****Please forgive any and all transcription errors as this was transcribed by Otter.ai.****

Koby Hastings 0:080

Hello, I'm Koby Hastings and you're listening to A Shark's Perspective.

(Music - shark theme)

Kenneth Kinney 0:21

Welcome back and thank you for joining A Shark's Perspective. I'm Kenneth Kinney, but friends call me Shark. I am a keynote speaker, a strategist, a shark diver, host of this show, and your Chief Shark Officer.

Kenneth Kinney 0:31

You're busy trying to grow your business and to solve problems for your customers. It's a hectic pace to raise money and make sure your people are performing well, all while innovating and keeping up with the competition, but put it all together and with the right mindset and pivots, you can grow and build and grow and build. Then how should a captain, if you will, navigate that river on an entrepreneur's journey?

Kenneth Kinney 0:52

We welcome a super nice guy. Koby Hastings is the founder and CEO of both SalesRiver and Leadrilla, a Kentucky entrepreneur Hall of Fame awardee. And the best description comes from something he wrote. He's a husband, father, entrepreneur, and just a dude from Kentucky with a passion for making inefficient things efficient.

Kenneth Kinney 1:08

And on this episode, we will discuss an entrepreneur's journey lead generation and improvements for real estate agents, building multiple businesses and knowing when to pivot to new ventures, creating categories, what ride sharing is before we knew what it was, the Kentucky technology scene and its Hall of Fame, the startup roller coaster, raising money, fried chicken, paying for a truck by coding JavaScript and PHP, Cardinals and Wildcats, sharks and lakes, and a lot, lot more.

Kenneth Kinney 1:31

So let's tune into a Hall of Fame entrepreneur with a Hall of Fame shark on this episode of A Shark's Perspective.

Kenneth Kinney 1:40

Koby, welcome to A Shark's Perspective. If you would tell us a little bit about your background and your career to date.

Koby Hastings 1:45

Yeah, thanks for having me. So I'm Koby Hastings. I'm the founder and CEO of SalesRiver. We've been around for about five years. I'll kind of step back and talk about me a little bit. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, been an entrepreneur since I was 15 years old in high school. Learned how to write code and fell in love with it. I wanted a truck, so I realized, Hey, I like writing code, so why not try to make money doing this? So I started my first business as a junior in high school. Door knocked small businesses in Louisville, had my brothers drive me around and landed some some deals and built websites for a couple 100 bucks, probably made, I don't know, 50 cents an hour when it was all said and done, but I've just been an entrepreneur since then. You know, being able to write code kind of gives you a freedom of being able to do anything you want and be able to attack any problem and be creative about it. And so I've done that for 14, like 15 years now 30 and so, yeah, I've had several failed businesses over those years. I've worked at well funded startups in various industries, and I've had this business we're working on now, started it in 2018.

Kenneth Kinney 3:03

So it's such an important lesson to kids today. If they want a truck, they just got to learn to code that just, that's the new that's the new Kentucky. You know, that's not a sentence we would have ever said 20 years ago. What languages were you primarily coding in?

Koby Hastings 3:17

So, start, actually started as a designer, and so like designing business cards and flyers for these businesses. And then as I learned to code, I learned, you know, HTML, CSS, pretty entry level languages, and then started getting into JavaScript to kind of start doing more dynamic things and getting into databases. And my whole career, I don't write much, write much code anymore, but my whole development career was pretty much full stack, JavaScript, some PHP.

Kenneth Kinney 3:49

Let's talk a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey. One of the questions in particular, I think I have is I knew you through the lead acquisition space, through those kind of conferences, leads con, lead generation world through communication with leads Council, back when it was leads Council and the industry impact shows but you started Leadrilla as a customer acquisition platform for insurance and then moved towards SalesRiver. Talk about that journey and what made you undertake that change?

