B (2:01)

The ARR. ARR was about 11 to 12 mil at the time. Pure nice. ARR. Really clean stuff all through stripe. Yeah, about 12 I'd say about 12 and a bit change. Okay. Okay. Yeah, it was. It was. We built the business to be really clean. Clean businesses sell. Our cat table was as small as it could be. It was near my wife. Me and my wife started the company from our kitchen table. And we did it through pure grit, determination, and long hours.

A (2:36)

To be clear, you and your wife owned a hundred percent equity at sale?

B (2:39)

100%, yeah. I had this. You know, there was a few people in the company who had helped me along the way, and they got really big earnouts. But it was only really from me saying, hey, I want to make sure you get a bigger and out out of this, rather than it being actually formally in a contract.

A (3:01)

This is against conventional wisdom. Most folks listening. See, wait, Nathan, I saw. I thought you're supposed to create an employee stock option pool and that's the way you get really good talent, is you give them equity. You did the opposite. Why?

B (3:10)

I didn't need to. I didn't need to. That was the thing. You do what you need to do. I actually found really, really talented people without doing that who believed in me. And doing that, I felt, would have slowed me down and would have made the deal much more complicated to do the sale. So I was just really honest. I mean, I. Some of my team members got over a million dollars earn out of this. You know, some people way more than that, and some people got a little bit less. But I did try and make sure that everyone was brought along from the journey. And I kind of kept my promise to everybody that, hey, if this works, I'm gonna change your life. And I did it. Everybody trusted me and it worked out, thankfully.

A (3:59)

And how many folks were full time when you exited?

B (4:02)

It was about 50. It was about 50 and growing. Yeah, and we was growing pretty fast, to be honest. At that time, Tom. Tom was adding staff every week where I forget their names. And, yeah, I think from starting to do the deal to end to do the deal. I think we'd added another 10 staff by then.

A (4:22)

So you're at 10, 11, 12 million of revenue, 50 people, $240,000 of revenue per employee. No employees own stock when you exited, but you made many of the millionaires. You just told me. When you did exit, based off sort of your choosing, how many did you make? Millionaires.

B (4:36)

More than probably looking back. I should have done that, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I was so happ. Happy to do it. These people had helped me on my journey, and they were part of My family and my team and I. I appreciated all of them so much. And, yeah, I wanted them to. To have the part of that success. It wasn't just me all on paper. It was just.

A (4:56)

How'd you decide? Was it just simply who was there the longest or how'd you decide?

B (5:00)

Yeah, who was there longest and contribution. So my two. My cto, he was like our fourth employee. But Tom was a catalyst. Catalyst. We'd already had product market fit when Tom came in. And Tom really helped us reach those bigger numbers later on.

A (5:15)

All right, let's get the backstory here. So I want everyone to see what you are today. Right, we're recording. So 2025, you sold the business, you know, two or three years ago. So just to be a clear. Callum, are you influencing this website design today or are you totally checked out of the business at this point?

B (5:28)

That. That website there is pretty. I am pretty much checks out. I am on the board, so I do handle direction from above. That website pretty much hasn't changed that much. It's got a little bit fancier. A few more moving things on there. My. The. The guy who designed that website was actually. He's been an employee of reviews. It was. I think he was number five. He came in at number five, Don. He's an amazing guy, amazing designer. And me and him work really close together and we taught each other so much about design.

A (6:01)

And so right here, we love going back to the Wayback Machine, the website at dub, back in 2014, when you launched again, you built it for a while. And in the early days, we go to a 2015 screenshot. This is what it looked like. So what was the V1 here? What am I looking at?

B (6:16)

Oh, my gosh. I don't even know that version. The V1 of reviews was. I came from a background of tech technology reviews. Like tech with.

A (6:28)

Com?

