From SEO Side Hustle to SaaS Success
business philosophies with Email Analytics Founder Jayson Demers!
The Come Up highlights successful business owners’ & operators ‘come-up’ stories in an easy-to-read, written interview format.
All content is transcribed from live interviews.
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For this issue - Jayson Demers, who exited his first business AudienceBloom, and currently owns and operates Email Analytics and OutreachBloom!
Jayson Demers Quick Stats:
💰No. of Businesses Sold: 1 (AudienceBloom)
💼Current Businesses Owned: 2
⏳Email Analytics Time In Business: 5 years
👥Headcount: 4 (plus contractors)
🛑Times almost Quit: 4
How you started your first business…
I went to school at UW, (the University of Washington) and while I was there, was in a fraternity. I moved out after my first year, but before I did they had some alumni come along and talk to us about careers. At that time, I was studying to be a software engineer - and honestly, just wasn't that good at it. I remember one of the alumni asked me why I wanted to be an engineer, and the only thing I could come up with was that the money was good.
He pointed out that if money was the goal, starting a business might be a better idea - especially since in his case, he had a bunch of software engineers as employees. He put it nicer than this, but effectively said something like, “I'm making more than them, and I'm telling them what to do.”
I hadn't thought of that perspective, so that was the first thing that got me interested in being a business, per se, rather than being someone’s employee. And I actually decided to finish college because of that conversation, though I started studying business, and ended up getting a degree in marketing and business administration.
After graduating, I took a full-time job in marketing.
While I was doing that, I was also really interested in SEO, and started to get really good at it. Now, this was around 2009 - SEO was still kind of in its golden era, where it was very easy to manipulate algorithms and get your pages ranking where you wanted them to. I figured all this out and I was running this network of mini sites and putting Google Ads on them to just make money on the side.
Eventually I figured, hey, I can do this for other people and I can have them pay me to do it.
So I was at a street fair one day at UW, and I saw there was a kiosk set up for this dog food company. At the time, it was the same dog food company I was feeding my dog, so I stopped at the kiosk and introduced myself.
The guy at the Kiosk happened to be the owner of the company, but then I said: “Hey, I've noticed that your website really has no SEO visibility. Is that something you are looking for any help with?”
We got to chatting, and he ended up becoming my very first client. I ended up doing a good job, so he referred me to somebody else, who in turn referred me to somebody else and it became a word of mouth referral network until I was making more money doing SEO than I was at my full time job.
That made me think it was time to quit and focus full time on SEO, and once I left my job, I had plenty more time to grow the business and really turn it into what it became. So that's how I got my start of what eventually became AudienceBloom - my first real business.
On Selling AudienceBloom…
I never really had a sale in mind.
My whole goal was always to make enough money to support the lifestyle that I want. If that meant running it forever, then so be it, or if it meant selling, that was fine too. Eventually, though, after seven or eight years, I could feel myself becoming…I guess I'll say lazy.
I asked myself the question, “If I was my boss, would I fire myself?”
And the answer was yes - I wasn't giving it enough effort.
I knew that if I didn't give the business the effort it required, it wasn't going to remain successful, and there were employees who depended on me for their livelihood. I knew at that point that I needed to sell for the good of the business and for all the people working for me, so I reached out to a company called Website Properties, and they walked me through the entire sale process.
They found buyers, put out ads for the business, fielded offers, and helped me every step of the way.
That process took over a year because several buyers fell through the cracks before we landed the one who got to the finish line. Eventually it sold, and I think I stayed on in an advisory role for some amount of time, too. It might have been six months or something like that. Nothing too crazy…
It wasn't life changing money.
It was money that allowed me to continue my lifestyle with a long runway. It bought me — I don't know — probably ten years with the lifestyle I wanted. My wife and I love to do vacations and things like that, and we didn't want to feel like we were financially limited in that regard.
The bad news once you make a sale like that is - you have money, but you no longer have an income. Your runway becomes long, but instead of growing, it's shrinking.
That was really tough for me to come to grips with.
