SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 470: How He Got 10,000 Interested In Product Before Launch with Scorely CEO Shawn Porat
06 Nov 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: What is Scorely and how does it operate?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks that I give away every Monday is Kim Dust. She's in the entertainment industry and is currently working a full-time day job and doing her side hustle on the side. Kim, congrats.
For you guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to officially enter. Again, text the word Nathan to 33444 after you subscribe. Folks, many of you reach out to me and you say, Nathan, so many guests on your show talk about the importance of batching. But whenever I try and batch, you tell me this.
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Chapter 3: How did Scorely build a launch list of over 10,000 interested users?
This is episode 470. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Karan Chaudhry in episode 471. He just sold his last business and now lands his first $500,000 customer for his new content artificial intelligence business called Com+. Folks, Nathan Latka here. Good morning.
Our guest today is Sean Pratt, and he founded a company called Scorely, which is a judgment marketplace and open fortune. He was VP at Mark Echo Enterprises, contributed to Forbes Time and Money Magazine, among others. Sean, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do it. All right. So tell us first, what does Scorely do and how do you make money?
So Skirley is a business credit bureau, very new, started about six months ago, and pretty much just trying to reinvent business credit, 21st century.
And so how do you walk us through how you make money? What's a transaction look like?
Chapter 4: What strategies did Scorely use to partner with Chambers of Commerce?
Sure. So, so our model is a little bit different than most business models where they just sell reports for a hundred, $200 each. Uh, we're trying to get a lot of small businesses onto the platform, get them engaging, monitoring any other businesses for free, build their own credit reports. And then, uh, we can push different loans to them if they need that type of product.
If they're looking for any credit card offerings, And on the other side of things, once we have a lot of businesses monitoring different business credit reports, we could offer them a premium membership where they could pay X amount of money each month to get more data affecting each of the businesses.
And are you guys, I went to scorely.com just in prep for this and kind of put my email in, but it said you've been added to the beta list. So are you, are you guys pre revenue or you're already generating revenue?
No, definitely pre revenue starting launching in about three weeks.
Okay, great. Walk us through launch list.
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Chapter 5: How does Scorely plan to generate revenue before launching?
How many folks do you have on the list?
So currently we have 10,300.
I want to, I want to just say to real quick people listening right now, they're going, Nathan, why do you have a pre-revenue guy on? I'll tell you the most successful companies understand pre-launch. They understand how to build a big wait list and big demand. So you just heard Sean say they've got over 10,000 people on the list. Sean, I would love for you to teach us how you've done that.
How have you built so much demand for a product that you've never haven't even launched yet?
It all started about three months ago. Went to Chamber of Commerce events, partnered up with them, partnered up with the different government agencies, went to different businesses that we were interested in getting them to report on their customer payment history. They told their customer bases about it.
Went pretty much to every company that we know in our network that has B2B clients, and they pretty much pushed it to them.
Give us some specifics. What's the company you reached out to and how did they actually push it to their community?
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Chapter 6: What challenges do small businesses face with traditional credit reporting?
For example, I guess I'll start with the Chamber of Commerce. For example, one of the chambers in New York State. they let their members know that they get access to free credit reports on any business. And they pushed it out to about 5,000 of their members. So what is that though?
Is that like an email blast? Is it a text?
Yeah, email. Email blast. And besides that, we also attended, for example, the New York Chamber Expo about three weeks ago and met a bunch of exhibitors. And about three of those exhibitors pushed it also through an email blast. to their customer base, and it's a value add for them.
They want their clients to have access to anyone's business credit report for free before they do business with them. That's why they're a couple. Before you, who were they using to do that? Nobody. That's the problem with this industry. There's only a couple of players out there. They charge an arm and a leg. Like you. like Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, for example.
What does Dun & Bradstreet charge?
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the $250,000 funding raised by Scorely?
Anywhere between about, I think, $120 to $200 a report, depending on what you're getting. And businesses can't afford that. Anytime they do business with someone, they can't just go spend $200 to buy a report to see if they have any judgments, liens, bankruptcy, anything derogatory on the report.
Markets are usually efficient. What do they have that other people don't that allow them to charge those prices? Because they're not stupid, right?
So they've aggregated a lot of sorts. I mean, they've been around for over a hundred years. Abraham Lincoln worked for them.
Chapter 8: How does Shawn Porat leverage freelancers for his business?
I mean, they're a great resource. The problem is they never really tapped into small business as well. Um, Donna Berkshire does an awesome job at public companies and, uh, large private companies. But when you get down to the small business level. you know, they just don't have that great information. I'll give an example.
Uh, one of my previous companies been around for seven years, uh, uh, recovery of judgment. It's a judgment asset investigation company. And, uh, for that company, we checked our credit report and it said that our credit score was like 25 out of a hundred. Uh, yeah, I'm done. It had, uh, It had our address from six years ago. It said that we spend $50 a month on expenses.
Meanwhile, we're spending about $25,000 a month on expenses. It was just completely inaccurate. And it sucks because, you know, there's a lot of small businesses out there that rely on their business credit to get funding. And because there's no good business credit report out there, they're stuck.
Got it. So you're saying, Nathan, the reason people are going to use us over Dunn is because we're just smarter technology guys. We know how to scrape the internet better and our data is going to be better and more accurate. That's why people are going to use us. Correct. Got it. I mean, so let's say Dunn's listening to this interview right now. Can't they just go do that same thing?
Their focus has predominantly been for like, you know, their financial customers and the small business industry. They've been trying for a while to tap into, but it's never really worked well. One of their companies, I believe produces about a hundred million dollars a year in revenue by charging between 2000 and $10,000 a year to small businesses to build their credit report.
So I believe that's a fundamental issue there. You know, you're charging small businesses to give you data. And I believe that's why it's never really, you know, been scaled.
Okay. And then again, tell us what your model is going to be. So who's paying you, how do you build a business here?
So right now I'm, you know, we're in the beginning, it's, everything's going to be completely free. You know, we want small businesses to invite their vendors or suppliers on board. We want a small business to come to monitor as many businesses, their competitors, their vendors, suppliers, partners, et cetera, and customers. And how we're gonna make money is by pushing them to different loans.
For example, small business built their credit for a couple of reasons. Main reason is they need a loan. So we're partnering up with a couple of alternative lenders, traditional lenders.
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