How Willful CEO Erin Bury grew Willful to $3.1M revenue and 10K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is aaron berry she is an entrepreneur speaker startup advisor and former technology journalist she's a co-founder and ceo today of a company called willful an online estate planning platform she's appeared in publications including the new york times forbes and cnn and she was named one of marketing magazine's top 30 under 30 marketers aaron you're ready to take to the top of course all right estate planning is not like a sexy hot topic how did you find yourself in that world yeah it's a great question as a journalism grad i did not expect to be the ceo of an estate planning company but you know every entrepreneur starts a company because of a personal experience and so we had a family member pass away unexpectedly and trying to wrap up their life when going through all the unanswered questions made us realize that there really isn't an easy way to record those wishes and take care of end-of-life planning so here we are and now it's something i'm very passionate about so when was that what year you launched company so it was 2017 it's actually my husband and i who founded it together which is always fun working with your spouse and uh and yeah so we've since created about 40 000 documents for people across canada we're a canadian company based in toronto and uh and we're currently working on building out other products that can help people with their end-of-life planning so so let's let me understand from a sas perspective on average what's a customer paying you per month to use your technology so it's actually not a recurring product it's more of a one-time transactional product so you're paying us anywhere from 99 to 149 for uh your documents your will and power of attorney documents and we offer free unlimited updates which is a competitive advantage and the idea is that we'll build out other products and services that help you along that end of life journey either you or your family and be able to increase our lifetime value through that how do you how do you think about you know it's hard to plan you have to do a certain number of these poas and 99 sales per month for you to have some revenue base to feel confident to go out make hiring decisions on to build the business invest more in engineering i mean how do you get to a product where you can add value to these folks even after they file the initial documents yeah it's a great question nathan i feel like the the sad truth is and this is true in canada as well as the us people are woefully unprepared for their own passing and about 60 percent of adults don't have just the simple legal documents so there's a really big pool of potential customers more of whom are turning to online tools because of kovid and in terms of how we actually create that predictability it's through marketing around life moments we know that having a child and the death of a loved one or the two major life events that cause you to think about these things and once we have you in the door then we become a trusted source for other products in future okay interesting so back in your first year in 2017 how much revenue did you guys do do you remember well we launched in the end of october so i'm assuming a couple thousand dollars by the end of that calendar year uh but really you know i my husband started it initially i joined uh i was running a marketing agency at the time that worked with consumer tech companies so i joined full-time after about a year and um you know i think in the first year we probably did a couple hundred thousand dollars of revenue so we felt like we had some good product market fit in that there were people paying from day one but we didn't truly achieve some of that scale until i'd say the last 12 months okay so 2018 you feel like you did two three hundred thousand dollars in sales something like that i'd have to look back at the numbers um because our fiscal is uh june 30th so for us we're all i'm always thinking in fiscal yeah yep okay this makes sense um so i guess the reason i'm asking the revenue questions is it's a big risk for you and your husband put all your eggs in the willful basket per se right so you had to he had to sort of de-risk it early for you guys to agree that you should leave your agency job and do this full-time what sort of moment was that walk me through that conversation yeah i mean i actually it's funny because now it sounds like it was all planned out in the stars to join willful but initially i left the agency for other reasons i was just you know not feeling challenged wanted to move on and as i actually looked around at all the options and what to do next willful just was the obvious choice to learn i'd never run a venture-backed company before i'd only run a service business so i was really looking for that challenge of how to get a vc to buy into your idea and scale a product team so it became the natural option but yeah at the time it was scary to have both of us taking no salaries but i do some paid speaking and other things on the side and luckily nathan we were able to start paying ourselves earlier than in 2020. oh that's great congratulations that's a big moment congratulations thank you um uh and so walk your venture back when did you raise capital we raised it right smack dab in the middle of uh covid and it was quite a roller coaster because we actually had a signed term sheet on february 27th and then you know a couple short weeks later the worlds went crazy and our investor raises from high net worth individuals into special purpose vehicles so it's not a traditional fund model so there was a couple weeks there where we thought there's no way this is going through because all of these high net worths are you know their liquidities being uh compromised and uh really at the same time that that investment was jeopardized we saw our sales and traffic go through the roof because unfortunately the pandemic made people think about their own mortality and contemplate and prioritize emergency planning so it just so happened that we were able to say hey look that we are actually a pandemic-proof business and a business that has actually seen our numbers go up and so they were able to rally the investors and we closed in the end of may okay close mma and how much did you close on uh 1.1 million canadian which i think is like four dollars u.s okay one one