Seeing a number in my bank account that was much higher than I was used to, but it was going down rather than going up - even though the number in the bank account is higher than I had ever seen before…the fact that it's going down constantly stresses me out to no end.
So yeah, it didn't change my life, but it bought me a lot of runway.
What next - and why SaaS?
In the first year after the sale, I spent time trying to find my hustle again... Eventually I did, and dipped back into my entrepreneurial engine, if you want to think of it that way.
I ended up just working on my current businesses, Email Analytics and Outreach Bloom. They gave me the relief I needed, but it’s taken a long time to get to profitability.
It took a long time to decide what to do next, but when I was running the agency, I had probably about a dozen employees spread throughout the world. The thing we all had in common was we all communicated via email - I think we used Google Chat for internal comms, but even then, we still communicated over email, and of course, all of our external comms with clients were via email.
We had a slowdown in sales, and I wanted to understand why it was happening, but didn't have enough information as a manager. I talked to my sales team, they didn't really seem to have any answers, so I signed in to the email accounts of my sales team to kind of find out:
Is it a lack of leads?
What is the problem here?
Why are sales slowing down?
What I pinned it on was the response time.
Whether it was because people were busy or what, I can't say, but it was taking too long to reply to inbound leads or new orders, and my best guess was it was causing sales to drop. I thought it was important to be on the ball when we got new orders, and didn't feel like we were meeting the expectations in that regard, so I started looking for a way to monitor analytics around the email activity and specifically response time of my reps.
There was no good service I was happy with - so that's when the light bulb went off.
I thought, I can't be the only person out there that has this problem - there's just no possible way.
I saw an opportunity to create the solution that I needed, and that's when I set out to create Email Analytics. I had the money from the sale, which I used to fund the development of Email Analytics.
Unfortunately, I wasted a lot of money on email analytics in the early days because I didn't have a good CTO. I hired an overseas development firm, and we had to scrap almost all of the code and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of invested money into it.
That was a tough pill to swallow, but what can you do?
I kept going because I believed in the project.
Once I found a good CTO, I was able to get it built right - and now we have what we have today, which is very successful, and it really fits my vision for what I originally wanted.
Was there a roadmap to profitability?
I didn't have any roadmap - I set out with money to burn and a vision, and it was a slow grind.
I lost and wasted a lot of money along the way.
But I said, “Hey, I’m supposed to be an expert marketer, right?”
I ran this marketing agency, I know SEO, I know how to get traffic to my website and users into this thing, and that was what I brought to the table. I was able to generate inbound leads, traffic, and revenue using my knowledge of SEO. As we started to grow and get some monthly recurring revenue, it started to attract interest from outside investors who thought what I was doing was really interesting.
A couple of years after I launched in 2018, I got investment from a VC - somewhere around $500k - and so today, the firm is venture backed, which is great.
We've just recently cracked profitability, and we're going on five plus years, so it's been a long grind to get there.
I went into it with a vision and marketing expertise, but no roadmap, no plan.
On simultaneously launching a second brand…
OutreachBloom is much more recent - we actually only launched to the public in December of last year.
Email Analytics was a slow burn, growing through inbound SEO.
I tried things like paid ads and wasn't getting much traction, so I stopped.
But what I really wanted to do was initiate an outbound campaign where we could go find our target audience, tell them about email analytics, so that they could find the value in it and just stop relying on people coming to us.
Early last year, I hired a sales assistant, and he and I embarked on this journey of figuring out:
How do we do cold outbound?
How do we find our target audience and message them with our message?
Over the course of the year, we did a lot of trial and error until we figured out a formula we felt was super effective and scalable. We were getting traffic, clicks, replies - all of that sort of stuff. I felt like we really developed a valuable process for going and finding our target audience and getting a message into their inbox.
And having run AudienceBloom for 9, 10 years, I already knew what running an agency looks like, so I just said:
“Well, we've developed this scalable process that's working well for us. It can work well for anybody, and I can sell it as a service.”
I decided to take our process and called it OutreachBloom - sort of a spiritual successor to AudienceBloom. I put up a website for it because I felt like it deserved its own website as its own unique service, but obviously the two brands are one company - it's just two separate services under one roof.
