How WildJar CEO James Oneill grew to $5.4M revenue and 304 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is James O'Neill he's the co-founder and CEO of wild jar it's his first startup 100 bootstrapped launched in 2016 and he's a passionate and driven with an appreciation for ipas and apis I love that James ready tickets the top yep Ready thanks for having me all right what is wild jar what are people paying you for so we're a cold tracking an analytics platform so um when customers search online um everything's very measurable through digital analytics um but when the customer picks up the phone and calls there's a disconnect between what they've done online and that offline journey and conversation so we help businesses understand which digital marketing channels Drive inbound phone leads what happens on the calls and the conversations and then integrate that core data into whatever technology stack you're using so crms analytics tools you name it will be there so in December 2020 when we chatted you mentioned that the average customer is paying about a thousand dollars per month is that still the average um yeah it's actually it's actually pretty much bang on so um we've we've gone through a few changes with with how we've approached the market um we we started as a product LED platform and um we we shifted to to hiring some people um and sales development teams and tried to go down that sales development Outreach um way but um it didn't really work for us so we've shifted back to Pure products inbound strategy and um yeah I mean it's the best model for us uh sticking to let's let's talk more about in a second but first let's let's get the output right of great inbound how many customers do you have now today uh 300 and well as of last month billing it was 304 304 he knows the number exactly okay I love that and can we take the 304 times a thousand bucks a month you're doing about 300 000 bucks a month in Revenue yeah so we we just did 310 so yeah that's awesome man uh all bootstrapped right you own 100 with your co-founder yeah 100 yeah that's amazing do you create an option pool for employees still just to get them some upside or no yeah um so not from a like an exit Point um we've definitely talked about it there's nothing in in writing but we've had those conversations internally um but we do a um every month we have a five percent of gross profit as a share so um that goes to employers every month okay tell me how that works so on 310 000 of top line revenue how much you take to the bottom line then how do you split that up usually yeah so gross profit um I think last month was about twelve thousand so in terms of five percent so far that 12 000 split between the team um as commission so we don't pay commission to um I mean we've only got one sales what James sorry is it five percent of twelve thousand no it said twelve thousand to five percent of our gross oh I see I see got it got it got it so so if we take 12 000 times times 20 right you guys did like oh my gosh you guys are very profitable you're like 240k of like profit gross profit last year five percent sorry last month five percent is 12 Grand yeah exactly yeah and then how do you decide how to who on the team to give what portion of that 12 Grand yeah so and so we we said it pretty early so we're fortunate that we haven't grown too many people to complicate it yet um but say at the moment so we share it differently so sales gets more um because that's more the the growth sign because there's no individual commission on sales um so that's how we set it from the beginning um it's worked really well because it also means people who come into the business can also share immediately um but it also means what the main reason why we started it that way wasn't more from a sales point because I was the only person doing sales but it was more of a support and Technical and implementation side where the quicker they get things done as well they know that if you know if they help customers faster you know close support tickets faster they also share in that in that Revenue that comes on because we're a very sticky product and and we are a it's a growing product so the more numbers and minutes our clients use the higher their profit and revenue to the business so oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so how many folks are on the team full-time today uh we're at six so we went from yeah from five to ten and then um so there's three new sales and like a customer success um and we've we've brought it back to six yeah I mean you're doing 50 000 in Revenue per employee per month which is just like exceptional world class four four to five times what your BC back competitors are doing yeah yeah I know it's exciting when you put it down in numbers that's why I like doing this because you get to really go into the numbers and look at it and you know it it's exciting I mean we love it so it's you know we wouldn't change it for sure let me ask you guys as co-founders you still have another 200 000 of profit you're making every month how do you decide how to allocate that Capital you paid out to yourselves as dividends you keep it in a business you go buy other smaller companies what do you do with it um so I mean we have been looking to acquire um that's definitely been on the road map and um we we've we've identified a few businesses um and the I mean it's pretty easy at the moment too so we're looking at possibly doing a bit of a debt raised there to do it but at the same time it's um we we have shared the profit as well um so we've taken it in different times um to help each other out and um yeah so we've done that too so it's it's only a bit sort of been more recently that we've decided to