Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies, and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
This week, I interview a founder who was struggling with his startup.
He pivoted a few times, but just wasn't getting anywhere.
And he noticed that he was spending way too much time on prospecting.
In other words, finding prospects, getting their email address, reaching out to them, and so on.
So he and his co founder built a tool to help them do that work more efficiently.
And then they went back to working on their failing startup.
But eventually they realized that this tool that they had built for themselves was a much better business opportunity than the startup that they were working on.
So they shut down that business and launched SellHack.
And suddenly they started to get traction, in large part thanks to some lucky media coverage on places like TechCrunch.
And within two years, they hit their first million dollars of revenue.
So I hope you like this interview.
All right, today's guest is the co founder of SellHack, an online platform for salespeople that helps them find targeted prospects, build email lists, and verify email addresses.
My guest started his career on Wall street as a broker, making 500 calls a day prospecting for new clients.
He decided to follow his passion for tech and joined Right Media, which was later acquired by Yahoo.
And after spending three years at Yahoo, he left and began his own startup journey.
Sailhack was founded in 2014 and is based in Cleveland, Ohio.
So today I'd like to welcome Ryan o'.
Donnell.
Ryan, welcome to the show.
Ryan O'Donnell (02:12.490)
Omer.
Thank you for having me.
Glad to be here.
Omer (02:14.730)
Okay, so let's start by what gets you out of bed, what drives or motivates you?
Ryan O'Donnell (02:21.290)
My kids, I mean, physically.
And I guess from a motivational standpoint, they're either climbing into bed and waking me up, and then they're the reason I do everything.
Omer (02:35.370)
So usually I like to ask my guests for a quote or something that kind of encapsulates how they think about what they do or what drives them.
Uh, what.
What is that for you?
Ryan O'Donnell (02:48.920)
Yeah, so when I saw this come through in the.
In the interview prep, I was thinking about this and didn't want to turn it into sounding something like, I Googled that.
You know, I picked a quote from the top 50 inspirational quotes out there.
So I thought.
You know, I actually thought long and hard about this and came up with something that I found in a.
In a Deck.
I presented last night to a group of entrepreneurs, and it's embrace the fear.
Act like a hero, not a coward.
Omer (03:16.240)
I like it.
Did you just come up with that yourself?
Ryan O'Donnell (03:20.160)
Maybe put an asterisk next to the attribution?
Because it very well could have come out of, you know, listening to a podcast like this and hearing someone really interesting talk about that.
But I think, you know, as an entrepreneur, as someone who's, you know, just going through life, there's, you know, a ton of fear that.
That comes into play.
And, you know, you'll look at, you know, some of the secrets of.
Of the super elite, you know, military.
When they face challenging situations, the first thing they do is they calm down, right?
They slow their heart rate down.
It's one of the things I try to teach my kids, right?
When something crazy happens, don't overreact, don't react right away.
Settle down, embrace the fear, right?
And then you have the choice of how you're going to act, right?
And it's act like a hero, not a coward.
Right?
And making the smartest choice possible.
Omer (04:09.360)
I like that.
You know, it's funny because this morning I, for some reason wrote down.
And again, this wasn't, you know, my.
My idea or my wisdom, but I heard it somewhere, but I wrote down the words, live life fearlessly.
And I don't know why, but it just.
Just sounded good and it kind of resonated with me.
And it also kind of made me realize that, you know, living life fearlessly doesn't, you know, it's.
It's easy to say, but it's not necessarily easy to implement in your own life.
You know, what does it mean, living fearlessly?
Does it mean you go out and do, you know, crazy stuff every day?
Maybe.
But then I was looking at your LinkedIn profile.
I think, and I think on there, you mentioned do one thing every day that gets you out of your comfort zone.
And I thought, how appropriate.
Just, it doesn't have to be huge.
But even if you just start to think that way, you know, doing one thing out of your comfort zone every day adds up to hundreds of things outside of your comfort zone every year.
So, anyway, let's talk about SellHack.
