SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SellerSEO Gets Booted From Stripe, Now Rebounding and Bootstrapped
18 Jun 2020
Chapter 1: What is the background of the guest and their business?
That's all bootstrapped. Like I said, we have a seven figure Amazon business. So just all bootstrapped.
The SaaS business though is down year over year though because of the Stripe thing, right? So like a year ago today, you're doing like eight grand a month.
Chapter 2: How did the Stripe issue impact the SaaS business?
Exactly. Yes, we are down because of the Stripe issue. And that's a warning to people to really take a look at Stripe.
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Chapter 3: Who are the main competitors in the Amazon seller tool space?
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My guest today is Andy Arnott. He's been an entrepreneur since the age of 19, started and run multiple seven-figure businesses, now running Seller SEO. His current venture is a suite of SaaS tools dedicated to helping Amazon sellers scale their businesses with SEO and paid marketing. Andy, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, absolutely. Hells yeah.
All right. This whole Amazon space, man, is just hot, hot, hot, huh? It's also brutal.
It's very competitive.
Who do you compete with the most?
Let's see. Some of the biggest players in the market are a company called Viral Launch, another company called Helium 10. There's quite a few, actually. It feels like there's a new one popping up like every week.
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Chapter 4: What unique features does SellerSEO offer to its users?
like WordPress, but there's like a Yoast, I think is the name of the plugin where it kind of like guides you. It's similar to that. Um, so it's, it's holding your hand, even if you know nothing about SEO to get you an SEO optimized listing.
Um, and then they also use, um, our, we have a traffic Titan tool, which is spinning up, uh, campaigns for Google PPC, but, um, integrating something called two-step URL, which, um, embeds a keyword, um, in those ads. So when you drop on Amazon, you get some organic rank for those keywords.
Okay, so they've got Promethean Wellness has a product called the collagen pro peptide, essentially, right? Their their title is like very long. And it almost feels like keyword stuffing, non GMO, paleo friendly, pasture raised, grass fed. These are things that I assume your system is going these are hot things, figure out how to put them in your title. Is that kind of what you do?
Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, the Amazon A9 algorithm is similar to Google was like five years ago. So they're kind of behind the curb. So keyword stuffing is, you know, even though they tell you, you know, best practice not to do it. We've seen over and over again that the companies that are doing that are the ones who are doing well. I always like to use Stanley Tools. I like to pick on them.
But if you pull up a Stanley Tools listing, you know, they're like, you know, four in one screwdriver. Right. And that's it. That's all they have in their title. And it's it's like on the opposite spectrum of optimized, you know, so. I mean, that's how some of the little guys are competing with these big companies is they just don't quite get it yet.
So it's cool to enable these mom and pop businesses to get some traction on Amazon.
How do you know what words are getting the most searches by consumers in Amazon search?
So there's a couple of different data points now. So they just released something called brand analytics that ranks keywords from top to bottom. That's one way. You have to pay for that? Yeah. It's not. It's part of the seller suite. So we're sellers as well. We still sell seven figures every year on Amazon. That's kind of how we got into the space. Okay.
But so we use that and we also use a bunch of other data sources and kind of combine them together to figure out what's going to work best.
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Chapter 5: How does SellerSEO help brands optimize their Amazon listings?
When did you launch the company? What year?
Uh, last year, uh, we kind of did a real soft, like beta. I think it was like in April just to kind of get our feet wet, see what worked, what didn't. Uh, we had a full launch at the end of summer. So, uh, we're just over a little over a year now.
Okay. And what are, I mean, is this a pure SAS model or you take a percent of sales or what?
Uh, no, it's pure SAS, at least at the moment. We, we might be changing that with PPC and things because we're actually underpriced, uh, for a lot of our competitors.
So what is Promethean and the average customer, what are they paying you per year to use the tech?
Um, so if they go yearly, it's, I believe we're at about $870 for our top plan. Um, and then monthly it's a 97 bucks.
97 a month is a fair average you'd say?
Um, our, our average is probably like 75 cause we have some lesser plans too, which we're actually going to phase out because, um, the tools work together. So a lot of people, when they sign up for the lesser plans, like, Oh, I want to, you know, get to this end point, but then they don't have access to the tool. So there's some frustration there. So I think we're going to go to a single plan.
Interesting.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did SellerSEO face after being booted from Stripe?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Well, I mean, that's fine. That's fine. Well, I mean, is it a daily show?
Uh, it's, it's weekly. And then we will throw in like something called a quick tip episode, which is usually like five, 10 minutes.
