SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He Does $10k/mo Helping SaaS Founders Book Sales Calls
19 Sep 2021
Chapter 1: What is the revenue model for Discoveroo.co?
No, so MRR range is probably between eight and $10,000 as it stands. But I mean, that's significantly more than it was kind of six months ago. So we're seeing quarter on quarter sort of like a 50% growth rate.
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Hey folks, my guest today is Joe Ogden. He's building a company called Discoveroo.co. It's an international B2B lead generation company. His background is in software sales and business development for the likes of Autodesk, Snow Software, and on behalf of Dell Boomi. Joe previously worked as a music agent in London. Joe, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. All right.
So when you did this at Autodesk manually, you hated it and said, I'm going to build a service to help everyone else do this easier. Is that right? Yeah, kind of. Well, I actually ended up becoming kind of an advocate for email sequencing software when I worked at Autodesk.
And that was one of the moments that I thought this could be absolutely could become a service that was just provided for sales teams, whether it's big sales teams in big companies or smaller companies trying to scale. What did you end up getting Autodesk on? Which tool? We used Outreach.
They originally used Yesware, I think it was, but they were moving to Outreach as I started working with them. Interesting. Okay. So tell me what Discoveroo does today. Maybe tell it through the eyes of a customer story, someone who's paying you today. Yeah, yeah. Cool. So basically what we do is we provide done-for-you email outreach. So we work with you.
We send email campaigns as your sales reps. We contact ideal prospects. We send advanced personalization within that email as well to generate the, you know, to generate the interest, generate the response from the prospect. So then when you hear from that prospect, it's in response to the email outreach that we've put together for you. Okay.
And then, so let's say it's an emerge filled out to 2000 leads and you do a really good job on response, right? Well, now my inbox is full of like 300 leads. I have to manually respond to, to get them into like my calendar scheduler, right? Do you handle the reply as well? Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How did Joe Ogden transition from Autodesk to founding Discoveroo?
Let me know if you agree and we'll send it. So we kind of just give the sales rep or sometimes it's the founder of the company work with the option of maybe one or two responses. They give us the thumbs up. We send it. The idea being that we're trying to sell meetings in their calendar. Right. So we try to handle that conversion aspect of it as well. Yeah. Okay. Interesting.
And what do brands pay for this? If someone's listening right now, they want to try this, what would they pay you? Our standard package is $1,700. We actually would charge 1,400 euros. Yeah, about $1,700. That's for the standard package, which is 200 prospects per month.
But generally, we see clients start on that package and then move up to one of our bigger packages, like 400 prospects or 600 prospects per month, depending on what they're trying to achieve at the time. What does 200 prospects per month mean? Does that mean 200 booked meetings? No, that means 200 people that we contact for them.
But we typically get a very good response rate because of the level of personalization in the emails. So the standard response rate to cold outreach is somewhere between 7% and 8.5%. But because of the advanced personalization, we get a 13% to 15% response rate generally. Well, Joe, let's like use me as an analogy for a second. I book podcast guests all the time. Right. I love CEOs usually.
Right. And so it's obviously a process. But if I reach out to 200 CEOs, I might get like 60 respond and I might book like 20 to 30 new podcast interviews, which I'd be paying. Like if you were handling that, I'd be paying sort of seventeen hundred for that. But for someone else where maybe they, that the meeting, maybe it's a lower ARPU thing that they're selling.
It's not photo desk where it's 10 grand a year. It'd be really hard to make that $700 a month work. So what's the minimum price point you really want these folks to be selling for them to work with you? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, generally we see that our clients who are selling products at $3,000 per deal value or more get the best return on investment.
I think anything less than that, I completely agree, can start to not have that benefit that comes with what we do. But I think anything above $3,000 per deal value, you start to see that return on investment from what we do. Do you do any higher volume, lower touch campaigns where it's like a mail merge email to $2,000 instead of custom to $200? No, we don't do that.
I mean, we're exclusively focused on the personalized outreach way of doing things. And part of the reason that we do that in the UK and in the European market is to demonstrate that legitimate interest that's necessary to be compliant with GDPR and data regulations like that. But actually, we do run campaigns in the US that are really successful.
