How Callum McKeefery Bootstrapped REVIEWS.io to $12M ARR and an $82M Exit

How much did you sell the company for?

82,000,000, all cash. Me and my wife started the company from our kitchen table.

So you're at $10.11, 12,000,000 of revenue, 50 people, $240,000 of revenue per employee.

I built a really nice viral loop. We found that if we got two or three reviews on a profile, the page would start to do really well. I had some big competitors in reviews, like well financed, VC backed companies. And I truly believe that we did well against them, against these well funded companies.

And how many folks were full time when you exited?

About 50. And we was growing pretty fast, to be honest, at that time.

To be clear, you and your wife owned a 100% equity.

100%.

Hey, folks. My guest today is Callum McKeefery. He built and sold Bootstrapped, I should mention, REVIEWS.io for $82,000,000 cash. He's now working on a company called Partner.io. Callum, you ready to take us to the top?

Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward to it.

So let's let's give the audience sort of a hook here, and then we'll go back and teach everyone sort of how you did it. So the end of the story is you sold the company. Right? So how much did you sell the company for? Was it all cash?

82,000,000, all cash. I've got a couple of shares still in Outpub with Cleara dot now, and I'm still a board member of that. I wanted a clean deal. I don't know if you know my backstory. I've got a son who's pretty poorly. He's disabled. He's got a really rare genetic disease, and I really wanted to add a bit of security. I wanted to spend a bit of time with him, and the offer came in at the

right time. Any other time probably in my career, I probably wouldn't have taken that offer because I really truly loved what I was doing at reviews and I think I still had a lot more to give to the company, but I had to think about my Founder emotionally.

Mhmm. Mhmm. And we'll loop back to all that. I did pick that up in your research. That was the main driver of you doing the deal in the first place was your son. So we'll pick back up. Before we go back and get sort of the full story, so 82,000,000 all cash was the exit price. And what was what was revenue at that point in time? Monthly recurring revenue time is 12, the ARR.

ARR was about 11 to 12 mill at at the time. Pure nice ARR, really clean stuff,

all through Stripe. Pretty... Yeah. About 12, I'd say about 12 and a bit change. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It was it was... We built the business to be really clean. Clean business itself. Our cat table was as small as it could be. It was near my wife. Me and my wife started the company from our kitchen table, and we did it through pure grit, determination, and long hours.

To be clear, you and your wife owned a 100% equity at that at sale?

100%. Yeah. I had this... You know, I I I... There was a few people in the company who would help me along the way, and they got really big earn outs, but it was only really from me saying, hey. I wanna make sure you get a big earn out out of this rather than it being actually formally in a contract.

This is against conventional wisdom. Most folks listening say, wait, Nathan. I saw... I thought you're supposed to create an employee stock option pool, and that's the way you get really good talent is you give them equity. You did the opposite. Why?

I didn't need to. I didn't need to. That was the thing. You do what you need to do. I actually found really, really talented people without doing that who believed in me. And doing that I felt would have slowed me down and would have made the deal much more complicated to do the sale. So I was just really honest. I mean, I... Some of my team members got over a million dollars earn out of this.

You know, some people got way more than that and some people got a little bit less. But I did try and make sure that everyone was brought along from the journey, and I kinda kept my promise to everybody that, hey. If this works, I'm gonna change your life. And I did it. Everybody trusted me, and it worked out, thankfully.

And how many folks were full time when you exited?

It was about 50. It was about 15 growing... Yeah. And we was growing pretty fast, to be honest. At that time, Tom Tom was adding staff every week where I forget their names. And, yeah, I think from starting to do the deal to end to do the deal, I think we'd added another 10 staff by then.

Mhmm. So you're at $10.11, 12,000,000 of revenue, 50 people, $240,000 of revenue per employee. No employees own stock when you exited, but you made many of the millionaires. You just told me when you did exit based off sort of your choosing. How many did you make millionaires?

More more than probably looking back, I should have done that. You know? I don't know. I don't know. I I was so happy to do it. These people had helped me on my journey, and they were part of my family and my team. And I I appreciated all of them so much, and, yeah, I wanted them to to have the part of that success. It wasn't just me all day on paper. It was

just How'd you decide? Was it just simply who was there the longest, or how'd you decide?

Yeah. Who was there longest and contribution? So my two... My CTO, he was, like, our fourth employee. But Tom was a catalyst catalyst. We'd already had product market fit when Tom came in, and Tom really helped us reach those bigger numbers later on.

Alright. Let's get the backstory here. So I want everyone to see what you are today. Right? We're recording to 2025. You sold the business, you know, two or three years ago. So just to be a clear column, are you influencing this website design today, or are you totally checked out of the business at this point?

