The Bootstrapped SaaS Exit That Beat a Funded Giant

[00:00:00] Omer:
Callum welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Callum:
Hi. Thanks for having me on.

[00:00:03] Omer:
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

[00:00:08] Callum:
I think the quote that I'll mention today is probably closest to the customer, always wins, and that's something I try and instill in all my staff and all the companies I work with.

Get as close to your customer as possible. Closest to the customer wins.

[00:00:22] Omer:
Love that. Nice and simple. So let's, we're gonna talk about the business that you're building currently today, and then we are going shift gear a little bit and talk about the business that you spent, a good 10 years building before you, you exited.

So tell us about partner.io. First of all your current business. What does the product do? Who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:00:45] Callum:
So partner.io is a basically a new partner platform that helps tech companies partner with agencies and other tech cos. So what we're trying to do is streamline and take away a lot of the tedious tasks that partnership teams are doing on a day-to-day basis, and then record revenue correctly, attribution correctly, and really simplify.

The channel, you've got three channels, inbound, outbound, and partnerships. Inbound and outbound have actually great attribution technology, but partnerships is a bit different and there's no real tech there that actually helps partner teams really be better at growing that channel. At my past business I noticed that we was using two different partner technologies and both of them were pretty awful.

And I was, my team spending all day in spreadsheets and everything else. That's why I founded partner.io to get partnership teams outta spreadsheets into a real bit of tech that actually can help them grow their partnership channel.

[00:01:46] Omer:
Awesome. So back in 2012, you started another company reviews.io, or as you were telling me earlier, it was used to be called reviews.co.uk 'cause it was started out from, in England.

You started this business with your wife and 10 years later, it was an eight figure ARR business, and you ended up selling it for $82 million. And it was a bootstrapped business as well, which on its own is a pretty amazing feat. So let's go back to that time in 2012. What were you doing at the time and where did this idea for reviews.io come from?

[00:02:28] Callum:
We were pretty broke when we started reviews.io, I actually was looking at starting two different businesses. I was running them side by side and I went to see a very well known mobile phone company with one, not the reviews.io solution, but actually with another solution. And it was an affiliate attribution solution, and it was too complicated for me to explain.

They were like, Callum, we really like you, but that we just don't know what you're selling here. I said, how do you, who does your reviews? That was my final question coming out the door and they said, oh we're looking at a few providers. And I said, do you mind if I come back next week and I wanna present to you this review platform I have an idea for?

So I spent the next week, building out an MVP. We had a, the bones of it already, but I actually made it a lot better and then went back to 'em and said, Hey, this is. Really reviews io version one. And they said, yeah, we really like it. But you're probably too small for us right now.

So I, but it was that spark of them saying, actually, this is quite good. We like it, but you're not right for us right now. And. That actually made me double down on the reviews piece. Couple of years later, we actually won that mobile phone provider as a client. Because we drove the business and so forth.

They saw that we got professionalized.

[00:03:48] Omer:
So what was it about reviews that inspired you to go and solve, build a product or this MVP? What kind of problems were you seeing out there?

[00:03:59] Callum:
There was a couple. So in the review space, there was one massive player and there still is there was a company called Trustpilot and they had a really good website that was actually helping brands build trust, but actually their business model was not.

What I'd say friendly. And I thought, you know what? They could be a really nice, friendly alternative to Trustpilot. They should be. They shouldn't be the only one. So that was why I looked into the business more, spoke a lot to merchants who were actually using vendors who were actually using Trustpilot.

And said, how, how do you like this? And they were like, oh, we hate Trustpilot. We hate Trustpilot. We're paying them but we hate them. And I was like, everybody seems to be paying this company but doesn't like them. So what if I could make a company that was similar, but they did and they did paying.

And that was the spark that led me into reviews.

[00:04:54] Omer:
So you had this meeting with this mobile company and pitched the idea of coming back the following week with showing them this reviews platform. What were you able to build in a week's time to go and show them? Because it was still an idea at the time, right?

Or were you building something?

[00:05:13] Callum:
It had a, had another platform that was actually live at the time which was really a price comparison company. And I managed to tweak that, had a review element built into it. So I was able to basically use some of the code from that strip all off the price comparison element, make a profile page and leave.

Basically just the review element in there. And then we managed to build out a small portal where you could. Manage your reviews. So it was a stripped down. The first version was really a stripped down version of another product.

[00:05:46] Omer:
And who was building the product? Is it were you coding yourself or did you have somebody who, who was helping you with this?

[00:05:52] Callum:
So we, I had a small team, two people. And actually both of those people stayed with me right throughout the journey right to exit and they're still in the reviews to IO business now and they're great valued employees. And yeah we did it hand in hand to be honest.