How did you come up with the idea for that business?
Ryan O'Donnell (05:22.800)
We built this group gifting application direct to consumer.
Failed to get traction on that.
So it was, you know, time to pivot.
So we said, okay, B2C is not working.
Maybe B2B would work.
If we can't get the distribution direct to consumer, maybe we'll go to online retailers who already have distribution places where wedding registries or baby registries are already getting created.
And we'll go to the, to a retailer and say, hey, look, when your clients are checking out online, you know, why not offer them the ability to split the purchase of a gift, increase order value and all that good stuff.
So we were selling B.
We ultimately went B2B with.
So we went from group gifting B2C to B2B group gifting.
And then we added video messaging as like a third pivot later, again selling B2B to retailers.
But in order to get to these retailers, right, I would have to go and find them.
I'd have to find the decision maker, I'd have to find their contact information, and then I'd have to make first contact.
Business development and prospect list building was a huge time suck.
We built cell hack as, as a way to make that a heck of a lot more of an efficient process.
And then, you know, kind of that's what's led us to this point.
Omer (06:40.380)
So were you guys, when you started building that, were you thinking of building that as a product or was it really a tool to help you do a better job with your own prospecting?
Ryan O'Donnell (06:51.680)
It was not meant to be a company, right?
It was, it was build, you know, it was, marco, please build me a tool that, that can, you know, speed up this process of gathering this information and then verifying it, you know, and then he built it.
I was like, all right, this is cool.
So I shared it with a few other friends and said, hey, I know you guys are also running startups.
You might dig this as much, as much as I do.
And then, you know, that's when that, you know, all the kind of viral sharing started to happen.
Someone posted it to producton and to Reddit and all these other kind of distribution sources.
And that's what helped, you know, get the word out to folks that, you know, who were sharing the same problem.
Because anyone selling to other companies, especially B2B and specifically for a startup who doesn't have the luxury of, know, going a traditional path of working with a list broker or anything like that, you've got to do a lot of these things on your own and time's against you.
And anytime you can trade, you know, trade your time for a reasonable amount of money, that's going to free you up to do other things as a startup.
You have to do that, right?
You have to prioritize your time first.
And we just saw, you know, there's a lot of, you know, a lot of startups and, you know, want to focus on how do I keep my burn down and how do I spend as.
As little as possible.
What they don't realize is that, you know, while they might not be spending an additional two to $300 a month, they're wasting six hours.
Right.
And that six hours is a heck of a lot more valuable than 2 to $300.
Omer (08:26.350)
When you were sharing this tool, this was just basically a free, free online tool that anybody could go and start using.
Like, people started sharing it on Reddit and things like that?
Ryan O'Donnell (08:35.620)
Yes.
Omer (08:36.260)
Okay, so at what point did you guys turn this into a business or decide to turn it into a business?
Ryan O'Donnell (08:44.900)
We took two paths internally.
First was Marco, who is, you know, cto, co founder, you know, technical lead.
I said, look, you got to, you know, get us set up for subscription plan for this, and we figured out, you know, what we would charge and how to get all the payment mechanisms in place.
And I said, I'm going to focus on making sure that we're able to run this business first and foremost.
And second, you know, I've got to come up with all the, you know, we've got people on a list.
We got to.
We have to communicate with them.
So the first thing we did two weeks or 10 days later, we sent in.
We sent our second email out.
The email prior to that basically just let folks know what was happening, that we were, you know, working to get things right.
And then, you know, 10 days later, the email went out to the whole list and it said, look, if you want access to this again, we're prioritizing access to folks who are serious about incorporating this as part of their business.
And our plan started at nine bucks a month.
So first access went to folks who pulled their credit card out and made their first payment.
And we were profitable and had revenue on.
On day 10.
And our hand was slightly forced to get us to that point, but you have to adapt.
And that's what we were thrown.
That's the situation we were given, and that's the direction we chose to go.
Omer (10:12.280)
So there's one thing I'm not clear about.
