5 SaaS exits, 100k subs on YT, Book author - [Alex Berman] | SaaS Growth #1

all right hello everyone uh looking forward to this conversation today I'm joined by Alex Bertman who I would class as a serial entrepreneur um a few exits under his belt agency founder SAS founder um and even a book author so I'm sure there's a lot to talk about in this episode and I'm looking forward to getting into it so Alex for those who don't know you could you just give us like a quick rundown of of who you are and and what you do and then we'll kind of dive into it from there sure I'm Alex Berman best-selling author of cold email Manifesto I'm a YouTuber over 100k Subs over there uh blessed to have that um and now we run sasis I run omni.us which is a cold email tool the cold email tool the best on the market warm-up uh lead generation and we write the scripts for you uh I've also done a bunch of other sasses we did tap Leo and tweet Hunter which got acquired for seven figures I was only working on that for three months before the acquisition which is pretty sick and a bunch of a bunch of other stuff we sold lead shark we've done a bunch of uh sasses and now time to uh time to do more yeah that's all I'm doing I'm working on Omni that's my main thing time to take over okay cool okay so I really want to dive into Omni um but I think we would do the viewers a disservice if we didn't dig into some of your past because there's there's so much going on um so how how long have you been like I guess running or operating businesses how long have you been in the game businesses in general maybe eight years um since uh since College I'm 31 right now so I'm starting to get older I started doing this when I was maybe 21 22 of a freelancer I was selling copywriting services to restaurants that was working okay then I got a job in New York custom cold calls for various companies and then working at an agency after that so I've always had side projects and stuff things didn't really start heating up until I was director of marketing at this agency and then they became my first client so instead of promoting me or giving me a raise they became my first client and that was x27 which became our agency and then started growing from there sure so x27 was like your first I guess um venture outside of being like a freelancer is that correct for a successful agency yeah okay okay and is that still going today x27 it's still going at a much smaller level basically now it's starting to become the uh the Fulfillment arm for Omni so basically Omni has cold email side of things but you can also get cold email as a service and x27 is the Fulfillment partner for that plus we have other clients like a couple dozen clients but it's really not the priority for us nice okay that's a interesting funnel going on there I like that um so you've got x27 which is like the Fulfillment arm of omni what other businesses or kind of I guess Ventures have you got going on because I think you're quite active on like YouTube and I saw today on Twitter you're now um it seems like you're now running like a an Instagram page like there's there's so much going on so what's currently taking up like all of your your focus oh yeah at the moment the Instagram page Berman uh family official or birming town is one I do with me and my wife we do like memes and family content that one we're at 1200 followers in four days so I'm just nice I I really think anytime content hits like that it's very sick so some of our reels now have over a million views we've only posted like eight reels so find out whenever that happens I'm like oh [ __ ] [ __ ] do something with it I'm in the in the Tweet you were talking about was it was Berman Town's growth compared to every Burger in Vegas which was my food channel still is my food channel on uh YouTube where I do burger reviews and that one took two years to get to a thousand 100 subs and then the Instagram channel has already gained 60 followers since I posted that screenshot a couple hours ago so you can see the difference in the growth that was the main thing it's like I do a ton of [ __ ] but some stuff is just it's the the whole point is you want to find stuff that hits and then move on from the other stuff of course of course um so with the how many YouTube channels do you have do you like have multiple channels in different niches or yeah so currently active YouTube channels that are publishing uh we've got the Alex Berman Channel which is cold email and then every Burger in Vegas which does burger reviews I'm also doing best meals on Earth which is me and my me and my brother Terence eating fancy meals around the United States um that one's not doing as well uh then we also have a Star Wars podcast with my other brother and uh we have one on watches uh History's Greatest watches those running for about a year um a ton of them bro oh crazy money had over a thousand subscribers that was like stocks and uh making crazy options please that's crazy and do you have like how do you fulfill on all of this do you have like a team that um I guess obviously you have to do the recording but is it pretty hands off in terms of like the post-production stuffs maybe scripting and stuff like that or yeah so the the production process we have down right now I'm filming at our house in Chandigarh so my team's actually over there eating um because we're doing YouTube videos right now for our main Channel um so today we've done I think three YouTube videos and 14 or 15 shorts um so I just grind bro that's what's all about uh content media content that's my that's the thing that fuels me you know some people really get off on uh making cold calls I just really like