canadian what is it actually u.s i think it's probably around 800k yeah depending on what day you look at the exchange rate exactly did you do that on it i'm curious about sbb models you do that on a note like a safe or did you do a priced round no we did it as a price round with a post money valuation of 6 million we had done some convertible debt earlier on from mostly shopify executives in toronto there's a lot of shopify executives who are angel investors now so those all converted along with the price round but it was uh yeah it was priced and and and walk me through that that evaluation conversation because you know this isn't obviously a typical sas movement but there's a clear path to launching a recurring product so how did you justify the valuation with really one-time sales yeah it's a great question i mean we always do try to position ourselves more as an e-commerce model versus a traditional sas with recurring revenue and the investors who want sas are never going to see the valuation there but luckily our investors had been executors themselves they really understand the space and they had also invested in other companies like moca who are more e-commerce based fintechs uh so really i mean it's always a dance nathan i'm sure everyone tells you this you you know it's like negotiating anything they come in low you go high you try to justify it they say no that's crazy and then you meet somewhere in the middle so luckily we found great investors who saw the value in the business and who understand that you know you're getting into bed for a decade potentially and so you have to both be happy walking away from the deal talking about your guys's content marketing strategy and if that's your primary user acquisition channel you rank very high according to ahrefs for competitive terms like online will even just the word will you guys are in the sixth position for it gets you caught 300 400 clicks per month organically is that an intentional strategy it is nathan a lot of the things we do are not intentional but this one is you know for us we always think about the behavior of our users you really start your search for estate planning and wills by hitting up google and so we've long known that pr content marketing and methodical seo is going to be the way that we win and the other big user acquisition channel for us is partnerships so being able to target people through new mom groups or mortgage brokers financial advisors anyone who's already having the conversation with folks around those major life moments that tend to be inflection points to create your will okay talk so community groups like mom groups i mean can you name one is it like a facebook group what's the title of it some of them are facebook groups but the more official ones would be you know parent life network is a big one in canada that uh that new moms are a part of but even just other kind of fintech so we're partnered up with wealthsimple and some of the other folks who are offering investing saving tools and then the b2b community is big so financial advisors insurance brokers mortgage brokers etc and when you look at your last full fiscal year of revenue history what did that come in at so that i am not going to disclose okay just because i know our competitors are always watching but i can say that it was about um we've seen like a four to five increase year over year so it's definitely gone up a lot can i i'm going to push further and with the more generic question have you broken a million dollar run rate yet and if not do you think you can do that you know in the next couple months yes we've broken a million dollar runway yes that's great and and is you know the next goal i assume is probably getting up to five or ten million do you think you get to like a five or ten million dollar run rate still selling just a lot of one-time products or do you have to launch a recurring product to do that you think i think to answer your question i don't know that we can get up to a 10 million dollar runway rate with the only the current existing product because it is a bit of a lower price product but as we start to look at things with more lucrative price points like estate administration tools insurance things like that i absolutely think that those one-time transactions could get us up to that run rate or that the commission could be on the b2b side so for example launching a version of willful where a financial advisor could pay a monthly fee to offer it to their clients and so the recurring actually comes from the b2b side of the business yeah i mean the the company that comes to mind when i'm interviewing you because you know i do so many interviews i've touched a couple in the space but like trust in will comes to mind and i'm going a bit off memory here but i think that they were only doing like 25 grand a month in revenue so 300 000 bucks a year but they'd raise like 8 million dollars at a ridiculous valuation you're doing it sounds like more revenue than they're doing but it's not true sas so you're maybe not getting the premium that they got but you're maybe making more money i don't know i mean i think cody and i are very close we are partnered with them and we do a lot of work together and i definitely would not say that we're making more revenue than them i don't know that for sure but the market in the us is just so much bigger right so and they've obviously seen a covet bump as well um i think that we're both trying to achieve the same goal but it's actually nice that we're both doing it in different ways so for example we have a family plan where you can buy multiple plans they don't so it's a way for them to validate that they all have subscription we don't so it's a way to kind of validate that so it's actually nice to your point early in the conversation it's not a sexy topic and so us estate planning ceos tend to be a pretty tight-knit club and to share learnings and it's nice to have these peers in other markets who are who are sharing those learnings yeah and sorry i have to add a correction there that's just their sas revenue like you like you they have a much larger business which is sort of a one-time sort of sales but they're trying to build that recurring revenue um that's super interesting wait so is there a path where in four years i'm interviewing you and cody and you guys are all part of the big same company you know what i always say uh if i had a