SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1279 He Does $6m in Event Revenue Annually, now SaaS
24 Jan 2019
Chapter 1: What inspired Dale Beaumont to start Bizversity?
Launched a book, did very well, then coaching business, business blueprint, continued to take off about 600 people paying 10 grand per year in that business, high margin business. He's now using money and profits from that company to funnel them into bizversity, basically an easy way to access content, business related content on your phone, on your mobile, on the go.
Most importantly, 160 people right now paying 14 bucks a month, so 2200 bucks a month in revenue as he looks to scale this up into a much larger business. This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn.
Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers.
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Chapter 2: How does Bizversity differentiate itself from competitors like Udemy?
With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Dale Beaumont. He's an award-winning technology entrepreneur, international speaker, and the author of 16 best-selling books.
He started his first business at 19 and has been building companies ever since. One of those companies is now a multimillion-dollar enterprise, which has enabled Dale to become an investor, philanthropist, and to step foot in more than 80 countries. Today, Dale is the founder and CEO of BizVersity, a product which gives direct access to the world's best business training anywhere, anytime.
Dale, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 3: What is the revenue model for Bizversity and how is it structured?
Yeah, let's do it.
All right. So tell us about Bizversity. At first glance, it looks like what might be a Udemy or a CreativeLive might look like for business people. Is that accurate?
Yeah. We basically started around three years ago. I've run a business education company for the last 10 years called Business Blueprint, which is based around training entrepreneurs, but through primarily live events. We run about 60 live events per year.
Chapter 4: How many users are currently subscribed to Bizversity?
So about three years ago, we thought, how can we build a platform that can provide training to business owners all around the world? And we realized there's another business website. There's so many out there, but everyone has a mobile phone. And so we decided to build the mobile first video learning platform to provide training to business owners.
We now have over a thousand videos in the library covering really everything from how to read financial statements to how to hire staff. how to run Facebook. And we now have over a thousand videos that are available through the learning platform.
Okay. And what's the revenue model? Is this a recurring SaaS model or one-time pay-as-you-go kind of thing?
Chapter 5: What strategies are in place to reduce churn for Bizversity?
Yeah. For the first 18 months, we made the platform free. However, in the last month, we've just turned on monetization. And so it's a subscription model, similar to, again, Netflix, $14 a month. And you can access all of the content that you want.
And also, there's a whole bunch of special features that are only available to premium members, such as the ability to download content, to be able to watch offline, the ability to create your own playlist, to speed up playback, and a whole bunch of other things that are only available to subscribers. So you get in two weeks, free trial.
or you can eat and then you can decide if you want to continue.
Okay. And walk me through, I mean, how many people are now paying for that service?
Chapter 6: How does Dale Beaumont's prior business experience influence Bizversity?
Yeah. So we now have about 160 people that are paying for that service. This is in our first month. So it's sort of brand new in terms of monetization. And so now it's just a matter of how we can continue to grow. So we'll do that by having those individual accounts, every single person either signing up directly, or we're now actually looking at talking to many companies as well about getting a
company-wide account and also we've had of interest from franchise groups that are looking to provide training to their franchisees because most of them when they buy a franchise they really they get a product or a service but they really don't get a lot of business training and they come in sort of very very green and lacking a lot of this training and
So it's a really low cost way to be able to provide a lot of information to especially first time entrepreneurs. So we see that's the kind of way that will probably scale faster in the future is by more of the sort of B2B style transactions.
Okay.
Chapter 7: What are the unique features of Bizversity's content delivery?
And give me a sense. Before the SaaS model. So in 2018, or sorry, 2017, Bizversity as its own unit, how much revenue did it do?
So Bizversity, so last year was all for us, it was just about building the platform. Thankfully, I've got another company, which is my events business, which is very, very profitable. What's that called? It's called Business Blueprint. Oh, that is Business Blueprint. Okay. business blueprint.
Chapter 8: What lessons has Dale learned from his journey as an entrepreneur?
So that's been around for 10 years and it's a great business. So I've been able to take some of the revenue and to put it into Bizversity to just build the platform, which we have done. So it's all just been about building up the software and now it's really around how do we make Bizversity start to pay for itself and then obviously be profitable and then to expand from there.
Yep. Yep. Okay, good. So you are just now really introducing pricing to Bizversity and that pricing is $14 a month like Netflix, 160 people at about $2,200 a month in revenue right now.
Correct.
Okay. How do you anticipate making people sticky on this? Anytime someone launches a content site or membership site, the hardest thing is churn is through the roof, especially to real SaaS companies that are software based. How do you keep churn down?
Yeah. So that's something that we're really trying to attack aggressively. So we're Obviously, there's a bunch of things that we're looking to do. So having Intercom built into obviously the website, but also the app as well, having lots of kind of conversations with people, like a concierge service. So people can just search for what their biggest problem or challenge is.
And then we just send them the direct video that solves that problem. So by trying to have more of a direct relationship with every single user through live chat, then we hope that that will help. The other thing that we've done is we've built in a bunch
different gamification modules as well we have uh badges that people can unlock based on their consumption we also have um a new content which is coming out kind of every week and the other thing we have is like a global leaderboard as well trying to make the product as as sticky as we can but we've still got um yeah so we really know that yeah in this area oftentimes the average span you know is
to four months. And also giving people a substantial discount for going 12 months in advance as well. There's nearly a 40% discount if you pay upfront. So we hope to lock people in for at least a year, which is enough to get people really on the product and then hopefully continuing for many years after.
Yeah, I mean, that's the hardest thing I've seen with these content creators is they'll use those exact words, force them into an annual plan because they know they're going to churn after three months if they don't. And then what happens is there's just more regret because they don't end up consuming enough content. And then it's an interesting model to go after.
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