That that website there is pretty... I am pretty much checks out. I am on the board so I do handle direction from above. That website pretty much hasn't changed that much. It's got a little bit fancier, a few more moving things on there. My... The guy who designed that website was actually... He's been an employee of reviews. He was... I think he was number five. He came in at number five, Don. He's an amazing guy, amazing

designer. And me and him worked really close together, and we taught each other so much about design and

So right here, we love going back to the way back machine, the website app back in 2014 when you launched. Again, you built it for a while. And in the early days, we go to a 2015 screenshot. This is what it looked like. So what was the v one here? What am I looking at?

Oh my gosh. I don't even know that version. The v one of reviews was... I came from a background of tech technology review point. Tech..com? No. Unbeatable.com. It's not on there. I don't know why it should be. It was part of Liquid New Media. So unbeatable.com was kinda like a CNET type thing. And it did tech reviews, but also was a price comparison

website. Part of Unbeatable was that companies would get reviewed on there as well, and that was a bit that I saw as growth. So I actually bought the domain name while playing golf one day, like ten years before I launched reviews.io which was a reviews.co.uk at the time. But I bought the domain name while playing golf and it was quite a funny deal. The idea was that it'd be me writing reviews, reviewing technology, reviewing televisions, reviewing

cameras, all the CNET stuff, the stuff that you go and see at CES. And then when I did Unbeatable, I noticed that actually consumers were writing a lot of these reviews and they were better than what I was writing. And we kinda doubled down on that, and that was what took me into the review space. What got me in further was that I think it was really early on I got sued by a company not removing

genuine reviews. And this company sued me for a £250,000. I really didn't have the money at the time. And it made me really go a lot deeper into reviews and it got stuck in my head, and that was the catalyst to launch reviews.i... What became reviews.io. And we really bootstrapped it from the kitchen table. There was nothing, know, there wasn't the tools that you can get now, dashboards and the frameworks and AI to help you do

it. It was really brute force. We had a couple of clients take a chance on us in The UK, and we grew from The UK, really. That's how we did it.

Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 into 550 software companies so far, again at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com, and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube,

and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. So, Callum, just to pull the story forward here, with the website and the concept we see on our screen right now, your twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen version, did you pass a million dollars of annual revenue with this concept or no?

No. No. If you go in a little bit further, Ronald, if you go 2022, we'd already blown up by then. 2022, we were doing 10,000,000 or or mortgage.

You basically... I guess, give me the give me the quick quote here. You went from half... Repeat this, I guess, if it's true. You went from about 500,000 of revenue in 2017 to five years later doing 10,000,000 of revenue. Is that about right?

Yeah. Yeah. That's correct.

Oh, okay. So take us into the growth tactics there. Right? What happened? I mean, based off the digital footprint you've left, it looks like you invested significantly starting in late twenty twenty one SEO just by how much you're being indexed by the way back machine. You also have very, very high domain rating, which really, I mean, you popped that back in 2016, but then you further optimized it, it looked like, in this 2018 onward period. What were your top growth channels in 2018, 2019?

I built a really, really, really nice viral loop to reviews.io. So, literally, the more clients we got, the more powerful the brand became because we were collecting more reviews, more content. It was getting fresher every day.

Break that viral loop down for me because a lot of people think viral loop is all about, like, I can't do a viral loop because I'm not a document signing tool. There's not two people for every one thing. Right? So how did you actually mathematically and psychologically engineer one user turning into three?

So one user turning into three. So we'd look at a niche. So one of our niches was car parts. So we'd look at... We went and won Euro Car Parts, which is a big European car part reseller. And then we'd win that client. We'd get our brand on their website. We'd now go and speak to the other people in the industry. So we go and speak to GSF, and we try and try and win three or

four in each industry. That was how we won the clients, but the clients really weren't where we were focusing. At that point, we're not focusing on the clients. We're focusing on getting footprint. So when we won Euro Car Parts, we wanted to collect as many reviews for that company as possible, and that'd get as many labels on the reviews that I own name as possible. And then we... The revenue would come. So, generally, once we collected,

say, thousands of reviews... I mean, look. We collected 57,000 reviews for GSF there. Once we collected a huge amount of reviews, all the people in the kind of street, like, are, like, doing amazing. They're doing amazing things with a review. Let's give them a call. So as we won one client and did amazing, you know, help them collect the reviews at the right time so they got really high conversion, collect really good looking reviews with photos, really good content. That had really powered that flywheel to get more going.