do that um because there's no point just keeping it in the business we've invested in another startup so we did we did help fund that um there's another sort of Charity business that we've put money into so okay okay so you're in a variety of things that makes a lot of sense um this is great now talking about the acquisition stuff right so when you look at companies go acquire considering your stage what are you looking for um similar businesses um there's our competitors a lot of them have been around the market for a really long time and and that's where we're winning a lot of our businesses from competitors who haven't evolved um and they're still their platforms and products are still um they haven't haven't moved forward and they're still still on Old systems um some of them haven't even moved to say like AWS and Cloud base and so we know that we can go in um migrate their platform to our platform maybe not everybody and not do it seamlessly but we know because we might we're winning so many businesses from them that we can do it um pretty easily and also you go buy an extension where you'd kill their code base transition their customers from that other Billing System under yours and paying for your Tech stack your code base your product yeah exactly yeah yeah um yeah that's kind of what we're looking at and then and then also other complementary I mean SMS um is being has been it's a huge remarket for it again you know through e-commerce and the like and because we are technically carrier we we started to do a lot more SMS so we've bundled in sort of SMS Products off the back of voice products so if if a call goes into a business and they miss a call we'll immediately SMS the customer and re-engage with them and and it's just more Revenue that is adding on to it so looking at other SMS providers and then we can also just cut that cost back because they're usually paying somebody like us to deliver the SMS um so we should buy that to acquire them that way um so what about the flip side of this if someone came to you guys and offered you guys 40 million all cash up front to sell the business do you sell um I mean when when we built the business we we didn't we we kind of thought five years because that's I mean you say five years but we would genuinely like you know five years we're not sales people and I think that's what we realized um trying to hire sales people we're we're very much product and we're very passionate about what we do but we're not very good at training sales people so if somebody did come to us it would have to be a good fit where you know they can Implement a sales strategy put us into those sort of tools then we'll do that um uh to give you an idea that in market right now there are competitors you know us ones to look at winding up a few of platforms like us to do something similar um there's like sales of the world or more so like um like if you look at the us to like invoker and dialogue Tech they've done that there's in in the UK there's uh infinity and response tap have combined and they're not really combining to say remove it's just more just to bring um Revenue together and so there's a few others who are trying to do it um but it's interesting you said so sales like because none of those businesses do what we do and we we do everything before the call actually comes into the business that's where our IP sits and that's what we're really good at all those other businesses it's around like what we're doing now is having the conversation and bringing analytics in the conversation which is really really important but in a buying cycle through a website people have been searching for three months or a month and then as soon as they call it goes into the contact center and they have that information but they don't know what their Journey has been like before so we're now integrating into like a dial pad and the talk desks and those cloud-based contact centers to enrich their data so that when we send it to that agent we say this customer has come through a you know Google paid ad um they started their Journey six months ago um you know they've called three times so then I'm going to have a conversation it's more meaningful as well yeah that makes sense I mean then also if you end up doing that really well they're all going to want to buy you right so that's great that word for you yeah um talk to me about churn right so what's gross churn what's net dollar retention um so churn um so like a logo churn so because we went through that sales we have turned more than what we we traditionally did um I don't have a number but uh a net dollar attention has definitely gone up so um when I worked it out I was like 22 so I think 122 um okay so so it's quite it's still quite great yeah it is good and and it's we we actually know it can be better um and the reason why it's not is we've changed our onboarding a little bit too so we um we we offer we don't say free because you know we we we like to entice them to say that they will stay so we waived the first month or two months invoices to onboard them um with an idea that they would obviously stay on and by doing that um obviously there's that that cost incurred on that side but you know it's it's um it's quite a competitive market at the moment so it's it's been good for us to onboard clients easier that way so well James again congrats on the growth it's impressive to watch you guys bootstrapped uh we're out of time let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book um I don't read enough um but we did traction um recently so that was quite good so Gino uh we've been I think it was so that was quite good for us um uh and I think we'll stick to it so I'll go with that