How WriterAccess CEO Byron White grew to $9.4M revenue and 14K customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is byron white he is the creator of the content creation platform writeraccess.com byron you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right so what is writer access is marketplace play here or sas blue both actually rhetoricist is a marketplace where you can connect with writers content strategists editors translators and people that are performing the type of valuable work that content marketers need these days we charge a sas fee to access our talent pool and our software that makes it all work but essentially exit redirects just makes it easy to find freelancers place orders and manage the workflow now you came on back i believe it was like uh september of 2018 i think um you told me that you launched the company in 2010 at that point you were just passing about i think a thousand customers where are you today how many customers um well that thousand active customer base um probably is uh been expanded to about 7 000 active customers of a year um we also have gone from 100 customers when we first started in 2010 to 40 000 customers more than 40 000 customers that have purchased from us in the history of the company so so so tell me tell me that one more time and what that means is that basically just means a lot of people touch you they churn so you still have seven thousand actively paying today but forty thousand paid you something that's correct in the life of the company 40 000 people have purchased content from us i see i see so take me back to founding year 2010 how much revenue did you do that year you remember about a half a million okay interesting and what did you end up finishing 2019 with um about 8.2 million and i can tell you this because it's public information we made the inc 5000 list five years in a row and that's public congratulations sure i i would grill you anyway and try and get it if you have if you if you hadn't if you hadn't disclosed it so so 8.5 million last year and what do you think you'll finish this year with um north of nine south of ten so we'll show another growth here this year for sure and have you done this all bootstrapped absolutely oh we love that that's impressive so decade in 10 million company all bootstrapped what's the closest you've come to selling equity not close at all um i haven't had interest up to this time uh we've talked with multiple but when you make the 5000 list you get repeated phone calls from private equity venture capital even on the corporate side uh people interested in the business because they see growth right so you they're interested in learning more about the business model so we've talked with dozens and dozens probably hundreds of people over the years and keep our door open for communication but uh for us it's about growing the business and helping our our freelancers uh you know grow their businesses which is really what we're doing we represent thousands of freelancers yeah break down the marketplace for me so so let's just talk about the last 30 days how many businesses like me have paid you something to access your freelancer talent thousands okay can you be more like two three five ten less than ten more than two okay got it and and uh let's just make it easy let's say it was 5 000 right 5 000 businesses like me have paid you to access your freelancer talent how many freelancers have they paid at least a dollar through your platform over the past 30 days probably about the same number i mean when i say they've done business with us they've made a transaction with us so um remember a couple things nathan we we charge a monthly subscription fee you know for the for the service so it's kind of like a platform as a service those fees range from 39 to 59 to 79 depending upon what you want if you just want access to writers and very light software no problem but if you want our full-service solutions designed for example for agencies that are scaling content you might need our white label solution and you might need access to our shutterstock getty image photo library so your content managers can manage content like one content manager can manage content for 50 clients if you're an agency writer access maybe more um so the platform builds in automation it builds in you know building a team up um you know launching articles well in advance of when they're due and working on a month-to-month basis to place orders you know manage the workflow cue up the content push it out directly to wordpress facebook you know wherever it needs to go and using our engines and software to do that so it's like it's like a content marketing workflow software on steroids out of curiosity i think this is going to surprise people maybe maybe it won't be surprising the customer don't name them but the customer that pays you the most monthly what do they pay you monthly um we have some customers that are paying north of a hundred thousand dollars a month you know to have content created at scale um we have customers paying a hundred dollars a month you know including their 39 a month fee right so that's that's interesting because that's kind of our problem right we're servicing 93 different industries more than 90 industries right we are servicing smbs tiny little startups but we're also servicing fortune 500 companies and agencies either micro entrepreneurs or full-blown thousand person agencies that are trying to scale content often for tens of thousands of clients they're looking to everyone's looking to us towards give me a great writer you know make sure they're proficient and skilled and make sure that they can work within the confines of what our orders are the specifications the requirements the rule sets that we can tag on to in order to make sure orders are done the right way uh built-in keyword optimization if you need it you know checking keyword density analysis or particular requirements i need x y and z sourced i need to know your sources i need you to research these five websites you know or every project is different and we're