How VisitorQueue CEO Nick Hollinger grew 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 uh adwords for sure google yeah and are we talking like a grand 10 grand uh so last month would have been probably around seven thousand okay on so okay that's a significant portion that caught 20-ish percent of your revenue are you raising capital to do more of that uh so not currently so uh we're pretty much self we've almost broken even uh we almost broke even last month for the first time uh as close as we've gotten last was last month the the plan moving forward and we just got some financing through clearbank are you familiar with them you always talk about uh venture debt and they're a form of venture debt so we just tried a loan with them that just came through about a week ago now for 14 000 and then we're going to test that out and see kind of how it how it uh plays with our cash flow and then look to probably raise some more venture debt as we go nothing significant though what's the fee they charge on the 14 000 uh it's a six percent fee it's actually weird it's a 12.5 fee with a 6.5 uh cashback that you get once you've fully uh spent the the the full 14 grand over what period of time uh when do we have to spend the money yeah like let's say you get the 14k a week ago right when do you have to pay the 14 they model i think based off percent of your ad spend or percentage uh they take revenue so 10 top line revenue every month or every sorry every transaction from stripe actually so they're pretty much taking it daily at this point we're scheduled to pay that back probably within six months based off cash flow projections um but we're scheduled to spend that within the first probably three months or so where that they we could then go to them and look for more of a top-up in that regard yeah so just to be clear right because a lot of people mess this up with clear bank just because of how they market it which is fine but a 12.5 fee and a 6.5 cashback when it's paid back on a six-month term as an effective apr of closer to 25 right um now when you if you i'm not i need to understand more about how the cash back works but it sounds like how quickly you have to spend that money to get the cash back uh before we actually uh hit our fault before we paid it back early so essentially we have six months to uh pay it back we're scheduled to use all that cash within the first three got it so they want you to use the cash in the first three and if you do that or if you use it any if you use up all the cash basically they don't want you to under they don't want to have capital committed to you that you then don't utilize right so correct you've already paid them back and you have this capital sitting on their card yeah yeah yeah so so they want you to spend the full 14 grand in the six months the scheduled payback period and if you do that basically your interest goes down by 600 points exactly they give you they give you a six percent interest rate and effectively apr is what you would look at 12 give or take there yeah something like that and the and the re i guess the the downside there is that is about half of your current mrr so if you wanted a bigger i mean do you think they could give you a hundred thousand dollar loan uh they capped us at 30 grand uh for their options but they would be taking 20 off top line at that point in regards to how quickly they're recovering uh yeah so we were we were more comfortable with the 10 to start to see how it affects our cash flow uh and if there is anything else that was hidden in there that we didn't uh find in regards to how they're lending uh but what we found was there isn't many lenders that for the capital we were looking for at uh our mrr usually it's about 500 in arr or more that's where we could start going to these other lenders especially within canada uh but uh below 500 we didn't find many but clearbank was uh one of them that was willing at that rate yeah yeah i mean if someone offered you like espresso doesn't go down this far tamiya hercules cibc all these guys you're too small for them but if you got a term loan let's say someone give you 50 000 you could pay it back over three years at an effective rate of like call it 16 or 17 percent um how would you think about that in terms of the clear bank deal uh like you're you're talking like if we went and raised like a went to an angel and got them to pretty much loan us the 50 grand rather than taking an equity stake yeah well it doesn't matter who you get it from but you you're let's say you get 50 000 and the way you pay it back is on a three-year term at something like an effective interest rate of 18 so it's not of your revenue that's an 18 on whatever capital is outstanding like a mortgage almost up there yeah yeah uh yeah we would be open to something like that if any of your listeners are out there are looking at uh different uh are looking at lending we would definitely be definitely reach out because we're interested in hearing what our offer would 50k ish be the right amount you think or you want less or more uh probably more after we figure out uh what clearbank was able to do for us because we're still testing right like uh we seven grand was an increase seven grand in ad spend for uh google adwords was an increase