Calm, the question here is the chicken and egg problem. Right? So how did you... Without cooperation from gfscarparts.com because you haven't landed them as a customer yet. So without their cooperation, how do you get the first 100, 200, 300, 500 reviews? How did you get their customers? How did you know how to... Who who'd ask for the reviews?

We we already ranked quite well for those pages. We found that if we got two or three reviews on a profile, the page would start to do really well. And we'd listen for people talking about GSF car parts or Euro car parts, and we'd go, hey. Why don't you leave a review? You've had a great experience. Why don't you leave a review? And those people had to leave those first couple of reviews, and that helped that

page round, and then we'd be reaching out to that business. So if you wanted your your rating to show up on your Google Ads, gold stars next to your ads, you had to work with one of the Google seller ratings partners, and we were one of those partners. Now, originally, there was only about five partners. Now I think there's about 20. Google stellar ratings license was super, super important in the early days.

I love this. Okay. So 2017, that was 500,000 of revenue. 2018, you broke a million? Yeah. Okay. Well, I was gonna say, year did you break 5,000,000 of revenue? Do you remember?

No. It's all... Like, the the numbers to me, I never really focused. And and and this sounds crazy as a bootstrap founder. But I was so focused on the product. I was so focused on making... I'm a product person, so I was focused on making a really good product. And I thought the revenue was secondary to to me.

I mean, the reason I asked the question is because we wanna identify the growth tactics that really work for you. So launching as a content and media business, for example, did not work for you. You then pivoted, and then you had success pretty rapidly. So let's let's talk more though about how you've sort of priced and planned these because based off my understanding, you are not a high ACV, you know, a... A, you know, commission structure sales motion. What... How many customers did you have when you exited, and what was the average price point?

I think it says 9,000 on there now. I think we probably had about seven, 8,000 comments then. We were a low ACV business. We did everything. In those early days, I'm gonna tell you, we did everything. What you shouldn't do in in a low ACV business. We got on the phones. I had salespeople on. It just really on on low... You know, for... To... I mean, our plans now have gone up massively, but we were doing

an... Our our probably biggest plan was, like, one four nine plan. And we get we... But we get on the phone for $29.29 dollars. We wouldn't just be pure play product led. We... We'd actually get on the phone for $29 and talk to those people and build relationships.

I'm bringing up a chart because this is, I mean, this is one of the things that that we teach. I take all... I plot basically everyone that's going on the podcast. I plot their ACV. Yeah. So, like, you know exactly where I'm going. There's a dead spot. It's very hard to build a a $100,000,000 company with a price point between 500 and like 5 k per year. My question to you is, I totally get getting on

the phone early on to learn. Right? But if you take 9,000 customers, right, times thirty minute call each divided by sixty minutes per hour, that's 4,000 five hundred hours if you're spending that with every customer. So just to be clear, do you still today get on a thirty minute call with every customer who signs up for a $150 a month, or is that to learn in the early phases?

No. That's really just to get learn in the early phases to get a true product market fit. You can't do that when you're at, you know, you're at 9,000 points. I think these, you know, now reviews only gets on the phone and they... Two nine nine plan or four nine nine plan. And even then, I think, you know, a lot of that is already done at that stage Yep. Via the product.

So to summarize so far what you've what you've taught us, the media business didn't work. You pivoted to an SEO strategy where you recruited people talking about a company on Twitter to actually leave a review on a landing page you built for the company that would then rank for SEO, then you'd go close the company and the viral coefficient started. You also casually mentioned paid ads briefly. I wanna understand, was that a big part of your growth or not? How much were you spending on pay at?

I think we were doing a thousand $1,000 a day for the last couple of years. We were really targeting people who wanted Google seller ratings. That was our biggest win.

So just to be clear, if you were gonna spend $500,000 that last year on ads, how much was on Google Ads versus LinkedIn ads?

30% LinkedIn, the rest on Google. And I truly believe closest to the customer wins every single time. I had some big competitors in reviews, like wealth financed VC backed companies that were backed to, like, hundreds of millions. And... But they weren't close to their customers. They weren't there listening to them. And I truly believe that we did well against them, against these well funded companies because we were listening to our clients and and talking to our

clients a lot more.

So, Calm, as we wrap up here, because I want to close the loop on this and then talk about your new business that you're building. But I do... For those wondering and saying, man, I wanna I wanna build bootstrapped like Calm, it sounds like... And correct me if any of this is wrong, but to summarize, your order of operations was basically you start off with viral coefficient using Twitter to get reviews, which then started fueling your

programmatic SEO strategy on the review pages. And once those were working, you moved on here and got pretty aggressive on LinkedIn ads and Google ads to the tune of about half a million clicks per year. Is that sort of the right order of operations? Exactly. That's great. So you sell the business for $82,000,000 cash. Just, you know, any lessons, maybe just one lesson that you wanna leave, the biggest mistake you made in your negotiations during the exit process?

