How I Cloned Two Stupid Simple Apps to Make $30M⏐Ep. #256

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
The barrier to entry is a lot lower and to build a business
where you're making 10 grand a month, which is life changing
for 99% of people in the world. I went to a website kind of like
a biz buy seller. There was a company for sale and
they work for sale for like 200 grand.
And that's kind of one of my skill sets is researching and
copying. I was like, you know what, I
think I can build something similar to this.
Didn't have a mentor, didn't have a rich dad or anything.

(00:20):
So I'm just learning on the fly on my own.
And within two or three months that business was doing like 30,
forty, $50. We were probably doing a million
a year first year. How valuable it is to go window
shopping on bizbuysell.com or whatever website you can learn
so much. It costs nothing.
Sell it before you have. It.

(00:42):
So I just came across this guy on Twitter.
His name is Will Cannon. You may remember him from my
episode on cold emailing here recently.
Will is an expert in scraping and selling leads and he's also
an expert in cloning other software businesses.
He's a serial entrepreneur, but specifically he's built 2
software businesses doing millions of dollars a year.
He's a bootstrapper. He didn't grow up rich.

(01:03):
It's very scrappy and he has an amazing story.
So if you've ever been interested in starting a
software business and you don't know how to code and you'd like
to just copy what works, this isthe episode for you.
So my kind of story is grew up for single parent household mom
dad got divorced when I was one year old dad left, never saw him
again to this day. We grew up with little just me
and my mom roof over the head, food in the mouth, but didn't

(01:25):
have weren't weren't able to have a nice thing.
So ever since I was a kid, I waslike, OK, lemonade stand.
I remember in high school it waslike CD burners just first came
out. So I was like, Oh my God, it was
Napster and Limewire. So I was like, my friend got a
computer with like a CD burner. I was like, you can make your
own CD. This is amazing.
And so I was like, I would sell CDs at school, right?
I'd have like a like a, a booklet and I'd say, Hey, write

(01:46):
down your 10 or 12 favorite songs.
They'd write them down. I'd go, oh, I'd download all the
songs I've Napster, I'd burn them to ACD.
I'd sell the CDs for 1020 bucks ACD and I'd make 100 bucks a
week or whatever it was. And at the time I was like, this
is amazing. So I've always been an
entrepreneur from the start. Had a couple jobs did worked at
Sears selling warranties to people that bought appliances
and worked at it. Had it worked in a collection

(02:06):
agency. So started working at 16 full
time right out of high school, me and my then girlfriend who's
now my wife. I said like what are you going
to do? She says I'm going to get my
real estate license, I'm going to get to real estate.
I said OK, I'll just get into real estate too, let's do it.
And we didn't know, but timing was amazing because this was
during like subprime mortgage boom right before the crisis.
So got into that, got a license,started working for a company,

(02:29):
1st month of work for a company selling mortgages.
I made that company $100,000 andI got paid 10,000 and I thought
I was the richest person on earth.
I thought Oh my, my life has changed forever.
Like this is amazing like I'm going to work here forever.
One day I'm sitting there, I getup to use the bathroom.
I get back to my guests and he goes hey where were you?
I said I'll use the bathroom. He said, no, no, no, no, no, you

(02:50):
need to be on the phones. It was like, and, and what am I
doing? And I was like, I just made you
$100,000 last month. Like I know, I looked at the
numbers like I, I made you so much and like you're like on me
like that. And so, and they, and at that
time the, they were like the owners, they were like crazy.
They had every Rolls Royce, every Lamborghini, every,
everything. And so it was like, it was like,
well, I want the 100 KET. I don't want the 10K.

(03:13):
So I was like, you know, I was like, I called her up and she
had her license. She was working for a different
mortgage company. I said, hey, what if we just
started our own like mortgage company?
And she's like, let's do it. Let's like, let's do it.
I had a broker license. So actually I could take the
next step. And so that was my last day.
I called him, I left him a voicemail and said, hey, I'm
done. We started our own mortgage
company. And at that time we didn't have

(03:33):
enough money for an apartment and an office because we were
kind of just starting. So we got to pick.
So we started the mortgage company out of the apartment to
start. And then we started stealing and
we're like, hey, we need employees, but employees aren't
going to come to our house. Like we got to get an office.
So we got an office, but we didn't have it was it was we're
struggling the first few months.It wasn't easy to have built it

(03:54):
up. So we got an office and didn't
have enough money for both. And we said, you know what,
we're going to just live in the office.
So we're going to get an air mattress.
When the employees leave for theday, we'll pop out the air
mattress and we're going to sleep in this office.
And so that was a really difficult time, But it was
exciting though, because I'm young, I'm in my early 20s.
I'm like, hey, let's build this.So started building it up and

(04:14):
eventually got enough money for you know, but the story there,
which is crazy is showered in a bucket in the bathroom of our
office. We had a bathroom in the office
stood in a bucket. Jury rigged A handheld shower
device to the office bathroom showered like this was with my
girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife built.
We built everything together andso just crazy story out of

(04:35):
coming from nothing and then we started making every we started
making so much money. We couldn't believe it.
We were like what what you know,this mortgage boom time so.
How are you finding customers? How are you finding all your
mortgage customers? Straight cold calling.
Just boiler room. We have boiler room.
Literally at that time, people were, you know, the housing
prices were going crazy. You could anyone could get a

(04:57):
loan. So you could get a loan.
Yeah, yeah, whatever. Any anyone you call someone up,
if they had a pulse, they were getting a loan.
So yeah, anyone was. Yeah, I've.
Seen the Big Short. I'm an expert.
OK, Will. So, yeah, I mean, really, we
were just literally just cold call homeowners that meet
certain criteria. We're calling them, hey, do you
need 100K? Do you need 200K?
You have all this equity, you know, and they were everyone,

(05:18):
everyone wanted a new car, everyone wanted a new remodel,
whatever it was. So, you know, it was, it was
difficult because easy. Sale it was product market fit.
Product timing. This is what I've learned going
back. It's like timing is so
important. So start bought 4 houses, bought
a bunch of cars, went crazy and boom 2008 happened and literally

