SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1444 Retarget Based Off Who Called Your Company, $1.5m in ARR, 45 Customers
08 Jul 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
My new book is out on Audible, How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital. You can grab it right now. Here's what a user, Thomas Lornaviticus, said. Latke is the real deal. Five stars. Hey, Nathan, I just listened to your podcast with JLD. You killed it. I saw your book earlier last week and thought, meh, I'll wait when Kindle costs $1.99 or whatever, as I have over 150 books to catch up with.
But then I sensed that this book may have something I need right now. I bought it for full price, but didn't really start reading it. Then talking with JLD, you mentioned that the strategies may not work if you wait. And that's so true. I read it. I'm feeling pumped to devour it even more. Thank you for sharing it all and kicking ass.
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. She launched Outleads back in 2013, helps you basically do retargeting based off call-in data, something very unique, tough to track.
She's figured out a way to do it. Team of five based in New York, currently serving about 45 customers, doing caught 135 grand per month in revenue. That's up about doubled year over year, and she's doing it bootstrapped, which I love. No churn so far, so obviously testing price point, maybe she needs to be more aggressive there, but she'll figure it out.
Spending up to 3,000, maybe 4,000, 5,000 bucks to acquire a customer with a six-month payback period. 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 Dorzen Rosenshine.
She's the founder and CEO of Outleads, a Microsoft accelerator company. Outleads enables brands to engage customers with online advertising and relevant content based off offsite and offline data. She has over a decade of experience in optimizing the digital presence for firms in a variety of industries from consumer electronics to home improvement. Doran, are you ready to take us to the top?
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Chapter 2: What is Outleads and how does it enable retargeting?
So if you're on a website and then you transition into a phone call, we have technology that basically follows you around. It connects the phone call that you just placed to your online session and appends the data from the phone call back into your online session, then enabling companies to advertise to you based off of that.
Okay, but if all that originated from a website visit, aren't I already able to be retargeted from that website visit regardless if I called or not?
So I missed what you said because you broke off a little bit. So you asked about... Sure.
What I was saying is, can't I still be retargeted since I visited the website regardless if I called or not?
Oh, yes. But your calling is a much more, a much stronger indicator of your interest, right? So if you're on the website and once you call, right, you've left the website. Now, without connecting your phone call data to your website activity, the company has no idea if you left because you called or if you just left because you weren't interested.
How are you connecting the two? How are you connecting the two, though?
Right. So what we do is once you're on the website, we generate a unique identifier to you and we append that identifier to the phone number. So once you dial, as soon as the call connects, that code, it's like a numeric code, it's being dialed immediately as soon as the call connects. And it's being picked up by the call center.
Okay. Hold on. I'm sorry. I don't understand that. I go to Dropbox.com. I want to buy Dropbox. They're using your technology. I then grab my cell phone that's sitting next to me and I dial Dropbox. How on earth are you going to connect the two?
Right. So if you're on your mobile phone and you're... So there's two scenarios, right? There's a scenario where you're browsing on your mobile phone and then you're clicking the... click the link that you have on the website, on the mobile phone, and you click into call, right?
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Chapter 3: How does the technology behind call-based retargeting work?
Or have you raised?
We have bootstrapped. You know, 2013, when I say 2013, that's sort of when the idea was conceived. At the time I was working full time, I had a full time day job and I was just putting a couple hours a day into this in the evenings and on weekends. So it took about two years until I had decided that I'm going to leave my day job. And then I did it gradually. So it took
After that, another year until I left my day job completely and just took my time. What do you mean?
You were like consulting or something?
Yes, exactly. I was actually freelancing, consulting, and I just kind of let go of my clients one by one until I transitioned into Outleads full-time. So it really wasn't until just a couple of years ago that I've been into this full-time.
Got it. And I thought you read in the bio that you were part of a Microsoft Accelerator, which means you have some funding.
Yes. So we got $25,000 from the Microsoft Accelerator. That was the only outside funding that we've ever received.
That's great.
That was more of a grant. So Microsoft is actually, you know, there are... Are they on the cap table? Nope. Okay. Yeah, they don't, I don't believe they do this anymore. But at the time, it was a grant.
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Chapter 4: What unique identifier connects calls to online sessions?
bigger budget, right? So because the Bing Ads ad spend was added to what we were optimizing, we also added a lot more features that were relevant specifically to Bing Ads. So the spend that our customers spent with us has grown for all those features.
What are the pricing axes that you're driving expansion around? Usually it's like, you know, per seat and there's like a usage data point and there's a few other things. What are yours?
Yeah, so we have different levels depending on how many phone calls and how many generally actually website visitors we've rolled. We've transitioned to just charging based on the number of website sessions. So we have different steps and each step is priced differently.
We also have... Just to be clear, so like basic at 300 per month is 10,000 monthly website visitors and then standard at 1,000 a month is 50,000 monthly website visitors. That's what you mean?
You broke, you broke off.
I was just saying basic is 10,000 per month at 300 per month. And then standard at a thousand bucks per month is about 50,000 monthly unique website visitors. That's the value metric you're pricing on monthly website visitors.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly. And then, you know, in the case where we roll out a major new feature, like an integration with Bing ads, which is a whole new platform, we just upped our prices a little bit for those that wanted to add that functionality.
Why price around monthly website visitors instead of like monthly calls?
Yeah, so basically we still have, you know, our system still runs and generates a numeric code for every website visitor that comes in, especially in the case of B2B. You know, we still generate that numeric code and kind of just pricing around the volume of phone calls that we get just puts a little bit of the
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