My biggest mistake was probably being a bit too emotional, if I'm more honest,

and not doing enough research on the people who I sold to. The the people who run the business now are great. We did have challenges after we sold, which were upsetting. They were upsetting. And and I sold because I was in an emotional place in in a... Where I shouldn't have sold probably.

What what what was upsetting post close?

There was a couple of things. Yeah. So, basically, we we closed and we, you know, we were told by by the people who purchased us private equity from me, oh, we're very Founder Friendly. We're gonna keep... You're gonna still be in this seat, and this is what we're gonna do. And then, you know, everything's gonna be under your control. There's nothing gonna change. You know? Carry on running it. Get it to 20,000,000. My aim... My my

dream was, you know, to get this to to to $3,030,000,000, 40,000,000, and really get to the stage where we were a a big well known global brand. I love the business. I love the people who are working on it. So pretty quickly, things changed. For instance, the press release about the deal. I didn't have any say on the press release. They did it via a paid wall platform, Axiom. And I didn't get to celebrate that win

or certain things that where I I I wish that things were done differently.

So there wasn't any part of the $82,000,000 deal that you had to hit an earn out. It's not like you made less because the company screwed up once you sold it to them. Right?

No. No. We we... There was an earn out that quickly got changed into just a deferred payment. And that... That's all done now. We're paid out completely.

So total cash Stefan for you and your team again was that full $82,000,000 cash?

My my biggest thing probably would be spend a bit bit more time researching who you're doing... If you're selling, who you don't... Who you're selling to, what the promises are going forward. I'm not I'm not bitter, except probably sounds like I am. But I actually really like the team that's running reviews now. And it it was probably, you know, the company that purchased reviews was basically a roll up of Shopify apps, but reviews really wasn't a

Shopify app. It wasn't that player. We we had a much different playbook. And the company... The people who were heading up that company at the time really didn't understand. They were really just trying to buy RevEng. So I probably should have done more research on them. I don't believe they took enough time to learn what we was actually doing.

It's the common theme you see. Right? A private equity firm gets behind a company. They say, mister company or missus company, go buy a bunch of other companies. That's what a private equity firm is supposed to do. You know, you will aim them because you need obviously your stuff. What is like App Hub and Silver Smith. Right? So Silver Smith puts $60,000,000 into App Hub. They say, App Hub, go do deals. They say, oh my gosh.

Cal... Like, Calm, we gotta do deals. We'd love to buy your business. They didn't really do a lot of research. They're now doing their thing. You're now moving on. I wanna give you... You know, we have about five minutes left of recording time here, Kyle. I wanna give you some air to talk about what your son is going through because it's a very rare disease. I... Based off my research, let's say fifty people in the world have it. It was a gay thing that drove your sales. So why don't we shine a light on that for a minute or two? And then let's wrap up with how you're thinking about your next business Partner.io.

Yeah. My my son's nine now. He's got a super rare disease. We know a lot about it. I actually fund a research lab in Buffalo, and I'm, you know, finding a lot of research. I actually doing something with Harvard at the moment on mitochondrial transplants, which is amazing. Amazing amazing potential with that. And we've just got him access to a to a new drug, which is where he's the first kid in the world to get access

to this drug. Rare disease, life expectancy is very hit and miss. Fifty kids. We lost about ten during COVID. And after COVID coming out and being so close to those families with lost children, I was like, Jesus, you know, I wanted to add some security to him. It's probably never gonna work if if... You know? So I wanted to add some security to him. I wanted to do more with more research. I wanted to fund some

more research for him, and that was a big driver for doing the sale. I absolutely love the reviews business and I loved working with my team and if it wasn't, know, things happen for a reason and maybe, you know, it was the right time. You know, Looking back, we'll look back through the lens of the history and it will go, wow, look at the timing there. But the timing really, I did the deal because of I

wanted to add security to my family and fund some research, go and get some cures for these kids. And we are doing it. It's great on that side. That that side's really rewarding. I'm actually in the process of moving some mice from Buffalo to Harvard at the moment, and it's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. You know, the the red tape involved is is unbelievable, but truly rewarding.

And I've learned a lot over the last couple of years in in that area.

