How WebBoss Ltd CEO Kev Wilson grew to $1.2M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is kev wilson he founded his company webb boss dot io in 2011 along with his son luke they've put over 40 000 hours of development into the system and it's they believe it's the world's most powerful cms website builder and hosting platform it's already used by many of the uk's largest companies and august 19th sees web boss launched globally as a feature deal by app sumo kev you ready to take it to the top yeah sure okay so what is this i mean should people think of this like an alternative to wordpress absolutely i mean every time we see a new system come up everybody says this is the alternative to web that's a wordpress sorry and uh we look at them they're not but we really are i mean we spent a long time developing this uh probably in hindsight we could have done things a bit differently but uh how long when did you launch uh we actually launched about five years ago really but we were forced into that in england getting the investment for this sort of project isn't the same as the us yeah you've raised you've raised money how much about half a million dollars when did you do that raise 100 years ago okay so in like 2015 yeah okay and and so you raised uh sorry you said uh 500 000 yes yeah and and what was that on a cap like did was it did have a valuation on it or no yeah we did those just on against a million pounds basis so free money or post money yeah that was pretty okay so 1.5 posts and then you're building now today so talk me tell me about a customer that's using you guys how do they use you um what we've done is because i say we were trying to we wanted a couple of million investments because i've been very hard to get in the uk for our sort of product uh the old fashioned over most investors um so we started looking for referral partners so i went to some of the big boys like reach plc so i don't know if that means anything to you but they're the biggest media group in the country and all virtually every newspaper title here and we now do we have to sort of open up a service division as well to finance our development so that's how we've been growing the business not ideal for a sas product but uh it's been sort of working for us together is where we are so we've got major companies like reach plc and uh when they are they're selling advertising to their customers and they need a decent website to do it through so we do all the bespoke systems for their all their customers and how much revenue how much revenue did you guys do in your first year in 2015 um it says there's not that much then because it's a bit of a slow build and we're doing now that's one thing back then it's we're doing around about 20 000 a month now and uh back there probably about five or six i would say and it's not growing a lot but we've had to sort of split our work between development and service which is not really what we want to do and if you're doing twenty thousand dollars a month now in revenue what were you doing a year ago uh well before covered pretty much the same actually unfortunately because we were using referral partners for a lot of our business i mean our biggest one made 500 staff off during covid so yeah okay it's about the same that makes sense now how that's just your recurring revenue how much of services revenue will you do this year um we'll probably do about the same again in service i would say we've got a new another company we've just started working ryman one of the biggest stationers in the uk got 220 stores and we've just done the white label version of the product for them so that's not exclusive so we have just just just to be clear so last year how much total revenue did you do and how much of that was services um last year would have been about recovering revenue about four thousand and sixteen thousand in services okay last year so so the no what did you do the whole year though so add up all of your revenue the whole year yeah last year we were doing about twenty thousand through covered periods yes you did so for twenty thousand the whole year or twenty thousand a month oh no sorry months a month that's what i'm asking the whole thing i'm sorry yeah yeah the whole year yeah if you did a quarter million in total revenue how much was services um about three quarters of that okay got it so about 200 about 180 000 with services and and the rest to assess how do you how are you transitioning people from services into this ass model at the moment we've had no marketing budget whatsoever so this is what we've been trying to raise funds for at the moment how much can i raise a couple of million really like what two million yeah and what valuation do you want to raise on uh which is possible obviously uh are we looking at five to six and y is for y five to six just the amount of development we've done i mean what it would cost to actually make our platform now how many how many folks are on the team is it still you and luke now we've got four at the moment and we did it we got a bit higher sometimes we get a bit busy we might need a few more designs to keep the service model going but for core developers there's just two it's luke and ollie and so okay so two developers do you develop two or no not really i usually come up with the ideas and get them to do the work yeah that's good you you do all the fun stuff and then they do all the other labor you know yeah all right fair enough are you guys profitable today um before the line break even okay and how many customers are paying you something monthly monthly uh sas i'm obviously around about 200 200 yeah okay and are they sticky what does churn look like it's virtually nil and honestly it is um we've got customers going back i mean we started rolling out properly before probably four years ago uh before that we were obviously building sites to test it and those customers are still with us and we're just on in fact one customer going back almost 10 years it's just having a new rebuild done you know so there's no need to leave that's what's different about web boss it really is everything you can expand it well it sounds like it sounds like they pay you like two or three grand to build the thing but whether it's the app or the website and then they can manage updates color changes things like that using web boss so they're never going to cancel absolutely yeah and also you can archive a design you can also stack multiple designs so for seasonal changes like easter christmas you can have them you just switch them at any time you can like you designs the way you built the system it's modular so if you want to change your design you go down to your content it just flips it automatically and kev how did you guys split up equity how much do you own yes not as much as we would like to really because i say investment of the uk is a bit different but me and luke and just over half of the company okay and anyone else own anything besides the investors or just you luke and the investors just look at the investors okay um would you sell the company today for a million all cash up front no you