
Verblio is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, United States.
Introduction hello everyone my guest today is steve pogross he's building a great company it's marketplace plus sas for content creation it's called verbalio.com he brings more than 25 years of experience to startup fortune 500 a non-profit to his role years of experience there to his role at verbalio he previously served as vp of this development strategy for a marketplace plus sas pioneer called live ops as well as leadership roles at tendril west junior and hsbc he received his mba from kellogg and has an m.a from wesleyan university steve you ready to taste the top ready all right so live ops og sass plus marketplace stuff happening here what's verbally working on uh verbally is working a lot we're uh we're riding a pretty big content wave as it becomes a more and more powerful tool for marketing uh and we're we've got i think we're going to create 80 000 pieces of unique content this year with 3 000 writers working on our slash platform and uh yeah we keep trying to focus on our mission which is high quality content at scale for every niche that's interesting okay so you think we'll do 3k writers on the platform this year who put together 80k pieces what were those same numbers for last year uh so the same numbers for last year were around 60 000 pieces of content and how many writers uh so about the same we actually uh it's interesting we're actually going down in writers part of my uh fine tuning philosophy of how to get more out of your marketplace is to actually use us the right size pool so i we started the company with ten thousand we're down to three thousand and i hope to be using 1000 active writers by the end because i think it's the right balance of getting the power of scalability and quality or scalability out of your marketplace without sacrificing quality of course now what do you i mean i imagine a key measure that you measure is on average what is the writer going to earn on verbalio what is that we do you know we don't as much as you think and it's because every writer comes with a very different goal some of them are looking for full-time work we actually had our first writer make a hundred thousand dollars last year on the verbio platform which oh nice incredibly proud of uh and then we have some that are working for side money that are just doing their side hustle and their goal is probably five to ten thousand a year and that's probably our average writer so how much time did you pay out in 2020 to writers so we paid about half of what we are we paid out a flat half so our company brought in 6 million or 6.1 million last year and so 3 million went to freelancers and does that work at scale can you keep sort of taking sort of 50 percent there if you put 10 million through platform you'll pay out five completely scaled it is it is built to scale okay so it's scaling so but less less writers so higher quality more pieces of content means each writer's average income via verbalio should sort of increase if you keep up with that trend exactly and the amount of pieces that they write for every client so they get better at better at their work and that's how we see it more they get paid the more quality our clients get and it's a beautiful virtuous cycle and so why a business that's coming in and they're looking for you know scaling their content creation it makes sense when they want to use a marketplace they don't have a fixed expense right or full-time salary on their balance sheet and p l but why why your marketplace over another marketplace there's a lot of writing marketplaces why do they pick you there are so we put a lot in so we our goal is to be the primary the premium marketplace in the business for content creation and we look at the business in some pretty distinct ways uh we have really focused on what i was just talking about quality is we look at that level of how do you get more quality out of your marketplace at multiple levels so some of that is just how do you get your writers more excited more engaged the more engaged the writer is the better they're going to perform and some of it is the selection process for how they get matched to clients and some of it is our content creation platform which we try to make as friendly as possible because as much as the writing quality is really important content creation is messy it takes a lot of co-creation back and forth so we have we have a client doing 1200 unique pieces of content per month on our platform they need to give edits on every single one of them send them to different uh subscriptions that they have within their profile and make sure all of that gets out on time and so uh Currently serving 1020 customers i don't want to downplay the the importance of technology in this whole marketplace has that customer tried to acquire the whole business uh not yet but but maybe i'll ask interesting okay and how many businesses could at least call it you know or actually today right how many customers do you have businesses putting at least one piece of conduct your platform come up 1030 one third okay got it so about the same number actually as we last booked about a year ago you had about a thousand then too that's about right okay okay interesting and um are we you know there are customers that also churn right so the ones that churn what content strategy were they trying to execute that just didn't work with sort of an outsourced writing team so yeah there's two different buckets so the reason that we've grown so much we grow 30 last year in a down economy i think the last talk to you in april when things were not looking quite that bright so i'm glad to come back to that story with a better tale uh and the ones that so we they were all replaced with much larger we've been focusing on moving up market and work with much larger clientele so our average customer now spends eight hundred dollars a month um and versus i think last time we talked to you was