making content and that's one reason why we keep making more channels is because I haven't been fulfilled Honestly by any of the growth of any of these channels yet so I'm trying to find one burmantown might be the one I'm trying to find one that gets like millions of subscribers because then I feel like then I would be finally satisfied wow okay well so my next question because you do a lot and so my next question was just simply going to be why like why you know there's there's um there's a you know there's an argument for that you should kind of just focus on the main thing and not um I guess dilute that Focus too much but it seems like you kind of are dilating your focus across like multiple puzzles Ventures stuff like that like why is that is it is it hoping you know one of them is going to be the big or yeah I'd be interested to know for me it's it's boredom so what what is it right now with Omni you know like right now Omni is a couple different parts like they're building and they're improving the tool we're generating free trials the sales team is out there you know sending cold emails and booking sales calls and closing deals and then it just comes down to like what am I going to do could I come up with more Omni features sure but our backlog is already you know 30 pages long like there there becomes a time there Comes A Time in every company when it's like more ideas aren't going to help you need the team that you hired to actually do the work and it's the same with almost everything like every Burger in Vegas it's probably time for another pivot but we filmed two years of content uh the Alex Berman YouTube channel we filmed a year of content in a row now we're doing you know every two weeks we're doing content we can pivot it back um but these businesses they don't take a lot of time and what I've found is like what would I rather do would I rather work on one business and then spend 99 of my time on YouTube watching garbage or would I rather work on 30 businesses get fulfillment out of that and still spend 20 of my time on YouTube watching Garbage I'd rather take the second one okay got it okay you'd like to stay busy okay nice interesting um I guess so what's your I think favorite's the wrong word but like what what business gives you most or Venture what one gives you like the most um fulfillment and enjoyment like what's because it must get I imagine it must get like um a bit mundane sometimes perhaps or you know a lack of motivation what's the one that kind of you know gives you energy no they all give energy the Alex from a YouTube channel like we're going hard right now um I was just filming a I filmed a full master class that's going to be the uh the lead magnet for our YouTube for our Instagram funnel which is now running as a separate funnel to all of our other funnels like no I'm super hyped on that I'm super hyped on burmantown because it's a b2c platform that we can use to launch apps instead of B2B platform which is like our Alex Berman brand um I like the book we're writing a whole another book right now I'm uh 11 chapters into the edit we'll probably be done in another couple weeks like no dude I'm only doing things that are that are keeping me hyped up and it's it's the ultimate in um in shiny object syndrome but I also happened to deliver on the shiny objects it's very strange yeah yeah exactly well so let's let's talk about that that delivery so obviously you exited um tapio recently which was like a big exit definitely definitely of like you're on Twitter you you would have heard of it um what other Ventures have you exited from like where have how many times have these side hustles these Ventures ended in that kind of you know that Pinnacle moment templeo was our biggest one so far but we only started doing SAS like a year ago and we've sold every single Sasa we've touched so the first one we did was simple apps which was a group of Shopify apps that one peaked at about 400 a month and we sold it for six thousand uh the next one we did was bought fuse which was a chat bot thing we couldn't even get a single customer for that but we had the the base whatever the software itself sold for ten thousand uh then the next one after that was lead shark which was our lead generation database we got that to a couple thousand in revenue and we actually sold that to the um the parent company of omni for 100k so the investors that did Omni bought lead shark out for monographs and then uh now we're doing Omni um top Leo tweet Hunter um it's one big company Pony Express was the one that was sold I didn't even know I owned tweet Hunter until the day it sold that's interesting what what were like your um before we we move on because man I think I feel like we could spend the whole episode talking about your past um what what were like your roles and responsibilities at Pony Express I was doing growth for taplio so recruiting influencers uh getting logos on the website just basically getting our trials up however we could um and I did all sorts of various schemes for that the first one was a launch campaign we cloned what worked with the Tweet Hunter launch where tweet Hunter had JK Molina you know Leading The Way with his influencer group we did the same thing uh with our influencer group and then added I think 10 to 12 000 in mrr in like two weeks which is pretty sick we basically were like um it was you could get uh taplio plus our course LinkedIn X for free which was worth you know 250 so everyone signed up for that um and I think we generally we must have generated a thousand credit card free trials off that it was insane um wow so I did that uh we needed to get logos for the websites we