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Chad Kodary (00:01.77)
What is going on everybody? We are on another episode of behind the revenue. I have my good friend on with us today, Roger Yelvington, and he's got an awesome company called ad launch. He's got experience in the agency space. He's owned gyms before. Like this dude's been all around just straight entrepreneur, straight business mogul. I'm super excited to bring them on Roger. If you can just tell the, you know, for some context,
Who are you? What do you do? Just give us a little background on yourself.
Roger Yelvington (00:37.868)
I'm one of those lifelong entrepreneurs, man. I knew at 16 that was where I was going to end up, is running my own business. I don't know if it's a problem with authority sometimes, but whatever that line is, I knew that I was going to be in that entrepreneurial zone. I'm a very good entrepreneur.
So, you know, just digging in from an early age and I kind of cut my background a little bit with banking. That was actually a really good foundation. So that's, I've started the career in banking and I ended up being a small business banker because that's where my passion was. So then I'm working with all these, like, then they put me in wealth management for small businesses. So it's like, that was a great foundation for me to learn.
and still kind of scratch that entrepreneurial bug a little bit until I ended up opening up the gyms and real estate and a few other ventures.
Chad Kodary (01:34.138)
You had gym you had like actual brick and mortar gyms right? I remember you telling me how many gyms
Roger Yelvington (01:36.962)
Yeah, yeah. So I'm a brick and mortar guy at first. And then about five years ago, started transitioning over into the digital agency world because of scalability, right? I was like, well, I could put another half million dollars into a fourth gem, or I can, I can build a scalable digital business and
You know, at the time I was working with, you know, about 50 gyms, uh, has a side hustle because I took on my own gym marketing, right? Because I wasn't happy with how it was going. And, uh, then all of a sudden, you know, other gym owners and it word spreads and I've got 50 clients that I'm side hustling while I'm, while I still have the gyms. And I was like,
Chad Kodary (02:22.638)
Wow. That kind of like reminds me of like Alex Hermosy, like the whole gym launch secrets where he was, you know, he started his own gyms. And then after that basically started doing marketing and consulting basically for the gyms running their ads and all that stuff.
Roger Yelvington (02:38.21)
Yeah, his approach and I actually looked at applying gym launch, he was definitely an innovator in the field for the whole fitness space, obviously. And so, I think applying a lot of those principles and I'm humble enough to say I learned from Alex. Actually, it was back when he was more affordable.
Chad Kodary (03:00.35)
Oh yeah, me too. Fun.
Roger Yelvington (03:06.594)
but I paid 10 grand and I got a one day onboarding into his Allen software, which I don't think is his biggest success. I don't think that he, but it enabled me to interface with him for a whole day, eight hours with a lunch break for 10 grand. And it's like, you know.
Chad Kodary (03:22.078)
Wow. Dude. What, and what was Alan? I, you know, it's funny because, um, this is a funny story about, I want to say maybe two years ago, a year and a half ago, two years ago. Um, I, I get a, uh, I see in Calendly cause I have my Calendly open. I see all of our books call it comes in that comes in for dash legs, like for demos and stuff like that. And I see Alex or Mosie.
And I'm like, okay, this is strange. Is this really Alex Hermosy or is this some, another person named Alex Hermosy, right? Like what's going on here, right? Um, and I get the booking and I tell my account executive, I'm like, you know what, I'm, I'm going to take over this call and I'm going to show up to it and just let me take it. Cause if it is him, that would be really cool. Um, so I ended up showing up to the call and it was Alex. He was on the call.
Roger Yelvington (03:51.823)
Right.
Roger Yelvington (04:05.871)
Right.
Chad Kodary (04:09.67)
And I demo dash clicks for about 45 minutes. We realized that at the time where we were wasn't a good fit for exactly what he was looking for. I recommended some other softwares kind of point them in the right direction and help them out. But it was, it was, it was really cool because he's, you know, he's looking, he's such like a high level thinker almost. Um,
but it was, it was, that was, that was a, it was a cool, funny story. It was a random thing that happened. So you spent it, but the reason why I was telling you this is because I remember he was telling me at the time, I don't know if maybe he was just trying to like do some R and D into other software companies. Yeah. Cause he was. Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (04:30.806)
He really is.
Roger Yelvington (04:36.184)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (04:44.902)
I think he was doing our, now that you say it, I'd have to look at the year that I did that, but I bet it was around the time he was getting ready to do this talent play.
Chad Kodary (04:52.386)
Yeah. So what was Allen exactly? Because I remember him saying something about that on the call.
Roger Yelvington (04:59.699)
So Alan was, it was an AI assistant, right? When AI was in its early stages and he said, it's basically it was an appointment setting where it simplified things. So you got all these leads being generated and Alan would take over.
and set it and so you would sell based off of appointments. The whole idea was to sell gym services and say, look, you can pay me per appointment of people that walk through the door. So there's no risk to you. So kind of trying to make it like the whole, making them offer so good they feel dumb saying no. Like what gym owner is gonna say no to paying for, somebody that's walked through their doors, 50 bucks, 75 bucks, whatever the cost was.
Chad Kodary (05:37.995)
Yeah, yeah.
Roger Yelvington (05:48.71)
because then it's on them to sell it, but at least we got them through the door. But I think they were just a little early to that game and a lot of issues with it working properly or easily or whatever the aim was.
Chad Kodary (05:52.188)
You.
Chad Kodary (05:57.003)
Was it good?
Chad Kodary (06:05.698)
I mean you paid the 10k and he spent the day with him. How was that? Honest feedback dude. If it wasn't, I mean he's a successful person. I don't think he cares.
Roger Yelvington (06:10.638)
I, oh yeah, I mean, I, look, I love, no, I really, I really like, you know, I like everything Alex puts out, his books, I mean, I'm not a fan boy, right? But the man makes a lot of sense, right? And he opens up a way of thinking that I think is really healthy for any business owner. But when it comes to the actual product, Alan,
It was a little too complex from a standpoint of integrating it with current systems. And I was like, I was one of the first 10 that bought it. So I was really early. Yes.