[00:06:07] Omer:
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So where did you go next? What did you decide to do to find that first customer?

[00:07:15] Callum:
So then we spent the next few months just building out the product and getting to really version one of reviews that I own. And actually we did an expo in Birmingham at the bi ec the IRX Expo. And I called the the exhibition center up and said, Hey, have you got any spare space?

Have you got any last minute space? And they said, yeah, we've got a little spot in the corner you can have, it's right near the door. And I was like. Brilliant. And I literally turned up there with a couple of banners, a desk. I took a table football. Machine with me and I, me, the developers and my wife, man this expo table.

And we did really well. We had so many inquiries and that got us our first few clients. And then it was just about staying in touch with those clients and really building for those first few clients. They helped us build and develop the product. Then what we do is really use those customers to get more customers.

So we'd hit into a niche and then we'd be like, Hey, do you know anybody else who could, who'd be interested in this? And really, reviews had a really nice flywheel that actually when we got our logo on that. That customer's site, then their competitors would look at that and generally they contact us and say, Hey, what are you doing there?

Can we speak to you? So we had this nice flywheel that kept inbound leads coming and it was like a snowball. So as we won bigger clients, our logo was seen more, we'd win bigger and bigger clients and we really. Made sure we was the friendly alternative to what was currently out there. We had friendly attempting conditions.

We really try and help our partners, we passed our customers as our partners to make sure that they were succeeding. We wasn't just treating them like an, we'd really. Hey, are we doing good? Do you need anything from us? How can we improve? And generally speaking to our clients letters to develop better and better solutions.

That actually meant we'd win better, more business over time. So that was a big thing for us.

[00:09:27] Omer:
Can you just briefly explain like what did the product do at the time? So what was the offer? How would they use reviews.co uk I guess.

[00:09:34] Callum:
So in the early days, we were just really. We were helping brands online retailers collect reviews via their pa from their past customers via email.

So we'd send out an email saying, Hey, you've purchased from Inter Flora, could you please leave them a review? And that was really the basic bit of the solution that was like kind of V one. And, that evolved to doing, insights analysis on sentiment and really improving segmentation, attributions all of these complex things that, companies, as we grew, we were able to increase our pricing to offer these certain more better integrations.

[00:10:14] Omer:
Got it. So you, you mentioned Trustpilot and that you talked to people and there was a lot of. People were unhappy with the experience they were getting there. So how did you figure out you said, Hey, what if I could build something similar, but something that people liked? And so how did you figure out what that was?

Or the one was it about. Particular features in the product, which is I think, where most founders tend to go. That's how I'm gonna differentiate. But you also talked about other things like friendlier terms and conditions, like making it easier to work with us and so on. So what was the, if someone said to you, why should I use you instead of Trustpilot at the time what was the answer?

What was the offer?

[00:10:55] Callum:
It was two things really. Yes, it was features. Features were super important and actually being able to develop. Features at speed. So I'd always go in with the pitch that we were developer, heavy sales. Light, Trustpilot was so sales heavy, they were very selling in a very pressurized way at the time.

Almost like Yellow Pages. So they were doing a lot of cold calls and I was like, look, if you. Why don't you? We are the alternatives that we're developer heavy, very sales light. If you want to go with us out of your own violation, not because we're pressuring you into an annual contract.

So part of it was how we approach the customer and part of it was the feature set. So once we had a base, we were able to keep talking to our clients, constantly talking to them so that we could learn what actually. The clients actually wanted and what we could improve. And in, in the end, actually, I think our features were a hell of a lot better than what Trustpilot were.

And a lot more forward thinking. And really we were in a lot different, in, in many aspects in that they were just so unfriendly, un business friendly. No one really liked. Paying for that service. Were very few people at the time. I'm sure that's probably changed. I've not really competed with them in a long time, really, because as we evolved, but the gaps emerged in the market, the Shopify ecosystem took off and we leaned into that very heavily.

And Trustpilot didn't. So what we, we did the things that they didn't do. And when we leaned into Trustpilot and we leaned into selling via partnerships, we leaned into selling via Advocates. That was when we saw a really massive growth for us.

[00:12:43] Omer:
Now I know one of the reasons for the success of reviews.io.

I. Was your ability to keep talking to customers, understand what they need, and then quickly translate that into the right type of product or the right solution for them. Maybe give us an example of that, because one of the things I think that many founders struggle with is they hear a lot of things from.

