$90k/mo With Software-Enabled Outbound Agency - Ryan Doyle at Sales.co

all right good stuff so we're we're just rolling live here um keeping it raw um so today I'm joined by Ryan Ryan I came across you uh I think on Twitter I think I've been following you for a while I'm not sure maybe you were like on Indie hackers or you're kind of you're kind of in like um what I would call SAS Twitter um been following your journey for a while um but for those who who haven't heard about you like what's your current situation like a bit of back ground and then we'll just like dive straight into it absolutely so I was a Salesman for tech companies I spent a few years and nights and weekends teaching myself to code August 2020 quit my job moved back to my family's Farm trade in labor for rent started building software that I wish I had when I was a salesperson built magic sales bot at the end of 2020 which was like the first GPT cold email copywriter um that got some fun fing that got some customers what that is eventually rolled into end of 2022 is this thing that's now sales.co so we are a Agency for lead generation but it's a tech enabled service my partner and I were developers we build all our own software and we use it to get leads for businesses in a different way than they're used to nice yeah yeah I funny enough I actually remember in my memory there are tweets of yours of like a ranch a farm or or something um so that that's that must be that okay and if you're comfortable like where are you at in terms of growth like doesn't have to be numbers like are you like early stage are things going well like how how are things looking so we are six or seven people we just hired somebody um this week extra we are at roughly 75k mrr and I say roughly because uh like in December like we did like a 90k month or 95k month but um we've been kind of at that level for six months or so and like there are some definite things to figure out at this level um we grew really quickly and we tried a bunch of different business models and now we're just trying to figure out like how do you get people the maximum amount of value so that you can start charging more bringing people on great stories um and that's a lot of work yeah so in my mind um like how how I've viewed your journey was yeah I remember you build an a SAS product and then I saw some kind of pivot to the agency but really it seems like you just kind of merged the the two you know what yeah why did why did that happen why did you sort of switch to this way of delivery so when you sell a SAS you sell it for 50 bucks a month a lot of times as an indie hacker and most Services really aren't priced below like $1,000 a month so there's a there's a desire to get towards High buyer ticket stuff right so I was doing sales for my products but I'm making 50 bucks a month every time these people they're saying every time you know I get great data this is great but like I'm just not getting leads and so you could really see in there a desire to get the end goal and I say to myself okay well why don't we just sell the maid service we'll clean your house instead of saying you know let's sell you a mop and a bucket um all all we're having done is somebody to use the tools that we've already built really with some strategy and that gives somebody what they want and now they're willing to pay 20x what they would have paid for a software because at the end of the day all they want is the result right yeah that's interesting I think we're going to see a lot more of that I mean there's there's it's already happening like um uh Nick Abraham over at lead bird similar model um I know my mate Ryan from Pitch Lane he's yeah yeah they're they're like doing something similar um as well so I think we're going to see the more people adopting that um because like you said software agency the people might care to a degree but really they they just want you know the the end destination and and how that's delivered they don't care too much um so yeah completely get that um I agree and and Ryan like builds a he built a great s um video prospecting right and so I met him when he was out here in Bali met him in Bangkok once um just the Indie hacker hubs and uh we just talked about like look it can be so simple like what if you potentially did this um just for a company and I think that they were already doing something like that but like glad to see they have success because I think that more Indie hackers would succeed If instead of building an amazing front end they would just say all right I've got the back that delivers the thing I'll reach out I'll get you the result and I'll just use the software I built start there earn some cash and then find a way to automate yourself out of existence but um you know you see too many Indie hackers just stuck not able to get something off the ground because that user isn't getting the end desired result and and that the Builder thinks that it has to be SAS yeah yeah yeah just the the product is is is the entry point right they still need to get whatever desired outcome they have um this is why you know Enterprise SAS companies they have entire teams like customer success teams who are responsible for people actually using the product you know they get them to adopt it and keep them accountable um are you because I I I believe you have like a co-founder are you like the the technical co-founder or are you more on like the the Marketing sales I'm more sales support success strategy and my partner J jaob greenfeld is handling a lot of our infrastructure our data we're also in two different time zones he's Europe I'm Asia and so I can handle a lot of our Asia team he can handle a lot of the Europe team nice nice yeah I was actually thinking I'm traveling around Europe at the moment I'm in Montenegro right now and I think Ryan's in barley and I'm so tempted to to try out barley but the time zone is it's something I'm scared about um okay sorry go on no no no I mean come out see if you can make it happen if you do calls like twice a week and you want to do them at like early morning or late night I think the lifestyle is worth it yeah but at the same time don't come here we don't need any more people yeah I know I know I'm I'm sure there's enough um tourists there already so I've heard um H how does how does this change like your your long-term goals like for example you know go goals differ right but typically the the SAS path is you know build a software product build some kind of Enterprise Value um you know some predictability and you know um either raise investment or have like some kind of liquidity event um whereas when you go to more like service the service based