Or listen on:
Around August last year I started to get some heat in our Facebook Group.
One group member was having doubts about the lifetime deal we were running on AppSumo at the time.
His doubts centre around my flaky work history and the potential unsustainability of the deal.
His suggestion to others in the group was that maybe they would purchase the deal, only for the business to go bust in six months, causing everyone to lose their investment.
It's a fair argument. I don't blame this person, or others for thinking this.
The only logical step was for us to both jump on a podcast episode to has out these differences.
So here we are.
It just so happens that
) is an experienced entrepreneur himself...
So we discuss:
Enjoy...
Keep growing,
Tom -
But the question is, can you build a SaaS product? This is very true. These are two different things. You could be a horrible marketer, but a great product person and you're gonna do really well. But a great marketer cannot build a great product. And you'll see a ton of these people on Twitter talking about how to, you know, selling books, selling courses, but they really, they don't have a SA product.
Cuz if you have a really good SaaS product, you. Don't have to market it that much.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Confessions of a B to B marketer podcast. Today we're joined by a very special guest in your not typical. Podcast SaaS interview. We're joined by VE Deva, who we actually met during the app, Sumo Launch of Bcast. He was interested in the product because his product was also on App Sumo at the time.
We then had a little bit of a beef where he actually thought the Bcast wasn't really a long term thing. We jumped on a call, hashed that out, put that video in our Facebook group for our users, and then now we've formed some kind of friendship together, myself and Vinny. So he's jumping on to talk about App Sumo, cuz he was also on the platform, why he had the beef with Bcast and what he now thinks of our SaaS products.
So it's an interesting conversation for any early stage SaaS marketer or B2B founder. But before we jump into that, I have to give a shout out to my man, Elliot. Thomas of contract devs.co uk. There's contract devs co uk. Elliot left us an a review. He said he found us in January, 2021 and can honestly say that he's enjoyed catching up on the back catalog of content.
Thank you, Elliot. And if anybody listening wants a contract developer and without the pains and worrying of outsourcing, then go to contract devs.co.uk. I'll be doing an episode in the next couple of weeks on Progress in 2021 for fame, the Agency and for Bcast podcast hosting Sasa. I won't talk about that now, but thing that are progressing slowly.
I'll update on all the numbers, et cetera in that episode, but for now, Let's jump into that conversation with Vinny, and again, I think it's not your typical entrepreneur interview. We jump into some topics ranging from is it worth going on? App Sumo, how he's growing and built his SAS product, teleport.me, and also what he thinks of Bcast.
So let's jump into that now. All right, so Vinny, welcome to the show. It is the show, the one that I've been following since I bought the BCAST codes. That's so great to hear that. You're probably the first actual podcast listener that I've had on the show, so it's a pleasure. Before we jump into, we're gonna jump into absolutely in general, but also your beef that you had with me and Bcast.
So we'll talk about that and we'll also talk about you and your business. But before we do that, can we just give the audience a bit of context for who you are, what you do, and why they should listen? Sure. I'm Ben Devaa, CEO and founder of a company called teleport me.com. I've been building this company for about 10 years now.
I've gone through pretty much every phase of building the company, from raising seed capital to raising a series A, to giving back money to investors, to buying our investors, to getting profitable, to building a consumer app. Then moving from consumer to ads to sa. To getting nonprofit NGO money. So basically done it all and then finally went down to the lowest lows.
The Abso, I'm just kidding. . But uh, yeah, so that was, uh, that's kind of where, where we met and I was on Abso I think right before your, and that's kind of how I thought of looking at Bcast and quickly, what does teleport me? Oh my bad. Teleport me is, sorry. I'm very bad at plugging on my own company. We are probably one of the fastest growing virtual tour companies software in the world.
We help businesses create virtual tours of spaces. Our typical customer is either a small entrepreneur, someone who's kind of hustling, has a website, SEO agency type deal, or a photographer or real estate agent. So that's kind of our target market right now. And you have a SaaS. Yeah, I mean, for the most part, we make a huge amount of revenue from in-app purchases on our application.
So we have about 15 million downloads and about 2 million people active on our applications. And these are free apps. That's how we kind of make our money and we used to make our money and the other thing we used to do was enterprise, so that we were either pay one time and enterprise. So we didn't have a SaaS thing.
We didn't have a recurring revenue model before, but now we do. Yeah. What are they buying in the app? They're buying, uh, kind of in purchases, you know, like 7 99, 4 99, higher resolution. Some people want Instagram share, just kind of typical like, you know, small sachet purchases is what I call them. You wanna go from free to, you want to get, uh, for example, our biggest seller is, Something called Stitch Later.