B (6:29)

No. Unbeatable.com. it's not on there. I don't know why it should be. It was part of liquid new media. So unbeatable.com was kind of like a CNET type thing and it did tech reviews, but also was a price comparison website. Part of Unbeatable was that companies would get reviewed on there as well. And that was a bit that I saw as growth. So I actually bought the domain name while playing golf one day, like 10 years before I launched Reviews IO, which was a reviews.co.uk at the time. But I bought the domain name while playing golf and it was quite a funny deal. The idea was that it would be me writing Reviews, reviewing technology, reviewing televisions, reviewing cameras, all the CNET stuff, the stuff that you go and see at ces. And then when I did Unbeatable, I noticed that actually consumers were writing a lot of these reviews and they were better than what I was writing. And we kind of doubled down on that. And that was what took me into the review space. What got me in further was that I think it was really early on, I got sued by a company not removing genuine reviews, and this company sued me for a quarter of a million pounds. I really didn't have the money at the time and it made me really go a lot deeper into reviews and it got stuck in my head. And that was the catalyst to launch Reviews IO. What became Reviews IO. And we really bootstrapped it from the kitchen table. There was nothing, you know, there wasn't the tools that you can get now, the dashboards and the frameworks and AI to help you do it. It was really brute force. We had a couple of clients take a chance on us in the uk, and we grew from the uk, really. That's how we did it.

A (8:14)

Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at Founder Path, if you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show, so sign up@founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply. And I see all those. Just reply and say, nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com so, Callum, just to pull the story forward here with the website and the concept we see on our screen right now, your 2014, 2015 version, did you pass a million dollars of annual revenue with this concept or no?

B (8:52)

No. If you go in a Little bit further, Ro, if you go 2022, we'd already blown up by then. 2022, we were doing 10 million or mortgage.

A (9:00)

So you basically, I guess, give me the. Give me the quick quote here. You went from half. Repeat this. I guess if it's true, you went from about half a million of revenue in 2017 to five years later doing 10 million of revenue. Is that about right?

B (9:12)

Yeah, yeah, that's correct.

A (9:14)

Okay, so take us into the growth tactics there. Right. What happened? I mean, based off the digital footprint you've left, it looks like you invested significantly starting in late 2021 SEO, just by how much you're being indexed by the Wayback Machine. You also have very, very high domain rating, which really, I mean you popped that back in 2016, but then you further optimized it. It looked like in this 2018 onward period. What were your top growth channels in 2018, 2019?

B (9:38)

I built a really, really, really nice viral loop to reviews that IO. So literally the more clients we got, the more powerful the brand became. Because we were collecting more reviews, more content, it was getting fresher every day.

A (9:54)

Break that viral loop down for me because think viral loop is all about like I can't do a viral loop because I'm not a document signing tool. There's not two people for every one thing. Right. So how did you actually mathematically and psychologically engineer one user turning into three?

B (10:08)

So one user turning into three. So we'd look at a niche. So one of our niches was car parts. So we'd look at, we went and won Euro Car parts, which is a big European car part retailer, and then we'd win that client, we'd get our brand on their website. We'd now go and speak to the other people in that industry. So we go and speak to GSF and we try and try and win three or four in each industry. And that was how we won the clients. But the clients really weren't where we were focusing at that point. We're not focusing on the clients, we're focusing on getting footprint. So when we won Euro Car parts, we wanted to collect as many reviews for that company as possible and that'd get as many labels on the reviews that I O name as possible and then we, the revenue would come. So generally once we collected say thousands of reviews, I mean look, we collected 57,000 reviews for GSF there. Once we collected a huge amount of reviews, other people in the client, these are doing amazing, they're doing amazing things with re. Let's give them a call. So as we won one client and did amazing, you know, help them collect the reviews at the right time. So they got really high conversion. Collect really good looking reviews with photos, really good content that had really power that flywheel to get more calum.

A (11:28)

The question here is the chicken and egg problem, right? So how did you without cooperation from gfscarparts.com because you haven't landed them as a customer yet. So without their cooperation, how do you get the first 100, 200, 300, 500 reviews? How did you get their customers? How did you know how to who to ask for the reviews.

B (11:43)

We already ranked quite well for those pages. We found that if we got two or three reviews on a profile, the page would start to do really well. And we'd listen for people talking about GSF car parts or euro car parts and we'd go, hey, why don't you leave a review? You've had a great experience, why don't you leave a review? And those people would leave those first couple of reviews and that helped that page wank. And then we'd be reaching out to that business. So if you wanted your, your rating to show up on your Google Ads, gold stars next to your ads, you had to work with one of the Google seller ratings partners. And we were one of those partners. Now originally there was only about 5 partners. Now I think there's about 20. Google Stellar ratings license was super, super important in the early days.

A (12:23)

I love this. Okay, so 2017 was 500,000 of revenue. 2018 you broke a million. Yeah, okay, I was gonna say what year do you break 5 million of revenue? Do you remember?