side of the spectrum that Enterprise Value is is a lot less and so is is this delivery model like you know um something to to get that cash flow and and then go back to software or like you know what's the the long term in a way yes and let me answer that by taking a step back so think the transition from SAS to service when we did this as early Founders who were looking for their first real hit we could take that value prop from hey I can help you write emails six times faster to I will give you one to four meetings per week and that is a very real result we were able to transition that to right and and then how we could Market that as since we were doing the work we could show Twitter we could show whatever results so we could put up a screenshot of an email look at this meeting that we just booked with Amazon or HP or whoever since we own the endtoend process we were able to show that now that we have that end to-end process that we're able to be in this zone of the whole process itself like those two things there we can make SAS wherever we see fit we could acquire SAS where we see fit right now one of our pain points as an email sending platform instantly they make cool features but we just want the core experience to be right so in a theoretical World Imagine That we replace an instantly with something that we build we get to this SAS someday now we can tell stories from using it in our endtoend ecosystem so it's not just we'll help you send emails at scale it's we use this tool look at these amazing meetings we're generating with Amazon and HP it can be that good of a story and um like we know the problem very very uh intimately because we live it every day so I think that it is a better way to get into SAS long term because we have Capital to work with we have the problems to work with and we can really tell a story when we get into SAS the idea being like B2B sales very interesting space very needed very full of charlatanism um old school thinking weird new school thinking a lot of focus on volume and not quality not humans and we think that there's a way to carve out being like this B2B sales Disney almost where like you ever see that Walt Disney map where he's got like Disney movies Disney park you ever see this yeah something like that we've got the main service there's the auxiliary Services there's the tools that support that service that the public can use that's the potential for this in the future I feel yeah yeah yeah that's massive sort of um building your own ecosystem it's funny yeah because I think in um instantly situation the the reason why they built the product was because they were running an agency and they needed something better they needed a better sending platform so it's kind of funny how it's like evolving um and what what's so you mentioned there about like sales from from an outside perspective it looks like your model is very uh like low touch like I I think it's changed now but I remember your old website it was just like very very simple I think it was like I I don't think you could even scroll or something it seemed like you fill out a form and then like somebody got in touch with you or I think you were offering like a free loom video my my mind's a bit blurry but um different yeah from like the buyer perspective you know do they still have to hop on a sales call with you do you just send them a stripe link like what does that look like yeah so what it looks like now is you can schedule a call directly from the page we'll qualify you from there and we'll get on the phone if it works then we send you an email what I mean by works is if there's Mutual fit send you an email with everything you can expect from us and a link to get started we try to make it as simple as possible like one real path we're cold emailing for ourselves we're getting noticed inbound from things we put on Twitter when people come to us I think a lot of people think like well you know I could have this ad I could have this podcast I could track the UTM through all this I could really figure out what my key acquisitions sources and I could have like eight customized onboarding paths we'd rather just be simple you come to our website you know that we do cold email for you here's what you can expect here's the happy customers want to talk if we talk here's how you start if we decide that we want to work with you we're not going to charge you until we start sending that removes some of the risk from you we collaborate and slack so we have humans that are actually managing the relationship uh based in Western Europe and I think it's just low touch on like the actual manual work that gets done and so much of what we've done is build software and automations so that a team member can set something in motion receive a result check it take a look at is this going to fit the client's use case put it into play and then get some automated reporting on like is was this good was this bad um that's where the automation is cool yeah yeah cuz yeah it looks like a lot of the delivery is software based but it's cool to see you like sprinkle in it into like the the customer experience as well because that in my opinion is the number one pain in the ass of like service based businesses is uh very um uh human intensive you know you have to it's very manual and it just very inefficient um which then impacts all kind of things Downstream well Liam I think it like I think it goes back to something we mentioned a few minutes ago which is Indie hackers will put a front end on something when really they'd be better served getting a backend out fast and trying to sell the result to people using the backend themselves as manual labor and it is human intensive and I believe that is necessary if you want to build a long-term viable business because you are going to learn things but what it kind of looks like is yourself and then a human zapier and then some automation you know you do it yourself and then maybe you have an executive assistant do it like a a human zapier plug data a into Data B you do that enough you figure fure out what needs to be coded and and then you can automate it away um but too many people skipped the automation step without trying to figure out what the actual use case is which only happens when you've sold it a certain amount of times yeah yeah yeah absolutely understand yeah like understand the problem you're solving first and then like try to um automate it or or scale it um experien that many times um from like experience in the context of CA I've always found that uh um the most successful cold Emil campaigns are really due to variables outside of the campaign and what I mean by that is like the market