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Bootstrap Past Growth Plateaus (Mike Roberts and Jamie Schneiderman) · Unstuck Pod

• Jamie: Hey, welcome everyone. Welcome today we're joined by Mike Roberts, who's both the, founder and CEO of both SpyFu and rival flow. Mike, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming. Mike Roberts: much for having me. It's been great pre, green room conversation we already had. Jamie: Yeah. No, I loved it. it's been awesome. And I look forward to what we can add for, for the listeners and for everybody. I really want talk more about your business. and sort of let's take a step back. let's look at, why a combination of two things, what is it that you're seeing in the industry? that's gone on why you start? the business and start and build it. Help everyone understand where you're coming, what you do, and then where you're coming from. Mike Roberts: we're of talking about two companies, But they all really under the same umbrella, just two different brands, one company. the main company is SpyFu, ⁓ and you can go to and type in any website and see every keyword that they buy on Google, every keyword that rank for, all their backlinks, their whole SEO picture, and even including AI answers and such. so that's this really sort of source of research. And ultimately, you connect that to Chat GPT and actually execute on, you say, hey, can you make a landing page for me that targets this keyword? Or can you, help me build ⁓ a, a marketing plan, ⁓ ads for, for a particular topic. But... Rival Flow is a company that it's a different product. It's part of SpyFu its goal is to take your existing content and improve it using AI. it just says, what questions your competitors answering better than you are? And then it fills in those gaps with AI. And what that does is it's a very predictable way to move you up the rankings. it's basically just SEO fully automated, but in a way that will never do any harm. you can give this to, your mother-in-law who has a website and just be here, run this, everything's going to work out great for you. and it's this, this bulletproof, SEO workflow that really two, X's very predictably, the actual, rival flow logo looks what we see. and maybe I'm doing this backwards for the camera, but jump. It's a very consistent jump that really kind of crushes it. Jamie: okay, very very interesting, rapidly evolving space, tell me, how did you get here? Why is that the path that you went Why that problem? Let's talk about the journey a little bit because I... ⁓ Mike Roberts: Yes, back in the day, before there was SpyFu, there was no way that you could type in a website and see every keyword that they rank on and that they buy. And I had this, I had this problem that a lot of people have. It's kind of curse of knowledge actually is what it is. I built this product. had a product before. before I built SpyFu and it was called Web Scraper Plus, but I didn't originally name it Web Scraper Plus. In fact, I would never utter the words Web Scraper because what I built was a product that would take data off the internet and put it into a spreadsheet or database. And what that process is called as a nerd is Web Extraction. And I am technically correct. ⁓ To day, ⁓ I still technically correct. It is actually a process. that data nerds refer to as there's extraction, transformation and loading. And that process is called extraction. But when people think of it, when people think of it, when they want to search for it, they call it web screen scraping or literally web scraping. And that's what we call it today, web scraping or web scraper. I was blind to that. In fact, I almost not blind to it, but I was like, nah, that's not right. But it is what people search for. by a factor of 20 X. And what I wound up doing is kind of the oldest school of old school SEO tricks is I changed my product name to match actually that search term. And when I did that, because these were early days for me and I built this product, I'd spent 14 months building this product, Web Scraper. And when I launched I was like, a lot of people, If you build it, they will come or whatever. Right. I launched this thing and I was like, I'm to be rich now or at least fine. But I made $1,500 in sales in say six months. And that was obviously I had to go back to work, but I kept working on that thing. And eventually it was the process of just changing the name that essentially six X to my sales overnight. And that allowed me to actually quit my job. It make me rich, but it allowed me to quit my job and work on it full time. basically question was trying to answer when I built SpyFu was, I blind to something else? there, is, cause this, idea of saying something in too much of industry insider way, you think of like airlines and stuff talking about low fares, whereas people actually search for