number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um at the moment that's okay no number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business inside the wild jar um slack 100 we we do everything with slack still I think I said that last time and yeah it's amazing so number number four how many hours of sleep do you every night um well I've just had another baby um so I wasn't sleeping much at all it was about three or four but we're back to about six so six okay yeah so nice so so you had two kids last time three kids now married and what you're 37 now yes 37 two days ago and so I was flying I flew from Singapore to Scotland so I had like a 45 hour birthday so it just kept on going which is what I could man well happy late birthday I'm sorry you're stuck in airports but uh man that's wild last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um uh I mean we're doing it now about boost trapping so not thinking about the bigger picture and I know you've been pushing it a lot but it's true I mean you don't have to be the biggest business in the world and um you know it's something that you know we just want aspire to be a really really good profitable business so um yeah if we did this earlier I would have loved to have started doing it earlier so yeah guys there you have it James at Wild jar playing aggressively in the car tracking complimentation space they're now working with caught 304 customers paying on average a thousand dollars a month doing 300 000 310 000 a month in Revenue profiting almost gross profit 240 which is amazing profit sharing plan with the team they split up 12 of that 240k which is fantastic good incentive there they're doing all that Revenue 3.7 million run rate today with just six employees incredible Revenue per employee beautiful example of boot trap founder doing it right and all the way by the way growing faster than some of their VC back competitors they were at 150k of Mr just two years ago so doubling over the past 24 months really impressive James thanks for taking us to the top yeah appreciate it thanks Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 2PM 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 statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya

Introduction hey guys my guest today is james o'neil he's the co-founder and ceo of a company called wild jar it's his first startup their bootstrap launched in 2016. and he did this after being born in new zealand grew up in australia now building this company from scotland james ready to take it to the top that's good thanks for having me all right so what is wild draw what do you guys do in our new sas business yes so with sas uh we're a cool tracking and analytics platform uh so we help businesses and marketers optimize and drive revenue from the inbound phone calls and give me a sense of you know how you fit in the space oh it's a very crowded space there's a lot of vc backed companies spending way too much money in the space what niche have you carved out for yourself yeah definitely i mean so we um myself and the co-founder so we came from a similar face and i'm from an agency background as well and we really looked at the market in terms of what we needed to do and and we saw that you know a lot of them were doing their self low cost high volume and then there's sort of the enterprise model as well um so where we fit is sort of right in the middle of it all uh where our model is more from an on-boarding perspective it is a full self-serve but we we work with them in the first three months to get them to a point where they can self-serve and move forward but we found it just fits really nicely in terms of our models so so what are customers paying on average per month to use the technology uh so last month was 970. okay so so not not small business not enterprise sort of somewhere in the middle yeah exactly Bootstrapped yeah really interesting okay and in the backstory you launched this in 2016. how did you guys fund the mvp i say base it so um myself and a founder we were at another business and we actually had this model within a sort of a traditional telco and we wanted to take it to the business then and it didn't work out i was had a product strategy um my founder was head of technology so i left uh went back to agency world my family has an agency and i was working in that and really wanted to obviously focus on on the call side as well we're good at so plugged it in there did a bit of an mvp we reached out to my co-founder and said look i think we need to you know spin off a new business he's from italy he flew back to italy and had three months at his family and then we just sort of went from there are you a developer how did you write the code for the mvp yes um it was really simple it was purely using other platforms so use like a twilio startup to to start on that um use the scripting so using like optimizely for like split testing to just show you know landing page from google ads because it was really just to start from that um and then just sort of use a proof of concept from the agency that i was in um went to another agency that we liked as well they like the look of it but obviously i'm not a developer so i had to get somebody to come in and do it properly so your first two customers were your family agency and then another agency you sold to exactly yeah interesting and and don't give me the sales pitch when you sold the second company not your family's gonna go the second company what was the pitch to them yes so they were actually um uh so we ran their search so they were outsourcing their search the google ad spend to our agency so it's kind of already half built into it but it was two complete separate businesses i see and do you