dealing with so many different types of projects that's the other problem right because we're representing writers editors translators content strategists and guess what we just expanded and launched designer access and we now represent designers illustrators animators photographers videographers so it's and they're all working the same platform just with two different brand names which is a whole nother discussion in itself nathan should we change our name or do everyone loves writer access so we're like stuck you know and like uh you know do we just have two two twin sisters writer access and designer access you know i don't know it's our it's our debate of the month within our team baron how many people are on your team 12 how many engineers couple okay four or five less okay um are so that i'm trying to figure out a phrase this question the biggest issue i see with founders that come on who are trying to build marketplaces is like virtual ran into this right they made a move and basically moved all of their freelancer talent from just contractors to full-time employees which jacked up their fixed expenses through the roof but long term can improve their economics i believe you just told me 12 full time on the team you keep all of your 5000 freelancers they are contractors not full-time employees the trick with that is how do you make sure that they will fill the demand that you drive them based off what you're paying them versus them going out getting their own work personally like themselves we encourage our freelancers to get their own work if they need to and or want to we believe in the digital you know the gig economy if you will where many of our freelance service are i'll give you some examples they're completely overqualified to be creating an article on vacuum cleaners okay or cleaning the house but they enjoy it they actually like that work maybe come on i a technical writer you're telling me you can convince them to write an article on vacuum cleaners and love it not only can i convince them they only want to do write writing that is not within their profession because they do that all day every day doing their job that's fair that's the point right so you know i i think um you know we're very happy with with the with the freelance base of writers we have and freelancers we have we think that's the right way to build the business model and it's not because we don't want to pay benefits or medical benefits it's just because most of our our our writers have full-time jobs and have those benefits elsewhere or have purchased their own medical we have some writers that you know they make in excess of 100 000 a year with us and they buy their own medical insurance and we you know help them out if they need help on it from an hr perspective um but you know for the most part um you know we we think that the you know that the freelance economy is is here to stay and people like it and want it and it's a healthy part of of the global infrastructure just like uber's biggest expense is going to be paying drivers i imagine your biggest expense annually is paying out your freelancers right so absolutely if you finish this year let's just make the math easy nine million dollars you said somewhere between 910 let's just say 9 million about how much will you pay out to your freelancers that's also public we pay 70 of every dollar transactional dollar that comes in is paid to our freelancers we don't that is that is actually one of the secrets i think for our success is we have been fully transparent with what our rates are with both freelancers and writers in our clients yeah so it's it's very important i think from our perspective that we be transparent because so frankly a lot of marketplaces gouge a lot more than that yep yep so you i mean if you look at your expenses to date so far you've probably already paid out over 5.8 million dollars to freelancers very much so yeah on track to be something like 6.5 and you've got a bunch of them that basically it sounds like use you full-time do over 100 000 bucks a year in revenue yep very much so interesting why isn't it cheaper to replace those writers that you pay the most with full-time employees that you pay sixty thousand dollars fixed and have them right full-time before we launched writer access we were a full-service content marketing agency servicing customers like the company store brookstone ftd iron mountain sales force great great brands and we struggled as an agency like all agencies do particularly when you're a big agency servicing those big brands when you lose a client it can be a devastating hit to the agency right because you have full-time employees as you just mentioned relying upon salaries to do the work but when that goes away and we had accounts that were half a million we had one account it was a million dollar account another one that was about three quarters of a million we happened to lose we didn't lose those accounts but they were up on their two-year uh you know uh programs with us and they just kind of ended and we produced a voluminous amount of content that they just needed to take a time out and say let us sort this out see where we're going we need to take a break so you know that that really was the trigger for us to say we want to do this differently number one we want our clients to work directly with freelance writers right we don't want a middleman to have to send an email alert to a client saying your content's ready to take a look at let me know what you think we wanted the feedback to go directly to the writers we also wanted the tone and the voice of instructions to go directly from the client directly to the writer even actual voices where we built in voice recording into writer access a cool feature that allows a writer to when they're placing an order they can have a number dial up and they can call in and leave some voice instructions which is fascinating because you get to hear the tone and the voice of the client this is interesting um you gave me the numbers earlier in the last 30 days 5000 businesses like me have used you and you've