B (12:33)

No, it's all the numbers to me. I never really focused and this sounds crazy as a bootstrap for amdah, but I was so focused on the products and so focused on making, I'm a product person, so I was focused on making a really good product. And I thought the revenue was secondary to me.

A (12:48)

I mean the reason I asked the question is because we want to identify the growth tactics that really work for you. So launching as a content and media business, for example, did not work for you. You then pivoted and then you had success pretty rapidly. So let's, let's talk more though about how you've sort of priced and planned these because based off my understanding, you are not a high acv. You know, account a, you know, commission structure, sales motion. What, how many customers did you have when you exited and what was the average price point?

B (13:13)

I think it 9,000 on there now. I think you probably had about 7,8000 clients then. We were a low ACV business. We did everything in those early days, I'm going to tell you, we did everything what you shouldn't do in a low ACV business. We got on the phones, I had sales people on, just really on, you know, I mean our plans now have gone up massively. But we were doing, our probably biggest plan was like 149 plan and we get, we, but we get on the phone for 29, 29, we wouldn't just be pure play product led. We, we'd Actually get on the phone for 29 and talk to those people, build relationships.

A (13:56)

I'm bringing up a chart because this is, I mean this is one of the things that, that we teach. I take all, I plot basically everyone that's going on the podcast. I plot their acv. Yeah. So like you know exactly where I'm going. There's a dead spot. It's very hard to build a $100 million company with a price point between 500 and like 5k per year. My question to you is, I totally get getting on the phone early on to learn, right. But if you take 9,000 customers, right. Times 30 minute call each, divided by 60 minutes per hour, that's 4,500 hours if you're spending that with every customer. So just to be clear, do you still today get on a 30 minute call with every customer who signs up for 150 bucks a month or is this to learn in the early phases?

B (14:35)

No, that's really just to get learn in the early phases to get a true product market fit. You can't do that when you're at, you know, you're at 9,000 points. I think these, you know, now reviews only gets on the phone and the 299 plan or 499 plan, and even then I think, you know, a lot of that is already done at that stage via the product.

A (14:56)

To summarize so far what you've, what you've taught us, the media business didn't work. You pivoted to an SEO strategy where you recruited people talking about a company on Twitter to actually leave a review on a landing page you built for the company that would then rank for SEO. Then you'd go close the company and the viral coefficient started. You also casually mentioned paid ads. Briefly, I want to understand, was that a big part of your growth or not? How much were you sending on pay ads?

B (15:18)

I think we were doing a thousand. A thousand dollars a day for the last couple of years. We were really targeting people who wanted Google seller ratings. That was our biggest win.

A (15:27)

So just to be clear, if you were going to spend $500,000 that last year on ads, how much was on Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads?

B (15:33)

30% LinkedIn, the rest on Google. And I truly believe closest to the customer wins every single time. I had some big competitors in reviews like wealth financed VC backed companies that were back to like hundreds of millions and. But they weren't close to their customers, they weren't there listening to them. And I truly believe that we did well against them, against These well funded companies because we were listening to our clients and talking to our clients a lot more.

A (16:04)

So Calum, as we wrap up here, because I want to close the loop on this and then talk about your new business that you're building. But I do for those wondering and saying, man, I want to, I want to build bootstrapped like Calum, it sounds like, and correct me if any of this is wrong, but to summarize, your order of operations was basically you start off with viral coefficient using Twitter to get reviews, which then started fueling your programmatic SEO strategy on the review pages. And once those were working, you moved on here and got pretty aggressive on LinkedIn ads and Google Ads to the tune of about half a million clips per year. Is that sort of the right order of operations? Exactly. That's great. So you sell the business for $82 million cash. Just, you know, any lessons? Maybe just one lesson that you want to leave the biggest mistake you made in your negotiations during the exit process.

B (16:46)

My biggest mistake was probably being a bit too emotional, if I'm honest and not doing enough research on the people who I sold to. The people who run the business now are great. We did have challenges after we sold which were upsetting. That were upsetting. And I sold because I was in an emotional place in where I shouldn't have sold.

A (17:09)

Probably what was upsetting. Post close.

