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Boost Revenue By 600% With Post Purchase Shipping Notifications

Kiril Kirilov is the CEO and Co-founder of Rush, a Shopify shipment software that automates the shipment tracking process on all fronts. Rush helps merchants and agencies ensure that any post-purchase shipping email flows are guaranteed to increase AOV and CLTV. Kiril is also the Co-Owner and Co-Founder of Proof Nutrition, a high-quality nutrition supplement brand.
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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[05:46] How Kiril Kirilov pursued the opportunity to provide quality communication to online consumers
[10:19] Why a tracking page can increase email click-through rates by 20% to 50%
[13:16] How to connect with consumers through shipping notifications
[17:10] Kiril talks about building a software as a service company for marketplace clients
[24:09] What is Kiril’s addressable market for Rush?
[29:30] Why communicating with your clients and future prospects is crucial for brand success
[35:37] The importance of supporting your product with exceptional education strategies

In this episode…

As an entrepreneur, selling your product is half the battle. How can you increase consumer engagement to turn a one-time customer into a long-time devotee? What steps can you take to deliver outstanding communication between your brand and clients?

According to Kiril Kirilov, communication is the key. You don’t need to pitch your product repeatedly. Once you provide the consumer with a beautiful experience and a branded tracking page for their purchase, their natural curiosity will take over as they browse and scroll. Regardless of your vertical category, Kiril knows that to increase your revenue, the most successful sequence is to communicate with your clients. Listen to this episode to hear actionable tips from Kiril on scaling the e-commerce marketplace.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley and Kiril Kirilov, CEO and Co-founder of Rush, sit down to discuss opportunities to proactively reach out to consumers post-purchase. Kiril talks about connecting and increasing click-through email rates, communicating with clients, and why consumer product education is important. Stay tuned!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:07

Hi, folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Joe Valley 0:18

Hey, folks, Joe Valley here. Thank you for joining me for another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast. This one is fascinating. It’s with a guy named Kiril Kirilov. He’s actually the Bulgarian has an amazing SaaS business to help people increase their revenue, post purchase, which is fascinating. We talked about all the opportunities to reach out to the customer and communicate with them proactively post purchase meaning when they’re going to when their products being packaged when their product is on the truck to be delivered, where it is, and all of this to the fact even when it’s on your doorstep, he gets into the fact that their data shows them that for every email you send to a customer post purchase, it’ll generate $1 and revenue, meaning that if you’ve got a sequence of seven emails that you’re going to send through this Rush.app, which is his business, you’re gonna gain $7 per customer. So if you’ve got 1000 customers, you’re gonna gain an additional $7,000 in revenue, post purchase, add or subtract zeros to the total number of customers as needed. The other cool thing about this is that in talking to hero, and he’s, he’s just a great guy. He’s a former professional athletes, he can run a open 110.34 He used to be able to anyways, which is pretty damn impressive if you know anything about track. And then when he started this company, he raised some venture capital money with some angel investors and some pretty impressive ones. Folks that owned WooCommerce, founded WooCommerce, the original founder there, SMS bump, Casey Armstrong, number of different folks to build this business talks a little bit about that, talk about all the things that you can do to boost revenue post purchase from the existing customers. And this is going to be really, really important as we go into the next couple of years, if we have an economic downturn, and your cost of lifetime value of a customer goes up. And he actually talks a little bit that’s another thing. I mean, just last thing, he’s flipping the script on SaaS businesses, instead of focus focusing on customer lifetime value. He’s really trying to focus on customer lifetime gross profit, which is very interesting. So let’s let’s get into it. It’s a podcast with the founder of Rush.app. His name is Kiril Kirilov. Here we go. Kiril, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast.

Kiril Kirilov 3:03

Appreciate you having me here. Joe. It’s been a while we tried to schedule the meeting like two times over the past couple of months. But here we go.

Joe Valley 3:11

I know but every time we chat, we get to talk about track and field which is exciting. Because you’ve got some incredible times and I’ve got an incredible son that does track and field as well. But we won’t go into that because I think we get lost for an hour Kiril Kirilov is your last name. If I pronounced that properly. Did I did I get that? Right? 1,000%. Right. All right. All right. Tell me about yourself. So the audience understands who you are and what you do.

