SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1404 He was fired then went all in, now $30k/mo
29 May 2019
Chapter 1: What is the guest's background and what led to the creation of GetCredo.com?
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Guys, all of you that listen to the podcast, you were the reason I wrote the book. SaaS CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, go grab it today at capitalistbook.com. Especially if you like audio, go grab the audible version right now. Again, capitalistbook.com. Launched a marketplace back in 2013 as a side thing, then had some, quote, career turbulence in 2015, decided to go all in on the marketplace.
Over that time period, he's moved the business from doing about five grand per month in revenue up to 30 grand per month in revenue today. He's taken churn from 3% and 12% in respective cohorts down to zero in both cohorts because he's really figured out how to deliver that value. He's bootstrapped, now serving 85, again, marketing agencies, feeding them clients.
That's his model with his team of four. He's full-time, three remote, sorry, three part, time all remote around the country. 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 John Doherty. He's the founder of Credo.
They take a high touch approach to matching businesses with the right SEO and marketplace agencies and marketing agencies. Sorry. He has a decade in SEO, primarily on the largest sites on the Internet. We'll jump into those in a second. He lives in Denver with his wife and their black Labrador butter bean. All right, John, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's rock it, Nathan. All right.
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Chapter 2: How did John transition from a side project to a full-time business?
How do you make money?
So we have a dual retainer plus commission model. So the agencies that we're sending work to directly pay us on a monthly retainer, various levels. And then they also pay us a percentage of all the work that they close in perpetuity.
Is the retainer aspect much like a SaaS model? Is it predictable and recurring or no? 100%. Okay. And which part of the business makes up more of your revenue? The marketing folks paying you that retainer or the cuts you're taking from place jobs?
Right.
Right now, it's definitely the retainers, but the commission side is growing.
Interesting. If the retainers end up getting big enough where it can underwrite your whole business, will you eventually remove the commission to drive more usage of the marketplace or no?
No, because... With the way my business works, right, there are people that there are a lot of people that can only spend a couple hundred bucks on marketing. Right. But there are a lot fewer that can spend three to five K, that sort of thing. So we're never going to get that huge volume of of people. Right.
So we necessarily need to have the commissions in there so that as the number of leads grows, we don't have to bring on more agencies to work with. to send them more work, we can just keep sending the same agencies more work and make more money from it at the same time.
Interesting. What is the, I mean, give me a sense of the size of your retainers. Are we talking a grand a month, 10 grand a month? What are they paying on average? They're anywhere from 500 a month to $2,000 a month. Okay, got it. And would you say 500 is a fair average if I forced you to pick an average? Most of them are around 500. Okay, got it. Let's get more of the backstory here.
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Chapter 3: What unique business model does GetCredo.com use to generate revenue?
And how many people are paying you something?
Uh, 85 or so have paid me this year.
Got it. Yeah. So if you got 85 people, you're doing about again, 2300 or sorry, 23,000 bucks per month. If I divide 85 into that, the average person's paying you about 250, 260 bucks a month.
Yep.
Interesting. And are you, this is the majority of your business model right now. I mean, what, I mean, how much money are you doing just through the commission side?
The commission side is about, about a third of that. So about eight grand a month, something like that. So 30 grand a month total. And we launched that model back in October. So it's only been in for like four or five months.
Okay. So give me, I want to understand more about the makeup of the company. So is it just you or what's your team look like?
So it's me and I have three part time people. So I have a customer success person, basically a sales exec that handles when someone comes in, she gets them on the phone. What do they need? Who are they? How do they make money? What do they need? And it gets them introduced to the right agencies and then does the whole follow up through to close. I have a part time developer.
She's based in Chicago. I have a part time developer in Ohio. And then I have a sale or an admin assistant. slash ops person here in Denver, where I am as well.
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Chapter 4: How did John acquire his first clients without prior jobs?
Yeah, I'm being very selfish here, but my thought process is if you can own the number one spot for any business person or an investor looking up another company, that's a valuable position to be in. The CEOs want to keep that page updated and then you create a little network.
100%. And I do that with the agencies and consultants on my platform as well in that they all have a public profile that's indexable. They can get reviews on there. And for most of the agencies, if you search their brand name, I rank number two or three with review stars in their search result. Interesting. So it's their first name and then it's maybe their Facebook page or something.
And then it's their credo listing that has like four stars, five stars or whatever drawing the user's eye. And so I'm getting some of that branded traffic as well, which they're okay with because I'm basically helping them convert better because- They have a good listing with review stars and such. It's the same as Facebook or something like that.
That's interesting. I'd love to do like some kind of like paid game with you where I give you a list of like 30 companies I really want to rank first for that right now. I only rank like the number four or five, four, and then I'll pay you like a prize, a cash amount for everyone. You get to like the first, the number one spot in the next six months. That'd be super fun.
That would be a lot of fun. Then you come back on the show and we tell everyone how we did it.
Yeah, totally.
All right. After the show, email me. Let's figure that out. That'd be fun. Sounds like a plan. All right. Okay. Sorry. I got selfish there for a second. Back to you. Churn. Are you losing customers? Not anymore.
Okay. Used to be. We actually changed the business model from ā it was more of a true marketplace in that a lead would come in, and then I had this whole custom email system that would email it out based off of what they needed and their budget and that sort of thing to people within the marketplace. And then they could reply. They had a certain lead cap they could contact.
But it didn't really work because ā For multiple reasons. One is if you're spending three, five grand a month, you need to have a much deeper like consultative effort. It's a much more consultative sales process than someone saying like, oh, yeah, I'll try this out for $200 a month for four blog posts. Um, so that didn't really work.
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