How VisitorQueue CEO Nick Hollinger grew VisitorQueue to $1.2M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is nick hollinger with a company called visitor q he's the ceo and founder and really what they're focused on is a b2b sas company that have partnered recently with google analytics to identify the companies visiting a website they're bootstrapped currently works with 5 000 companies across the globe also the game day director of one of canada canada's most successful junior hockey teams nick you're ready to take us to the top let's do it all right so a visitor q what's the partnership with google look like and why is that unique to you uh the partnership really ties into their google analytics apis and allows us to gather information about uh from google analytics about the companies visiting another company's website allows us to to integrate easily with any website because most websites across the globe have uh google analytics attached to to their website uh already so getting set up is super easy uh and uh really adds a benefit for us you don't have to add any code to your website i mean this is basically an ipad just hit your website you do some back channels some data enrichment and figure out what company it is you got it yeah and then we provide that to uh b2b companies so they can follow up with the ones that don't convert okay so i'm on getlocker.com i am trying to close more uh founders to pay for my data an ip address hits me they don't sign up so i don't capture their email but you send me an email and say hey you just got a visit from ip address 193 615 611. it's company x how do i go to actually reaching out to them do you give me an email or what yeah we would provide you with firmographic information so uh a phone number that uh would be included in that uh so you could give them a cold call or we also provide the key contacts there so the key employees that you could say hey uh we would probably sell to the marketing director or uh someone in information so i want to follow up directly with them okay where are you getting your from a graphic data are you paying kind of full contact or discoverorg or what's what are your sources there uh full contact is our number one source there but we use another uh like most data is commodity at this point so we're pretty much sourcing it off of each other yep yeah i mean yeah the the secret about the space is basically everyone buys everyone else's data and then sometimes you have your own engineering team that adds a little bit of your own flavor but it's generally all the same correct yeah we do have a team that we work with an outsourced team that will go through and enrich any records and so on uh but generally uh most of it's coming from full contact for the firmware what's your full-time full-time team size today uh about eight full-time equivalent okay um that is six full-time and then a few contractors here there okay how many engineers uh that's three engineers and any quota carrying sales reps uh no most of our so our rpu is at a level where it doesn't really make sense to have an outbound team or what level is that uh 75 uh uh per month per month okay okay got it so you're going after mass market play not an enterprise everything's marketing driven everything's inbound yeah yeah uh okay interesting so 75 bucks a month now when did you launch the company uh so post revenue as of april 2018 uh started working on the original idea about june of 2017. between 2017 and your first dollar revenue how much did you sink into the mvp oh that was probably all of my money that went into that and burned a bit of money there but probably closer to 15 20 grand okay um i mean and so that was mostly your money or did you raise angel stuff early on no uh completely bootstrapped nothing outside of my my uh my finances or a personal guarantee that i put on a loan has gone into the company yeah that's interesting so i mean most people that's the hardest part right is getting the initial cash to get started so it sounds like you took a loan out from a bank and per personal guaranteed it uh no i was fresh out of school i had some cash that i'd saved up uh and put that into the company to get started i found a co-founder who had the technical piece that we needed so we could really do this thing uh incredibly cost effective uh and then once we started uh hitting some uh revenue uh and and finding those growth channels that we needed we went got a loan from what's in canada it's called the business development bank of canada uh and they do business loans for for smaller companies uh and take a personal guarantee on them uh but that was already after we had revenue to to kind of increase our marketing spend that loan how much was it for uh 45 grand okay 45k and and so okay so that's that's original story that's how you get some of your momentum going um how did you get your first customers where'd you find them uh first customers that was that's a bit i have a terrible memory but i'll try to i'll try to go back that far uh so not far it's only two years ago yeah i barely remember what i had for dinner last night um so the the first customers were mainly just us testing channels uh we used uh we used different uh google analytics uh sorry google adwords facebook uh all these different channels to actually um to actually you uh generate signups on our beta and then we also reached out to friends that we had within the industry and got a few customers what keyword early on worked really well for you or actually tell me like the real channel that the first couple customers came from uh so the first ones would have been google adwords for the most part we tested out a bunch in the in the beta uh that we had and we signed up about a thousand accounts in the beta so uh we used a number of different channels and for adwords it would be website visitor identification would be it would be a big one for us uh product hunt drove us a ton of different signups i i would recommend anyone launching if you need some uh if you need some people to test out your product definitely use product time when did you launch on product hunt uh that would have been december of 2017 i think i believe something along those lines yeah november december you got 86 up votes do you remember how many impressions the website got that day i don't to be honest i know that that to date has probably driven about 300 sign ups uh and those trickle in as they go uh but most of those would have been around the first week that we launched a product on yep and we say sign ups you mean trialing accounts or paid customers uh that's trialing accounts okay and how many paid customers are you working with now today uh currently 300 300 okay that's pretty healthy right so so how many i guess each month right so we just finished october out how many new trials did you have and then how many convert to paid typically yeah so we uh about 250 last month and then uh we added about 30 new customers last month like actually paying ones the big thing there is we don't see a our average conversion is about 45 days uh for for an account to convert uh so the ones that we're converting last month would have been sign ups in what is it that august uh late september at that point yeah so 300 customers at a 75 dollar rpoo puts you about 22 000 a month right now in revenue you got it yeah and that's up from what about a year ago so november of 2018 we're at about three grand in uh nmrr okay good so the growth is working what now you talk to us about your early channels google adwords what are your channels are working nicely today yeah so in the beginning we test out a bunch of different channels as i was saying like linkedin was in there but it the the cost for a free trial account just wasn't uh didn't make uh didn't make the cut for a lot of the accounts given our poo and our uh ltv what were you optimizing for what'd you want to get below uh so i that at that point we were looking at uh anywhere from uh i don't even know i don't remember it off right off the bat but and i could pull that number up but um what we know now is that uh we have uh a cack of about 500 uh and adwords plays plays nicely into that and so does facebook and our current channels um but linkedin was well above that 500 uh per month price so you need about you need about 10 trials you have a 10 conversion rate so to get one new customer you need 10 trials and if one new customer's cac is 500 bucks divided by 10 you're willing to spend about 10 bucks to get a new free trial is that right yeah that's about right yeah okay and where are you like last month did you spend the most money direct paid...