WildJarrevenue

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 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