When you said that you started sharing the tool with other people you knew, and then it kind of went a bit viral and people were sharing it on Reddit, things like that.
I assumed it was a link, that somebody could kind of click on a link and go and access the tool and start using it.
But then later.
Ryan O'Donnell (10:33.050)
It was a Chrome plugin.
It was a Chrome plugin.
Omer (10:35.530)
Okay, okay.
And so when did, and then you talked about this page where people could sort of sign up to sort of get access.
So I'm kind of, I'm kind of a little bit confused about, I thought they already had access.
Ryan O'Donnell (10:48.250)
As soon as we took the site down, we left the registration page in place.
We just put up a simple landing page.
Omer (10:53.330)
Okay, okay, okay.
Ryan O'Donnell (10:54.170)
So people sign, you know, people were driven to the site.
You put a little message up that says, you know, I forget what, what it said.
I'd like to go back and find it, you know, something effective.
We're, we're taking a nap right now.
You know, if you'd like to know when, when we wake up and this thing's going again, you know, leave your email address.
Right?
And then we had a bunch of people leave their email address and then we contacted them.
You know, like I said once before, we, and that once, just to try to keep them fresh and let them know to expect something.
And then as soon as we were ready to go 10 days later, we said, look, if you want this, it's going to cost at least nine bucks to get it.
And that's how we onboarded our first couple customers.
Omer (11:38.390)
How much revenue have you guys done over the last two years since you launched?
Ryan O'Donnell (11:42.630)
We've done over a million dollars over the last two years.
Omer (11:46.310)
I think the point, the most interesting thing for me here is a lot of the times when somebody starts out with some or a desire to launch a new startup, there's almost this expectation that I need to have a fully baked idea that is going to be the winning idea that I'm going to go and build into this huge, successful company.
And I need to be super clear about who my, my target market is, who my, the niche is that I'm focusing on.
And what's interesting with you guys is you, you got to a point where you've, you've hit a million dollars in revenue over the last two years, but when you started out, you had a completely different product in mind.
When we think about the previous startup and you had a completely different market or target customer in mind, but it almost seems like that was maybe a necessary part of the journey to get, to get you where you are today.
Ryan O'Donnell (13:01.330)
For, for better or worse, yes, that's, that's what happened.
If I had to do it all over again, and I'm sure in the course of my career I'll be, I'll be in a position where it's time to start again and, and move on to something new.
I think what I've taken away from that is, you know, I had no domain expertise in, in online retail, right?
I had no domain expertise in, you know, gifting or payments or anything like that.
And I really didn't even care about any of the three, right?
To, to, to any degree, right?
They just weren't in my wheelhouse.
I had a lot of things that were in my wheelhouse and what I think I took away from that is I, I don't think it's smart for me in particular and I can't speak for anyone else listening because, you know, there's a, there's a contradiction to every, you know, statement or piece of advice I could offer.
But I am going to focus on, on things that I know, right?
I'm going to focus on problems that I have and solving them, especially if there's an inadequate solution to them existing currently, right?
That's an opportunity.
That's something I know really well.
It's something I can get behind if it's not something.
And like I said, we use CellHack every single day.
That's a plus, right?
If you use your own product, that's even better, right?
So what I'd like to at least offer to entrepreneurs, when I speak to them and they tell me what they're working on, you know, I asked them how much they care about it, you know, what, you know, how does this personally affect them?
And then, you know, I challenged them to, you know, especially if their experience is different, you know, in their career prior to this, you know, what are some of the challenges?
You know, it's easy, right?
If you're, if you're an ad tech, for example, right?
Why would you leave ad tech to go start like a photo sharing company, maybe you're going to have success with it.
But if you're an ad tech and you're doing a specific job every day and you're like, this is the most frustrating, time consuming thing in the world to go in and review these ad creatives and do this or that.
Why not?
If that problem isn't solved, start there, solve that problem, right?
When you solve that problem for people, you're going to learn about what are the other things that are connected to that problem that you could solve next, right?
