My $5k hobby project used 1 to many selling to reach $700k ARR in a year

give it up for Robert Warner hi everybody thank you um so a couple of things um number one it's a CEO one there I'm not really a CEO of anything CEO implies you have Executives to be an officer over and I don't have any Executives we have a team of eight people um and that's plenty for me so this session today is a bit of a weird one um in as much as

I kind of feel like we've broken about every rule of sassa over the last year um we followed almost nothing that everybody else does we've not raised money we've not done so much when it comes to content marketing not done that when it comes to paid traffic not done that raise money not done that we've done very very little but we've done a few things that I think are relatively smart so quick intro to me um sat in the room in the back of my business partner Joe and together we

built a white label digital marketing agency specializing in Google ads that was a worldwide agency with a team of 35 people um we start it took about nine years to build that business and we became what's called a Google channel sales partner which is if you don't know it's kind of like a hidden tier of partnership within Google that's kind of like invite only it's like going behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz you have to get ass back there and you get to go to hang out in Mountain View and do some cool stuff and like give you some nice perks um ultimately

kind of got bored of running an agency and then if we were looking last year what Joe and I were talking about next steps and next stages and what we might do in the future and kind of went oh this is interesting if we sell an agency we can probably get in the region of you know two to four times ebit for that agency as a valuation on exit if we build a SAS we can get five to ten X Revenue it's like I screw this we saw in the

agency and that's exactly what we did we put the agency up for sale and we sold it last November um but in the meantime I want to cover with you guys today um we call this our accidental SAS we didn't mean to build a sass So for anybody here who's building their SAS with a market changing and world domination Vision we had none of that um we had we I said we didn't even plan to build a SAS we had a problem to solve

for ourselves and we hired a guy of Fiverr to build a solution for us and we did a test launch we we call our test launcher test launch of our bvp who's it everybody here familiar with the term MVP yeah yeah we did a bvp which we call a barely viable product um and it really was um but it had one thing that going for it that gave us massive value so what we

did we did a test launch and we did that to our own internal email list one thing had been in the agency space for several years we had a good email list and all we did knowing that we had a product that was pretty weak and pretty feature incomplete was we focused on the Big Marketing idea you'll hear people talk about Hooks and USPS we had one thing and we sold the hell out of it once we've done that we then went into what we called our sort of product like

growth which says a far Grand the term for anything than we formerly ever did um and do which was we had weekly user calls with all our users on a group basis and remember we could get accelerated feedback and grow really quickly and it also meant we could build out marketing angles one thing you'll see throughout this session is what kind of marketers first and foremost were about building the Big Ideas we're about the angle the hook the reason why the Texan enabler to get us

there but it's about the idea first and foremost um and then once we've done all that we then started doing what we call partner launches any of you guys run affiliate programs for your businesses cool well we do that and we probably do it slightly differently to how you do it but it works really well for us and we have a one-week promotion strategy so when we run on a with an affiliate we typically run for one week and then we all move on and do our own

things it's not a long-term relationship typically but it allows us to sign up customers at scale so a one-week promotion for us on a bad one will sign up 30 new paid users so it's highly highly time efficient for us so here are growth um and so for context um we didn't start developing anything until April last year so April 2021 we started and this

is I get slightly weirded out by this Slide by the way I've sat in the big room in the you know in the group we're watching all the grown-ups where they've got charts that are like multi-years you know you know we start in 2014 and we've got 2017 and they've got this big time spans and you've got something we've got years where in months we're kind of baby steps at this we are really the New Kids on the Block trying to figure stuff out and breaking things as we go so everything we see here is US just kind of winging it a bit

um so Doom had no product July we did our first launch and we got to a 144k annualized which was a really nice start on month of first month of launch a fast forward over to the where we are now and in September we'll hit about 1.25 million ARR something up there or thereabouts so and in context we went full time on this in January until when after we launched in July most of the rest of 2020 we

