Ready Reviewsrevenue

hello everyone my guest today is mike hall he's a 38 year old serial entrepreneur gone digital he's been involved in startups entire life even when they were just called new businesses from patenting a product manufacturer in china to owning a construction company and now creating a cutting-edge marketing tool in the form of a sas with the word of mouth bot he's an innovator and creator at the core whether it be online or offline mike you're ready to take us to the top let's go all right it's onebot.io tell us what the company does and how you make money all right nathan uh wombot stands for word of mouth but and it's a marketing tool so basically it automates the process of getting a high volume of real online reviews for companies and once it gets those reviews it uses live data and our proprietary logic to decide where to put uh each review so this might mean internalizing a negative review as feedback or putting positive reviews on yelp until uh the rating is above a 4.0 for example and then wombat would automatically start sending the positive reviews to google where they're you know have the most impact and bottom line the purpose is over time uh this means ranking for more keywords on search and a dramatic increase in organic traffic and so how are you how are you incentivizing people to leave these reviews in the first place uh well what we found is timing is the most important thing uh i've talked to a lot of people on both sides so uh the customers the consumers that are buying these products and leaving the reviews a lot of them fully intend to leave a review if they have a great experience 90 percent of people that have good experiences in fact say they would leave a review if it was easy so we make it very easy for the business and very easy for the consumer uh to leave the review uh and by asking at exactly the right time uh we're getting people to write you know paragraphs and books online about uh how great their experience was with their electricity how are you asking them though like what's the electrician dude the electrician gives you the customer's email and you email them directly well it could be email through email or sms yeah so for example black time electric in salt lake city they started with 111 reviews now they have 929 as of today on google and this is because uh asking at the right time so with them specifically we integrate with their quickbooks uh so they invoice a customer as they always would and we programmatically get that data and we uh contact their customer at exactly the right time so what do you charge for this on average per month what do people pay well our customers are direct uh companies and then we also uh have a white label version that we distribute through partners like marketing companies for example so we do charge per location uh it's a very new business so uh the pricing we're still trying to do our best to figure out a hundred percent but on average right now uh the market seems pretty comfortable at 199 per location approximately um so just to be fair are you selling mainly to brick and mortar locations like you give the example an electrician which i imagine like what do you mean a location for an electrician sure so that could be a physical geographic location where if they have multiple um you know locations around the city or a region but it but reviews are really ubiquitous so the electrician is an example uh but it's not the status quo so we have service companies we've got doctors we've got lawyers we've got a lady how many how many companies today uh well in the last two weeks we've gone up a little bit more than 10 well we've got just under uh 60 uh paying users right now that that account for a little bit over 200 locations in total okay so can i take 60 times 200 bucks you're doing about 11 grand or 12 grand a month in revenue right now uh just just a little bit over 12 yes but but but also to like i said uh we charge per location so that doesn't mean that we're charging that 200 per location we we're still trying to figure out our pricing but you're doing about 12 grand a month right now with 60 clients correct okay so that's without each one paying 200 a month on average on average where were you exactly a year ago were you pre-revenue at that point uh a year ago this month i was making a hundred dollars a month yeah my my first customer and and and i i was moonlighting uh you know developing the software and uh you know i had a construction company i was working at it with it uh on a daily basis so year one was 20 2018 you launched in 2018 correct okay and i bootstrapped the company or raised capital no i i bootstrapped it everything's paid on my own how many people now today at the company well uh tomorrow i have my first sdr starting so as of tomorrow there will be two in the office but um we do have developers designers a lot of uh you know copywriters i mean in total i've contracted you know 20 30 people in total but that's not full-time employees how many full-time just okay yeah as of tomorrow that's great okay good what about churn it's critical in a sas company have you lost customers yeah absolutely at the beginning i did have a lower price point uh to try to accommodate folks like real estate agents or lower volume companies and i found that does not work so i had a 19 plan and found that those folks are the ones that turn uh the most so what i found was actually increasing the price to the direct user uh maintained uh you know that that partnership longer and decreasing the price uh to partners uh had the same effect uh for parts so mike what is your turn today what's the revenue turn per year uh i i mean like i said it really would if you split it into two different categories you know the direct users and the the partners i mean with the direct users right now it's it's probably i'd say 10 or less which is not great but but but it's going down much less in the last six seven months okay so about 10 logo churn per month uh well it it was initially uh but what's it today you mean give me the updated number uh 4.3 percent when i looked at it okay four point three percent logo turned permanent uh correct okay that's great and are you how are you getting these customers where did you get the first 60 well like i said i was working with my construction business i didn't have a lot of time to put towards it so everything was through cold emails i would spend 10 15 minutes a day i have a very robust system of gathering emails and i send out a high volume of emails uh on a daily basis and through cold emails is how i was obtaining the the user how are you getting the email in the first place uh through a number of that's a long answer