And then you're going to learn, you know, from that what you could build next.
And then that's how you build your platform and your application and your company, right?
As opposed to coming in and saying, look, I've got this vision for this, I'm going to build this huge Overarching, you know, over architected system and platform.
And then I'm going to go try to find clients.
Right.
I like to get products in people's hands as quickly as possible that solve, you know, the simplest but most annoying problem that they have.
And then, you know, establishing those folks as my early champions and talking to them and engaging in dialogue to learn about what else, you know, what do you do after you do this?
We just solved this for you.
What do you do next?
Right.
What do you do after that?
What'd you do before this?
Right.
What do you do in combination with this?
And that's how you learn about what are the other related things you can build that can ultimately let you charge more for a service and go after more potential customers.
Omer (16:28.460)
So so far it sounds like, hey, it's a great story, it's easy.
But in reality, things are never really that easy when you kind of look under the surface or under the hood.
So I want to kind of explore that a little bit more and sort of learn about, okay, once you launch this product and you started charging for it, what, what lessons did you learn along the way?
And, and specifically I, I want to spend some time talking about some mistakes that you guys made that.
So you sort of look back and say, if, if we were sort of going back in time and you know, do doing the sort of those growth and marketing or sales activities again, I, I wouldn't do it that the same way.
I would do something differently.
So let's kind of go back to you guys are you put the page up and then you launch the product with the subscription plan.
So tell me a little bit about
Ryan O'Donnell (17:25.270)
what happened next from getting this thing out in the world.
It was the day after we, I want to say we did around $500 in revenue that day.
And you know, $500 from nothing is nice.
It's two car payments, right?
And when you have no other source of income and all of a sudden your car just got paid for for the month and it's going to repeat next month because those are kind of month to month renewing.
That's a nice thing.
It's like, check that off the list, I don't have a car payment anymore.
Right?
But, but $500 is, you know, 250amonth.
When you split it between two people doesn't, you know, it's, you're not living off of that.
So we had to figure out, well, okay, how do we get this number up?
Right?
So one of the first things that we did was we took A very manual approach.
And we said, okay, let's go research these.
These 50 people who just took their credit card out and decided that what we built was, you know, valuable enough to spend their hard earned money on.
Right?
And we did it very manually, right?
We found all these people.
We went and, you know, searched for them, you know, online, and we made note of, you know, characteristics about them.
Right?
So where did they work?
Right?
What was their job title?
Where were, you know, where were they based?
Where did they live, you know, what was their company size, you know, and we went and looked in at, you know, try to infer from their organization, you know, do they have direct reports?
Are they using this themselves?
Are they buying it for their team?
And from there, we were able to build our first couple customer Personas.
So we knew that we had a subset of folks who were technical recruiters, they were online recruiters.
We had a subset of folks who were VPs of sales at companies from five to 50 employees.
We had CEOs from the Internet industry located primarily in New York and San Francisco at companies with less than 10 employees.
Right?
So based off of that, we were able to come up with our first few segments.
And then from there, if you do a search, if you go online and you do a search for, you know, CEOs, Internet equals industry location equals New York and San Francisco, company size, you know, 2 to 10, for example, you're going to come up with hundreds to thousands of results, right?
There's no reason why we wouldn't go and focus on other people who were similar to the folks who had already spent money with us.
And that's really where we started, right?
So we started sending emails out and making phone calls and buying Facebook ads targeted to audiences who resembled folks who were our existing customers.
And that's how we started our growth engine.
Omer (20:28.510)
A lot of people, I kind of feel like sometimes they kind of skip this step or try to initially cast the net a lot wider.
You know, although this product is for everybody, right?
So what benefit did you get by creating these segments?
Did it.
Was it really just about targeting, or did it also change the way that you thought about, you know, everything from the copy that you're writing on your landing page to the product features that you were thinking about.
Ryan O'Donnell (21:07.240)
A CEO of a tech startup cares about different things compared to a VP of sales at a Fortune 500 company, right?
They fundamentally care about different things.