Kiril Kirilov 3:38

Approaching 40. Right now coming up from a small country called Bulgaria is fairly unknown. And Froggen was actually my patient for quite a while almost like 12 years. I’m not going to go into that specific route. But essentially, that was the main reason for myself to find some space in the digital marketing ecosystem. Back then, when I used to have a surgery of my left knee, and I needed to find a way to build some more income in order to supplement myself and my needs. I was like, almost like 24 years old back then. And that’s how I actually started looking for more opportunities. And the first one that actually showed up was how to build quote, unquote, a business on eBay. And I just bought this new book for 70 bucks. And here we are a couple of years later, like 14 years later, 14

Joe Valley 4:33

years later, yeah, not a company. So yeah, so for the track and field, folks out there Kiril Your 100 meter 100 open time was 10.34 right they are right there templates. Correct. It’s pretty damn fast. So you didn’t weren’t able to make a comfortable living as a professional track athletes. So you decided to do some digital marketing on the side and 14 years later, you’re out warming up and exercising with 200 meter open runs before the podcast? Correct. So you’re making money as digital online expert, do you own a company called Rush.app? What does Rush.app do?

Kiril Kirilov 5:14

That is correct. I’m currently sweating. By the way, I don’t know if people can recognize it. Going, you’re glowing? Yeah. Thank you for that. Essentially, I currently have like two businesses one a little bit bigger than the other. But one is my quote unquote, once again, passionate business, which is having a supplement company locally in Bulgaria, a private label one that currently have more than 10 Plus products. And we’re becoming like the leader on the market, just because we definitely care about quality, and how to communicate with our clients. But my story goes back to the past couple of years doing dropshipping myself, like using China as a fulfillment center in order to not pay for inventory upfront. And essentially, I got hit on so many bumps down the road. So I figure out that there was an opportunity that I wanted to pursue, I have no deaf experience. That’s why my co founder and partner teamed up with myself, like two years ago, when we build up a company called Rush, which is a software as a service company, that it’s supporting Shopify merchants, for the time being, with anything, both parties to build a better customer customer experience. While utilizing the data coming up from the shipping carriers, whether it’s going to be delayed delays, and whatever the case might be, in order to supplement the communication, in a sense to number one, get the eyeballs coming back to your funnel, and number two, monetize them, and build a profit generator and also a retention generator.

Joe Valley 6:52

So you’re actually this is the concept with Rush.app is helping merchants make additional revenue off of clients who haven’t even received their product yet it’s being shipped to them, it’s on the way Correct. There’s communication that happens and they actually buy something else.

Kiril Kirilov 7:12

Yes, and the two main reasons why this is happening, maybe number one, people are eager to know exactly what’s happening with the parcel because it’s not like Amazon, or eBay, or some other for example, big marketplace that you’re almost like safe and secured with these refund policies and whatnot, but you’re just purchasing from a random DTC brand DTC brands, and you never know what’s going to happen if an item is going to get delayed super, super long, or what is currently the whole policy around the brand. So we’re, we’re going to tap in, we’re going to build these automation sequences in flows. It’s almost like set it and forget it, the consumers, the clients of the of these DTC brands are going to open them up. And we’re currently seeing a tremendous amount of huge open rates, anything between 50 to 80%, on the email, and on the low end, like 80 plus percent on the SMS site. So essentially, we’re not really selling through these notifications, we’re just notifying. But you’re giving another reason for the prospect to come back and just spend more dollars.

Joe Valley 8:13

So it’s not a direct pitch for, hey, you bought this now take a look at this, this in this, it’s just notifying them, helping them communicating with them about the process or the timeliness of their past order. And within that you’re giving links back to the website for similar products, or how’s it work?

Kiril Kirilov 8:32

Oh, you’re giving a link to a quote unquote, branded tracking page with the most recent information about their current bar, sell a branded tracking page, correct, they’re going to go there, they’re going to look up the order status. And essentially, they can keep on scrolling down. And we’re going to be applying, you know, these call to action, you know, elements in buttons, for instance, like banners, and some upsells, and cross sells. So once you are providing all the consumers with a beautiful experience, they’re naturally going to click through and just browse around. And at the end of the day, they’re going to spend more money with the brand, and not essentially spend their time on a third party website like the DHL, and USPS is etc.

