How Wavve CEO Baird Hall grew Wavve to $1.4M revenue and 9K customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is baird hall he's building out many different companies but most importantly the tech entrepreneurs co-founded a three bootstrap sas companies designed to help podcasters and video creators to get more region engagement on social media as a founding partner and low-fi mentors he's co-founded wave subtitle and duplicate all right bear you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it nathan thanks for having me so so what came first it's i mean it sounds like you're trying to help you said podcaster specific and video creators specifically did you start out start out as a podcaster no we fell into it we actually tried to build back in 2015 we tried to build a social audio network it was think of like reddit based on audio so like these forums and threads all based on audio messages and it was a failed startup we worked on it for two years tried to raise money really did all the things incorrectly um and at the end of that project we had this little internal tool that took a lot of these audio clips from this startup that didn't work out and shared them on social media we used it as an internal marketing tool so we actually built it internally use it ourselves and when that company folded we started selling it and that was january 2017 and we've been running with that ever since so 2017 and i'm assuming you're talking about wave wavv co yep yep yeah that's our um audio sharing tool okay and so the first i guess the first user was you but the first sale was what in 2017 yep january 2017 that's when we launched kind of version one and started getting our first sales on the door and you're selling direct to podcast hosts that want to take the audio clips out and put them on social no it's directly to the podcasters themselves so they use this independent of their podcast host the podcaster signs up uploads their audio content and can clip it choose animations images and really make it exactly look exactly the way they want it for instagram facebook wherever they're trying to promote their podcast so i think podcast trailers is kind of a good um one-liner for it one of the things i always struggle with with this is if you look at like consumption of video content on these social networks especially on mobile devices a very large i don't know the action or but a very large percent actually happens on mute which means you have to have a very compelling visual in the first two seconds to get people to actually unmute otherwise these clips are totally useless how do you approach that the first thing we did was provide a lot of customization so people can use images the best thing to do is put a headshot of somebody of the guest ideally usually for these for interview style podcast and make the visuals look really good really sharp animations but the big key was having automated transcriptions and captions so that even if it's on mute whatever the person is saying identifying multiple speakers and having the words show up as the clips playing uh was really key so we got that in um and people been using them and um you know it's a lot of podcasters that don't have an audience they're really trying to build it so they're trying to find really unique ways to stand out and um you know get people checking out their podcast for the first time so that's kind of our core uh core audience there and how do you make sure that that doesn't kill you and from cost perspective right if i mean if i take one of my 15-minute episodes you want to transcribe it i pay rev 1.50 to transcribe you know you know each minute essentially if you're doing this for free as part of your tool i could see this adding up as a massive cost center for you um it's not bad because we only transcribe the clips themselves which are usually pretty short so while that podcast episode is 15 30 minutes we're the promotional clips we usually recommend being anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes so um the transcription cost it's really gotten more efficient over the last couple years um so between that and just video generation through aws's tools has gotten a lot cheaper so we can run pretty lean from a technical perspective these days what would you estimate in terms of number of minutes of sort of transcribed segments you're producing each month across your entire customer and user base that's a good question i haven't looked lately um i mean it's well over ten thousand videos uh the average on uh you know between one or two minutes so i think that's probably the best guess i would start with and how many videos is each sort of user making per month or maybe just a better question how many customers you have paying for the platform um we've got let's see active subscribers should be uh it's nine nine thousand active customers right now okay and you're using a tool i was curious what two people use are using bare metrics or profit well or what yeah uh bare metrics for wave and then subtitle uses profit well so you like to dive you like to diversify right yeah yeah i like to you know keep it up all day and um got it up in front of me right now actually okay and how do you build i mean this is a sas platform or a pay-per-video or what uh it's sas based on usage um the lowest price is ten dollars and it goes up to sixty but our average revenue per user is twelve sixty three um just you know twelve and a half bucks so you know it really took us a long time to build the customer base out to the point where you know it was went from a side project to full time um so you know it's very very much a volume play we're really pushing that far and wide and trying to keep costs down because a lot of podcasters most of them are diy and you know not exactly making income from their podcast project yeah i mean but i mean this feels like a pretty healthy business then right i mean if you've got 9 000 customers paying 13 bucks a month what is that like 110 grand a month in revenue something like that yeah 115. that's what we're at right now that's great and so again you've done that since 2017 so now i mean that's not bad growth at all have you done that all bootstrapped yep all bootstrapped we haven't raised any money we all put my co-founder and i put a thousand bucks in both and have just been building it that way the first year was man it was a lot of just a lot of direct outreach and um getting this thing off the ground took just a lot of brute force but we were very lucky in the fact that our product creates content that helps promote the product itself so we have watermarks and uh you know for our free plans and then even our premium users like the the animations that we've created are very unique to wave so it really stands out so word of mouth has really helped a lot too that's interesting i don't want to just skip over that though because i talked to plenty of founders that that say this is their strategy they just cannot execute so i mean the fact you've gotten 9 000 customers over two years and over a million dollar run rate bootstrap is impressive so like let me dig here for a second right so when you say when you say your first hundred customers it really was just pure outreach and brute force actually take me through like what your days look like back then was it a linkedin search for a podcast host and then a linkedin message or like how'd you do it it was a lot of my technical nick is my technical co-founder and he built me this we used the itunes api to give me a little search dashboard so i'd go on twitter and i would try and find people that are promoting their new episode ideally like their first or second episode i'd look for their podcast in our little search tool and then their rss feed always had their email in it so i'd grab the email and then i had a little template that i was just sending cold emails to people and probably send in between 30 and 50 every day or two i would say and that's how we probably got our first 50 to 100 customers and then we started doing some work on social outreach on social media really worked hitting up podcasters on instagram they would share an image of their episode and i'd send them a direct message and say hey why don't you turn this image and try it with a video instead with that audio included so that was probably the first hundred and after that content marketing really started picking up for us um and then it's kind of just been slow linear growth every month since then let's stay on this for a second so you're sending 30 to 50 cold emails per day what was the subject line um uh that's a good question gosh i can't remember off the top of my head it would usually be something like um something really short like your latest podcast episode or um you know checked out your podcast something like that because i would i personalized most of these i wasn't i mean i used a template but i was still looking up the podcast saying hey you know i saw you promote on twitter and you know the subject line subject matter your podcast is interesting so i personalized them too that that really helped not as far as efficiency goes but i think it helped get that early attention and what were you are you optimizing for in the initial cold outreach you know a lot of people say well nathan that's a dumb question you want them to click a link to like book a demo or to start you sign up for free but there's a lot of people right now that...