SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
UBIweb Makes $1.7m/year Helping Plumbers Launch Websites
17 Oct 2020
Chapter 1: What is UBIweb and how did it start?
There's organic growth because people throughout the years will upsell themselves to our packages because every year you have the option of downgrading, renewing, or changing your package upwards. In other words, my organic revenue, our organic revenue grows 9%. We don't lose clients, basically.
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We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
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My guest today is Dan DiLoretto. He's the co-founder of UBI Web. With 15 plus years of sales experience, 15 in online marketing, he developed a turnkey online solution for SMBs for their online marketing, primarily targeting Canada currently. He started out of his basement with one partner and bootstrapped their way so far to over 700 clients and over 20 plus colleagues.
Dan, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. All right. Introduce us to your partner here. What's Patrick working on?
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Chapter 2: How does UBIweb acquire and retain customers?
Not much. Our media spends around 60K a month.
Okay. For your customers.
Yeah. So we have about a 30% management fee on top. So we're making about 20, 25K monthly on that.
Yep. Is that included in the $150,000 per month or it's extra?
That's on top. That's gravy.
Yeah. Interesting. That to me sounds like an interesting growth opportunity, right? If you can get that 60K up to 600K or 6 million, that starts to become very interesting.
So we don't like that revenue too much because it's less profitable and a lot of time and energy versus our subscription-based model or our last, if you will, our website as a service. The advantage there is that when we have that client, they don't leave. And the more they spend, the higher they become, they become more poachable.
We're in a very competitive industry, so we don't like the big spenders. I know that sounds a little weird, but the least you spend, the harder it is to poach that person. And with the service we give, it's very difficult to come get one of our clients.
That's fair. So you're going to go for a high volume of customers at a lower ARPU versus less customers putting millions through your platform per month.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does UBIweb face in targeting blue-collar businesses?
We're about 20. That is comprised of, sales is at the moment, six, seven. And the rest is on the operational side. So everything from onboarding specialists, customer service agents, to obviously web developers and campaign managers. And we have a small ICO team that's actually growing very fast because obviously the demand in terms of our higher packages is becoming more and more.
How many engineers are on the team?
In terms of how we produce websites, we're not building WordPress sites or anything like that. We're essentially building We have a web builder that we've created that actually is part of our own IP that we're actually integrating into our own CRM ERP that we're building at the moment. I won't give too many details on it now because it's not in place yet.
But having said that, the system that we have in place allows us to basically use graphic designers to build websites.
Okay, so you don't have any engineers on staff that help you productize your offering?
So the 10%, the minority shareholder, that's the web agency, we tap into them when it comes to tech dev.
The one developer.
Yeah, so they have the whole team of devs.
Got it. So, I mean, how do you manage margins in this business? I mean, are you profitable today?
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Chapter 4: How does UBIweb's pricing structure work for clients?
Interesting. I mean, that's a great way to do it. So on $150,000 a month, like last month in revenue, how much will actually hit the bank in terms of cashflow?
Our positive cashflow, let's say on any given month is going to fluctuate between 10 and 40K. I see.
Yeah.
Bear in mind that what happens is we're scaling up our sales force. We went from two sales reps to six in a very short amount of time. And sales reps take about one to three months to develop. And then the units that they sell are going to start going live usually within two to four months.
So there's this two to six month burn rate that really hurts in terms of salaries of sales reps where there's just no revenues coming in. The bootstrapping is that burn rate of sales reps.
It makes total sense. I see it all the time. I mean, I usually see ramp periods taking three to six months. So if you figure out how to do it even faster, that's great. What are you setting quota at for those sales reps?
Two sales a week per rep.
Two sales a week per rep. And what price point?
Pardon?
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