How Visably CEO Chris Dickey grew Visably to $630.8K revenue with a 3 person team in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is chris dickey he's building a company called visibly a smarter search strategy is what he's focused on trying to help brands identify their footprint in search all right chris you're ready to take us to the top absolutely so so i think when most people think about this space they probably use a tool like ahrefs or sort of sem rush help us understand the different that you know your different vision yeah absolutely so i think those are fantastic tools i use them as well there's no reason you know you shouldn't be using either of those platforms however it's important to recognize that what we're interested in is understanding what are all the potential touch points where a customer may find a brand and search and where those platforms fall short is they focus exclusively on how your how your website or your own domain is performing which is just like one of many ways that a customer may find you there's like this massive kind of map of a customer journey where they might click on um a review and they that might be their very first touch point it might be an ad maybe um an e-commerce website say you're selling shoes or something like that someone like actually clicks on an amazon link and amazon's recommending your product i think the thing that i come from it you know from the perspective of a pr agency and you know we are always leveraging third-party endorsements to help promote our clients products and services and you know that's essentially the first page of search is this really multi-channel mashup of different stuff like reviews and e-commerce and ads and and quora and questions and you know and you know the thing about and you know nadh refs or or amaz or sem rush is that they they only tell you how your website is performing so for a page like you know i'd like to throw out the term best fleece jackets like it's a it has decent search volume it's obviously a very interested customer and buying a fleece jacket if you look if you look up that keyword and you look at all the links on that page what you'll find is that there's not a single manufacturer link being elevated by google [Music] and so if you want any presence on that page you either have to buy it which is pretty expensive or you have to earn it you have to earn some kind of media review or something like that so you know there's there's literally zero opportunity for an scm or sorry um an seo uh on that page yet you know if so sorry just to cut you off real quick so how are you helping a brand earn that so what we're doing is we're providing the intelligence on where does your brand exist currently who's talking about your brand and then what channel is it so you know i started this this kind of quest with like a simple question how do you where does my brand exist in search like that question was not being answered like that solution was not out there um you can find out your website you can find out your advertising you couldn't just figure out like how within this serp how are people finding my brand so visibly actually looks at the content behind every single link on the page and identifies yes or no is your brand of content present on that page and then number two what we're doing is we're segmenting all the results by common channels that kind of mapped different marketing departments so we're identifying all the pr hits on the page we're identifying all the brand owned hits on the page we're also identifying all the e-commerce that's on the page and so once you can do that and you get this like nice map of where your brand is and where it's not and it's also channel specific you can have your pr team like take a look at those and say oh yeah we could definitely get you there or your ecommerce team says oh like there's a merchandising opportunity there which we're under leveraging so you could see like the fleece jacket right if you're the manufacturer you've already got a presence you already spend money on ads you see yourself listed in the three paid ads on the page there's there's three e-commerce like amazon thing is listed something else from google stores listed and you can basically see in the metadata if your fleece jacket is in any of those and then lastly maybe there's three articles one from nat geo one from outdooradventurer.com and another one that real press about it and maybe you don't have any press exposure so your pr team will then go try and get organic press placements so that you place there yeah exactly so it's also like a list building tool so number one i describe it it's like you know we're a listening platform where we're listening we're figuring out who's talking about you where you exist number two we're a list building tool we help you segment and organize and extract clean lists from from you know from their search results you know what visibly will do for you more than tell you where you exist it also tells you where you don't exist which is what i call it like it's like your blind spots where are these is that you weren't even didn't even know you weren't leveraging that you could if you just had that information so i think we get the product now help me understand how you monetize so what are customers paying on average per month for this so we are pre-revenue uh we're we're in beta we've been developing the product for about a year and a half uh we launched the the product um the beta product earlier this month in fact so july so it's it's free anybody can come to the website sign up for a free account use it as much as they look how many free signups do you have um we are around a thousand and how did you get those it's not easy your first hundred we're about three weeks in um so i feel fine with that um you know it's it's tough you know we started with our own networks you know i'm i'm an agency owner so i know a lot of marketing directors and a lot of other agencies out there and kind of dangled in front of them um we've also worked with um several b2b outlets like like pr week pr news uh pr daily we're gonna be start doing some more work with the seo community pretty soon with search engine land um search engine journal um things like that um we're chatting about search engine visibility strategy on podcasts we're talk telling people you know as an agency owner like this was not an idea that i just came up with one day it was this started four years ago with my pr clients saying how do we have more impactful pr hits and we we recognize at that point the most impactful thing we could do for our clients the pr team was win more placements in search atop a search and the places that their websites couldn't rank and um we kind of developed a practice around it and then you know the idea was like how the heck do we scale this we need software um and that's when i had that question saying where does my brand exist in search how do we audit these these these search engines so how chris how much did you spend this is always like the challenging part right when you're spinning a piece of software out of an agency is how much of your agency profits do you dedicate to building the mvp of the software it's not cheap to build good software so how did you make that decision and how much have you spent to date on the software totally different companies um agency operates on its own books and its own llc um visibly is its own thing we have investors for that um how much did you raise we raised 700 000 um upfront and we we received a grant from zeta wyoming to kick it off um for 50 000 so you could say we put in then i've i put in another i don't say 50 of my own money so i'd say to date we've we've infused around 800 000 and we haven't spent all that yet but chris that must make you super nervous right like what if you launch this and like no one wants it it's a i think i think every startup has that question in mind right like it's entirely possible that someone's like oh i don't care about that but can't you hedge that by getting like pre-sales to some degree yeah we just haven't built the product yet you know that we can sell yet um and i i feel pretty confident we you know once you have this data there's so much you can do with it like for instance i'll give you another example of how we can apply this data is um cost per click people are spending a lot of money on um on paid campaigns and on