Joe Troyer 0:54
Hey everybody it's Joe Troyer, and welcome to another episode of show me the nuggets, I'm super excited to have none other than Shaun Clark from Go High Level one of the founders of Go High Level joining us today. And just before we jumped on, we're talking about how very early on in Go High level, after the launch, we actually met at an event that a fellow named Tim was putting on and the the growth trajectory that you guys have been on at Go High Level over, really the past what, roughly three years has been absolutely incredible. And I'm super excited to just bring you on the show, and to pick your brain and let our audience kind of peer into what you guys have been up to.
Shaun Clark 1:38
Well, it's awesome to be here. Thanks for having me.
Joe Troyer 1:40
Yeah, man. Super excited. So I always like to zoom out for a second. So you, I know you're, you're from somewhere in Oregon. I know that you had some successful companies and startups, it seems like before you got into Go High Level. But man, like I don't know how you got it in the space. So let's start there. Like, How'd you end up in this crazy world that we know of digital marketing?
Shaun Clark 2:07
Yeah, so it's kind of an interesting story, at least it is for me. So I had a prior SAAS company that was serving small businesses directly. And it was in the accounting space. And I basically ran out of new ideas. So I did what I always do, I just asked my customers, you know, what do you want? And they said, you know, we want more customers. And I'm a software engineer. So I was thinking, Oh, well, let me see if I can figure out how to write some software and do that. So you know, wrote some software with my, my co founder, and started to go out and sell it to a lot of small businesses, and they really loved it, it was super encouraging at first, but then all of a sudden, a lot of them started canceling. And when I would get on the phone, I'd be like, whoa, wait a second, what's the deal? You know, they would say, well, we really love it. But you see, we're busy. We don't have time, we don't, we can't learn this stuff. You know, we got to, we just we got to abandon ship and go back to what we were doing. Because we just, it's too hard. And you know, right in that moment, there's a lot of ways the world could have gone and, and I was I was concerned was gonna go down the drain. But lucky for me, a marketing agency called me. And that marketing agency had a customer in common with us and said, Hey, I'd really like to see the platform and see how it works. And when I showed it to them, immediately, they understood it so much better than the average small business owner, they sold it to all our clients, two weeks went by, they didn't cancel, and it just kind of grew from there. And they started introducing us to other agencies. And what they taught me in that moment, and in the preceding weeks was the agency is really that secret sauce, right to the the competitiveness and the success of a small business in the marketing world and the adoption of technology. And so from there, we just stopped serving small business all together and went headlong into agencies and haven't looked back.
Wow, man, that's, that's quite the crazy pivot, I guess to catch everybody up. If they haven't heard of you guys. And they've been living under a rock for the last couple of years. Can you give everybody kind of a high level understanding of what is, what is High Level?
Shaun Clark 5:49
Yeah, so High Level is really the all in one agency platform. So if you're a marketing agency, or marketing professional, our goal is to be kind of a one stop shop for your business. So every app you've probably ever seen, if you're out there trying to glue six or seven apps together, Zapier or pretty much all of those apps just in one cohesive package, and we white label. So that means that we sell to the agency, we don't sell to small businesses, and the agencies are able to then white level the platform and sell it on even to their clients as well. So it's really about us supporting agencies, kind of through and through.
Joe Troyer 6:20
Can you talk a little bit about kind of the growth of High Level like from start to now How long has that been? How many accounts do you have? Sure, whatever. Yeah,
Shaun Clark 6:29
this is a really good, this good day to ask that question. So we just hit 10,000 agencies a couple days ago, so pretty excited about that, and a little internal celebration. And, and in that has happened really over the last three years. And underneath those 10,000 agencies, we're now supporting over 200,000 small businesses. So we have an incredibly big platform at this point. And really, it's just been, you know, I would say, kind of a kind of a hockey stick curve as we've gone along. But you know, we have some amazing agencies that we work with, and that's kind of we find the agencies or tell other agencies about awesome tools they use. And it's a really nice collegiate environment. So we're able to kind of get the word out through our existing customer base.
Joe Troyer 7:13
That's awesome, man, obviously, yeah, hockey stick type of growth, for sure. I'm really curious, like, what do you think has been like the 80/20 of the growth would have been like the big levers that have led to? I mean, you guys have grown faster in the agency space than anybody I've ever seen or experienced before?
