How to Build a 6 Figure Software Business in 10 Months | Ep. #816

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about how to build a 6-figure software business in 10 months.

So Eric here has created a software company called ClickFlow.

ClickFlow. That's what I said. You're like, clickFlow.

My bad. I'm like standing up. All right, so ClickFlow. And what this tool does is it takes Google Search Console data And it'll tell you how many people are clicking on your title. And you guys already know this, the more people that click, the higher you're going to rank. Because think about it, if everyone does a Google search for the same term, they click on the second listing instead of the first one, what does it tell Google? It tells Google that the second listing is more popular than the first or more relevant, and it should be swapped, and number 2 should be 1 and number 1 should be 2. So Eric created this tool called ClickFlow that helps you A/B test your title tag to get the maximum amount of clicks. If you get more clicks, again, your rankings go up. So Eric, you've been in business for 10 months.

Correct.

And you charge for the tool?

Yep.

Annual fee or monthly fee?

So some are on annual, some are on monthly. All right.

And Eric got to 6 figures a month. And this is—

6 figures.

6 figures total. 6 figures a month would actually be really hard in 10 months.

Yes, yes.

It's possible, but it's really hard. So he got to 6 figures in total in less than a month. And the reason I say 6 figures a month would be really hard is you're starting from month 1, you're not going to automatically jump to 100 grand a month.

No.

And in software, there's this thing called churn in which just because someone pays you today doesn't mean they're going to pay you tomorrow because they could cancel. So Eric, and here's what's interesting, Eric doesn't have a huge audience to leverage from day 1 to cheat. Yes, he has a blog, he has readers and visitors, But it was hard work and he got there more so without leveraging your name.

Correct.

And what was the first thing that you did to get traffic to ClickFlow or get it out there or get people to know about it before you even try to get to revenue?

Cold outreach. Cold outreach. And what I did for— so all of you looking to launch a software product right now, and I think I actually got this tip from you or somebody, but I think it was from you. But like, so I emailed people and my headline, all it said was feedback. Okay, so feedback, and I was specifically targeting people that I use a tool called DataNize, which scrapes the web. And you can, I think there's like a maybe free version you can use for a little bit, or you can use like, there's other tools out there, but I basically targeted websites that I thought would be a fit. Maybe their Alexa ranking was like, you know, below 200,000, which means they had high traffic, right? And I said, hey, look, look, I was looking for people with SEO titles. I said, hey, look, we got this tool right now. It can do this. Would you be interested in it? It was very simple. It was like 3 sentences. People are busy, right? And we actually got people responding. Like these are enterprise types of websites. And we actually got a couple of people to buy just off cold email, not even leveraging my relationships.

And Eric does have a list, but when he launched his software, his goal was to try to grow the software standalone company, not rely on his brand and it'd be an independent company versus being tied in with his agency, Single Grain.

Correct.

Another thing that he did was webinars. And what was your strategy with webinars at the beginning? Because I know, you know, with a product like ClickFlow, it's not like something goes— someone goes to a landing page and they're just like, oh, in 1 second they see the value and they're going to buy. It's very valuable and SEO should use it, but it's not as simple of a pitch as you go and you show a 1-minute video and people are ready to buy.

Actually, even before that, you know what I did? So I did hit like a small segment of my list, maybe like, let's just say like 300 people or so. And I said, hey, because these people are like engaging with SEO content quite a bit. And I said, hey, would you be interested in this tool? Here's what it does, like a couple of lines. Again, just a couple of lines, people are busy. And I said, look, if you pay me X amount of dollars pre-selling, this is before we even developed the tool. I pre-sold like, I think like $10,000 worth and the tool wasn't even ready yet. And then people PayPal'd me a bunch of money.

And you use that money to develop the tool.

Correct.

Which is awesome. And keep in mind, when Eric built a 6-figure business in 10 months, he hasn't been charging for it for 10 months. So he took time, he all the way from the idea, built it, and now started charging for it, and he already hit that, which is quite impressive. Now going back to the webinar strategy, you don't have, you weren't leveraging your own traffic. I know Single Grain gets over 100,000 visitors a month, but how were you getting people to the webinar and what was your strategy With the webinar? Because a lot of people just say, hey, I'm going to do a webinar, I'm going to drive sales with it. But it's not as simple as just showing up on a webinar, talking about marketing and people buy from you.

Yeah. So, for this one, okay, I was at a dinner a couple months ago and I was talking to this guy and I was like, this guy really knows how to talk about funnels. And this is like an entrepreneur's dinner. And then we're just nerding out on marketing. I was like, what is this? Like, I usually don't get to talk to people that really know marketing at these types of dinners. And then all of a sudden we shake hands and he's like, oh, I'm one of the co-founders of ClickFunnels. And so, I was like, okay. And so, ClickFunnels, just to give you guys some context, they are a SaaS company and they do over $100 million a year. Maybe, I think they said they're over— they're on track for over $150 now apparently. And they didn't raise any venture funding at all. So, I was really intrigued by this. I was like, what's the secret? So, if you guys go to YouTube right now and you Google Russell Brunson, Russell Brunson Grant Cardone 10X talk, he will literally That is his webinar, right? And in that webinar, his offer— remember Neil and I always talk about the importance of having a good offer. The offer is not just his software. It's like 6 months of his software for free and it's his courses, right? And basically the offer is something that would transform you into becoming a really good funnel expert because that's like the thing that he sells, right? You got to be good with funnels. So, he's like, yeah, it's all about making a bundle, bundling the offer and it becomes more valuable. So I was like, okay, how do I do that? So what I did was I bundled our, a couple of our courses and I bundled the software. It's like you get 6 months of course, that for free. Right. And we just started pushing that a couple of weeks ago. And now what it does is it allows us to collect cash upfront. Let's say, let's say like $1,500 upfront. Right. And then after like 3 months or so, it's going to rebill them on the software. So now you're getting this cash upfront to help you grow the business faster. And you're getting that rebill a couple months into it.