Koby Hastings 4:22

Yeah, for sure. So I guess I'll start kind of when the when Leadrilla was born, and so prior to Leadrilla, for about three years, I had a blockchain consulting firm. So we had about six engineers. We built software for several large banks and corporates around the world. We had clients in Europe, Asia, the US. We did stuff with Microsoft and Oracle, and so we had, you know, had a really good business, kept the lights on, paid our team well, and it wasn't that fulfilling for me, like it wasn't a product that we owned, and like it wasn't really changing the world, like we were just, you know, building software for clients for what they wanted. So. Yeah. And so in 2018 November 2018 I was in Florida playing golf with my brother. He has an insurance agency, and at the time, he probably had 50 agents on his team. And as he I had never, I don't, didn't know what a lead was at this time, like I'd never been in marketing. I'm just, you know, this engineer from from Kentucky, and so he was explaining the model of an independent insurance agent and how they acquire leads and make sales. And everything he explained to me just sounded so outdated and inefficient. It sounded sketchy. I mean, historically, the lead gen industry is, is somewhat of a sketchy business. There's a lot of bad actors. And so when, after that conversation with him, I told him, I was like, man, let let us help you. Like, we'll try to run ads. I don't know if it's going to work, but we'll run it at cost, see if we can make something happen. And so we started running ads for my brother and a few of his agents, you know, Facebook ads, Google ads, driving consumers to landing pages for insurance. And about a month in, things were working. They were making sales. Their CPAs were really good. And all of a sudden we had 100 agents knocking on our door, because word of mouth was kind of spreading between his group and, you know, adjacent agencies within his organization. And so as we got all this demand, we're like, how do we scale this? We have all these are like small agents with small budgets, but in the grand scheme of things, this could potentially have legs as a legitimate business. And so that's when we came up with the idea of Leadrilla. There's 1.2 million licensed agents in the US, more than majority, percentage of that are independent agents that work in the field, that we could go out and serve, just like we were serving this small group in Florida. And so Leadrilla, the original idea was a self serve platform that an agent could create an account in a couple minutes, put a credit card on file and say they want, you know, they launched what we call a campaign, and say they want 20 leads and a 30 mile radius of Pensacola, Florida. And they it's completely self serve. They don't have to talk to us. They just go on there and, you know, launch their campaign, and then they start getting leads. So on the back in we automated the generation of those leads, so running the ads on Facebook, on Google, optimizing by agent performance, agent, demand, geo coverage, time of day and whatnot. And so once that was built, it launched in April 2019, we went live, and it grew really fast. We started acquiring a lot of agents across the country. Got to a couple 1000 users by the end of 2019 and then, you know, over the next few years, the platform just kind of grew and grew. So today, Leadrilla has over 20,000 insurance agents on it. And about two years ago, we started getting a lot of interest from large national insurance carriers, national fmoS, IMOs, which are basically insurance agencies. And they didn't want to send their agents to Leadrilla to buy leads and calls from us, but what they wanted was the software. And so over those four years, we had kind of become this platform that is, the platform that services the smaller agents. And so what we started doing about 18 months ago in 2022 was licensing that platform to large brands, so national carriers across insurance, whether it's life insurance, health insurance, Medicare, even for Home Service brands, so national, you know, solar companies, bathroom remodels, roofing, siding, you know, a ton of subcategories and home services. And so now we have this enterprise SaaS platform that is a spin off of Leadrilla, and that's called SalesRiver. So SalesRiver is our main company now. Leadrilla still runs, but SalesRiver are is the main thing we focus now. And it's an enterprise SaaS platform for for brands.

Kenneth Kinney 9:16

Regardless of the new interest that's peaked, why would you not just expand Leadrilla as opposed to build out a separate SalesRiver?

Koby Hastings 9:25

Yeah, yeah. So there's a few angles to answer that. I'll try to answer them all.