And when you speak to them, you need to, you know, and you're trying to gauge their interest or, you know, their intent.
To actually come on board and use your service, you have to offer them different things, right?
The CEO wants to get to their, you know, they're looking to pile on revenue, right?
It's not saying the VP sales at your, you know, that's your publicly traded 10,000 person company doesn't.
But what they're interested in is, they're interested in, you know, how do they help their team, the folks who report to them, their sales organization of 50 to 500 people, how do they help them become more efficient, right.
Which ultimately leads to more revenue.
But fundamentally, these people care about different things.
So by segmenting our customer segments and getting fairly granular on there, we were able to create messages and talking points that when we spoke to either one, we were able to talk about things that actually mattered to them.
And initially we guessed at a few things.
But one of the questions I always ask when I get onto a call with someone in some way, shape or form is, you know, what piqued your curiosity enough to want to schedule a call with me today?
Okay.
They'll answer that question and then I'll typically follow that question up and I'm making notes the whole time that they're talking, right?
Because I want to use their words and I want to look for patterns based on a segment that these folks are in.
I'm looking for patterns that I can, you know, that I can use in the future that's going to speak with the, with the correct tone to my prospect.
Right.
So my follow up question to that, once it's, you know, what pique your curiosity, I'll ask something to the effect of, you know, what are you doing now?
Or, or what problem do you have that you think cell hack is going to solve?
Right?
And they'll say something like, you know, I'm, I'm spending a lot of time building my prospect list, right.
And then my follow up question to that is, you know, tell me about how you're spending that time.
What exactly are you doing?
Right?
And they'll take me through their process then.
So then I know exactly, you know, I know why they're interested, I know what they're looking for me to solve and I know what they're currently doing, right.
And that helps me, you know, both be more successful in the, in the call that I'm on with that person, but also in my initial email outreach or phone outreach or ad campaign creation, it helps me choose the words and frame our value proposition in such a way that is ideally going to generate the highest rate of response to those outreach campaigns.
I think I'll sum all this up by saying initially, you know, we had assumptions about this, but one of the first things that we did for every, every customer that we had, because we had zero marketing automation in place at this point, we would schedule a quick call with them, right?
When I say quick call, no one wants to join an hour long call, right?
Very few people want to get on a half hour call.
We would structure our calls to be anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes.
In fact, I keep that today, the link to my online calendar.
You can only block out 15 minute times, right?
Because I want to like, you know, I believe that we can get, accomplish what we need to in 15 minutes having done this.
But we would schedule calls with folks and then we would ask them, we would ask them these questions.
Now they had already spent money with us, but we would ask them these probing questions to help us in the future with our, you know, with our future prospects, we'd be working with.
So talking to your customer and having a reason and a structure around how you talk to your first few customers is very important in helping you find and then helping you actually close your next 50 customers.
Omer (25:36.329)
So far it sounds great.
And it sounds like you guys have, or you have a, you have a well defined process now for dealing with sales calls and, you know, closing.
But give me, give me an example of one example of things that didn't go well when you were in the early stages of growth.
Ryan O'Donnell (26:01.610)
We would, what we didn't have, we didn't have onboarding in place, right?
And no one wants to be demoed.
I just said, you know, we schedule 15 minute calls to be respectful of folks time where you've got people who don't even want to have a call, right?
They signed up for the, for this product hoping it would do something.
We didn't have onboarding in place because again, this was like day 15 and 16 at this point.
So they'd get into the application and have no idea what to actually do with it, right?
Or how to use it.
And then what we'd see is that the people who would get frustrated that we didn't speak with would end up canceling, right?
Because they weren't getting the value that they expected out of it.
So one of the first moves that we made within the first month, within the first probably 30 to 45 days of having this thing out in the wild, is we invested in a tool that would specifically help with onboarding and some marketing automation.
So based on the action that our customers were taking within the application that would, you know, we would code up some JavaScript and based on whatever action they took, that fired a signal to our marketing automation platform that had an email that went out to them that basically told them, you know, you know, keep doing the thing that you're doing, right?