clearly must have been a third less five five hundred yeah um and so that's been a big difference in our business we the churn on those accounts that are basically we consider enterprise a thousand dollars and above turn at two percent per month our largest for our largest i don't know how many i think we're somewhere between five to seven clients at twenty thousand a month those don't churn they have zero percent and then the lower marketplace that you brought up the question for they turn around nine i think eight to nine percent now it's really gone down from i think 10 to 12 last time i talked to you um and they're just it's a different business it's a subscription month-to-month there's no long-term some people have short-term needs for um so there's a variety of reasons one is the clients could have short-term needs for content they could see it for a few months another is they could have not done it before a lot of them are agencies that went in for one client and their contract went away and some of them we might not be a good fit for um and i don't know why but i think uh they think they should try again and so what does that mean in terms of mrr 10 Monthly recurring revenue 20 customers 800 bucks a pop you're doing what 800 grand a month in revenue these days yeah we're crossing 7.50 and we should be at 8 30 8 40 within the next two months that's great and then yeah during code so at the beginning of cover we chatted i think you said you're at the six million run rate so you think you finished last year somewhere around like uh eight million run rate is that right so we we finished with six million in revenue and a run rate of around seven plus and when we've had a pretty big growth first four months of the year yeah interesting where's that growth coming from the growth is coming from large customers that are looking at content as at scale they really have a need um to do well they're thinking of content as competitive advantage what i mean by that jargon is that a lot of them are building their businesses based on content so the first wave when we first talked a couple years ago it was small businesses trying to keep five blogs upload wave two was digital agencies that went up market we were solving a big pain point for them how do you manage content do it by vertical and do it at scale and this next wave is really coming from really large clients that are thinking how do you build the business if you have a company like verbally or powering you where you can do quality content at scale for any niche which is a pretty it's kind of the the the fuel of the modern marketing engines and a lot of people are thinking more creatively about how to use it now have you changed your team dynamic at all last time i spoke with 22 people or 20 or 17 people i believe how many people today yeah we're 31 now and we have seven open wrecks and we should end the year at 40. we're on uh we don't know what are they doing what are you hiring for sales people engineers it is super balanced across the company Bootstrapped so because we're bootstrapped as you know which is one of your favorite topics as well is that you know you the the dynamic is you invest behind the curve you uh you invest six months after you really needed that person and so we basically are adding incrementally to all parts of the business as we need them probably our biggest connection how many engineers today we have seven engineers today okay and how many any sales reps that carry quota we have uh we had our first uh we have our first three well we had one sales rep for four years and now we have three and our first executive vp of sales that's a big hire yeah so most of our focus is on driving marketing brand driving seo and living the content dream of the if you if you build it people will come to you how are you i mean it's interesting to ask content guy how he's thinking about seo are you thinking about seo from a content perspective or like programmatic seo where you're sort of auto launching pages comparison pages things like that uh it's interesting so our next big phase will be productizing content so moving a lot more into the second part that you said so so far we've really been following what the market demand is knowing that we had something really valuable and the next phase is how do we take some of these ideas like seo refreshes how do you revamp pages at scale and turn those into products um yeah there's a lot of them video falls into that bucket too that we still have a lot of work to do to build out our video company that we bought a couple years ago tell me about that video company uh so we bought a company called automagical which is very similar to uh to um sorry been out of it for a while so uh similar to other players in the market that are trying to take existing content and turn them into into videos by using ai the the twist that we put on it is i think that the the main goal of those of that video technology should be to dramatically reduce the cost of creating the video as opposed to fine-tuning the quality so we then put our writers on uh once the video comes it has a great draft that the ai created and i think that's about 50 there and then we have our writers go in and finish the story to have a much higher level product at a lower cost interesting very cool now talking about capital needs um you have to come around here were you the founder of the company or did you come in after founding i was hired by the founders about four and a half years ago got it and are the founders still active in the company are they left they are both out of the company and uh they're both on the board so how how do you guys think about yeah you don't need to think about this really because you're not you're not raising capital but if you were to put a valuation on the company how would you think about it uh so unfortunately there's not as many comps as i would like in the space i think marketplace and sas has really taken off and i appreciate