How Salesbolt Hit $240K in Annual Revenue with 80 Customers as a One-Man Shop (Interview with CEO Craig Maxwell)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, salesbolt.com today is doing $20,000 a month in revenue, up from $12,000 a month just a year ago and $35 a month a year before that, call it in 2021. He's a one man show with an army of contractors, spends about $5 a month on Formula q. It's a dev shop based out of India, then another 1 or 2 k on fiber engineers. He's got just a bunch of contractors building this thing. He's about breakeven right

00:22now serving 80 customers, helping them automatically enrich their HubSpot and Salesforce accounts with lead data. Again, salesbolt.com is go to market right now. 90% of his leads are coming from the Chrome extension, but his bigger contracts are coming from the Salesforce app exchange. So we'll see how he chooses to scale from here. Hey, folks. My guest today is Craig Maxwell. He's a sales and marketing expert with nine years of experience in the technology industry. He's the

00:45founder of salesbolt and has previously held various roles at companies like Epsta, including SDR, AE, and SDR manager and in sales operations. He's got a proven track record of driving growth and success, which you can learn more about on his LinkedIn profile. Craig, you ready to take us to the top?

Why Craig Left Epsta

Craig Maxwell

01:00>> Absolutely. Thanks, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

01:02You bet. Why leave EBSA by the way? I hear those guys are super capital efficient. They've got nice scale. What happened?

Craig Maxwell

01:09>> Oh yeah, that's an interesting one. So absolutely loved my time there. It was like complete formative years of my tech career. Guy Rube is an absolute legend. And if you ever get a chance to meet him, I'd definitely recommend doing so. It was more a case of my alignment at the time. I was in an SDR role going into an AE role. So I'm doing a lot of three sixty work in terms of sales outbound. And

01:35>> I sort of saw my path going a bit more towards products. I was really interested in learning to code. I started to learn a lot of code and JavaScript and built a few different kind of hacky widgets here and there. And I figured this is why I enjoy a lot more than just selling. I wanna do a bit more. And from there on, I I just follow that path. Right?

Quota Structure at Epsta

Nathan Latka

01:57That's great. What was your what was your quota target at at Epsta?

Craig Maxwell

02:04>> It was never actually When I was back there, were so young and in this infancy. We never had a hardcore quota. So I think my monthly attainment was around fifteen, twenty k. They best set off like small

02:21>> transactional deals. Right? A lot of them.

Nathan Latka

02:23What does that mean? So in one month you'd need to sell 20 ks of new ARR or new MRR?

Craig Maxwell

02:28>> New ARR. That was just, yeah. It wasn't huge at the time. We didn't have an enterprise products. I think the primary play then was the Chrome extension for, like, Bullhorn and Salesforce integration back then. Mhmm. Since then, I think they've pivoted.

Nathan Latka

02:44Well, you're uniquely positioned to teach your audience quickly if they're trying to hire their first version of Craig Maxwell how to structure the quota target. Right? So, like, what did you like or dislike about how you had it structured at EBSA?

Craig Maxwell

02:56>> I would say

02:58>> it was very unstructured. So let's just recap on that. The good thing is that it was quite flexible. I could really do my own thing in terms of what worked for me in terms of tooling or kind of process. I remember putting together my own metrics, of creating my own dashboard in Salesforce, tracking myself. When I really figured out what worked, everything just became

03:23>> so smooth from there. But I I would say having a process in place like that before hiring your first SDR would be,

03:33>> yeah, a nice place to start.

Nathan Latka

03:36Let's fast

Craig Maxwell

03:37>> forward to

What Salesbolt Does and Its Two Products

Nathan Latka

03:39let's fast forward to salesbolt then today. So what's the company do and what's the average customer paying you per month or per year to use the technology?