almost focus on selling our agency in fact although I'm from the UK and Joe's from Ohio we sold it to a guy in Austin um who will probably catch up with this weekend so that was our big Focus the second half of a year not building and growing our SAS so it largely got back burn until kind of January so what do we do at PPC ad lab um PPC ad lab essentially it's Google Advertiser data what we're interested in is who is advertising on what Search

terms in what locations with what ad copy what devices they're targeting what times a day do they run their ads what days of the week do they run their ads and providing this like hyper level of detailed competitive intelligence so that you know at any one time what your competitors doing are they bidding on your brand are they breaking any franchise rules which is an interesting use case we've come across are they lists of people you can Prospect and target for your own Outreach people spending money on Google ads is usually

a really good indicator they're spending money in other marketing services so it's a great qualifier so the people who've been uh Google ads managers franchises Ecom stores digital agencies you know that's been typically our customers so far so let's start with our our beginning what happened so it was late March last year um Joe and I had built a product it was an information product that was selling to our agency customers and one of the commitments that we'd given was that we

would give them a list of plumbers to prospect to it was about it was about the plumbing markets thing um so I would give you a thousand Plumbing leads which was a great idea to realize we couldn't get it and we tried just about every tool known to man to buy them couldn't get it just nobody had that date of all we wanted was a thousand advertisers in the us we'd have thought it'd be really really easy nobody could give us the list um so in an act of desperation

um I said to Joe I got an idea how we might be able to build something to do this ourself I've been just Googling as you do looking for answers so let's give it a test and see what happens so we did and I hired a guy on Fiverr um because that's where you go when you need seriously important development work done you go to Fiverr and if somebody says yes sir I can do that for you so perfect you're hired here's some money and so we did um

and we've got this we got back a csb and we thought that's downtown did that really worked really well and it was much more than a thousand with job done can you do that again can you can you run us a list of you know a dentist this time because we've also got dentist classes too and after about three of these csvs this contractor said Rob this is getting quite annoying couldn't you just give me some money and I'll put a UI on this thing for you and then you can get them yourself and you don't have to ask me wait sure how much do you want it's a

500. all right all right you're in let's do it so for 500 we got our first version of our UI this is nice and Joe and I got there might be something in this this is really useful data if we need it we can't get it anywhere else but nobody else can either so let's take a look what can we do with it and we realized very quickly we've got this Unique Piece and the Unique Piece was real-time complete data for

every one Advertiser our competitors were fine and we were finding ten we were literally 10x more data than they were so what we did was we built that into kind of marketing angles and said if you know how your competitors are behaving then this is how you can behave this is how you can get ahead this is how you can wow prospects and we built up marketing argument much more comprehensively than we built the product um and then

I said that was March July the second we opened the doors to our first customers so what's that 12 13 weeks something of that kind and about 5k in cost was what got us that point in between this our little Dev guy from Fiverr went Rob I'm really enjoying working on this can I have a job all right how much do you want you want you're in you've got a job so we hired him and he's now our our lead and we've got a team of three developers full time but

um that's how we got our break with this literally um a guy on Fiverr so what we did was we did the seven day launch to our agency contacts I'll break it down for you in a second with a live webinar with an encore and a replay sequence and we created what we called a Founder offer which gave huge benefits and discounts so this is kind of the the process flow in its entirety and that's even the little email from my guy on Five are saying yeah sure I can build that for you you probably can't read it

but um that was Nathan said show proof what dates that March 27th I think it is um when that actually happened so here's what we did we had a list of agencies from our from our agency days and when new agencies would buy this kind of thing because you know it helps them build lists of prospects it gives them a unique conversation to have so this is our promotion sequence what Tuesday we send out an email going hey we're running a webinar Wednesday on Thursday do you want to come

we'll send another one on Wednesday another one on Thursday and Thursday evening we run the webinar Friday we're doing live Encore and we get and we would typically getting about 250 300 people show up live to these webinars so we get a good crowd and we do replays over the weekend and we close it out on the Monday and as you can see here what we did was we created a page with what we call the founders offer and the big difference

that we did that we do in all of our promotional activities is we have published prices on our website our agency plan on our website is 397 a month and it was that price on day one even though it was nothing like an agency level product at that time our webinar price is a bigger better package for 197 a month and it has deadlines it has scarcity and urgency built into it and you'll see there we also had an annual plan which