Find, find more prospects from XYZ Corp.
Right.
Or, you know, said something to the effect of, you know, you know, your, you know, the file you uploaded couldn't be processed because of one reason or another, right?
And we gave them, you know, based on the action that they took in the success or failure there, we had messaging that went directly out to them.
Your credit card's expiring soon, right?
Or, or whatever.
And they took, you know, they took action from that point.
They clicked the call to action in the email that they were sent or in the in app notification.
And we quickly got a lot of these bottlenecks resolved with our clients and that significantly helped our retention.
Omer (28:11.500)
So you make a good point there that putting some thought into onboarding and making sure that you give new customers a frictionless experience to go from sign up to actually getting value out of using your product is super important.
But given that you guys have just been in market for what, 15 or 16 days, I wouldn't fault you for not having marketing automation in place.
So definitely, I think that's one of the things that come with any kind of growing pains of any new business, and especially if you kind of have launched quickly and are growing quickly.
But I want to kind of explore a little bit more about mistakes that you guys made.
Ryan O'Donnell (28:54.040)
Cool.
I've got one for you.
Again, all this kind of follows the same thing.
So we, we would get on a call with our customers, we would try to get on the call with them, and we would ask a series of questions to them.
And I went through some of the questions that we asked of them in terms of what value they think we're going to solve, what they were doing before us, so on and so forth.
But inevitably what would come up in that call is they would say, hey, it would be great if you have this.
It would be great if you had that.
I would use you if it did this instead of that.
What we would do is with our prospects and some of our paid customers on the lower plans is our product development initially was driven heavily based off of unfounded feature requests.
And some of them were or significant investments that basically for anyone, technical.
Nicole.
We incurred a ton of technical debt building out things that we should have never built out because somebody asked for it.
Omer (30:03.220)
Give me an example of one that was particularly time consuming.
Ryan O'Donnell (30:08.180)
I mean, it's a current feature in our product right now, right?
It's called Company Minor.
It's a way where you could take a list of companies and specify a list of titles and essentially not automate it.
From the perspective where we're going to pre fill a bunch of.
We're going to get all this data for you automatically.
But when you're searching for these prospects at various companies and you're looking for the CTO at company A and the CEO at company A and the VP of Marketing at company A, and then you're looking for those same three titles at company B all the way through Company, you know, Company N, for example.
You know, going back and forth from an Excel doc can be somewhat cumbersome and confusing, right?
So, you know, we probably spent a good couple weeks to a month building out a tool that would make that more efficient.
And we have some clients who use it, right?
But I would say, you know, 5% of our clients use it.
It's certainly not something that the investment that we made in it, we've not achieved a positive roi.
The reason we built it was we had a few people ask for it and we didn't scrutinize the feature request hard enough.
We didn't stick to our plan, quite frankly, we didn't have a great plan in place, you know, that we deviated from.
You know, we were looking at, okay, the core application's built, it's in a stable place, it's doing what it's doing, you know, what next.
And then rather than, you know, being really critical of these 10 or 50 things that we could do, you know, we went after one that, you know, randomly was suggested by a few folks within a short period of time.
And, and that's what led our product decision on that specific feature.
Right.
If I had to do it back, if I had to do it over again, I would have said that that's not in our product roadmap.
It's noted.
We'll keep it in mind.
But I would have rather built something.
I would have rather built what we're building right now, which I'm not at liberty to talk about.
I would have rather built that.
Omer (32:33.060)
But it's so hard, isn't it, when you've got, you've got people, and especially if they're already spending a little bit of money with you to when they say, well, hey, you know, if you had this, or whatever, it's.
I think it's Hard to.
To not go and start building that stuff because it seems.
It seems kind of the intuitive thing to do, doesn't it?
Ryan O'Donnell (32:53.220)
It does.
And, you know, some people listening to this might be thinking, well, why wouldn't you do that if you didn't have anything better to build, right?