google ads if you had a measurement if you had a measure stick telling you what's the likelihood that someone's going to find you organically versus like not find you organically um that would that would inform your cost per click strategy so we can do that now we can we can we can tell you like what's your organic visibility on any page not you're not your website your organic visibility so across every single all these links are talking about you are not talking about you um and and if you have strong organic visibility already um among you know whatever how many keywords like thousands of keywords um you can perhaps shift your cost per click strategy toward keywords you have less organic visibility on or less of a chance to actually um get that customer yep so help me understand the team size today right so how many people have been working on just visibly we have um oh man well a bunch of advisors but um we have we have four engineers um kind of working from everywhere we're from we have two backing guys we have one front end guy and we have one dude doing machine learning and um ai um that's because we're we're we're categorizing and classifying all these websites that's how we identify what's an earned media hit versus an e-commerce hit and we've cataloged you know millions of websites at this point um and then we have two marketing guys uh myself included i guess you could say i'm i'm a marketing guy and uh that's that's it we're a skinny little startup so so how i mean the reason i'm asking is because you always want to like sort of back into okay our current like total expenses per month with no revenue is x we need to get to that amount to get to profitability like as quick as possible so obviously you want to try and minimize expenses before you have too much you know before you have revenue um what have you been able to get i mean what's what are you burning right now per month we're doing like 10 grand a month or like 100 grand a month honestly i think i think we're doing like 30 to 40 grand a month um which is which is pretty pretty good um i i think we could be spending a lot more than that um i'm not paying myself right now you know um and you know we have a we have a one of our engineers is basically working um for for equity only so i think we're cutting as many is possible at this stage in the game you know it is all about getting to a paid product which we expect will be out sometime this fall um at which point you know we we hope that we can kind of develop our our freemium user base to a level that some of the people will see the value in what we're doing and want to jump on to a more premium level chris do you have that much time you obviously have to look at your cash in the bank today and project that you're going to burn 40k every month between now and the fall i mean how much buffer have you given yourself what if it takes you a little bit longer than fall to actually get to like real paid revenue do you have enough buffer in the bank we should be good until spring 2021 okay so you have fall winter and sort of spring to really start cranking on revenue and then you have to make drastic changes if you can't get meaningful revenue by spring 2021 well i i wouldn't say drastic i mean i think we'll we'll we'll have to go out and raise more money you know that's you know like we did a seed round and you know the next we'd either do a c2 or series a um but you know all of us would love to keep as financially independent as possible yeah how did you convince i mean you convinced someone to believe in you guys early on that's how you were able to raise 700 grand so so who did you convince and how did you convince them did you just point to your agency that you built and said look i've done it before i know it's a problem i do it all my agency clients yeah you know part of it is like you know product market fit is always the question that everyone's talking about at this point and in many ways as an agency we we establish market product market fit before i even knew that this was going to be a product i just know like we needed this thing and our and our clients loved it it was the most valuable thing we were doing for our clients it was the no no other pr agencies in the space were talking about how to win more pr hits and search um there they had this incredible impact we could report on them really well so i i recognized that you know if we built this thing and we presented it in the right light there was a real real thirst for it and then i realized that this could help a whole lot of other industries as well it's not just a pr thing it's a it's an econ thing um it's it's a it's a digital marketing thing um it could be you know an sem thing um and so you know it's a multi-channel way of managing a brand and search and so i'm like okay like there's something cool here i can't believe no one's done it um you know we we kind of we kind of did our diligence up front we won that early grant so we had very little skin in the game you know from from day one we developed an mvp that had some patents pending on it um and then we took that to investors and they and they all understood what we were trying to accomplish um we were lucky that um we just we only have three angels involved um at this point so it's a really tight group of people the people who i think um believe in me and what i can do with this thing and um so yeah that's that's where we are and i think i'm just fortunate that we had a network that i could uh pitch to and would uh accept you know what we were trying to accomplish i'm not i'm not the serial founder you know i think a lot of people at the stage there like went to some you know a-list mba school and they have deep yeah you have cut but yeah i mean but look just because i mean you have what counts which is you have an agency i mean very successful statistics come out of agencies because you already know the problem and you already have a built-in customer base those should be your first paying customers as you're just upselling on top of professional services you're upselling the software subscription so i mean we'll see what happens i want to have an update interview with you in spring 2021 and see how it's going but for now we're out of time let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um i've been reading a customer success um which is all about how to generate a really great um um sas uh solutions are the books the books just called customer success i believe it is yeah it's obviously seo uh optimized yeah number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i'm i'm a big fan of the guys from buzzsumo um and you know the original team that was there and i i just loved how they built it from the ground up with almost no investment and uh i i love everything about that company number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company besides visibly oh man um there's a bunch of kind of chrome plugins which i'm a big fan of one that i use quite often is uh keywords everywhere um and it's just a really great way to kind of keep your mind thinking about keywords all you know while you're searching number four how many hours of sleep to get every night probably six okay that's not bad and what's your situation married single kids i got i'm married and i have kids and i got little kids how many uh i got one i got one four-year-old um and it's yeah this pandemic's been a hoot i can i can imagine and how old are you chris 39 39 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew just to be yourself you know don't don't don't try to be someone that you want to be or you think you should be or you think other people want you to be be your authentic self guys there you have it visibly.com spinning it out of his agency they raise 700 grand to build this tool helps brands understand what their footprint looks like on search across multiple assets pr paid organic you know you know a review rating on amazon whatever it is they help you understand that there are pre-revenue today they've got about six people on the team four engineers two marketers looking to launch here in the next couple of months called fall 2020 burning about 30 to 40 grand per month right now as they look to drive new free signups about a thousand free sign up so far in the first three weeks they've been accepting it so nice early traction we'll see what happens chris thanks for taking us to the top thanks david