So a lot of people that use our app use it when they're traveling or they're outdoors and they wanna conserve battery, and so they use the stitch later option to stitch when they get home so that they don't lose battery. Awesome. Now, for the audience's perspective, those than the audience that dunno what app is, go to app.com.
What essentially they do is they sell a lifetime access to your tool, take 60 to 70% and then give you the rest. But they've got big volume so they can do that. Now, BCAST has been on app and actually is on SMO again. Yeah, NIC teleport me, has also been on app mode. Can I ask you why? So for me it was, uh, the pandemic, right?
So we had a steady stream of customers that found us on seo or again through our apps and kind of upgraded to the professional plan, the business plan, enterprise plan. But because of the pandemic, suddenly there was a massive demand for virtual tours. And as an experiment, we decided to try different.
Distribution mechanisms. And so we tried Apps of Marketplace, which is very different from the program that you got into. And yeah, so that we tried Marketplace and we were the fastest selling product on marketplace. And because of that, they, even before I think we, we went live, so Marketplace has a couple of stages where you first a private link and then you become public.
They sent us an offer to go to the main place and yeah, so that's why we did ab It was mostly just an experiment and then it kind of took on the, the interest in the product because of the pandemic, kind of blew it apart. And so you didn't do the main. We did the main offer. So we went from marketplace to main offer.
But yeah, we got into marketplace in September and then we did the main offer. So we were not very interested in doing the main offer because they, you know, AB takes a huge chunk of your revenue. But then they gave us some good deal. They gave us a good deal in terms of percentage cut, I think. I haven't heard a percentage cut that's as high as ours.
And they also told us that we can, uh, get on the Black Friday, uh, train. So Amazing. Can you share other numbers from the deal, whether it's like growth, revenue, total number of codes sold? Yeah, I think in total number of courses, we sold about 2,500 codes. And yeah, each code is $79. You can do the math from.
Awesome. And so one of the core reasons, in my opinion, of doing App Sumo is the other benefits apart from just the cash. Yep. What for you guys were those other benefits? I think SEO is a huge benefit. APPO has great domain authority, so. Getting a significant link there and getting a lot of traffic. Go to the link and then go from there.
Link to our link is, in my opinion, initially the only reason that was important for us for optimal is kind of the SEO stuff, but we saw a lot more other opportunities because we have never had these kind of customers, right? So our customers will just buy and they use it. If and only if there is an issue, which if you do good software, they never, they never show up, which is our case.
Our customers almost never sent a support request and so we had a great product. So even when we did AB Sumo, if you go look at our deal page, we have 39 5 stars out of 40 and none of them incentivize like a lot of Sima deals are. And so for us, it. The support was not really a problem. We had a good software, we knew it.
So these customers are kind of like champions. If they really like your product, they'll talk about it, they'll share it, they'll evangelize it. And we never had that before. We had customers that liked us and they used it because it solved their problem. So we got that from apps, which is a lot of evangelists, I guess.
Awesome. Looking at the downside for me, there's two clear downsides. One is that you have users, both downsides stem from the fact that you have users to serve for the rest of their life. First question is, do you have an understanding of how much extra additional server costs these users are costing you?
And then second, my other point is that if and when you come to sell the business, the acquirer is gonna be like, okay, so. 70,000 users, 3000 of them you have to support for the rest of their lives and they're not gonna pay you again. Maybe it's different for you because you do like one off fees. So did you consider that second part as well, the acquisition part?
Yeah. No, I mean for us, acquisition is never on the cards. We could have sold to Google and Facebook like plenty of times, so it was never an option for us, our biggest issue was sustaining the revenue side of it, and our deal is not like an unlimited deal. I think BCA has kind of like a unlimited, you know, like this because you have to do it, right?
If you're a new product like b A, you've gotta. Basically give them the world to start off it. So our deal is from a space perspective, we do $79 per code and each of that code gives you three GBO space. So it's, that was our kind of math around it, and we still sold. Okay. You know, I mean, most of the customers that we get is, every customer that we get is a profitable customer.
So you mitigated. The risk of the server costs by limiting bandwidth or data storage. Right. So, you know, because they can never upload more than three gigabytes of information, that they're never gonna be unprofitable. Yes. Awesome. So overall, would you say that absolutely is worth it? Overall, I think, yeah, I mean I think, uh, we did well and we were not a new product, so for us, you know, we didn't have that much.
