Bootstrapped to $82M: How Callum Mckeefery Built Reviews.io from His Kitchen Table

Callum Mckeefery built Reviews.io from scratch with his wife—no funding, no equity dilution, and no fluff. In this episode, he shares how they scaled to $12M ARR, outpaced VC-backed competitors, and exited for $82M in an all-cash deal. He breaks down the exact viral loop that created SEO-fueled growth, how they hit $240K revenue per employee, and why he chose not to give employees equity—but still made many millionaires. Callum also opens up about the emotional driver behind the exit: his son's rare genetic condition, and the cutting-edge research he's now funding. Finally, Callum talks about his new SaaS startup, Partner.io, where he's rebuilding from zero with the same gritty playbook. In this episode, you'll learn: How to engineer viral loops in B2B SaaS Why small ACV doesn't mean slow growth How to win against VC-backed competition without fundraising The emotional side of selling a company Tactical breakdown: SEO, paid ads, and partnerships as growth levers Post-exit reflections and the pitfalls of private equity buyers What he's building next at Partner.io Perfect for: SaaS founders, B2B operators, bootstrappers, PE firms, and investors looking for real, gritty founder stories with no BS.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  How much did you sell the company for?

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Eight to two million, all cash. Me and my wife started the company from our kitchen table.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  So you're at 10, 11, 12 million of revenue, 50 people, $240,000 of revenue per employee.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  I built a really nice viral loop. We found that if we got two or three reviews on a profile, the page would start to do really well. I had some big competitors in reviews, like well financed, VC backed companies. And I truly believe that we did well against them, against these well funded companies.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  And how many folks were full time when you exited?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  About 50. And we was growing pretty fast, to be honest, at that time.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  To be clear, you and your wife owned 100% equity.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  100%.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Hey folks, my guest today is Callum McKeefery. He built and sold, bootstrapped, I should mention, reviews.io for $82 million cash. He's now working on a company called partner.io. Callum, you ready to take us to the top?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, looking forward to it.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  So let's, let's give the audience sort of a hook here and then we'll go back and teach everyone sort of how you did it. So the end of the story is you sold the company, right? So how much did you sell the company for? Was it all cash?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Eight to two million, all cash. I've got a couple of shares still in our pub with clara.io now. And I'm still a board member of that. I wanted a clean deal. I don't know if you know my backstory. I've got a son who's pretty poorly. He's disabled. He's got a really rare genetic disease. And I really wanted to add a bit of security. I wanted to spend a bit of time with him. And the offer came in at the right time. Any other time, probably in my career, I probably wouldn't have taken that offer because I truly, truly loved what I was doing at reviews. And I think I still had a lot more to give to the company, but I had to think about my family emotionally.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  And we'll loop back to all that. I did pick that up in your research. That was a main driver of you doing the deal in the first place was your son. So we'll pick back up, before we go back and get sort of the full story. So 82 million, all cash was the exit price. And what was, what was revenue at that point in time? Monthly recurring revenue in time is 12, the ARR?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  ARR was about 11 to 12 million at the time, pure, nice ARR, really clean stuff. All through strike, pretty, yeah, about 12. I'd say about 12 and a bit change.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Um, 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.

• 2:35Speaker 00

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

• 2:39Speaker 01

  One hundred percent, yeah. I had this, you know, I, I, I, there was a few people in the company who would help me along the way. And they got really big earn outs, but it was only really from me saying, hey, I want to make sure you get a, a, a bigger hand out of this, uh, rather than it being actually formally in a contract.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  This is against conventional wisdom. Most folks listening. So 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?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  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 do, doing that I felt would have slowed me down and would have made the deal much more complicated, uh, 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. Um, you know, some people got 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 going to change your life. And I did it. Everybody trusted me.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Um, and it worked out, thankfully.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  And how many folks were full time when you exited?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  About fifty. It was about fifteen, growing. Yeah. And we was growing pretty fast, to be honest, at that time. Tom, Tom was adding staff every week where I'd 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.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. 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 them millionaires. You just told me when you get exit based off sort of your choosing. How many did you make millionaires?

• 4:35Speaker 01

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

• 4:56Speaker 00

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

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, who was there longest and contribution? So my two, uh, 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.

