How WhatConverts CEO Michael Cooney grew WhatConverts to $10M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

founders what's going on you guys know i love in-person events and they are back the recording you're about to hear is from our most recent event where we had hundreds of founders come together share intimate details templates kpis okrs about their business and it was something special something special we'd love to meet you in person if you want to see the next live events we have coming up via our schedule the link will be down below in the description if you're listening on itunes check this out on youtube you'll see the links in the description or you can just google founder path or latka next event we'd love to see you in person in the meantime though enjoy this recording it's a good one good morning so i'm where this michael cooney one of the co-founders of what converts so how we got started is i was running a digital marketing agency and i had a web developer that worked for me for about seven years he got an offer from corporate he went away and eight months later came back and he's like a isn't working for me so i'd like to come back but i don't want to work for you okay he says do you have any ideas where we can build a company and i was like as a matter of fact i just come from a client meeting and we had doubled the leads for this client in our campaign i walked into the room and i said hey we doubled your leads isn't that great and he's like um i don't know were they good were the leads any good and i'm like yeah sure but it says can you show them to me uh well i can but to get those specific leads you know there was like 500 leads and i'd have to get 100. it was like gonna take three hours of work so i was fed up and i said to jeremy you know what this lead tracking and reporting issue has been going on too long and we need a solution so i said if you can help us if we can track all phone calls and forms being filled in and chat back to the marketing responsible store all that and report it i think we can build a really strong company and so he went away and the first thing he started was like how can we track every form on any website across the world without requiring them to change the form so he went and worked on that for a week came back he says i got it we got it organized and that's how we started the company so we went and played a round of golf and at the end of the round of golf jeremy and we had a discussion we said look how we're going to set this up we said let's do 50 50. he'll develop the product and i will go ahead and do the sales and marketing so we wanted to do bootstrap and through our journey this is the the growth you can see in the first year we started in march 2015 and we grew almost to a hundred thousand dollars and i've got all the labels there so the first million it took us four years to get to the first million because we're still working in the agency uh while we're building the product and i call that the scary phase it's scary because there's a lot we don't know and there's so much advice going on and a lot of advice you get on twitter turns out to be wrong so um also in addition to not knowing what we're doing and just trying to figure out the sas space we came up against well-funded companies so a lot of companies in this space you know call tracking was one of the areas where there's a lot of well-funded companies and it turns out to be the feature that converts really well for us um so on all these companies there's a billion dollars in funding so i call it the scary phase because we're like well should we get funding or should we stay bootstrapped we chose to stay bootstrapped and the reason for that is number one over the years i've heard stories of founders starting companies getting investments and if they don't get traction that's just in for a whole lot of hurt and we weren't sure if we would get traction we didn't know if the product would be well received so that was the first thing we wanted to avoid the risk we wanted to build it in our own time and make sure um we got traction michael real quick i'm in the back of the room to your left yeah there's a lot of people in this room actually raise your hand guys how many of you started your sas coming as an agency or professional services raise your hand this is like by far the number one theme from successful assassins starting as an agency you did that speak spend more time speaking about how much revenue the agency do are you storing it today and how did you use the agency contracts to learn about the sas product you could build yeah sure so i mean running an agency i actually started an agency in south africa which is still going now my brother runs it and i've got have one in the usa as well so combined we were less than two million we're probably about 1.5 million um the agency in the usa i just still manage about a handful of clients and i sort of dog food are what converts product with them and then south african agency is still running they're about a team of uh 20. so um i think i covered everything anyway so that's the reason we decided to bootstrap because we're still getting some funding from the agency and we could build it at the same time we um we also wanted the optionality we didn't want to invest to get involved and changing you know controlling how we develop things so we just wanted to stay focused on sorting the problem we had and then the other thing is we wanted to grow value before we got funding so the reason for this is people say to you do you want a tiny piece of a huge pie or do you want the whole pie well we're like well we want the whole pie and when it comes to the stage we want a huge piece of the huge buy [Laughter] yeah okay so when when do you decide how you can skip funding so bootstrap versus funding and i'll put it into three distinct buckets you got your problem your product and the promotion so with the problem when you create a product you're solving a problem and if you can't um if there isn't a problem to solve you're going to find it difficult to get your message across you're going to find it difficult to get sales so you really have to have a real problem and you have to understand that problem and it really helps if you've lived that problem so as the agency i'd lived that problem for 20 years and more funding wasn't going to help me you know define the problem any better the next step is the product would having funding help us build the product well my arrangement with jeremy was he was going to build the product and we could have got more developers on the thing but what we found is we sort of lucked out jeremy had worked for me for seven years so he understood the problem really well and near the development skills so that focus development allowed us to create a product and innovate um where we came across certain um features and we just felt that if we had other developers who didn't understand the full problem we wouldn't have created as good a product so it was a slow burn like getting the product developed but at the end of the day we feel that we have a much better product and you'll see as i speak that that product allows us to compete with well-funded companies the last one was promotion this is one area where we do feel pressure from well-funded companies and i'll show you an example of that in a bit so let's dive into the problem so by living the problem what this enabled us to do is not only develop a great product but it's also enabled us to develop the messaging when we are talking messaging we're talking to our target market we know what they're feeling we can position the product um to solve the problem very very nicely so that's allowed us to grow 60 year-on-year since we started um the other thing i've got here is avoid shiny objects so once you start a product and you get customers what you're going to find is everybody's got ideas and you have agencies come to you and they say sorry i'm not very good at a mic you'll have agencies come to you and say hey we need you to develop this feature and if you do you'll grow 10x and you get lots of these lots of suggestions and you have to have a framework on like how are you going to avoid these shiny objects so we have we call this a hundred year test can i go back okay there we go okay we call it a 100 year test and it's just a simple framework where it's like your core value of your product if you look 100 years ago was it true or was it valuable if you look 100 years in the future do you still see it being valuable so we took for instance call tracking this is one of the main features we have and we look back 100 years ago was call tracking valuable well it wasn't really anything so no well let's look 100 years in the future is call tracking going to be valuable and i think call tracking is already becoming a commodity is it still going to be valuable i doubt it so call tracking isn't our core value then we look at okay well marketing was marketing valuable 100 years ago absolutely will marketing be valuable 100 years in the future i believe so and and if it's not google's in a lot of trouble so we see marketing...