B (17:14)

There was a couple of things. Yeah. So basically we closed and we were told bod of by the people who purchased this private equity company. Oh, we're very founder friendly. We're going to keep. You're going to still be in this seat and this is what we're going to do and then, you know, everything's going to be under your control. There's nothing going to change. You know, carry on running it, get it to 20 million. My aim, my dream was, you know, to get this to, to 30. 30 million. 40 million and really get to the stage where we were a big, well known global brand. I love the business, I love the people who are working on it. So pretty quickly things changed. For instance, the press release about the deal. I didn't have any say on the press release. They did it via a paid wall platform, Axiom. And I didn't get to celebrate that win or certain things where I wish that things were done differently.

A (18:14)

So there wasn't any part of the $82 million deal that you had to hit an earn out. It's not like you made less because the company screwed up once you sold it to them, right?

B (18:22)

No no, we, we. There was an earn out that quickly got changed into just a deferred payment and that's all done now. We're paid out completely.

A (18:30)

So total cast iPhone for you and your team again was that full 82 million bucks cash.

B (18:34)

My biggest thing probably would be spend a bit more time researching who you're doing. If you're selling who you do, who you're selling to, what the promises are going forward. I'm not, I'm not bitter, except probably sounds like I am. But I actually really like the team that's running Reviews now. And it was probably, you know, the company that purchased Reviews was basically a roll up of Shopify apps. But Reviews really wasn't a Shopify app. It wasn't that play. We had a much different playbook and the company, the people who were heading up that company at the time really didn't understand. They were really just trying to buy revving. So I probably should have done more research on them. I don't believe they took enough time to learn what we was actually doing.

A (19:22)

It's the common theme, you see, right? A private equity firm gets behind a company. They say, Mr. Company or Mrs. Company, go buy a bunch of other companies. That's what a private equity firm is supposed to do. You know, you will aim them because you need obviously respectful what is like App Hub and Silversmith, right? So silversmith puts 60 million bucks into appub. They say appub, go do deals. They say, oh my gosh, Cal, we gotta do deals. We'd love to buy your business. They didn't really do a lot of research. They're now doing their thing. You're now moving on. I want to give you, you know, we about five minutes left of recording time here. Come. I want to give you some air to talk about what your son is going through because it's a very rare disease. I, based off my research, let's say 50 people in the world have it. It was a thing that drove your sales. So why don't we shine a light on that for a minute or two and then let's wrap up with how you're thinking about your next business partner.IO.

B (20:01)

Yeah, my son's nine now. He's got a super rare disease. We know a lot about it. I actually fund a research lab in Buffalo and I'm, you know, finding a lot of research, actually doing something with Harvard at the moment on mitochondrial transplants, which is amazing, amazing, amazing potential with that. And we've just got him access to a new drug which is he's the first kid in the world to get access to this drug. Rare disease, life expectancies, very hit and miss. 50 kids. We lost about 10 during COVID Um, and after Covid coming out and being so close to those families with lost children, I was like, Jesus. You know, I wanted to add some security to him. It's probably never going to work, you know, so I wanted to add some security to him. I wanted to do more with more research. I wanted to fund some more research for him. And that was a big driver for the. For doing the sale. I absolutely love the reviewers reviews business and I loved working with my team. And if it wasn't, you know, things happen for a reason and maybe, you know, it was the right time. You know, looking back, we'll look back through the lens of the history and it'll go, wow, look at the timing there. But the timing, really, I did the deal because of. I wanted to add security to my family and, you know, from some research, try and get some cures for these kids. And we are doing. It's great on that side. That. That side's really rewarding. I'm actually in the process of moving some mice from Buffalo to Harvard at the moment, and it's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. You know, the red tape involved is unbelievable, but truly rewarding. And I've learned a lot over the past couple of years in that area.

A (21:50)

Well, we help you find a good solution, obviously, for your son, and he lives to be long and healthy and old aged just like you. But I think one of the lessons for founders listening to this is we're constantly told that your company has to be pursued, right? To get a good exit, you. You must be pursued by somebody, be the pretty girl on the street. You needed to get a deal done for a variety of reasons. Even though, you know, this company was growing, you just told us your son said yes. You still were able to get and negotiate what I would consider a healthy multiple.82 million cash on 12 million top line, which is about a 6.87x multiple. Right. So that's a good lesson for everybody. It is possible to drive you lead a sale process and still get a good multiple. Would you agree or disagree with that?

B (22:30)

Yeah, 100%. 100%. You've got to drive that process. You've got, you know, the legals involved in doing a deal of that size was. Was something I'd never seen.