• 5:15Speaker 00

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

• 5:28Speaker 01

  That, that website there is pretty, I am pretty much checks out. I am on the board, so I do handle direction from above. Um, 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. He 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 worked really close together and we taught each other so much about design and.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  So here, we love going back to the Wayback Machine, the website 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?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, I don't even know that version. Um, the V1 of reviews was, I came from a background of tech, technology reviews, like tech.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  With. Techaculous.com?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  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. Um, 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. Um, the idea was that it would be me writing reviews, reviewing technology,

• 7:12Speaker 01

  reviewing televisions, reviewing cameras, all the CNET stuff, the stuff that you'd 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 to I, what became reviews to I O. And we really bootstrapped it from the kitchen table. There was nothing.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Um, you know, there wasn't the tools that you can get now, the, the, 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, um, in the UK and we grew from the UK really. That's how we did it.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  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 founderpath.com. 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 at 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?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, not, not. If you go a little bit further, Ronald, uh, if you go 2022, we'd already blown up by then. 2022, we were doing 10 million or more.

• 9:00Speaker 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?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, that's.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  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?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I built a really, really, really nice viral loop to reviews. 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.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Break that viral loop down for me, because a lot of people 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?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  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'd go and speak to GSF and we'd 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.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  And that'd get as many labels on the reviews that I O name as possible. And then 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 industry were like, these are doing amazing. They're doing amazing things with the reviews. Let's give them a call. So as we won one client and did amazing, you know, helped 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 powered that flywheel to get more.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  But look, Callum, the question here is the chicken and egg problem, right? So how did you, without cooperation from GFS Carparts.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 who'd ask for the reviews?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  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 Carparts or your own 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'd help that page rank. 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 Stella Ratings partners. And we were one of those partners. Now, originally, there was only about five partners. Now, I think there's about 20. Google Stella Ratings license was super, super important in the early days.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  I love this. Okay, so 2017, that was 500,000 of revenue. 2018, you broke a million?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, I was gonna say, what year did you break 5 million of revenue? Do you remember?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  No, it's all like, the numbers to me, I never really focused. And this sounds crazy as a bootstrapped founder, but I was so focused on the products. I was 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.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  I mean, the reason I ask the question is because we want to identify the growth tactics that really worked 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, a, you know, commission structure, sales motion. What, how many customers did you have when you exited? And what was the average price point?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I think it says 9,000 on there now. I think you probably had about 7, 8,000 clients then. We were a low ACV business. We did everything in those early days. I'm gonna tell you, we did everything what you shouldn't do in, in a low ACV business. We got on the phones. I had salespeople on. Just really on, on low, you know, for, I mean, our plans now have gone up massively. But we were doing our, 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.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Product led, we'd actually get on the phone for $29 and talk to those people and build relationships.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  I'm bringing up a chart because this is, I mean, this is one of the things 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 that to learn in the early phases?

• 14:35Speaker 01

  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 in the 299 plan or 499 plan. And even then, I think, you know, a lot of that is already done at that stage. And via the product.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  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 spending on paid ads?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:27Speaker 00

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

• 15:33Speaker 01

  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 well 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.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  So Callum, 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 Callum, 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 down here and got pretty aggressive on LinkedIn ads and Google ads, the tune of about half a million clicks per year. Is that sort of the right order of operations? Exactly. That's great. So you sell the business for eighty-two million dollars 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?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  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 properly.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  What, what, what was upsetting post-close?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Um, there was a couple of things. Yeah. So basically, we, we closed and we, you know, we were told by, or by the people who purchased us, private equity from me, 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 twenty million. My aim, my, my dream was, you know, to get this to, to, to thirty, thirty million, forty million, and really get to the stage where we were a, a big, well-known global brand. I love the business. I love the people who are working on it. So pretty

