How Ready Reviews CEO Mike Hall grew Ready Reviews to $5.2M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is my call he's a Serial entrepreneur animating easy to use highly effective marketing tools for local businesses at his company called wambot dot IO Mike radio takes at the top I'm ready let's go Nathan I know you joked you said Nathan I was a little bit late because I was getting him out of my McLaren and my audio wasn't connected has a slight Flex which we love but it's working I I love collection on the McLaren every day and it just a even more two weeks ago I was in New York City in Manhattan when they unveiled the new uh Arturo Supercar McLaren so McLaren invited me there the president of McLaren was there and I got to uh I got to complain about the the maintenance issues uh you're a car guy then huh I love cars man absolutely amazing so that's why you do SAS profits to put into cars that's pretty much where it goes that's amazing I love I love the honesty all right what is wombat what are people paying you for okay it's Word of Mouth bot uh which it basically is an automated system to get online reviews but in the end of the day the value that we're selling is business growth on autopilot for local businesses um but we have two types of users we've got local businesses but we've also got a partner program which is really blown up in the last year and a half where we have resellers uh selling the application and they Rebrand it for their own and they keep 100 of the revenue it's completely new different type of uh strategy we're seeing if it works here so so I guess tell me tell me well let's let's reverse engineer first last time it came on I think you said you were doing like four of what 450 Grand an AR something like that I I really can't remember I know it was about two two years ago or something like that what are you at today uh for ARR uh probably around three quarters of a million uh right now it might even be a little bit more at the end of this year but we're doing a little bit more than uh 60 000 per month right now that's great and that's that's all revenue you get you don't have to pay a bunch of that out to your value out of resellers right well yeah yes I I do have a marketing guy that gets a percentage on different things he brings in but when it comes to the resellers uh you know it's completely separate so I keep 100 of that Revenue so how do you make so from a value added reseller how do you make money from them okay uh well right now we charge them 199 per month okay but but I give them 50 locations to resell we have resellers all over the world right now that are reselling it for anywhere from 99 a month to uh 4.99 per month um so we have guys making tens twenty thousand dollars per month uh on reoccurring Revenue but they're going out and doing all the effort and the work of selling it which is not a lot of work to sell on by number one but um but the the thing that makes that an attractive business model from my standpoint is that it's a very efficient sign up in customer acquisition you know process we don't talk to them we don't do demos they go through funnels and everything else and they sign up and you know we have a free trial so they can sign up to and and the cool thing is as uh last year and a half we've really kind of boiled down our our ideal user our ideal partner and that the partners end up being sales people okay we had a bunch of different types of folks marketing companies and different things that would sign up but sales people they don't have to be technically uh you know Advanced they just have to be able to sell uh so uh that's where they're a sweet spot and we're just now really starting to crank that up Mike how many of them how many vars do they pay you 199 a month how many value-added resellers do you have today uh a little bit under 300 there's a little under 300 uh yeah in total 300 okay so I can take so I can take 300 times 200 bucks a month that's where you get 60 Grand a month in mrr yes but but some of those are on we have like a three-month plan for we have different distribution platforms but um but some of them go through like um where they get 99 a month for the first uh three months things like that so it doesn't add up exactly and also too we do have a pretty substantial churn rate I say it but it's a fact uh so but which it's always still growing but how big um when it comes to direct users like businesses it's very small like you know maybe two three percent but when it comes to Partners uh from the last year and a half I can't even give you an exact number but it's it's too much it's like maybe 20 20 some percent it's a lot uh but the thing is we were not concentrating on um sales people my marketing guy that does a great job you know getting free trials in for the partner side it came from the MLM world we had a lot of MLM people in there they come with a lot of problems and uh you know what that ended up happening is they were trying to sell it to resell it to resell it they weren't actually but but they ended up finding some terrific sales people that really you know took off with it 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 the 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 valuation 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 a 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 round 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 Mike when you add up all the volume of all the revenue your bars make together do you know what that is what they charge their customers no I I was talking to somebody yesterday about this my guess is somewhere around a half million a month maybe a little bit more uh that they are bringing in uh directly to themselves but but again I have no way at this point and we don't have enough time to tell you exactly why but I I used to be able to track it now I don't just make it easier on them why not why not try and take like I mean can you not take 10 of that okay so I watched one of your shows uh the other day I forget the app's name but I have it on my phone I contacted them uh my next step is to have an integrated Payment Processing platform and to capture a percentages Revenue it does two things it's going to make it easier for new partners they don't have to go out and get their own stripe or PayPal accounts to do recurring payments and we're going to capture more of that Revenue that plus sales enablement tools is the path forward so you know our current Revenue even if we didn't grow our user base and we had uh sales name with tools to sell to these partner uh I'm thinking would more than double the current ARR uh so so those are the things I'm trying to work on at this point in time but but it's still it's still in its infancy man we have a couple of investors some guys that uh did really well one guy does 70 million a year in a software company another guy sold his software for 84 million bucks and how much have you raised none uh right now so I I'm just kind of at that that point that they're doing due diligence we'll see whether or not I want you know or not on one but we'll see whether or not uh it goes like how much Capital do you need um it's I I mean if I had somewhere near a million dollars I I think I could do a lot with that you need that all right away or could you do like 200k today no it wouldn't be right away so there's you know holes in the boat there's a few problems I'm