Kenneth Kinney 9:30

Obviously, a lot of it comes down to revenue. One could be, of course, basically the other for record as well, yeah, and

Koby Hastings 9:36

Yeah and that's one of the angles. So Leadrilla got to a point once we were about three years in, and had a pretty large user base, that business kind of became self serving, because everything was self serve on the user side, and how they interact with the platform, the back end was also pretty self serving. So actually acquiring the leads, we didn't have to do much work, and so it got to. A point where, you know, we can launch new products and new verticals on Leadrilla and grow, but we we still can go focus on something else and continue to grow that as well. So that's why Leadrilla still exists today. If you go to Leadrilla.com the other part of the The answer is like, Why? Why shift all of our focus to something new, which is SalesRiver. And a lot of that just comes down to, you know, as a as the whole business, like looking at enterprise value. And so the enterprise value of a SaaS company is much greater than a generation company. Gross margins on a lead gen company can be, you know, anywhere from 20 to 40% whereas a SaaS business is typically 90 95% and if we can go focus and on the larger enterprise brands sell them our software help them run their business a lot better, there's opportunities to also plug in Leadrilla into their platform and and maximize the opportunity from both sides.

Kenneth Kinney 11:01

Absolutely. Well, one of the things also, and I know you were, we were dialoguing about this via email, was that you have a what's called a first in its kind, sales enablement platform when you're trying to explain this now towards agents who didn't hear about you. How are you going about marketing that, in explaining that one of a kind. Because one of a kind. Because one of the things that reminded me, this is not a knock against your old website or the new one or anything. This is a something that all technology platforms struggle with, is I go to someone's platform unless I really know Koby well and know exactly what it is you do. Lord, if you went to HubSpot, you'd probably still be confused as to what they actually do. You know what I mean? It's it's so rare that it's actually clearly defined. And so when you try to explain that to the people that are buyers who haven't heard about you or don't understand what I because I think it's brilliant, the white label back in and where you can go with this, and again, just if it's known for its performance. But what do they have to know who you are to be able to understand what it is that you do and you you sell. This is a good question for any technology entrepreneur out there, though.

Koby Hastings 12:07

It is. Yeah, it is. And it's actually something that that we've struggled with. I mean, we just launched the SalesRiver brand February of 2023, and so, you know, our our platform does a lot. There's a ton of different value props. And so, you know, we're in the process of figuring out, what are we, how do we how do we name, how do we tell someone this, and you know less than 10 words, and that's a challenge. I think a lot of young software companies run into that challenge as well. And so, you know, the approach we're taking, and, you know, there's a lot of new marketing things we're doing over the coming, you know, three to six months, we're trying to define what category we're in. If you think about Uber, when they came out and said, We're the first ride sharing app, every consumer in the world was like, What the heck is ride sharing? Right, right? That sounds sketchy. I'm going to get murdered. I get kidnapped. And so they like, that's a perfect example of someone that created their own category and they dominated it because they were the first ones. And so from a like, high level marketing perspective, that's kind of how we're thinking about it. We don't know the answer. I mean, we know our value adds a ton of ton of value. It solves a lot of pain points for our our customers. But, yeah, that's a that's a challenge.

Kenneth Kinney 13:32

It's not an invitation for everybody to try to go sell him something. So don't, don't pester him. Non stop with we can help you tell your story better emails, but it's a struggle for everybody. I remember in a conversation I had, I've had multiple times, I think, with Scott Brinker, who is the VP of platform integration, or whatever at HubSpot. He's the guy that does that's known for the martech 5000 and he's been on the show a couple times. I know we presented as well, but he was talking about looking now at all these technologies, and it's way beyond 5000 it's in the 10s of 1000s now, with companies like yours and the offshoot, the Leadrilla and the SalesRiver. Now count, you know, it's two different ones, but when you think of the 1000s that multiply trying to go to all these different websites, and we also know that customers, regardless of what industry they're in, have to have to have decent explanation and understanding and context and that it's a it's a good thing that you're resolving it now before you really rock it with growth, it's just good that there are a lot of people like me and others that you know much better in the space who can obviously heavily recommend you and help it bridge that context, if you will. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So question, you mentioned this a couple of times, and I'm curious, what is the Kentucky technology scene like? It's not that anywhere other than the Northeast, and Silicon Valley is known for its technology, but Kentucky is not normally what I think of as, yeah, Silicon Valley Middle America?

