SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1299 After 4 years with no salary, is he making the right choice in launching a Hubspot "for the rest of us"?
13 Feb 2019
Chapter 1: What motivated the guest to leave a stable job for entrepreneurship?
Be more confident. He's been through, you know, had made lots of money, salary positions, done the startup thing before. So, you know what? I want to risk it again. And in 2015, basically quit his full time job, said, you know what? I'm going to build this thing. It's all in one marketing platform. No salary for four years. Just now launching a paid model.
So far, I've sustained themself via a one point five million dollar raise. Also doing about 10 grand per month in professional services work. Now about 30 clients paying $79 a month, so about $2,300 a month in revenue across their Intellisphere program and other SaaS platforms are just now launching.
Chapter 2: How has the guest funded their startup without a salary?
A team of 35 based between India and Washington. 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 of 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. 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 Bruce Worrell. He is an entrepreneurial leader and team motivator with ability to proactively identify market opportunities and solve challenging business problems. He's currently doing this in his company, Intellisphere. A passion for new product and service innovation, startups, helping entrepreneurs, driving business acceleration and business execution.
He's got a lot of experience doing that. Today, we're going to, again, focus on Intellisphere. Bruce, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. All right. Tell us what the company does and how you make money.
Yeah, so Intellisphere basically helps businesses grow sales and build brand awareness through a series of services and technology tools. So Intellisphere, the platform itself, is in essence an all-in-one digital marketing system. It's a SaaS-based system. We make money by ā we have a free service, and then we have paid versions of the service.
So you start for free, and then you can go from there. So SaaS-based service, very inexpensive, $49 a month, $99 a month, et cetera. We have a service that helps measure and keep track of brand awareness called Affinity Pages. So we keep track of brand awareness of all kinds of brands, national brands, local businesses, politicians, sports athletes, et cetera.
We make money there because it's tied into our tool set. People can manage their Affinity Page if they're a business. using our tools. So that's how we do that. And then we've learned that a number of businesses are interested in kind of us doing the work for them. Uh, so some people just don't have the bandwidth or the knowledge to use the tools.
Uh, so we find a lot of doctors, lawyers, et cetera, other folks who want us to do marketing on their behalf. So we have a, we do full service marketing as well as a self-service tools.
Okay. And on the just SAS side of things, what's the average customer pay per month, would you say?
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Chapter 3: What services does Intellisphere offer to businesses?
We've, we've certainly bootstrapped quite a bit, but we've raised probably about a million and a half in capital as well.
Okay. That's going to be my question is if you've been building for three years with no revenue, uh, or little revenue from the SaaS side, how have you funded it? And it's through the, through the raise.
Through the raise as well as we've, we've put a lot of money in it ourselves.
Okay. How much have you guys, have you put in yourself?
Well, there are two ways of calculating that. Um, one is we've taken no income for four years. Secondarily, so that's ā and trust me, we both make good money or we used to make good money. So that's a commitment. And then I'd say we both put in hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
Are you married? I am. Actually, I should have said, were you married when you started and are you still married now? I'm not taking a salary report. Barely, barely. Exactly right. Walk me through the psychology around that. So you come from, I imagine, a high paying job. What goes through your brain to say, OK, I'm going to go do this irrational thing, but take a big risk and try it out?
Well, I'm kind of a start. I've done some startups before, so it's not the first leap. But in general, my feeling about startups is you have to feel compelled enough that, you know, it's going to be a whole. Usually these things are a marathon. They're usually not, you know, really quick sprints. So you have to be committed to the concept and you have to really believe in it.
And then it's got to be the point where you're like, I just got to do it. That's how we felt about it, my partner and I, and we basically said to do it. Of course, our wives are just the opposite, like go stay, you know, worked at Microsoft, worked at Amazon, like take the corporate job, do that thing. And I was like, well, Sorry, you can't do it, right? And we feel good about where we're at.
That's good. That's very good. All right, so you're scaling now. You're just launching these products. So you launch it. How are you getting ā you have 30 customers. How are you getting these first customers?
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Chapter 4: How does the pricing model work for Intellisphere?
Marketing tool.
Sure. So I don't know if you or your listeners are familiar with like HubSpot or some main tools, right? So we basically built HubSpot for the rest of us, right? So it's easy to use. It's simple. It's affordable. It does social media marketing. It does a bulk email.
It does reputation monitoring, promotions, events, surveys, poll questions, newsletters, analytics, lead generation, all in one tool set. Very inexpensive.
Why not just do one thing really well first and then expand? Why have you decided to build everything first, spend money on developers, and then try and go sign up customers?
That's a really good question. The thinking ā so everyone ā basically what the market needs is they need an all-in-one tool set. It's very clear. You talk to customers. There are all kinds of point solutions in the marketplace today. People have social. They have SMS. They have email. They have SEO. And that's not what customers want. They want one tool set that helps them do it all.
Really, marketing is an integrated process. So having a point solution is great, except for you got 10 other point solutions that that client needs to purchase, buy, learn. in essence, pay for, etc. That's not what the market needs. We actually build with what we believe the market needs.
Interesting. Okay, very good. Yeah, I mean, when I think about this kind of business, I go, the biggest risk is there are hundreds of other companies doing just one of these things. And how do you beat all of them when they can connect these other tools with things like API, Zapier, SnapLogic? It's very easy to do that these days.
Yeah, you think so. But actually, you've got to pay for each one of them. You still have to learn. They're not interconnected. The data doesn't connect. It's Sure, you can have loose connections and pull together a bunch of stuff, or you can have a tight integration. Really, everyone's moving towards tight integrations, right? HubSpot's tight integration. You look at what Salesforce is doing.
They're buying tools. They're putting things together. The whole market is going to move to an integrated marketing set. We believe that that's absolutely the case.
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