cheap tickets. Jamie: ⁓ ⁓ Mike Roberts: Cheap flights, cheap tickets, not really low fares. Low fares is an inside, an industry term. And we want to uncover those things. What I did is I built this thing overnight, over a weekend as a prototype. And it turns out a lot of people, a lot of people wanted it. A lot of people used it. And then we built that and that now it's about a $100 million a year industry. And Rival Flow, it's the natural evolution of it. Because if you think of what we're doing, we're trying to figure out what the curse of knowledge is. Well, when we write content, we also have a curse of knowledge. if you're like, you You've got this business process thing and you you understand SaaS, economics and business nobody else, right? Or I've got this friend who's a lawyer and he knows probate law inside and out. But what is easy to forget when you have that much knowledge is that most people don't know what the hell probate law is, that's what flow does. Most of the time it's answering, it's filling in the gaps with AI. That's kind of the stuff that you forgot that you what causes you to rank because your customers are coming to you, not at your same level. Jamie: love it. ⁓ great. ⁓ makes so much sense. Let me, it's You're making an interesting point. want to, I see something similar where see companies all the time talking in their own technical, in their own language, their, technical stuff that they're thinking and forgetting. How do my customers talk? What, what are they looking for? How are they? they're thinking from their products and they're not thinking from that. You've basically said, well, that there's the whole world operates that when you're searching or looking online, you're trying to find something. It's how do we reframe the entire thing to that entire conversation to be that way? it's fantastic. What a very, cool thing. Okay, let me go to the next step, which is okay, very cool product, And I understand where you're coming from the problem that you're trying to solve. who's the customer? who are you? Who are you talking to? Who comes and says, ⁓ I need SpyFu arrival flow now as an sort of add on to that. who are those people? Mike Roberts: Yeah, it's typically marketers and entrepreneurs. also be, mean, marketers can be at an agency or they can be in-house. there's, guess, two kinds of marketers and they have a little bit of a different ICP definition or sort of persona that we deal with, but generally marketers and entrepreneurs. Jamie: do you use your own product to find them? Mike Roberts: do we acquire customers? why did I originally want to the product? It was because I thought maybe there was some keywords that I wanted to advertise on, but ⁓ I didn't know if I didn't know what I didn't know. Right. literally I was like, I could just type in some keyword, type in searches and see if my competitors show up or not. But the thing is, is that even if you see your competitor there, you don't know whether or not it's a successful keyword for them, rival flow shows you, sorry, SpyFu shows you the history. every, it shows you the keywords that they bought and then abandoned. And it also shows you the keywords that they doubled down on. like, ads, in advertising, in Google ads in particular, people will waste money, but nobody wastes a lot of money for a long time. Otherwise you just go out of business, generally you can observe the pattern, do these people continuously buy it month over month, year over year or how much are they spending? And we show that we tell that whole story. We even show you the split tests that they've run and which test one, right? it's a, Yeah. Jamie: think it's great. so ⁓ you and I chatted a little bit we're talking the evolution of the business over an extended period of time. And I'd love for you to share some of the challenges that you faced sort of, and I, call it stall points or call it hitting walls or along the way. Can you describe a maybe some of the things that worked or didn't work for you to go past that point? I'd love to hear more. everyone would. Mike Roberts: SpyFuza, first of all, it's a bootstrap company. I own 100 % of it. And we've never taken any capital. And that's deliberate. And the reason is because at some point I figured out that ⁓ it when that when you are choosing to take capital, you're potentially maximizing the amount of rich that you can get, but not maximizing and potentially minimizing the probability of getting rich, if that makes sense, Because there's a lot of for me at that point, I like, if I could get to like, if I could sell this company for a half a million dollars, that would be amazing. And then I was like, if I could sell this company for a million dollars, that'd be amazing. And then I was like, 2 million, I was like, wait, ⁓ hold out, you just keep going going and going and kind of procrastinating. this