I think a lot of people have an issue with like their product going down, not working bug reports. I don't know what your experience was, but we never had that. People just loved the product. We had some people who couldn't redeem codes for some reason. I don't know why that was happening, but our biggest complaint was maybe out of the 2,500 people that bought it, I think, uh, maybe 10 people complained about not being able to redeem codes.
Yeah. Overall, I would say yeah, it's a six sort of ten seven outta 10. Nice. Now moving forward to Bcast, and let's first understand the story. So you see Bcast and then you, because you have, you've run a lot of podcasts, so you're like, should I buy this for all of our podcasts? And then I think you were considering it, but then you wanted to speak to me, why did you wanna speak to me?
So I was very early in SMO in the LTD space at that point, and I've been a big fan of podcasts. I run my own podcast on basketball, which is quite famous, and I had some ideas of doing some more podcasts. So when I saw your deal, I was like, oh, this is a good deal. But then when I saw the deal terms, I was like, okay, this is unsustainable.
And then I looked at your profile and it just seemed like you were someone who jumped from company to company to company. You know, every two, three years. And I just felt like, okay, this is a lifetime deal, but it's probably not gonna stay for five years. And that was my thing cuz I was gonna, I think I put in significant amount of, I think I bought 20 codes and so I just had to think twice before putting that much money.
And it's not that much money, it's just I'm doing it on the site. It's kind of, Just something that I, if it was a business expense, it's very different, but it's just something I do as a pastime. So I just had to think about that. And then, um, yeah, I think that's pretty much it. You know, the product was solid, and I think I told you this even the first time we talked like.
The thing that kept me there was that as far as I tested it, it worked and the promise was there. Like, your UI is not that great, but it works, which is good. And the promise of like kind of adding in ads or adding in audio snippets, I didn't trust out, to be honest. I really didn't. As it is just the promise.
So I went for it and then, uh, I realized, and I think I kind of backtrack from there and I was gonna refund the code. But then I realized, you know Andrew, who I know from Finded startups, we sat on the same desk and I thought, you know what? Worst case scenario, I lose my money. But that's fine. Oh yeah.
Thank you. Thank you to Andrew Crump. And then also thank you for saying that our product is solid. That means a lot interesting thoughts on the UI and maybe we'll get you to give more detail feedback there. But thank you. And so for the audience benefit, me and Vin jumps on a call, had about 20 minute chat about his reservations, about my work history, and then put that chat into our Facebook group so everybody could see it.
Did you feel more reassured after that? Not really. I think, you know, like what I've learned the 10 years of being our entrepreneurs is that they lie a lot. You know, it's just, I mean, I've done it true. We tend to overpromise under deliver for most of the time, and not because we want to, but because we know that we have to over promise for people to believe in the vision.
Right. And most of the times it doesn't happen. And so I always take it with a grain of salt. But then, you know, being an entrepreneur and an investor and advisor, I just understand that there are certain things a lot of entrepreneurs cannot control. And for me it was just the fact that I think they were like, and I think we spoke about this before also, that everything that I would see that you had done like kind of indicates to what I would call as a marketer, Durban.
right? And you run a thing called SaaS market here and you do a good job of it. And I think I really like the podcast and I really like your community and SAS market here. But the question is, can you build a SaaS product? This is very true, is these are two different things, right? You could be a horrible marketer, but a great product person and you're gonna do really well.
But a great marketer cannot build a great product, and you'll see a ton of these people on Twitter. Not talking about how to, you know, selling books, selling courses, but they really, they don't have a SAS product because if you have a really good SaaS product, you really don't have to market it that much.
So I think that's where I was. I had the reservations, which is like, can he build a product that follows the marketing? Right? Because you're good at marketing, you know how to do it, you know, how to, you kind of also running this as an experi. Every day you're kind of talking about how you're building it, you're talking about the business, and then I realize that you have a co-founder, but he's not very out there.
So I think maybe like talking about him a little bit more would really help cuz then you know, like, okay, there's a tech guy. I don't know if he's part-time or full-time, but I think he's part-time, but at least there's somebody who knows and who's gonna take care of the tech stack. Because you have promised, I don't know, like unlimited bandwidth.
I don't know. I don't remember the deal terms, but yeah, so that's kind of it. I mean, it's not, it has nothing to do with you, it's nothing to do with Tom. It's just, and you, I think you know what I'm talking about. You know, there are certain people, you see their profile, you see what they do, and you're like, mm.