that you're targe in uh the product you know you're you're trying to sell um the social proof that company has you know the brand Affinity all these all these sort of what I would class as like external variables that typically as a service provider um you know you don't have much control over in in your situ where it seems quite productized you know how do you cater to to all those external variables do you kind of have a very strict ICP or do you also help out with those other areas yeah so on two levels first the ICP it is a case of the rich get richer so if you have a product that has some social proof if that product can be correlated to a revenue increase or a cost to decrease you're our type of person and when you talk to an IT provider a consultancy a devops tool they're very Downstream from revenue creation or cost savings and so it can be hard to say hey X want to try our product we'll make you 24% more Revenue next quarter that just doesn't really align so if we can tell the story to anybody of listen we're this marketing platform we are this Hiring Agency whatever and we can give you the same result you expect now or more of a result at a reduced cost that is a great story to tell um and then we also just want to know like are you handling leads because if we pass you Amazon level leads and you've never been on a sales call before or you don't know how to to follow up or you don't know how to like consultatively sell and get a Buy in from somebody it's going to be worthless to you so that's the two things we really look for on the ICP but then on the other side there's like the three kind of campaigns that we run so if we have one of these companies with a great story to tell were either going after a big mature market like they understand this very well what we would call a total addressable Market approach how many people are in this market how quickly can we email all these people can we set them up on some sort of cadence and then really invest in like iterating overtime on copy to get in front of them the other two sides of this are really around like growth stage companies where we're either doing something slightly custom or we're just experimenting with a new campaign every two weeks to figure out like how are we going to tell your story because you might have like one story we help this cool brand increase Revenue like this but you think it's applicable in fields one Fields two and Fields three like Telecom cpg and um mobile apps and so we'll try something in each of those trying to figure out what's the story to tell and the end result of that is you as this earlier stage founder Now understand okay people in the Telco space respond to my offer when I say this and it's this role I can now use that in LinkedIn advertising spin up a landing page on that great let's try to figure out cpg now and I think that's useful sales should inform products sales should inform marketing so a bit of a ramble but I felt like there was a lot there no no no useful yeah I think this is the um the sort of uh the key to unlock building a company like this is you really need to like break everything down into its individual components like you know you need to know who your ICP is what problems they have what type of campaigns are you gonna have to create for them because to create systems for those campaigns you need to have some repeatability right you can't everything can't be like I'm sure there's like a a human element where you you know you tailor the approach but um for your own scalability you really want to break everything down into systems that can be replicated by like uh team members so know it it makes sense to me me um and it's what I've seen like um just through speaking like with Nick Abraham like what he does where there's just a a system behind everything um obviously I imagine you have like custom software uh you know um behind the scenes but what's like your go-to Tex St in terms of like you know how are you getting your leads how you sending your emails uh how you personalizing those emails like be interested to hear that yeah so sending instantly um though that may change soon um if we can ever build something of our own when it comes to finding leads that truly depends on the use case we might start with a custom scrape and then you typically enrich it through like an Apollo uh a zoom info something of that nature and then run it through any number of verification tools because those those data providers aren't always showing the best data that part is super boring except for the interesting scrapes um when it comes to personalizations so um I mean hack you combine me and my partner and we've been doing GPT personalizations in cold email for um years and I'm just checking if you can hear me I think the connection lapsed for a second but yeah years on personalization stuff and um I think what didn't work in personalizations before was that you were asking GPT to write an email and it'll always write an email like GPT wants to write an email when you own the endtoend process like we do we can feed back into a custom model what has generated positive responses and now you can start to write emails like a successful campaign instead of just what GPT wants so that was like a a cool thing to figure out um beyond that we do a lot of custom stuff so custom software for the personalizations custom things for like when a lead responds to something getting that data into our client's hand faster um custom software for reporting custom software for automating tasks for the team and a lot of this is just again like backend scripts fed into air table uh which is what we're using for task management yeah interesting yeah similar similar setup to what I've I've heard other uh people in your situation use are you um are you using like intent based signals like website visitors uh job posts that sort of stuff yes those are some things that we scrape but with the pure intent based signals like a bombora provides where it says it'll show you who has been Googling let's call it retail Solutions or point of sale solutions that data is just horeshit and sorry if you're not allowed to swear on this podcast but it's it's just pure BS um yeah I've worked with it for years like since I was in corporate sales and it's just it's never told the truth people are always like I don't know where you got this data um I remember so like bom Bora is like 30k a year and I remember I didn't want to deal with that back when I did this and I scraped all the bombora data off of crunch base and I emailed all these people you know tens of thousands of companies and I didn't get like one positive response from any of that it was