(05:39):
went from we were on top of the world back to nothing.
I mean back to nothing. I mean, within a matter of
months we went from making so much to basically nothing and
we're like, hey, we're done. We were upside down on 4 houses
that all went down in value 4050%.
It was really bad. It was for foreclosures.
It was my cars repossessed. My prized possession of time was

(06:01):
my S class Mercedes, which I loved as a kid.
Boom, watch the, watch the tow truck, take it away.
It was a really, really, really hard time.
And I was, we were like, hey, wejust got to go get regular gobs.
Like we'd be a bit like, we're screwed.
And so how this leads to kind ofthe story, which is at that time
when we were building the mortgage company, we were hiring
a bunch of loan officers and to hire those loan officers, we

(06:23):
were buying lists of Realtors and loan officers in California.
And we were cold emailing those loan officers with a pitch to
try to get them to come in an interview and come on our team.
And so I had a bunch of lists. I had a list of Realtors.
I had a list of loan officers. I had these lists.
And I had people in my office, adjacent offices to me at the
time that were like, hey, do youhave that list of Realtors?
And I was like, yeah, I'll sell it to you.
I'll give me 100 bucks or whatever.

(06:44):
So I was, it was like, it was like it wasn't a big deal, but I
was like, OK, there was like there could be something here.
So I went to a website. Were you just buying these from
other people or were you scraping them?
Yourself, No, not yet buying from other people, just buying
from. You're middle man.
Yeah. So I went to a website I saw on
a website called, I think it wascalled Biz Ben.
It's kind of like a biz buy seller.
It could be still available today.
I saw on the website that there was a company called List

(07:05):
guy.com for sale and all that. That's a good domain.
Yeah. All that company could be still
in Business Today and all that company did was sell lists.
He had a realtor list, they had a dentist list, they had a
chiropractor list, every industry broken down.
There's a lot and there's a lot of websites that do this.
I've bought from a lot of them. Right, So I, I thought in my
head, hey, I already have a couple of these lists.

(07:27):
I'd have some Internet marketingknowledge issue.
Maybe I can buy and acquire others.
Maybe I can find some more and Ican build a website like it.
So I, so I saw that business wasfor sale and they were doing, I
think I want to say like $10,000a month in revenue or something
like that. And they were for sale for like
200 grand or something, like something in this rating.
And so I think I may have signedan indie era.
I may not, I don't remember, butI kind of inquired, I started

(07:48):
digging a little bit and that's kind of one of my skill sets is
researching and copying, if you will and so.
It's fun too. It's so much fun.
I love it. So I dig a little bit and I was
like, you know what? I think I can build something
similar to this and let's see where it goes.
If it goes nowhere, we're going to get regular jobs.
We're already applying, me and my wife, regular jobs.
We're just like, hey, this doesn't work.
Can I side note you for a minute?

(08:09):
Yeah, I just want to emphasize how valuable it is to go window
shopping on bizbuysell.com or whatever website and dig into
businesses like whether you wantto buy it or not.
You can learn so much digging into their due diligence stocks.
It cost nothing. Just I'm I'm not suggesting
anyone like breaks Ndas or does something unethical or steals
proprietary info, but you can just learn like I remember I did

(08:32):
the same thing. I was shopping on biz by sell
and I saw this company that it enabled people to buy shipping
like e-commerce brands to pay for shipping with crypto.
It was like they were doing 300,000 a year in profit.
They were selling for like 600,000 a year and I, I just
thought interesting like I couldcopy this.
I could I have a list of ecom brands like they only have like

(08:53):
half a percent of the market andlike it just gets your gears
turning, you know? 100%, yeah.
I mean, you can, you can figure out what margins are in general
for a certain industry. You can figure out where they
acquire customers, if if they have more detailed analytics,
you can find out what channels are more profitable for them.
I mean, there's so much you can find out.
I wasn't maybe as in depth aboutit at the time.

(09:16):
I just thought, hey, I have somelists.
This guy has lists, he's making some money.
I think I could do it. So we started that.
So we started a website, it was called the Data Supplier.
So we started that. We started that website and
we're like, hey, we're going to,we're going to buy a bunch of
other lists. So we had a couple already.
We're going to buy a bunch of others and we're going to
package these based on industry and we're going to sell these
lists. And I want to say within a short

(09:36):
handful of months, maybe two or three months, that business was
doing like 30, forty, $50,000. It was just out of nowhere.
How are you finding customers? Again, like at that time it was
kind of grey hat SEO. So we were ranking number one
for e-mail lists, realtor e-maillists, every e-mail list thing
you can think of. We started ranking number one in
no time from our on the borderline grey hat SEO at the

(09:57):
time. And then we were cold emailing
people. So we were cold emailing
businesses. We weren't, we weren't, I don't
think we were cold calling at that point.
We're just cold emailing and doing SEO and that just started
blowing up. And so we were like, OK, we're
on to something. We don't have to give her a good
job. This is amazing.
And so that kind of parlayed into the agency.
So that's the back story of how we started the agency.
That kind of parlayed into the agency that we had, which

(10:18):
basically worked with so many customers.
So that's some Fortune 500, but a lot of them are small and
medium sized. They needed a clean list of
their ideal prospects. We provided that.
And yeah, that led to that kind of 10 year run ish of being kind
of self-employed and kind of just selling B to B data and
doing kind of cold e-mail and cold calling stuff.
Oh man, that's amazing. So when you say you were working

(10:40):
ton of hours a week, you were basically just like manually
scraping, manually putting together these CSVS, emailing
the people, and the whole time you're thinking this needs to be
automated, this needs to be assessed.
But it's hard. Like it's hard to get over that
hump, especially when you're making money.
Like you have to make a significant time and money
investment to get there. Then when you get there, you
don't know that it's going to work.