Customers or potential customers often end up wasting a bunch of time building features that nobody really wants to pay for, but they thought they did. So how did you go about that? How did you capture that feedback? How did you filter this is there's some gold here, this is where we should invest of very limited time and money versus a whole bunch of noise that, we need to ignore.

[00:13:37] Callum:
It's a very good question, and there's no simple answer. You've, some of this is common sense. Some of this is listening to you your customers as a cohort and actually filtering out the noise and the, bad ideas. Actually that's not us. You have to push back on some ideas.

But generally they'll give you that theme and you'll hear that theme over and over again. Hey, we just need this. We just need this and that. Those themes generally will start to present themselves. Like I'd always, I. I'm a true believer that a founder should be doing those early calls with all customers.

So I'd always be on the call and I'd always be in my notebook writing stuff down, and I'd always go through my notebook, every, every week or so, and I'd see a theme, hold on. A lot of people are asking for this. How hard would it be to develop? Can it be a quick win? We used to do things where, we'd.

I'd put it on the site. I'd literally test what a feature would look like on a site and it wouldn't actually work. It was that small that we was able to do this and I'd see the clicks and I'd know actually there's traction there. Or I'd even create a page, it's so easy at the time. I'd create a landing page for a product, put some ads to it, and.

As soon as people started clicking on it, I'd, no, actually they want that product. Let's work more on that product. I'm not perfect. We did go down the path, the wrong path a couple of times. And that was a painful lesson. But more often than not, we managed to use common sense by focusing on our ICP, building features that actually matched our ICP. That wa that was how we built the right roadmap.

[00:15:24] Omer:
Yeah I think that focused on the customer, but like you said this, looking for these recurring themes that you're hearing about repeatedly from different customers and paying attention to that because, maybe they don't quite know what the solution is, but this they keep talking about a pain or something that they need to solve.

[00:15:39] Callum:
And you know what, one of the biggest things that. I learned is that actually it was the customers who didn't go with us who generally drive you in the wrong direction. They go, oh, if you've got this feature, we'll go with you. And then they don't go with you anyway. But actually they're just driving you in the wrong direction and they're just saying this because they're probably not gonna buy in, and it's just an excuse.

If you're listening to this and you keep getting customers not going with you and it's asking for a certain feature, just validate that a little bit maybe because maybe it's just an excuse. And I've had that several times. We used to get bigger companies say to us, oh, we want Salesforce integration.

So we built out Salesforce integration and when it like went live, nobody wanted it because it wasn't our ICP and actually it was our. It was the wrong, it wasn't our ICP and they were trying to push us in the wrong direction. So you've gotta be, it's not an easy thing to do. The building out the roadmap and knowing what to build and when to build it is not easy.

And you've gotta be very strict at it. I'm, in my business now we're a new startup. I'm now building it. We're building out features and we're building out different elements and. I'm very conscious of not being pushed off track by potential customers that really aren't potential customers.

They're not our ICP

[00:17:05] Omer:
You mentioned back then, you were broke. You are trying to build, bootstrap this business. You choose to go into a market where you're gonna compete with a very well-funded. Big player. Did you try to raise money at that time to, to help you move things along?

[00:17:25] Callum:
Yeah, I did. Very unsuccessfully.

Tried to raise money several times. Went out to Sandhill Road, we went, me and my wife went to San Francisco and spoke to some big VC firms. So spoke to some small VC firms, but. Ultimately we couldn't get the right deal. Most VC firms loved what we were doing, but actually wouldn't work with us because we were husband and wife, which was a bit disheartening.

When me and my wife got married, she actually kept her maiden name so that we had different surnames. So maybe we could look like on the site that we weren't married. But yeah. It was very difficult with our setup to, to raise capital. So really that just made us focus more on being profitable and every time we'd, we'd win a couple of clients, we'd always reinvest the money into the product, into the team.

So we grew a little bit slower, but that actually meant that we didn't have the crazy growing pains that a lot of VC backed businesses actually have. Meant I was able to spend more time with each team member, make sure they understood why we exist, who our client is, and that kept us really very focused.

We wasn't able to do some of the things that our competitors were able to do, and go off track. And, having people sell your product in the wrong way is very dangerous. And I was able to. Control that a lot more than some of my bigger competitors. And VCs would actually make you selling it in an unfriendly way.

They're gonna want you to, jack up prices, have annual contracts and things like that. And that was something we were dead staunchly against. So yeah they, we didn't agree with how their selling methods were and they didn't agree with ours, but we finally got product market fit in a good way and we had great velocity.