paid out about 5 000 freelancers what's total gmv project value through the platform past 30 days hard to say you've got to be getting close to a million a month um we've had um our f yes we've we've had a million dollar a month actually recently um and that's been exciting um but i think the numbers can also sway even above that or below that depending upon a lot of variables an election month for example you know um you know covered uh new rules and regulations and shutdowns i mean it's a weird time of year to be trying to get stable numbers of of of growth but overall good news writer access has been very lucky very successful and hats off to all the entrepreneurs that haven't you know done as well as as we have or other people but we had a very good year this year which we are blessed with so yeah i mean if you do 9.5 top line you pay 6.5 million out to freelancers you're helping all those freelancers plus you've got three million in revenue yourself where your biggest cost is your team of 12. i mean that means you're cranking you know gross revenue per employee of 250 000 which is way above industry average of 180 000 so i mean profitable business bootstrap helping a lot of people make money this is the way to do it we'd like to think so we're going to keep going on and we have exciting plans to scale into seven other countries and to like i said expand designer access which we're just now rolling in we also had a lot of interesting we had an interesting year we we run a conference i you may or may not remember that it's called content marketing conference typically that's a 600 person live event that's what it was in 2019 we because the the event fell on um april 20th we had to make a pivot four week notice and we moved it all online to a virtual event we went from 600 attendees to 15 000 registered attendees for cmc it was off the charts and um that helped us certainly to get some visibility for the conference um and that was a lot of fun to be honest and in a very valuable service the key to that was we basically uh made it free right everyone was hunkered down we wanted to give back to the community so we opened our doors and we had 50 speakers three keynotes um uh ten workshops three hour deep dive workshops uh my content strategy certification program was back in there as well so we could give badges out for people that went through the training and it's just been off the charts um we left that program sensing that this community needed education so we took the content strategy certification program and turned it into uh six workshop webinars three hours in length we called them workshop webinars we had no idea if anybody would show up the first one we ran 1500 people registered 700 showed up go figure you know who has time it was really you know against what very counter-intuitive you know to to imagine that that something like that could come together but uh but it's been great so we have about a thousand people in what we call writer access academy right now which is this new free resource for people uh to to learn content strategy to get content strategy certification it has the 24 hours of recordings from these these deep dive workshops plus the core elements from my content strategy master class book and a workbook so that's just been a fantastic resource for our fans our both our writers as well as our clients that are trying to educate and acclimate people on content strategy so i'm sorry for the long-winded answer there no no it's fine that's super helpful to understand so i mean you're also building obviously a massive distribution channel here how many people do you have on your list that are either content writers themselves or they're hiring content writers um hundreds of thousands yeah i mean and do you eat do you stay in close contact you email once a week yes yeah that's interesting i mean you there's a whole model there i mean there are brands that only have an email list in the space that are doing a million two million a year just selling sponsorships into that into that size sort of list have you played with that no yeah yeah interesting we when we don't really hard sell too much to our list hard sell anything to them other than we offer free webinars we we provide spotlights for our talent you know we just feel like remember we're in the content marketing space right so we have to practice what we preach we believe in providing informational assets that are helpful and resourceful and help people make their life smarter better faster and wiser so we let our work sell itself last question there's a lot of folks in the space that are not running their marketplaces as efficiently as you are peng is an example in the design space design pickles also in that space i've interviewed probably three dozen that are sort of in the space doing somewhere between three and 20 million dollars in revenue you know if i if i figured out way to get you 100 million bucks and say listen buy rent keep twenty percent of the company i get eighty percent because i'm bringing the revenue but you go buy a bunch of these things and build a hundred million dollar revenue company that you're paying out you know ten thousand freelancers each year over a hundred thousand dollars each i mean would you ever go for something like that or do you really enjoy your freedom you know what i enjoy is taking something that i've been part of building with my team and making it big much bigger than we have right now in our way to do that as a bootstrap sales trap you know as an entrepreneur that's that doesn't need vc funding and i'm past that anyway and even private equity would be questionable whether they could help us do what we what we want to do our strategy is to go abroad you know go to other countries and take you know the the the self-serving fabric we've created and make it accessible to people you know outside the united states that can grow so we're kind of doing that on our own would i welcome the opportunity to talk with anybody else in this industry and see what it looks like to put businesses together to form something