(11:01):
You know, maybe people want thatpersonal touch, right?
What was the tipping point whereyou were like, all right, we're
done with this agency model, we're going to go full SAS.
Was did something happen to makeyou really make that decision
for good? Yeah.
So I mean, I knew it. I knew it the whole time because
I remember in 2000 and I want tosay 11 or 12, so I started
uploading 2017, but 5-6 years prior, I knew that that's where

(11:22):
I wanted to go. There was a site called, I think
it was called Elance. So it's kind of like there was
like a thing at the time. Yeah, upwards.
It was freelance. There were freelance and Elance,
I think they merged or something.
Yeah. So Elance, so I found a team on
Elance to build the first MVP ofwhat I thought was going to be
my first platform that was goingto do.
I think it was called sales leads or sales leads plus or
something like that. It was, you know, so that we

(11:42):
have the domain, you're ready togo.
We paid them and they just took our money.
They just literally took our money, didn't build a thing,
couldn't even get in contact with them, couldn't get support,
didn't even get our money back and left such a bad taste in my
mouth. And I was like, look, we're
making good money. This.
It's hard work. It's a lot of you know, but it's
not the same time. We, we can have a life together.
We can, you know, figure things out.

(12:02):
Yeah. So I left the bad taste in my
mouth and it took another five years, which looking back like,
Oh my gosh, I ought to start it then, but you never know.
But it took another five years for me to kind of get the guts
up to say, you know what, let's try again, let's try it again.
And so I remember trying it again because the other one was
going to be B to B&B to C data. At the time, there was a company

(12:22):
called Sales Genie owned by Input USA.
They had both B to B&C. And so the second time around I
was like, no, no, no, it's just B to B, Let's focus on B to B.
Let's get away from the B to C stuff.
Yeah, they just took took time for us to for me to want to pull
the trigger. Obviously that that five or six
years we accumulated a lot more money or we had a lot more
assets. So it's a little bit easier of a
swing. Hey, I guess it doesn't go well,

(12:44):
it's not doesn't wipe out everything you have.
That's kind of what happened. And it was, it was also just
the, the hours of just like, hey, I remember like Sunday,
Sunday nights, I was like, I had100 emails.
So I was like, I'm to draft everything before Monday
morning. I was up at late at night.
I'm like, this is just not the life for me.
So I was like, at one point I was like, you know what, You got
to just try again. And we tried again.

(13:05):
Necessity is the mother of invention, right?
Like you push yourself to the limit and that was what you
needed to do to finally automateall this during those five
years. Like what were you making in
profit per year with the agency model?
Yeah, it was. It was probably it depends on
the year. Some of yours are better than
others, but it was probably high6, low 7 figures.

(13:25):
Wow. For those years, really good
living. Improv.
Yeah, really good living, but nothing too crazy.
I mean, we're in Southern California and cost some things
crazy, but yeah, still really good living.
I could have just done it forever.
I, you know, it wouldn't have been a.
It's still not a bad business tothis day.
People can do that and start with that.
So good living, Yeah. Now, how are you ensuring or

(13:45):
were you ensuring that people weren't getting the same leads
or like that the same leads weren't being hit up 1000 times,
right? Yeah, there wasn't insurance and
that was the, that was the greatpart of it.
It's like, hey, if I have a listof Realtors and let's say I
verified that list and it's fairly valid, right?
Customer A comes today, CustomerB comes tomorrow, Customer C
comes on Thursday. It you're selling the same list

(14:05):
over and over, especially if they want to at that time a
bigger bulk on this right. So that's the beauty of it.
You're you have a one time cost to create or build it.
You have some small costs on going to keep it as accurate as
possible at that time. You're reselling it over and
over and over and over to, you know, to to however many people.
If 100 people come to your door tomorrow to buy it, you're
reselling the same thing 100 times.

(14:26):
It's a digital file. You upload it, you send a link.
It was hard, but it wasn't because there's also a lot of
people that came. They don't want just every
realtor. They want something very
specific. So I'm manually manipulating
CSVS like had a team build a software to try to do it as
well. I can do it as I can, but you're
joining files together, you're apending data where it's like,
hey, I have these fields, but now I want to add a phone

(14:46):
number, add an e-mail, add a date of birth out of whatever.
So there's a lot of intricacies to building out strong lists and
then keeping them clean is the harder part, and that takes a
lot of time and effort. Were you continually like
revalidating the phone numbers in the emails or no?
Yeah, the emails, yeah, which are easier to verify and they
have a smaller cost to verify versus phones.
Phones, we had a call center in the Philippines where we take a

(15:09):
subset of the list. Let's say the list of 10,000
people, we'd take maybe 500, randomize it.
So randomize 500, send it to thecall center in the Philippines.
They would hand manually hand dial every person and give us a
disposition report and that gaveus a rough estimate of what that
full list would look like in terms of accuracy.
And so we want to have a certainthreshold there as far as number
of disconnects, number of wrong number, wrong person, etcetera.

(15:30):
But yeah, I've been verifying phone numbers is a little
harder. Now what?
Let's just say theoretically youhave a list of 10,000 Realtors.
What did it cost you to do acquire that list and what were
you selling something like like that for?
Yeah, next to nothing. I mean at that I got
sophisticated enough. We had relationships with so
many people in the industry. I could get AI could get a list

(15:51):
of and still can probably of every consumer in the US with
just about every data point minus, you know, maybe a few.
But like literally like your name, your date of birth, your
address, all your interests and hobbies, your phone number.
And I can, you know, 200, three,100 million consumers for like
1000 bucks, like because of the relationship I had.

(16:11):
So like literally next to nothing.
So you're buying a realtor list for $100 or some small amount,
and then you can resell that same thing for that same amount
20 times or Infinity amount of times.
Yeah. And what would you sell them
for? Like, yeah, so per lead or like.
We kind of tried to double end it.
So I ran a company where so me and my wife were running this.

(16:32):
So she had her own company and Ihad my own company.
I had a company where I'd sell abulk.
So I'd say it's a realtor list. Every realtor in the US, it's
500 bucks. You want California list, it's
200 bucks. Some just bulk list.
She'd have a business where she's selling on a per lead
model, so it could be anywhere from $0.50.
Yeah, retail and wholesale, yeah.
Yeah. So and people would come to her

(16:53):
and come to me the same person, they'd say I want this.
And then next week they'd go to her.
So she had her own business thatwas selling on a per cents
model, per cents per lead depending on quantity and type
and everything else. And I'd have a bulk 1.
And so we both would. We'd hit them from both ends.
People need to understand like I've purchased realtor list a
dozen times for, you know, I've launched 80 businesses, right?