I talked to our investors about it and they loved it…all of the funds from both brands funnel into the same bank account, so it's essentially two revenue sources for the business now.
Best growth channels…
SEO and everything that goes under that umbrella, which includes content marketing and a content strategy.
Link building,
technical SEO,
onsite SEO optimization…
SEO is still my bread and butter, and the number one thing I recommend to other businesses. Almost every business— with few exceptions — should be investing in SEO. It’s still where the majority of our traffic and leads come from. Aside from that, honestly, the other channels have become so saturated that I have not been able to find success.
I'm sure there are experts out there who are finding success in things like social media, influencer marketing, it’s just not what I've been able to find any success with.
So to them I say congratulations, but it’s just not for me. I am drinking my own Kool Aid in terms of what I'm using is what I'm recommending and that's what's working for me.
Cold outreach, obviously, has been phenomenal as well, so I am super bullish on it.
Thoughts on personal brand…
When I was running AudienceBloom, I was spending a ton of time on my personal branding…
I was writing for major publications about SEO, marketing and entrepreneurship - mostly war stories, lessons learned, tips and tricks - all that kind of stuff. I did a lot of articles over the course of six years for a bunch of different publications; I was kind of obsessed with it.
I was willing to do it for two reasons:
One, putting out all that information was helping me to grow my brand while also making me feel good about providing value to other people who might need it.
Two, all of that exposure in those publications was driving awareness of my business and creating value there.
So for about six years or so, I was really into personal branding.
Then, after about four years or so, I noticed the returns were diminishing - I felt like I was putting far more into it than I was getting back from it.
I looked at it and I thought,
I've got so many articles up online, there's so much helpful stuff here.
People are going to find me - I don't know that there's much value in continuing this.
So I started to go quiet in terms of publishing content…my socials started to quiet down, too.
I just started to feel like I was just yelling into the void, and didn’t want my brain occupied with what my next tweet was going to be, or trying to mess with the algorithm to get as many likes and clicks as possible.
And honestly, I haven't missed it.
My profiles are there to be found if anybody wants to see them, but they’re not going to see much...
I do think there's probably value in maintaining them, because if there's a prospect who wants to scope me out, they might think I’m inactive, but I don't think winning new customers through social media is something that's happening very often anymore, unless you've got an insane following and personal brand - something far beyond what I built.
That's just my sense.
Using it for personal connections is probably the best way to do it nowadays - there are just so many people out just yelling right past each other.
That's why I stopped doing it, frankly.
And even if you have a unicorn moment, put out something viral and it gets 100,000 clicks or whatever is reasonable for your industry…
The likelihood that any of those views turn into a paying customer is still extremely low. I don't have anything useful or important to say and I don't want to just put junk out onto Twitter anymore.
So you have to ask yourself, “Is there value in going viral if it doesn’t turn into dollars in my bank account?”
The answer for me was no…maybe I'll get more followers - well what good is that?
If it doesn’t make me any money, what the hell am I doing?
For people who are externally validated, I think they're getting their dopamine from likes, but for people who are internally motivated - we're looking for cash flow.
So I think that as an entrepreneur, you have to ask yourself, “Am I spending my time in the most effective way for my business?” Because if it's not turning into cash flow, then the answer is probably no.
What I've found with the vast majority of social media is that a lot of it is pretty toxic, so I’m not even using them at all anymore - even as a consumer. I really feel like it alters my brain chemistry - actually makes me feel bad — whether that's upset, or outraged or sad about things that are happening.
Again, I just think to myself, I'm in charge of my brain chemistry…
I'm in charge of how I feel…
And if exposing myself to content, which is all over social media, is making me feel this way, then why am I doing this?
Information is a lot like food - you can eat a lot of junk food, but that junk food will make you feel like shit.
And when I'm limiting myself to things that make me feel good, I find that my whole mindset and mental health is better. I feel like most media now is designed to get you addicted to it. The way they do that is by creating an emotion. And generally, that emotion is fear or outrage.