Shaun Clark 7:31
Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it's twofold. So the first and foremost is commitment to agencies. So we're not there are many people out there who quote unquote, focus on agencies, quote, unquote, work with agencies, we only work with agencies, and that focus is very real. So we don't see agencies as a sales channel, we don't see them as a place to go get customers and suck them in our app, it's not how we roll. And that makes us different and unique. There's not a single person I'm aware of, that does what we do in that way. And so that focus, I think, is important. So if we stand behind our customer, and then from there, it's our community. So you know, today, we have a community just in our Facebook group alone of 13,000 marketing agencies. And you know, it's about asking agencies to share with their friends and their colleagues, you know, tools that they use. And so literally, the big lever has been our community saying, Hey, would you please let anybody you know, if you like this app, if you like this platform, can you tell other people about it, and that true, truly has been the lever that we have used to grow? And I think it's great, because it's word of mouth. It's, it's a referral. And we certainly ask people to do it, incentivize people through an affiliate program to do with that kind of thing. But we, but it's way better in my mind than having a sales team and running ads and doing all that stuff. If you can do it, because it's truly about agency sharing with other agencies.
Joe Troyer 8:51
Man, I love it. That's super awesome. I think one of the things that you guys have done too, is you hit on it earlier, but you've done so much improvement to the platform. And in the software space, we call that shipping, right? And shipping updates with new updates. And I don't know anybody that ships faster than you guys, either in the agency space. Can you tell us a little bit about how you get ideas, how those ideas lead them to? Yes, making the commitment to actually doing those updates, and then releasing those updates? Because again, I think that has been one of the big things, I would guess that is lead to lead to that hockey stick growth. And and again, you guys are just doing it at such a incredible clip or pace.
Shaun Clark 9:34
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we're software engineers. And so we really like writing code. So that helps, but I would say that again. So first of all, where do we get our ideas? It's super easy. We get it from our customers. So the way we look at our business, the way we look at ourselves is we say look, you know, we're here to serve our customer base. So we don't want to sit around and really opinionate a lot about what we think would be a good idea. We always just go out to the community and ask we have a an ideas list that our customers can vote on. And then we take ideas off that ideas listed, we go make them happen. And then how do we execute super quickly? Again, it's it's focusing on the agency. So we don't say like, well, gosh, what would the lawyer, the plumber or the dentist need out of this feature? We could care less we say, what does the agency need out of this feature, and we create the version of that feature that is custom built from the very from the very get go for that that agency use case. And I think it allows us to execute faster than a lot of other companies, because that same feature with another software provider, even it was this quote, unquote, same feature, it would have to cover this massive broad use case, whereas we can really hone in on what does the master marketer need? You know, what does that what does that marketing agency really need? And I think it allows us to go a lot faster. So it's focusing on the features that mattered our customer base first and only, and focusing on the parts and aspects of that feature that are most impactful to our customer, and leaving the rest alone. And then honestly, we're very MVP focus. So you know, if we, if we do have an idea, we do have something that the customer wants, we get it out in the skinniest possible way we can imagine because the other thing we find is that, again, the more time you sit around thinking about, oh, gosh, I wonder what we could do with this, like, just don't do that. Get it out there. Have people say, Oh, it's great. But but that's great. Now you can really iterate off of that. And again, it's listening to the customer following their lead doing what they're asking you to do
Joe Troyer 11:18
Love it, man makes makes so much sense. I'm curious, like, how do you keep up with support when you drive product innovation so fast? Right? Like, how does your team stay up to date, let alone your agencies than everybody else like, with with how you guys have have built a high level and at the clip and at the speed and the features. I mean, I know that I've I've built, bought, sold exited SAAS in the agency space before. And like that, that is that is really, really hard to do to ship fast, and then also to be able to actually support the product. And with your guys's speed, frankly, like, I don't know how you guys have even done it.