idea of either raising capital, because you don't want to raise capital when you don't have a product. You don't want to raise capital when you don't have very many customers. You want to raise capital until you have product market fit. just put that off. And I didn't necessarily shut mind to raising capital at any point. And I also just kept saying, I'll just not sell. And the business just keeps getting worth, ⁓ getting more and more valuable. but there are these interesting points. that you reach where acquisition cancellations equal out. And that's where you plateau, overcoming those things is... inevitable if you keep here's the deal with business right if you position it that the only way that you can fail is if you give up and then just don't give up then you don't fail right that's trick ⁓ Jamie: I love it. Great. Yeah, it's great. Listen, this is great line. That's fantastic. Mike Roberts: and plateaus are that. you see the goddamn plateau coming, that it's happening and have to figure out a way around it. And I'll tell you, I'll just give you a quick life hack, this isn't such a big deal now, but one time. We had a plateau and I was probably about $2 million. $2 million is kind of a typical plateau. Almost everybody runs into a plateau at $2 million I know of. every business, it seems it's a organizational plateau of some form. for us, weirdly, overcoming plateau was a matter of changing our design. kind of ⁓ as technical founder, think to yourself, the last person I need to hire is a designer. Jamie: Yeah. Mike Roberts: But if you're technical, it might actually be the first person that you need to hire. It might be close to the first. Because you might not be thinking in that way. And you might not realize how much of a big deal your lack of design skills are actually costing you real money. that actually was surprising to me. we made it past. Jamie: that point and kept going from there. Mike Roberts: roughly got us to about four or something or five million or something. what we would now call ARR. But then I didn't even know what ARR Jamie: Yeah, There was no term that. I find interesting, we talk about your when you hit talk about your 2 million plateaus, lots of people coming in, there are people coming in buying, right? And you're selling. And it and all of a sudden, it's like, is it there's a little bit of an element of I'm not sure exactly why people are buying from me. I don't know exactly why gotten all the way here. Lots good thinking and lots of good work got into but I don't know exactly the formula. And what takes me past point feels a little unknown. in your case, design, it's something I'm not good at. Something I don't know was design. A different way of thinking ⁓ that really drove us to the next place. Mike Roberts: Yeah. Right. mean, that that a product change ⁓ as to a marketing change. That wasn't the first. I don't think that was that wasn't the first sort of plateau that I got to. Frankly, actually, the first plateau that we got to is relatively early and it was just hiring a marketing person. like we're literally bootstrapping from zero. Right. I literally have. Jamie: Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Mike Roberts: $3,000 in my bank account or some ridiculous, right? ⁓ and and I'm in my house my crappy little sort of 1,400 1,500 square foot track home, me at my living room table and then I ⁓ worked my way to buy a different house and people in it and then this is real close to the edge kind of stuff Jamie: Yeah Mike Roberts: The SaaS business by Foo launched to about $20,000 a month. And we kind of hovered in this sort of 30, $40,000 range. Then I did hire somebody dedicated to marketing and like, it had a lot to do with making our email a bit more sophisticated to get past to get ourselves that really quickly took us to something a $75,000 a month, and it's weird right now you think in terms of millions of dollars in ARR. At the time, I definitely was thinking in terms of dollars per month. Boots shot thing is amazing, man. Jamie: Survive lot of what you're talking about. I love it and agree. I get it and I've seen I've so much of it. So let's jump a little bit to where you're at right now. ⁓ Mike Roberts: Mm-hmm. Jamie: what's going on with you right now. And if I could peel back the, for everybody, it's just the two of us. No one else is listening. ⁓ just ⁓ all the let's talk a little bit about what's going great on the business over the last 12 months. Let's talk about what's maybe the biggest challenge that you've over the last 12 months. Just give me a picture of where we're at today. Mike Roberts: So everybody in our industry is meaningfully impacted by what, and mean by everybody in our industry. I'm not talking about me and my competitors or whatever. I'm talking about everybody that ⁓ on Google for traffic, Everybody. is meaningfully