So that's why I stay away.
Current business goals…
As always, my business goals really boil down to cash flow.
I have employees who depend on the cash flow of the business to pay their bills - they have families, and they have bills to pay too. So my first priority is to keep the business alive, and that means constantly figuring out how we can optimize cash flow.
And in order to do that, it really all comes down to customer experience…
Make my customers happy so that they stay and continue paying.
Differences between SaaS & agency business models…
They’re way different…
With SaaS, you've got lots of software problems. Things will happen and you have to react to it - sometimes you'll have major issues that cause an entire service outage for a number of days, and then you've got to communicate with customers and tell them what's happening and why.
It can be a big deal.
With the agency model, I find that there are a lot less problems, but you also have a much higher standard of responsibility and communication. It’s much more high touch, high value, one to one comms, whereas SaaS is much more of a low touch, but higher stakes when something goes wrong.
And from a business model sense - with the agency side, I have a spreadsheet that lists out all of my hard costs and my variable costs, so I know exactly how much I need to charge in order to hit a certain profit margin.
On the SaaS side, it's much more difficult to do that. Costs amortized over thousands and thousands of people. There's a lot that goes into Google Cloud console, and then there's all these other things that you have to set up on the tech side - because if my code isn't efficient, it's actually going to run up server costs.
So how can I allocate my resources - which are my developers - into assessing the efficiency of my code? And can we refactor it in a way that, again, makes it more efficient to save us money in the long term?
There's just a million factors in SaaS, whereas an agency, I feel like it's actually much easier to have an understanding of your costs and create a price point that gives you a profit margin that you want.
What would you do differently if starting again?
I would start by hiring a CTO who I trust.
When I first started Email Analytics, I was very naive and inexperienced with building software, so I thought I could have somebody on Upwork build it - but you can't. You need somebody who is going to work with you every day on your business hours and be there to address every decision as they come up.
Eventually I hired my current CTO, so all day we're online working together, answering questions and working through problems and challenges.
I probably spent over $400k before I realized that I was doing it wrong, and when I hired my CTO, he gave me the bad news we had to throw almost all of the code over the side. It was painful - I hate talking about it, but it's true. So hopefully somebody reads this and learns from my mistake.
Yeah, I fucked up bad, and I hope somebody out there avoids that mistake.
On almost quitting…
I don't know the number of times, but I would say I almost quit 3 or 4 times. And when I say that, what I really mean is that I had serious thoughts like,
What am I doing and why am I doing this?
Am I good enough to do this?
Do I know what I'm doing or do I suck?
The self doubt is real, and it always has been for me.
I’d venture to say that most entrepreneurs deal with doubt - I think part of the entrepreneurial journey is having the resilience and the persistence to overcome the really hard challenges that make you feel like you should quit and just go back to work.
I remember when I was running Audience Bloom, I had a moment where I was really stressed out. My wife and I — who was my girlfriend at the time — were living together, and she said something, and I snapped.
And I remember I just leaned up against the wall and I slid down it, and it all started coming out…
I hadn't told her how stressed out I was, but I said, “I've only got a month left of money in the business. I'm going to have to shut it all down and fire everybody and go back to work.”
I just had an emotional breakdown.
I knew I had to do a bunch of layoffs and improve my cash flow situation, but that meant I needed to fire people who I had hired, trained and loved, but didn’t have enough money to pay anymore.
And the next day I did it.
I made a bunch of calls - had to listen to people crying on the phone and telling me how they were stressed out because they didn't know what they were going to do. It was really hard, but it was the right decision.
But I have been through moments like that, where it felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders. I’ve felt like I wasn't just responsible for myself and my family, but other people and other people's families. I've wondered whether I'm good enough for this and whether I should just quit - but I've learned in my entrepreneurial journey the importance of resilience and persistence.
That’s what separates the ones who cross the finish line from the ones who don't.
So whenever I feel that way, I remind myself - persist, be resilient, keep going…
And so far, it's worked.
That’s it for issue this issue!
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Interview by: Alex Tribe
Edited by: Angus Merry