SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
BoomTime.com: Hit $2.8m in Revenues, First 100 Customers From Linkedin
30 May 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Boom Time, again, helping SMBs understand go-to-market strategies, not only just on the SaaS side, but also on the services side. Team of 35 people, six engineers as they scale, serving 300 customers, paying on average $800 a month historically. So $250,000 a month right now in sales. Their new customers, though, being onboarded at closer to $2,000 a month price points. They look to scale.
They are profitable today. They've raised $8 million. Slow growth in the teens over the past 12 months, but Bill predicts that's going to pick up here in 2020. Nathan Latka here, guys. And if you're enjoying the podcast, remember there's a premium version with even more. You get early access to episodes. So you would have heard this almost four weeks ago.
There's 1500 searchable transcripts by data points like revenue greater than a million or located in the United States or bootstrap SaaS companies only. If you want to help out right now, head to getlatka.com or check out the show notes for a link. Your support also helps us to continue to produce high quality shows in the future. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Bill Bice.
He is building a company called Boom Time. He's a serial entrepreneur since age 14, passionate about enabling smaller businesses to more successfully compete with their larger competitors through effective marketing. Through the years, he built and invested over 25 companies, but kept finding the same flaws in marketing strategies.
So as a programmer at heart, he founded Boom Time, a company that tackles marketing as a technology problem. Bill, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. Okay. So tell us, I mean, is Boom Time an agency or a SaaS company? Yeah. Well, it's both. We use technology to deliver a service. So I think the whole problem with this area is neither approach by itself really solves the problem.
You've got to have both. Yeah. By the way, I don't disagree with that, but I always envision the story of kind of what came first. So are you a technologist at heart, SaaS came first, or you were in agency consulting at first? No, I started on the technology side. I mean, I started my career as a programmer, wrote the software for my first company and
And so we really started on the technology side. And and I desperately wanted to solve the problem purely from the tech side because, you know, SaaS businesses are it's a great business model. But the problem was we just we couldn't get there.
We couldn't actually solve the problem without adding the service onto it because it you know, the whole problem is that the vast majority of businesses are. just don't have the resources and the expertise to do the day-to-day execution that is required to do this well. Okay, good. So when did you start this company? What year? So six years, so whatever that translates to.
Call it 2014 to get going. And what was the first product you took to market? Was it consulting or SaaS? It was SaaS. So we started by building really a content-oriented marketing automation platform And and then when you really get into the problems that companies have in this area, it's it's really the hard stuff. How do you get that regular flow of really great content?
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Chapter 2: How does Bill Bice define Boomtime's business model?
Well, we have several thousand. So we've got 3,000 clients total, but that includes people that are using just the technology piece. So in terms of what we really do today, it's several hundred where we're providing the combination of both the technology and the service. Okay. So what are we talking like 200, 300, something like that? A little over 300. Okay. 300.
So, so, I mean, can I take 300 times that 2000 a month and basically back into revenue? You can. Okay. Very cool. So that's 600, I mean, that's 600 grand a month, right? Yes. We're, we, we also got our way there over time. So I'd love to say that every client was at that level, but, uh, so we have a, uh, we, we have a pretty wide range there.
So we're, we're doing, we're doing, uh, we're doing about 250 in MRR right now. Oh, fair enough. Okay. By the way, still healthy, right? So, so there are essentially 300 paying that make up a $250,000 a month in pure SAS revenue. Now, is that kind of also including professional services revenue or is there revenue on top of that? That's professional services. Yeah, that's all in. Okay.
The key to our model, though, is that the way you create great content is we built a network of subject matter experts. So we have 300 writers that we use. We don't do any of the content creation internally. That's part of the workflow that our platform manages.
So how do we get great ideas, turn that into creative briefs, send it out to writers, get it edited right for the voice, distribute it, take the analytics, iterate through that process. Mm-hmm. Okay, so what's interesting about listening to your story is I've interviewed people that are solely doing one of these things. For example, scripted, right? Marketplace to go hire writers.
It sounds like you've kind of built your own little scripted inside of the, like embedded into your business and these pricing plans. Why have you chosen to kind of do a lot of things for the kind of the small business, right? Or the company that needs your help versus going all in on building like the best marketplace to hire writers? Well, there are good solutions for that. But the problem is,
this from the CEO's perspective, which is where I come from, what I need is somebody to solve this problem. I took every method you can think of in the companies I've worked on, built in the entire team internally, used external agencies, subcontracted it all out, All of those have challenges.
Like to have a decent marketing team to actually execute on all the things you need is, you know, four to five roles. That's pretty significant if you don't have a company that supports that. Hiring an agency, honestly, that'll work. But a ton of CEOs won't keep writing that $10,000 a check month in and month out, even though it is going to work, because it's just hard to see the ROI.