Can I just kind of tilt your head a little bit? I think it's a very accurate analysis, and I think you're right. I haven't really built a SaaS product before, but I have done a lot of marketing over the past eight years, and so I think you're right, like when you go to, especially in the first year of Bcast life, when you go to the site, maybe the marketing was good, et cetera, and the product wasn't.
As good as the marketing probably, but that even Neil's fault, who's my co-founder, that's more because we have, we are in a competitive market with people that have been doing this for eight years, just building their product and they've raised millions. I only think that really in the past, like. Two months.
We've got to a point where I think the product is starting to live up to the marketing, and I totally agree with your point that when you have a great product, you don't have to market so much. And actually sometimes it's better to not market so much and let the product speak. And so hopefully that is where we'll get to.
I still wouldn't have done it any other way though, because when you're bootstrapping like we are, there's no way to get to a great product without. Two years building it with two developers. Yep. No, I understand that. I mean, like I said, I have no issues with the methodology and not, I have no issues with the product.
It's just I, with SMO, there's, there are always entrepreneurs who are out there for cash grabs and it's a little sad because you're taking, I mean, I'm fine, I'm doing this like as a part-time thing, but I've spoken to about three 50 people, three 50 people that have bought my deal cuz I give a three 30 minute free session.
And most of them are not that rich. I mean, they're kind of, uh, they're all buying this as, you know, it's kind of aspirational for them. And I feel a little bad that I put that money. It's their hard work, hard earned money, and, and there are entrepreneurs that take advantage of it. I just, I just feel, you know, sometimes it doesn't work out and that's okay.
Sometimes the company doesn't work out. It's difficult to start a company. But overall, I think, you know, that was my concern. And like I said, you know, I think knowing Andrew, I just kind of said, okay, you know, if Andrew knows. Let's go with that. Yeah. Yeah. Some credibility. Amazing. So what does 2021 have stored for VIN and teleport Me?
Well, I am right now, so I'm gonna give a shout to not Macedonia, which is where I am. I'm here to, as a part of startup Macedonia, to mentor companies and help them out in their growth phase. I do 10 hours a week of this while I run my company on the. I think the company is really well positioned. You know, we, we are extremely profitable.
We are growing. We have a small team now. The market is booming. There's kind of a boom and virtual tours and, and 360 panoramas and so on and so forth. I've not seen that kind of boom in the last 10 years, so I think it's a good thing and our SEO kind of sucks. So hopefully 2021 is where we improve our SEO and, uh, kind of become the number one.
You know, I think we're number two or number three right now. Hopefully 2021 will make us number. That's the goal. The year of s e. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's your plan also. So you know, every time you share something, it's very relevant to me because I'm also kind of going through that same journey. It's like, okay, how do I build content?
How do I find what the right content to build is? Like I said before, we never had to market it. Cause our product was so good, we just had people comment. And now that, and we didn't, our se was really, really bad. Like really bad. And so now we are gonna do the SEO and like stuff that SAS companies do. So that's kind of our thing.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of my recent post on SEO have been inspired by a guy called Nick Jordan who's gonna be coming on the show next cuz he, they, they're killing it basically. And so I'm just modeling on him and also on what Cja Patel told me. So, yeah, I'm sharing everything on LinkedIn and I'll be sharing it on this podcast as well with Nick.
Vin, I wanna thank you for coming on and being so honest and sharing your startup with me and the audience. I hope we can fulfill your, your dream for an amazing podcast host that sustains over years, if not decades, and I'm sure we'll continue to go on that journey together. Hey man, it's gonna happen. I hope you do.
And, uh, if not, then you know, somehow if you can help me out in any way, like this podcast was great. I said I'm gonna buy it if you get me all your podcast and you're like, all right, fine, . So thank you for inviting me. Thank you for inviting me too. I'm excited to see your journey. Amazing. Thank you so much.
All right. Bye Tom,
and thank you so much for listening to that interview. I hope it was eye opening for you. I hope it was interesting. Of course, if you have any feedback for the show, please go to Apple Podcast, hit the 4, 5, 3 star mark, and then give us some feedback in the form of that review. It can be cons. It can be positive.
Whatever you think is extremely valuable for me to understand that so I can improve the show and make these episodes more valuable for you as a B2B marketer. And with that, I wanna thank you so much for cheering in. It really is a pleasure to have you join us on the journey for building this SaaS company and for building this agency.
It really does make everything worthwhile. I wanna thank you so much for giving off your time, and thank you so much for listening.