SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Lift-Ai Spins Out of $10m Agency, Goes $0 to $1m Run Rate in 4 Months Bootstrapped
19 Oct 2020
Chapter 1: What is the background of Don Simpson and his experience in customer engagement?
got eight clients in production. We were hoping to hit 100 in MRR at some point this year, and we've already hit that. So we feel pretty good.
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My guest today is Don Simpson. He has pioneered the use of customer engagement to drive revenue for global brands for three decades, first in building inside sales operations, then leading in the use of live sales chat. And now he's pioneering AI to score website visitors conversion potential to trigger optimal customer engagement. Don, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, you bet. Thanks, Nathan.
That's a lot of buzzwords. Break it down for me. The website is lyft-ai.com. What are you guys doing?
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Chapter 2: How did Lyft AI evolve from a live chat service to a SaaS model?
How am I going to set this up to move forward? It makes it a little simpler.
So you personally own a hundred percent of Lyft AI, the tech tool?
Yes.
I see. I see. Okay. That makes way more sense. Got it. So, I mean, what's the team look like today? How many people?
Well, we've got eight FTEs and historically what we did is we had a team in India that was part of the MarketLink business. We actually had a few iterations on this. It took us about four or five years to really figure this out and make it work to the point.
to make the technology work and lift AI where it works and it's accurate and to be able to operationalize based on the scores that we're gleaning from the technology to really make it sing. It took quite a few years. It wasn't like we just said, hey, we did this overnight. And we had a fairly significant team in India. We outsourced a bunch of the development to a team in Russia.
And then just kind of over the years, As we iterate, we got to the point to say, okay, this product is, you know, this technology works and it's good. But now we've got a pretty small team internally just to continue to fine tune while we see and try to find that product market fit.
So eight full-time folks, how many of those full-time folks are engineers? Three. Okay, three. Any quota carrying sales reps besides you?
No, actually, yeah, we have one.
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Chapter 3: What pricing strategy is Lyft AI currently exploring for its services?
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, that makes complete sense.
If it's a low-scoring visitor, you can still use bots, but you just have to be, I don't know, more calculated in the way you engage the visitors.
It has to be lower touch. The economics don't work as nicely. Do you pay for Bombora data or ZoomInfo data or full contact data to enrich the data that you're tracking?
Not yet.
Okay, so really, you don't pay anything out to any other data providers? No. Huh, fascinating.
Trying to position it as you can use all of those things. You still have a lot of anonymous visitors on your website that you have no idea who they are and what they do. They may have very high purchase intent. Or there may be somebody on your site that doesn't necessarily reveal themselves. If you do have an IP reveal, you could say,
Based on our score, based on looking at the behavior of this visitor, we think this is a great opportunity and potential that you could do a BDR outreach for somebody who's been on your site but didn't necessarily engage you.
Are you profitable today? Are you reinvesting everything back in growth?
I've been reinvesting everything. Now I'm just trying to go on that pretty much break-even line. We're bubbling up a little bit above, a little bit below every month. As we grow, I'm just going to continue to invest and build.
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Chapter 4: How did Don achieve a million-dollar run rate in just four months?
So that's 25x on your current run, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, we got lots of work to do and lots of building to do.
Let me ask the question more directly, make it real. David Cancel approaches you, wants to buy Lift AI to enrich Drift's tool. He offers you a 7x multiple on your current revenue. So he offers you $8 or $9 million, all cash up front, no earn out. Do you take the deal?
I don't know. I don't know if I'd want to answer that. I actually met David Kensal. I can't tell you how much respect I have for him. And I don't think that's a question that I want to answer.
Have you signed any LOIs to sell the company in the past year? No. Very good. Building, building, building. I love that. Last question here. Churn. Any gross churn? None yet. None yet. Very cool. All right. Um, yeah, I mean, again, you launched it. This is what's impressed me.
You launched this thing in March and it sounds like you sort of reached out to some folks that you already had relationships with via your BPO business. You closed them. You went from zero to a million dollar run rate in under basically six months, which is really impressive. So congratulations. Um, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.
Hmm.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Don face while transitioning from an agency to a tech product?
How old are you? I'm 54. 54. Last question. Take us back 33 years.
What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? I would swing for the fences.
Guys, there you have it. MarketLink was his first company launched in 1990. It was in marketing agency, did about 10 million at its peak in 2018. Then realized, you know what? I got to spin out this Lyft AI product, which is essentially, you know, using conversational marketing in a real sort of revenue attribution way. He launched it just a couple of months ago in March, 2020.
Already has eight customers paying on average $13,000 per month. So six figure ACVs right off the bat, broke a million dollar run rate doing about 1.2 in terms of ARR run rate right now. Team of eight people building this, three engineers, first quota-carrying sales rep just joined with a million-dollar quota. We'll see how that goes. Bootstrapped, which we love. Don, we're rooting for you.
Thanks for taking us to the top.
Thank you, Nathan. I appreciate it.
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