Craig Maxwell

03:48>> Yeah. So we have two different products. So I kind of split them there. But the Chrome extension, we have integrated LinkedIn with Salesforce primarily by recruiters who are creating candidates, searching for candidates on LinkedIn recruiter, and getting an easy back and forth between two systems so they can add resumes, edit and update fields, and create new candidates as they're working on the fly essentially. The other app we have is on the Salesforce app exchange. And that's

04:15>> more of a data enrichment app. With that tool we come up against user gems. We kind of compete in that space for contact tracking,

04:23>> champion tracking. So imagine your champions left one company, moved to another company. You've got a churn risk at company A and an opportunity at company B where if you track that champion over time, you can obviously resell them. They're ready on your product, ready on your value prop. But now they've left a vacuum in that prior account, which may churn out if not dealt with from CS as well.

Chrome Extension as Lead Generation Channel

Nathan Latka

04:45How many leads last month in April 2023 did you get from the Chrome extension versus the Salesforce app exchange?

Craig Maxwell

04:53>> Yeah. It was about 80% weighted towards the Chrome extension. And I think roughly we get like in terms of pure inbound, not referral, it's like thirty, forty leads a week. So a huge volume you have invested in.

Nathan Latka

05:0840 leads a week from the Chrome extension? And

Craig Maxwell

05:10>> that's correct. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

05:12Oh, what's going on there YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

05:36your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

06:00get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over 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

06:22not 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, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

06:48going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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

07:09if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. If Or 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. Alright. Let's jump back into

07:36the interview. And that that's impressive. See, lot of people underestimate Chrome extensions because if I go to your Chrome extension, no offense, it doesn't look huge. Right? You've got nine reviews. Now they are five stars, which is great. And you've got it says a thousand plus users, but this is quite a powerful distribution channel for you.

Pricing and Deal Sizes Across Both Products

Craig Maxwell

07:50>> Absolutely. And that leads us into the cross sell of the ISV app where there's a much bigger ticket item behind it.

Nathan Latka

07:58How big?

Craig Maxwell

07:59>> Average. Well, I mean the average sales size in the Chrome extension is skewed because you have single user sign up zero touch, which is great for the kind of bottom line. But that really skews the average deal size, right? So we have people paying $50 a user month up to $20.30 grand a year, right? With the ISV app, the average is a much more smooth because we're paying, they're paying on based on usage.

Nathan Latka

08:20Sorry. What is the ISV? You mean the Salesforce app is what you mean?

Craig Maxwell

08:23>> Yes. The enrichment app. So the contact tracking app, I guess we could call it for better term. That has a minimum price band of 12 ks a year. Now we're tracking 10,000 contacts per month. So every month on the month, we're just saying, here's who's changed jobs, here's where they currently work, here's an email address. We've alerted the owner of the record, update that, send it to a flow in Outreach and far away from there. So

08:49>> that was something to mid market and enterprise.

Nathan Latka

08:52Interesting. And how many paying customers do you have today?

Team Structure and Co-Founder Story

Craig Maxwell

08:56>> In total across both apps, have, I think it's 80 ish, 78, 80.

Nathan Latka

09:01That's great. And is it split eightytwenty? About 80% of those are from Chrome?

Craig Maxwell

09:06>> I'd say it's heavily weighted towards Chrome. We probably got like 90% on Chrome and less than the rich app because of the later time to market with that. So we only started building that

09:20>> towards the back end of last year and didn't really release it fully.

Nathan Latka

09:23Who's we? What's the team size today?

Craig Maxwell

09:26>> Ah, good question. I started off myself, then I brought a co founder

09:32>> back end of twenty nineteen around COVID.

Nathan Latka

09:35How much equity did you give him or her?

Craig Maxwell

09:38>> 50%.

Nathan Latka

09:39Oh, you just split it

Craig Maxwell

09:40>> right down the middle. Yeah, was, well, at the beginning to be fair, was 40, but then I wasn't in such a cash rich position. So it got to the point where we had to rebalance at the cap table.

Nathan Latka

09:51And so how much did your co founder put in in terms of cash to get back up to your equity level?

Craig Maxwell

09:57>> Yeah. I think at the time we were spending about 20 k a month in development. Right?

10:03Okay.

10:03>> So I

10:04>> think he was funding most part of that in the beginning and I was catching up later. Right?

Nathan Latka

10:10That Did make you nervous? How much did you guys spend in just cash on the MVP before you had your first sale?