A (22:40)

All right, let's wrap up here on what you're focused on.

B (22:42)

Now that reviews One of our. Later on in the journey, one of our biggest drivers with partnerships, all tech partnership became a real big thing. Early on, we did nothing in partnerships. Towards the end, it was all partnerships. Like 40% of the Rev was through partnerships. And it was a team that drove me mad because they had no systems in place, there was no accountability. The revenue was coming in, but I couldn't, I couldn't make it repeatable or grow it any further. It was a mess. So, you know, when I left reviews, I thought, what am I going to do next? What was the, you know, I used to journal the bits that were annoying me around the business and partnerships frequently came up in my pad. That was the bit I challenged. I went, right, I'm going to build a better partner solution. We have a really good inbound motion, there's really good inbound technology, there's really good outbound technology. But partnership tech was a bit rubbish. I actually used two partner solutions. I like names, app reviews, and both of them were garbage. I never even got one of them running properly, even though we spent $100,000 a year on it. So I wanted to build a complete partnership solution and I went into it very naive and I think that's maybe what you tech founders do, they go into things naive and then they have to figure it out. And that's what we're doing. I wouldn't say we've got true product market set. Even though we're doing okay revenue, we're at, you know, about 69,000 and. But we've not got true product market fit there yet. We're still developing the product and then gone back to the old days. I'm on the phone listening to what our partners want and I'm, you know, trying to get that off our moments again. And that's pretty really exciting if you look at our marketing. I'm trying to these different marketing messages and tactics now to try and see what resonates. We're doing a lot of LinkedIn, going back to LinkedIn again and yeah, it's really exciting. Got a great team. Bizarrely, some of the team who, people who left reviews have joined me on this, this, this journey. And when, I mean, they left, they left prior to the sale. So my CTO was, you know, great, great developer. And he was like, callum, I'm going to leave reviews. And I'm like, do not leave reviews. Do not leave this rocket ship. And he went, no, I'm leaving. I've got a job offering. London I want. Please don't. And he did Leave. And obviously then he didn't get any earning out. He didn't have that exit. So when I started partner, he went, whatever you're doing next, I want to be involved. So, you know, we're really good friends. And he came back and we're like doing that with a few people now. So there is, there is a couple of people who I've worked with for a while.

A (25:29)

So put all that at a clean sense for me on partner IO so that when we interview in a year and you tell us how much you grown it, we can sort of look back at this. So, so you've gone from zero to $70,000 a month in revenue with how many people on the team?

B (25:39)

There's nine people on the team at the moment.

A (25:42)

And the main growth channel is LinkedIn ads.

B (25:45)

LinkedIn ads? Yeah.

A (25:47)

How much are you spending a month on LinkedIn ads?

B (25:51)

It's about $8,000 a month, not a great deal.

A (25:55)

This is so eye catching. You're just, Are you doing all this manually right now? You're just testing it all manual? It's just me.

B (26:00)

It's just me and a conver account. You know, I'm just finding that hook. I'm just finding what resonates, what hooks, what converts. Double down, double down, double down.

A (26:11)

All right, Calum, as we wrap up here, people want to learn more about you online. Where's the best place they can find you?

B (26:16)

LinkedIn. I spend most of my time on LinkedIn as a social platform. Do a bit on Twitter, but mainly LinkedIn.

A (26:23)

Guys, there you have it. CalumLaunchReviews IO in 2014 and got his first users by using a viral coefficient. He would look on Twitter for people talking about a brand. Get the Twitter users to leave a review on a programmatic landing page he built for the brand. Eventually tell the brand, hey, you got to pay us because we have all your reviews. That then led to a big programmatic SEO motion. Blew his domain rating up on Ahrefs to above 80. Organic traffic, over 200,000 clicks per month. And then he said, okay, this machine is working. Let me pour paid ads on the funnel. About $500,000 a year spent on ads in 2020, two of which 30% were LinkedIn, the rest were Google Ads. Ultimately built that business to over 8,000 9,000 paying customers and 12 million bucks of revenue. Bootstrapped before selling in 2022 to a roll up group called AppHub for about $82 million, all cash. He's now building partner IO. If you want to check it out. You can find him online@partner IO Calum, thanks for taking us to the top.

B (27:14)

Thanks, Nick.