Well, we help you find a good solution, obviously, for your son, and he lives to be long and healthy and old age just like you. But I I think one of the lessons for founders listening to this is we're constantly told that your company has to be pursued, right, to get a good exit. You you must be pursued by somebody, be the pretty girl on the street. You needed to get a deal done for a variety

of reasons even though, you know, this company was growing. You just told us your son's situation. You still were able to get and negotiate what I would consider a healthy multiple, 82,000,000 cash on 12,000,000 top line, which is about a 6.8, seven x multiple. Right? So that's a good lesson for everybody. It is possible to drive. You lead a sale process and still get a good multiple. Would you agree or disagree with that?

Yeah. 100%. 100%. You've gotta drive that process. You've got... You know, the legals involved in doing a deal of that size was was something I'd never seen.

Alright. Let's wrap up here on what you're focused on now.

At reviews, one of our later on in the journey, one of our biggest drivers were partnerships. All tech partnership became a real big thing. Early on, we did nothing in partnerships towards the end. It was all partnerships. Like, 40% of the rev was through partnerships. And it was a team that drove me mad because they had no systems in place. There was no accountability. The revenue was coming in, but I couldn't I couldn't make it repeatable

or grow it any further. It was a mess. So, you know, when I left heart... Left reviews, I thought, what am I gonna do next? What was the... You know, I used to journal the bits that were annoying me around the business and partnerships frequently came up in my pad. That was the bit I I challenged. I I went, right. I'm gonna build a better partner solution. We have a really good inbound motion. There's really good

inbound technology. There's really good outbound technology, but partnership tech was a bit rubbish. I actually used two partner solutions. I like main names at at reviews, and both of them were garbage. I never even got one of them running properly even though it's an $100,000 a year on it. So I wanted to build a complete partnership solution. And I went into it very naive, and I think that's maybe what you, you know, tech founders do, where

they go into things naive and then they, you know, have to figure it out, and that's what we're doing. I wouldn't say we've got true product market fit even though we're doing okay in revenue. We're at about 69,000 MLR. And... But we've not got true product market fit there yet. We're still developing the products. And then going back to the old days, I'm on the phone listening to what our partners want, and I'm, you know, trying

to get my moments again, and that's pretty... Really exciting. If you look at our marketing, I'm trying to these different marketing messages and tactics now to try and see what resonates. We're doing a lot of LinkedIn, going back to LinkedIn again. And, yeah, it it... It's really exciting. Got a great team. There's only some of the team who... People who left reviews have joined me on this this this journey. And when I mean they left, they

left prior to the sale. So my CTO was a, you know, a great great developer, and he was like, Calum, I'm gonna leave reviews. And we're like, do not leave reviews. Do not leave this rocket ship. And he went, no. I'm leaving. I've got a job offer. I'm like, don't. And he did leave. And, honestly, then he didn't get any air in air. He didn't have that exit. So when I started Partner, he went, whatever you're

doing next, I wanna be involved. So, you know, we're really good friends, and he came back, and we were, like, doing that with a few people now. So there is there is a couple of people who I've worked with for a while.

So put all that at a clean sense for me on partner.io so that when we interview you in a year and you tell us what... How how much you've grown it, we can sort of look back at this. So so you've gone from 0 to $70,000 a month in revenue with how many people on the team?

There's nine people on the team at the moment.

And the main growth channel is LinkedIn ads? LinkedIn ads. Yeah. How much are you spending a month on LinkedIn ads?

It's about $8,000 a month. Not a great deal. This

is so eye catching. You're just... Are you doing all this manually right now? You're just testing it all manually?

It's just me. It's just me and a Canva account. You know? I'm just finding that hook. I'm just finding what resonates, what hooks, what converts. Double down. Double down. Double down. Alright,

Calm. As we wrap up here, people wanna learn more about you online. Where's the best place they can find you?

LinkedIn. I'd I'd spend most of my time on LinkedIn as a social platform. Do a bit on Twitter, but mainly LinkedIn.

Guys, there you have it. Callum launched reviews.io in 2014 and got his first users by using a viral coefficient. He would look on Twitter for people talking about a brand, get the Twitter users to leave a review on a programmatic landing page he built for the brand, eventually tell the brand, hey. You gotta pay us because we have all your reviews. That then led to a big programmatic SEO motion, blew his domain rating up on Ahrefs

to above 80, organic traffic over 200,000 clicks per month. And then he said, okay. This machine is working. Let me pour paid ads on the funnel. About $500,000 a year spent on ads in 2022, of which 30% were LinkedIn. The rest were Google ads. Ultimately built that business to over 8,000, 9,000 paying customers, and and $12,000,000 of revenue bootstrapped before selling in 2022 to a roll up group called App Hub for about $82,000,000 all cash. He's

now building partner.io. You wanna check it out, you can find him online at partner.io. Callum, thanks for taking us to top.

Thanks, Nathan.