impacted by AI overviews, sort of no-click searches, et cetera. we rank on a lot of keywords and have historically ranked well on a lot of keywords on Google. we lost a lot of our clicks, a lot of our clicks, not from any kind of a penalty, but because now those things are getting answered by AI overviews. And at some point, that impacted our acquisition by 30%. So. Yeah, that's a meaningful change, we battle way around, we sort of work our way around it. And it's kind of like, there's a certain solidarity to it. we help our clients solve problem, we solve the problem ourselves. It's something that impacts the entire world, the entire industry. There may be some winners and losers, some winners in this game. that I'm not quite aware of, but in general, most people have lost clicks. we try to help people. We try to help ourselves. We've moved the needle quite a bit ourselves. probably back to about a 12 or percent loss year over year, it's a big number when we lose traffic. It's large. We have a lot of ⁓ customers. Jamie: And is it? yeah, I was going to say but I the loss of clicks everyone's feeling the pain? that mean like, as you said, that mean that more people running as potential customers looking for solutions? Is that the benefit of that kind of problem? mean, Mike Roberts: It's of, no, no, we don't, actually, haven't gotten more customers in the last year. ⁓ lost, not, we've like, we've had net, we've had some net loss, know, net loss I'd say, because we have fewer customers coming in the door from, from, from our biggest source of acquisition. But it's not like, it's terrible. It's just that it's, It's just that it's flattened our growth curve. we're probably, we're probably ⁓ in similar boat. It's literally everybody actually is ⁓ as as I know, has the same, has had the same, has had the same thing happen to me. It's watch it happen in your own Google search console. And then you claw your way back, but, and we're, on our up on that. it's all good. Jamie: Okay. Thanks. Okay, no, that's great. Okay, then let me throw a thing. if you could wave a magic wand and fix the biggest problem that you've had, sounds I have an idea of that. What would that look like? What would that be? Mike Roberts: Well, here's the thing. Acquisition. If you of SaaS products two sides of a spectrum. right? I actually think that things kind there's two types of software products. I mean, there's a lot of different sides of SaaS products. But one side of it where you have an acquisition advantage and the other side you have a retention advantage. And products are baked this way to some extent. for example, you don't sign up for email provider very often, but when you do, you almost never cancel it. Therefore, email providers don't think about It's not something that they have to think about because it never happens. Even if Jamie: Mm-hmm. Mike Roberts: you have a CC decline, that CC decline is going to get solved by the customer because they just lost their email if they don't solve right? So, and that there's, If you're a CRM provider, if you have you're hosting a website, there's a whole set of things that are that on that end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum would be things where what you're selling is like, let's say access to a class or something Jamie: Mm-hmm. Mike Roberts: You use it, you're done. What's your purpose ⁓ of staying, around as a SaaS customer? SpyFu as a research product is someplace ⁓ on let's say, the left side of that spectrum, right? the high acquisition, it's got an acquisition advantage because we can just say to you, hey, Jamie: Yeah. Yeah. Mike Roberts: Did that your competitors are doing this thing? they're buying some keywords that you're not, and they're making on them. Would you to see what they are? Hell yeah, you want to see what they are. You want to see what they are. And you come in and you get it. And you're all right. You might even feel some gratitude. you might stick around for a while just from being like, man, that was sick. I was the most amazing thing I've ever seen, but standing it alone, there's not much reason for you to stick around for a very long time. Right. Jamie: Yeah. Mike Roberts: what do or what we always have to do, what we need to do is basically take that inbound acquisition advantage. sorry. Let me flip back to the other side, the right side of the spectrum. The challenge with those companies that your cost of acquisition is high and competitive. it's great because you've signed somebody up for $10 and they're $10 a month and they're going to stick around for 10 years, You're going to make $1,200 in LTV on a $10 a month customer. With SpyFu, somebody might sign up. We might make, let's say on a $10 customer, we might make $110. We don't charge $10 a month, but it's a different... It's a different economics. The thing is, that if