Joe Valley 9:11

So one of the lines that we talked about in terms of subject lines for the podcast was get eight times more opens and clicks than any other type of email and increase your revenue by 600%. Correct. Do you have specific examples of people that have used this type of service and increase their revenue by 600%?

Kiril Kirilov 9:34

Correct? I have and the reason behind that powerful amplifier that is happening on the back of the of the post purchase experience is due to the fact that nowadays let’s say that email in general enclave you only send 20 I don’t need to make any recommendations when email service provider, but these are the most popular ones in the Shopify ecosystem. If you’re putting up some care binds together, we’re gonna see on the on the low end 10, or 15, to 20%, open rates and one 2% Click through rates, which essentially is going to kill your reputation and authority in the eyes of these email service providers like gmail and hotmail, and all the inboxes that are going to be receiving these notifications. But using Rush, technically, it’s a natural way for people to open these notifications about your days in transit, yours, our days out for delivery. But guess what, seven days after an order has been delivered, you can make a follow up asking for a feedback, how was your experience what we can do better next time in order to make you a satisfied customer after all, and that’s why I said it is we’re seeing between, you know, 50 to 80%, open rates. And the most beautiful part is our email notifications are getting between 20 and 50%. Click through rates. So essentially, what we’re seeing as data is between three and five sessions, on average, a single consumer on a single order, is going to come back to that very tracking page to look up the order status, and continue on brown browsing around. So what people can expect, regardless of your vertical category, whether selling clothing and apparel supplements, I don’t know, CBG doesn’t really matter. It’s like as a benchmark for every single email notification, which is technically servicing the shipping information, you should expect to get $1 for a single email that that is going to be sent out. So if you’re doing 5000 shipments or orders per month, you’re easily going to get at least five grand at the end of the month, like the easy. And our cost software is probably going to cost like 40 or 50 bucks, easy as that. So that’s why we’re seeing these tremendous, you know, our wide driven results, just because we don’t charge we’re not cheap. But we are all reasonable when it comes down to delivering better ROI. So essentially, our application is going to pay for itself at the end of the month.

Joe Valley 12:04

That’s a pretty interesting statistics, you know, one $1 per email of $1 of revenue, $1 profit per email. Yeah. Yeah. Because it would depend, but you’re sending you in this situation. You know, if you’ve got 250 orders every month, we’re getting an additional 250. Or if you’ve got 2500. You can 2500. That’s that’s what you’re talking about. Right? Or? Or is it the 250 orders times the seven emails that you’re sending?

Kiril Kirilov 12:34

That is correct. Okay, I can Yeah. So it just compounds, it really depends on how many flows and sequences you’re going to build up. And he’s just

Joe Valley 12:44

he recommended, what do you recommend in terms of how many emails gets sent out? Ah, that’s a

Kiril Kirilov 12:49

good question. By the way, what we see right now is between four and five sequences, so for instance, even with the approach of q4 season, and with the business of the of the seasonality, and anything in regards to the fulfillment that is happening on the back of the, of the of the warehouses, so what I mean is that usually is going to take between 24 to 72 hours for your warehouse to process the shipment is still not out of the warehouse. But this is actually the time that the consumers are most eager to know what’s happening. Give me more reasoning, like frequently asked questions, you know, find back on their most common objections, I don’t trust your brand, I don’t justify the pricing, nobody’s communicating with myself over the next 72 hours, send them a follow up. But it’s gonna be tied to connect connected to the fact that once an item is going to be out for delivery, we’re going to recognize the status because we’re tightly connected to the API’s of these USPS, and DHS, and all these big players. And we’re going to disregard, the first sequence that we’re going to continue on with it’s in transit is right now out for delivery, prepare yourself to be at the doorstep or at the address at the moment of the delivery. If there is a failed delivery, no worries at all, we can see that and we can send you another follow up. And one of the most successful sequences, I think I’ve mentioned it like once a couple of minutes ago, is having a specific date, tightly connected to the delivered status. So if it’s like seven days later, if it’s like 14 days later, so for example, if you’re selling supplements, you can expect for people to be like, say happy or satisfied. Five days later, they need some time in order to feel the product, right? If it’s for example, a dress or hoodie, it’s like almost instant experience. So it really depends how we’re going to connect it to the delivered service to build that better customer experience.