bigger larger but more scalable so we can put more food on the table for freelance writers and you know uh you know help our business grow up absolutely i mean it's it roll-ups will are inevitable right nathan i mean that's i'm sure you have a lot of fans you know that are listening in that are on the pe side and the v you know the venture capital side and saying who can we roll together who's doing it well out there right i mean that's a big part of your audience so the hard part is finding the hub that's the hard part the leader that can do it all that's right i mean it'll be an interesting exercise on the design side nathan you know what we do over there i'm very against the 99 design sort of model which by the way 99 designs just sold a vista printer now you saw that or not yeah and that's matt's been on the show many times the founder of of 99 designs to like walk through that model just a very different model and by the way i thought that was really interesting that he moved to australia he was going to maybe take the company public over there i mean i need to go back and listen to those noted i will yes i i need to forget about you you recorded that i need to go listen to what he had to say but i've never met him i don't know who he is but i think that when you look at their model they sort of started out with like 99 designers do the work but only one of them gets paid you know it's like that was the model it was crowdsourced design which makes sense for a quick logo you know maybe it makes sense and and there was actually a great review i got a lot i gained a lot of respect for 99designs from a really great um author of communication arts magazine that made a defense of of that crowdsource model saying look i i enjoy competing why not this is fun you know i don't take it personally if i don't win the problem is people that are depending upon revenue from these marketplaces and that's where it gets tough but i think we've seen matt pivot away from that and be more like lock into a designer give them an opportunity to perform and that's the tact where we're going that's what's worked successful for writers we don't really agree with or like the crowdsourced model so that's where we're going on the design side but you know hey some of these come from design pickle i don't know i don't know i mean their model's interesting but their freelancers are seemingly overseen so they're kind of on their payroll i'm sort of thinking i don't know you did an interview i just think you have a lot of there are a lot of ways for you to vary in my opinion to very efficiently deploy capital besides just your current model right i mean you also have these if you want to stay in writing only there are all these brands um uh that i know right now that are looking at selling that are massive communities in the writer's space or like you getting into like the um the uh you know self-publishing school what chandler's building and help using your writers to write books right yeah look at what tucker is doing with with book in a box that has now obviously changed and edited and gone through scribe right is now what it is i mean there's so many opportunities for you in terms of content so i we're watching closely that's why i had john i appreciate you coming back on byron hey great to be here with you thanks for your time you bet let's wrap up here very fast with the famous five number one favorite business book i'm still going back to in search of excellence i think about it all the time and i'm always in search of excellence so i'm going with tom peters number two is there a ceo you're following are studying not really not with steve jobs out of the picture i mean it's certainly a lot of respect for a lot of ceos out there but you know steve jobs for me was was somebody that i had a great deal of admiration and respect for number three what's your favorite online tool for building writer access um tools that we created ourselves like word vision which went defunct but it became a catalyst for what we could do differently at writer access namely track the performance of content that we're creating for our clients and is baked in free of charge at writer access interesting number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night four to six and situation married single kids um married with kids from a previous marriage go colby one one one kiddo one child yeah all right very cool and how old are you uh 58 58 byron last question what do you wish you when you were 20 to be an entrepreneur i've been dreaming about it forever and living the dream i guess you could say guys writer access they have over 5 000 businesses paying them over the past 30 days to access over 5 000 writing freelancers talent they'll do 9.2 million in terms of money through the platform this year have many free answers that make over 100 grand via the platform they pay out 70 of their total revenue out to their writers but still even after that spend 3 million in gross revenue into the company of just 12 people he's done it totally bootstrapped since 2010 growing nicely over 8.5 million in gmv in 2019 and just 1.2 back in 2018 so nice growth look out for design access coming out next byron thanks for taking us to the top hey thanks anything 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 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hello everyone my guest today is Byron white he's one of the original content marketing revolutionaries and founder of writer access he started several other businesses including freelance access life tips idea launch and more Byron is the chair and founder of content marketing conference and event featuring 65 speakers and 20 keynotes in 2018 he's authored four books on content marketing topics as a popular speaker at dozens of conferences and host a webinar and podcast series Byron are you ready to take us to the top three and I'm with you thanks for thanks so much I want to figure out what to dial in here on the show cuz you do so many things writer access is that a sass platform pure play software it is yes okay and did