(17:15):
So sometimes I want a cold e-mail them, cold call them,
cold text them, sometimes Bismarck, ND sometimes everyone
in California. I would I would reckon that most
people that buy these lists fromyou never end up even reaching
out to a lot of them, if not most of them, if not any of
them, right, Because like the initiative dies down or they
they can't figure out the cold e-mail software or they lose

(17:36):
steam like so it's not like if you sell a list 100 times, those
100 Realtors are are each getting beat up 100 times.
That's it usually doesn't work like that right?
A. 100%, yeah. I mean, we still see that to
this day where, you know, there's a lot more to the list
that goes into a a successful outbound sales campaign, right?
It's the messaging, it's the timing.

(17:58):
Is it, do they have intent? Is there's all these other
factors? It's how you're sending, it's
your product or service, you know, are you targeting the
right ICP? There's so many factors that go
into this that yeah, I mean, most of the smaller S and BS or
mom and pop shops aren't successful with these type of
campaigns. And so there's a lot of factors
that go into it for sure. Now I know that you got tempted

(18:20):
to start another agency to like actually do the outbound for
these guys. Did did you ever get tempted to
do that or did you do that? What's in the agency?
We did we so we so we we did some cold e-mail stuff.
We did some cold calling stuff. You know, it's more work.
And we found with there was enough revenue on just providing
the list itself that we didn't need to yeah, I was like, yeah,

(18:40):
I was going to hire, have to hire these people and do all
this extra work and then e-mail servers and deliverability.
And there's all these things that go into it.
And I mean, I have some friends now that do done for you cold
e-mail. And it's like, you know, if you
do it right and you're and you're on top of your game, you
can there's 100% there's a business in itself right there
that anyone can start. But yeah, we just found there's
enough money on the on the on the side B to B data side.

(19:00):
We can just focus here. We don't need to go and Add all
these extra things into it. Yeah, I mean, I remember I paid
a guy on Upwork 1 or 2000 bucks to build my own custom bulk
texting software built on Twilio.
And then I paid another guy in Turkey to scrape Zillow every
single morning for for Sale by owner listings to get their
phone numbers because that that was like the owner's cell phone

(19:23):
number on the Zillow listing if it was a Fizbo, right?
And then I would bulk text all of them every morning and, and I
would take the Zestimate and then I would subtract like 40%
from it and just say, Hey, I seeyour house is listed for
100,000. I can close fast all cash 60,000
today. And 98% say screw you or no.

(19:44):
And 2% are like, let's talk, youknow, and like there's just so
many amazing things that come from, from bulk scraping, bulk
outreach. Like the world is just
completely your oyster, and for guys like us, there's a lot of
rabbit holes to go down when youstart doing that.
For sure, for sure. Yeah, that's amazing.
So what happened with that? Did you end up?

(20:05):
We ended up buying a few houses in other states that we never
saw in person and we completely lost our shirts and it was a
huge mistake and I'll never do it again.
About this house in Mississippi for like 40 grand that oh, I
just, I've got stories anyway. Yeah, 'cause I thought about
doing that too. I thought about if you want to
call it low balling, but yeah, Ithought about that too.

(20:25):
Like, hey, like let's let's, let's scrape, let's build out a
list. And then let's just hit up
everyone with a specific kind ofvariable percentage down from
what they're listed at. Or kind of we, we can, we can
append some or what we think thevalue is and then go 30 percent,
40% or 7% lower. And then what's the harm in
reaching out to all these peopleand saying here's an offer, take
it or leave it. And 1% except and the numbers

(20:47):
were boom. Here's the problem like this is
something that I learned that makes me short like open door is
the fact that you just cannot replace that local knowledge.
Like if I'm a realtor in this random rural Mississippi town, I
know that like that house is in a bad school district or it's
about to be rezoned into a bad school.
I know things that ChatGPT doesn't know, AI doesn't know

(21:10):
the Internet doesn't know. Like we think the Internet and
AI knows everything, but AI has not captured 99.9% of
conversations, right? It's not there, it's not
listening, it's just captures what's already on the Internet.
But one-on-one conversations arenot being recorded and there's a
lot of gold in those, right. So if you got Zillow trying to
had buy and sell homes, they lost their shirts and they have

(21:30):
all the data you've got open door trying to do it for like 13
years now. I don't even think they're
profitably. I could be wrong.
Obviously the stock's going crazy because it's it's kind of
like a game stock, a GameStop stock at this point.
But like it is just really freaking hard to buy and sell
homes profitably unless you are a local right?
Yeah, I agree. Real estate is very local and 1.

(21:51):
You know, you might see like, hey, home prices are going up,
home prices are going down, but and there's specific local areas
where they're, you know, they'redoing the opposite.
So totally agree with that, yeah.
Yeah. All right.
So you're printing money with this agency, you switched to the
SAS. What did like your first three
to six months look like on the SAS model from revenue and
profit wise? I think it was like 2000 a

(22:12):
month, 5000 a month, 8000 a month, 10,000 a month.
It just started going it just right off.
The bat, were you still doing the agency on the side?
So like, you didn't turn that off.
First. Yeah, for the first, I'll have
to look back. But like from the 1st 6:00-ish
months, I was still doing that. So you still have that kind of
revenue stream. But then once we hit till I
think like 10 or 20 MRR, it was like that was in short order.

(22:33):
That was four months, five months in, it was like, hey,
this is recurring revenue. This is not recurring revenue.
This is different. And so, yeah, I just put pivoted
all started pivoting all my timeinto that.
And we got our first customers through cold e-mail.
We were using our tool to build out lists of people we were cold
eating. Your own dog food.
In my in our own upload, which we still do to this day.

(22:53):
So you said your first months ofup lead revenue 2 KMRR, then 5K,
then 8K then 10K within a few months once your MRR hit 10 to
20 K you shut down the agency. What happened after that point
in the the UP lead story? Yeah, I mean, after that point,
so me and my wife still running the business didn't have any
employees, obviously had to outsource debt to you, didn't

(23:13):
have any employees. And we're so our son is 3 or 4,
we're driving him to preschool. I'm in the car, you know, we're
in the car doing customer support on the IT.
It was just, you know, bootstrapping it, right.
And so it was like, hey, let's we're going to grow this
business and it's growing and the revenues are growing.
We have financial ability now tostart bringing in some people.