your support and uh and fostering the terminology to get there uh and so i think you know you uh there's a variety like you have your marketplace options like you've got your up works that they have their valuations you have your sas companies and then you have your services companies that are clearly much more towards the one-to-one revenue and nowhere near as high as the uh you know five to 10 to 15 of the rest of them so i think it's still yet to be defined of how much value is here and i think it's up to the industry to prove out what we can do that's different than anybody else and how it's a more powerful platform before we get there so right now it's basically comps and conversations but i i hope it gets a lot more towards the five plus than it does towards the one if someone offered you guys 100 million dollars today about 11x multiple do you take it yeah yeah there you go direct answer we like that on the show steve will not know let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh it's currently alchemy the dart art the dark art and curious science of creating magic in brands business and life by rory sutherland he was ready for that one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um you know i love david cancel he was just on my podcast and i find him deeply inspiring in the way he thinks about brand and the things about people and all of the intangibles that build a great business well hey let's give your podcast some love here why as a sas plus marketplace brand why'd you launch a podcast and what's it called uh the podcast is called yes and marketing based on the improv idea that uh marketing ideas can come great marketing ideas can come from anywhere and there are no best practices in marketing so i talked to inspired leaders and inspired marketers with the idea of we're going to learn from from any of them uh with the idea of like the focus of our company is really a lot more on building new marketing capability than it is on you know the the basic idea of delivering the service and people can find that on itunes i assume please everywhere i hope you like it say it again the title yes in marketing yes and marketing very cool number three what's your favorite online tool for building verbalio you know i know this is boring but i'm going to say slack and slack because god it's so fundamental to how we created a great um remote culture during this meantime everyone's on all times of day on all sorts of channels just creating water cooler talk in a way that would have never been possible before um so i think i think about it much more from cultural than i do from process driven kind of productivity number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night oh man last year uh so uh i aim for six to eight but coronavirus has not been very helpful i have the whole corona somnia thing that i know many of us are suffering through yeah number for our situation married single kiddos married two kids 10 and 13 boys living in colorado gives lots of outdoor time and fun things to do boulder colorado how are you steve i am 48. 48. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh man every step along i was thinking about my career every step along the way that i did something that i thought would be good for my resume versus what i wanted to do was a mistake so i worked for large companies three giant banks all of them went terribly horrible terribly wrong it's just not a cultural fit so i wish i would do what i felt like doing which i did most of my career in uh just all of my career guys big moments happening at verbalio even during clovid last year they run a marketplace of writers their first writer earned more than a hundred thousand dollars which is great over 3 000 writers on the platform will create about 80 000 pieces of content this year that's coming from 10 020 businesses paying about eight hundred dollars per month to use verbio.com they're breaking they just broke the 750 thousand dollar a month threshold which is called a eight nine million dollar run rate that's up about thirty percent year over year they pay over fifty percent of that nine million revenue to their writers support 4.5 million 5 million ish they're doing this all of their team at 33 31 out there in boulder colorado steve thanks for taking us to the top nathan great to see you again one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan laca.com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya
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2024 Revenue
$150.6M(Est.)
Customers
1K
Funding
$0
Avg ACV
$147.6K
Team
286
Founded
2011
| Year | Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Verblio Hit $150.6m revenue in October 2024 | Estimated |
| 2023 | Verblio Hit $102.7m revenue in November 2023 | Estimated |
| 2022 | Verblio Hit $111.9m revenue in November 2022 | |
| 2021 | Verblio Hit $10m revenue in November 2021 | |
| 2021 | Verblio Hit $10m revenue in October 2021 | |
| 2020 | Verblio Hit $6m revenue in April 2020 | |
| 2018 | Verblio Hit $3.1m revenue in November 2018 | |
| 2011 | Launched with $0 revenue |
| Year | Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Reached 286 employees (October 2024) | |
| 2023 | Reached 323 employees (November 2023) | |
| 2023 | Reached 323 employees (September 2023) | |
| 2023 | Reached 323 employees (July 2023) | |
| 2023 | Reached 31 employees (July 2023) | |
| 2023 | Reached 336 employees (January 2023) | |
| 2023 | Reached 336 employees (January 2023) | |
| 2022 | Reached 347 employees (November 2022) | |
| 2022 | Reached 349 employees (January 2022) | |
| 2022 | Reached 347 employees (January 2022) | |
| 2021 | Reached 31 employees (November 2021) | |
| 2021 | Reached 31 employees (October 2021) | |
| 2021 | Reached 339 employees (August 2021) | |
| 2021 | Reached 22 employees (February 2021) | |
| 2021 | Reached 333 employees (January 2021) | |
| 2020 | Reached 17 employees (November 2020) | |
| 2020 | Reached 17 employees (April 2020) | |