Chad Kodary (06:51.29)
Oh, so you were really, yeah. Are they still even open? Do they still have it or did he sell it?
Roger Yelvington (06:58.526)
I, it had so little value to me in the long run that I just kind of aborted it. And I mean, I probably still have a license. I know that he did sell it. And with that said, I probably could have gotten more value out of it, but things were going really, really well with how I already had my shop set up. I was just looking for an easy kind of add in, and then also the ability to, you know, pick his brain for it for a day. So I was like, oh, I wouldn't win. Yeah. It was cool.
Chad Kodary (07:03.786)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (07:22.338)
So how was that? So what'd you learn in that day? What was like the biggest, what was the biggest takeaways that you took from spending a whole day with Alex Hermozi?
Roger Yelvington (07:32.35)
This is interesting. The biggest takeaway that I learned is to shut the fuck up because I wanted to win his respect so badly that I spoke too much. I wanted to give opinions, oh, well, here's what I'm thinking about doing, blah, blah. And granted, in my defense, it was before Alex was Alex, you know? He was just, oh, Jim Lodge guy. And I definitely had a lot of respect, so I wanted to earn that respect by.
Chad Kodary (07:39.234)
Good.
Chad Kodary (07:53.933)
Yep.
Roger Yelvington (08:01.422)
showing value and the lesson learned was, I spent 10 grand. I didn't spend 10 grand to get him to like me or to respect me. I spent 10 grand because I wanted, this is a person that has achieved a certain level of success and I can learn from this person. And I spent too much of my time with pride and ego trying to position myself. And it was just, you know, I learned not to do that going forward.
Chad Kodary (08:28.43)
Okay. Fair enough. So you went, you went from having gyms to then servicing about 50 people in your agency, right? We'll call it an agency because 50 clients is more than a lot of agencies that I know. Um, and then, and then you, do you still have your agency or did you kind of weed out of that?
Roger Yelvington (08:40.098)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (08:44.922)
No, I still have it. What I did is I still have some clients that we service, and I just stopped selling the service because the focus can't be on, because there is a lot of churn, but the clients that you have that you service really, really well, I've had clients for over four years, or since the beginning, and it's just mostly lead generation services. And what's that? Yeah, mainly gems, but it's all fitness-related businesses.
Chad Kodary (08:53.984)
Gotcha.
Chad Kodary (09:07.614)
And it's gyms still gyms mainly gyms. Cool. Fitness related. Gotcha. And then, no, so I want to just keep, I'm going to dive even deeper because, so you went, you went brick and mortar business owner, then you went into the agency space and now you have a software that you just created and just recently launched, I think you might still be in beta and it's called ad launch, right?
Roger Yelvington (09:15.362)
Yep. And yeah, go ahead.
Roger Yelvington (09:33.622)
Yeah. So, so when I got into the agency space, I immediately recognized that there's a lot of agency owners. I don't know what the hell they're doing. They're just in this because they're just like, Oh, I can do this from home or easy barrier to entry. Right. And so early on, I was like, man, they really need more structure.
Chad Kodary (09:36.322)
So what does AdLaunch do?
Roger Yelvington (10:00.17)
And I felt like I had a good background between banking and then also being a local business owner that I had some lessons learned that I could apply into this space. With that said, I tried to solve too big of a problem at first. I wanted to solve all the operational issues in a software and build a software that I actually had the software idea right when I started my agency.
And needless to say, wasted time, effort, money. It was too heavy of a lift because I'd never built software before. And so I had to put a pin in it. I shelved that project. It was called Agency HQ. And it was gonna do all the things that there was a gap in the market for operationally, like proposals, contracts, billing, before Go High Level or Dash List, before anybody did that stuff, right, for the whole picture.
Chad Kodary (10:57.195)
Yep.
Roger Yelvington (10:58.478)
Retention wasn't even touched anywhere. Like nobody's retaining clients. And the reason I wanted to, is because all these agencies, I would meet these young guys. They're like, yeah, I'm making like 50 grand, 70 grand, 80 grand. I'm like, oh, let's break that down. And then by the time we had a call, it's like, oh yeah, I'm only making five grand, 10 grand. It's like, there was no retention. There was no process. They didn't know how to build a business. They just knew how to sell and market themselves.
And honestly, I don't have much respect for that, right? I've got respect for building a business that's an actual business, not your ability to say that you can fulfill a service, your ability to actually fulfill a service. And that is a big differential between, to me, an entrepreneur and a business person in the digital space, and somebody that just wants to come in and make a quick buck. There's, and...
Chad Kodary (11:35.51)
Yep, truth.
Roger Yelvington (11:51.574)
And for somebody that wants to come in and make a quick buck, I don't fault them. Everybody wants to chase opportunity, but they need to be presented with a better structure or a better process on how to do it. And everywhere you look at in the marketplace for how to start an agency, it's all about sales.
Chad Kodary (12:10.206)
Mainly a lot of it because I think that's where most people struggle with. That's like the first domino.
Roger Yelvington (12:14.902)
It's the first thing they struggle with and it's the most exciting thing. It's not exciting to talk about how to retain a client. Right.
Chad Kodary (12:17.822)
Yeah. Cause you run. Yeah. And you know what? I have some real stats on that. I'll actually share that too. As you know, piggyback off what you're saying here. Um, we would first hear reopened dash. Like I did a webinar every week for 52 weeks straight live webinar for hundreds of people would show up. And I talked about so many different topics, any topic that was related to, um, prospecting or sales or anything related to closing new business.
the registration and signup rate would go through the roof. Like we would have four or 500 people live on a webinar. Anytime I did a webinar that was focused on retention or customer service or like the backend, like after you actually get your client.
Roger Yelvington (12:57.54)
Alright.