[00:19:23] Omer:
I know you were telling me earlier that at the time Trustpilot probably had, hundreds of salespeople doing outbound, and for you, most of your leads were coming in through inbound and. I wanna talk about some of the stuff around events and gorilla marketing 'cause I think there's a lot of fun creative stuff you were doing, but.

You were also creating a lot of content, so can you speak to a little bit about that? A lot of bootstrap founders, they don't have the money to invest, to go and, do expensive campaigns or ads or so on, and so they look at content as one way to do that, but that can often be a very slow, laborious, kind of painful process.

So what did you do? What worked for you? What didn't work?

[00:20:08] Callum:
LinkedIn was amazing for us. LinkedIn was amazing. I'd post, multiple times a day and I'd really highlight my competitors' weaknesses and the way they were treated, their clients. And generally those posts went viral and I positioned, reviews to IO is the underdog really.

And that really helps. We'd also do a lot of blogging, a lot of podcasts, and primarily we couldn't compete on an outbound motion with cross BYOT or yacht, which was our other competitor. And so we had to do something different and I really took the challenge to them in an open platform like LinkedIn.

And, I'd, put them in a post and say, Hey, I'm confident the reviews.io has a be the best delivery rate in the industry and I'd love to prove it. And I call on the other CEOs to actually protest with us and nobody would. But it actually got traction, people shared it and generally bought in business.

Being a founder and actually posting and being a personality, bringing personality towards those businesses, couldn't bring personality through because they were VC backed. They were playing a different game to me. So I was actually able to manipulate the, do things that they couldn't, I knew they couldn't with me in that space.

[00:21:29] Omer:
Yeah. I think it's pretty clever how you were you looked at I think you used this term. I dunno if we were the recording or earlier you said you try to be the antitrust pilot, like looking at what they were doing, what you thought. Didn't resonate with customers or there was an opportunity for you to show some uniqueness or differentiate and just saying, okay, I'm just going to do the opposite in many ways to, to stand out.

The other thing I just wanna just touch on is you mentioned earlier about the ICP and focus on that. But from, am I right that you didn't just say, okay we're going after Trustpilot type, we're gonna build a similar product and we're gonna go after all the customers that they serve you.

You actually looked at that customer base and then said, I'm going to, I'm gonna, I'm gonna focus on the people who are using Trustpilot, but currently feel like they are underserved. So it was a segment of that larger customer base. Is that right?

[00:22:31] Callum:
We targeted these. Trustpilot is great for big, bigger brands where they're doing television advertising and Trustpilot can, they can put Trustpilot logo on their tele, their advert.

But smaller brands brands doing 5 million in revenue. E-commerce brands doing 5 million in revenue. That was my ICP where they had team members. They had great customer service, but. They were being underserved by, by the competition being underserved and overcharged by the competition. So then we came in with fairer pricing, which was actually correctly priced for the market, and that resonated and it spread like wildfire.

[00:23:10] Omer:
Let's talk about EV events. I know you, you were looking for these events you talked about Birmingham and the NEC for people who don't know, that's was a national exhibition center. I. And it was an opportunity for you to go out and meet potential customers and show up face to face and all that.

But what were some of the other things that you were doing this sort of, these gorilla marketing tactics because you didn't have the money to spend and so you, you were constantly like trying these whatever you could think of, right?

[00:23:40] Callum:
We tried, any way to get our logo seen.

Without us paying the exorbitant fees, we couldn't, I couldn't afford an, in, in the us. Conferences are super, super expensive to get a standard, a conference. I just had a quote today. And they're quoting over a hundred thousand dollars for us, a pretty small standard for partners io and.

I couldn't afford it. I just couldn't afford it. I would've loved to have done it. So I needed to get my logo out there to get noise out there. And we used to do things like, in Seattle we purchased a bus and we had it vinyl wrapped with reviews that io and we parked it straight outside the conference center.

And collected pick parking tickets all day. At another event, we hired tuk drivers to take people from the hotel to the conference center. And then later on they took them from the conference center back to their hotel. And what we did, we just put posters on the back of the air took bikes, we were always trying to think outside of the box. Probably one of my best marketing campaigns was in London where we actually, me and two of my friends who were the employees, two of my best friends, we actually went out and did some, we cleaned the street. We had a stencil made, and we actually cleaned the logo into the road actually as you came into the event center.

That was quite good. What another one was that. We'd actually, I, if we had a standard, an expo and we were quite struggling, we would for visitors, I'd go into the toilets and put leaflets and posters up in the toilets

[00:25:18] Omer:
of

[00:25:18] Callum:
that. And weirdly, nobody ever said anything, but we knew, at least 50% of the attendees would go and visit the toilets, the gents toilets. So I'd make sure if they went in, they'd see our logo at least. And just things like that. We really didn't have a lot of money and we needed to get our brand out there. And the more people who've seen it, the more people who got in touch and it worked.