| 2018 | Reached 12 employees (November 2018) |
you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is steve pacros he has brings 20 plus years of startup fortune 500 and nonprofit experience to his role as ceo at a company called verblio he's also served in leadership roles at live ops tendril western union and many other companies he received his mba from kellogg's school of business and his m.a from wesleyan university stevie you're ready to take us to the top i'm excited to be back all right yeah thanks for coming back on if people missed your first episode just quick overview what does verblio do verbalio is a content creation platform we provide content through our network of three thousand us us-based writers and we do that through our sas platform that's focused on how to deliver content at scale yep and you were on a couple months ago and shared that uh again you're swimming about a thousand customers pay on average maybe 500 bucks a month or 6 000 acv so people can kind of back in obviously to five or six million in arr how's the virus impacting you guys oh cool so first of all i was on a couple years ago just to make sure that went by really fast yeah uh versus months and um so so a couple things one is we're all going everyone's going through tough times we have a unique view um i can go through customer accounts and all the data pieces that are kind of important to you to the show um but we have a unique view because we do have around a thousand clients on our platform and we see what's happening to them so the big trends for us is that we're seeing uh it's a packed in kind of different constituents in different ways our larger clients who are mostly agencies and large publishers of quality content are mostly doing fine if not increasing the amount of content as they see this is a pretty one of the few feasible channels in this age our smaller clients and agencies that work with the verticals most directly impacted are definitely bleeding and going down significantly so we've seen a drop of about 10 of them so far uh we reach out to all of them and the stories are pretty crushing um and so we're kind of in between those two trends right now verb leo itself is about even um in terms of in terms of cash flow monthly cash flow it's first as far as monthly clash monthly cash flow i feel pretty fortunate to be in that position and i know that many aren't yeah okay so when you just help me understand in my audience know what 10 means so you've seen 10 percent revenue churn over the past 30 days from this particular small business cohort so we've seen about a 10 drop in our small businesses so our smallest accounts that are maybe uh that are averaging more towards the 100 to 200 accounts versus the much larger and our average is still around 500 so uh so the the nominal number of small businesses our accounts have dropped by 10 yep are you so when i was preparing for this interview i could see a use case where you know you help people find writers to write more content i could see a scenario where people are now doubling down on digital because they're there there is no in person really anymore right now are you seeing some of your larger accounts you know double and triple expansion revenue over the past 30 60 days so not yet i think everyone's kind of in shock mode we're still in this uh you know right now we're on april 3rd just so everyone knows because every week is so important at this juncture everything could change in two weeks i think right now everybody is mostly trying to do a reset and an applause so most of uh most of the revenue that we did lose turned into paused revenue so our paused revenue went up by 50 in three weeks so they're not officially cancelled um but i think what's going to happen uh and i'll give insights into i've been talking as many industry leaders as possible i think there is going to be a lot more towards the trend of content marketing digital marketing are two of the few avenues that still remain relevant and it's one of the few ways that you can market in a way that is that fits the right tone and the appropriate tone for the times that we're in which is you don't have to be aggressive you prepare your your story for when people are looking for it as opposed to when they're not ready for it so when you say your paused revenue how much mr right now is in your paused bucket 65 000 okay 65 out of a total of what like 294 300 something like that 500. uh around 460 to 470 a month yeah okay interesting and how when will those account like have you set up a structure of when those accounts will unpause or is it indefinitely for now so we have a limit on the number of paused pause modes you can have one of the reactions that we had to covet is to expand the number of months that a customer could pause it used to be three months and now we're up to four and we're looking at all options as far as we want to make sure that our clients have enough time to come back to us for when they're ready oh so you already had this pause function built in as part of your pricing plan pre-virus and now you're just editing the length of that plan to help handle virus effects actually yes we did but we only launched it last july so we're just learning about it now and we feel pretty fortunate that we got that in before this happened yeah interesting okay what about i mean what about people are you making any any cuts or anything like that to you know stay at breakeven so we are we had a pretty aggressive hiring plan we grew by 50 47 last year with pretty much the same team supporting it and some additional contractors that went aboard and so we actually had a hiring plan moving towards doubling the team from 12 to 24 in a very short period of time what we did was we moved a lot of those to contract higher so three of the key hires got moved to contractors but we still brought on everybody so we're done with hiring but i don't plan to change that or to let anybody go so how many people are full time