MVP Approach and Development Philosophy

Craig Maxwell

10:16>> That's again a bit of a nuanced one. So I started the MVP myself. Right? So I already had paying customers before I met my co founder. So I spent very little and I would never advise somebody spending 20 ks a month in development for an MVP. I can do things super cheap. And in fact, I have my own like incubator within the business now where we test a hypothesis, we test a feature, we spin it up

10:38>> as an independent app or independent extension, and then we integrate it and see if it fits. If it does, we increase the product value base. And if not, we have this either kind of half dead projects or a bit of a R and D, but it might come back in the future. We always get requests and it's a fun way of building stuff.

Nathan Latka

11:00So how many folks are full time today?

Craig Maxwell

11:05>> We've recently brought on a strategic investor. So they have some

11:12>> Oh yeah. That's

Nathan Latka

11:13so Craig, just employees.

Craig Maxwell

11:14>> How many out the co founder. Do we have any employees? Even myself and Yeah. So Look, actually that strategic investor bought out my co founder last week. So it's just me currently at the moment and that strategic investor in terms of employees. And we have offshore developers in terms of our dev shop.

Nathan Latka

11:34What's the dev shop you use? What's the URL?

Craig Maxwell

11:37>> So we currently use a guy called formulaq. So formulaqdot, I guess,.com or.io. Let me double check for you.

Nathan Latka

11:46Formula q. And and everyone's always asking how do I find a DevShop I can use and rely on and trust for a good price? How did you find these guys?

Craig Maxwell

11:53>> It was really through referral. So it was somebody well known in the industry who'd worked for a dev shop who'd built some very reliable and well known products. He started his own dev shop, and we kind of took the top developer there and trust him for

Nathan Latka

12:13Yep. That's formulaqsolutions.com. And then so what are you spending today, would you say, into your dev shop per month? Are we talking like $5 a month, $10, 20

Craig Maxwell

12:22>> It's close to the 5 k mark. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:24Okay.

Craig Maxwell

12:25>> We have It depends if we have features to build or just product support, most of that support costs. Then we up and down in terms of flex with various different outsourcing platforms, you know? Yep. Upwork, Fiverr, etcetera.

Co-Founder Exit and Strategic Investor

Nathan Latka

12:40Yep. And what so if we take those 80 paying customers, it sounds like we've got a big range of price points, but what's total MRR today?

Craig Maxwell

12:47>> Just shy of 20 k.

Nathan Latka

12:49Oh, just shy okay. Is okay. So one man shop doing 20 k a month. That's not a bad deal. Why did the other guy pull out if you guys are already up to 20 k in MRR? That feels like good growth.

Craig Maxwell

12:58>> I think he went to focus on another venture that you already had going. So it was more a case of

13:05>> splitting focus, you know,

13:08>> not trying to back too many courses. And I think the time that he spent on that other business, I can completely understand why he would wanna double down on that right now.

Nathan Latka

13:19Yep. That that makes sense. And then, I mean, how do you feel like you can sort of I've always wonder if someone can take a company to 10,000,000 in ARR as a one man shop and just rely on an army of contractors. I mean, do you feel like there's a real shot at you doing that?

Path to Scale and First Hire Plans

Craig Maxwell

13:35>> Honestly, I wouldn't want to. No, I think at some point there would have to be some dilution of capital and we have to get some strategic hires on board. The first hire I wanna make is gonna be NCS. I don't necessarily wanna grow this to 10,000,000 as a one man band.

Nathan Latka

13:55Busy now if it is.

Craig Maxwell

13:56>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:57I I guess are you you built the initial MVP, so do or I guess, can you code?

Craig Maxwell

14:01>> I can't actually. So when I started to learn to code, I realized that I could be very good at coding or very good at selling or okay at everything. And I decided to go with the latter because

14:12That's fair.

14:12>> I need

14:13>> to be able to manage other people and other

Nathan Latka

14:15So who who else besides the dev shop did you pay in the last thirty days in terms of doing freelance work? You mentioned Fiverr. What what tasks did you put up on Fiverr?