(23:34):
So that's when he started bringing in people.
So he brought in our first person on customer support.
He's still with us to this day. And so like we we started
bringing in people. We knew that if we're going to
scale this business, we're goingto need really good people.
So as Benin was about, and this is what most people find out
isn't when you're starting to grow businesses it and you know,
the people are such, such a big part of it.
So it was trial and error on bringing in people, bringing in

(23:56):
a salesperson, bringing in this person, OK, that person doesn't
work. Figuring out processes for how
to bring in all these people, how to train them, which I
hadn't ever been in a big organization, so I didn't have
any experience in it. So I'm just learning on the fly.
So it became about people. I mean, but look part of it was
our timing was right. I had a skill set to acquire
customers profitably. So the revenue just kept going.

(24:16):
I think within the first year wewere probably doing a million a
year. Our first year.
A big part of that was by through cold emails which I
shared kind of like script that we used for that and there was a
bunch of follow-ups. It wasn't just.
One, tell me about your like E signature business, how did that
come to be? How did you find customers for
that? Sure, definitely.
Yeah. So, so 2020 came, COVID,
everything shut down. And you know, I'm here in
California and it was, I honestly part of it was I wanted

(24:41):
to test myself. I said I've had.
So by the, by the end, I believeit was three years old, I don't
remember. We were doing a revenue at the
time. Maybe we were at 2 million AR or
something, some small millions of AR.
I said, you know what? I said, I want to see if I can
test myself and if I can build another SAS company.
So I started looking at what I should do and I, what do I do?
I go to G2. I start looking at all the

(25:02):
categories in GTO. I said OK, I want to do
something similar so I want. Sorry, explain to people what G2
is. Yeah.
So back in the day we called G2 Crab, now it's G2 and that's
basically a review site for Udubsoftware, so software companies.
So you can go there and you can see different categories and
then you can go into the categories and see all the
different businesses, how they rank in terms of people

(25:22):
reviewing them publicly. And you can see what people that
have reviewed them well say about them.
You can see what people have given 1*2* reviews say about
them, what they do bad and allows you to kind of do some
market research, allows you to see what's going on in specific
industry. So I went to G2, I knew I wanted
something similar to what I did with uploading and zoom it, but
I wanted a fragmented space. I wanted a big market, right?

(25:44):
So I wanted there to be at leastone or two companies that are
doing that are worth over a billion and I want it to be
worth it. There's a lot of winners.
So I looked at a bunch of spaces.
I looked at you. You're saying like QuickBooks.
I looked at that space. I looked at a bunch of spaces
and I saw the E signature space.And so I thought that was
interesting, especially because of the timing where you can't be
face to face, at least at that moment it could it's harder to

(26:06):
be face to face to do signing. So people are sending a lot of
stuff electronically for E signature.
So I then I started looking at the, the market dynamics.
I saw, hey, right now globally at that time, I think it was
like this was 2021% of documents, all documents
worldwide that are signed are electronically signed.
I said, what, wait, what do you mean 99% or hand?
And it to me, it was like what that like there's, there's a

(26:28):
room for this market to grow, But it, that was that's that.
I don't know if that's true, butthat that's what I found at that
time. And it was like, whoa, I was
like, I thought it would be 20% for E signed or 30% or
something, maybe just because I'm in software.
But so I saw that and I was like, OK, I was like, there's a
market it here. It's the ad gap is going to
change. It's going to be 99 one and then
8010 and eventually it's going to fall.
So I was like, hey, it's a long road here for this market.

(26:49):
But then here's what I did that most people don't do.
Most people at this point say, OK, I'm just going to build the
software and test it out. I said no.
I said, I want to make sure and I want it to the best of my
ability that I think I have a, the ability to acquire customers
profitably before I build the business.
That's the hard part. But so I started doing, I

(27:11):
started diving in. And So what I found was a lot of
the companies at that time and still today were a lot of their
business was from these tools and templates.
And HubSpot pioneered this or, you know, five companies before
that, but they're building thesefree tools that they're giving
away as part of the funnel of those tools.

(27:33):
They try to get you to sign up for their software or they're
getting these free templates away.
And so for the E signature space, it was these online
signature tools where like, hey,I can hand draw my signature, I
can type my signature and I can create like this kind of
signature that I can use for documents.
And on the template side, it wasthese contract agreements,
marketing agreements, landlord agreements, all these
agreements. So every company or most of the

(27:54):
companies in this space, in thatspace were doing this and they
were SEO ING for these phrases. And so I knew at that time I had
an SEO advantage because at thatpoint I had driven, you know, I
don't know, 10s of millions of website visits from all those
sites I've built throughout through through all this time.
I've done a lot of grey hat, Black Hat SEO, learned a lot
from it, moved completely to do just things by the book and had

(28:17):
a lot of success doing things bythe book, especially now then
probably. So I said, you know what, I
think I have a advantage here and I'm acquiring customers
profitably. So let me try this.
So found the dev team on Upwork,same dev team at that or sorry.
Well, we had a dev team for the business that up we built.
We hadn't brought a team in house yet.
So use that same dev team that we had originally found on

(28:38):
Upwork to build MVP for signaturely.
I used the word the company signaturely in part for the SU
advantage of having the word signature in the domain.
And I said, you know what, let'sdo it.
So built the MVP and launched itand the other side of it, she
was like, hey, how do we price this right?
The idea behind signature because it wasn't just like I

(29:00):
can acquire customer, preferablyI can build AE signature
business. It was how do I put a little
twist on? So at that time I started
reading all the reviews on GT. I started reading all the
reviews, all our competitors. So DocuSign was the biggest.
There is Adobe sign, which they've now changed the name a
bunch of times, but like basically was DocuSign and Adobe
are the two big companies, right?
Adobe's big DocuSign just says Esignature.
They're big. Started reading all the reviews