now 12 plus three contractors so we have 17 or 18 full-time hires right now and seven so we're 23 uh with with the additional full-time contractors too i see and how many of those total are engineers of those total sticks are engineers okay and any do you use kind of outbound sales or any quota carrying reps we don't we only have an inbound sales lead we just brought on a fractional vp of sales that was one of the one of the positions that we moved to contractor who's figuring out our messaging right now and kind of how do we move to outbound in the right appropriate way at this time okay none of them carry quota though no one carries quota yeah yet yet yes yeah very good all right and talk to me a little bit more about how you've capitalized the business obviously you were not the original founder and you went into how that kind of changed in the last episode so we won't rehash that but are you raising additional capital or has your vc backers are they saying hey steve do you need more uh we are fully bootstrapped so we have no we have no capital much less additional capital at our hands and so i think that that comes with pros and cons uh in this crisis it is a particularly good time to be a bootstrap company because we had to learn to live lean for a really long time uh and so um we the the one access to capital that i'm looking at i'm waiting for a call right now is from the payment protection loan program um which the government made available we're all trying to figure out and how that can give us an extra level of assuredness to to keep the staff that we have for as long as humanly possible so the the math behind that is essentially taking your total payroll expenses excluding 1099s between february of 2019 and january of 2020 and then dividing by 12 to get it monthly and then multiplying by 2.5 right so whenever you get that number obviously you then felt the forms and things did you already actually submit with your local bank or are you still waiting on instructions from your bank so first of all i learned thank you so much for sending out proactively guidance to your audience and how to do it i learned more from you than i did from the government on how to do this thanks i am in this very interesting point where i am currently looking at my phone and waiting for my banker to call me to do the application over the phone because she personally has 800 applications she's trying to submit on her laptop today and didn't know as of yesterday what the process would be jesus which bank are you with we're with bok financial they've done a great job of just immediately following up in uh in a way that i think is going to create a hell of a week for those guys yeah i mean so i like the spirit of the federal government of get this money out as quick as possible it's kind of like the mentality we take at software founders like ship it even if it's not perfect but like for context last year all the sba when you add up all the loans done across the country was 25 billion the federal government is basically asking that same network now to distribute 350 billion dollars right in a week or two week span it's a nightmare it's gonna be crazy and uh i do like their approach of doing more sooner and knowing that they're going to accept mistakes that they're going to make versus the opposite of making sure they got it perfect i do have a funny do you have time for them yeah you can edit this give me a funny story in 1999 i was living in brazil and i had to apply for a cell phone and at the time uh brazilians like state-run phone company was a total disaster and so they would give you a giant phone and the way they activated it is you walked around with the phone for three weeks and they could call you at any time to activate and if you didn't answer it you never got your phone activated they might never call back and so this is reminding me of walking around with my cell phone in brazil for three for three weeks waiting for the phone to call that's crazy it would that you when you ran your calculations i'm gonna do some guessing here i mean two three like what check are you expecting if it gets approved i think it should be around a half a million dollars it could it depends on how they categorize our freelance writers if they include those as well um then it would be uh possibly double that but i expect them not to so i think it'd be around a half a million if they if they can do the formula that they're saying that they're providing for companies and that the pot doesn't run you know if it runs out i'd be they're gonna have to manage it in some way yeah there's not gonna be enough in there for the first round um they're either gonna have to reduce the amount or find some other way to funnel through or offer a heck of a lot more so yeah are you saying are you saying there's 350 million of a billion available and it's going to run out quickly yes yeah yeah and i totally agree i mean if you take that number and just assume that each company only gets a hundred grand that's only 3.5 million companies okay there's 30 million small businesses in the u.s right so it's definitely going to run out um and so what is your let's just let's fast forward a week or two weeks let's assume that you do get 500 000 is your intent to then spend that to cover payroll for the next eight weeks or will you use it to make other investments so we run pretty we run super lean so which means our cash account we don't try to bolster as well we try to invest as much as we can moving forward already so i think my first account will be just the the extra assuredness that we don't have to make any changes and then we'll think about strategically can we even add more once the dust settles but i think the the point of the loan is to make companies feel more confident of keeping their exact payroll not making any dramatic changes and that's exactly what i hope it does for us and phase one in phase two i think it becomes more interesting which is can we expand