that come before the conference and before the speaking and the podcast or was it later before the conference yes yeah okay so let's let's focus on that then tell us what writeraccess does and what's the revenue model how do you make money sure redirects this is a marketplace that connects 25,000 customers with 15,000 freelance writers editors content strategists and all kinds of interesting people in the content marketing industry what was though sorry what was the marketplace number there 25,000 customers and white on the other side some customers and 50,000 freelancers five zero one five one five zero zero zero so a lot of travel and a lot of customers and our software and our platform makes it easy for our customers to find freelancers place orders you can manage the workflow inside of our platforms with some really cool tools and do you view this more as a marketplace revenue model it's a percentage of spend that kind of goes to the platform more it's more a flat fee SAS model for the first five or six years of our eight years of operations we were a pure marketplace transactional business in the last year we made a pivot over to SAS where we're now charging a fee to use our technology and access various levels of talent in our pool biron that's a big change it's a big deal why'd you do it well I think there are the millions of dollars that we put into our software had to find a way to generate some revenue at some point we were very careful with we did that and wanted to make sure we had a really good value proposition and we're worth 39 bucks a month or as much as $350 a month to use our platform access our talent and create a unique brand position that very simply had something that the other brands and marketplaces out there did not have so we've achieved that goal we made the pivot and it has gone crazy well like insanely well like quantify that for me well we're probably we're bringing in more customers on on a daily weekly basis than we were when we were an open source free platform which is pretty crazy if you think about we'll just be clear an open source free platform can't bring on any customer so of course now do you mean though you're now today we're in a week bringing on more paid customers than you added in terms of just new free users in the past well the free users I agree with that your statement that you don't call them customers until they pay but imagine this when we were open and free for anybody to try we could bring in freelancers that wanted to try to see what the platform was all about or we could bring in people that were kicking our tires and you know taking a look at our model but that's spending any money those customers and presumably prospect customers those prospects costs us money because we have to deal with them and call them or email them our market to them and figure out what they want so by gating our model to say if you're serious about content we would like you to prepay a $39 fully refundable prepayment so pull out your card if you if you really are interested in experiencing the quality of our of our platform and our service that's that's what I mean and so when you look at the numbers of of all of those free people who actually bought a blog post for $17.50 you know we're bringing in more people now they were paying 39 or more just for membership than we were for the spicy one I have 10 people that finally bought something for $17 I see now you said you go between 39 and something like 3 or 400 bucks per month give me an average just to avoid going on every cohort what's the average customer pay per month [Music] okay good and then let's put this on a timeline what did you launch the platform that the the marketplace platform the whole thing [Music] 2010 and then just recently 2017 is when you turn on the sass revenue correct at the end very end of 2017 [Music] we're pleased to announce that we made 5,000 lists for the fifth year in a row oh that's great that's really that's really really great hold I'm work into that in a second what tell me first of what have you scaled to in terms of total customers using you well 25,000 about 26,000 customers down mean a deposit under access sorry sorry I just met re the show usually focuses on sass revenue I always forget to qualify just on your sass product yeah um okay I mean are we talking like hundreds or thousands thousands okay so between a thousand and ten thousand is fair yeah okay got it so so I mean look minimum a thousand at a hundred bucks a pop so it's already generating a hundred grand per month in m RR is that accurate you know I wouldn't go that far we have if you look at churn rates and if you look at sorting out the lifetime value of customers you know I wouldn't say that that's a fair number okay neither of those things tie back though to current MOR they might be future indicators of growth but taking a thousand customers times 100 LRRP would give us a hundred thousand and mr which of those two numbers are wrong the customer or the average ARPU the average is not a thousand thousand we don't have a thousand people at this moment in history paying average ninety nine dollars I see I see I see L okay so if you that as well only 30 days ago did we launch the three hundred and forty nine dollar program so you have to keep that in mind you know that's right no I understand by the way that you're just launched this there but oh there's a lot of people this model of moving from a market place to a market place Plus SAS is very in right now a lot of people are trying it and so I try and dive into these stories understanding at the SAS revenue is typically fairly early I mean do you know off the top your head to do is it a hundred 150 or four hundred that are on just the pure play SAS side I love your tenacity with numbers thank you but I'm really not prepared to disclose how many people are paying on a monthly recurring basis I think our stats and our story is more interesting with regards to how we made the transition and what value proposition were offering customers fair enough sure I appreciate that but we've also done about 