chance to move down to san diego which is where they're based instead of staying here el winter in toronto and trudging through the snow absolutely i mean obviously there's a few paths for any company there's ipo exit or staying profitable long term and i think we're very much on an exit path and when we think about ideal acquirers we want it to be somewhere where we want to work right i'm going to have to spend years of my life at the acquirer and so uh of course we really admire their culture and their mission and erin when you look at 40 000 documents processed so far how many customers have paid you at least a dollar in a one-time fee to generate those 40 000 documents yeah i think i'd have to again check but uh between 10 and 15 000 kind of paid customers to generate that 40 000 documents and do you have any relationship with those 10 000 folks like today if they used you three years ago or is it really sort of one time and then you're not around anymore so they're coming back and making updates to their document we offer that for free as a kind of competitive advantage in the market but uh really that building out that kind of longer-term relationship is the priority for us for 2021. yeah i mean that's a huge advantage if you can get these folks that paid one time a long time ago to still be addicted to your platform come in once a year and update it before their new year's celebration for example what's the activation metric you're tracking each year to say you know what we love this they're still active on the platform yeah that's a good question i'd have to ask our conversion manager but i don't know that we're really tracking a lot of that right now and that's kind of the next phase is okay now someone's in our ecosystem what are we actually doing to turn them into a long-term ambassador what is your team size today how many folks we're at 15. 15. okay how many engineers uh four four okay great and then everyone else is sort of a mix any quota carrying sales reps so we yep we have a b2b sales person we have an affiliates manager we have a great product and delivery team um and then some marketing folks as well that kind of blend between paid acquisition and uh the more content seo side of it and then we also have estate lawyers in each province on contract with us but they're not full-time employees does the bdr or the business person they have a like a sales quota they have to hit or they're just more handling all the relationships and partnerships it's a mix of both they do have a quota that they're aiming for but they also do a lot of fulfillment of those partnerships as well so actually working with partners on the account management side and then also doing a lot of the outbound and how do you structure maybe with a company like cody and trust and well how do you structure your affiliate arrangement and how has it changed from the first one you deal you did to now in terms of what you've learned yeah so for us it's really kind of we always have offered a percentage of revenue but again we're not a huge price point product so we have to find other ways to incentivize partners to promote us over a bank insurance company where they might be making thousands of dollars in commissions so we've started to expand from those learnings into uh earnings per click and for sign ups instead of just for conversions and i think that's something that others in the space are moving to as well so just just to put this out because epc earnings per click used to be only something you would see on like warrior form these like very deep like websites for like affiliate marketers but it's creeping into b2b and b2b sas exclusively so what you're saying is there are partners that you would pay just because you know the quality of their base is so high you're comfortable taking the risk and if they say yes aaron we'll send an email blast out to our list of a million people we're going to drain a thousand clicks you're comfortable saying we'll pay three bucks a click because you know what they're probably going to convert at 100 and also because we have a conversion manager whose job it is to create great journeys once they get there and to also be tweaking the product continually to know that we can actually service them the hardest challenge for any startup is getting someone someone's eyeballs on you right so for us we're happy to pay you especially as you said a very targeted market like new parents new homeowners etc um and and to pay for that versus a conversion super interesting what a great story let's wrap up here erin with your famous five number one favorite business book uh the power of habit by charles dewig number two is there a ceo you're following or studying great question i mean i guess cody from trust and will i really admire his leadership style and what he's been able to achieve in the business number three what's your favorite online tool for building wilco um asana it's my bible for project management number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night oh i i sleep a lot eight hours every night love that and what's your situation mary some obviously married kids no kids yet but uh you know what stay tuned nathan and you might you might see some in the future you're you mentioned parent life network and these mom groups i'm going oh maybe there's some kiddos on the way here we'll have to see all right so so mary no kids yet and aaron do you mind me asking how old you are i am 35. okay last question take us back 15 years what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 that uh entrepreneurship was a career path guys there you have it she started off as an agency now teamed up with her husband launched willful dot co helping with power of attorney and wills and end of life planning they've done over 40 000 of these documents filed spanned across over 10 000 customers that have paid them something to do this it is a one-time fee model right now but they did raise capital 800 000 at a six million dollar valuation we'll have to watch closely and see if the sas uh product is in the works right now they're just focused on driving free engagement and free updates for their user base as they want to keep updating those wheels and documents over time erin thanks for taking us to the top nathan thanks for having me appreciate it 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 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