Ryan Shank updates on PhoneWagon, a bootstrapped startup in Techstars with 77 customers and $6,800 monthly recurring revenue. He closed a $250 sale and a $400 upgrade that could scale to $2,000 monthly, though he hit only half his $1,500 weekly target. Facebook ads are now delivering 4 to 5 qualified leads per day.
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And I realized that next morning, tomorrow, I'll probably wake up and your camera will be staring me in the face and be like, yo Alex, what up? What's up guys? It is Thursday, August 17th. There's 42 days left to Techstars. We've already started off with a pretty strong morning. We got some product changes that we fixed. John just closed a $250 sale. I think he's closing another sale right now. I have a $300 upgrade that's gonna happen. Again, 42 days left to Techstars. We're at like $6,800 in MRR. Every second counts. So welcome to the vlog. My name is Ryan Shank. I'm Ryan Shank. This is our journey. We're building PhoneWagon from the ground up. I hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being wagoneers. Welcome to the vlog. There's like 150 people on this email list, right? Like everyone's copied on the face of it. So he's like, yo, the Powerball's up to like $500 million. The pool is back. So like obviously if there's like 200 people on the list, I'm gonna plug, right? So everyone's just like, I'm in for 10, I'm in for 10. I was like, I'm in for 50 and also plug in the daily vlog. A lot of eyeballs on this thread. Hashtag no shame. It's a straight plug. Then I'm looking at like the real-time traffic and then some dude is randomly goes, Ryan Shank from M Help Desk? Small world, man. I used to use it for my repair shop. Hi, and I'm here with Ryan Shank. What? Yo, that's dope, right? That's so dope. Hey, this is John. You in the pool? The pool, the pool. You swim in the pool? Mm-hmm. You know what the pool is like? The dynamic number pool? For sure, for sure. Sure, yeah, very much. Call me back. Man, why do you always got yeses? We work with a lot of folks. What's up guys? Today we have 3 new SDRs starting out for us, so I've been training them this morning. I'm just gonna get them onboarded, making sure that they know the process, the script, and all of that stuff. Other than that, I'm doing our one-on-one with Alex today, 'cause I need to catch up with him. He's managing director of Techstars. We have our big rock meeting, and then it is like full-on blast of all sales today, just hella demos. I feel like next time I'm gonna find a camera in my life and my whole life is gonna be fucked up. Ah, nice. Alright, we're gonna get started. The first thing I wanna talk about, I think some of you guys have started doing this already, others have not, but just intros. So a few of you have been using these spreadsheets really, really effectively. So our big rock for the week was $1,500 in net new MRR, and we did not hit it. So we passed $7,000 in MRR, and we have 77 customers, but we actually have a pretty, like, down week in terms of, like, net new gross new MRR. and that new MRR. Big rock for next week's $1,500 and that new MRR. Shoutouts to Raj for doing something. Intro intro intro. He's been doing it since 2009, so he's got to be like— These guys, they're like so perfect because they're all doing it. They're all like doing it. Yeah, yeah, do this like all counts and I realize that next morning tomorrow I'll probably wake up and your camera will be staring me all in the face and be like, "Yo Alex, what up?" "Hey!" "What did you have to say for yourself?" I'm like, "I don't fucking know, I just have nothing to say." Alright, frame yourself however you want. Update. Yo, I wear the same shit every day. People are gonna think I wear the same shit every day because I do. Yo, you know who else did? You know who else did? Steve Jobs. But I wear like literally, like this has pizza sauce on it from last night. It's not even like it just looks the same, it's like actually the same. You didn't have to tell them that. Like, literally has pizza sauce on it. Like, my clothes are dirty. My clothes are dirty. You know what the worst part is? We didn't even have pizza last week. No, it's cuz this is the only XXL shirt and I got fat, so like I have to wear this one. I got fat. Quit drinking rosé, man. All right, what are we doing? Woo, just got a Bumble match. You should put that flag of your first million dollars as the second Bumble photo. Ooh, ooh, that'll help the conversion rate. Wagoners, what is poppin'? We got an update to our to-do list today. What was the to-do list? Oh guys, alright, so here's the update for the to-do list today. So we got all of the product stuff that we had yesterday that we were like trying to figure out, we got everything working. So we figured it out, we got all of the customers that were waiting for stuff, we got it shipped to them. By the way, one of the customers that was waiting for a lot of features upgraded today from $75 a month to $400 a month, and he said he could probably even 5x that. So this customer could be worth $2,000 a month to us, but he just upgraded today to $400, which is amazing. So super happy that we got everything figured out for him. He was waiting for a couple product things. Again, we got him shipped, boom, upgraded. So we got $500 in expansion MRR this week for people that have upgraded from their current packages to like larger packages because they're starting out with small packages with us, they're testing it out, it's working, and then they're upgrading. So that was really, really cool. Oh yeah, so we're also doing a bunch of stuff with Facebook ads. So we're starting to get like 4 to 5 leads a day from Facebook ad campaign. Thank God, because we've been spending thousands of dollars every single month on Facebook ads. It hasn't been converting, but we're finally getting a bunch of people that are perfect customers converting for our Facebook ads. So that's the update for today. We had one— we had two auto converts today. So we had two people that automatically converted, which was amazing. They didn't even do anything else. Alright guys, so we just got done the Big Rock meeting for today. Today was a relatively good day. We had like three sales today. We just did the Big Rock meeting. We didn't hit our big rock because the big rock this week was $1,500 in net new MRR. We only got $750 this week, but it's still Thursday. So we still have all day Friday, which I think we can get some big sales. After Big Rock every single week, it's sort of like a meetup, not a meetup, but like a hangout session. So like, check this out. So they like buy pizza for like everyone in Techstars and then like everyone eats it down there but like I'm gluten-free so I'm not like eating that pizza and it's like unhealthy and I still have to go to the gym today and it's 8 o'clock so we didn't get to do that but you can see everyone just like chilling, hanging out, whatever, it's kinda cool but, um, alright, so that is the vlog for the day. You know, it was productive, we did a lot of demos, got a lot of demos on the calendar so, uh, if you guys are new here, my name is Ryan Shank, uh, we're out here every single day, 7 days a week, we're building PhoneWagon from the ground up, no outside funding, we're completely bootstrapped We're going through Techstars in New York City. I hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being Wagoneers. Peace!