3,000 these interviews and I know what my audience wants to hear and it's metrics not pie in the sky kind of philosophy so Cheryl you already shared stuff on Inc so wanting to share what you already share with Inc what's revenue and what did you share we generated 7.2 million dollars in 2017 and we did not disclose to Inc what percentage of that was SAS versus marketplace rep okay great so all the way now does that include the conference business or just everything to writers access sorry does that does it okay and and so you mentioned I think you said the software came after the conference what what made you want to jump into creating a marketplace why not just double down on the conference let me Flip my question let me flip my question then conferences are very hard to scale most people lose money their first year the comments why go into something that you know is gonna be a loss leader for at least a year so it's our fourth year of the conference actually be our fifth year this year we absolutely knew that the conference would be a money loser going in to going into the play but we felt it was very important to us to establish our leadership position in the marketplace and to meet face to face with customers and prospects in to you know really do our job to help educate the masses on content marketing which is really what we've tried to do for four years mm-hmm and talk break I mean break down the nerves that first year you know you're looking at ticket sales a month before go-live Day and you're like oh my gosh we're like 50% full and then hopefully big spurt right - two weeks before walk me through was going through your head um well yeah I love them we did some we did about 150 people the first year 300 the second year think about this for a second what we did 150 the first year but 282 second year 3 almost 400 third year and 600 the fourth year 600 the fourth year and so we we think that's pretty good growth you know and the show this year was just jaw-dropping this was the fourth year this was the fourth year yes in May of 2018 and it was have you structure you know altered pricing you know dealt with the meal negotiations with the conference then have you gotten it to the point where it's cashflow positive now or is that breaking ball so okay that is a laugh of someone that's still losing money on it which is okay nothing wrong with that by the way I'm just curious you know how you're thinking about it sure so the first two years we ran the conference we hired a company called a rising media that did a fabulous job of running the conference yep or a professional conference management company and their goals and objectives are to make money as soon as possible and what that meant from our perspective was philosophically this was not ever intended to be a moneymaker for writeraccess it was meant to be its own standalone grant content marketing conference that was founded by me the chair of the conference we have philosophical differences with rising media on expenditures should we film every session should we have black curtains behind the stage these became very frustrating conversations for both sides of the table and I completely respect their side at the table which is money the conference's be property so after two years we decided to sever ties with them again nothing but positive things to say about them sure huh and and move the conference to Boston where we could lose money at a much faster pace and have a much better show yeah so we took it to the next level big time we moved it to the western waterfront we paid speakers what we felt we should be doing from the get-go we went from you know for non paint he knows - last year we had twenty keynotes twenty you know telco show that has twenty keynote speakers it was insane ten during the regular conferences that we hosted a Content Marketing keynote I'm sorry comedy marketing keynote series which was fascinating to see what the response to that will be which was what response absolutely overwhelmingly positive this marketplace as it turns out is starving for comedy like in a proportion that I did not even understand when I came up with the idea to experiment with comedy marketing which I believe is is a new frontier so okay so this makes a lot of sense you're still losing money on it but you you know you can afford to lose money on it because you can underwrite it with other lines of revenue so writeraccess obviously another line of revenue is there any other revenue streams I'm missing from your overall business not really I mean we have our highest here of it right or axis is what we call me a service so we've layer services into the SAS model but it is recurring revenue from a SAS perspective so we basically give away free free managed service when you sign up for a $349 package ok leap we leap from 99 at the highest sass pure SAS you know tier to 349 which layers on service on top and Byron what's the team size today how many people eleven okay and what's the breakdown between the software engineers writing the SAS product versus the folks doing onboarding and professional services things like service and only I have a very important developer and development team that is very small but does is it just one person it's okay if it is pretty much yeah but you know we do we yes and no we've had other people work with us over the years we've been around for eight years so we've had a department of two or three people on full-time one job - so we flip-flop around depending upon what our next year's plan is with regards to roll out if you're SAS product scales you know downtime will not be an option and so stability in the developer role is gonna be critical I struggle with that a lot of people that are not - up or struggle with that you know what you just articulated one person there's maybe might be like someone building a bridge where there's a single point of failure if winds at 150 miles per hour you never want a single point of failure so does that make you nervous and if so how do you deal with that um it doesn't make me nervous and you know but we've got