said that very quickly i know because with a lot more than that how much would you sell for know like reach or rhyming or something because i've heard of them so they'll buy it without question so we've got the funds for marketing but i think hopefully appsumo will feature deal with upswing and they approached us as well uh it goes on the 19th of august so hopefully how did happen lifetime deals uh which is what appsumo is known for can destroy the economics of a sas business for a variety of reasons how did they convince you to give and agree to a lifetime price point because they are looking at if we had to raise the money and invested that in marketing uh i'd quite probably do the same to get the same amount of return and it's only a short thing for a lifetime deal and i forget what i mean is it lifetime or is it a short term it's lifetime so it's lifetime but we can i mean if we sell ten thousand i think we could you know if we do ten thousand sales that would fit into our running costs quite comfortably okay sort of an ongoing cost i'm not worried about that okay yes i can understand the well people think like that but uh to get our name out globally i mean we were to spend a few hundred thousand dollars in marketing to do that and uh that's what it's going to cost it's not going to cost us that much in service in those sites i mean you sort of will get this it's like a drug you'll get the hit of initial cash from the absolute deal but if you can't convert any of those into monthly recurring plans to grow your 4000 a month and like stacking sales it just all goes away the month or two hours and you're stuck supporting thousands of new people that love deals that are going to overwhelm your support channels and that's all you're going to do all day every day so how do you think about that because we've got we're always adding to the system so there's always going to be no updates about that we're going to be doing fulfillment packages fulfillment partner we're working with a lot of companies want to work with us we have the end users don't know about us i'd say that's why we need marketing so we'll add a fulfillment plug-in to the system modules we call them and so that's an extra monthly charge if you want that so we're adding things yeah like how many do you think these are people on amazon more people they're like jcpenney shoppers they love deals they're groupon shoppers right so how do you convert them into a monthly recurring plan what gives you so much confidence that you're just going to add a feature and they're going to start paying monthly well to be honest i'm not looking at the appsumo that was the main conversion i'm just looking at sumo promotions getting my name out there from a lot of people because once they've bought their deals that's it isn't it they're not going to be buying if they want another site they're going to have to pay the full rack for it and if they are developers they're gonna have to pay the ongoing rate which is normal that's well that's that's why i'm asking you so you believe that a large chunk of these folks will start paying you monthly in the future oh absolutely yeah yeah this is not a trend that i've seen with appsumo customers from others that have done launches which is why i always ask the question what the plan is because i think it's a great way to get your name out there but if there's not a clear plan to drive up sell revenue it can be dangerous for the business there's many sas companies by the way that have done absolute deals that have gone out of business and so then how does that you know the customers if they bought a lifetime deal but you're only in business for a year and then you shut down how does that make them feel when you promised a lifetime you only gave them a year i totally agree with that i get it as well but i mean if you're a developer and you use our system you're going to be doing more than once a year aren't you somebody's making a living out of it i don't know i i don't i don't know how many how many developers are on appsumo um i can't i won't get the figures they've given us but it gives quite a why would they and why would they use you over wordpress or these free website builders because what our system can do i mean i mean that system does much more than wordpress i mean if you you get wordpress is a page editor isn't it a lot of plugins other people have made web boss is a very sophisticated page editor with all the plugins you need already built into it so well when people tend to once have used our system they tend to stick with this i say you don't know it's churn uh people like the system it's more it's it's not as complex as wordpress to build a side with but it's not an easy web builder don't get me wrong i won't pretend it's wix that we don't want it to be but uh it's very easy to add things to it with what's built in there so once you've used our system you won't want to go back to wordpress all right well we'll see what happens kev in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five number one you said you don't read a ton of books we're going to skip it number two is there is there a ceo you're following or studying apart from you oh that's me you can't now you can't you you should have gave me all these compliments at the beginning then i would have gone easier on you you know um i said i love the big guys i mean they were in the uk branson to be honest i mean yeah number three i like it i like the big ones i mean i like elon musk because he's out of the box number three what's your favorite online tool for building web boss uh i didn't do that side of it so i wouldn't even want to answer that what's your favorite online tool actually okay except web boss yes i don't know any jake and that one sorry uh that's a good point actually because i don't tend to do anything else okay great questions we'll skip it number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night six and what's your situation married single kiddos we only have one uh married with three kids three kids okay very good how old are you i'm not telling you that let's get there okay uh no problem uh last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh how to structure an investment deal properly how to wipe structure and investment deal properly are you not on good terms with your investors um it could have been better it's not like we're not on bad terms and i said we didn't know we were new to this when we got involved and i think i know what i know now to be been handled a lot differently mm-hmm yeah all right guys there we have it web boss dot io easily create websites and apps they were doing twenty thousand dollars a month about a year ago still doing about twenty thousand dollars a month because of cover they've been flat but they've got over 200 customers they're about breakeven today with their team of four kev thanks for taking us to the top thank you 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 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m 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 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