Shaun Clark 11:57
Yeah, it's not easy. And, you know, we, you know, we have good days, we have bad days. But you know, what we find is, again, we're lucky for us, our customer base tends to be more on the expert level. And, you know, again, it's certainly certainly relative to the average, you know, small business owner that that sort of thing. So we don't have to spend, we spend a lot less time dumbing a product down, it's more about creating the right feature. So that that helps, we certainly get out ahead of our support team. Often, I would say we have way more features today, and this will all just continue into the future, than even our average customer knows there's probably things in the app now that I don't even know are there. But that's okay. Because again, all of them are born out of the right place. They were an idea that came from an agency that we knew was needed by the community. And that's, our goal isn't to create a situation where Hey, every feature is going to be used by every agency, our goal is to help all agencies, and we know that some agencies are going to do you know, Facebook ads, some agencies are going to be in the website space, some agencies are going to be in the SEO space, like we want all of these tools. And we understand that they're not always going to cross apply to everybody. And that's okay. And it's just about you know, going as fast as you can to try to get these features out because we know the community needs them. And you know, as time goes on, you know, people catch up, we'll catch up, support will catch up, you know, and just kind of do the best you can every day. But so far, it's been great. People really love the platform. And you know, just the impact it's had on helping agencies scale, helping agencies become way more profitable, helping them cut, churn, all of those things are just so heartening. It's like, let's not stop, because this is really exciting. So that's what we're doing.
Joe Troyer 13:31
That's awesome, man. I'm curious when like looking at your team, what what's your team structure look like? It seems like you're very product and development focused? Is that where most of your team sits?
Shaun Clark 13:40
Yeah, so it's, we have about 150 team members today, the vast majority of them are in either engineering, or they're in support. You know, we have a couple of other folks here in there that are really critical to the to the business. But in general, we want to stay product focused, right? We want to stay engineering focused, we think of ourselves as like the engineering team for the agency. So what I mean, think of our customers as customers, I we think of almost as partners, right? They're like, it's almost like they hired us as their back end engineering team. And so that's the goal. How do we put as much investment as we came into the engineering team, because that's what's going to help those agencies grow. That's what's going to give them the tools that they need for that next customer that's coming down the road. So if we can play that position, and we can play it, well, we can serve our customer the best. And so yeah, it's really about how can we can hire more engineers, you know, more product managers, you know, more more folks to help get more features out faster.
Joe Troyer 14:33
That's beautiful man love it. So we know that you're an advocate for the concept of compound economics or the power of compounding, specifically with High Level can we dive into this topic a little bit and talk about how consultants and agencies can be thinking about this and looking at applying high level into their business?
Shaun Clark 14:53
Yeah, sure. So I mean, I have a pretty good vision of what I think the future of agencies look like and You know, I think it is really about taking the current focus on services and adding on technology. Because if we're looking at it from the customer's perspective, customers are going to need both. And today, if you think about how this is served, it served in a very siloed way. So the agency comes in and they do the services, and then there's maybe and then maybe they recommend some software or something, or maybe the client already has some that the agency adopts or sort of adapts to. And I think this is, this is really where the change is going to occur, I think in the future, the agency is going to walk in the door and be the provider of both the technology and the service in one place. And they're also going to have the revenue coming in on both of those. Whereas today, a lot of people, they maybe they recommend a product, heck, maybe they even have an affiliate relationship, they're effectively just a reseller, they're not really a provider. And because High Level is white label, the idea is simple. You go into that small business or that medium business and you say, hey, look, here's all of the marketing tech you need, and all the marketing services that you need. And you get it from one place. And as the marketing agency, it creates a revenue stream around both of those product lines. And now you've got the ability to sell both those product lines. So we have lots of customers today, who they may put their foot in the door on the software, because it's less expensive. It requires no staff to run it. And it has huge profit margins. And it's very scalable for them, they add the services on to it. And then later down the road, if they were to lose those services, they still retain the software revenue. I mean, we actually have two customers this year that are going to do 3 million in revenue off software fees alone. And again, all of this is white labels. This isn't them reselling high level, this is them selling their white labeled platform, and it's working beautifully.
Joe Troyer 16:44
Now that's crazy. I'm curious, when when you look at all of your agencies, and you look at the future of agencies, like you just described, what are your thoughts on like, the the concept of niching? down?