you, you if you look at how much people pay to acquire a, email customer, right? An email sign up, you have to pay a lot. You have to meet that person at that one point in their life when they're willing to switch. Jamie: Yeah. Mike Roberts: And then you have to probably pay a huge amount to get them. And maybe you even have to pay to onboard them. You might have to hold their hand in onboarding. you're not going to break even on that customer for two, two or three years. And those are the types of companies that don't work well for bootstrap, They work well for venture backed because damn good and well, if you can acquire those customers, you're going to double or triple your money on the law in the longterm. Jamie: Right. Mike Roberts: on that customer easily. even if you pay three years, you're probably going to keep them for 10. But you need a bucket full of cash to acquire as many of them as you can in order to have a reasonable, a reasonable business. Because you're, what are you gonna do? You have $100,000 in the bank. Okay, I'll acquire $100,000 worth of worth of email, email signups, email vendor, whatever they're called. And, and I'll break even in three years. Jamie: Yeah. No. Mike Roberts: I'll have my $100,000 back in three. That's not good. Doesn't work out. So those are the end these where you require, venture capital. we can't just basically say, let's become one of those. What we need to do is take the acquisition advantage that we have and then turn the customer into a long-term customer. Railflow is a workflow product. It works out better for us from a long-term perspective. We've got some baked in products that do well. Jamie: ⁓ good. Not so helpful. ⁓ Mike Roberts: keyword tracking and on. But we continue to build those things out. And the company in space that there's a company our that ⁓ out executed us that did great job of that actually, SEMrush. What they do is they bring you in and convert you and convert every customer into ⁓ longer term SaaS products. And that's model that works. Jamie: it. Mike Roberts: that works well, comes across as nickel and diming to the customers. we, we, we generally. try to not do that. I don't always want have surplus value. My customers will always have surplus value, right? I always want to leave more money in their pockets and make them feel they have gotten more value. And it's, we don't want to do things are manipulative or in any way take advantage of people. So, And to some extent, some companies do, we don't, we don't do that. that's the best way to improve our product is to continue to, kind of like, build out these. These value creating things rival float does a fantastic creating repeatable value based on agitation, essentially your competitors beating you, this is a bad Let's help you out. And we literally solve their problem. Jamie: Okay, this is. ⁓ Mike Roberts: But it's hard to come up with those ideas, frankly. It's hard to come up with ideas that work well, that actually serve the customer. But, I've got a few. Jamie: Yeah, no, I'm sure you'd I clearly you do you clearly have have lot listen, I think what's interesting here is you're talking about sort of the latest evolution of both the market talked about what's happening with with search talking about competitors coming in and sort of splitting, I say splitting products or splitting flows in terms of trying to maximize both acquisition and retention. you've gone through multiple cycles of how to think through, both solving the problem for the customer, but also how do you keep, I say the business, cause I think that's, people use terms a pivot. it's too harsh. think that evolution and, adjustment, It's a constant game of adjusting and modifying get yourself, to the right place as you go. it's been great. You've been great with your time. really do appreciate it, Let me, one last question I'd love to throw your way that just maybe, if you don't mind, oh, just for the folks who are listening, if there's one piece of advice that you'd give them around just as they're thinking about their business and as they're thinking about the process of, evolve evolution, would you think about it? How would you get to think about tackling that and approaching that as they as they go forward ⁓ in of continuously growing their business? They're starting but then there's what now what now what now we've been doing 20 years right Mike Roberts: I'm a data, a big, I'm, I'm really into data, I love data. I understand it and can imagine like industries out of data. I've invented things with large amounts of data, right? what I've come to understand is, is that, that quantitative analysis kind of can, especially early, can mislead you quite a bit, Especially if you're not an ⁓ absolute of your own processes and have many ways of triangulating your truths, right? You have to be able to say, if I'm use