Chad Kodary (13:00.87)
You can cut the numbers by like two thirds. Nobody would show up. Right. And the reason for that, it's not sexy. And on top of that, the reason for that is most people, most agencies, the re they're struggling with getting clients. And that's what they're wanting. That's what they want to be educated on. They're not even mentally there yet of, Oh, I have clients. Now I need to figure out how to keep them. A lot of agencies are not even in that mindset, right? You have to actually sign up some clients and go.
Roger Yelvington (13:04.262)
Yeah, because it's not sexy.
Chad Kodary (13:30.784)
through and like, you know, go through the wringer here a little bit, um, in order to even think about retention. Like these guys don't know what that is. Um, I would say probably 90% of agencies and we have a lot of data on agencies as you can imagine in dash clicks. You know, we signed up thousands of agencies every single month that come onto our platform.
Roger Yelvington (13:44.271)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (13:48.314)
I can tell you that probably 90% of the agencies, at least that we see our brand new agencies that come off of somebody sold them a course or they saw a coaching program that they wanted to get into, or they saw some ads online and bought some education material on how to start your own digital marketing agency or SMMA, like kind of like a Tai Lopez style thing. Right.
Roger Yelvington (14:08.226)
Right, right, right.
Chad Kodary (14:09.418)
And then they go and they, they are now entering the world of agencies. And that's why, by the way, that's why the world of agencies is trending and it's still trending so heavily, right? Because everybody wants to open up their own marketing agency, right? It's a big trend in, in the digital space, right? Owning your own digital marketing agency, right? There's thousands and hundreds of thousands of courses and education materials, all related just on opening your own marketing agency, right? So that's why I think 90% of the
Roger Yelvington (14:23.43)
Great.
Roger Yelvington (14:29.574)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (14:39.452)
it is newbies. And that's why anytime you do anything that's related to how to get a client had to, you know, get more leads booked on your calendar. Like those, dude, those are the topics. We literally just did a webinar. It just did a webinar. Uh, was it yesterday? I think it was yesterday. I just had a live webinar yesterday. Yeah, it was yesterday. Um, we had about 300 and something people register and there was about 150 ish, maybe close to 200, maybe at its peak.
showed up on the actual call.
Roger Yelvington (15:09.414)
Come on out, Wally.
Chad Kodary (15:12.126)
And the topic was how to get 80 new clients per month for your marketing agency. And that was the first webinar that I've done in like six months, maybe even more than that. Right. So it was like fresh, usually like when I do webinars and they're recurring weekly, the, the momentum builds and you know, you have the same people keep showing up. And then you just have more people and more people as you keep doing it. Like when I did the 52 straight, you know, I started off with like 10 people in my webinar and then next week it was 50 people and a hundred people that just kept rolling it. Right.
Roger Yelvington (15:30.53)
Right.
Roger Yelvington (15:40.822)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (15:41.594)
And the reason why I'm saying this is because it's such a, it's such a topic for these guys where they want to know more and they were so engaged that the retention on the webinar, like, dude, these people stayed all the way until the end, they, they are trying to figure out how to land their first client or their first couple of clients. Right. So just to add some like data and validation to what you're saying, like it's truth, like that's what it is. People don't care about retention.
Roger Yelvington (15:58.363)
Yeah, yeah.
Roger Yelvington (16:05.506)
Yeah, and you don't, I mean, I guess one way to look at it is, you know, you don't care about...
you don't decorate a cake before you bake it. You gotta bake the cake and then decorate it, right? And really, who wants a cake with no icing? But also, who wants a cake that hasn't been baked? So I think you've gotta have, but you can't have one without the other. And so it's just, I think when you're selling and catering and providing services to a marketplace like agency owners.
Chad Kodary (16:17.494)
Yep, exactly, exactly.
Chad Kodary (16:28.386)
There you go.
Roger Yelvington (16:45.286)
and you have this influx of agencies that have never sold anything and they want to spend money to try and figure it out and then you have the smaller percentage that actually have sold and need to retain you know it's like well which ocean do you want to go after right
Chad Kodary (17:05.207)
Yep.
So let's keep going with this. So I know you came from, so now you have your software ad launch, right? So a little bit more into the journey. You have your software ad launch. You went in beta. I know you signed up your first couple of beta users, which is awesome. How's that going so far? I mean, how does it feel to be in the first iteration of a live software with users? I remember that feeling. It's exciting. Like, what are you going through right now? What are the types of challenges and really awesome moments that you're just experiencing right now?
Roger Yelvington (17:13.583)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (17:28.132)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (17:35.854)
Yeah, well, AdLaunch has been, it's been great because, you know, it's allowing me to go all in on everything I've learned as an entrepreneur and a marketer and a business owner to serve and solve one problem and try to be the best at solving that problem. And it resonates because I think we take for granted sometimes the things we know versus what
our target audience knows. You know, I would think that all agencies would know how to run ads in media buying in a certain way, but the reality is that they don't, right? They offer the service, but they don't know how to fulfill it. And you know, that's the eye-opening thing is, I'm jumping on these calls and, you know, I'm assuming that all these agencies know how to run ads, but they don't, right?
And some of them do. And those are great conversations because that's what this has done. You asked about the beta users. I wanna give a lot of credit to Ross Christofoli because had he not posted, he saw the software, he loved it, and he posted about it. He just shared it. Didn't talk to me, didn't ask me about it. He said, oh yeah, check this out.
Chad Kodary (18:36.866)
Yep.
Chad Kodary (18:43.691)
Yeah, he's awesome, dude.
Roger Yelvington (18:53.134)
And then I started getting all of these demos. I wasn't even planning on selling it for a while because.
Chad Kodary (18:57.226)
How many demos share the numbers? I remember you shared it with us and I thought it was fucking awesome, dude. How many demos you Ross did a post on his Facebook page or I think on his group, whatever it was. All right. How many how many I think you were getting scheduled calls, right? Is that what it was? Demos.