Joe Valley 14:46

And those are follow up emails after they’ve received the product. Are they seeking feedback and reviews? Is it doing that in combination with links back to the website for additional browsing, what is it? Do you actually say? Are there any problems you’d like to tell us about or anything like that? How detailed do you recommend people get?

Kiril Kirilov 15:07

Yeah, the flow is basically a sequence, you might start with a feedback request, for example, then you can say, You know what, we have that beautiful, I don’t know, limited connection right now on sale, then you can, you know, have, let’s say, two days later, send another follow up. So for instance, like, anything that is going to continue on compounding the trust and the satisfaction, in my opinion, it’s crucial. Don’t just try to hard sell, make sure to make people understand better your product, the brand and your service. If they can do that. They have enough reasoning to continue on coming back to your website and your store to spend not more dollars, people get lost with five days later, I’m gonna send 20% off of you know, 15 days later, I’m gonna send 50% off. Nobody cares about discounts. They care about the added value, which is the overall experience in my opinion.

Joe Valley 15:57

Yeah. So you mentioned that the, you know, you mentioned product or service, but this is really for physical products that are being shipped. Right. It’s not a service. Right. Yeah. And primarily for products at this point being sold on Shopify, right? That is correct. Right. So if I’ve got a WordPress site, not usable at this point,

Kiril Kirilov 16:19

not at the moment, even though I used to use WooCommerce and Shopify at the same time, you know, a few years ago, and we’re definitely looking forward to expand on WooCommerce as well.

Joe Valley 16:31

And how long have you been in business with with Rush.app?

Kiril Kirilov 16:35

How many years it’s like two years, like we started the company, on March 2020, it was just an idea of show the mock ups. And we started putting pen to paper. And we essentially, we started hiring the first developers. But listen, if if it wasn’t for my co founder, I was probably not going to be sitting here doing the podcast, maybe we were going to be chatting about something else. But not about building a software as a service type of a company. It’s a different beast. And it’s nothing in comparison about building a D to C or b2c brand, that is serving people with physical products. It’s it’s b2b, peanuts pure form. And it’s really essential to understand the core obstacles and common beliefs and pain points about what kind of products you’re gonna build, in order to ship it out as fast as possible, so that you can make sure to make people proud of using your technology compared to your competitors.

Joe Valley 17:36

Yeah, building a SaaS business like yours is very different than selling grilling a princess for sure. Yeah, remind me, how did you and your partner meet?

Kiril Kirilov 17:45

We’ve been friends for the past couple, let’s say seven to eight years. Essentially, my wife and his wife were pretty close, ever since high school. And we just chatted around, shared a couple of beers. And at some point, I got to know him a little bit better, he has to know me a little bit better. And prior was he was working up work, the company itself as a technical lead and Product Manager. And he was leading a team of 20 developers something like that. It’s a pretty big size team, because usually the size of the small teams and technical developers and technical leads, or sorry, not more than five to seven developers, he was doing 20. And he’s like, Listen, I’ve been building software for the past 20 years, I know how to put up the code. And I know how to scale the technology. And I was like, let’s sit down, see what kind of investment we need to put together. So we were bootstrapped in the beginning in 2020. And we attracted some eyeballs from pretty well connected and sophisticated and also experienced angel investors, which I’m super proud of, by the way, because they’re number one friends of ours right now. And number two people that I can always follow up with, if I need to look for some help.

Joe Valley 19:05

Help in terms of I need more money, or help in terms of hey, look, we’re experiencing this challenge in our business. You’re my mentor, essentially, how would you address this? Which one is so check

Kiril Kirilov 19:16

it out? Both, if not more? And what I mean is that I’m going to just, you know, share some of the names because it’s publicly available right now. Number one, we have the x co founder, the original x co founder of WooCommerce. By the name of ADP Nah, he’s angel investing in our company. We have the guys behind SMS bump. It’s pretty popular SMS solution. We just one of the biggest ones right now in the Shopify ecosystem, currently part of the family of yachts for the guys also back this up on that journey. We have Jonathan Kennedy, who is the founder of Carson. And we have last but not least, Casey Armstrong, who is currently the CMO of shipbob. The biggest Threepio warehousing solution in the United States and also serving, you know, 1000s of Big Shopify brands. So these guys not just know that they just, you know, put some dollars and some skin in the game. But if they we need, if we need, like a second pair of eyes, they’re always there for us. So sometimes I’m going to be last into what should we do next, like what kind of go to market strategy we need to go after? How should I treat, for example, my big, you know, mid market enterprise clients, what is important for them, they’ve been there, exactly where we’re going after right now. So it’s a little bit easy for us to understand the ecosystem, and to not purport to not make some stupid rookie mistakes. But like that we have good coaches around us. So we need to be the good athletes that we need to just practice every single day and move forward and execute.