Shaun Clark 16:57
Yeah, so I think this is entirely possible. You know, I think that what I've, where I don't like niching down is I don't like niching down in one service. That's the place where I feel like we've worked we work on a lot of different agencies and a lot of different ways. But the number one thing I see is as a, there's two problems I see. So the biggest problem is churn. So the guys are just like I just do Facebook ads for dentists, you know, the problem with that is, it sounds really simple. So when you're going through the coaching, or you're starting to build your business, it feels warm and fuzzy, because it's really focused. But when you see it from the dentist perspective, they don't want to hire five different people to do their marketing. So you know, while it may feel good to you, it doesn't feel good to your customer. And as a result, it creates a lot of churn, right? And so ultimately, I feel like you can niche down in dentists, but you should niche down in dentists for everything they need, you need to be the one stop shop. And a lot of times I think people think well that Oh gosh, does that mean I need to do all of this stuff? And it's like, No, no, no, no. You need to know how to get all of it done, right. That's why you need to work with people like Invisible PPC, who can come in and help you actually fulfill all of that while you're active while you're focusing on just making sure that the customers getting what they want. And to be honest, the customer could care less who's actually fulfilling the service, there's no, there's no loss there, right. And again, as you are the provider of solutions, I think that's where the niching down is great. You can niche you can niche locally, I think that's a niche into itself. You can you can niche. You can niche in an industry, I think that's great as well. But where I would highly recommend people do not niche is in one industry and one service that is just asking for churn and burn. And that's why you've got to be more holistic. So it's both providing additional services, as well as providing technology and finding people can help you do both
Joe Troyer 18:51
perfect love it. When it comes to customer retention for agencies. We've hit on it a couple of times, but what do you what do you see your your most successful agencies doing in terms of customer retention?
Shaun Clark 19:06
You mean, how are they How are they retain? Are the people who retain their customers retaining the best? I mean that Yep, they're selling tech. They're selling SAAS, they're selling technology, our highest or lowest churn customers, our highest margin customers, our most profitable customers, they they always have software as part of their of their offering. Because what here's what here's what I find, I think that a lot of the talk in the agency space is about like performance, because it feels good. It feels like it should be the right answer, like Yeah, I did a good job or I didn't do a good job. Isn't that the way I should be judged, but I think that people miss the fact that they're not selling to robots and computers, they're selling to humans, who are driven by emotion. And a lot of the time the price point of services is just high. It's just going to be high. And unless you know and there's definitely a divide here. There's definitely people where you know, if you You provide a ton of different services, and you have a $5,000 a month retainer and you're doing everything for that business. That's, that's definitely a way to go. But for people who can't jump to that level or haven't gotten there yet, you got to realize that if you're, if you're hitting someone with a $3,000 bill every month psychologically just feels expensive. They're not going to say, well, but for my three grand, I'm actually getting 100,000 in revenue, they're just not going to do it. They're going to get to a place often emotionally, where they're like, it's just too much, I just don't know and busy, I'm overwhelmed. I'm gonna pause, quote, unquote, and you get that phone call, like, you're not a bad guy, Shawn, but we're just going to pause for now, we're just not sure. And that's a really nice way of saying you're fired. And the problem with that is, as soon as you are fired, you're done, you're gone, you have no service with them. And no longer a vendor, it is very hard for them to then come back two months later, when they realize that actually that was a big mistake. So the customers that we have that do the best, they've sold software, that they have a $300 minimum a month software recurring revenue stream coming in, and that never gets cut. It's incredibly sticky. And then the services come on, and then they come off, but then they can come back again, a lot easier. So those those are the real techniques. It's software plus service. Those are the stickiest agencies by a wide mile.
Joe Troyer 21:17
Yeah, I can definitely see that. I mean, the pain of disconnect to stop using a white label version of High Level once it's integrated, I mean, would be astronomical. Like there's nobody that would say like, I want to cancel, I don't want to pay that 300 bucks.
Shaun Clark 21:30
I hate those free leads coming in. I hate my higher Google rankings. I don't like I want no more five star reviews for my businesses. I'm done. No one ever says that. But they will say, I don't know what I'm getting for those Facebook ads. I'm just not quite sure. Let's pause. That's what happens every day.
Joe Troyer 21:47
Yeahman. Makes sense. I'm curious. Shifting gears just a little bit. Shawn, is there anything happening right now in the tech space in the marketing space, new channels? You're seeing? What what what are you excited about right now?