and bring on more people yeah so again this changing guys we're recording this friday april 3rd this this information is changing regularly but as of now any money that steve if he gets 500 does not spend on like payroll or mortgage utilities or rent he has to essentially pay back and the terms on that again currently is a two-year loan at a at a one percent it was point five yesterday it's now a one percent interest rate which is still pretty cheap money by the way but i think most companies steve are gonna end up spending that money in the eight weeks to cover payroll i think so as well yeah and i actually just learned that from you is what the current rate is as well because yesterday i was looking i didn't even know yeah it's changing it's it's i mean it's literally this is one of those things where you know the government doesn't like to usually move this fast because they want to have everything like other ducks in line but they realize if they don't get this money out like you can't wait eight weeks you got to get it out so yeah as of as of this week we just saw the 6.6 million people registering for uh for unemployment uh so we're kind of in that state of shock i'd be i'll be interested to know where we're at by the time that you we even release this podcast yeah we'll see we'll get it out we'll get out quickly so we're gonna follow your lead in case they want to apply as well um listen anything else that you want to touch on tough choices you have you've had to make over the past 30 days relative to you know responding to the virus i think responding to the virus is something we thought about really deeply we want to make sure that we nailed our tone and provided our clients and our audience something really valuable so we've thought about this in a few ways is which is what can we reach out to everybody with so one of the first things we offered was we uh we reached out in bulk to all of our clients and offered them a guide for how to change your content tone in the modern age is it's so important to get this right right now you just have to lead with empathy and there's it's all about them right now it's not about you and we also offer 10 free topics which we charge 100 for for our top seo topic creation team to redo your topics or offer new topics and we're kind of thinking about our next level of things that we can offer as well and then we adjusted the pause the amount of time that companies could take off too so i think that was one of the things the other thought thing we thought about is what other assets do we have to offer and so i started a new video series on linkedin um that we're sharing out where i'm just interviewing marketing leaders agencies agency coaches on how to guide what are what do they expect to see from the crisis and then what are their best recommendations we're trying to make these really short like five minute videos that people can see three times a week and so you can just find that on your linkedin you can find it on my linkedin and hopefully find it valuable very good we'll link to that in the show notes for sure steve let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book cool so i gave you my favorite business book last time which was switch but i'm going to tell you my favorite current one which is the power of little ideas by david robertson and it's about it really appeals to a company might about like mine which is innovation doesn't have to come from a blue ocean strategy where you have to disrupt the whole world in classic startup style but you can incrementally build out what you've already done uh in a way that's much more similar to apple love that number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh i'm learning a lot from mark oregon right now who is uh the founder of eloqua and in uh influiative who i spend a lot of time uh talking to and also learning from number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh so uh so i think slack is the one that everyone's going to say but i just think it's so powerful and can be used in so many interesting and creative ways that i i can't say enough about it especially in this virtual time our favorite channel right now is quarantine tips where everybody is sharing their tips for staying sane or fun things that they found on the channel we just did a poll on we found out that the average alcohol intake had increased by 42 percent in the bay area since this all started and seeing if you were above average or median average so funny all right number four how many hours i sleep to eat every night last time i said seven now i'm saying seven good hours and now i'm saying nine terrible hours fair enough and what's your situation married single kids married with two boys they're now nine and 12. and how old are you and i am 47 this time 47 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew it's the same thing which was i moved to san francisco in 1996 and i joined non-profits and i thought it'd probably be a better time to join the startup movement guys there you have it verbalio again surviving the virus they've seen 46 thousand dollars in paused mrr over the past 30 to 60 days out of their total kind of 460 000 in mrr so again about 6 million run rate right now helping teams scale their content better with their massive army of writers he's applied to ppp we'll see what happens there in the meantime steve thanks for taking us to the top always a pleasure nathan thanks you guys know i fight like heck to get these data points for you from these ceos that rarely do these kinds of shows if you want more shows like this make sure you subscribe right now we're trying to get 10 000 youtube subscribers by the end of september here 2019 and it would mean the world to me if you clicked now to subscribe additionally i've got two more great interviews for you if you want more data points from the world's leading sas ceos click and watch one of them right now
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