needed a bunch of Enterprise clients at one point so I just started emailing these LinkedIn influencers and I got us uh Tesla Moody's Prezi uh McKenzie a bunch of these other guys just by Cold emailing um so I did that for them and uh all the marketing [ __ ] you know like I filmed all these videos like all the tutorials and little videos inside of tablet over me I did the vsl for their landing page um came up with the name I got I bought the domain taplio for 700 nice nice nice we love a good domain okay so basically growth that's that's the best way oh it sounds amazing and um I you know I I I'm active on Twitter so like you know I I was watching the Journey of tweet hunter tapio or Pony Express um that was acquired by lemon pie I think they call they call themselves um are you happy with the the acquisition there are some people I S you know have an opinion that perhaps the um the multiple was a bit on the low side but still a million dollars right over a million dollars like is that something were you personally happy with that or do you think um maybe could have gone for more no dude I have mixed feelings I have to I had to hire a mindset coach to get through it imagine imagine thinking you're worth 10 million and getting 1 million or thinking you're worth 1 million getting a hundred thousand it's just stupid it's [ __ ] stupid bro but you know it is it is what it is um you play some hey you know what it was it was the it was the largest play that we've done this far um and I'm very confident in our ability to do it again with Omni and do it 100 times bigger so that's really all that's really all you can do um you can negotiate stronger contracts next time uh and you can just keep moving forward that's that's all that's all you can do with it there's a there's a lesson in everything and sometimes we we talk about that like lessons when we're referring to failures but I think you've gained a lot of lessons and also gained a lot of money at the same time so it's kind of like a golden lesson so I think yeah it's just for the next one like for Omni and for others you'll probably you know maybe do things a bit differently to get a kind of different outcome but I definitely wouldn't see it as like a I wouldn't personally see it as a negative situation I mean like you know what it is is it's it's just like you know we talk about starting businesses we talk about validation and what I what I validated with the Pony Express situation was what I call the the rage method which is research acquire grow and sell right research make a list of companies reach out to those Founders using cold Outreach to try to acquire a piece then grow them as much as you can and then exit you know research require grow exit which is exactly what we did on taplio um and it's exactly what we're doing now with Omni you know I found my Omni co-founders on Twitter the same way cold DM we flew out to Bangalore met with them and let's go the guys who funded Omni have six million dollars a year in other assessments and so they saw Omni as the next big bet for them um so that's that's the main thing that I validated I validated that this model of partnering with people that already have successful sasses and then growing either new senses or growing their current SAS to the point where they can sell works very very well um and if you look at the the deals that we've done so far like the five exits each one has been bigger than the last and so number six should be ten times bigger than the last one so Menominee cells if Omni sells maybe it'll IPO who knows if Omni sells it's going to be bigger than than any of that and then the next one after that is going to be even bigger so that's that's all I'm looking at okay so last question before we dive into only because there's a few things I want to dive into there um so I I don't know perhaps um um I'm overestimating it here but you seem like a bit of an OG when it comes to cold email right um like I've I've read your book uh cold email Manifesto um I think it was either free or really cheap I think it was um and 99 sites on Amazon yeah yeah um and you know for someone who has done a fair bit of cold emailing you know I wouldn't say I'm a Kingpin um you know I used to be an SDR as an employee so very familiar with like the old way of cold emailing and now the new way um and I I learned a lot from it as well um how I I kind of already know the answer to this but I want to dig into more detail like how um impactful has like the power of cold email been for you like it seems like it's opened so many doors um like what are some what are some of those doors that it has opened sure I met the the co-founders of Pony Express via called Twitter DM first of all so we talked about cold Outreach in general uh got us this exit um I got my first job with cold email knowing nobody in New York City I um basically we scaled another lead generation company to over a million dollars a month in like 2017 before it all fell apart I talked about that in chapter one of the book that was all yeah on going to events um so it's it's everything everything you want you know I used to run an animation company and we met a bunch of celebrities using cold email the same way uh helped my brother start up a uh ghost writing agency saying the same thing just emailing famous authors uh so it it really is the great leveler you can meet anybody and you can as long as you have a good pitch for them you can get them to to work with you or at least hear you out which you can't say with ads you can't say with SEO um that's why I that's the main thing I like about cold email and so it helps you do anything you know even with birming town this