I'll talk about in a moment um that for us was a big win because it allowed us to create some scarcity and urgency and here's where it did this is a screenshot straight from our stripe account from last year we signed up 76 paying customers in seven days um collected 22k in cash and that cash came in part because nearly 10 of our buyers bought the annual plan I mean that's a big commitment when you're buying an annual

plan from a product that's barely out of the box I mean this thing was it was clearly very very rough um and yet they bought it and it nearly doubled our cash collection which is kind of cool um we'd immediately got 12km RR and we've done it all for a 5k build cost so as far as a scrappy launch goes we didn't spend the year ideating we didn't spend a year planning we didn't do customer research interviews anything that normal grown-up sisters we

did none of that all we had was a really unique idea that we knew solved a problem that waiting in our market for 15 years and nobody is solved so that was how we got it started we then went into as I said we're selling our agency at the time so we were kind of not really focused on growing this product it was nice MRI at the time but that's all it was um so what did we do the first thing that

we did was we ran weekly calls with our customers every Wednesday noon Eastern there'd be a call on a webinar with all our customers we tell about all the new features we were releasing and they gave us some great use cases cause they felt like they were invested in the product they got the deal they got on the ground floor they got the best pricing they were winning um and we made them Our Heroes because people were going out and using this data you know hey I use your data I sent

a few videos out and I got a client the next morning it's worked like a gangbusters because they've never seen anything like brilliant bring it on recording um and so we gathered all this feedback we also figured learn that building a product for 5K is really good until you realize you haven't architected it very well and your first server Bill comes in for eight grand um that hurt that wasn't a nice moment oh great Oliver has gone on Amazon um we need to probably redesign that

fairly quickly otherwise we've just generated ourselves a huge problem um so we did um and we were using it every day to build new Hooks and new marketing angles and that's really where Joe comes into this in terms of capturing those thoughts those ideas that people were creating us and those angles that came out of that for example were people going hey I work with franchises in multiple locations we can see which franchisees are advertising outside of their designated zip codes and breaking the franchise

rules we can now enforce compliance on something we could never enforce before we're going like that's a cool idea yeah well done thank you you've just done our marketing job for us because we didn't we didn't ever think of that um you know you we're getting users give sending in videos of their Sops for how they were using in marketing it's like great we've now got another marketing angle we can go with this we've got people using it to protect their brands he was bidding against them and send cease and desist letters and things all these things we wouldn't we had

literally no idea that these were use cases and to this day people keep bringing us more use cases for the product but that sort of Hiatus few months over the summer was brilliant and it just gave us this time to just gather this thing rebuild re-architect put a slightly more grown-up UI on it that looked a little bit better um and not so on 1980s actual sketch um and you can see what we had this was from one month alone I was at 12 weeks

1581 user comments just in our weekly live calls now I see people doing beta launches and free launches and trials and all that and they're doing one-to-one demos and feedback how long does that process take you to get over a one and a half thousand pieces of individual feedback from real paying users who put their hand in the pocket and you can see all the yellow stuff there it's effective feature requests they were right in our roadmap for us just by showing up and talking to us and yet they thought we were doing them the biggest favor in the

world because we were engaging with them and supporting and listening and it was a very much a kind of two-way street so that's what we did over the summer um and then we get into the real fun stuff and this is where it really gets to start properly which was our partner launches um the way we do partner launches is we do joint ventures with them and so what we will typically do and how we start this off