some pretty good you know backup and redundancy and Plan B you know if and when needed we can bring in other people that we know and trust - how about if something unfortunate happened yep so you know we try to cover ourselves but the key for us is trying to think way ahead right so you know if we need to beef up our staff we absolutely will you know we've been profitable from since the get-go so if we want to spend more money on something we can and we've done that in scale we've done that in Romania with you know four or five developers working for us with our core developer scaling it out we've done it with other full-time employees but the key is you have to really understand the wants and needs of your customers and what they really want and how to stay ahead of your competition and the platform and so you know we make decisions okay what do we want to invest in trying to stay three to six months ahead of the game yeah so for example we we've made a decision that we want to expand into representing designers and illustrators and animators because our clients have been asking them for long on ten you know we need content but not just you know words we need to expand beyond words yeah and some of her some of our investments have absolutely failed my famous mom is launching translation service we we went at it like most companies probably would we staff to help build the model out we hired with developer you know additional development support to build a version of writeraccess that could manage a slightly different workflow platform and the whole thing took about eight months we spent about a quarter of a million dollars on it and then we're like Donna let's go holy moly have you ever seen the prices of a PPC prices of you know higher translator they're like you know five to ten dollars a click you know so it's very we learned after six to eight months of investment and it's gonna be a slow growth trap you know not a you know certainly a hit the market fast and have a new expansion in these days did you say transcription or translation translation Oh translate even tougher even tougher than transcription we had we hired 25 translate we didn't hire but we screamed and recruited in translators around well thanks for sharing that it's always fun to you know laugh at other people losing all their money so it doesn't happen to you let me go back to the conference real quick did you decrease prices to increase attendees when you took over no okay so what was like the price point of this past year 1600 per ticket okay rich ticket cost just over two thousand dollars okay sorry average it cost you a thousand of service the 60-minute average ticket price about a thousand dollars I see okay so times the 600 folks that was about six on our grand they're on revenue excellent math Lou I'm quick today okay I'm Sharma let me know I asked I mean I'm not joking some people give away hundreds it gets for free sometimes to fill seats so it could have been way lower than that I don't know we physics on our there but losing money breaking even so it sounds like the majority the revenue really is coming from the marketplace especially as you scale up the south side of the business that I hear it very accurate do you share or what thousand just because I know you're a mathematician that 600,000 was our 2018 revenue from the conference not our 2017 as you were doing your reverse engineering of 7.2 million really - only a couple hundred thousand from the the conference room yeah yeah nice we were saying on the marketplace side of things so so what what volume of jobs did you put through the platform over the past 12 months or how do you measure that we put through over a million in eight years but and you could correlate that with our revenue growth so we put together hundreds and thousands of hundreds and thousands last year hundreds hundreds of thousands so so is it fair to say of the of the twenty five thousand customers right or sorry of the fifteen thousand freelancers all of those 15 dozen freelancers were paid call it at least more than a hundred bucks for at least one job through the platform in other words they're all out okay yeah that's interesting okay so it's an interesting very good scaling south side of stuff let me just make sure I've got everything here right now is I think I do so that's very good Byron let's uh let's Ono last question want to ask you about your friend I'm sure Joe pulizzi exits 2016 for 17.6 he had a the same kind of product mix that you did as an acquisition in the next you know on the road for the next one months for you guys [Music] are you saying the company much like Joe did in the next couple months I can't I don't know you well enough to know if you're being sarcastic right now you know I've sold businesses before I started businesses I'm a startup guy I love starting businesses and it's frankly hard to find businesses that run as well as writeraccess does and given me an opportunity to you know to do what I love doing which is to work every day and making the product better in the service better so you know I've had I'm fortunate I'm gonna prepare that isn't looking for the exit to retire so instead I'm looking I'm gonna consider are you calling by the way are you calling Joe that's gonna hear this are you calling him old is that what you're saying he's right he was ready to retire how's his novel doing he's you know he's got a he's got an interesting you know position in the marketplace he did very well I'm still trying to figure out if he's sold Content Marketing Institute or whether he hung on to that and just sold the conference because he sold the business to a conference company yeah I guess is they were not probably interested in seeing I ya see mi still continues on right so you know we've certainly set up our conference to sell it if we wanted to but you know I think it's an important part of your ecosystem yeah I meant to route I don't know enough to know if it's a good strategy or not I do know that there's a lot of software come you know I'm usually SAS pure SAS not marketplace like you but I