Craig Maxwell

14:23>> So we have like regular hourly developers that we have on there. So feature requests, for example, from a a large potential client, rather than getting our full time devs who know our products inside and out. We've got some strategic guys who've worked on features so they kind of understand the backbone of what we do. I can grasp new feature functionality pretty quickly.

14:43It's nice.

14:43>> Doesn't it take

Nathan Latka

14:44a lot of work though for you to give them the spec and then make sure that they have a local environment set up, you know, relative to how formula queue is set up? How do you make sure they've accessed all their repos, the GitHub account? How do you manage all that?

Craig Maxwell

14:54>> They're a full time member in that. We flex up and down on a fairly regular basis. It just helps keep our regular costs down rather than having them the full time.

Nathan Latka

15:01Oh, I see. So you've got a fiber engineer that's like, I'm making this up. Python on the front end charges you $30 an hour. One month, it might be 10 hours. The next month, it might be thirty hours if there's a feature request.

Craig Maxwell

15:12>> Exactly. And that just happened organically. It wasn't by design. We originally had them on the project pretty heavily then things kind of pitted down in terms of how we needed to use them. And then we just kind of scale up and down as and when needed.

Nathan Latka

15:27And it works really I love I love that. You're like the definition of a great indie hacker here. Talk in terms of keeping costs low and still getting sales, which is great. Talk to me a little bit about what other expense. So you've got Formula HQ Formula HQ solutions is like $5 a month, 5 or it sounds like maybe a grand, $2 a month. Where else are you spending money?

Craig Maxwell

15:46>> Yeah, if that's maybe infrastructural costs. So Amazon Web Services, the standard things, probably about $2 a month. We have some quite heavy computational costs there.

16:00>> A few of it's various different API providers to do enrichment and stuff like that. But most of our stuff is proprietary. We've built our own email finder to help keep those costs down. That was one of those pet projects actually that we spun off on the side, leadgo.io. It just finds emails, but they're 10 a penny. So I never found that actually drove its own.

Nathan Latka

16:20So legal.io is your software?

Craig Maxwell

16:23>> Yeah, yeah. So we guess I had that built just so we could find emails of people who've changed role and company

Nathan Latka

16:29or

Craig Maxwell

16:30>> company to be clear of course. But that was Instead of contracting out to hunter. And those platforms.

Nathan Latka

16:38What's hublink.io?

Craig Maxwell

16:41>> So that was something that I talked with around HubSpot integration. So I went to SaaS doc and found that all the new subs in Europe are just using HubSpot. And it kind of bugged me. So thought how difficult would it be to make a quick MVP front end, back end integration HubSpot? Just very similar case to salesbolt. And it took about three weeks, maybe a month. But

Nathan Latka

17:09How much did it cost you using the fiber fiber engineers?

Craig Maxwell

17:12>> Yeah. Not much. Around less than 5 k.

Profitability and Cash Flow

Nathan Latka

17:19And who did the design? It's beautiful design.

Craig Maxwell

17:22>> That was well, I just it's piecemeal. Just, hey. Make this well, the logo, I just used what I use?

17:34>> Canva. Just tweak the Canva designs and just edit it using

Nathan Latka

17:39So I I love this. You're resourceful. So I guess what what's the hell with it? You're doing $20,000 a month. Are you profitable today or are you breakeven?

Craig Maxwell

17:46>> I think we're just over breakeven in terms of like minimal profits. Also, some founders draw from myself and co founder as well to keep us

Nathan Latka

17:57Oh, so even though your co founder pulled out, you're still paying him or her?

Craig Maxwell

18:00>> Historically, yes. But I mean, in terms of going forward cash flow, that obviously won't be the case, which would be nice. So it should be more profitable moving forward. And we also have loads of big clients who are just coming into their second third year renewals. So you should see a bit more consistency in terms of cash flow.

Nathan Latka

18:18That's great. What about growth? So if you're at $20 a month today, where were you exactly one year ago? Do you remember?

Craig Maxwell

18:22>> Yeah. I've got the stats right in front of me actually. So one year ago, May we're at twelve and

18:28>> May before that we're at 35

Nathan Latka

18:31That's pretty cool. So how do you go from 80 customers today to 800 in two years?