we've got data from our internal launch in July as to how many people showed up the webinar how many purchased live on the call what the average order value was so that's our warm customer list we're wanting to test how well we can replicate that with other people's warm customer lists so you know we made it really super easy for them you know we would we gave them the webinar titles the email swipes the replays we promoted their offer to our audience it was a

typical webinar swap there's nothing complicated about this we were tracking all our key metrics so what will total earnings what was their total commission they were going to get from month one um what was the live conversion rate on the call what was the earnings Pro attendee and then once you've got one set of numbers we can go again and again and again and again um full disclosure though if you've worked with joint venture Partners you know it's like herding cats I mean these guys are damned hard work I went wonderful brilliant but damned hard work

and you can see here and by the way our entire Seven Day promotion sequence and partner sequence is in the artifacts on the drive that's in there so literally every email I mean you need to be on my emails clearly but the whole structure timeline everything we do is all templated out there for you so you can just swipe and deploy it um so we did everything and we prayed promptly and we paid generously this is our very first affiliate our very first partner in fact is business partners in the room in the main room at the moment

um and he walked away with I think it was about seven Grand seven grand in cash not bad for a week's worth of emails showing up and doing an introduction to a webinar and then from there we've stacked to bigger and bigger Partners using these stats right now there's a launch about to go down in about seven days from now and check this out we're paying 100 of

month one Revenue as a commission now that sounds big and scary and most people no I can't pay a month one month worth of commission that's just not going to happen and yeah I've seen people downstairs in meetings I've had with people going yeah my cac's about six months people my cat's one month um but that's six months of acquiring customers one at a time here

we will acquire somewhere in a region of 300 to 700 new users in seven days that's best part of a hundred thousand dollars of MRI a month now there's not many other ways I know where risk-free I have no money down I have no money out I can go out and acquire let's call it 500 new users in seven days I'll happily give them 100 Commission of month one Revenue because they ain't

going anywhere people like the product people stay so when I heard somebody on stage yesterday we have a very generous affiliate program we pay sometimes up to 10 or 20 percent right [Laughter] you really want to get somebody's attention do you think these guys are paying paying attention when they've contracted this to us what you can't see in the contract actually that comes underneath this is they have contracted to provide a minimum of another 300

customers per year to us after the launch because the revenue is so valuable to them as well so if you can find the right partners and you can pull a deal off and I would suggest to be bold um you can pull some seriously big numbers in into your business and that's where we move all we've done all year this is literally the only thing we've done is we've run a partner webinar once a month we're running one of our own once every three months um and that's taken us from zero to

about 700k in seven months full time but a year since launch and will take us to about 1.3 million by the end of this month at about 1.5 by the end of October um I appreciate there are bigger boys playing at far bigger scale than we are right now but as a bootstrap scrappy little operation of six people eight people it's not a bad start um we've got a lot to learn a lot to do but if you ever think about going one-to-many it's got a lot of payoffs too and I strongly recommend it

oh that's the wrong thing to press so this quarter what are we doing um we're doing that in September in about a week's time from now we're moving into Enterprise we've found that Brands really really care about the stuff that we do for them automated reporting of their competitors and their marketplaces and their brands we're launching our own Splinter product and this is something I'd recommend anybody thinks about is Splinter off a part of the Hill product that you can sell on Lifetime deals you can sell one-time deals and then put

people into an upsell funnel to send them the main product we're launching that in October and we're also starting paid traffic so for us um we're kind of just taking our baby steps and we're getting going in Earnest now so quarter four for us is where the fun really starts but it's nice we're profitable we have cash and we've not had to sign the equity um and it's worked very well for us so last 20 minutes that's what we've done we've scrapped the whole thing we've probably broken

every rule known to SAS um Nathan has probably got his head in his hands or banging his head on the table somewhere in a dark room if you could hear this right now but it's worked really well for us so take away we've only got one real Channel webinars we've processed it and we can repeat it anytime we want and just turn customers on on demand and let your customers do your marketing for you because they really will ladies and gentlemen thank you that's all I have to say [Applause] [Music]