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...