SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 610: Toofr Hits 100 Active Customers Paying $180 Monthly to Get Better, More Accurate Emails With CEO Ryan Buckley
26 Mar 2017
Chapter 1: Who is Ryan Buckley and what businesses has he founded?
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 sold mark.
Chapter 2: What is the business model of Scripted and how does it generate revenue?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. OK, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Jose Avila. He is a 17 year old that doesn't want to go to college and he wants to start his own business. For your chance to win 100 bucks just like Jose every Monday morning, simply subscribe to this podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it.
Nathan Latke here. This is episode 610.
Chapter 3: How did Ryan Buckley transition from screenwriting to founding Toofr?
And coming up tomorrow morning, you'll learn from Milton Chen. His company is called VC, which is helping 1,000 customers use video to transact information. He actually invented at Google and Facebook chat and WeChat and all these things, the de facto video sharing standard. Unbelievable interview. Highly technical. Good morning, everybody. Nathan Latke here. Our guest today is Ryan Buckley.
Chapter 4: What unique features does Toofr offer compared to its competitors?
He's a serial entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Scripted.com and Twofer.com. He focuses on solving problems that marketers and business owners deal with on a daily basis. Ryan, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. All right. So we'll focus mainly on Twofer today, but you're also running Scripted. Tell us quickly, what is Scripted doing? What's the business model?
How does it make money?
Yeah, so we're a marketplace that matches businesses with writers.
Chapter 5: How is Toofr funded and what is its team structure?
We make money on a subscription fee, businesses pay to access the platform, kind of like a Costco or a Sam's Club membership. And then you order writing jobs from our writers on top of that. And we take a small cut of that as well.
So it's kind of a SaaS marketplace, a SaaS model plus a transaction fee.
Yeah, it's kind of a unique hybrid model, marketplace revenue model mixed in with the SaaS revenue model.
That's a hot space. There's a lot of people looking for those kinds of companies.
Yeah, yeah. And content marketing is hot as ever. So we're in a nice position.
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Chapter 6: What challenges does Toofr face with customer churn?
Have you raised capital for Scripted? We have. We've raised $15 million for Scripted.
And when did you launch the company? 2011. Okay, so what was that, about six, seven years ago? Yeah. Did you just sense an opportunity and you said, you know what, I'm going to go win this space? Or were you like a proficient writer and you loved writing?
We started in screenwriting software, oddly enough, and did that when I was in Los Angeles right after college.
Chapter 7: What strategies could improve Toofr's customer retention?
Met my co-founder, whose best friend was a screenwriter. And that's what got us into the writing business. What got us into content marketing marketplace is customers pulling us that direction. A lot more interest in getting blog posts written than in getting screenplays written. so we just followed the market into content marketing.
Okay, makes good sense. Let's talk about Tufer. So did Tufer come before or after Scripted?
Tufer came before, actually. This was kind of in between the screenwriting software and Scripted.
Chapter 8: What insights does Ryan Buckley share about his entrepreneurial journey?
I took a job as basically an entry-level sales rep at another startup in San Francisco, And it was a very technical company. Actually, there was email data appending. And it was for various reasons, detail that doesn't really matter. It was very difficult to sell kind of all of a sudden. They basically got some cease and desist letters.
So we in the sales team were like, shoot, what are we going to do? We needed to rapidly expand our essentially our net. And we just started putting together these Python scripts to identify email addresses and put lists together and started running drip campaigns before. It's kind of like in the early days of all of that. What year? This was 2011 as well. Kind of late 2010, early 2011.
We were using a software called Genius. I think Marketo was still a relatively new technology at that point. So it was Genius plugged into Marketo that would help us run drip campaigns. And then that was actually when I learned to program. The first language I learned was Python and was using Python scripts to scrape websites and guess email addresses.
And that became those Python scripts, although I've iterated on them. dozens and dozens of times and two for is not even in Python anymore. Um, that, that was kind of the germ for that became twofer.
And so how did you make sure that that intellectual property stayed with you versus the company you built it to help you sell in?
Yeah, well, a good question. I mean, that company is kind of morphed and this, and like later on been acquired and it wasn't core technology to that company. Uh, And I think like two for still is like vastly different than those original scripts were. So I don't know if they've never asked me about it.
How does it, what's the model? I mean, is this a SAS model or pay as you go or how does two for make money? Two for is a straight up SAS model. Okay. And on average, what are customers paying you per month?
Our, our poo right now is $180. Okay.
One 80. And again, you, this was, so let's say this was, this has been going what for seven or eight years now, right?
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