we need a long time to talk about that but there is a number of different ways uh through you know crawling millions of sites uh through a technology i created or uh subcon you know not some contract but using other sas services that provide some of these name name one of the tools you use ah snob dot io is you know like a a known a known tool uh that i've just recently started using uh that's knob dot io ah snob snov dot io and then how do you once you get the email what are you using to send it i have a system set up uh it's called automatic i don't know atomic email and i have it it's a pretty unique system but uh i i send it through there uh in how many per day on average uh it it really goes up and down it fluctuates but i can send 20 30 000 emails a day currently i have millions of emails that uh again i've been very inefficient in uh copywriting and content and that's why and what's the tool you send these through it's called automatic email uh atomic email i'm sorry hey what's the website uh atomic email sender.com i think it it's uh it's not a sas product it's you pay it one time and it's a native application uh like you're used to in the 90s i guess okay just to be clear is it spelled spell it for me is it ato mic yeah correct like a like atomic bomb atomic email interesting okay good and so that's like a tool it's this on your desktop or it's a web tool it's a desktop so it's a native application it's not a web-based cloud cloud-based app is it called atomic email hunter no uh it's just a tablet yeah that's the same company but that hunter is not very good uh that atomic email hunter does not does not work very well but but their sender works uh it's kind of a clunky system but uh it it does the job interesting and how do you know that deliverability is high uh because i track it how uh through code i can i can track opens and clicks um you know uh it what i don't have right now is a ability to follow up and do a drip and uh you know uh action-based follow-up which i'm working on developing now but uh you know so everything would have to be manual to follow up with uh emails at this point in time interesting when you send out 20 000 in a day how many would respond well the response to me is uh signing up for a demo so they would go to my website wombat.io they would search around get interested in it sign up for a demo and my closing rate has been fairly high because of that you know like i said in the last four months i've worked on this full time and i've tried different lead generation tactics and email so far is has been the most efficient way of generating interest sorry what is the response rate uh it's all over the board when when i was doing it uh earlier last year i i believe it took about 33 000 emails to get a new user but when i increased the volume uh it took much more so uh i don't have the exact number but give me the actual response i don't want how many for a new user but for a replied email like a response if you send out twenty thousand what's your responsibility it all depends on the category so i'll give you an example uh you know recently we sent out uh about throughout a week about sixty thousand emails to a number of uh marketing companies or freelancers and we have a new plan that's 1.99 per month that includes 50 locations which they end up charging you know reselling it for 299 or more a month what was the response rate the response rate for that i think i had like seven or eight demos set up and you know probably about three three closes out of those eight demos i see but but again uh if i send it to a bunch of electricians i might have a lower response got it do you know yet what your cac is your fully weighted customer acquisition cost i i do not uh too early yeah i i i i'm assuming there's going to be a number of additional expenses uh to really grow it uh you know properly like i said right now it's it's completely bootstrapped in all my shoulders and so would you would you uh where are you based uh murfreesboro tennessee and it's about a half an hour uh south of nashville i'm originally from delaware but i moved here about seven years ago and i really like it around here very good when do you think you'll break 15 000 bucks a month uh well i believe i do have a commission only outside sales person and he's about to close a deal with 60 locations at 100 a month with a two-year term at 144 000 bucks for the two years so uh we should be breaking that as soon as that paper is signed mike but you and i both will believe that when it's signed and the money's in the bank right you you are correct it means nothing right now yeah how um how have you looked at raising capital to drive growth or no i i have not um you know there is there are um examples of uh competitors raising a large amount of capital and i can appreciate that but uh for me right now uh i i don't i don't have intention of raging capital though very good all right let's wrap up mike with the famous five one answers one word answers here if you can number one what's your favorite business book uh well i got a lot of books over here but the one on top is uh predictable rationality here by uh dan early it's a great great book about the psychology of uh you know illogical decision making and how we buy things number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um first when it comes to mine is jay conrad levinson he actually passed away about five years ago but he's the creator of gorilla marketing and i believe wombot really is a gorilla marketing tactic and he's somebody that i used to read books you know when i was a teenager good number three what's your favorite online tool uh it would probably have to be that atomic email sender i guess uh you know that that's that's one that's worked out the most uh for me so number four how many hours of sleep to get every night eight plus i get plenty of sleep and what's your situation married single kids yeah i got a wife and two sons all right so and how old are you i'm 38. 38 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew just to stick to one business at a time i've done too many different things and in uh if you stick yet anything for a while you you know it's easy to succeed guys stick to one business at a time launched wombot back in 2018 now 60 customers paying 200 bucks a month 12 grand a month in revenue got his first customers by cold emailing 10 to 15 minutes a day you know 10 20 000 emails sending out per day via snov dot io and atomic email again profitable bootstrap two people but in nashville tennessee 4.3 logo churn per month it's too early to talk about cac but as he looks to scale again makes reviews easy mike thanks for getting us to the top thank you nathan