How We Bootstrapped to $7.5m in Revenue

um it's great to be here thanks nathan for inviting me to come and share some stuff with you guys all right um so today my name is scott branley i'm the ceo and co-founder of shopper approved and today i'm going to talk to you guys about how we boot strapped to 7.5 million arr and how we are competing head-to-head and even beating companies that have over 400 million dollars in venture

capital so tell you a little bit about who we are first of all i want to share with you something important we are it says we're one of the leading online review platforms in the world but we are the number one highest rated online review platform in the world and i'm gonna talk a little bit about that more scott what's your source on that what

site so i'm gonna i'm right behind her i'm actually gonna tell you why i say that there you go all right okay so um we are also an official google review partner and we've been that for over eight years we have a really good relationship with them and we are the only online review company in our industry that has made the inc 500 and we've done it twice completely bootstrapped and we've also

made the utah 100 list three times and the utah fast 50 list so shopper approved is a true david and goliath story and you can see this chart here um on the left side you can see shopper approved with no blue line right and uh we're next to yatpo trustpilot and bizarre voice now bizarre

voice has um to date um collected over or raised over 130 million in venture capital trust pilots raised 200 million and that was before their their ipo which took them to over a billion and then japo's raised over 436 million dollars now that chart does not do that not deal justice because

if you look at us compared to them it's just a little bit a little blue box but um yappo has raised enough money to buy a small country right so we're competing with the with these guys head to head every single day and and we're winning and that's so exciting um how many here are bootstrapped can i see a raise of hands oh this is awesome okay perfect

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

to 900 employees so they have 20 times more employees than we do and obviously they have tons more free cash and so it's it's a challenge but it makes it so much fun because we win and i'm going to show you how we do that so i put together this this presentation i'm calling it the shopper-approved bootstrapped sas playbook and

i'm going to give you nine strategies that we use um to help us compete against these companies every single day so that and those are engineer your success leverage your strengths and outsmart your competition so the first one that i want to talk about is you should try to find one blue ocean usp that can disrupt your market and then own it for everything you've got

so what we did back in 2010 when we launched most review companies at the time they were getting about a half of a percent conversion rate from people that bought from them to actually people that left a review and we figured out how to get 42 of those clients to leave a review after they bought and that became our disruptive usp and we owned the crap out of it

so this is our very first website the home page as you can see there it says shopper approved gets up to 70 times more ratings and reviews than its competitors and we plastered that everywhere because it was true and that gave us a huge competitive advantage for several years and then in 2018 so eight years later our competitors finally started catching up to us their conversion rates got better so we changed it to

40 times which was still an amazing usp and then in and then today our new site um we we say 10 times and a lot of times it's higher than that but that's what we decided to go with um now and that still is a huge usp right to get 10 times more views than your competitor for the same amount of work and you don't have to do anything right so this is

something that has really helped us to compete against these bigger these companies that have all this money and it's just this amazing one usp that we just rode to the end um and i'm going to talk to you a little bit about some other usps that we've created along the way a little bit later so the second thing second strategy that we that we did is to give your customers a dopamine hit as

fast as possible and i wish i wish i made this up but one of our partners actually told me this phrase and i absolutely loved it because it's it's an amazing way to think about how to um how to look at customers coming on and and signing up to your software if you can get them to get that dopamine hit right off the bat then the odds are that they're going to stick around and they're going to continue to use your

product so these are three things that we did to help get that dopamine hit and then keep it flowing over time so the first thing we did is we created an onboarding team to to show our clients what success looked like i wish we would have done this at the beginning but this we didn't actually do this until a few years ago but it's it's really helped a ton so the second thing we did was we cut our

integrations from seven days to one day and we've done this through apis and through integrations with shopping carts and things but we've also done it uh through through some slides i'm going to show you in a second and then the third thing we did was we started reaching out to clients that we noticed weren't collecting reviews over 30 days and we started reaching out directly with them and trying to figure out what

their problem was so we could fix it so here's just some of those some slides this is our onboarding team you can see there's only four people on that team but they make a huge difference to our clients every time our sales comp our sales department makes a sale these guys on board that person right off the bat and it creates this amazing relationship with our clients and it it also helps to

to set the expectations right off the bat so that they know what's coming they can help them to show to set up their their software so that they're set up for success long term they can do upsells right on the phone because they've got you've got their full attention right they're talking to you on the phone and you're walking them through your software so they can upsell your products and and offer additional

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

form and we said how can we serve you to help us meet your needs take a moment and tell us more about your goals and we gave them several different check boxes to tell us what their goals were using our software and then um as part of that too we asked them what shopping cart they used so that allows us to get them using our software faster right but it also gives us the ability

to follow up with them right off the bat and we just tell them what they want to hear because they told us what their goals were and that makes it so easy for us to sell them our product because they already told us what they want to buy so that's helped a ton the other thing we did was i told you we looked at clients that hadn't collected reviews in 30 days so we started following up with these clients and finding out why because if they're if they're not collecting reviews they're going to

cancel and so we only started doing this in q3 of last year and in in six months we helped 144 clients start collecting reviews again solving whatever problem they had and that's helped to save 293 000 in arr that would have churned if we wouldn't have reached out and done that and the other cool thing because of us doing that we've ended up having zero cancellations in the last two months it's actually

three months now due to clients canceling because they weren't collecting the next strategy this is the third main strategy to engineer your success is to make your product as sticky as you possibly can now we've talked about stickiness and i'm sure you guys kind of understand the concept there but i love this picture when i was looking for pictures about stickiness but the idea is to make your product so

valuable that they can't live without it and the benefit of doing this is it it increases your retention and it obviously lowers your churn rate but you have to make sure you do it in a morally responsible way and obviously the the lower that you can get your churn the higher your you can get your cash flow which means the more money you have to spend on growing your company and so you can scale faster so on average according to rick curley the

average b2b sas monthly churn rate is 4.67 percent now that doesn't seem like a huge number but when you times that by 12 months that is a big number that's almost like 50 churn rate over a year shopper approved our churn rate is 1.31 per month which is 3.5 times lower than the average and just to give you an idea what that looks like here's a chart of 2021. our monthly terminates at the bottom in blue but i put our cumulative churn rate on

here because i wanted to show you how quickly churn can add up even if it's low so in the in just one year our cumulative churn rate is over 15 so that means we have 15 less cash flow to grow our business if we don't do something about it and the other way you can look at that is every single month we have the first 15 of all the sales we make have to go

towards offsetting the churn so if we can anything we can do to lower that churn gives us more cash every single month and makes and puts more money in our pocket am i going too fast you guys all following me okay i just want to make sure i get all the information to you guys because i put a lot of stuff in here the next thing is leveraging your strengths this is that that middle the middle three strategies

so these are three levers that you can pull to play higher faster and the first one is to look for ways to make your company look legitimately bigger than you actually are and i think a lot of you guys have this struggle right you're competing against other companies and you want to legitimately look like you're a bigger company so these are three things that that you can do to do that and make and this these are all

legitimate um very trust trustworthy ways to to do that so the first one is to go for the inc 500 the very first time you break a hundred thousand dollars in a year now you got to know the trick of getting into the inc 500 so the very first year you break 100k you have three additional years to break two million in a year

so you have four years total um that fourth year that you hit two if you hit two million you're pretty much guaranteed to make the inc 500. that's a huge deal but the caveat is you have a very small window to apply in that after that fourth year to get on the list so if you miss the window you miss the opportunity to get on the inc 500 and there's a difference between the

ink 500 and the ink 5000 so the ink 500 is much more credible now if you don't make it if you don't make that window you can always apply the fifth year but the problem is your company over time doesn't grow as fast right so your multiplier is going to go down the reason why you want to apply in your the fourth year after you break 100k is because 100k is their minimum in order for you to apply so your

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

that still is credible the other things you can do is you can add third-party social proof to your website a big one is the bbb that's something anyone can apply for and put on their site we leverage the crap out of it we have an a plus rating and all you have to do is just help your customers and you'll you'll keep it it's not hard to keep that rating the other another thing we do is we add trust card

security seals to our website to show our customers that our website is safe because a lot of people have website concerns and that's an easy thing that you can do and and it just makes your customers feel more comfortable so they buy from you and then the third thing you can do if you have clients that have really cool brand names you should leverage that on your website and if you can collect a testimonial from one of those brands and put it by those

buy those logos so here's just some fun pictures this is i call this top picture our dumb and dumber picture i don't know if you guys have ever seen dumb and dumber but um jim carrey is walking around with one of those hats on right so this was at one of the inc 500 awards galas that's my business partner garrett and that was a super fun day the bottom one is our awards wall at our

office and you can see our two inc 500 plaques and there's our utah 100 plaques and and some of the other awards that we've won there but these awards have helped us to become a legitimate player in our space even though our competitors have all this vc and all these employees right customers don't know the difference they go to our website and they see that we're an e500 company right and that's all that matters because they don't know

the other thing we do is we add like i just said we put brands that we that are our clients right on our site to add credibility but then we throw a testimonial underneath it this one's from science.com they're also an e500 company but then that bottom image obviously you can see there our bbb rating inc 500 g2 4.9 captain 4.9 and then some publications that we've been listed in

um so the next thing you the next strategy under leverage your strengths is to uh dominate your online reputation this is the world that we live in as a review company right we help our clients to do this every single day but we decided to do it ourselves and this is nathan you're asking about how i could say that i don't know where you went but anyway so i said shopper approved the number one highest rated review platform in the

world so a few years years ago we realized that with a little bit of effort we could become the number one highest rate of review platform on line and so what we did we made a spreadsheet and we we found all we went put all our competitors in the spreadsheet we went to g2 we went to captera we went to trustpilot and some other um review major review companies that are um apply to our space and we just wrote their their score of all our competitors

and they all sucked and so we're like we can be the number one review company in across all the different platforms all we have to do is just send customers to them and and within a year we were the number one so you can see that um i just pulled these just the other day so the top one's g2 we have a 4.9 cap tara we have a 4.9 and trustpilot which is our direct competitor we have a 4.7

they have a 4.1 on their own review platform like anyway so you guys can do this this is easy you can become the highest rated company in your industry all you have to do is just do the same thing it's really easy and that's a really cool strategy sorry my my throat is very dry so this is just to give you an idea of traffic from g2 itself um you know we've

had over 4 000 visits from g2 in the last year but the bottom number is even cooler because these are active buyers and we're getting 10 of that of those active buyers coming to us because we have the highest rating so the next strategy under leveraging your strength is to truly invest in your customer success and for the first eight years of our business we were reactive and that

allowed us to lower support costs and be more automated but it was impersonal and it led to lower loyalty and higher churn with fewer upsells because everything was automated right we were trying to do things with as little budget as we could but now we've switched to being proactive so we flipped it so our support costs are higher right because we have the onboarders and things like that and it's less automated but it's way

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

they jack their prices and we've seen that happen over and over again and they'll go high so what that allows us to do is come in and we almost have to raise our prices in order to stay competitive otherwise people won't believe that we're a legitimate company so that's allowed us to raise our prices and and have more cash flowing come in so we can grow our company off kind of their coattails of them raising their prices

but that also lets us make them the bad guy right because we always we always come in under them but we can say well you could go with us or you can pay more money and go with them so they're going to go with us and then that also because we don't have investors and and super high overhead we can always negotiate a better deal and make the sale this is our current website pricing page

we didn't have a pricing page for a long time but we decided to add one in because we did user testing and every one of the users looked the first page they went to was our pricing page like there's no pricing here so we put this back in but what we changed is if you can see starting at we added that starting at and what that allows us to do is still show a price but it it gives our sales guys the ability to

change that price based on the client's needs from that list that they gave us at the beginning when they signed up so it's kind of the best of both worlds then the eighth strategy is when you can't build or buy a tool to grow your business leverage someone else's and i'm sure you guys have this problem where your competitor comes out with something really cool and you you just don't have the resources to to build it or to match

it or it's going to take like three years for you to to make it happen so um this has been so cool this is an awesome example so yacht po remember they had 436 million dollars right just you can't live on it but it's a start right so their strategy is to buy your way to the top so the last couple years they've been buying up companies and kind of creating this marketing

platform right but what they've actually been doing too is ostracizing some of their partners that they worked with in the past so what do you do when you can't do that we don't have the funds to go and buy up all these companies and do the same thing so what we did we partnered our way up so we went to their direct competitors of the companies they bought and we partnered with them and we co-branded their software and they already have a like a brand

established behind their name now you get ad shopper approved and that brand together and that just makes an even more powerful um combination but we put it under our company name and our brand right powered by them and now we have additional income streams and our partners are happy our clients are happy and now we compete directly against yahoo for free so it's awesome

so think about out again like how can you outsmart or out think companies with vc um the ninth thing is always be looking for new blue ocean usp disruptors now remember at the beginning i told you we had the one right collect we collect up to 70 times more reviews in our competition well over time we've naturally found other

usp disruptors that open blue oceans for us and this will happen to you guys so here's just a few of them these are really fun i i just want to share these kind of in closing so one of the things we came up with was a concept called review destinations and what we realized is there's a lot of open review platforms out in the world which means anyone can go leave a review right so we're like why don't we just after one of our clients customers buys from them

why don't we just redirect a portion of that traffic to these other open review platforms and they can leave reviews on those platforms too and so we create a review destinations now this is awesome so this is a listing in google um for one of our clients mountaincrestgardens.com reviews right that's typically what you look for if you're looking for a company's reviews you can see that there's all these uh

five star ratings on there right and they're all high they're all like 4.6 4.7 we power all of those reviews on all of those review platforms from shopper approved using review destinations so they don't need to go buy any of our competitors products we power the reviews for them so that was just one of those cool things that we found along the way right one of those usps

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

and search listings so here's some of the ways we leverage that we have a q a tool which we partnered with a company co-branded right one of the best q a companies in the world we call it shopper approved q a powered by answer base so we leverage that q a to get feature snippets in google to generate more traffic that's ugc seo the second one is we collect product reviews and because of our partnership with google we put those

stars in all those product ads in google shopping the other thing we do is we have a shop approved certificate that optimizes to get star ratings and listings in google not only for your website but for product for all your products every single one of your products has its own page and it's got stars on it and then that second one the facebook listing that's review destinations that's ugc seo and then

this bottom uh one is video testimonials that's ugc and that's seo as well so we understand this concept of ugc seo and we've leveraged the crap out of it and then the last one is the traffic and conversion stack this is very similar to what you would see on amazon now amazon has this huge competitive advantage because they know what converts and they know what works on their product pages all we did was reverse engineer it

call it a really cool name and market it and all of these are our tools that we put on our clients product pages and it helps them to get more traffic up to four times more traffic and up to nine times more conversion on every single one of their product pages is freaking awesome so these are some of the ways that you can create these ug these um usps right that can help you take your company to

the next level so if we can do it as a scrappy little bootstrap company against companies of 400 million in vc so can you and a strategy like these can that can help us to do it and the reason why people love sports movies is because the underdog always freaking wins and i love it and we're the underdog and we're gonna kill it in our industry so thank you for your time appreciate it

awesome thanks scott