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Cody McLean

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
266 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

And since I was 14, I was just trying to get traffic and trying to convince others that my hosting business is different or better than the thousands and thousands of other hosting businesses out there on the market.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

And that was a difficult thing, but I was able to use that asset and bring it in to actually build out my company.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

So we had a cool office and appealed to tech companies and I had to do the same.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

So part of the key to my success and potentially yours as well are gonna be covering a few different points here in these next few slides.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

We're talking about a strong culture and the need for tacit knowledge and what that is actually.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

And also the importance of automation, minimizing your overhead and your administrative costs and how I was able to do that.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

Then we also have the idea of using outsourcing creatively in a way that you might not have thought about before.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

So the power of tacit knowledge.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

so back in 2019 i was able to actually open up what was effectively my dream from the from the get-go was to create this really hip neat office that was going to not only appeal to our customers but also set us apart from our competitors because we had to have this type of environment in order to attract the kind of clientele that we were looking for

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

And this also allowed the agents to build relationships with the clients because our agents actually liked working for us.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

And again, the ancillary benefit is this concept of tacit knowledge, which I'll get into in a little bit.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

And so we were a very data heavy company that had to focus on metrics and a typical ramp up period for corporate BPO is one to three months to get all the agents that you're hiring to meet the KPIs that you're setting to us as the customer.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

And one of the things that I noticed is that whenever those companies would start scaling or adding agents, our ramp up period for those new agents was actually less than the industry average.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

And so I looked into this and I really this is where I discovered the concept of tacit knowledge.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

So here's some of the clients that we're able to build out.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

And a lot of what we did is I put, since I've been through so much, I wanted to note that we were gonna give back to the region.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

We would end up volunteering at foster care, at shelters, doing donations, doing a lot of charity work.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

We would also have like League of Legends nights for the agents.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

And sometimes we'd even allow them to play video games in the office.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

And so I tried to replicate as much of