Koby Hastings 14:56

Yeah. No, definitely not historically. Um, and I think you've seen this over the last five to 10 years throughout the US, these smaller pockets of cities throughout the throughout the Midwest that have kind of come on to the startup map. And Lexington has been one of those. Like, we're in Lexington, Kentucky, second largest city in Kentucky, and then Louisville is the largest. And so between Louisville and Lexington, we've definitely seen a lot of growth in the startup ecosystem. And you know, there's really good support and groups in both cities that kind of help drive that and create community events. But yeah, I mean, over the last five to 10 years, there's definitely been growth. Lexington is a great place to live. Cost of Living isn't too high. It's growing. And so, yeah, I mean, it's growing for sure. It's not in Austin or a not Silicon Valley

Kenneth Kinney 15:56

....or San Jose, where even the CEO can't afford to live there.

Kenneth Kinney 15:59

Right, right.

Kenneth Kinney 16:00

What is today's struggle like for you? I say struggle, but what is the story now as an entrepreneur trying to raise funding, because I know you successfully got some funding not that long ago to help grow this, but it is a different era, even today than when it was when you started Leadrilla.

Koby Hastings 16:19

yeah, it is. It's not the best time to raise money right now. And so we were self funded for our first four years. And then last year, throughout 2022 we spent about nine months raising and ultimately, in December, we closed a series, a round led by mucker capital out of Los Angeles, I would say the biggest challenge through all that, you know, we spent four years with no outside money, pretty small team. We never got any larger than 12 or 13 employees, mostly in office. We had an incredible culture. I think we still have a great culture, but it's been a lot of work to keep that and so after we raised I think now we're at 23 full time employees, and then a handful of part time and so, you know, bringing in new leadership, bringing in just an influx of team like near, nearly doubling the team size, making sure that you're still focusing on culture and that people are still happy is is critical, and it takes a lot of work. You know, as a small company with 12 employees, you're a pretty flat organization, and people have been there for a couple years, and they've been there since the early days. And when you start to introduce, you know, managers like executive team, mid, mid tier, managers that you know, people fall into new roles, and they have new people that they report to, it shakes a lot of things up. And so that's been a challenge. I think we've done well with it. And I mean, there's a ton of answers to this, like, when you, when you have an, like, an injection of capital, what changes? Like, a lot changes. I mean, you're, you're constantly pushing against time. So typically, when you raise, you raise, you know, roughly 24 months of runway, and you're burning money because you're investing in the business and trying to grow. And so there's so many factors that you know play on a week to a day to day basis that you have to stay on top of. You're always pushing to get new revenue. It's fun and exciting, but it's also stressful. I call it the startup roller coaster.

Kenneth Kinney 18:37

Yeah, you have how many employees now full time, 2323 so and that includes you, or not you.

Kenneth Kinney 18:43

That includes me.

Kenneth Kinney 18:44

Yeah. So I think it's fascinating you bring that up because so many people, so often focus every bit of what they do on market position. Yet, as somebody who's run a company, from my experience, and now I hear you say a lot of the same thing, it's worrying about the other 22 people and all the day to day things that happen in the world. Yeah, it's duct tape and chicken wire that you try to keep everything glued together on top of creating a great product that you can go market and sell and beat the competition out of.

Koby Hastings 19:14

Yeah, exactly. And I think every startup goes through that phase for a lot...

Kenneth Kinney 19:19

I don't care if they're a billion dollar brand, they still have this issue.

Kenneth Kinney 19:21

Exactly.

Kenneth Kinney 19:22

They've got to keep focused there.

Koby Hastings 19:24

Yeah, I've talked to other founders, and, you know, we all have the same issues, right? Whether it's people issues or whatever it is. I always joke and say, you know, a startup kind of at this stage where you have a live product, you have customers, users on it, the public facing view of the company is that this is awesome, like everything works perfectly. But in the office, there's 20 people running around, like chickens with their head cut off, like manually doing things and like fixing stuff, and it's chaos that's that's real every company in the country, every every company goes through that. Yeah.