Joe Valley 20:52

Pretty impressive, pretty impressive list of names there. And you know, you’re giving your credit to your to your business partner that if it wasn’t for him, you wouldn’t be here. But if it wasn’t for you, he wouldn’t be here, either. He’d still be working his day job at Upwork. Are you comfortable telling us you know, in the in the 24 months that you’ve launched the business, how many subscribers you’ve managed to raise,

Kiril Kirilov 21:20

of course, I can actually tell you how many, how much money we’ve raised so far as well. We’re currently serving a little bit over 1500 Shopify customers right now, every single day, we’re super proud of that like, because I don’t really believe that we still have a product market fit. It’s a big total addressable market, which is the Shopify ecosystem. So essentially, after you probably going to close 20,000 30,000 live active customers, you might find yourself in a position to know exactly who you’re serving. But right now, we’re still figuring out whether we know we need to go beat no big deal, I’m sorry, a mid market enterprise, or we should go out and sort of, you know, the SMBs. But the product is applicable for both ISPs. On the other hand, with raise a small round, like 300,000 USD in 2021, that was backed by our angel investors. And we currently close the seed round, which is 2.5 million euros, not USD, I think it’s like 2.8, or 2.7, based upon the currency conversion, but it doesn’t really matter that much. And we’re pretty much with well established finances, we grew up, we grew the team from around a couple of guys, like we were sitting at five guys, the total team in 2021. Right now, we’re 24, something like that. So put it like r&d 11 or 12, developers currently working full time. And we have amazing, you know, support, growth, marketing, and also a special division for partners, which are our influencers and our agency that we’re currently supporting every single day. So it sounds like a small team compared to what’s currently available in the ecosystem. But I’m really proud of the guys that are currently making this. And I don’t know who said it, but people make the teams to teams make the brands and companies grow up faster. And I can’t complain, I have my sleepless nights where I need to sit down on the laptop and just trying to figure out, you know, things out, but essentially, building a software as a service company. It has been like my greatest education over the past couple of years.

Joe Valley 23:31

That’s pretty impressive what you’ve done, the names that you’ve gotten to, you know, invest in, believe in you. You’ve raised, you’ve raised some money, I’m assuming all of that money, or the vast majority is going to the team that you’ve built to continue to build the product. And and then of course, to market the app to folks as well, in the e-commerce world. Are you are you focused on? Or is there a differentiation between you know, folks that are doing 1020 50 million in revenue or those doing a million in revenue? Do you have a preference or are you going after both? As far as clients? We’re going off

Kiril Kirilov 24:09

to them all to be honest with you. Yeah, we have clients currently, some of them are doing like five new per month, like huge seven figures per month, we have customers who are getting started, like you know, mom and pop shops or just you know, some random Junior guys. So what I mean by that, like people getting started at the age of 2122 Trying to figure you know, e-commerce out, but everybody starts from somewhere, we need to respect them, because you never know after two years, how these guys guys are gonna explode. I’m actually, you know, sitting with a reason why and I don’t need to make, you know, another ad for another, for example, huge conference, but I was in Miami like seven or 10 days ago, and I can make to Bulgaria. I was attending a pretty well put together Shopify conference I’ve made So many great friendships and connections or whatever, but I, you know, my mind was blown blown away by the fact that most of the big agencies right now that are supporting for instance, let’s say email marketing, and CRO and Facebook advertising and tick tock is right now a big trend. Most of these founders of these agencies are at the age between 22 and 25. Like, it’s ridiculous, like these guys four years ago will probably like seeing it at high school. Yeah, like, maybe trying to go to college to university right now. They’re building these big seven, eight big agencies, it’s ridiculous. But the brands on the other hand, like the mature ones, the ones who are doing, you know, some good amount of revenue, like, build up from guys, I mean, fairly, you know, young people like 25 Plus, but for the most part, like 30 plus years old.