remember that first year of business back in 2016 you know how much revenue you did uh yeah we did about 170 thousand 100 okay so that's i mean that's not bad for your first year in business that's pretty good yeah we got to 30 really quickly so yeah 30 monthly 30 monthly oh 30 000 a month yeah yeah when did you hit that 30 at the end of 2016 you were 30 grand a month yeah towards the end of 16 which we weren't expecting so we thought it'd be a bit more slow but um just with i mean my co-founder is amazing amazing developer and um you know he's rewritten and re-written lots of voice platforms before so we could get a really good product to market so that was good did you guys just decide to split equity 50 50 uh no sue uh it's the third third third the um the others in my agency my family agency um we thought we would need to do some sort of equity put into it there but we actually didn't so it's really just my dad's thing now along for a ride so so it's your data 33 you with 33 and your cto co-founder with 33 yeah correct very cool and how many total people on the team today five five people and one um like part-time accountant like one day a week and then how many engineers besides your co-founder yeah just one just so it really is just Currently serving 172 customers tim well that's impressive how so how many customers is this code now supporting uh so we've got 172 customers of last month wow so he can he can support all the same code base 172 customers that's impressive yeah yeah he's amazing wow okay so 172 customers and you've done all this bootstrapped right Monthly recurring revenue yep 970rp that's about 160 thousand dollars in mrr today then huh yes last month we did one 167. seven yeah that's i mean that's great growth where were you exactly a year ago do you remember uh we were of one thirty one thirty where is the growth coming from how are you signing folks up um so for us it was all organic and um you know we were in a space where you know we knew the industry as well so we we knew a lot of agencies i've got a lot of agency contacts um the where we started the australian market it was there was a few sort of legacy um platforms that have been there for a while and and they weren't scaling very well so we wanted to build a platform that would scale um scale quickly um and so that's what we did it was all organic all word of mouth and i a lot of agency people moving around as well so you know they'll take the platform and turn us on there do you have i mean so you've done this bootstrapped when you say like organic growth you know when i hear organic growth sometimes i go oh well they're just not sure how they're growing which is maybe a bad thing because then you don't know how to do more of it right so what is organ i think you probably actually know how you're growing how are you actually growing yeah well it's interesting that you stay that's it during covert we we thought let's let's invest in our brand so previously what we've done it's a little bit different is that we're 100 white label platform so we found channel partners and the channel partners essentially they they grew our business so we went on a complete white label so we our brand while joe was completely out of it um and then as things happen you know we picked our first enterprise like proper enterprise client around that 15 month and then brand starts to become a little bit important and sort of during covert we just thought look we need to start marketing ourselves a little bit um and sort of from july to now uh we've done some ad spend we've done some video testimonials video case studies building a little bit and we would have brought on out of that 172 i said we've brought on about 30 new logos in that time period so that's great Customer acquisition cost growth so i mean what can you spend on ads to get a new thousand dollar a month customer uh yes sir i don't have last month's spend but the month before we spent like nine hundred dollars on google ads um it was about sort of 500 on facebook and about the same on linkedin so it was really low well it's well so finish the story so how many customers did you get from the 900 of spend yes so we signed up five okay 12 leads signed up five was about 170 uh cost per acquisition yeah i mean that works right so now the question is how much can you put in those channels and hold those economics yeah exactly and this is what you know we've it's been interesting i mean we've obviously been watching australia the last few weeks and really you know it's been really interesting um so i had no idea about the sort of community space i was going through it all and um yeah i mean i'm glad we tested it but really doing our numbers is something that we've only really started to do recently so where so i mean most of the the 172 customers and the first two come from your agency partners are are they are they mostly agencies to like describe the majority of your customers what are they yeah agency partners majority definitely interesting so so an agency partner like your family agency would pay for a white label license to your platform and then resell it to their end customers exactly yeah oh i see and then you get a cut and that cut equates to about 970 a month per agency yes so we we would essentially so we built it into the platform where uh yeah 100 white labels so they would reskin it take it to their clients um put a markup model within it if they want to so we would the rate that would give them this is a healthy rate that they can go and resell and put 50 margin on or whatever that number looks like or bundle into their product offering and how i mean i guess they're paying you your full rate they're making margin based on what they upsell