Roger Yelvington (19:01.911)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (19:07.442)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (19:10.894)
Yeah, I was getting, so I put in a booking link and then, you know, started getting messages about it. And I just said, you know what? I'll do a lifetime deal for a limited number of seats for right now and, you know, and cap it off. And so I did, I think I scheduled over the course of about 10 days, like 24 demo calls. Every, what's that?
Chad Kodary (19:33.938)
All from Ross. All from Ross's post.
Roger Yelvington (19:37.378)
Well, so I think about 16 of them were from Ross's post. And then a lot of them, and some of them were referrals of people that had signed up at the beginning of it, and now they were referrals. So by the end of the 10 days, it was referrals from people that had signed up. And it was 997 for lifetime. And, you know.
Chad Kodary (19:42.807)
Wow.
Chad Kodary (19:53.806)
Gotcha.
Chad Kodary (20:04.754)
one time fee or payment plan. Just one.
Roger Yelvington (20:06.006)
Yeah, a one-time fee because I definitely wanted some people that were in it with me for the long haul that I felt were, I didn't sell, so I sold 20 out of the 24 and really I capped it out. Yeah, and well, it's really almost close to 100% because of the four that didn't sign up, two of them were e-commerce and I told them that, I'm like.
Chad Kodary (20:19.602)
I fucking conversion rate dude.
Roger Yelvington (20:31.874)
This isn't a good fit, right? This is like, you're not going to want the software. You can kind of run ads and make it work for your use case, but I'm not going to have a roadmap dedicated and I don't want your feedback, right?
Chad Kodary (20:33.303)
Yep.
Chad Kodary (20:43.85)
Yeah, I think it's good that you did that. You're taking out people that are not a good fit for your software. You know who you serve.
Roger Yelvington (20:48.674)
Right. Especially because I looked at it like I'm the main person servicing these initial group of users because I have to train my customer service manager who I've hired and is learning from the demo calls, is learning from hopping on with these. But
Chad Kodary (20:58.92)
Yep.
Roger Yelvington (21:06.934)
I want them to learn about the audience that we're serving, which is agencies that are trying to provide a specific service for local businesses. Service businesses, local businesses, there's tens of millions of them out there that need this service and they need paid ads, but the agency learning curve is too steep to serve them.
And there's not solutions that are really easy for the end user to use. So that's where the opportunity is, is creating a simple, but effective platform to actually run an ad that converts at a local level. Right. And, and, um, yeah, so that's the conversion rate was great. I mean, people, you know, the agencies, they got it and.
Chad Kodary (21:42.242)
Gotcha.
Roger Yelvington (21:51.274)
It was the best thing for the business was to take them on, even though it made me a little stressed because it's like inviting somebody over to your house, but like you didn't clean up. Right. That's how it felt. And it's like, I'm that guy that I'm like, you know, if somebody comes over, I want to have like, you know, the food out, like, and like, I want everybody to have a great time and to not to not be confused. Right. But like, you know, inviting people over. Yeah, and it is.
Chad Kodary (22:12.727)
Yep.
It's part of it, dude. It's part of the journey. You're, you are in beta. It's dude. I remember when we launched dash collection, we were in beta. You let in 20 people, right? You said about 20 people in. Yeah. When we launched our beta program for V2, right? I'll talk about V2 now because it's more recent. We already had users that were using the platform for years, right? We had hundreds of users that were using the platform. Can you imagine using, moving over hundreds of users into a,
Roger Yelvington (22:24.118)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chad Kodary (22:44.68)
platform brand new right just like you're doing brand new platform with bugs with the chaos it was it was it was a fucking nightmare for like a good three months
Roger Yelvington (22:54.054)
I can imagine.
Chad Kodary (22:56.058)
And we learned a lot, which is great. The users went through it with us, which was really awesome. A lot of people supported us along the way. And that's just what the journey is all about, dude. And you make just at the end of the road, you're just going to have a 10 times better product because you're building it with your users. Those 20 people, how are you collecting feedback? Do you have them in like a Slack group? Like, what are you doing with them?
Roger Yelvington (23:15.118)
Well, so I've been really responsive with them on Messenger directly, feedback and just kind of providing them service. That's why I capped it out at 20. I'm probably gonna open up a couple more slots on a referral basis and then I'll do a large push for a beta at a higher price point. I'm not gonna do these lifetime deals forever, but I love bringing tranches of users in and then it does help offset the developer cost because we have a
Chad Kodary (23:22.204)
Even better, dude.
Roger Yelvington (23:44.662)
a team of seven that's working full-time on this. And I wanna add more and I wanna grow faster, right? So it helps fuel that. But the big value is just those 20 perspectives. Now you gotta take it with a grain of salt because some people they give feedback and it's just their use case and like you can't serve every single use case. But you understand their mentality a little bit even if some of the feedback you can't implement. But.
Chad Kodary (23:47.147)
Yeah.
Yep.
Roger Yelvington (24:10.682)
Then you also have these conversations with feedback where it's like, whoa, that's a great idea, right? And getting a clear vision of what's important to them instead of what you, all the assumptions, because you have to start with assumptions and then the real data helps you weed through those assumptions a little bit more effectively and efficiently. And that's what's been great for it.
Chad Kodary (24:34.379)
Got it.
Dude, so, so 20 users in the beta, obviously you're going to be pushing through ad launch here. It seems like that's your main focus now moving forward. What, where do you see yourself in the next one, two, three years? I know, I know me and you have had previous conversations. We have our little bro group of SAS founders, which is really awesome. And like, I know, I remember you talking to me about funding. You asked me like, when is Dash like is going to get funding? I said, honestly, we've been just kind of bootstrapping it the whole way through.
Roger Yelvington (24:44.633)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (24:53.954)
Yep.
Chad Kodary (25:06.576)
It's been a thought, but never really pulled the trigger or anything. Like, do you see yourself getting funding for ad launch? I know you said you come from the banking world. You're familiar with the space. Like that's what you want to do. You want to like throw basically gasoline on the fire, right? Is that, is that what you want?
Roger Yelvington (25:16.462)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (25:21.142)
Yeah, and I think throwing gasoline on the fire, you want to have a controlled fire. You want to know, you don't want to just pour gasoline and then walk away. So, and setting the parameters of what the funding is going to go towards and what the clear vision is. Because right now, I look at ad launch in two phases. There's the phase of helping agencies provide
Chad Kodary (25:27.554)
for sure.
Roger Yelvington (25:46.154)
an easy service to plug in ads and to make things simple and to streamline it. And then there's the real product, which is performance, right? It's aggregating data. It's having automations in place that bring the performance to the next level using AI machine learning. And I have some great, you know, our team has the experience of doing this for Keller Williams.
with KW Command. So our team has already been through this wringer before to create a really high-end nationally recognized product. Now we're doing it for ad launch and we wanna take that to the next level. But the big part of it is implementing the AI and machine learning. If you have that clear plan where you know the data and how it can be used, the gasoline on the fire is that's where you wanna pour the gasoline.
Right. And it's not like you can just hire an AI guy, an AI dev to come in and be like, oh, here's how you can make iterations of this. So we have somebody that's a high school friend of mine who's been one of the. You know, top AI machine learning guys in, in his field for years now.
and he's on our board. He's the only board member I have right now because I'm like, look, I need you to be part of this. And he's like involved until he gets the green light of, okay, are we taking this to the next level? Because you have to have a plan with what you're gonna do with the data.
Chad Kodary (27:22.754)
So you have to get product marketing.
You have to get like in order for me, like, yeah, first of all, you have to get product market fit in my opinion, before you go through funding. And usually they say that product market fit from a revenue standpoint, you want to try to get to like at least between one to $2 million in gross sales. Obviously every, every company is different, but you know, that's where you're like product market fit. Okay. People are paying to use it. We have some people that are sticking around. There's a need for it. People are actively using it, right? You start seeing, you start seeing some numbers and some trends
Roger Yelvington (27:42.286)
Yeah, yeah.
Chad Kodary (27:55.464)
TV and, uh, you know, Roas when you're running ads and like things like that, right? You start seeing all those different SAS metrics. Um, so are you going to wait until you get to, let's say, um, just as an example, a million dollars in sales before you start raising maybe like a seed round or a series a
Roger Yelvington (28:03.49)
Absolutely.
Roger Yelvington (28:14.254)
You know, what's interesting is, I think, and I probably should get, maybe have an advisor for this, but I don't even feel like I need it. I feel like I have a gut feeling as an entrepreneur at this point that-
I'm gonna know when I'm ready to take on funding. And when I'm ready, I will be able to get it. And if I'm not ready, then I'll never get it, right? So as soon as I feel that I'm ready where it's like, okay, I can, number one, I can, with confidence, put a pitch together and not give 100% of my equity away. It's not a flyer at this point. So I know what an investor needs as far as confidence, because I've invested in projects in the past as well as an investor.
Chad Kodary (28:53.133)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (29:00.672)
what a investor looks at for risk criteria. And, you know, I want to make it a no-brainer for them where it's like, Oh, well, clearly this works. Here's the right team in place. You just need fuel for the fire. And the thing that I'm looking for, because you can bootstrap that. Obviously there is a way to bootstrap almost any business. The reason I feel that it's not right for this business is because I feel like with the advancements in AI and machine learning.
to get a foothold and to take market share, you have to move quick and you have to fail quickly, right? So if I'm bootstrapping, I'm looking at option A, option B, I might spend a week figuring out which option, right? Or maybe a couple of days, whereas fail quickly, you know.
Chad Kodary (29:32.098)
Yeah, you gotta move quick.
Chad Kodary (29:46.338)
Dude, you know, I just did a podcast. I had Mikael Dia on from Funnelytics. Um, and honestly, I think out of all the podcasts I did so far, his for me was my favorite one that I did personally because I was so interested about the topic. And he went through
Roger Yelvington (29:54.532)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (30:08.318)
his whole funding story. It was like the story of like him thinking about fundraising, then actually fundraising, then getting the funds, then failing, right? Then failing and then being in a situation where he's in right now and kind of like starting over, right? And it was such an insane story. He's, he's doing great right now, but you know, obviously there's a whole, you know, years of a journey in between that story, right? But
Roger Yelvington (30:14.403)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (30:19.66)
Oh wow.
Roger Yelvington (30:26.341)
Right.
Chad Kodary (30:35.93)
It was insane to just hear like just the funding process alone. He told me, uh, it was like eight months, basically, until he started looking till he actually had money in the bank. Right. Most companies can go out of business in eight months. Like that is a long time. Right. So like that, and then when he was funding, it's like the pressure from, from the board, the advisors, right. And he raised a total of three and a half million dollars.
Roger Yelvington (30:48.314)
Hey, most companies go after this. Yeah.
Chad Kodary (31:00.918)
Right. So it wasn't a small, he did like a C he did like a seed round that he did like, I think a series a right. And he did like 1.5 and then 1.8 million. Right. In two different rounds across, uh, the first year was 1.5. And then I think he said like 18 or 20 months later, something like that. He did another 1.8. Right. Um, but dude, like, I think like.
Roger Yelvington (31:21.802)
I bet it would be amazing. I bet it would be an amazing experience for him to be like, you know what, if I had that money today, if I started from scratch and had that money today, here's what I would have done. He probably has a completely different game plan.
Chad Kodary (31:34.722)
You know what? He said all the things that he failed that and that he would have done different. Like that's why I think he was so vulnerable in that podcast that because he was sharing that information, I learned so much. And I think the viewers, like, if you guys have not.
Watch that podcast by the time you're watching this podcast, you'll make, L's will already be out. Cause I did it before this, like, dude, take a rewind when you're done with this podcast, just go backwards. Cause make a L D F from funnel. Lytics. That podcast was really inspiring. Yeah. Anybody, dude, anybody, anybody who's like interested in just funding or understanding what happens when you're raising capital, not only for a SaaS companies, for any business, right? Doesn't, you don't need to be a SaaS. Uh, uh, founder.
Roger Yelvington (32:02.83)
definitely gonna I'm gonna watch it I'm gonna watch it when it comes out for sure
Roger Yelvington (32:16.344)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (32:18.976)
to do to go through funding. Right. So it was it was inspiring. Honestly, it was inspiring and it was like motivational and it was like just like eye opening. It was so crazy moments. It's all the same time we ended up. I think it was like almost an hour because I was like, so I just had so many questions. I just, you know, I wanted to know like where to go wrong and what happened. Right. And so anyways, OK, so just going back to topic, not to go too much off topic. Yeah, but it was it was it was cool. It was a really cool experience for me, at least.
Roger Yelvington (32:28.943)
I like that.
Roger Yelvington (32:33.656)
Right.
Roger Yelvington (32:41.446)
That's good.
Chad Kodary (32:49.456)
So ad launch, you're here, you got 20 beta users, maybe possible funding in the near future, right? Where do you see yourself going between now and the next six months? Like what's like big items on like roadmap as far as feature wise? And like I know you said that you have seven developers full time and you want to get more developers and obviously with development comes cost. You sold you booked 24 people on your calendar.
Roger Yelvington (32:56.334)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (33:05.795)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (33:18.926)
Uh, at nine 97 to pop, you made 20 K so far in the last couple of weeks of just being open, right? But you know that you're going to need revenue in order to continue the development process. Right? So like, what's the game plan? Cause you can't hold on to these lifetime users for a month without, you know, letting new people in and opening the doors and, you know, making some money. Right? So what's like the goal? What are you, where do you see yourself next six months?
Roger Yelvington (33:30.126)
Absolutely.
Roger Yelvington (33:38.926)
Absolutely, absolutely. I could see within a month, I believe I'll open up the doors for another, one more round of like lifetime deals. Maybe 20.
Chad Kodary (33:52.418)
How many you think you'll let in? Another 20? Okay.
Roger Yelvington (33:54.67)
Maybe another 20. And the thing is, the better that the software gets, the easier it is to service the users. So each round, each round we're looking at, and maybe I would let in 30. But I want it to be manageable, get that next round of feedback. While we're doing these iterations of the software, it's becoming very clear where the focus needs to be. We're working on launching Google Ads platform.
Chad Kodary (34:02.399)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (34:07.021)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (34:22.682)
but also just perfecting certain features that are important for people running Facebook ads. Like there are some competitors out there that offer different options, but it still doesn't seem like anybody's out there making it super clean, simple, guided process on how to do this with best practices. So there's still a big window of opportunity for just instead of going wide and adding a million different ad platforms.
Chad Kodary (34:28.599)
Yep.
Chad Kodary (34:50.302)
Yeah, don't do that. That's the worst. That's the worst mistake in my opinion. And because we experienced it in dash, looks like we got, we went so wide that it's, it's so hard to manage. And now we're just like, you know what? Stop really quick. Let's go deeper into each one of, we call it apps, right? So like we have our deals app and our billing app. And so like we, we just, in our mind, we were like, let's just more apps, more apps, more apps. And we want like all these apps so you can come into dash six and just not have to do anything else. We're like, dude, there's no way.
Roger Yelvington (34:54.072)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (35:08.37)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (35:20.296)
would come into Dash Flix and not have to use any other software in their business. I mean, let's be realistic for a second, right? You're gonna need other softwares. And I actually, it's funny. I'll tell you funny, not funny, but I'll tell you like a real lesson that I learned. I was watching a podcast and I think it was from the owner. It was the CEO of, dude, what was that? The CEO, not pipe drive. Not BirdEye. It was BirdEye's competitor.
Roger Yelvington (35:24.93)
Right, right.
Chad Kodary (35:50.298)
Oh, I'm going blank, dude. Anyways, it was, it was one of the, it was a company that has over a hundred thousand users and they serve a small businesses, right? It was a, I'll probably get the name in a second. I was going brain dead here, but I was listening to the podcast and, um, the person that was interviewing the CEO. He was like, Hey, like, so you guys right now are solving the problem for small businesses, because what they basically do is they help you focus on capturing leads and converting them. That's their thing.
Roger Yelvington (36:00.433)
Oh wow, okay.
Chad Kodary (36:19.774)
Right. So he was like, well, you guys focus on, you know, the first kind of, you know, the first, like the first section of the sale cycle, right? It's like you're capturing leaves, you're converting them and like, and then there's all these other things that what happens after you close a deal, there's like all of these other things that you need to do. And his response to this, I'll never forget his response was, well, that's not our problem.
Roger Yelvington (36:26.534)
with the perspective of the same thing. Yeah. OK. Thank you.
Roger Yelvington (36:43.275)
Right.
Chad Kodary (36:43.414)
Like that's, we're not here to help you do those things. If you want to do those things, you can do it and you can integrate our software into those other platforms, but we're not going to sit here and we're not going to worry about retention or like all of these other things. Like that's not what we're doing. Our mission is to help you get your leads and convert them better into sales. And that's what we're here to do.
Roger Yelvington (37:05.638)
When you find that company, let me know, because there's probably some lessons learned there, because that's exactly what AdLaunch is about, is we're solving the problem of agencies and their clients. It's a confusing process. It's hard to get ads that perform. It's hard to make it from start to finish, and to offer that for a couple of different platforms.
We're just trying to solve that problem right now. And leads come in and again, there's that same issue. So our goal is to not say, okay, well now we've got the leads and what are our users want? Well, they'll value a CRM and all these nurture sequences. No, we're looking at how can we integrate with CRMs like dash clicks, right? Where if any of your users are plugged into AdLaunch and they can execute ads from the CRM,
But we've integrated where when the leads come in, then any custom nurture sequences or anything that DashClicks would have would follow up. And that's not the problem we're trying to solve. We just wanna make sure that we can get the lead and get the results from the ad into the CRM.