know a lot of SAS companies that are launching their own conferences I also know the opposite happening Clayton mask is the best example he shut down his user conference which was huge you know for variety reasons I have a suspicion it's because a private equity firm din like the negative EBIT on that run of business and he's trying to get cash flow positive for you though I meant assets on the marketplace side of things if I pay a hundred bucks through the marks Ari a thousand bucks Google marketplace and you helped me get a writer obviously you make your cut kind of in between there what generally do you take into you charge me extra or the writer extra oh we're we're very transparent in that by the way most most of these marketplaces are not which really bothers me we're 70/30 split seventy percent goes to the freelancer 30 percent render access and now we will continue on we have no no inclination to change those rates they're very fair and interestingly enough they you might find this interesting back in 1992 when I first started my when I started my first company was called freelance access graphic arts placement agency literally a 10 a 10 company if you will but focused on graphic designers and illustrators and copywriters we we were the first company I the country too and publicly announced our rates back in those days we also invented something I came up with an idea called the portfolio access system where we scanned in printed samples of graphic designers work and illustrators work and printed out 11 by 17 dye sublimation prints and you probably wouldn't remember this but dyestuff printers when they first hit the marketplace for $40,000 printers yeah Myron I have no I was born in 89 I have no idea what you're talking about so it was really really cool stuff so I bought a die set printer on my credit card which later cause of divorce by the money I was newly married my wife's like what like what is this trust me on this one I'm so business five years later for a lot of money yeah it was really exciting that's great so just to be clear if I put a thousand through writers access today you'll keep seven hundred the writer will get three hundred I wish sorry you keep three hundred the writer get seven hundred yeah I wouldn't have happy talent so we're but we're holding our that's great it's great yeah so I mean look I mean and again I can kind of back into a gmv right if he got six million in revenue just through that and that's thirty percent of it was total I mean you guys are put in eighteen twenty million bucks worth of projects for your platform over the past twelve months something like that just so inclined to Matt I just like I just like getting the top-line numbers you know generally accurate though I like I like the concept of staying steady with with disclosing are being transparent with our marketplace rates being transparent with with how many customers we have an umbrella word great mathematicians like you that are interested in doing reverse engineering I disclose pretty much you know what what you need to do reverse as you know but I'm saying it's like it's like you're you're like this is like bad sex right there's too much for play you're giving me the math to do and then when I do the math you're saying I can't confirm or deny that it's fantastic when I hear ya I hear you Byron alright let's let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book cool we in search of excellence number two is there a CEO you're falling or studying right now you know Brian how I guess my friend so I have to footnote that but I think what he's done and what he will continue to do is just remarkable yep number three what is your favorite online tool for building your business writeraccess besides your own you know food boy there's just so many you know I think I think I'm gonna go with my buddy Mike Roberts spyfu say it again a spyfu SP yfu by you okay Mike Roberts my pal from spyfu I think what what was spy whose ability to shoot too quickly instant instantly show-and-tell a competitive intelligence on what your competitors are doing is absolutely jaw-dropping from what angle like an SEM SEO content marketing um yes and just from a business perspective you can see what ads they're running their marketing plan their marketing vision how much money they're spending you can reverse engineer their success and I think that that is absolutely a deal changing thing number four how many hours will sleep to get every night four to six okay so call five they're on average and what's your situation married single kiddos married son from a previous marriage okay good and how old are you 56 you didn't happen now I know you got divorced because of the printer you didn't happen to marry the woman that sold you the printer right did you will save that for episode tool that's last question Byron what do you want your 20 year old self new see what he was your 20 year old self new what do I wish my 20 year old self knew something you wish you knew when you were 20 oh my gosh I wish the web is around I wish I could buy domain names when I was in my twins guys there yeah but he wishes the web was around back in the day writeraccess big success launches a marketplace many many years ago call back in 2010 they've now scaled that to many millions of dollars of volume in terms of projects going from people who need writers to the actual writers Byron keeps 30% of those project sales and pays the writers caught 70% they've got about 15,000 folks freelancers on the platform 25,000 customers once that did well he said you know what let me build up the ecosystem let's launch a conference first year hundred fifty folks attended then 280 in year two year three 400 a year for about $600,000 ticket price about six hundred grand in conference revenue still though breakeven the cash flow negative as he uses that again as a loss leader to grow the marketplace to about 7.2 million bucks in revenue last year alone scaling quickly with a steam of 11 up there in Boston and other remote locations Byron thank you for taking us to the top thanks for having me