And the primary reason we do the personalization is for the results. But a byproduct of doing that helps us, you know, achieve that GDPR compliance in Europe to show that we're basically contacting people for a legitimate reason. We've done research about them or their organization that we reference in the email.
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Chapter 3: What services does Discoveroo offer to its clients?
We have six customers who have active campaigns now. We launched at the end of last year. So the sort of Q4 last year was me leaving Autodesk and trying to get customers. And we've sort of seen a steady flow of new customers coming in since January this year. It's started to pick up in terms of interest and inquiries. It's really great, but it's been a very interesting eight months.
It's exciting to be where we are. Okay, so we'll go back to you leaving Autodesk. That's a big move, but six customers at about $1,700 per month. That means you're doing, what, about $10,000 a month in revenue right now, something like that? Yeah. Actually, some clients pay more than that per month because typically people start on the standard package to test us out, right?
I mean, we're kind of new in the market, so people want to know what do they get from doing this kind of campaign. But typically, clients move on to a higher volume package after they've done that first month or maybe two months. So it sounds like MRR was higher last month. What was it? No, so MRR range is probably between $8,000 and $10,000 as it stands.
But I mean, that's significantly more than it was kind of six months ago. So we're seeing quarter on quarter sort of like a 50% growth rate in terms of revenue. So we're hoping for that to continue. The forecast is for that to continue to Q4. And how many of these six customers signed up like in the past like two months?
In other words, do you have customers still from like four months ago still with you actively paying today? Yeah. We have customers who got on board with us in January who are with us now. I think the latest one was probably in July that they signed up. So we're probably just starting campaign two for them now. What's your intention, though, for people listening?
Should they think about using you for two months and then stopping? Or are there ways people can get value from you over the long term, over and over again every month? Absolutely. It's for the long term.
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Chapter 4: How does Discoveroo personalize email outreach for better results?
I think, you know, some of our clients have been on board since January, maybe start to close deals after. Well, I know for sure that one of them in particular start to close deals after kind of three months in. It's just building that pipeline. And, you know, we also do manual follow up as a nurture lead. You know, there's so many different facets to it, but absolutely. It's a long term approach.
The idea of being in our vision with this is. is to, whether it's for a sales team or for a founder, to just be this engine running in the background every day. We're researching prospects. We're reaching out with that personalization. So we're just building that pipeline of opportunities. But yeah, I mean, we don't see any clients who try us out for a month and then decide not to do it.
I think a lot of the time with our clients, they're testing the water to see if it, you know, to see what the rewards are for them in this, what they can get out of this and to scale up from that point. And if I sign up with you today, do I sign, do I sign you up for Joe at, you know, get latke.com. So you're sending those emails as me, or is it at discovery.co?
No, so it would be as a member of your team. Okay. So it's white labeled in that sense. So basically, it can be as you and we configure everything, we set up a mailbox, we warm it up, like it's like a dedicated mailbox separate to your main mailbox, if that makes sense.
That's how some clients do it for others, me or one of my team as a member of their team, but with their email address, if that makes sense. It can be done in a few different ways, basically. If we set up a brand new inbox for, you know, Joe at NathanLocker.com to do this from, don't you have to sort of warm that if you're going to be sending cold emails?
I want to just sign in the spam or the promotions folder if it's not a warm, like a brand new inbox. Yeah, absolutely. So what we tend to do for the first two to three weeks while we're doing the onboarding, we're writing the sales messaging, we're building the data. We also warm up the inbox. Yeah, so absolutely. Because deliverability is so key. So we use tools to do that.
And just like through the night and through the day, it's sending emails. emails and receiving emails to warm it up. So again, to avoid going into spam folders. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Very cool. Let's bump into team today. So how many folks? We have two people internally. It's myself and my colleague who's responsible for managing campaigns and building data.
But we work with freelancers in the US and in the UK who are kind of the researchers and writers. So again, the kind of magic ingredient to what we do is that research and level of personalization.
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Chapter 5: What pricing structure does Discoveroo use for its services?
So the freelancers we work with, and we can scale that up and scale it down depending on how many campaigns we have, they do that kind of research and we coordinate the campaigns internally. And bootstrapped, right? Or have you raised capital? Bootstrapped completely, yeah. So what's the secret to hiring freelancers to run the system?