data to get to one conclusion, I need to be able to get it. you always think of like, in an arithmetic, as a third grader or whatever, you're okay, well, if you can add it, can you also get to the same solution by checking your math, subtracting or multiplying and dividing? So, but you want to be able to come to a conclusion about is this, is this particular thing that we're doing causing more customers to sign up or causing more people to cancel or whatever. But you need to be able to approach that from more than one data point or starting point and get to the same conclusion. And you have to be skeptical of your own ability to not guide the process. Okay. the one, one sort of antidote to this or sort piece that really can be helpful is just talking to customers. Okay. That seems really obvious, but it's hard to get customers on the phone. If you can't. Jamie: Yeah. Mike Roberts: I using, a lot of people use GA and stuff that, but I recommend using Microsoft Clarity and just watching people do the things, right? one hot fricking hack that I have lately, To try understand why people would cancel is to go in and watch them cancel. I would have never thought of it for some reason, like, you always think of watching, what I'm talking about? in clarity, you can watch people click and you can watch them fill out forms. You can watch them go through all the steps. ⁓ you're watching them use site. I've actually not ⁓ actually thought for some of watching people cancel. Call me an idiot. I just never did. but if you watch a ⁓ it's not we I've watched people sign Jamie: And you're watching them cancel. Interesting. a great, not a fun watch, but yes, useful, ⁓ Mike Roberts: I've watched them go through the onboarding. watched them do all kinds of things to activate, but I've never watched them churn. I can learn where getting frustrated and then they cancel and like, I can kind of make some inferences and they're not that difficult leaps. you can see somebody having a bad, if they have a bad experience and then they cancel, you're like, I should probably figure out why that bad experience happened. Jeez, man. I've been doing this for 20 years, dude. and for some reason I haven't thought of like, and these sort of mouse click things have existed long before clarity, but I never thought to watch people cancel. And anyway, I just did that like, let's say two weeks ago or something. ⁓ Jamie: Amazing. You're learning, it's you're learning. When I say learning new things all the time, there it is. There's brand new love it. Learn, ⁓ live and Okay. Hey, listen, I think it's fantastic. I think it's amazing me. sit with, I sit with companies. I sit with founders all the time and you're having a conversation all of a sudden. They're like, I never. Mike Roberts: I'm the biggest idiot in the world. Jamie: there's ⁓ super smart working their asses off and all of a sudden it's I never thought about that. here you are saying I never watched anybody cancel. Mike Roberts: I mean, don't get me wrong, I have quantitative data, a shitload of quantitative data that tells me any reason why somebody might cancel, but I've actually never watched them cancel, ever. Jamie: Okay, I, this is the, actually the last question. And here's the important thing. You have people listening and they want to find SpyFu ⁓ they want to find Rival Flow. Please tell them how they can find you, ⁓ to you and, know. Mike Roberts: Totally. Yeah, you go to spy food.com. And one thing that I want you to know is that you can SpyFu for free. you can type in your own website, you can type in your competitor's website and all of the main stats stuff at the top, how much do they spend on Google? How much, how many, how many, how many keywords do they rank on that kind of thing? That's all right there for free. And you can use it pretty much. It's a public utility of the internet, It's the only one out there that you can do that with. There's no other competitor that we have. got before there was SpyFu, there were no competitors that did this. We've probably got 20 competitors or something that basically do exactly what SpyFu does at some level. It's copied many times. And... I think they're all walled gardens. can't really, you have to at least create an account with SpyFu. Use it all you like. And SpyFu, you can just remember SpyFu, you can get to Rival Flow, You don't have to memorize Rival Flow necessarily. SpyFu is easy. It's Kung Fu, but how 007 might do it. And you can find me on LinkedIn. a... Mr. Spy, M-R-S-P-Y. I'm pretty much Mr. Spy everywhere, but also you can just search me up on like, Mike Roberts of SpyFoo. there's a lot of ways. Jamie: you Awesome. Well, Mike, thank you very much for your time. This is great. Really appreciate it. And guys, thanks for watching. we'll see you in the next episode. Thanks a lot. Mike Roberts: Thanks so much. great time.