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How We Bootstrapped to $7.5m in Revenue

... and Beat VC Backed Competitors with $400m Raised

Scott Brandley · ShopperApproved

Published September 1, 2022
About this resource

Scott Brandley, CEO of ShopperApproved, shares:

- How we take on companies with 20x more employees and 100's of millions in VC every day and win

- Keys to making yourself look ‘Legitimately Bigger’

- Why you should focus on giving customers an Instant Dopamine Hit

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What you’ll learn

Scott Brandley explains how Shopper Approved competed against heavily funded rivals by focusing on differentiated value, customer experience, low churn, online reputation, and strategic partnerships.

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Key moments

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Build a strong USP

“um i'm going to give you some really cool strategies that we do because we have to scrap every single day to compete against this type of money and these type of resources if you look on the right these are the number of employees that these companies currently have working for them so shopper approved we have 50 amazing employees that we love and but we're going up against companies that have 770”

Give customers a win

“products that you offer and it's it's just been amazing so i would highly suggest if you don't have an onboarding team that you s you start looking into setting one up this is another thing that's really helped us we set up a 45-day risk free trial and there's nothing special about that but what we did is as part of that trial we set up this”

Control churn

“multiplier is the highest it can possibly be after the fourth year from the time you break 100k in sales does that make sense so look at where you are in your company and if you can make that work do it and you can even make the inc 5000 as long as you're breaking about five making about five percent increase per year over a four year period of time you're pretty much guaranteed to make the inc 5000 too and”

Dominate online reputation

“more personal we have like this almost like a friendship with our clients now and that leads to way higher loyalty and way lower churn and a lot more chances to make an upsell the so then the third section is to outsmart the competition and the way we do this the first way is we use price as a weapon against companies with vc and the way we can do that is because v we let vcs set the price because as soon as money as soon as a company gets vc”

Partner your way up

“another one is ugc seo this is user generated content seo this is an a brand new type of seo that is way powerful than regular seo but nobody understands how it works or why it's important so we figured it out and we realized that you can leverage user generated content in google and generate a crap ton of traffic and um”

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About the speaker
Scott Brandley

Scott Brandley

CEO · ShopperApproved

As the Co-Founder of Trust Brands, he helps businesses to be more successful by building trust and social proof through customer ratings and reviews, reputation management, and online security. He has an extensive history in the software industry — bringing creativity and innovation to the forefront to develop effective solutions that help businesses thrive in the global marketplace. He believes that a strong work culture drives companies ever forward and provides his teams with opportunities for growth

Company revenue
$7M
Team size
50

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