Chad Kodary (38:06.466)
podium.
Chad Kodary (38:12.876)
Yep.
Chad Kodary (38:18.59)
And that company, by the way, is called Podium, the one I was referring to. So yeah, Podium has over like, they service over a hundred. I mean, this is a massive, massive company that's doing a couple hundred million dollars a year in sales. Right. So like lessons learned there. Um, and I just, like, when I, when I heard that statement, I was like, damn dude, like that resonated with me so much because here I am trying to.
Roger Yelvington (38:21.282)
Yeah, that's right. Okay.
Roger Yelvington (38:27.266)
Oh yeah, I'm familiar with it.
Roger Yelvington (38:32.1)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (38:41.89)
fix everybody's problems across the board for everything. And it's like, well, I don't need to fucking do that. I just need to do one thing really, really good. And people can go buy other softwares for those things. I don't need to be like this all in one, like don't use anybody else. It's just like, that's not what you don't need to do that.
Roger Yelvington (38:59.718)
Well, and it's really, and I think has software designers and entrepreneurs, we get caught up a little bit about what we can provide. And we use that as a crutch, right? Because it's just like from owning the gyms. I learned this in the, in owning the gyms for over 12 years, right? People don't sign up to gyms because it has the newest, you know, equipment or because it's got a
and a treadmill with a TV or whatever, they do it because they wanna, be healthy and lose weight and have, everybody has a reason. So all of our software is, is it's providing a solution to a problem that there's a reason that they need it, right?
Chad Kodary (39:35.543)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (39:46.854)
And if you can resonate and empathize with your audience what that problem is, and they feel heard, oh, this person gets my problem, and I have a degree of certainty that they can solve it. It doesn't have to solve all of the sub problems that come along with it, right? It just has to solve the overarching problem, and hopefully it does it really, really well.
Chad Kodary (40:08.142)
Yeah, I agree dude. So, so you said that you're going from Facebook, you're going to be, you're in the process of creating like a Google integration to be able to do the same thing with ads, but just on the Google side, right? Are you at, when you're done with Google, are you going to stop there and you're going to go deeper into both of those or you, are you, do you plan on going into both?
Roger Yelvington (40:20.09)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (40:27.578)
Well, so we have an allocation of, there are team members that we have our roadmap of API integrations for additional platforms like LinkedIn and a few on the roadmap. And we're always gonna be pushing forward to build those in parallel, but in our sprint cycles, because we do two weeks sprint cycles, every sprint cycle we're putting about,
Chad Kodary (40:52.792)
Yep.
Roger Yelvington (40:56.494)
I don't know if you guys use in your shop points, you guys assign point values to tasks or no, or yeah, story points. So, you know, I'm just looking at increasing the amount of story points that we can handle in a sprint cycle, right? Right now it's about 50 or 60, right? I wanna get that to be 120. I wanna double that.
Chad Kodary (40:59.382)
We use JIRA. Story points? Yeah, story points. Yep.
Chad Kodary (41:14.446)
Got you.
Chad Kodary (41:21.106)
And are you referring to story points as one story point per hour? Is that what you're doing, or how are you referring to?
Roger Yelvington (41:26.47)
Well, so I, you know, being from an entrepreneur and a non-technical founder and working with a dev team, there's some trust involved because as much as I'd like a point to equal something, it's really, from everything we've looked at, it's really just they're assessing the task and assigning a complexity value almost to it.
Chad Kodary (41:53.29)
Yep. That's normal.
Roger Yelvington (41:54.062)
because there is a range, once they dig into the coding, there's a range of how much time that's gonna take. So if they try and tie a point value to an hour amount, you're never gonna, it's never gonna be a one-to-one. But I think for the most part, and also we try and leave a buffer to handle any bugs that pop up, because those take priority and we wanna get those tasks done. What I've learned is we did the mistake of, I have these larger,
Chad Kodary (41:58.786)
Yep.
Chad Kodary (42:17.016)
Yep.
Roger Yelvington (42:24.282)
tickets that I really want to do on a roadmap. And the team's working on it. And then they're like, oh, you know what? We dug into this ticket, we did the R&D. This will make this sprint cycle too heavy. So, you know, we would suggest pushing it to the next sprint cycle. And so I did that the first couple of times, but then I learned, you're always gonna have those large overarching things. So...
Chad Kodary (42:48.084)
Always.
Roger Yelvington (42:49.394)
So, and you're always gonna have a million things that you still wanna get done that are priority, that are smaller. So what we've adopted is we take those larger tickets and we break it down into say, you know what? We're gonna put it on here, we need to get it done, we're gonna get everything we can, and then we're gonna roll the remaining points over to the next cycle. So that way we're not just starting from scratch, because if you take that out, then you have to replace it with a bunch of stuff that's not his priority anyway, to equal it out. So.
Chad Kodary (43:14.998)
yep fair enough that's a good way to it's a good way to look at it
Roger Yelvington (43:17.566)
Those are kind of the things that we're getting our process down for. But it's exciting, man. I just love, there's nothing better than logging in and the teams work hard and the features are live and things are working and people are like, oh wow, that's awesome. Solving problems, man.
Chad Kodary (43:34.446)
see something new you see it's awesome dude I love it
You know, when we push, we push code usually on Tuesdays and Mondays and Fridays, I think. As like our push days, I could be wrong. It could be, I think it's actually Mondays and Thursdays, something like that. And whenever we push, I get basically, you know, automated emails go out to me and we have, we use teamwork chat. So we have it integrated with teamwork chat where we just, it pushes like the whole release
into teamwork chat with like everything that was done and it links up to JIRA and all that so I go one I go I'm like a kid in a candy store dude I swear I'm like all right awesome there was like 34 new tasks that was like today we did a push um and uh there was there was I don't know maybe like 20 something tasks on there and I just go one by one and I'm like oh my god they changed the font refresh the page here's a new font oh my god I'm like I'm like this is a new feature like even small
Roger Yelvington (44:13.775)
I love that, yeah.