(29:21):
on them. Bad reviews, good reviews.
The thing that kept coming up was they're too complex.
It was like very hard to use or they had a lot going on, right?
And so. Probably because they're
building for enterprise, enterprise clients too, but
you're not even trying to do that.
They have their strategy there Sand BS, there's a lot of churn S
and BS there's, you know, they're price sensitive anyway,

(29:42):
So I was like, OK, let's let's build something so simple to
use, so stupidly simple that your my grandma, you know, your
grandmother could use it, right?So, and that was our first time
on tie line was stupid simple signatures like just and like
we're talking like bare bones simple, like upload document who

(30:03):
needs to sign, no API, no contract life cycle management,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like no, it's like just stupid
simple signature. It's like the easiest tool that
anyone could use. And so we ran it by a bunch of
people Ran's family like, hey, there's like we kept iterating,
iterating, got the MVP going. And that was kind of the start
of signature. And how's it doing today and how

(30:25):
did you get your first 1000 customers?
We started doing some cold e-mail stuff.
We knew we wanted to target somereally small businesses, so
started doing some cold e-mail and the SEO as planned took off.
And so we had a freemium model so you can sign 3 documents per
month completely for free. And if you want to sign more
than that or you need teams or blah, blah, blah, more access

(30:47):
business branding, blah, blah, blah, you can upgrade to a paid
plan and it started taking off crazy, but from a free level.
So revenue wasn't crazy. Revenue wasn't like UPLADE where
it's a first year million AR in the second year.
It wasn't crazy, but the user base was crazy.
They loved it and they also didn't need, most of them didn't
need to sign more than three documents from these were just

(31:08):
like mom and pop shops that wereusing it here and there.
And so we started growing in users really quickly.
I think we had maybe over 100,000 first year or two.
I put most of my time into up lead because that's the bigger
business. So I wasn't putting a lot of
time into this and it was continuing to grow, but it still
is today. So today we have 1.9 million

(31:31):
users. I think we're going to pass a
few million any minute now probably, but 99 point X percent
of those are on a free plant. They're free users that use the
platform, love the platform and the platform and we get a ton of
traffic. We probably get 800,900 thousand
visits per month to the website.And a big part of that is the
tools and templates that we built.

(31:52):
Those drive a lot of traffic. Those people go through a
funnel. So it's not a huge business in
terms of revenue, but it's a bigbusiness in terms of a user base
that loves it. We eventually moved to a free
trial model where free your credit card, there's a free
trial if you don't cancel the seven days you're getting the
bill and it's a free trial model.
So eventually moved to that. It's up the Rep a little bit,
but not drastically because a big portion of these people want

(32:15):
the free. So we still have free a backdrop
of like a backdoor offer to a freemium plant.
So it's a great business. And I always looked at it like
if I build up the big enough oneday and I do want to sell, which
I don't, I don't want to sell right now and I get offers all
the time, I don't want to sell. But if I did at some point I
would have this other business Icould pivot to and put a lot of
my time in and that's already built as a base and it has some
customers. And so I can then I could push

(32:36):
and really grow that. And that's how I look at that
business. But yes, the great business and
great customers and we're still building and we're excited to
keep, you know, keeping it simple.
You know, still we have an API now, we have things now, but
still keeping it very simple andoffering the best support to our
users and help helping them get documents signed and moving away
from DocuSign. Yeah, that's amazing.

(32:56):
What are some business ideas that you're seeing in the lead
Gen. space, like stuff that's like tangential to what you're
doing that you think someone needs to capitalize on, but
you're too focused or too busy to to capitalize on?
Is there any other like agency plays you see?
Maybe it can be built on top of your software, or alongside it,
etcetera. Yeah.
I mean, well, what I mean where are spaces going eventually with

(33:19):
everything that's going on is you know, right now you're going
into a Zoom info, you're going into an up lead and you're
saying here is my ICP, her title, industry, etcetera,
etcetera. Maybe you're uploading some
lists of domains, you look like customers etcetera and you're
running some signals and you're gathering some data, you're
pushing those into systems and those systems you're sending
emails, are making calls or you're sending to your reps,

(33:39):
etcetera. This is slowly getting automated
in a way, right? You know, in in the future, it's
you log into up lead up lead hasaccess to your CRM, Salesforce
or help whatever you use. We know what who your best
customers are, what they look like.
You know, emails are being sent and eventually calls are being
made on your behalf and your calendar is being filled with

(34:02):
appointments without you literally doing anything like
not even going into a software and saying, oh, here's my ICP
note. It's like just click a click a
couple buttons, close your eyes and meetings are on your
calendar. Like that's where it's going.
And it's hard, you know, if people are building that and
people are trying to build that,but it's not perfect yet and it

(34:22):
but it will be 100%. You're not going to need to go
have your, you know, SVRS aren'tgoing to need to look, they're
still going to be a space, A market for that.
You're still going to be able tomake cold calls and get into
accounts and it's but things arebeing automated in a way that
you know, they're just going to look a lot different in a year
or two or five than it is today for sure.

(34:43):
So that's one that's one of the things I'm saying.
I also have a, a lot to talk about about that like a
QuickBooks competitor, because one of the ideas that I had was
around there's a lot of servicesin around being a QuickBooks
competitor that are profitable other outside of just the
software itself. And these are things like, for

(35:05):
example, for you for that business, it's like payroll or
health insurance or credit card processing.
And you know, what's funny is a lot of times those other
ancillary services around the software are sometimes a lot
more profitable than the software itself, right?
Because if you think about it, think about like, let's just say
you're going to build a what ACRM for, I don't know, dentist

(35:27):
or pick any industry, right? It's like if you have, if you
created ACRM for dentist and maybe you use lovable or cursor
or something like that. Maybe you use an outsource dev
team, maybe you use Go high level or some other software and
kind of why you build ACRM for dentist and you build everything
out for that, whatever the industry is.

