SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapped to $82M: How Callum Mckeefery Built Reviews.io from His Kitchen Table
26 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: How did Callum McKeefery bootstrap Reviews.io to $82 million?
How much did you sell the company for?
$82 million, all cash. Me and my wife started the company from our kitchen table.
So you're at 10, 11, 12 million of revenue, 50 people, $240,000 of revenue per employee.
I built a really nice viral loop. We found that if we got two or three reviews on a profile, the page would start to do really well. I had some big competitors in reviews, like well-financed VC-backed companies. And I truly believe that we did well against them, against these well-funded companies.
And how many folks were full-time when you exited?
About 50. And we was growing pretty fast, to be honest, at that time.
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Chapter 2: What viral loop strategy did Callum implement for growth?
To be clear, you and your wife owned 100% equity.
100%.
Hey, folks, my guest today is Callum McKeiffery. He built and sold Bootstrapped, I should mention, reviews.io for $82 million cash. He's now working on a company called Partner.io. Callum, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. Yeah, looking forward to it.
Chapter 3: How did Callum compete against VC-backed companies without funding?
So let's give the audience sort of a hook here, and then we'll go back and teach everyone sort of how you did it. So the end of the story is you sold the company, right? So how much did you sell the company for? Was it all cash?
$82 million, all cash. I've got a couple of shares still in Outpub with clearer.io now, and I'm still a board member of that. I wanted a clean deal. I don't know if you know my backstory. I've got a son who's pretty poorly. He's disabled. He's got a really rare genetic disease. And I really wanted to add a bit of security.
I wanted to spend a bit of time with him and the offer came in at the right time. Any other time, probably in my career, I probably wouldn't have taken that offer because I really truly loved what I was doing at reviews. And I think I still had a lot more to give to the company, but I had to think about my founder emotionally.
And we'll loop back to all that. I did pick that up in your research. That was the main driver of you doing the deal in the first place was your son. So we'll pick back up to that. Before we go back and get sort of the full story. So $82 million, all cash was the exit price. And what was revenue at that point in time? Monthly recurring revenue in time is 12, the ARR.
ARR was about 11 to 12 mil at the time. Pure, nice ARR, really clean stuff. All through strike. Probably, yeah, about 12. I'd say about 12 and a bit change. Okay. Yeah, it was, we built the business to be really clean. Clean business itself. Our cat and table was as small as it could be. It was near my wife's.
Me and my wife started the company from our kitchen table, and we did it through pure grit, determination, and long hours.
To be clear, you and your wife owned 100% equity at sale.
100%, yeah. I had this, you know, there was a few people in the company who would help me along the way. And they got really big earnouts, but it was only really from me saying, hey, I want to make sure you get a big earnout out of this rather than it being actually formally in a contract.
This is against conventional wisdom. Most folks listening say, wait, Nathan, I thought you're supposed to create an employee stock option pool. And that's the way you get really good talent is you give them equity. You did the opposite. Why?
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Chapter 4: What emotional factors influenced Callum's decision to sell Reviews.io?
It was about 50. It was about 50 and growing. Yeah. And we was growing pretty fast to be honest at that time. Tom, Tom was adding staff every week where I forget their names. And yeah, I think from starting to do the deal to end to do the deal, I think we'd added another 10 staff by then.
So you're at 10, 11, 12 million of revenue, 50 people, $240,000 of revenue per employee. No employees own stock when you exited, but you made many of the millionaires. You just told me when you did exit based off sort of your choosing, how many did you make millionaires?
More than probably looking back, I should have done that. You know, I don't know. I don't know. I was so happy to do it. These people had helped me on my journey and they were part of my family and my team. And I, uh, I appreciated all of them so much and I wanted them to have the part of that success. It wasn't just me all day on tape.
How'd you decide? Was it just simply who was there the longest or how'd you decide?
Yeah, who was there longest and contribution. So my two, my CTO, he was like our fourth employee. But Tom was a catalyst, catalyst. We'd already had product market fit when Tom came in and Tom really helped us reach those bigger numbers later on.
All right, let's get the backstory here. So I want everyone to see what you are today, right? We're recording this in 2025. You sold the business, you know, two or three years ago. So just to be clear, Callum, are you influencing this website design today or are you totally checked out of the business at this point?
That website there is pretty much checks out. I am on the board, so I do handle direction from above. That website pretty much hasn't changed that much. It's got a little bit fancier, a few more moving things on there. The guy who designed that website was actually, he's been an employee of reviews. I think he was number five. He came in at number five. Don, he's an amazing guy, amazing designer.
And Me and him work really close together and we taught each other so much about design and
So right here, we love going back to the Wayback Machine, the website back in 2014 when you launched. Again, you built it for a while. And in the early days, we go to a 2015 screenshot. This is what it looked like. So what was the V1 here? What am I looking at?
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Chapter 5: How did Callum ensure employee success without offering equity?
So we went and won Euro Car Parts, which is a big European car part retailer. And then we'd win that coin. We'd get our brand on their website. We'd now go and speak to the other people in that industry. So we'd go and speak to GSF. And we'd try and win... three or four in each industry. And that was how we won the clients. But the clients really weren't where we were focusing.
At that point, we're not focusing on the clients. We're focusing on getting footprint. So when we won Eurocar Parts, we wanted to collect as many reviews for that company as possible. And that'd get as many labels on the reviews that I own name as possible. And then the revenue would come.
So generally, once we collected, say, thousands of reviews, I mean, look, we collected 57,000 reviews for GSF there. Once we collected a huge amount of reviews, all the people in the client street were like, these guys are doing amazing. They're doing amazing things with a review site. Let's give them a call.
So as we won one client and did amazing, you know, help them collect the reviews at the right time. So they got really high conversion, collect really good looking reviews with photos, really good content. That'd really power that flywheel to get more.
Calum, the question here is the chicken and egg problem, right? So how did you, without cooperation from gfscarparts.com, because you haven't landed them as a customer yet. So without their cooperation, how do you get the first 100, 200, 300, 500 reviews? How did you get their customers? How did you know who to ask for the reviews?
We already ranked quite well for those pages. We found that if we got two or three reviews on a profile, the page would start to do really well. And we'd listen for people talking about GSF car parts or Euro car parts. And we'd go, hey, why don't you leave a review? You've had a great experience. Why don't you leave a review?
And those people would leave those first couple of reviews and that helped that page rank. And then we'd be reaching out to that business. So if you wanted your rating to show up on your Google ads, gold stars next to your ads, you had to work with one of the Google seller ratings partners. And we were one of those partners. Now, originally there was only about five partners.
Now I think there's about 20. Google seller ratings license was super, super important in the early days.
I love this. Okay, so 2017 was $500,000 of revenue. 2018, you broke a million. Yeah. Okay. I was going to say, what year did you break $5 million of revenue? Do you remember?
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