it at i mean do you ever wonder well we should just go direct to customer and make the full margin ourselves yeah i mean well i mean we built it so that we didn't have to and i guess that's why we're able to scale the way we did so i mean if we did then it's more people um and you know we're working well working with you know these key partners it is interesting though because you know we are looking at you know what this point of time what we're doing right now but um what we've found has worked for us especially over the last few months is it just new product new features and we're calling them power-ups essentially but rolling them back into these clients and and you know they're loving it so for them it's the yeah we know where we sit in a conversion i mean the agencies especially during covert we've found have been for the trusted advisor as people have been digitizing um the businesses as well so we're we're with them we're in a point of a conversion we're a technology piece into their stack and you know we plug into hubspot or salesforce whatever they're using to work with the end clients what is your gross revenue trend look like annually um i i don't really know but in terms of the logo i always worked out is on the 172 we have now clients we had a total of 208 with us so we've lost um i think it's around like 36 odd clients total um so over four and a half years we're looking at three and a half percent sort of logo um we haven't looked at revenue but what's interesting from those ones have come off is that when we went through this period of um like it was just myself and a co-founder we were doing seventy thousand and we're sitting there going as we we just keep doing what we're doing now or do we sort of go and grow a little bit more um and i went to an agency who is another one who i knew really well and they said look we would love to work with you but you're only two people so we don't really want to you know it's a bit of a risk for us so we hired somebody he came in um but attracted the wrong end client for us so a lot of those logos that we've lost are actually through the acquisition of you know this really small self-serve self on board and what we found is we don't work well in that space i mean we can they can come on and work with us but where we work well as a expert or trusted advisor to the agency partners so um but we definitely need to do better in terms of working out that the revenue term but i mean everything i can't start you know like the first month it might be 100 in the second month 300 then there might be a thousand and up to two thousand so so do you have you quantified what your if your if your gross churn annually is about four percent have you calculated what your expansion revenue is annually no okay yeah interesting and when you are upselling clients from a hundred to a thousand like you just said what are you typically upselling the number of seats or feature based upselling or something else it's all volume so we're essentially a volume based uh business so we have volume of what um so minutes so number rental and core minutes so if an agency comes on with founders if we when we when we give them a full self-serve on boarding themselves they'd come on use us um but they don't use the full platform they don't use all the they don't plug it into all of their clients whereas when we onboard we give them sort of that one two three months of look we need to set up clients go through because the more clients they bring on then the more numbers they're using in terms of to advertise with and then the more core minutes is what we're charging so the more calls their clients are receiving is the more that we actually that's a great utility metric to upsell against i bet i bet if you measured your expansion rate it would be very healthy yeah no i'd love to do that all right man very cool stuff all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book um i'm i'm not a big reader i like small sharp snippets but i have read um uh the simon spinning start with wine that was good number two is there a ceo you're following her studying um there in scotland here there's a guy called james what is from a company called brewdog it's a beer brewery and i think what they're doing is amazing in this basement you know it's uh it's really interesting what they're doing and and also any australian business for the new zealand business like xero or afterpay you know those guys are good number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh we use slack literally everything's built in slack crosstalk number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night uh about six six and what's your situation married single kiddos uh married two kids busy guy how old are you 35 last question what do you wish you when you were 20 um probably to network more maybe so yeah be happy to network i think i stepped back a little bit and yeah i mean i love it now so yeah just go out there and do more guys wild jar playing in the call tracking space they've got 172 agency customers who resell their product to end users each of those agencies pay on average a grand per month they just did 167 000 in revenue last month so over a 2 million run rate that's up from 130 000 a month just a year ago so healthy growth they're doing all this with just five people launched in 2016 and bootstrapped which we love mvp was all sweat equity with his cto co-founder that wrote the original lines of code and still doing all the coding today james thanks for taking us to the top perfect thanks jason 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 pm 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 statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya