SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 569: GrowSumo Helping 70 B2B SaaS Companies Grow Affiliate Programs, $100k New MRR So Far with CEO Bryn Jones
13 Feb 2017
Chapter 1: Who is Bryn Jones and what is GrowSumo?
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. 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 is Rhett Gillins. He's in the restaurant industry and he feels stuck. He wants to start his own software business.
Chapter 2: How did GrowSumo leverage Product Hunt for growth?
So congratulations, Rhett, for your guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday morning. Simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now in order to enter and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you subscribed. Nathan Lackey here, this episode 569. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll learn from Slater Viktoroff of Indico.io.
They've raised $4.5 million, currently helping 20 financial firms process their data faster. And we know trillions of dollars are made the faster these financial firms can process their trade. So this is a big business. Good morning, folks. Nathan Latke here. Our guest today is Bryn Jones.
Chapter 3: What business model does GrowSumo use for influencer programs?
He's the co-founder and CEO of GrowSumo. GrowSumo graduated from Y Combinators Summer 2015 group, and they're building a marketplace for influencer programs. Prior to building a tech company, Bryn was a member of the Canadian National Swim Team. Bryn, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. Yeah. Good morning. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for jumping on.
Chapter 4: What differentiates influencers from traditional affiliates in GrowSumo's model?
I appreciate it. No problem. I found you because I was looking at some things that got hunted a bunch on product hunt and you guys had a great curated list kind of pop to the top. How did that marketing kind of initiative do for you guys in terms of growth for GrowSumo? I mean, it was huge for us.
We actually launched on Product Hunt, not expecting very much to happen, given that we're kind of an enterprise software company. And we shot up right away. I think we ended the day top three. We had hundreds of companies sign up. And most importantly, because it was really the first version of our product that we launched, we got tons of great feedback.
Chapter 5: How does GrowSumo automate influencer program management?
And were these, you know, you can get a lot of leads, but it's always a question of kind of quality. Were these leads good enterprise kind of quality leads or was it more kind of, you know, hackers and stuff that are more product hunt prone? I would say the primarily it was it was hackers. It was people that were running seed stage companies.
But there were also some series A. But I mean, like any type of funnel, there was a very small percentage of it that was highly qualified. So very large enterprise accounts came through to us and are actually our customers today because of it. And so it's worked out really well. Right. So, OK, let's dive into the business. What does the business do and what's your business model?
Chapter 6: What metrics does GrowSumo track to measure success?
How do you make money? Right, so we're building a marketplace for influencer programs. Companies, software companies, for example, like Evernote, want to harness the power of influencers. Influencers for Evernote promote their product or their brand and let them make money.
What we do is we charge a one-time annual fee to Evernote, and then we take a percentage for every dollar that the Evernote team pays out to their influencers. So you're almost like an affiliate program on top of an affiliate program. Exactly. We really are like a marketplace for affiliate programs. The difference here is influencers are more than just affiliates.
Influencers is anybody from an accountant to a web development shop that's recommending products and services to their clients, but can also be the affiliate marketers.
Chapter 7: What challenges does GrowSumo face in the affiliate market?
Yeah. And I imagine you probably just based off the quality of your site and the sophistication of your verbiage, I imagine you lean towards the enterprise stuff versus the hardcore affiliate cold traffic marketers. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we definitely have affiliates on here, but primarily we're focused on influencers of any type. That could be anybody on social media.
That could be really anything. And affiliate sites right now don't enable that. It's not easy for those influencers to go and work on them. Okay. It makes sense.
Chapter 8: What advice does Bryn give to aspiring entrepreneurs?
Take us through some of the economics here. So you mentioned Evernote, they pay a one-time fee upfront. Is it the same one-time fee for everyone who's listed on your platform? So we have two different services. There's a month-over-month fee, and that's $300 a month.
What that does is it makes it very easy for people to go... This is for early stage companies, people that don't require specific groups, specific filtering, all that type of stuff. And then there's for the enterprise account... Brian, sorry, I don't understand that. So that's for somebody that's a new startup with a new affiliate program, they get listed for $300 a month? Yeah.
If you're a new startup and you have a new affiliate program or you want to run a new influencer program, it's $300 a month. And what that does for you is it lets you really go in and manage the program yourself. If you're trying to just explore the space, you can go and you can find influencers. You can create automated drips that go out to your influencers based on influencer activity.
And it's a really good starting point. The enterprise version though, what it does is we fully automate the entire program. We send you weekly email lists of influencers that you should reach out to and invite into your program. We help you identify who those people are. We even give you the content to send out to those influencers based on their activity.
The enterprise account is $10,000 annually. In addition to this, we take a 10% fee on all payouts that you make over to your influencers. Got it. Okay. Let's, can we get specific with a real example or this is valuable. So maybe reply.io cause we just had them on the show a few episodes ago. Great company. So they, I imagine they're on the enterprise plan, right?
Um, yeah, actually they're on the, they're on the early stage plan. They decided to manage the program on their own. Um, it was a new marketing initiative for them and they decided they wanted to invest. But before they went full tilt into it, they wanted to see what gross demo did for them and what type of return we could provide to them.
And I can tell you, Reply is very happy with the return that they're seeing right now. And I can imagine in the next few months, we'll be upgrading them to the enterprise plan. So how are you finding them kind of qualified or helping them find with filters and stuff, qualified influencers to reach out to?
Like, tell me about some of the assumptions that are driving your backend recommendation engine. Right. So first we help them identify, and this is a big, important point. You have a lot of customers today that are influencers. You just don't know about it. And so we discovered this when we're doing our customer discovery, when we're going and analyzing what makes a good influencer.
So most of your customers are good influencers. And so we work with them to identify their top influencers from their customer base. Next, we have a web scraper that goes out and identifies people we believe would be good for them to reach out to and invite to We bucket these groups, right? You send out 100 invites, you might get three to five influencers join your program.
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