(35:48):
And let's just say you built a business where I'm giving this
software away completely for free.
There's no charge. This is a free CRM for dentist
and I'm making it or whatever industry and I make it the best
CRM possible for that very specific niche vertical.
But as part of that, you have touse my XYZ, whether that's my
credit card process instruments or my, you know, my payroll, my

(36:09):
health insurance, because a lot of times those other services
make more than the $100 a month you're going to make per user on
the software. And so I think there's a big
business there that hasn't been tapped because as software costs
to create software is coming down, it's in some way race to
the bottom. And if, if that's, if that is
the case, how are you going to monetize that?
Well, in certain areas like the CRM area or whatever, even like

(36:32):
a QuickBooks competitor, there'sother services in and around the
software that you can make a lotof money on and you can give
away the software for free. So I think that, you know, I, I
haven't really seen anyone doingthis, but I've seen like, for
example, Squire, they have like,I think that's ACRM for Barber
shops. They have like all in one tool
for Barber shops. They rate I think 100 something,
$150 million or worth a billion or whatever it is, and they're
building the best software they can just for one vertical, just

(36:55):
for Barber shops. If you're a Barber shop, you
have to have this. But The thing is, they're not
even giving you what for free. They're charging for the
software, but they're also getting all these other things,
the credit card processing, the health insurance, the the
credit, the payroll, all the other stuff in around it.
They're building it all in one. I think there's a big market for
building these all in one tools and giving software away
completely for free knowing you're going to make money on

(37:15):
all these other areas. Yeah, well, let's break it down
real quick. Let's say you're a dentist and
not unreasonable for a dentist to do $1,000,000 a year top
line, right? That's very conservative.
Let's say it's 1.2 to keep the numbers easy.
So a dentist is doing $100,000 amonth.
Let's just say they're pushing it all through credit cards.
OK, let's say today that dentistis paying 300 a month for

(37:36):
HubSpot. I mean, that's, that could be
reasonable, right? 300 a month for HubSpot.
You come in there and say, hey, I've got a CRM.
It's better than HubSpot. In fact, it's a CRM only for
dentists. In fact, instead of being 300 a
month, it's free. Cool, awesome.
What's the catch? Well, there's no catch.
I just need you to bring your credit card processing over from
whoever you're with to me, what is it per month?

(37:59):
3%, right? Same as Stripe or anyone.
But what you do is you just white label someone else's
credit card processing and do what's called interchange plus
pricing, which means for the 10%of customers that use American
Express, you're not going to make any money.
For the 80 or to 90% of customers that use debit cards
or other credit cards, you're going to make between like .2%

(38:19):
and 2 1/2%, right? And so then if you're doing
100,000 a month in credit card transaction volume, and let's
say you average 1%, you're making $1000 a month from this
client that like their CRM is now free, their credit card fees
didn't go up at all. But a small percentage of that
is just coming to you. And so you're making 3 1/2 times

(38:39):
what HubSpot was making for the same thing.
But it's a win, win, win all theway around.
Is that what you're saying? 100 percent, 100%.
And then it'd be obviously you could layer on the other
services group health insurance,payroll, etcetera.
I mean, it's also a good idea for a company that's already
like an insurance company or a payroll company or a credit card
processing company. If I'm a credit card processing
company, right? My instead of just saying, OK,

(39:02):
I'm going to go to walk in this restaurant, try to get their
business and business, this is alike a whole other section of
area they haven't explored. I'm going to build CRM for
restaurants or I'm going to build a CRM for whatever and I'm
going to give it away for free because I want their business.
So it's yeah, I mean, look, it'sa no brainer.
Like you said, if you're a dentist, if you're a
chiropractor, whatever you it's a matter of industry and you
have someone come to you and it's hey, this is completely

(39:24):
free. It's going to save you XYZA
month. You know, you have to use credit
card processing or you have to use other services, but the
pricing doesn't change there either.
Or maybe in some cases you have some relationship where you can
get even better pricing there. I mean, look, yeah, every single
dentist that you approach, isn'tit?
But if a small percentage of those do and then you're you're
ingrained, right? They're not going to then go pay
for a CRM after they're getting it for free.

(39:45):
And especially if you're narrowing down to one vertical
and you're and you're serving that vertical really well.
And there's probably like, that's why Squire these others
are doing well because there's no one that was going after
Barber shop CRM. No one there's the, I mean,
there was, but there wasn't anyone doing it in a real way,
putting all their time and energy into it, right?
So. It's it's it's interesting.

(40:06):
If someone's listening to this and like, OK, well, first of
all, I'm not going to start a credit card processing company.
We're saying you don't have to go Google white labeled CC
processing service. I just did it.
There's dozens of them, right? You can just plug into their
system. They'll take a little cut, you
take a little cut and then you're thinking, well, how am I
going to build a CRM? You don't even need to vibe code
it. Just use high level, right?
Just use high level. You have a three to $500 a month

(40:27):
agency account and you can have unlimited sub accounts for free.
And oh, dentists too, over saturated copy and paste it.
Do it to chiropractors, Barber shops, whatever you want, right?
So you don't need to build the the CRM, you don't need to build
the credit card processor. You can use the same service
high level to do the outreach tofind them.
You could be eating your own dogfood to find these customers.

(40:48):
I love this. Yeah, yeah, I think it's
amazing. And but let me also say too, you
know, there's a lot of talk right on X and you know,
podcasts, everything about how and look, I love lovable and
cursor and Rep and all these tools.
I love them and I think they're amazing.
And I think they're lowering thebarrier to entry to build
software and we're in a crazy time to pay.

(41:09):
I said things are changing 100%.Let me just say that first.
But let me also say the notion, and this is coming from someone
that has built SAS tools to compete with really big
companies, the notion that you can just like, hey, I can build
DocuSign in 48 hours and I couldand I can get to 1020 million

(41:30):
AR. This is easy.
I can, I can, I can, you know, Ican buy code this way.
It's a lot harder than it looks to get to scale and like
millions of like, let's say 5 or10 million plus an AR, right?
Like, look, getting to 100K in AR is completely different than
getting to 10 million in AR. And I just want to say that for

(41:50):
anyone listening that, you know,because there's people that just
think it's just really easy to do to get to scale.
And obviously everyone has theirown definition of success,
right? Some people 10 KA month is
that's all I need. I'm freaking I'm I'm mind is
blown. And some people they they want
to get to this next level. It's as someone who's tried and
still trying, it's very hard because it doesn't, it's not
just, it's, it's easier to do now because it's not just the

(42:14):
software, but there's things that come, there's other parts
of the business, acquiring customers profitably, building a
brand, There's all these other things that you need to do to be
successful. And so I don't want to make it
seem like it's just easy to do, but it's a lot easier to build.
And if you have a skill set around acquiring customers or

(42:34):
you're willing to, you have a drive to go learn.
Like that's my whole life, right?
I, I'm learning from reading books, from watching YouTube
videos, from listening to podcast, didn't have a mentor,
didn't have a rich dad or anything.
So I'm just learning on the fly on my own.
And if you have the drive to do that, you very well can be
successful. And it's a lot.
The various entry are a lot lower now.