Why, you know, why wouldn't you listen to your customers?
You know, hindsight's 20 20.
You know, sometimes you don't.
You don't know these things until you actually, you know, do them and then learn from it.
But I think, you know, the goal is, is that anything, especially if someone's asking for something and they're not paying you any money for it, that's an immediate red flag, right?
Especially when they say, well, I will pay you money if you do this.
I like to get people to pay up front.
I say, well, because everything.
What drives our development right now, everything that we build is tied to revenue.
We don't build anything that does not generate revenue for us.
I get a ton of feature requests coming in, things like that.
But everything that we do has to have a bottom line to it, and we'll reprioritize stuff based on the opportunity.
So if I have a big client come to us, like what happened recently, and they needed something specifically built, but this was a $20,000 customer a month.
They were spending 20 grand with us.
So they immediately what they wanted, help to get their feature prioritized.
Where in the past, if you're not holding feature requests tied to revenue, either that you can make across your platform or from one client who's already committed, I think it's really easy to get in this habit of trying to please people, right?
Just because they're the ones, they're the squeaky wheels who are emailing you as opposed to doing the things that are going to help your business go to the next level and making changes that are going to be sustainable, even either sustainable from a revenue standpoint, meaning they're going to keep you in business longer, or they're going to be something you can fall back on in two to three, to five to 10 years because they're core components of your business.
Omer (34:55.090)
I want to talk a little bit about your pricing plans, because looking at the site today, you have standard plans which start at $9 a month and go to $249 a month.
And then you have team plans which go from $99 a month to almost $1,200 a month.
And I'm sure you may have some custom plans there as well for larger customers.
Ideally you want to be having some of these larger plans in place and appealing the attracting those types of customers.
I'm curious how you went from launching with a $9 a month plan to, to where you are today.
And the reason I ask is because a lot of the times people will launch a product and it's really difficult to figure out what the right price is that they should charge.
And I think some people have an approach, hey, you know, even if I can, even if I can get $5 a month from somebody initially, that kind of helps me validate and start to, to get a little bit of early traction and then I can kind of deal with those people and raise my prices as I sort of go along.
Other people try to sort of get their prices a little bit, you know, maybe spend some more effort on that early on.
So when you launched, was the $9 a month plan the only plan you offered at the time?
Ryan O'Donnell (36:25.640)
No, no, our plans have been priced the same.
We didn't have team plans in place then, but they were nine through 249.
Omer (36:33.640)
Okay.
Ryan O'Donnell (36:34.620)
Right.
Omer (36:34.820)
And you were getting people signing up across the board on those plans?
Ryan O'Donnell (36:40.940)
Yeah, for the most part they would start with the $9 plan.
And you know, with CellHack you can, you can upgrade or downgrade your plan throughout the course of the month or from month to month, depending how your needs kind of ebb and flow with prospecting.
Right.
So we set up to be flexible.
Most of the folks started with a nine dollar plan.
When they hit their limit, they would upgrade to the $29 plan.
When they hit their limit again, they would upgrade to the $99 plan.
And then, you know, they'd be able to kind of right size their account based on what they needed.
Okay.
Omer (37:15.170)
And each plan allocates a certain number of what you call email credits, certain number of credits.
Ryan O'Donnell (37:22.890)
So.
So your cost per credit roughly is anywhere from 20 cents to 16 and a half cents.
Okay.
Compared to, you know, the market that we came into and what helped us kind of shape our pricing.
If I'm going to preempt what might be a follow up question from you, we looked at what other companies were charging.
Right.
And we looked at, you know, not going to name any names, but there are some historical list brokers that would charge anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar per contact.
Omer (37:55.930)
Right.
Ryan O'Donnell (37:56.090)
And we said that's way too high, you know, and then we looked at, you know, other kind of technology related solutions and what they charged and you know, we, for better or worse, we picked a price and that Price has worked for us compared, so you can compare it to existing players in the market.
The second thing we compared it to was what's the opportunity cost for someone not to use us and to do.