Joe Valley 25:48

Yeah. Yeah, I find that, you know, over the last decade, the average age of the person in the industry is much older than it was, it’s like kids, slapping things together anymore, just to make a buck. The exceptions where there are some of the young ones that are innovating and doing things differently, that are helping everyone else, they’re seeing the problem and solving it. But the majority of the folks that I work with a little age, a little wisdom to them. And current goal is to build a great brand, a great business for eventually a great buyer to take over at a great price. It’s not just slapping it together and trying to make a buck anymore. It’s trying to I think it’s

Kiril Kirilov 26:25

a great point that you just mentioned it. Number one of the fact that you’re building something for an exit, if you’re not building for an exit, you’re not really like pushing yourself too hard. And I’ll say that you need to not sleep, for example, hustled hard every single day. But essentially, you know what the opportunity is currently in the market. So if you build to exit, you’re going to shrink the time to build to be accurate, in my opinion, I can see it as a trend. And I can see so many, you know, you know, threads of my actual exited quite a bit of free karma brands over the past couple of years like they started from scratch. And essentially, in two years, they’re just, you know, going to the races and just making a pretty healthy amount of money.

Joe Valley 27:07

Well, I’ve seen it lots and lots of times, yes, in the position I’m in let’s, let’s take a moment then, to jump to a little mini promotional ad here, folks, we have a goal of giving away 10,000 copies digital copies of the EXITpreneurs Playbook. So you could do exactly what Kiril was talking about. Exit well learn the value of your business first set goals reverse engineer path to them, make sure that you’re pulling up pushing the levers that are going to improve the value of your business and improve what I call the four pillar tilt. It’s not just a multiple times your discretionary earnings equals the value of your business, there is going to be a multiple range that your business is going to be. And that four pillar is going to tilt one way or the other increasing the value or decreasing the value. So you’ve got to learn what buyers want. And those four pillars. They’re all in the exit printers playbook. You can get a free digital copy at exitpreneur.io/QLpod forward slash QL pod just like Quiet Light Podcast. There, you can download a digital version of the book. If you do it on your mobile phone or mobile device, you can download it directly to your Kindle iBook or Nook and get essentially get the free digital version or Kindle version, if you will. So if you are an entrepreneur, building a business to exit, I know I wrote the book, but please get the book. There’s a lot of information in that that’s going to help you I’m giving it away for free. If you’re an entrepreneur that’s going to buy a business. If you’re an acquisition entrepreneur, don’t you want the opposing team playbook? It’s exactly what it is. It’s called the exit printers playbook. Not the acquisition entrepreneurs playbook. So get the playbook if you’re buying a business, it’s going to help you make some better decisions as well. EXITpreneur.io/QLpod. And now back to Kiril. You’ve been listening to me ramble I see you smiling there. This is all right up your alley as well. You must have with your you know, investors, you must have talked about the exit and the ultimate goal in the business. Right? They’re looking for a return on investment as well. How do those conversations go?

Kiril Kirilov 29:16

Wow, that’s great. By the way, that was a great way that you just put together but going to a question. That’s a great talk right now. And that is coming up on the top, to be honest with you. Number one, because so many of the venture capital funds are seeing that the recession is gonna kick in, and it’s probably gonna last for a couple of years. The trajectory is like two or three years right now. Even listening to guys like David Sachs and Jason Calacanis, or if you want to go to Y Combinator, it doesn’t really matter. Everybody’s seeing that the inflation is going through the roof, and the interest rates are not going down at all. So it means that, if you’re not, if you’re building a business, on moving science, you have a great chance to be out of the business in no time just because you’re not building on this right? Fundamental Principles, which essentially like product marketing and support if you understand your product, but it has to be communicated Toronto support, and you know it, you have to know how to communicate with your clients and your future prospects and leads. So going back once again, to your question, I do believe that so many of the new entrepreneurs who are going to be entering the ecosystem, so for instance, the SaaS ecosystem, I’m going to have some hard time, if they don’t have a clear blueprint, to figure out how they can bootstrap their way to success. The guys who have raised some capital, they have a little bit of a longer runway, it really depends how we’re gonna optimize your runway over the next couple of maybe 24 to 30 months. That’s what people are currently trying to optimize for right now. Speaking specifically, for Series A, B, and you know, the the bigger rounds, because you have more overhead, more talent and more hires have been made over the past couple of months, we don’t really specifically go into that category. But we’re also being aware that we would rather be alive in two years, and make sure that we can still support our clients and still continue on growing, you know, regardless of if it’s 20%, or 100%, if it’s of 1,000%. But making sure that we can remain in business. And and I think that the valuations are not like what it used to be like, through the COVID period, which essentially anyone with good idea, or maybe well put together, MVP can get a 30x Multiple. Right now it’s between five and seven, if you’re lucky. So are you