[00:25:41] Omer:
At what point did it become reviews dot. It switched from reviews.co uk to reviews.io. And what was the change? Were you looking you were focused initially on customers in the uk Yeah. Was that when you decided to expand and tackle like the US market?

[00:25:58] Callum:
It was really, as soon as we had product market fit in the uk I knew that this needed to be a global business for to actually be it to be worth anything.

At the first stop was the us and then we went to Australia and then into Germany. But to do that, I had to rebrand from. Credit UK into io. And we did that really slowly. We actually ran them both side by side for a bit, and then slowly we wouldn't publish anything on io. We wouldn't use IO on any of our advertising, but the domain actually still lived.

A big part of our solution was actually, these profile pages that had amazing SEO and moving those over very slowly. Actually was quite challenging.

[00:26:42] Omer:
So you did that slowly because you didn't wanna mess up the SEO that was working.

[00:26:46] Callum:
Yeah.

[00:26:47] Omer:
Yeah. That's always a fear, isn't it?

[00:26:49] Callum:
There was a lot, there was a lot of code, there was a lot of, we were serving widgets on people's pages and there was a lot to it that, that move over was really painful for us.

And I probably made, it probably lasted, three years to be fully moved over. But we wasn't in a rush. We knew we had to take our time. It probably, if we, I would've gone and spoke to a consultant, they would've said, oh, do this. We'll do this in a month or a couple of months.

But I actually knew that. We had to take our time with this and we had to do it the difficult way, which was to run them both side by side.

[00:27:22] Omer:
You start to get traction and you're doing, all of these creative things to reach customers. Get the logo out there, you having to bootstrap by necessity because you can't get investors to give you any money.

And slowly things start to get traction. You start to generate revenue, acquire customers, sort, grow the business. But still there's a lot of you, you are working under a lot of constraints. As a bootstrap, I. Business. And one of those challenges I know we were talking about earlier was hiring and not being able to hire people from the industry, if you like.

So what were some of the challenges there, and then how did you get around that in terms of finding people?

[00:28:07] Callum:
So I couldn't, I literally we couldn't hire a one. Sales team members at the time. So I generally hire people from other industries that I interacted with, and I actually liked those people and I'd watched them and see they had great customer service or they were really good sales people.

And then I'd approach 'em and say, Hey, do you want a career change? I've got this startup. It's a great opportunity. I've hired people who worked in. Cafes, people who worked in restaurants, bars, nightclubs, estate agents, all backgrounds. But the core thing is, could I work with these people and were they actually, did they have the work ethic that's needed?

Because that's the important bit. I can train them to be great salespeople. I can train them to be great customer service, but there's gotta be that spark. And that's generally what I'd look for. I. Used to hire, I'd have a server in a restaurant and I'd be like, this guy's got something.

Like you could see something there. And I'd be like, do you want a career change? Here's my telephone number. If you ever want a career change, gimme a call. And invariably, some of our best staff came in that way. And because they weren't from the industry, they weren't, ex SaaS salespeople.

They didn't require these huge wages, which were set by the big boys and set by VC money really. A lot of those people when I exited were still in the business. The majority of those people were still in the reviews io business and without them I couldn't have done it.

It was their work ethic combined with my work ethic and my wife's work ethic that actually. Helped us grow reviews that I owe into what it was.

[00:29:54] Omer:
So that, that's like. Super. It's a super creative way to find people because you're looking for like the raw talent, right? That there's something about these people that has potential and, hope I can train these people to do those other things.

And you were having to, it was necessity again, right? You didn't ha you, you couldn't go out there and potentially hire the types of people you would have if you had the money,

[00:30:18] Callum:
yeah. What's funny is these people are actually the market leaders now and like people are like, learning from these people who, with the early days, people in reviews who didn't come from a tech background, actually now tech people are learning from them, which is pretty ironic.

I was I was in an expo in Las Vegas, on Monday. And some of the, they were like, oh, the nicest guy in the room. The guy who has the most knowledge, the best sales person in the room I is one of your team members from reviews. And I was like, that's amazing to hear that because these people weren't.

Maybe destined for that. And, but they earned it 100%. They earned it without any doubt. They had that spark. They had an opportunity. They took it and did amazing with it.

[00:31:03] Omer:
Why do you think most more people don't take a chance like that? I would say 99% of I. Companies, hiring managers would never do something like that.