• 17:54Speaker 01

  quickly, things changed. For instance, the press release about the deal, I, I didn't have any say on the press release. They did it via a paid war. Platform Axiom. And I didn't get to celebrate that win or certain things that where I I wish that things were done differently.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  So there wasn't any part of the eighty two million dollar 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?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  So total cash flow for you and your team again was a full eighty two million bucks cash.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  My my biggest thing probably would be spend a bit bit more time researching who you're doing if you're selling, who you're who you're selling to, what the promises are going forward. I'm not I'm not bitter, it probably sounds like I am, but I I actually really like the team that's running reviews now. And it 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 player. 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 revenue.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Um, 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.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  It's a 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 to have your stuff. But it was like App Hub and Silver Smith, right? So Silver Smith puts sixty million bucks into App Hub. They say, App Hub, go do deals. They say, oh, my gosh, Cal, like, 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 have about five minutes left of recording time here, Cal. 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, fifty people in the world have it. It was a gay thing that drove your sale. 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.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, my my son's nine now. He's got a super rare disease. We know a lot about it. Uh, I actually fund a research lab in Buffalo and I'm, you know, funding 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 to a new drug, which is when he's the first kid in the world to get access to this drug. Rare disease, life expectancies. Very hit and miss, fifty kids, we lost about ten during Covid. Um, and after Covid coming out and being so close to those families with lost children, I I was like, geez, this, you know, I wanted to add some security to him. It's probably never gonna work, you know, so I wanted to add some security to him.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  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 I absolutely love the review, this 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 history and it will go, wow, look at the timing there. But the timing really, I did the deal because of, I I I wanted to add security to my family and, you know, fund some research, go and get some cures for these kids. And we are doing it. It's great on that side. That that's really rewarding.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  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 the red tape involved is is unbelievable, but truly rewarding. Um, and I've learned a lot over the past couple of years in in that area.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Well, we help you find a good solution, obviously, for your son, and he lives to be long and healthy and old aged, uh, just like you. But I 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's situation. You still were able to get and negotiate what I would consider a healthy multiple, eighty two million cash on twelve billion top line, which is about a six point eight, seven X 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?

• 22:30Speaker 01

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

• 22:40Speaker 00

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

• 22:42Speaker 01

  At reviews, one of our, later on in the journey, one of our biggest drivers were partnerships. All tech partnership became a real big. Thing, uh, early on, we did nothing in partnerships. Towards the end, it was all partnerships. Like forty percent 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 heart, 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 about the business and partnerships frequently came up in my pad.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  That was the bit I I challenged. I 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 my names at at reviews and both of them were garbage. I never even got one of them running properly. Even though we spent a hundred thousand dollars a year on it. So I wanted to build a a a complete partnership solution. And I went into it very naive. And I think that's maybe what you, you know, tech founders do, where they go into things naive and then they, you know, have to figure it out. And that's what we're doing. I wouldn't say we've got true product market fit.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Even though we're doing okay in revenue, we're, you know, uh, about sixty nine thousand M O R. Um, and but we've not got true product market fit. There, yeah, we're still developing the product. And then going 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. Um, and yeah, it it it's really exciting. We've got a great team. Bizarrely, some of the team who people who left reviews

• 24:52Speaker 01

  have joined me on this, this, this journey. And what I mean, they left, they left prior to the sale. So my C T O was, you know, a great, a great developer and he was like. Callum, I'm gonna 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 offer and I'm like, please don't. And he did leave. And obviously then he didn't get any earn 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.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  So put all that into clean sense for me on partner.io. So that when we interview you in a year and you tell us how, how much you've 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?

• 25:39Speaker 01

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

• 25:42Speaker 00

  And the main growth channel is LinkedIn ads?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  LinkedIn ads, yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  How much are you spending a month on LinkedIn ads?

• 25:51Speaker 01

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

• 25:55Speaker 00

  This is so eye catching. You're just, are you doing all this manually right now? You're just testing it all manually?

• 25:59Speaker 01

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

• 26:11Speaker 00

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

• 26:16Speaker 01

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

• 26:23Speaker 00

  Guys, there you have it. CallumLaunchReviews.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 gotta 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 2022, of which 30% were LinkedIn. The rest were Google Ads. Ultimately built that business to over 8,000, 9,000 paying customers and, and 12 million bucks of revenue bootstrapped before selling in 2022 to a roll up group called App Hub for about $82 million all cash.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  He's now building partner.io. If you want to check it out, you can find him online at partner.io. Callum, thanks for taking us to the top.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Thanks, Nick.