Shaun Clark 21:59
Oh yeah, Well, I have my super nerdy but I think this is going to be bigger than anybody can imagine. I'm excited to be recorded so that if I if I if I say something stupid, it'll forever be here. But I think Google My Business messaging on the local side is going to be just a huge huge change this year. So if anybody doesn't know what that is, it's it's the ability to write now you go to Google, you search and what does Google say to you? Oh, okay. Let's say you say dentist near me, it's going to show you the dentist, it's going to give you the reviews. And then the action you're going to take is you're either going to call them or you're going to go to their website. that's those are the two things. But Google has seen this now for years where, gosh, what's down? What's down below? There's local search results. Gosh, there's the Angie's lists of the world, right? The yelps of the world, and how are they making money. They're selling the traffic that they're generating off Google. And so Google has decided, look, we're done here, we're no longer going to have this happen. So they're introducing Google My Business messaging, and why it's so important is think about the paradigm shift. It's come to Google, search for local businesses, do your research. And now instead of leaving, there's gonna be a message button, you can click it, it's an in browser messaging experience, it doesn't use your mobile texting app, and you're literally talking to the business through Google. And so that is come to Google search and stay not come to Google search and leave. That's a huge difference. And I think it's going to take local by storm,
Joe Troyer 23:20
man, I love that I think, you know, you can definitely see that they've been moving towards that anyway, you know, with with, with with their services, and paying for leads, I definitely see messaging as being a game changer. You know, we know how much lead volume is driven by Google My Business already. It's crazy.
Shaun Clark 23:39
Totally. Right. Yeah. So you ask a guy like you like, Hey, you know, like on call, like calling, right? Like how many, you know, what percentage of the calls does the business get from Google My Business today. And most people, it's like, 70 80%, right? It's huge. So we already know, that's where the business gets all its traffic. And imagine all of a sudden, you can start messaging, and we're on the beta for this. So all of the Google My Business messages come into high level already. But we're also we also meet with the product management team, now Google every couple of weeks. And we've seen the roadmap, it includes they're gonna integrate payments into this, they're going to integrate scheduling into this, they're going to integrate reservations for restaurants that do this, right. So they're going to integrate all of this stuff, because they just want to dominate the space. And I think this is where I think this becomes a big advantage for the agency is this is where the agency can take leadership. This is like, you know what, remember when like mobile optimized websites, or secure SSL certificates, and those agencies that got on these trends earlier, were like, Hey, did you know you have to be secure? Hey, do you know your website doesn't look very good on a mobile phone? A lot of agencies credit a lot of new business around that idea. And I think this is where these businesses can say, Hey, did you know that if you turn this on tomorrow, a truckload of leads are gonna come in the door? Oh, and by the way, I have a platform that's going to allow you to automatically respond to those inbound leads, and you know, do what you need to do to turn them into customers. That's a leadership opportunity.
Joe Troyer 24:59
Perfect, man, I love it. Let's Let's peek behind the curtain if we can a little bit. I'm curious, like, where do you see the future of High Level?
Shaun Clark 25:08
Gosh, I mean, we love what we're doing. It's a lot of fun. Agencies are an amazing force to be reckoned with. They, in my opinion, are the future of not just service but also of technology into the small business. And we're super passionate about helping small businesses. I think small business owners are amazing people, they are they in the statistics bear it out. I mean, they're more innovative, they care about their communities more than pay more on average, they're just better people to ultimately Foster. I mean, just think about it, nobody wants 1000. Walmart's right. That's just not a beautiful, bright future. And so, but agencies are like that she sort of super secret sauce behind the scenes. And so our strategy is simple, promote, and grow and scale, every agency on the planet, give them an easy way to get out and get a horde of customers and stay right there and just keep that model going. And whatever, whatever feature they need, whatever feature is going to help their business or their customers business, we're going to enable them with that technology. And the go to market strategy there is just unbeatable, because the only people you compete against, at that point are venture backed startups who have hundreds of millions of funding. But these people are just putting it into ads, and they're just putting into sales. People that don't have agencies don't have your skill set just can't provide the level of outcome that you can. And so all we have to do is just weaponize you with the same technology that these venture backed startups have, and you just crush them. Because you go into a room and you're like, Oh, you got that fancy technology? Don't worry. Got that. But do you have these amazing services that the business also actually needs to be successful? Oh, no, you don't. Because that's all you are, as a software company, boom, game over. See you later. And that's exactly where we see this killer.