They would always be about, they gotta have the experience, they gotta come from the industry. They gotta do this. And like we said, part of it was like it wasn't by choice. You were just trying to do whatever you could to find that, the talent. But it does make me wonder about how many.

People are out there who have the potential to do some amazing things. If someone can just see that potential and give them an opportunity.

[00:31:38] Callum:
I think a lot of it is in the VC market. It, there, there's a playbook and they're just pattern matching. They're just like, go and get, some a star players and they're just pattern matching and saying, oh, go and, go and recruit for this role. And it's not easy. It's not easy. It's gotta be done by the founder, I think. I don't think it can be done by anybody else 'cause you've gotta own that if it goes wrong.

But. For me, it was a necessity, but also looking back, I still like to hire people who aren't from the industry, even though I can afford those people. Now, I'd still rather hire from I'd never hire from really, from my competitors. I'd think that's a terrible idea. They come in with these preconceived playbooks and they wanna do it.

Oh, this is what we did there. I don't want that. I want people who are like sponges, who are like, I wanna learn. I want to, it is totally different being a startup a bootstrap startup to being a VC-backed startup. And I think way too many bootstrapped companies, copy VC-backed companies and that the bigger VC backed competitors and actually make fall into traps of thinking they are VC bank when they're not.

[00:32:55] Omer:
So this journey, it was a 10 year journey of 2012 to 2022. When you eventually sold the business it sounds like in an ideal world you would not have sold it. You would've continued to do a lot more with that business. But just tell me about what happened? How did this. This situation come about and why you decided to sell at that time.

[00:33:19] Callum:
So my son has a very rare genetic disease. There's only ever been 53 children in the world diagnosed with his disease. It took us a long time to get his diagnosis and it's a pretty awful disease. And I just didn't have an understanding of what care he'd need, whether I could fund any research, and I really wanted to get into that.

I'm a big believer in giving back and, I didn't have the funds really to do the research that I wanted to do and to do the investments in, into, research. And to be honest, the offer just came at the right time. That was it was just timing. It was a good offer at the right time.

It was a difficult decision because me and my wife both loved. The business. And, but we also knew that we had to secure my children's future. We don't know whether Hudson will level work and things like that. And we don't know how much his car costs. We don't know how much, gene therapy costs or stem cell therapy or mitochondrial therapy.

There's all these different things. And by selling it de-risked. As a family. And without that, I probably wouldn't have sold if I'm, brutally honest. It was a painful thing for me to do. I left a lot behind a lot of my best friends in the business and, I still felt like I had a lot to give to that business.

[00:34:48] Omer:
Yeah. It sounds like a really a bittersweet moment to sell the company, but it also sounds like it was the what you needed and what your family needed, it just the right things appeared at the right time to, to help you deal with what you were going through.

[00:35:01] Callum:
Yeah, it was, it is very, it's been very tough emotionally and it was all part of our journey.

To get there. And since selling, we've been able to do some amazing things with the money that we've had. We've been able to like, support, lots of children directly and indirectly with research and even just, I help. Several children who are just in hospital and need actually special care and we'll actually fund that for them.

[00:35:29] Omer:
That's awesome. So that was back in 2022, and then obviously you had other things to focus on with your family and then. Recently, not that long ago you launched partner.io. So what was the impetus for that and what got you back in the game?

[00:35:49] Callum:
Partner.io launched in 2025, January, 2025.

And I actually probably wasn't there. When I left reviews, it was with the intention of that's me done. Like I'm just gonna do bit, philanthropy, I'm just gonna do a bit of property try and secure, have revenue streams for my son. But I. No, I missed it. I missed working with developers.

I missed working with people and I missed customers, and I missed solving problems. So I went back to my little books. Every year I'd give myself one of these little diaries and I'd write all my notes in there, my ideas, my challenges, the big things that I was struggling with. And at reviews, one of the biggest teams that fastest growing revenue stream was partnerships.

Inbound was actually leveling off and, but partnerships was growing really well, and it was a tricky team. I, we didn't have, we had two solutions in place. Both of them were pretty bad and I. We were still using spreadsheets. It was pretty very manual. We were paying really big wages to partner managers, but actually they were spending a lot of time doing these tedious tasks.

So I thought if I could solve that problem and actually make that channel a lot more efficient and effective, and actually drive a lot more revenue and track that revenue, then that'd be a great product. So that's what we started doing. And the first part of. The solution that we actually built was the training element, which was training partners and accrediting them how to sell your product, how to use your product, who your product is for.

Then it grew from there. We added referral in and we added event management and various, or the features so we could be, become this full suite for partnership teams. And it's gone really well. The feedback's been amazing. Again, most of it is inbound. Most of what's coming in is inbound.