uh this one when I wanted to grow it you know there's a couple ways we're going to grow we're going to grow with good content we're going to grow with advertising we're going to grow with shout outs how do you get how do you get influencers with 100K plus followers in your Niche to follow you back well send them a really good cold DM that's exactly what happened so it's it's all the same skill interesting okay and I agree I agree I I think it's there's so much um there's a lot of like negative stigma attached to like code outbound I think you know a higher percentage of the population are just like so anti-sales in general um and so it gets a lot of stick but for me it's open a lot of stores too well this is the way I think about it bro let's say Mark Cuban didn't know Bill Gates or let's say like Elon Musk didn't know Bill Gates what's he gonna do how's he going to meet him his assistant is going to send a cold email to Bill Gates's assistant so even at the highest levels the billionaires the richest people in the world are using cold email to succeed you have access to the the exact same tool as them and you're choosing not to take advantage of it because it seems scammy just tell it tell me again why you're smart for thinking that yeah I know I mean sales like businesses wouldn't exist without sales anyway so I think it's um it's flawed um okay so why why did you start Omni I started Omni because I'm just pouring some water in here certainly because I was on the golf course with a meat who was running first principles and we're talking about suchin Patel and I think he really wants to be sujan Patel deep down the founder of milkshake and so like we're just playing golf and I was like you like Sujin you know what he like you know he has a cold email tool and then I mean it was like well I want a cold email to him too I was like all right sick let's build one got it wow okay just like that very spontaneous and he's been in development for a long time um it took us a long time to make it it's been it was started about a year ago maybe a year two months ago so before smart lead came up before um lemless bought us before uh even instantly started like Omni has been in development it's been a very slow process to get the devs uh to get it going but it's fun dude SAS isn't easy yeah yeah and I I want to dig into that because I think there's a lot of misconceptions but let that's interesting so you said it was difficult to get the devs to like move what what were some of the obstacles you faced there was it just but like being one of the first movers you kind of had to create the Playbook or like what were the struggles there oh we pivoted part of the way through so it started as just a normal cold email tool and then the cold email Market evolved when uh when companies like it actually happened when instantly hit their appsumo lifetime deal uh the cold email Market evolved from let's say the Lem list era to the instantly era uh lemless era being one email account personalized all this stuff uh to the instantly era which is unlimited emails unlimited sending so once the market evolved I didn't want to launch a limbless style tool into a market that has clearly evolved on so we had to make some changes there um and then it just it's taking a long time to build these features I don't know I'm not a Dev that's that's also probably my issue I'm not a developer so I trust them I just started sitting in on their uh daily stand-ups now and I'm putting a lot of pressure on them now which I wasn't before yeah they they give you a written update and you're just like yeah sounds good no idea what you're talking about yeah well it's basic stuff like they wanted to do or they have been doing pushes uh every two weeks they've been doing you know their Sprints are two weeks long and you think that's good enough right two weeks yeah every two weeks but then you look at the app and it's progressing so much slower compared to your competitors and then I was looking at their code and I was like what do you guys write code every day why can't we push code every day and they're like oh it leads to bugs but I'm like isn't the main app it's got some bugs anyway how much buggier could it be and then now we're they they wouldn't do daily but now we're doing weekly pushes and daily hop fixes at least like it's just little something they're very they really want some some [ __ ] like in a very specific way that I can't wrap my head around maybe because I'm not a developer um I know for us we need to move fast and we need things I would rather have a buggy app that is fully featured and has uh you know works in the right way uh then have an app that is perfectly lined up but it's you know only 10 of what the market wants yeah yeah interesting I think that's why um it's so important to have like somebody on the product side which is sort of which is separate to the development because um I think really somebody should be setting the vision and then uh the CTO the developers are responsible for like building that that vision and if you have somebody doing both it brings in a lot of like sometimes unneeded complexity um sometimes features and releases that maybe aren't aligned with like the commercial aspect of the business and so I think having that product side is really really important and and sometimes because you're separate from the developers you know you it's I think it's easier to move things along quicker because obviously the developer you know how long it's going to take and that causes friction and stuff like that so I think it's really important to have that product side um how I guess how has it been like operating in such a