Joe Valley 31:51

even we’re talking, we’re talking about SaaS businesses, you talk about five to seven of revenue, or five to seven of earnings,

Kiril Kirilov 31:59

five elements revenue right now. But it’s like more like future revenue that you’re probably going to sell to investors. But let me just not like,

Joe Valley 32:06

let me throw a caveat there, folks, this is because all of the money that’s being invested is into development and building that client base. He’s not actually profitable. I would assume at this point, is that right here? Right. 1,000%? Right. So there’s David Newell wrote a great piece on building a six, seven or eight figure SaaS business, you know, if you do a search for that, and David No, it’s on the quiet like page, it’s basically a mini book that he talks about, and the valuations flip from a multiple of earnings or discussing earnings to a multiple of revenue, when you get to a certain size when you have a certain amount of subscribers. And when you’re taking all of your money like heroes and reinvesting it in the growth of the company for future value, that’s when you get a flip to a multiple of revenue. And hey, five to seven times revenues. Pretty impressive. I’m sure there’s lots of e-commerce and content owners that would love to get five to seven revenue. It’s not the case, it’s not the way it happens in that part of the world. But, you know, with what you’re doing here, I’ll certainly when you get large enough, of course, certainly certainly possible. So how far out into the future? are you predicting or hoping that maybe you and your investors will have an exit? Or is it just not in the cards yet, you’re just focused on building the business and making it great.

Kiril Kirilov 32:06

I think it’s the second option, at least for the time being number one, because our current VCs and Angel investors per se, are willing to back us up regardless of the of the route. So you never know if the recession is going to kick in, like what’s happening right now in the ecosystem. So we’re always going to optimize accordingly, to continue on building a great business put together while not sacrificing on the future opportunity to put it like that. So for instance, I think that the main indicators that people have to focus on right now, it’s think about even a potential Series A round or Series B if you’re definitely qualifying for such a big round. But making sure that you can be in the mindset of a bootstrap company, what is important right now in terms of KPIs in order to number one, sustain the growth of the company, and to not sacrifice just not, you know, burn capital over stupid in your ideas and initiatives, etc. Like apply the 8020 principle, be be aware of the fact that even the market is going to get squeezed a little bit. Let’s say for example, Shopify is super profitable. They have so much money in the bank right now. But the Dow down I think, like 70 or 80% on the stock market. It’s a huge indicator that something is happening. What is the exact what are the inputs and the outputs? I don’t Really no, because we have some, you know, news that are coming up, you know, left and right. But it’s not like I’m currently sitting on the board of directors on Shopify. And what’s happening behind the curtains like, there is 1.7 million Shopify stores in our case, but how much? How many of them actually making money? Is it to 20,000? Is it 200,000? I don’t know, half a million, or maybe just half a million, I’m making more than, I don’t know, 30,000 per month, not more. Maybe the big month was seven, eight, Degas in the low of 20,000. In total, you never know. So make sure that, you know, essentially, what is your ideal customer profile look like? How can I support you in the best fashion possible, and how we can stack more value not only from features and product, but give them blueprints, give them education, give them for example, data that is currently at your disposal, we have so much data right now, even you know, at the best q4, we know essentially how, how big delays are gonna occur in the next q4 season, provide the data in advance and say to them, You know what, make sure that you’re going to keep these things in mind before going to start, you know, scaling in q4. And you’re going to start monetizing, but don’t sacrifice on the fact that you need to retain your customers, because you’re building your product in your brand as an e-commerce owner, not just the just to squeeze profits, but the majority of the profit is happening from the people who are going to become you know, a second time purchaser a third time purchaser, and maybe a lifetime purchaser, for example, for the next couple of years, this is where the money gotta be made. And if nobody is going to get it like straight, that you need to do the extra mile, to not sacrificing a service and your support and your product, you have a great chance to build a great brand. And that’s basically it’s not about copywriting. I mean, copywriting is essential. But make sure to service your consumers and clients in the best fashion possible.