Growth Strategy and Market Expansion

Craig Maxwell

18:39>> Yeah. So there's a few things that I really wanna do, but the main thing for me at the moment is a primary focus is how we get our Richmond app to be more product led in terms of growth. So from a growth hacking perspective, the Chrome extension is a great distribution channel, but we don't I

Nathan Latka

18:54know it's just so busy. It's like, how do you get this from nine reviews and a thousand users to like 900 reviews and 10,000 or a 100,000 users? How do you break through the noise?

Craig Maxwell

19:03>> I think one of the things that we've probably done wrong is not focus on other CRMs. So I mentioned HubSpot as one of the things that kind of bugged me and I wanted to figure out. But if I look at some of the other tools that integrate in a similar way in terms of Chrome extension usage, maybe LeadIQ or something like that, they break into different areas of the market but also focus on a different niche.

Nathan Latka

19:27I

Craig Maxwell

19:28>> think that niche is more around, Hey, we provide you data and we integrate that data into different CRM systems versus what we turn it to focus on right or wrong was, Hey, Salesforce is the top CRM for enterprise clients.

Nathan Latka

19:44Yep. We know

Craig Maxwell

19:45>> that these products are missing these features and we can add them in a particular way.

Nathan Latka

19:48We're rooting for you. We hope it works. We hope that strategy helps you grow and you give us an update in a year. But for now, Craig, we're out of time. So let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Craig Maxwell

19:58>> Favorite book? Oh, that's a good one. I recently Rich and I pulled out a tapestry. It's a classic one. But I've recently read one that one which will be my second, which would be

20:11>> oh god. Let me pull the title. A super good Psychology of Money by Morgan Hansel.

20:16>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

20:17That's a good one.

20:18Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Craig Maxwell

20:23>> Chris Fettysbill. Actually bought your book because of him.

20:26Oh, nice.

20:26>> He heard it.

20:27>> Blackthorns.ai.

Nathan Latka

20:29Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, oh, Chris. Blackthorn. Yeah. Yeah. The event company. Yeah. Yeah. Oh gosh. So much of what you're doing is comparable to what he's doing in terms of like the using the Salesforce app exchange for all his growth, all that stuff. So very cool. Alright. Chris is a great one. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building salesbolt?

Craig Maxwell

20:48>> Favorite online tool for building salesbolt? It would have to be Jira right now. I couldn't live without that managing tickets for my dev team. I'm a snip up for your sending messages, but it's necessary.

Nathan Latka

20:58And number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Craig Maxwell

21:02>> Four to six.

Nathan Latka

21:03K. And situation, married, single, kids?

Craig Maxwell

21:06>> Single.

Nathan Latka

21:07Okay. No kids.

Craig Maxwell

21:08>> And how old are you?

21:10>> 33. Same age. Actually, August 28, I think you're October 3.

Nathan Latka

21:16Oh, October 3. Yeah. Yeah. You've done your research. That's impressive. Alright. Yeah. We're about about the same age. That's great. Last question. Something you wish knew when you were 20.

Closing Advice and Wrap-Up

Craig Maxwell

21:26>> It's not that hard to start and just do it.

Nathan Latka

21:35Guys, salesbolt.com today is doing $20,000 a month in revenue up from $12,000 a month just a year ago and $35 a month a year before that call in 2021. He's a one man show with an army of contractors spends about $5 a month on Formula q. It's a dev shop based out of India, then another one or two k on fiber engineers. He's got just a bunch of contractors building this thing. He's about breakeven right now

21:58serving 80 customers, helping them automatically enrich their HubSpot and Salesforce accounts with lead data. Again, salesbolt.com is go to market right now. 90% of his leads are coming from the Chrome extension, but his bigger contracts are coming from the Salesforce app exchange. So we'll see how he chooses to scale from here. Craig, thanks for taking us to the top.

Craig Maxwell

22:17>> Excellent. Thanks, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

22:18One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 live. It is fun to watch every Thursday, 1PM

22:43Central. 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, the 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

23:06fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign

23:27up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people.

23:47We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.