And how are you getting people to attend your webinars?

Yeah. So we run like Facebook ads, for example, right? We might say, you know, we might, we could even target, we target cold audiences. In some cases we even target like Neil Patel, for example, and then these people register. And then eventually you see like, you know, which audiences work, which ones don't. And you just kind of prune like in the other lessons that we teach in this podcast.

Now you also played around with pricing. So are you guys a really affordable SaaS solution? Are you going more upstream? What's your pricing model like?

Yeah, so we do have lower-level pricing like $59 or $199, but like going upstream, you know, the price does start to go up and our competitors actually charge— their pricing is not published at all and they are upstream.

And does the majority of your revenue come from the small accounts or the larger accounts?

So it comes from, I mean, yeah, it comes from the larger accounts. The small ones, here's the problem with the small ones. This is why just, you got to know your customers. The small ones, and we predicted this, and this is why we might do away with the smaller plans. They churn because they don't get that much value from it because the product only helps you get higher traffic.

So the sales cycle with the larger price points are longer. How do you go and get these larger companies to pay you?

Yeah. So for the large, the cool thing about these larger companies is they like doing the annual stuff, right? They just want to get it over with and they just want a little discount upfront.

Yeah. But how are you getting them? Because you and I both know we have a similar blog audience. Majority of our readers aren't enterprise companies.

Yeah.

So how are you getting them? Because they're not coming to neilpatel.com or Single Grain and, you know, putting out their wallet and buying.

It's cold outreach. It's cold outreach. And then I'll give you an example of one that we got. So cold outreach, here's what happened. They responded and then we got on a couple of phone calls. Well, go through the process of how you're doing the cold outreach. Yeah. So it's the same thing we use. We use a tool called Outreach. We'll reach out to them and then we'll say, hey, feedback, the same feedback thing, right?

Well, let's back up. I haven't used this tool Outreach. So outreach.com?

Outreach.io. And Outreach.io is a sales outreach tool, so it will automate your outreach.

So how are you finding the people that you want to outreach to first? Does Outreach.io figure that out or did you—

DataNice.

DataNice. Okay. So you discussed that earlier. You're typing in a competitor. If you guys don't have a competitor, go find the closest similar company or a product that is similar. If someone's using that, they can also use you. You go and find out who's using their product. DataNice gives you the URLs. Do they give you the email addresses?

No, they don't give you the email addresses. So here, here's the combo that you got to use. So if you use a tool like DataNice, you will, you put in some search parameters, right? Like Alexa score above this. Maybe they are using Shopify, for example, right? They're using certain technologies. You can find it. It's going to list a bunch of websites. And then you put in a title that you're looking for. So, for example, it might be VP of marketing, for example. Okay? Then it's going to give you all these like LinkedIn. And then what you do from there is you use a tool like Linked Helper, for example, and you can scrape their private Gmail addresses. You load those Gmail addresses, right? Or it has their corporate addresses in there too. So, that's Gmail and you shouldn't reach out to the personal ones, but there's also the corporate ones.

I'm assuming Linked Helper is breaking LinkedIn's terms of service?

Don't know. I have nothing to say.

Privacy policy, but continue.

Yeah. So anyway, you know, I am not an owner of Linked Helper. So anyway, so corporate, if you go to, you load those emails into Outreach, okay. Or you can use a tool like hunter.io. hunter.io works as well, which will find the emails for you. And from there you set up a sequence. So the first email is like the feedback. And then you follow up with them three days later, right? If they don't respond, it follows up with them three days later.

Let's go back to the first email feedback. Like, hey, so and so, can I get feedback on my tool? You're in the marketing industry. Would love to see what you think of this.

So yeah, it's it's that's exactly what it is.

And then the second email.

The second email I don't remember. Yeah.

So you're just following up with them.

So what it does what it does is this. I don't remember the exact words, but it's like. feedback. And then I think the next one is like just following up on this. And the third one is like, hey, we're not doing this like that much anymore, but this looks pretty relevant to you. Are you sure you don't want to talk? Right. And we, the email sequence, like the sequence of emails was only like 7 emails.

Cool. So Eric pretty much broke down how you can build a 6-figure software company in less than 10 months. The big takeaway from this is you don't need an audience. You don't need anything. The easiest strategy, and this is the majority of your revenue, correct me if I'm wrong, He does outreach. He goes and finds people through DataNice using similar competitive softwares. He then goes and finds their email addresses using the tools he mentioned, does outreach, asks for their feedback because it's easier to get a call by asking for feedback versus trying to sell them on the first call. Because if people say they like it, then he goes into, well, if you like it, do you want to try it? And would you want to potentially be a customer?

Exactly.

So that's it.

Follow those strategies and you too can build a nice Before we go, I know this one was a little longer, but hopefully it's helpful. I actually, I would say that you probably should, if this is relevant to you, probably rewind this a couple of times because there's a lot that's in here to distill. But anyway, we're going to do a live event in downtown Los Angeles if we get to 1 million downloads for Marketing School. We're on track for 850,000 right now. Go to marketingschool.io/stats to keep track of our progress. We need you to do— what we need you to do Is rate, review, subscribe to this podcast. If you love us, if you support us, you get to hang out with us, you get free food, you get the recordings as well if you can't be there, or if you're there as well. And we will see you tomorrow.