Roger Yelvington (44:30.882)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (44:36.771)
Right, right, right.
Chad Kodary (44:41.556)
you see these tasks being put in. And some of these tasks have been worked on for months. Like we just, we're launching a new feature that we were supposed to launch today, but there's a couple of kinks. So it went live, but nobody knows it went live because I'm sure people know because they're in the dashboard, but I haven't announced it or done like an email blast, right? And it's basically templates for funnels. Like we built 150 templates over the last six months.
Roger Yelvington (45:06.143)
That's awesome.
Chad Kodary (45:06.27)
And we're pushing that live. It's a massive feature that people have been waiting for. Right. So like today I go and I refresh and I'm like, dude, fucking six months of, of work between a funnel builder, building all the templates and us building out the whole functionality to even use templates and have a templates page and all that stuff. And it's like, then you go there and there's just a new page in the dashboard called templates. And it's, it's like, it's really cool. Right.
Roger Yelvington (45:10.134)
Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (45:22.658)
Yeah, I love it.
Roger Yelvington (45:28.23)
it's gratifying to be able to serve your audience and to give them something they can make money with. And that's what I'm focused on is we're serving agencies. So ultimately we have to give them something they can make money with. So we look at things like every agency is gonna have slightly, and I'm sure you deal with this, every agency is gonna set up their shop slightly different. They're gonna have different needs, different services. They might be a done for you agency or a do it yourself agency through the software.
Chad Kodary (45:50.167)
Yep.
Roger Yelvington (45:58.48)
That's where I get excited to figure out how the agency can go in and turn off and on features that create that client and experience that they're selling and it matches what they're selling and matches the solutions as to what they're selling. I think digging in over the next six months like we talked about before, I'll do another release.
Chad Kodary (46:17.186)
Yep.
Roger Yelvington (46:27.106)
I'll open up about 20 to 30 more spots. And then it's just gonna be a public beta where it'll be marketed. Anybody that wants to come in will do it. But it's just the constant iterations. The way a lot of people ask, I don't know if they ask me this, which, because people don't know anything else to ask, I think it's kind of like at the gym. People would ask when they sign up for a gym membership, what kind of equipment do you have? Right?
It's like, they're only asking that because they don't know what else to ask, right? They really just want to lose weight, right? But they're just like, what kind of equipment? So if I have a life fitness versus like a hammer strength piece of equipment, is that gonna help or hurt you anymore in your journey to lose weight? No. They don't know what they're talking about. So a lot of times people, what are your competitive advantages, right? Versus whatever, right? And, you know.
Chad Kodary (47:10.194)
Yeah, they're not gonna even know what the hell you're talking about.
Roger Yelvington (47:20.814)
Competitive advantages with software is interesting because if you're competing with people that are offering and serving a similar need, right? Everybody's going to have their own experience. You don't have to offer anything differently. You just have to listen and iterate on your roadmap to serve that audience. So my goal is to not try and say, Hey, we're better because X, Y, and Z. We offer X, Y, and Z the best possible way we can, just like any other service or competitor. However.
I believe, and what I'm excited about is over time, having these conversations and having our team, like I was on a call today and I got some really, I'll give you a little tidbit, a feature to auto increase the radius until you meet a certain minimum audience size.
Roger Yelvington (48:10.614)
That came from a call today and we're gonna be putting that on the I immediately put that on the roadmap that's like I want that as soon as possible, right and One other one and this is just from today Break down the radius into a tenth of a mile. Like right now we just I didn't think about it, but
That makes a big difference when you're doing local marketing because it can expand, uh, just what you need to have the, the ad perform. Right. So those types of roles and flexibility, those collectively are going to be our competitive advantage and our differentiators. But when you're at the beginning, you're just trying to create a course service that
Chad Kodary (48:28.866)
Yep.
Chad Kodary (48:50.392)
Yep.
Roger Yelvington (48:50.903)
that solves that problem just like your competitors do while you're listening and iterating along the journey. So that's kind of what I look at for the next six months is we're just trying to create a quality software that listens to our audience and listens to our users.
Chad Kodary (49:05.642)
Dude, well, you've done a phenomenal job. I, you know, I remember when you demoed a ad launch for me, it looks great, man. Um, so, um, there's a lot more to come. Um, I know we're getting, we're heading, uh, at a time here, but dude, like your story has been inspirational. I know people are going to watch you. Um, Roger, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, where's like the best place that they can reach you.
Roger Yelvington (49:11.814)
Thanks, man.
Roger Yelvington (49:29.398)
That's a good question. So on Facebook, I'm the only Yelvington with a Y-E-L-V-I-N-G-T-O-N. I'm the only Roger Yelvington on Facebook. So yeah, the only. Yeah, Facebook or you know, adlaunch.com. Right now I'm still doing all of the demos. If anybody's interested in it, I'll hop on a call and go through. If you're seeing this and it's a little bit later.
Chad Kodary (49:38.306)
the only so Facebook is where to go. Awesome, brother.
Chad Kodary (49:45.09)
There you go.
Roger Yelvington (49:54.574)
and you saw this and you wanted to talk to me directly in the notes of booking the demo, just be like, hey, I saw the interview with Chad and I'd love to talk to Roger about, you know, a specific question or something. More than happy to jump on calls because I love this. I love solving these problems. I love talking to people that are interested in it and geeking out about it.
Chad Kodary (50:06.926)
Cool, man.
Chad Kodary (50:17.002)
Love it brother. Well, I'm sure we will see you on a future episode to see how your milestones keep hitting. Um, thank you so much for your time, Roger, and we will see you on the next one. Bye.
Roger Yelvington (50:20.972)
Yeah, man. Yeah.
Roger Yelvington (50:26.478)
All right, thanks Chad. Take care, man.