just the data was just such BS um especially since covid because they can't align IP with user search they used to say we know that Amazon is headquartered in this building any searches that emanate from that IP we can associate to them then people started working from home and now how are they going to do that so it just kind of failed interesting yeah yeah it's it's not intent data isn't the H Mary but I think there's like I've noticed a lot of innovation happening in that space um just so many products being built that you know offer the the intent signals and so I'm interested to see how um what becomes like accessible um to to the average company over time on that note like with everything that's been happening over the last year two years you know tools like instantly coming out smart lead clay.com um you know what you're doing here combining software and and the service for like what I'd call like the modern lead generation agency like where do you see the future of cold outbound particularly in the context of like you know your your your like average company that have teams of sdrs you know not not like your agency but maybe like larger software companies and stuff like that who have been really using the old model for for so long so maybe this is a slightly different take but I think that if these teams have sdrs are going to be successful the most successful ones are going to become more human not more automated and I say this because everyone has access to GPT now everyone has access to easy sending tools and people are going to catch on at some point that this is not the the vibe like it can be quite it can be very fad centered oh this is a great um sending platform this is a great headline formula people are going to grow tired of that quickly something that people have not grown tired of since the Inception of sales however many thousands of years ago is that humans buy from humans and so take for example everybody that we pitch from our cold emails everybody that like responds positively everybody that we reach out to gets a personalized Loom with our face on their website and Linkedin profile saying what specifically we would do for them and that creates such trust such um faster sales cycles and such good results that I tell people about it and when people see it they go oh this is great I'm going to write a script for this I'm going to record one video and send it to a thousand people and then they fail because they left out that intangible human element so I think the best teams are going to become more human interesting I I agree with that um like a a question on that tactic so just so I understand so anyone who replies positively to your campaign sales.co you or your team members follow up manually with a loom video wow wow wow wow interesting how many of those like today sorry today today I did five wow okay well that's maybe that's the secret source to to scale in honestly I mean people say well I want to scale well we've been doing looms for 14 months and it's something that doesn't scale but it got us to like 75k 90k months so who gives a yeah yeah yeah of course of course and I like that I I do agree with the sentiment that there's always like I don't see all of these tools in Tech I don't see it like replacing sdrs I see sdrs just becoming more enabled um and I think yeah there's always going to have to be that the those manual touch points especially if you're like you're selling into Enterprise right where it's you know you're you're following like an ABM Playbook um I think like a a big percentage of what sdrs do today can be uh can be automated like research and leads all this kind of stuff but I think there's still always always going to have to be that human element I think a big I think the the next um cohort of tools we're going to see currently everyone's focused on getting the reply they're focused on personalizing emails they're focused on sending more emails they're focused on more volume which all gets more replies I think um a big unlock here is how can you turn more of those replies into opportunities because that's re that's really where the the the money is right the further down the funnel from reply to positive reply to opportunity you know that those are worth a lot more than just you know one reply and so I think that's where we're going to see the the next batch of innovation who knows that that's my prediction because it seems like everyone's just focused on the the replies at the moment yeah hey if if an indie hacker is listening to this and they want to know how to get more replies and and more opportunities I would say try to build something that gives somebody free money and you might hear that and go but if you can reach out and say something like I saw you do this we can plug this in in 10 seconds seconds and I'll give you know 25% extra Revenue next month there are people that do this we do cold email for them and they get like 45% reply rates and it just goes Gang Busters and so I think it it does start at the product too like what is the thing that you provide does it make somebody money and you can't sell everything um as much as we'd love to it's going to be a marriage right what you sell part of that success is driven by what you build nice nice to like that all right well we're we're kind up to time here want to respect your time um thank you last sort of question what what are like your plans for 2024 you know where are you going to take things um so one of the plans is I'm going to take a month off and let my partner run the business for a month because we wanted to see how it does under one leader um I think that that's something great to do just to see like stress test where am I not seeing things that I do manual like automatically um so that we can get some more automations in I think that there's more services for us to bolt on that we eventually spin out as Standalone software products um that's what I would really like I I do think that I'm not going to leave doing the sales for our product anytime soon I'm still involved in sales and I think it needs to stay that way is until we can go okay we're kind of happy with this level and and hire other people to do it nice I like the uh the month off did you have to did you have to fight for that or no no super easy it just it just takes like you know some preparation been preparing for it for like five weeks now nice good stuff we'll enjoy that okay well for those listening you know how can they find out more information about you and get in touch so my website RPD doyle.com um and our website sales.co nice all right Ryan thanks so much appreciate your time thank you Liam have a nice time bye