Joe Troyer 27:06
I love it. Man. I want to be super respectful of your time. I want to kind of wrap things up here. I'm curious, Shawn, is there anything you feel like we missed? Is there anything you'd feel like Joe? Man, I, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about this, or if we didn't bring this up?
Shaun Clark 27:20
You know, I think the biggest thing is how excited I am about the future of agencies. You know, if you look at Google Trends, and you search a digital marketing agency, right now, what you're going to see is that Google, if you go all the way back to when Google first started tracking this data, that's that search term has never been searched more than it is right now. And I think there's a very good reason for this. COVID has hyper accelerated the adoption of digital technologies to small business. and small businesses have realized that it is not easy to do. And they are out there looking for digital marketing agencies to help them. And ultimately, this is where the future goes. And if you're a digital agency, I think this is a beautiful time to be in this business, because people have never been looking for your help more than they are today. And I think the future here of starting, if you're just getting started, what a great time to start. People are running around trying to find you. So this is an awesome time to get in. This is an awesome time to get going. And what you're doing is is really helping all of these small businesses grow and prosper. So for me, it's just a really hopeful, exciting time. And to watch this industry just grow and prosper in a way that I think it has never done before.
Joe Troyer 28:30
That's awesome, man. That's a really, really beautiful vision of the future man,something I can get excited about as well. So in wrapping things up, Shawn, instead of asking people I feel like on every podcast, Hey, Shawn, what are your favorite three books? Do you have maybe one book that has made a big impact on the way that you do business? Or the way that that you act or the way that you see the see life?
Shaun Clark 29:02
Yeah, absolutely. Um, I read a book called Mindset. It's a very old book. It's by a woman named Carol Dweck. And what I liked about it, I'm Kevin nerdy sciency, dude, and she did this really cool thing where she followed, she would give test to grade schoolers, at levels that they were it was impossible for them to pass the test. And then she would simply follow up with them afterwards and say, hey, look, you know, you failed. Um, what did you think about the test? And, you know, she found that there's two sort of types of responses, you know, people would say, Well, you know, it just proves that I'm a loser, and I'm an idiot, and I don't really know anything. And then some people would say, Well, you know, it's really challenging and, you know, and I would love to learn more about it. I'd love to get better at it, and, you know, etc. And she followed these people forward in life, and the outcomes to the tee were the same. The people who saw the failure on the test as a personal slight against them had a horrible outcome. And the people who did not who saw it as a challenge fundamentally had amazing outcomes in life. And so I just have always taken away from that book that it is about mindset and your mindset around challenges that you run into and how you deal with them that will ultimately determine your outcome. So although I just kind of took the punchline out of the book, I still think it's worth reading and it's a it's a great book,
Joe Troyer 30:22
man, nobody has recommended that book before so thank you for the unique recommendation. I'll definitely check it out. I know our viewers will as well and Sean man I just want to say thanks for taking the time and spending our community here I know that we have lots of people that follow us that already use High Level like us you know, we have hundreds of sub accounts inside of our agency account and if you haven't checked out High Level definitely highest recommendation here from from a user avid user and definitely watch from afar even if you're not a user what they're up to just crazy crazy cool company doing awesome stuff. That is just hockey sticked right like we've talked about you guys are definitely somebody to watch out for
Shaun Clark 31:05
couldn't be here without without people like you Joe I just appreciate all the support.
Joe Troyer 31:10
Yeah, man without without without question, love what you guys are up to. So definitely go check out high level and you guys have a Facebook group as well. What's the easiest way to jump into that?
Shaun Clark 31:20
Oh, yeah, well, you gotta be a customer so gotta Go High Level. Because we only work with you know, we want we want we want committed people in the group. But I will say it's worth joining. We have the absolute best marketers on the planet in our group and we're lucky lucky for it, so definitely come check it out.
Joe Troyer 31:37
Alright guys, you heard it here first. Hope you guys enjoyed this interview, Joe Troyer signing out.