Many would argue, you know, your real IP really are the systems you've built to manage freelancers, to have them understand what to write, train them, and then get them on client accounts. Yeah. Well, none of our freelancers really deal with clients. We do that entirely internally. The way in which we manage them is a combination of Google Sheets, Airtable.
We use technology like that to just be able to coordinate things and to distribute tasks. It's been a learning curve, to be honest, but it's been really interesting. I And they had very much a freelance team writing content for them. It was a really great business. And I really liked that way of doing things.
They didn't have a massive team internally, but they had a good footprint in the industry. And yeah, I thought they did a really good job of doing that. So we have a model that doesn't require us to have a huge team internally. And we can just rely on the freelancers we work with. That's very cool. And talk to me about future growth.
I mean, are you going to try and productize this at all or keep this sort of a service business? Yeah, for now, we're going to keep it as a service business. We might expand into maybe doing some LinkedIn outreach as well. But I mean, email is getting such great results for our clients. And I think, you know, stating the obvious, but email, you can reach almost anyone on email, right?
So I think it's something that's sticking around. So we're keen to just grow it as it is. to really become the absolute experts at email outreach. And that's kind of the track that we're on. In terms of growth, we're looking for, we want to increase to maybe get three new clients per quarter. And by the end of 2022, we're aiming for between 40 and 50 clients on the books.
You have some great testimonials on your site from Tom at Headstart and me at Flare and Sam at Testimonial Hero. Can you share any case studies where, like with the actual results, like you generated X demos for Testimonial Hero? It's a hard question.
There's nothing off the top of my head, but I think we are actually going to try and publish a case study pretty soon with one of our existing clients. So yeah, for the listeners, that's something that could be checked out in the next few weeks. Very cool. Any plans to raise capital or stay bootstrapped? As it stands, we're planning to stay bootstrapped, yeah.
But I'm open-minded, but I think I've just been, I came into it with this very kind of stubborn mentality, I think, of like, no, we can do this. We don't need any capital. But I think, obviously, there's some drawbacks with that in terms of, you know, recruiting if we do want to build a team internally eventually. But for now, it's working well. But yeah, never say never, I guess.
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Chapter 6: What is the ideal customer profile for Discoveroo's services?
So I'd recommend that book to anyone. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Actually, I mentioned Scribbly, but the founder of Scribbly, Dani Bell, I think she's maybe, I think she's still at the company, but I think she's done a great job of really sort of pioneering content as a service and kind of, yeah, pioneering that movement really.
And I think that company has grown really quickly and I think it's really cool. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own? Well, I'd say the tool that we rely on the most is Apollo, and that's for data building. That's for sequencing. And of course, we are an outsourced sales agency, so that's something we rely on.
But I think for anyone out there who does want to do it themselves, I'd say use Apollo. You can use it for a few different things. It's really, really killer if you use it in the right way. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Probably seven-ish, seven and a half. Not bad in situation, married, single kids?
No.
In a relationship, but no children. Okay. And how old are you? 34. 34. Last question, Joe. Something you wish you when you were 20. I've been thinking a little bit about this and I think that something that I, I've always been very, very ambitious.
So I used to work in the music industry, but I've worked in software sales and I've always aimed for the top, you know, that's kind of relevant for this podcast, but I've always aimed for like the big names in the respective industry. And actually when I've managed to get there, I haven't necessarily had the best experience.
It's been a good learning curve, but I actually sometimes think that maybe I should have had my eyes set. I don't mean lowering the bar, but I mean maybe not being convinced that I have to work for the biggest player in that respective industry.
Actually, I learned more about sales, for instance, working for a corporate level thousand employee company than I did working for enterprise level companies like Autodesk.
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Chapter 7: How does Discoveroo ensure compliance with GDPR in their outreach?
So I think sometimes... But yeah, sometimes aiming for the top name just for the sake of working for the top name isn't necessarily the right way to go. Guys, there we have it. Discoveroo.co launched just recently, less than 12 months ago, now doing $10,000 a month in revenue across six customers. They are helping their customers do email outreach, personalized email outreach to get responses up.
They can help you get 200 prospects or reach out to 200 prospects for just $7,800 per month as he looks to scale and learn all the ins and outs of the problems associated with this in his role at Autodesk. Joe, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you so much. Cheers, Nathan.