We are doing some marketing, we've had a hell of a lot of, a lot of companies reach out and a lot of big companies talking billion, billion and trillion dollar businesses reaching out and doing demos on the solution, and we've got about a hundred clients at the moment actually using partner.io.

[00:38:08] Omer:
And I, I would encourage everybody to go and look at. The partner.io website because it doesn't look anything like a trhttps://saasclub.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/tools-and-materials-used-for-fashion-designing-4XD3MX3.jpgional SaaS or software product website. It has, it looks fun, it has a lot of personality and it's just, I think there's some, it is a good example of instead of going out and copying and making your website look like your competitors doing something which stands out.

[00:38:35] Callum:
You've gotta do something that stands out. You've gotta be memorable. You've got, there is, again, I've entered a, an industry where there is a few major players that have quite big market shares. But I think they do a, not, when you use a bad word, I think they do a pretty horrible job of serving their customers.

So I wanna be that alternative. A full suite alternative. I don't wanna do part of the partnership solution. I think there needs to be one product that actually does, email marketing automation for partnership teams, email automation, newsletters, partner newsletters, partner payments partner, referral management.

It has to be all in one suite. I know a lot of the experts out there will tell you to just, focus on one bit of the problem. But I think that mindset is changing. I think you need to have, if you want to compete now, you need to actually have a complete solution. And it can, no, you, when I launch reviews it.

In 2012, you was able to have really an MVP that was, it could really held together by bits of string almost. Now clients expecting a lot more and you have to have a fully fledged product when you go to market 'cause they're expecting it to be perfect from day one. And they're expecting it to not do one little bit of their problem.

They're expecting it to fix the whole problem.

[00:40:00] Omer:
Yeah, especially in this space, it's a kind of complex, quite a complex thing that they're trying to do. Before we get into, we wrap up I want to just you mentioned this a couple of times and I just wanna, I. Just ask you about it, like this idea about your notebook, about collecting these ideas and writing stuff down, and I noticed on your LinkedIn profile you also said, Hey, when I'm not working in this business I love to be journaling and my ideas and collecting these ideas and so on.

And it's a trait that I've often found with a lot of successful. Entrepreneurs and founders who are always writing this stuff down, because often we have these great ideas and two minutes later it's gone and you're like, what was that amazing idea that I just had? And is that the reason you do it?

Is that something you've always done? And I You the kind of person who does it is it kind of Ponte spontaneous when you have ideas, you're always like writing stuff down or you make time every day to be. Just journaling and getting stuff outta your head.

[00:40:56] Callum:
I wish I could say I make time every day, but I don't, I literally, I'll be on the way to the carpark and I'll, if I can't, if I can't get the notebook out, I'll use, apple Notes. I'm putting things in Apple Notes nonstop. As well as doing the, doing them in my actual diary. I don't make time for that.

It just comes naturally. And what I'm looking for is common threads. I'm looking for me writing the same things down multiple times, and there is a, there's a funny story here. The business plan for reviews io, I actually wrote in the cinema while. Watching Toy Story two with my kids, I think it's Toy Story two, but watching a Disney movie with my kids.

They were watching the movie and I actually wrote the whole business plan for reviews io on my phone. And literally that got us, and it was still relevant 10 years later. And, you've gotta, there, there's so many great ideas that aren't acted on. And I'm not saying my ideas are any greater than anybody else's, but I think if you can just make quick notes, you can actually build out, your brain will build out these threads on its own.

Some of my best ideas, I always tell everyone, oh, my ideas come to me in the bath when I'm most relaxed, when I've not got a screen in front of me and I'm just deeply thinking about. The problems that my my target market is facing, and that's generally, I'll try and think about that, and it doesn't come.

I, I, none of my great good ideas have came from staring at a computer.

[00:42:33] Omer:
And I think what was really insightful about what you shared there is similar to what we were talking about earlier about figuring out which features to build for customers was you're collecting all of these ideas, and I think that I've experienced this as well where you have these ideas, you keep writing them down and then you just get so overwhelmed because you're like, I've got like a thousand things here.

I dunno which one of these are good ideas? Which one of these bad ideas, which ones I should act on? You do I personally, I end up doing nothing because it's like, it's easier than having to choose. But the thing that I noticed about you is again, that you look for those themes, and if something is coming up over and over again, that's the signal for you that you should be doing something about it, or this is where you should be paying attention.

[00:43:15] Callum:
And then I'll just go and I'll just go and find my target audience and I'll go and have those conversations, Hey, is this really a problem? What if there was this? And generally those conversations are the ones that will validate or, not validate your idea. But I won't. One thing that you've gotta be really careful of is you've gotta make sure you just, one, you're speaking to your ICP, who you think is your ICP, but also speak to multiple people.

