How Zembula CEO Robert Haydock grew Zembula to $3M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Robert Haydock he has a background in the performance optimization of digital marketing and advertising campaigns and asset she co-founded zamboula in 2016 after seeing a need for a new marketing format that intrigued consumers the company has quickly found its place in the market by delivering consistently better engagement than traditional marketing techniques Robert are you ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely all right your 2016 you're late to the market but you have something brand new why is your stuff so interesting and why are you seeing higher engagement rates so what we found is focusing on psychology is what's driving performance these days and what we're focused on is when you reveal something you take much more ownership in what you reveal and so by giving marketers an easy way to deliver that by using our platform they're able to create these experiences very easily and then deliver them to the market and people respond better to them so this is a total psychology play well what does that mean so like tell me a story of how a customer is using you right now so we have alpha industries out there they're an online retailer they sell kind of bomber jackets and other retail items and they used us over Black Friday for a massive campaign on their website and got over a 30 percent lift in revenue by capturing email addresses and promoting their product on their website okay so what is the symbol of thing I mean a lot of people you know we have email marketing companies all the time or they have a little opt-in form on the site but I mean what are you doing differently by the way I love are you on your on where those workout balls aren't you yeah put the camera down wait show me what what I'm gonna judge you based off the color here we go okay blue I like blue that's good I'm like I'm like I'm like what see what seat is this guy in where he's like floating on air I love it okay yeah so tell us specifically like what makes it so unique so what makes it so unique is if you remember like scratch off reveal cards maybe you've got one from Macy's like 10 years ago in the mail where it's like this is our annual sale and you get it and you scratch off and you're like you got 30% off you're excited to use that because you feel like that offer was specially delivered to you and so what we're bringing to the digital world is that same sensation of receiving something personally you that you then take ownership in okay so you're looking at what IP address hits the bomber jacket website and based off the IP address let's say they're in Austin Texas say hey you're an Austin you need bomber jacket X it's not too hot not too cold just perfect for weather on the lake exactly that or it's based on odds like they're just giving away either fifteen thirty forty percent off and based on who you are and what time you land on the page you might get thirty percent off or you might get forty percent off okay this is less about knowing who the user is in terms of identity and more about scarcity urgency things like that exactly okay yeah and what we found is as we've gotten into this there's just a lot of different ways to use it and it really is about that relationship with the user and then taking ownership of the message this sounds like a very campaign driven thing in fact to use Black Friday as an example a lot of people in the space have big issues with churn because it's campaign driven what's your churn annually so our churn is fairly low we're about five percent churn here yeah logo churn and that's all feeling you're not monthly that's annually but we're very enterprise focused we only just launched a small medium business version about three months ago so our customer base has mostly been large corporations not small businesses okay that's why recently we've opened up some small businesses so I'm sure we'll have higher churn but what people put this on their website and it's a better mousetrap they tend to stick around and it's a source of SAS product right it is so what's the average so we understand how big you're talking about what's the average enterprise paying you when they start are we talking ten grand a hundred grand a million a year we're talking fifty thousand a year that's helpful and how are you pricing it is it based off number of campaigns number of seeds number of leads captured what is it so when you have an experience on your page which is what we call one of those scratch offs you may have ten fifteen of those in a library on our platform so for every we count the number of those experiences in our platform and then we also look at in an emergent number of impressions and the combination of those to indicate which plan you're on interest and that gives you enough leverage where if someone has success with you you have the power to drive expansion revenue because they hit the limits exactly and so we start at $99 a month now goes all the way up to you large enterprise paying us a couple thousand dollars a year interesting and how many customers say are you serving so we're serving right now a hundred and ten customers fifty of those are large enterprise and then what we just launched three months ago is the SMB market so what that would have been late August early September yeah okay and is it fair to say I mean can I take one hundred and ten times that fifty thousand annual price but you just gave me and you guys are doing what about four hundred fifty grand a month or about four or five million a year in revenue you know we don't talk about exact revenue but you can definitely calculate it for yourself I don't wanna push you to reveal anything you don't want to reveal but just taking those numbers I mean is it fair to say you're doing maybe around four hundred grand a month in revenue is that fair a little less than that but okay yeah and that's because you just opened a much lower price point plan right you're onboarding so customers yeah exactly can we say it's between 300 and 400 per month is that fair I'm not gonna like give you specifics okay we're just in an industry where we're growing and it's not something we publicly share yeah look I asked because you say you have 50 enterprise accounts so it could actually be significantly less if not all 100 are paying at $50,000 ACB so if we just take all our so okay just clear we have 50 enterprise customers got it got it got it so so what I really should do again without pushing you too hard here is basically just take the 50 customers paying that big contract value and assume you guys are doing much closer to maybe 200 grand a month but you're looking at our scale in a self-serve model that maybe has more customers yeah exactly and we decided to go self-serve because we feel like they're more innovative and they move faster so we're really excited about what we're seeing those customers do and how they're using our product do you have enough data yet to note like again they do move fast like you just said but they move fast into your platform and sometimes they move fast out do you have a sense of how the cohorts performing in terms of stickiness we don't really have a good idea yet we have a 30 day free trial so we'll probably get a better idea of that kind of midpoint next year yeah so it's early days for us in the SMB okay and I've hit your hard on numbers here but let me take a step back here and get a little let me get more the back story here when did you launch the company so we launched as scratch it about four and a half years ago okay seventeen twenty thirteen and then we changed the name to zamboula in 2016 in march and launched at the launch festival in San Francisco that Jason Calacanis runs yeah very cool and Boots chapter you've erased capital mostly bootstrapped we've raised about 1.1 million today ok why do you say like why do you it's always funny when people say like mostly bootstrap but we've raised capital like it's pretty black and white why do you say mostly bootstrap though well I think when you look at a company that's run for four and a half years on less than a million and a half dollars in outside capital that's not typical of a true like venture company yeah and so my view is kind of you you lose your bootstrap title as soon as you raise money and spend it at a rate that's venture based got it interesting and where are you guys based what's team size today we're based in Portland Oregon and we have ten members on our team okay and did you back in kind of year one was this more of an agency you were doing custom stuff and then you built us thought the tech yeah so this was I was doing consulting in b2b and a little bit and b2c on just helping with ad buys and copy and content and this started is an idea for that and then ended up being its own company so the first about six months to a year we're just experimenting with existing customers and a few outside customers and then 2014 we decided this is a product in 2015 we really started building it out that's great and can you give me a sense in that first year where you were really focused on in December 2015 how low was revenue do you remember I mean we were like a hundred thousand one hundred fifty thousand dollars a year total yeah hey guys hey everybody's got to start at zero sometimes you start a negative something if you put a bunch of cash up front so that's pretty good how first year yeah okay that's great and then walk me through...