competitive market you know instantly launched they've been around for like a year now uh smart leads launched um I'm not sure when but maybe last six months um uh you've got tools like maility which it's all very similar in the sense of unlimited accounts like that kind of let's call it cold email you know 0.2 or 2.0 or whatever you want to call it um how has it been operating in that that competitive market it's really three or 4.0 there's been I'm not yeah I'm no historian but there really was like the mail Shake era which was like uh descending called email scripts in low volume then there was the lemlist era lemlist big thing that they invented was the um well they really took our concept of the first line and renamed it the Icebreaker so the more personalized cold emails the hyperize Integrations that sort of stuff and then there's the instantly which is the unlimited sending which I can't take credit for I can just take credit for the lemless the warm-up and and the first line um so how how um how do all these tools survive well okay so the market we're in is called martech marketing technology and marketing technology companies are things like HubSpot and Salesforce and all the crms are martech and what's interesting about the technology that we offer that all of us offer you know instantly smart lead all these guys is all of our apps at the end of the day make the customers money right Omni makes the customers money instantly makes the customer's money HubSpot makes the customers money so the thing that drives us is aggressive sales that's it right does it matter if you use Salesforce or HubSpot not necessarily so how are you going to choose well it's which sales person do you like the best which uh you know SEO optimized articles that you're reading that you like the best and it's the same with cold email tools as long as you have you know the right features like I would be scared if I was mail Shake right now you know falling behind or I'd be scared even if I was limless you know falling behind and missing Market ships but as long as you're in line with what the market wants then it just comes down to whose sales people are more aggressive got it and so at the very beginning I think he said well you have like a sales team um my understanding of omni is uh it's mainly product LED right like people sign up for like an account like self-service um are your sales reps like uh doing outbound are they taking sales calls like how does that sort of growth process look like we're doing outbound um I'd say of course only 20 20 30 of our meetings are outbound right now we're optimizing uh to increase it we get a lot of inbound um from our YouTube channel and everything um right now the way it works is you sign up for Omni you put in your credit card you need to put in your credit card to check out uh the free trial um a lot of people do not credit card free trials I hate sasses like that I haven't had a SAS like that work all the sases I've done they've only succeeded if you do a credit card free trial um and then once you put in your card then you can book a call with the uh the team and they'll help you get onboarded on Omni and then also sell you on the packages nice so you uh you can't use the product without booking a call is that or my you can't use the product without putting in your credit card you can use the product without booking a call we're thinking about switching um because what I think is if you're forced to jump on the phone with somebody and get set up churn rate is just going to drop um the the that's the other big issue with all marketing technology companies because there are so many of them and because they all kind of do the same thing the churn rate on martech as an industry is higher than than average and I know even with taplio I think we're at 30 40 churn rate we're at even higher than that on Omni we're fighting to keep it down so those churns you've got to get those annual packages you have to sell even multi-year deals in order to fight this versus if we were on if we're in any different industry it'd be a lot easier like um first principles the company who is is behind Omni as well there are other sasis in real estate and their churn rate is like three percent and so they're actually doing Less sales per month than Omni but because their churn rate is lower their growth trajectory just looks like it's a lot higher um so fighting in this industry I wouldn't pick this in industry for my next business I know that for a fact I'll pick something boring next time yeah I know what you mean like so as somebody who did retention in staff like it obviously um acquisition sales is the the sexy part of business right Everyone likes those new invoices coming through but there becomes a certain point where if you don't get your churning control like you've just got this leaky um bucket problem and I know what you mean when you're in a competitive market um you're you're offering your offer basically becomes a commodity because they're like well there's like you know 10 other products doing what you're doing that one's cheaper I'm gonna go with those guys and so I think building that human connection whether it be hopping on a sales call whether it be having a CSM who like reaches out to new users and tries to onboard them and make sure they're set up I think that's really and customer support I think that's really like how you stand out I know um a previous Test Company I worked at we were like the underdog it was inside security and so we were competing with tools like you know well these big American tech companies and people would leave them and come to us even though we would be more expensive