(42:55):
But also, let's not get it twisted and think that building
a $10 million AR business is just easy and I can build this
no code tool and boom, and I'm up and running because, you
know, there's a lot of talk around SAS is SAS is dead and,
you know, everyone's displacing and yeah, like SAS is probably
on the downturn, you know, compared to where it was in
2021. But at the same time, you know,

(43:18):
people choose Salesforce, for example, be not just because,
well, in part because of the market leader and sales team.
Just know them. OK, great.
But you know, are you SoC 2 compliant?
Are you, you know, for DOC, you say like there's all these
things that go into the businessthat people should be aware of
when they're going and they're just trying to start and compete
against a big competitor. It's a lot easier said than

(43:39):
done, but it's possible. But it's a lot easier said than
done to get to get some massive steel.
Yeah, I just want people to knowthat they don't need to build
massive scale 100%. Exactly right, they don't.
Like you just don't. Yeah, the barriers to entry is a
lot lower and you to build a business where you're making 10
grand a month, which is life changing for 99% of people in
the world, like like that shouldbe your short term goal.

(44:00):
And then obviously, yeah, try toscale up in there.
But like barriers to entry is a lot lower than it was 100%.
Last question for me, what toolsdo you use to copy others?
Like if you're cloning another website or another SAS, another
business, are there any like cool tools or tricks that you
like to use to do that? There's not a lot of tools or
tricks that I that we use. Or frameworks, kind of like your

(44:22):
framework of you went to G2, yousaw that everyone hates how
complex it is, stuff like that. Like how do you look at cloning
other businesses? Yeah, I think you have to look,
you have to know your angle. Like I don't think price can be
your differentiator because eventually, like I said, there's
going to be some software that'sfree, that's making money on
slavery services. So I don't think price can be

(44:42):
differentiate. I think you have to have that
one angle, right, whether it's ease of use or something else.
But also everything's being copied.
So just be, you know, you come up with, oh, I'm going to offer
XYZ and I'm going to do this. The other people aren't doing
well. Now all the other people see
that if that, if people want that, they're just going to do
that. So features aren't, can you
really be a differentiator? So I think at the end of the

(45:05):
day, This is why it goes back tobuilding the brand because what
I see most people, they have companies in their mind that are
shortlisted when they're going to buy.
And so if you're going to buy XYZ software, payroll, whatever
it is, you already have QuickBooks and one are maybe,
maybe one on here in your in your brain, in your mind.
And so building a brand is such a key part of how you

(45:27):
differentiate on the copying side.
Yeah, like, look, anything can be copied now, but the harder
part is acquiring the customers profitably.
Do I have a skill set or a way Ican acquire customers
profitably? And can I eventually get it to a
point where I build a mini brandSo I'm in customers minds?
And so I think those are the twoareas that you should focus on.

(45:49):
Like, look, if you're if you're,if you're building a, a
QuickBooks competitor, you can go on QuickBooks and site and
you can go on G2 and there's a there's frameworks and things
you can do. But at the end of the day, if
you can't acquire customers profitably, none of that
matters. And if at the end of the day,
you can't build a mini brand andbe in some people's minds, none
of that matters. So I think those are the more
important areas. So much to focus on when they're

(46:09):
copying is not just because you can go on every competitor's
website. You can run it through tragic BT
or some AI to analyze everythingand figure things out.
But figuring out what your differentiator is going to be,
your short differentiator, whatever that may be.
And then figuring out and even pre selling before you build.
Like for example, if you can cold emails, you can cold e-mail

(46:29):
people right now for before yourcookbooks competitor is built.
You can run, you can start cold e-mail campaigns right now and
see if you get some yeses. If you get some yeses, then go
build it. Figure out how to fire customers
first before you go build the thing.
A lot of people are like, I'm going to build this, I'm going
to do this and it's so exciting and they get so much hype and
they, they build it and they're like, what do I do now?
Acquire customers. How do I do that?

(46:50):
And like, no, just start the customer acquisition.
Run Facebook ads test right now before you even have it.
Throw up a landing page, do whatever.
See if you can get people to through a funnel right now
before you even have the thing and then go build it once you
have proven out you can acquire customers profitable.
Amen. You're preaching to the choir.

(47:11):
We don't have to wonder anymore.Chris is like, I know this.
This is the easy money. No easy money.
It's great. Like, no, it's like we we don't
have to wonder if people want our thing before we build it.
Like we don't have to. Yeah.
Sell it before you have it. Sell it before you have it.
Amen. So that that's man, I mean,
that's that's what I recommend. Will you're the band?
Where can people find you if they want to find you?

(47:31):
Yeah, so I just started a YouTube channel.
You can push Will Cannon or it's.
I we'll collab, we'll do a collab link on that.
Perfect. We'll do a collab link on that.
I built my personal brand website.
I am Will cannon.com built that.I have all my playbooks there
completely free. So I wrote a playbook on SEO.
I wrote a playbook on code e-mail.
I wrote a playbook on Legion. I wrote a playbook on
everything. And it's not just like a ChatGPT

(47:51):
written playbook. This is like all my 20 plus
years of experience building outall these businesses.
I put everything I know into these playbooks and they're
completely free. Not selling them.
You have to get your e-mail to download them and I'll put you
on my list. But not selling them, getting
them away completely free. And go check out.
I am Will Cannon. Yeah.
I'm on Instagram, I'm on LinkedIn.
I'm everywhere. Yeah, Hopefully people got value
and I appreciate you having me on Chris.

(48:12):
Absolutely. Thanks, Ben.
What do you think? Please share it with a friend
and we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.

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