And yet the number one problem in marketing is the lack of consistency. If you don't commit to a strategy and stick with it, you're never going to get the results. You're not going to see the ROI. So what you really need is a solution that pulls all of those pieces together. That's the unique thing about what we created. And I created it to solve the problem that I was experiencing.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Bill face when starting Boomtime?
What were you talking like you were like basically flat exactly a year ago doing 250 grand a month a year ago as well? No, we had we had OK growth, not nearly as much as I would like. So that has changed a lot in the last quarter. But but year over year, you know, we were we were in the teens kind of growth. OK, fair enough. So so maybe two hundred thousand dollars a month a year ago.
Now, one hundred two hundred fifty grand a month, you know, teens in terms of growth. Now, have you bootstrapped the company or do you decide to raise?
Chapter 4: What was the first product that Boomtime launched?
No, there's really a big platform behind this. So we've raised a total of $8 million in VC in order to build this platform. So see, that's more challenging, right? If you're bootstrapped growing in the teens, fine. But if you raise $8 million growing in the teens, I don't want to be at your board meeting. Let's just put it that way.
So how are you managing these VCs that are saying, why aren't you doubling year over year? You should be doubling. So I think one of the biggest problems with venture-backed companies is not getting the foundation built right to start with. So in my mind, it makes a lot more sense to take your time and do it well and then hit the gas in order to grow.
There's so many great concept and ideas that fail because it's the problem with VC-backed companies. Like you are pressed to grow no matter what. And so it is a challenging dynamic to manage. But that's also your job as the CEO is to sort of deal with that conflict. Well, by the way, I mean, you say VC. The problem with VC backed company. I mean, you are a VC backed company, right?
So, so you took the part of the challenge here is like, right. You took a bunch of dilution when you raised the 8 million based off evaluation that you were able to sell people on, which is important to be able to sell that vision as a founder. But then if you don't meet those things, there are all kinds of bad stuff can happen. You run out of cash. You have to do a bridge round with debt.
You do a down round. You pro ratchet clauses, liquidation preferences, blah, blah, blah. So my question really is you believe in what you're doing. You've got a great company. Problem is you have these people on your cap table that gave you 8 million bucks to throw around. You've potentially already thrown a lot of that around.
How do you manage their expectations in 2020 and 2021 to make sure you don't end up in a down round or a bad situation? Yeah, it's the right question. So we've got some real advantages. One is we're profitable.
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Chapter 5: How is Boomtime pricing structured for customers?
Oh, nice. Great. And we have a payback time period that that is it depends on the we're averaging about about five months. And I think we're going to get that to four months very shortly. OK, right now, when you sign a new customer up for like your average customer, by the way, if you're doing 250 a month is paying about $800 a month times 300.
So you're basically saying to get $800 a month customer, you're spending about 4000 bucks to get them. Yes, but our average new customer today is at $2,000 a month. And so when you take the fully loaded cost of acquiring that customer and delivering the service to them, we're currently at a five-month payback and we see the ability to get that to four months.
And it's really because we're using ourselves to market ourselves. So our customer acquisition cost is very reasonable today. And the big question that is right at the heart of what you're talking about is, can we get the growth that I think this concept deserves without dramatically increasing the customer acquisition costs?
That's one of the horrible ironies is typically as you increase growth, your acquisition cost goes up. So are we able to take all the things we've learned and manage that? Yeah. Now, were you the original founder here? What's the story with Benjamin Morin back in 2006? Yeah.
Yeah, so the company was actually run by, I recruited in a CEO by the name of Mark Cannon, who originally developed the concept behind what we're doing. Mark used to run Hibu in the UK, the Yellow Pages company there. So a lot of what we're doing is all of the challenges that Mark faced in doing that at immense scale. How do we do a better version of that? And that's what really created Boomtime.
So when Mark retired, I came back in as CEO because I just, I love what we're doing so much that I think it's worth taking it the rest of the way. So when did you raise the $8 million? So our last raise was, what, about 18 to 24 months ago. Okay, got it. So like the April 17th Series B by Saba and Verge for $3 million. Was that actually much larger than $3 million? It was more like $8 million?
Yeah. No, that was just the B was a little bit more than that, but the B got us to a total of like 7.8, if I remember correctly. Oh, okay. So you had raised some prior to 2017 as well. Right. There's a Series A before that. Oh, I see. Okay. Got it. Makes sense. I should have known Series B, Series A. All right. Fair enough.
So just to be clear, all those investors are still on the cap table today? Yes. Okay, great. So driving growth, where are you finding new customers today? Yeah. So our, our primary route is the same thing we do for our clients, which is expanding our audience on LinkedIn. So if you're in B2B, you know, LinkedIn, this, this is like Facebook was in B2C 10 years ago.
I mean, it's just a, it's an open area. The growth is tremendous. You know, it is the place to be if, if you want to grow in B2B. Yeah. Okay, good. So, I mean, tell me how you're doing that. Are you're, you're scraping legally? I mean, what are you doing on LinkedIn? We're not scraping illegally.
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