and you know as a smaller company not move as fast they would come to us just because of the customer support they would say well it takes me 48 hours to get a response from those guys you you respond in 20 minutes and you actually care you're not just palming me off um so I think that human connection a lot of people don't think about that um they kind of just want everything to be automated and not speak to anyone but I think it is the way you stand out and like the community you build around it as well like YouTube and stuff like that I think that's really important um so you've talked about first principles a few times uh they bought um one of your companies so is it fair to assume you've raised investment is this like a um you know is there Venture Capital behind this we've raised it a little bit and we're we're mid-raised so I can't talk about the numbers but we're we're mid-range right now yeah nice okay cool um and how I guess is that from my understanding um Pony Express was was like bootstrapped I don't know about your previous company but you know what are your thoughts on sort of bootstrap versus going down the sort of venture backed way I don't know how I feel anymore bro I think my next one I'm not even gonna have co-founders I'm just gonna [ __ ] sell some random [ __ ] and see at some point you just got to go in it alone and see what would happen um Venture is cool because it lets you play uh at a bigger level than your actual businesses you know like you could be making a thousand a month and spending 20 000 a month which is great you know or like Omni I think we're making 20 something thousand a month and spending you know 14 000 some months and 18 000 some other months like it's cool to be able to spend without worrying too much about it um now we're profitable which is sick um but I like that I like I like the ability to do that because let's say we raise like a couple million dollars you know we can burn they'll tell the investors we can burn like 500k of that on random experiments and still have enough money to survive uh the hardest part for business is the thing that [ __ ] everyone's mindset up a lot of the time but messing my mind set up too is not knowing where the money is going to come in the next month or even the next week um because if you're not if you're worried about where that check's gonna come from next week you're going to be acting in a very short-term way but if you're set up for the next six months for the next eight months for the next like three four years now all of a sudden you can start acting like you're going to be around for the next three or four years which aside from SAS that's the biggest thing I got from the tap Leo Pony Express acquisition I have cash in the bank now where I have a house you know like I have um you know a YouTube set that we're building that we've invested thousands of dollars in like I've got a team now that's doing all this stuff like this is all these are all uh decisions that you can make when you have years of cash in the bank you can't make those same decisions when you only have a month of salary uh before you run out again yeah yeah I definitely see it I definitely see it there's I guess it's Pro you know everyone loves cashing the bank it gives you that security there's something to be said though where you know obviously you don't want to be running like paycheck to paycheck month to month like am I going to make it or not but there's something to be said for that sort of situation where it is you know um kind of survival mode and so that sometimes that um putting you in that position it it can work in your favor but I do agree um you know it's definitely good to have like a Runway and and have a bit more of a safety net you know be able to experiment a bit more rather than every call every bet you make being like um life or death um the thing that put me in that mindset is now now my journey is to make a billion dollars so I'm like and now you know I used to wake up and be like oh [ __ ] how am I gonna make like three thousand dollars this month no I wake up and I'm like oh [ __ ] how am I gonna make a billion dollars so I I just I'm trying to trick myself the same way like my back is to the wall because I don't have the billion yet yeah so I get hyped the same way but the ideas are now different like the sasses that I started the business ideas that I've had now are billion dollar potential or I can't even think about them I don't even entertain them yeah but that that's why these these lessons like whether you view them as negative or positive is so important right because it's kind of it's um transformed you into this person who is now thinking billion dollar rather than 5K a month 10K a month so that's why I think like everything has a lesson um for for Omni how did you get your first 10 users I can I could probably make a confident guess but so we did we I just tweeted bro I I just sent a tweet I was like um what was it uh wanna wanna beta test a new cold Outreach tool like this tweet and I'll send more info and then we got like 100 likes and then I did Auto DM using tweet Hunter and then I just sent them a link to the sales page you know the the access was them putting in their credit card uh and you know we got I think 20 which 50 conversion rate turned into 10 pin customers nice easy Bros especially when it's aligned with the market well I think also um highlights the importance of a personal brand right like there aren't many people who could put out a tweet like that and get their 10 you know especially when you look at like the Indie hacker Community you know people are busting their balls to get their first 10 