If something big comes out, like in the Amazon space that people need to know about, like just recently, Amazon rolled out, um, uh, uh, feedback, a feedback button, which sounds pretty basic, but on an Amazon order now on the seller screen, you can hit a button that says request feedback, uh, Um, so that's, that was kind of a big deal. So I just did a quick episode on that.
And then we also do, um, because we record live every Tuesday at 1 PM Pacific time, a lot of times, um, uh, people can't make it like our guests can't make it. So then we kind of do an extra, we call it, which it's just a one-on-one like we're doing now.
Yeah. Okay. So how many customers have you scaled to over the past year?
So it's an interesting story. So we got to about $9,000 MMR. And then we had a programming issue where the cancel button wasn't working on our software. And with Stripe, they have a one percent chargeback rate and then they boot you. And so we ended up getting booted from Stripe. So we ended up having to start over pretty much, which was really, really frustrating.
You know, when you port over, it's really hard to get people to port over when you're, you know, spooling up a new billing system. So that was a that was a real issue and a real problem.
So that was about 120 customers paying 75 bucks a month for nine grand a month in revenue. Stripe shuts you down. How many have now gone over to your new billing system?
So we're back up to 32. But what we did because of this, it was good in the fact that like I always try to spin negative to positive. Right. So what I saw this as a positive is that, OK, we need to turn off any type of paid advertising. We weren't doing a ton already, but it was like we need to turn off our paid advertising.
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Chapter 7: How is SellerSEO adjusting its business strategy post-Stripe?
You know, I'm an SEO guy, of course. So, you know, I remember you're probably too young for this. But back when I was 19 years old, I was using ICQ. Everyone's talking about chatbots right now. I was doing chatbots when I was 19 years old. Um, using ICQ chatbots to, uh, get referral, uh, uh, referral links, getting commissions on referral links and things like that.
So, um, yeah, I'm just, I'm one of those guys who turns dials and figures out, you know, how this is, this is a, this is a ton.
I mean, did you hire an agency to basically, and say, go get referring pages and referring domains? Or did you do like auto launch a bunch based off like creative content?
Uh,
So I did a couple of things. One of the things is we do have an agency that builds us links, but it's very minimal actually because it doesn't look natural. And then we also have VAs building links. We have We just kind of have a system in place to really ramp up that organic traffic.
Yeah. I mean, that's where there's a disconnect there, right? So like you have like over 100,000 backlinks, 1,700 referring domains, but your organic traffic monthly is actually extremely low. It's about 2,300 clicks per month relative to how many backlinks you have, which is a sign to me that these are basically trash referring pages and backlinks.
So some of them are. But the other thing that we have not done, which we're about to get back into, is we really don't post any content. There's no like very little blog posting. So if there's no blog post, there's nothing for Google to look at. So that's going to be our next step is to start rolling out more content.
Interesting. OK, very cool. Are there any take? I mean, do you recommend this? If there's people listening right now in other industries wanting to drive backlinks, should they use the agency that you're using? Do you recommend the agency or no?
I've honestly had mixed results. I honestly think the best thing to do is follow somebody like Neil Patel. He's got a ton of articles on how to build backlinks and then hire a VA and, you know, make a loom video. If you're the expert on that, make a loom video and show them how to do it and then pass it off to them.
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Chapter 8: What future plans does SellerSEO have for growth and development?
You can use it for Shopify. If you're not an SEO person, you know, that's where it's really going to going to work for you.
OK, so you're testing these things. You got about 32 customers at 75 bucks a month, so about 2400 bucks a month in revenue right now. Have you bootstrapped this or raised capital?
Yeah, it's all bootstrapped. You know, we like I said, we have a seven figure Amazon business. So just all bootstrapped.
The SaaS business, though, is down year over year, though, because of the Stripe thing. Right. So like a year ago today, you're doing like eight grand a month.
Exactly. Yes, we are down because of the Stripe issue. And that's a warning to people to really take a look at Stripe.
But why did you have a cancel button? That's what people are listening are going to think. Well, he should have had a cancel button. That's his fault.
No, no, we absolutely had a cancel button. The code wasn't working. So when people clicked on it, nothing happened. And by the time we were brought, you made aware of it. The percentage was, you know, there was like three or four people that had submitted chargebacks. And because of the percentage, Stripe just booted us. Interesting.
How many folks are on the team today, just on the SaaS side?
So we have three full-time people and then four kind of on contract that just like on demand, you know, like people like writers and things like that.
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