SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1612 How He Used SEO To Scale To $150k MRR In Team Time Management Space
23 Dec 2019
Chapter 1: How did Resource Guru achieve $150k MRR?
launched resource guru back in 2012 now 1450 customers paying 105 bucks a month so about 150 grand per month right now and revenue that's up from 105 grand just a year ago so 30 40 year-over-year growth they follow an seo playbook to drive that growth 870 grand raise they are profitable team of 11
in london and other remote locations one percent revenue churn per month that's gross and the net revenue churn per year right around 12 spending up to 325 bucks to get a new 100 a month customer so four month payback again as they help teams manage the time of all their resources or their people or employees hello everybody my guest today is andrew rogoff he's the co-founder of resource guru an online team calendar that's changing the way teams manage their time follower of all things digital and part-time eco warrior as well andrew are you ready to take us to the top
I am. All right. All right.
Chapter 2: What is the revenue model of Resource Guru?
So tell us about the company. What does resource group do and what's your revenue model? How do you make money? Okay. It's a, it's an online team calendar. Um, and it also tracks, uh, time off people's time off. Um, and we're changing the way teams manage their time, um, trying to help companies become more profitable, um, more efficient, uh, uh,
and get them away from their old, you know, spreadsheets and other things they used to use to track their team's time. And is it a SaaS model? It's a SaaS model, yeah. So we're a sort of fairly typical subscription-based app. We have three pricing plans.
Chapter 3: What strategies are used to drive customer growth?
Andrew, what's the average company pay per month for this? Average is... About $105 a month. And what will people get for that? How many team members can they manage?
Chapter 4: What keywords did Resource Guru optimize for first?
For that you get, it's about, the average plan is about $5 a month. So a team of 20 people, 25 people? Roughly, yeah. Yeah, that's great. Very good. Put this on a timeline for us. When did you launch the company? What year? Launched in 2012. 2012. Very good. And then what have you scaled to over the past four years? How many, or sorry, past six years? How many customers have you scaled to?
Chapter 5: How does Resource Guru prioritize keywords for SEO?
We're up at about 1,450 customers. Very specific. You're counting every morning, right? We do. We actually have a channel, a Slack channel, that shows us all the customers as they come in. Well, let me be extra specific with the number. So 1,450 customers at $105 a month. That would put you guys at about $152,250 per month right now in MRR. Is that about right? Uh, yeah, I think so. That's yeah.
Chapter 6: What is the customer acquisition cost for Resource Guru?
So we're coming up to about 2 million. Yep. That's right. Yeah. So 152 grand per month, obviously times 12 puts you at about 1.8 million in terms of run rate. So do you think you'll hit 2 million by the end of the year? We've got 30 days left. Uh, we might squeeze, uh, probably not. Probably not. I think that'll be early next year. Okay. Walk me through how you're driving this growth.
Chapter 7: How does Resource Guru maintain low churn rates?
Where, I mean, where are you getting these customers from? Um, it's mostly through SEO. Uh, that's kind of how we, how we started in the beginning. What keywords? What was the first keyword you optimized for? Um, I think it was resource scheduling. Uh, it was as simple as that. Um, we, we, we had a hunch that people were searching for that and it kind of turned, turns out to be true. Okay.
That's kind of how we got going is that, is that, people found us on the web through good SEO at the beginning. When I search resource scheduling now today, you guys don't rank for that. Are there other terms that you rank really high for that bring you in customers? if you look at, uh, I don't know where we are for resource, uh, resource scheduling.
Chapter 8: What are the future plans for Resource Guru's growth?
You guys are at a position 11 there at the bottom of the first page one. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Still good. Yeah. It's various. It's lots of different terms around that, that we're, we're ranking well for. How many, so walk me through, instead of saying actual terms, tell me the process so others can do it in their own industry. So how did you find all the keywords you wanted to rank for?
We used tools, really. Things like Moz and just, you know, good SEO work, which is kind of looking at competitors. In the early days, that wasn't possible because we didn't actually have that many competitors, but... Now you can look at competitors' keywords and what they're targeting.
So Andrew, all these things spit you out a list of 700 keywords you should rank for between your competitors and ones through the keywords tool that you know get searched a lot. What do you do with that list? Well, you've got to prioritize them. So you've got to look at things like relevancy, how relevant that makes to the product that you're producing.
Uh, and then you've got to look at, uh, volumes. So how, how, how many times are people searching for those keywords? Um, and then use those kinds of factors to, to prioritize them. Um, and, uh, so what I'm trying to get at, what I'm, what I'm trying to get at is once they're prioritizing, you know, the ones you want to rank for me, do you have a team member dedicated solely to SEO?
Did you hire an agency? How'd you actually implement them? Uh, we actually started off with me doing SEO, which is, um, probably not the best thing in the world, but, um, uh, and we kind of, to be honest, we've spent more time building the products than we have with SEO and marketing since, since we launched. So with these tactics though, I mean, what does the growth look like?
So if you're at 150 grand today per month, where were you about a year ago? Do you remember? I can't remember exactly. I mean, it's an easy round number. It would have been the end of last year, the end of 2017. Do you remember? Not off the top of my head. Or you have to know generally. I mean, you doubled year over year, you tripled year over year, you're flat. No, we're not tripling every year.
We're out... Our sort of monthly growth is, I'm not too sure. We've grown about 40%. We've grown about 40% in the last year. Oh, that's great. Okay. So if you're at 150 grand today, you would have been out, call it maybe about 105 grand about a year ago. Something like that. Yeah. North of a million bucks still.
So over the past year, you've basically gone from essentially a million to 2 million in run rate. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. And very good. And have you raised capital or bootstrapped? We raised capital. Oh, Andrew, I was liking you so much. And now you're on the dark side. How much? We haven't raised a huge amount. We raised 695,000 pounds, which is about $870,000.
Was it angels or equity or what? Sorry? Was it angel? Was it an equity round venture debt? What was it? Uh, first round was kind of friends and family. Um, and then we had another round, which included index ventures, which is a large VC in Europe. Yeah. So this is, this is, this is typical, like this is typical venture capital, not debt or convertible equity or anything like that. No, it's yeah.
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