users and it's like that's the Milestone you know forget 10K mrr and all that stuff um I remember listening to a podcast with it was like steli and Heaton Shaw who do this startup podcast and I remember them talking about like your first 10 customers your first hundred customers there's a thousand customers and me as an agency owner we had like 12 customers I'm like your first thousand customers that's insane but then when you start a SAS you realize thousand customers they'll come to you you know like it's all there in the funnel if you get a certain number of Trials it's right there yeah well that's that's that's why you do software right an agency could never well maybe there are agencies out there with a thousand customers but sounds like a life uh not worth living um just be 2K like um what what channels are driving most of your sign ups now did you say I think you might said YouTube well you know you said most of them come inbound like what channels specifically are they coming from YouTube Twitter and now uh we finally started pushing hard on Instagram and Linkedin uh YouTube Twitter Instagram LinkedIn so it's just our personal brand that's really we don't have very many followers on our corporate Instagram we don't have anything it's just like I make YouTube videos I used to talk about email 10K now I talk about Omni I I used to put the book as the auto plug now I put Omni um things like that you know just just non-stop uh building funnels and things like that interesting so how does that work on Instagram because um I mean I'm not the most active user but I don't see a lot of um B2B companies like trying to sell their product on Instagram because it's kind of a different you know the audience different level of awareness um is it like more of like a personal brand funnel where you're you're kind of I guess pitch in the value proposition of cold email and then it's like well hey here's a tool to do that is that kind of how you're doing that or yeah it's the same thing as YouTube uh very low awareness so you can just talk about actually just like high level business stuff that's going to go that's going to go viral like you know three tips from garyvee or like reacting to this uh tweet reacting to this Tick Tock and then plus like Twitter threads and then you force them into push them into a funnel using some kind of giveaway similar to what we do on Twitter um then they sign up for that and then they're on our email list and then once they're on the email list it's the same as any other funnel you just type them up on whatever you want to sell them that weed nice okay cool got it okay last few questions because when I respect your time here um so what do you think the future of cold email looks like you know there's a there's a few things going on recently um with like warm-up um you know I guess maybe a bit of fear-mongering about like the likes of Google cracking down on it like what do you think the future looks like you know 6 12 24 months from now future could look like the past meaning I think we're going to move away from high volume cold email if if there is a constant race with the spam blockers like yeah sending a thousand cold emails just won't work if Google's machine learning is getting smarter and it is you know all AI is getting smarter and what's going to happen like AI is going to be writing cold emails AI is going to be identifying spam and uh and what's going to happen like uh it's going to stop working as well so you're gonna have to move to other Omni channels the only reason why Cold email works is because a CEO checks their email if they stop checking their email and instead they're looking at Twitter then you're gonna have to switch to Twitter marketing if they start hanging out at conferences and throwing their iPhones in the trash you're gonna have to start going to conferences so that's that's the way to think about it where's cold email going in the future I am still very bullish on it I think cold email is going to be around because everyone still uses email when people stop using email cold email will stop working but everyone still uses email yeah I agree I can't see it going anywhere I can't see the power of cold emo going anywhere I can just see the barrier to entry getting higher you know um yeah like you said as these platforms get smarter to and it's kind of a good thing right they should be fighting against spam right spamming and code even two different things and so um yeah I think just the barrier to entry is definitely going to get a bit higher um spamming and cold emailing are two different things and the line has gotten blurrier with tools like really like Omni as well with the unlimited sending because they make it easy to send personalized Outreach at scale but it also makes it easy to spam and in the past those were harder to come across these were like black hat tools five years ago that you couldn't even buy and now they're just tools that everyone uses it's not like people didn't know how to send unlimited emails and do inbox rotation five years ago it's just they didn't want to do that because it was scammy and morally wrong now it's fine uh so the market just evolves uh that way wow this guy's probably like you know um hitting themselves that they think like well they probably tried to capitalize on it and everyone pointed their fingers at them and now the market has moved to a stage where it's perfectly reasonable that's it that's that's super interesting um what do you think is a common misconception people have about SAS because there seems to be again unlike that I know um Twitter is a very small bubble right Money Twitter even smaller bubble but