There's a and try and filter out, there's some people that will tell you, everything every, 'cause they know you, they don't wanna offend you. Great idea. And you've gotta filter that out. And I. If you don't, you can go down the wrong path.

But generally I'll always build an MVP. I'll do a bit of marketing and I'll see how that marketing resonates. So I'll put a small sides up and I'll put some ads to it. I'll see what the click through rate is. I'll see how long they're staying on the page, what they're reading, and that'll give an idea and that'll help me validate that idea.

That'll gimme an idea of, Hey, this is working, this isn't working. If someone's clicking an ad and then they're just shooting straight off, you've missed the mark. If they're not clicking the ad, you've missed the mark. So I'll have a set benchmark in my mind what I want to achieve and then, I'll go and take it to a few people after that.

It's the great thing about the internet. We can validate ideas really quickly.

[00:44:30] Omer:
Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's a great example of just some simple things that, you can do very quickly to figure out a lot. I think it doesn't necessarily replace having the conversations with people, but the but, but compliments each of, yeah.

Yeah. Totally. Okay, so we should wrap up. Let's get onto the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:44:55] Callum:
I generally don't listen to most people on business advice. I. Don't overspend probably is just control your finances.

Don't take venture capital too soon. That'd probably be my only one. Big one. And don't overspend.

[00:45:12] Omer:
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:45:15] Callum:
There's loads of books. I like Zero to One by Peter Till brilliant book. If you're in the SaaS space, Impossible to Inevitable. By Jason Lempkin book from Sasa.

That's a great book. Phil Knight Shoe Dog. Brilliant book. It'll get you through, the challenges he faced in that book. We all face as entrepreneurs, but they're very well written down and it'll make you feel better about yourself and just carry on.

[00:45:40] Omer:
Love that. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:45:45] Callum:
Perseverance.

[00:45:46] Omer:
What's your per favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:45:50] Callum:
Notes on Apple making notes. It's the it's the best app on your phone.

[00:45:56] Omer:
And now you can record and transcribe as well, right? So it makes it even easier.

[00:46:00] Callum:
You can record, you can drop, dump them into AI now and work 'em out.

But generally it's just, you've got this great, your phone is the best tool.

[00:46:09] Omer:
Oh, what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:46:13] Callum:
It'd probably be in the medical space. I'd love to build a low cost exoskeleton for children with special needs who can't use their legs.

And actually there's too many young children who are disabled who don't have a physio on hand to make sure they're keeping moving. So I'd love to in invest more time building out a solution for that. I think that'd be very worthwhile and a great product.

[00:46:43] Omer:
Sounds amazing. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:46:48] Callum:
Oh, there, there's not many. I'm pretty boring. I I focus pretty heavily. I'm a very deep thinker about technology and business. Yeah, that's it. I've watched the same TV show every night before I go to bed. The office, the US version of the office. That, that, that's what relaxes me.

You've defected to the US version?

Yeah. Yeah. I actually prefer, weirdly I prefer, I've always preferred the US version to the UK version, but everybody, I tell that to my family and they're like, you're a traitor. I.

[00:47:19] Omer:
Yeah I had that, I grew up on the UK version and when I came, when I moved to the US I didn't find the US version funny.

And then after a while I find the US version and Steve Corll a lot more funny. And I go watch the British one and I'm like, oh, Ricky, it's not that funny as I remember as much as I remember.

[00:47:36] Callum:
So it's totally different. And I, they've both got the same name. That's the only similarity for me.

[00:47:41] Omer:
Yeah. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work? My kids. My family by far. Awesome. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for sharing. The journey over those 10 last, I guess 10, last 15 years. Congratulations on the Exit, which, which for many reasons turned out to be, the right thing at the right time for the right reasons.

And maybe we'll get you, invite you back and talk about partner io and what you do in the coming year or two with that business.

[00:48:16] Callum:
That'd be amazing. I'd love to be back on. I. Give you the update.

[00:48:19] Omer:
Yeah, that would be awesome. So if people want to check out partner.io, it's partner.io, they can also go to reviews.io to learn more about what we were just talking out there.

And if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:48:33] Callum:
Connect with me on LinkedIn, let's, I'm happy to give out any advice. If you need help with anything, hit me up on LinkedIn.

[00:48:40] Omer:
Awesome, thank you. Appreciate it.

[00:48:44] Callum:
Thanks for having me on.

[00:48:45] Omer:
Yeah. I wish you the best of success.

Cheers.