trying to solve uh development issues I've had the same Developers for seven eight years they're great guys but uh how many full-time today um it's it's not maybe like one you can kind of say is full time but we don't I don't have any employees I don't have any full-time staff I do everything through Partnerships do you code no so how do you get the how do you make sure that the things keeps working for all these 300 value out of resellers all the white labels I I I have uh developers that are basically on call every day so it's but but they're not full-time so that specific thing full time but but I have developers at any time of the day I could contact them and they will look into the problem they will fix the bug and it's usually fairly quickly well Mike I mean look one thing I'd encourage you to think about I don't know if you know this but like you know founder path my other company you know our whole goal is to help Founders get to 5 million bucks in ARR totally bootstrap of 100 control we could give you take your Mr today times five where would you spend the money to get Drive growth well there there's a couple things so the the development side for integrating a payment process which we already have stripe but we don't use that connect for um you know what do you call it we don't use the Connect Four uh you know partner payments so that would be number one development side the other side is to have a targeted marketing campaign directly towards uh sales people uh and it's that's not and I and I have a number of uh things that are pretty much ready to go and but uh content content is a big hurdle um so that would be one place where the revenue would be spent uh and um just on getting the development off the bar really I I think um which the development process might take three four months to get everything who are you using what's the dev shop you're using right now I I don't want to say their name but they're they're offshore so where where which country it's in India and they are like a larger organization and actually when I went to New York but I told you that the guy flew in uh that I've been dealing with for years is it Cody toss no no okay but if you have any recommendations please let me know no this is this is the number one thing we help founders with they use founder path and they take money from us we help make sure they've got amazing engineers and a lot of time it's an outsourced engineering from that we've already vetted that we have other Founders that are paying for so we know it's good quality work so we can chat about that offline but this is great so six thousand dollars a month and now if you're doing call it six thousand a month today what were you doing exactly a year ago do you remember uh it's probably about 20 some maybe 24 or 25 000 something like that uh you know oh that's a lot of growth so I mean how have you doubled in the past 12 months what changed well like I said uh David dubs who does a lot of the the marketing side he was really going towards you know which I hate MLM side but he was going through that but we were having five 600 free trials per month okay and I think at the height it was almost 700 so uh what we kind of ramped it up for a lot of free trials we have an affiliate program so that they get paid you know and things like that for referring others uh but um you know those 500 on average might end up being you know 40 new paying users which is great but then because of a return rate it was a it was up down kind of gross but um the beginning of the year it was starting to go down I think because of Christmas uh things like that MLM kind of thing again and then you know I gave dubs a hard time boom you found some bigger guys to go out there and advertise it and uh it went up properly but like I said at this point in time but we're not having great growth like today but what we're doing I'm getting rid of the churning disputing you know type of user partner and I'm bringing on the sales person and would you sell the whole business today for for a million dollars all cash up front no not for a million bucks no two no no probably not like it would be like it's so easy to grow this thing like and it's from my perspective like it's clear now how to go forward and that the problem is that um there's there's so much opportunity I mean like we're selling the sales people I just did a webinar last night for two hours had a bunch of our sales people on there we got this guy from Australia uh he's been doing commission only sales his whole life you know very successful guy who lives on a resort but um he says the best opportunity he's ever seen he's signing up five to six uh you know local businesses per per week at this point in time and again he's capturing 100 of the revenue and um and like I said our partners are flocking to people like him that are publicly saying things on his Facebook group because they are just hungry for sales enablement tools um so you know there's some missing pieces here that I'm trying to uh put together this year but um you know sales enablement and capturing some of the revenue that our sales People Partners are uh you know getting from local businesses for sure all right Mike sounds good we're out of time let's wrap up with the famous five quick answers here number one favorite book uh Jay Conrad Levinson and uh Gorilla Marketing number two is there a CEO you're following or studying no I'm not I'm not no number three what's your favorite online tool for building one bot ah did it uh I you know there's so many right now I I really don't have I'm sorry I wasn't ready for like the uh the Fast Five uh I I like wombat for growing a business business growth too many number four how many hours of sleep to get every night uh you know between four and eight it all depends on what's going on that day all right in situation married single kids I'm married you know happily here in Tennessee how many kids uh what one's done we got one son that's why that's why I'm here in the middle of the car all right you're very cool and how old are you I'm 41 I'm too old 41. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um just to uh to start a software business uh because and when I was 18 I went to one class for HTML I should have just kept going with it and continued to learn how to code um and because I love to build stuff so with software the building blocks are free I'm building a house right now it takes forever and but with software if you know how to code it's free uh it is wombat.io help small businesses grow he doesn't want to deal with all the sales work so he has over 300 value-added resellers that sell his product he does not take a cut from them right now but they make about 6 million bucks a year through his program that's his estimate he makes about sixty thousand dollars a month because each bar pays about 200 300 bucks a month for the software that's he's doing six thousand dollars a month right now up from twenty five thousand dollars a month just a year ago totally bootstrapped which we love and he's a one-man I wrecking machine all Consultants building this tool which we love Mike thanks for taking us to the top I appreciate it and talk to you soon 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 their 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 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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