To prospect and do the thing that we solved manually.
Right.
So it takes, on average, you know, two minutes to get all that contact information that you need to, you know, first name, last name, title, company, email address, phone number, you know, location, address to get all that data.
It's going to take you two to five minutes, two minutes on average, to get all those data points about one person and into, say, an Excel doc, where all the data is in a unique column.
What we found is that if you take base salary, someone's making 60 grand a year.
It's costing that business, it's costing them anywhere from two to $5 per contact for the amount of time that person is spending doing the thing that we solve.
So we figured, look, if we can, if we're charging 10 cents and we're effectively saving our clients, or, sorry, if we charge 20 cents and we're effectively saving them $1.80 per contact, there's a return on investment there.
And what comes out of that is they're saving time.
But those five hours that we're going to free up for them, those are five additional hours that they can spend, you know, on demos, sending emails, working on proposals, helping to, you know, helping to generate more revenue for their company.
Right.
And that ultimately is what has, you know, become our value proposition.
Omer (39:49.910)
All right, it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions, and just like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Ryan O'Donnell (39:56.710)
Oh, boy.
Okay.
Omer (39:59.430)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Ryan O'Donnell (40:02.630)
Shut up.
And in the context of.
And I learned it as a broker, and it was ask a question and then shut up.
Omer (40:12.780)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Ryan O'Donnell (40:15.180)
I don't read a ton of books.
They take too long.
I like listening to podcasts like this.
If I had to read a recommend a book, how to Win friends and influence people.
Omer (40:24.700)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Ryan O'Donnell (40:30.620)
Curious experimentation.
Omer (40:32.620)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Ryan O'Donnell (40:37.060)
My calendar.
I put everything in my calendar.
Personal, professional, even when I want to golf or go to the range or work out, everything lives in my calendar.
I have specific time carved out that I don't care what comes up.
If it's in my calendar and it's that important, that's what I'm doing then
Omer (40:54.740)
what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Ryan O'Donnell (40:58.660)
I would like to build the crystal ball.
That would help me see based on all the products that, you know, based on the product that we're building right now, what I'm going to be working on 612 months, two years from now as we continue to grow.
Because, you know, it's just you always learn new things when you, when you release new stuff to the world.
I wish I could, I could see what that's going to be.
Omer (41:23.070)
Yeah, I'll buy one of those.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Ryan O'Donnell (41:30.710)
There was a trend going on, I think Twitter or Facebook recently that was something along the lines of what are the first seven jobs I've had the coolest jobs in the world?
I was a ski instructor, a camp counselor, and not because I come from a privileged background or anything.
I figure if you're going to make money doing something, you might as well do something you enjoy.
Yep.
Omer (41:55.920)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Ryan O'Donnell (41:59.640)
Kids.
My kids, my family.
I work from home most often.
My co founder shares the same, the same passion, but my kids.
Cool.
Omer (42:11.400)
If folks want to find out more about cell hack, they can go to sellhack.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Ryan O'Donnell (42:22.230)
Ryancellhack.com I reply to every email I get when it's from a person and not automated.
So yes, questions, comments, feedback, anything.
Ryancellhack.com Sweet.
Omer (42:36.390)
Ryan, it's been a pleasure.
Thank you for, for sharing your story and, and your insights with, with our audience.
I, I certainly enjoyed this conversation and, and I wish you all the best.
Ryan O'Donnell (42:49.760)
It's been, it's been a lot of fun and thanks to the folks who.
Thanks for putting this on.
This is, these are, you know, there's been a ton of interesting people that you've interviewed as an entrepreneur, I dig hearing from in this sort of format.
These, these sort of, you know, these stories about topics that, that are important to me or might be at some point in the future.
And then to the folks who are listening, whether it's over your lunch break or coffee or while you're cranking through some emails, thank you for your time and like I said, don't hesitate to email if you've got any questions or comments.
Omer (43:25.540)
Cheers.
Ryan O'Donnell (43:26.500)
Cheers.
Thanks.