there seems to be a lot of hype around like starting a SAS company um what do you think of something you know somebody who has started uh still operates and have has exited like multiple SAS companies what do you think of some like common misconceptions that that people have common misconception is it's going to be cheap I haven't spent less than six figures on Assassin yet dude lead shark was a 100K or 70k or something omni's 200k like this isn't this isn't fun dude I mean it's not like funny money like you sit there on a golf course you think this idea is going to be a billion dollars and then you're in 200k in the hole and your thing's only making 20K a month you know and I used to look back and see the people bragging about 20K a month and be like oh [ __ ] that guy's doing so well but when you're when you're slowly inching back your 200k on your 20K a month it doesn't feel the same um so I would say that's a misconception like don't just go with any idea think through the uh the opportunity and how easy it's going to be to uh to start the SAS um and then I would say the exact opposite is also good advice so misconception too is sass is hard uh I don't think so I've had an easier time getting SAS customers than I have for the agency because there's no cold email funnel there's no anything it's like all I'm doing is asking for a free trial that works so much better that conversion happened so much faster than it does to let's say you know get a university to buy an app for 250 000 you know that might take seven eight months uh versus a SAS they might sign up in a couple minutes or even in seconds and they're going to be the same Fortune 500 companies yeah interested yeah yeah I think yeah it's friction right the free trial if you don't like it you cancel whereas um slightly different if you just wired 250k um misconception another third one is on the profit margins people think that SAS is a higher profit margin than agency work but if you're a freelancer your profit margin is 100 you know like you can go do Twitter ghost writing for 5K a month get five clients and make 25k all profit yeah it's not the same with SAS like you've got Amazon web services you have to pay you've got developers you have to pay there's a lot of costs that go into it yeah so most people who want SAS really would be better off as Freelancers you get more freedom and you'd make more money yeah I think just in business as a whole as a freelance because sound sounds great you know being being a big business but it comes with the team comes with the the extra overheads comes with the extra stress um so yeah that's that's some good advice what what does the future look like for Omni you know what how how do you plan to take over the world as we add more features and we get stronger we're basically going to have a tool where you pay us you know 10 cents and you make thirty dollars and anytime you have a tool like that it's just going to be our responsibility for telling as many people as possible about it and uh that's gonna be that nice okay basically Step One is get it working to the point where it's printing money for the customer and then tell as many people as possible got it all right sounds good okay last two questions what um what are two books or like resources you'd recommend to the audience if they like if they want to learn more about SAS if they want to learn more about SAS or I can broaden it a bit more I can broaden it a bit more just like entrepreneurship you know business um succeeding in business succeeding in business so the first one that never really sunk in for me um maybe it's a bad book recommendation there's this book called traction uh which is all about it's by the founder of DuckDuckGo and it's all about the bullet hook framework which is identifying a channel doing Market testing on that to figure out what works and then using that to grow your SAS you don't actually even have to read that book just Google bullet hook framework and grab that chart I just use that chart as inspiration um in terms of inspiring books there's one by uh the Nike founder called shoe dog that is the best written business biography of all time uh will really grip you and then for uh improving a business onward by Howard Schultz the CEO of Starbucks is one that that's the one I've read the most times five six times it's all about how Howard Schultz took 10 years off from CEO of Starbucks and then he came back and all of the stuff that he changed when he came back to re uh ignite Starbucks's growth and I think about that all the time because all businesses are in a constant state of revitalization you know I just had to do it on me with the moving from the twice weekly to the Daily and the more you can do that revitalization the stronger your companies will become and so I highly recommend that second one onward by Howard Schultz nice cool I haven't I haven't actually read that one I've read the others okay cool all right well let's finish it there thank you so much Alex where can um where can the viewers find you learn more about what you're doing well if they're watching this on YouTube they can just go on over to Alex Berman on YouTube we've got over 100k Subs now uh all sorts of free content over there and you get everything you want if you want us to write your cold email scripts you want 38 more meetings this month for free going over to omni.us you get that free trial right there and you get all your cold email Scripts omni.us sounds good all right go check him out and to the viewers if you found this interesting please leave a like And subscribe we've got some more interviews coming out in the coming weeks cheers peace thanks Liam