from five the month before and still seeing how an increase because if do they require that you spend the 14 grand on adwords is that part of the deal uh part of it is uh it's not just adwords but they do give you a pretty much a virtual credit card which can be put towards specific uh channels can you increase your salary no i still pay myself like garbage can you hire two more engineers using clear bank money not clear bank money no they they do allow you to submit an invoice but i believe those are it's more for if those if they were to accept that invoice that you submitted uh they would use it towards uh they would use it toward they would want it to be towards a marketing gym yeah yeah are you built on stripe yeah interesting okay cool um talk to me about economics right so gross revenue trend over the past 12 months uh so i have gross rep i have net uh for the last 12 months was about 12 uh 12 uh we haven't cracked that 100 mark but given that we're within small to medium business we uh were comfortable but still looking at ways to uh optimize so so so net revenue churn annually is 12 or retention the inverse about 88 percent you got it that's great do you have meaningful expansion revenue or no uh no not on a not on a monthly basis we're not seeing that that number where we want to the the uh the leverage isn't there at this point but we're looking at different ways to to optimize that and are you profitable right now are burning cash uh so net burn last month was probably two or three grand okay uh so we're we're happy with that yeah we're getting there uh but that probably means that i need to go find some more money to spend right if i want to keep growing up yeah i like that very good all right so doing uh doing uh doing about 22 grand a month 270 000 bucks in terms of ar run rate today burning caught three grand six folks on the team sounds healthy what what's the next test you're gonna run uh more money towards the channels we know uh work and that's part of the clear bank test we're doing right now uh and after that 14 grand is gone uh look at additional ways that we can optimize those channels uh but also spend more towards them yeah all right let's wrap up here nick with the famous five number one favorite business book uh i'm gonna be typical and go hard thing about hard things number two you must listen to the show a lot oh a lot yeah do you like it is there anything you wish i asked that i don't um i'm actually curious why you're asking the finance question now like what payment platform they're using is that is that a play you have going on you don't have to discuss we'll definitely chat afterwards let's just say this let's just say this um i think arr is a real asset uh and i think that it should be valued like an asset and i think you can lend against that as an asset and i think right now most the options in the marketplace are taking advantage of entrepreneurs and they're way too expensive yeah i like that okay yeah we'll talk after yeah all right number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh my aunt actually from get around she's not to see uh ceo anymore she just stepped down but uh jessica scorpio very good uh number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh i'm gonna say google analytics i'm a big metrics nerd and i love to see the attribution side so google analytics is definitely my favorite number four how many hours of sleep you get every night uh healthy seven seven okay good and uh what's your situation married single kids uh when is this episode airing in about six or six to twelve months from now six to 12 months so definitely it's going to be a fiance at that point okay um and uh no kids at all very cool well we'll we'll make sure we do actually we don't want to spoil that that thing we'll make sure you release the sixth grade yeah when's that happening when's the when's the big problem within the month within the month oh exciting nick that's very exciting is she are they kind of in the entrepreneurial world as well uh no she's a dental hygienist oh good some diversity that's good yeah absolutely how old are you uh 24. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh so four years ago uh don't take yourself so seriously we're all floating on a rock through space and none of it matters anyway so so don't take yourself so seriously guys there you have it visitorq.com helping you understand which ip addresses are hitting your website so you can do follow-up and kind of account based marketing doing a call at twenty-two thousand dollars per month right now on revenue up from three grand a month just a year ago so call 650 percent year over year growth obviously easy to multiply small numbers but they're scaling nicely 300 customers paying on average 75 per month they have not raised any money burning caught two three grand a month six folks on the team 12 gross revenue churn no expansion for 88 net revenue retention payback period on their cac of about 500 bucks is just seven months so healthy economics all around nick thanks for taking us to the top thanks david these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want to do it more so if you want to get more of this stuff make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other ceo interviews right now