Joe Valley 36:52

Yeah, listen, I I’m going to make a prediction that, you know, a business like yours, Rush.app is going to actually flourish during an economic downturn, because people are going to want to make sure that they’re maximizing every dollar. And when they can, when they can spend 40 or $50 a month for your service and get $1 for every email they send out. And they send seven emails to a single customer that placed an order, and they’ve got 1000 emails that they’re sending out every month. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s a lot of profit added. And it’s servicing that customer and it’s building their own brand and reputation that’s going to help them survive and thrive during an economic downturn and come out the other side, really strong, and much more valuable. So I think your business is going to help a lot of people during this economic downturn. One last question that I’m confused about, I just want to get it answered for the audience. And that is, does Rush.app replace Klaviyo? And other email type services? Or does it just focus on post purchase email communication with

Kiril Kirilov 37:59

the customers? A great question, by the way, and I want to add something on top of in regards to the value that you just mentioned. Number one, think about it like that, if clever is the gun, right, we are the trigger and the bullet that is going to be sent out. So we essentially are trying to leverage any kind of notification systems where there’s going to be push notifications or SMS notifications. So email marketing notification systems like Klaviyo, we’re just providing more data to feed the beast, which is Klaviyo. But claim is going to get the data and is going to transform the data in multiple recipes, we call them. As I said it like delivered 10 days later, I cannot, for example, follow up with the customer, if it’s currently at customs, or if it’s a delays happening without any proper reason. Or if it’s currently for example, failing to deliver claims, you don’t have the data. We’re providing the data, we’re pulling the trigger, and we’re sending the bullet through an email, SMS or push notification, and something that we started optimizing internally and like building up as a coach and moving forward, I can see all the SaaS companies, you know, preaching about customer lifetime value, but we’re switching switching in the model by the way. And we’re probably going to be the first ones we’re going to start speaking about it we want to introduce it’s fairly unknown, but nobody’s using it. Like optimizing for customer lifetime value is great. But you should optimize for customer lifetime profit generation that you’re going to build over time. So think about the cross profit, not only the revenue that you can build up at the end of the day, and as you said it like we’re trying to provide more profit to supplement the growth of these businesses. We’re not trying to just provide more revenue, they can send 1000 For example, abandoned cart sequences, they can, you know, build up revenue, but they’re essentially not building gross profit. We want to show them how to build more gross profits to even become more profitable as a as an econ brand. And essentially to stand out On the facing challenges right now. So for example, with cost of acquisition is going up on Facebook, attribution is completely ruined, people are going to tiktoks and trying to find their way to keep on looking for more top of the funnel prospects and leads. But regardless of the place that you’re gonna look for more for more customers, and make sure to squeeze enough gross profit, post purchase,

Joe Valley 40:24

there’s a lot of it there. And it’s just waiting from the sounds of it. It’s under utilized, and your service really makes it easy. So I appreciate the time that you and your partner put into building this business Kiro. Because you’re building you’re building a business is gonna help 1000s 10s of 1000s, hopefully in time for your benefit, and for the benefit of the e-commerce entrepreneurs that are out there that need to make things easier and more profitable. So I appreciate all of that. Appreciate the time you spent with us today. Tell the audience how do they reach out to you? How do they find you how to find about the service, things of that nature.

Kiril Kirilov 41:03

I’m elsewhere, I’m on Twitter, I’m on LinkedIn, you can just search for KKiril as my username. And just go to a store that if you just send a notification or support ticket and just ask for myself, I’m going to stick around because I’m always looking to communicate with our future clients and our recent clients and make sure I’m going to be as close as possible to guys. And Joe, thank you so much for having me today.

Joe Valley 41:26

My pleasure, man. Thanks for Thanks for coming on. I’m glad we finally made it. I’m glad that the baby’s healthy and strong and yes, you’ve got a few 200 Open 200 runs and before he came on the podcast today. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Outro 41:42

today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast subject or guest, email us at [email protected] Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.