Kenneth Kinney 20:01

So, well, you talked about being the ripe old age of of now, hitting your third decade. One of the things I wanted to touch on was, in it, this is really the new technology world. When you think about it, you've entered the Kentucky entrepreneur Hall of Fame at this ripe old age. But again, kudos to you. But when you think about that. What does that mean to you?

Koby Hastings 20:23

Man, it's it's pretty cool. I got a call three months ago from from one of the guys that that helps run it, and he let me, he told me about that, and this is kind of what I had to speak at that event last week on stage. So this is kind of what I talked about, is, you know, after that phone call, the call ended, and I was like, you know, I was honored to get the award. It was, it was just cool to get, but in the back of my head, like I had this feeling like, this isn't really my award, like, I just, I don't, almost felt guilty that was, like, in my name and not in the company's name, because, you know, right now we have 23 employees. We've had people dedicate, you know, your job is half your life, and we've had people dedicate half of their lives for four or five years that have gotten us to the point we are today. So this is their award, and one of the quotes I said on stage is that one of my favorite books is Good to Great by Jim Collins. And there's a quote he says, if we get the right people on the bus and the right people in the right seats and the wrong people off the bus, then we can figure out how to take it someplace great. And I've just been fortunate, you know, we all have here at here at SalesRiver, that we've had really good people that have helped drive our company over the last five years to get us where we are. So that was my take on it. I mean, the award went straight from it never touched my house. It came straight to the office after the event. It's on display in the kitchen area. But, yeah, it's pretty cool. It means a lot. And I think going back to, you know, just like startup ecosystem in Kentucky, like things like that, the the list of Hall of Famers that are in that are it's an incredible list, if you go through it. So it's pretty cool to be a part of it.

Kenneth Kinney 22:19

Well Koby, I ask this of everyone who appears on the show. You've heard me referred to at conferences as Shark. You're going to get to understand this question, what is your favorite kind of shark and why?

Koby Hastings 22:32

Hmmm, well, I don't like any sharks. I'm from Kentucky, so like, I only go, I, like, get my feet in the water when I go to the lake.

Kenneth Kinney 22:39

Good Kentucky lakes.

Koby Hastings 22:42

yeah, well, there probably are sharks in there. Probably, I know, I don't know hardly anything about sharks, but maybe a bull shark. I just feel like bull sharks are, I don't know, like they're just fierce, like they'll, if they want something, they're going to go get it.

Kenneth Kinney 23:02

They've had bull sharks have been found as far north as Alton, Illinois, but I think, you know, they probably take the freeway over to Kentucky, a little bit of a drive in. But bull sharks can or one of the few sharks that can live in fresh water as well. So instead one of those lakes. So Koby, it's that special time the show. Are you ready for the five most interesting and important questions that you're going to be asked today?

Koby Hastings 23:25

I'm ready.

Kenneth Kinney 23:26

All right, so as a Kentucky resident, and this is a good entrepreneur, tie in fried chicken, Popeyes or KFC.

Koby Hastings 23:36

KFC

Kenneth Kinney 23:37

Gotta honor their motherland. Yeah.

Koby Hastings 23:39

Better bread. Better breading, like the, yeah, it's also Kentucky. I mean, Colonel Sanders is a legend,

Kenneth Kinney 23:46

and as an entrepreneur. I mean, you talk about his journey, he went to, I think it was like 95 he got 95 no's before he got one person to use this recipe to make the chicken. It was amazing.

Koby Hastings 23:57

Exactly

Kenneth Kinney 23:58

All right. Well, you went to Eastern Kentucky, yep. But if you were watching at home of Game of the Louisville Cardinals versus the Kentucky Wildcats, who would you pick?

Koby Hastings 24:11

Louisville Cardinals. All the way they may not win any more than four games this year because they're pretty bad but, uh, our our office is actually our view, or on Main Street, it looks at Rupp Arena, which is where Kentucky plays. So I always say I'm going to hang Louisville flags on Main Street outside our office when Louisville plays here. Haven't done it yet, but....

Kenneth Kinney 24:32

All right, so Hall of Fame question for you, would you rather be a Hall of Fame athlete or a Hall of Fame Technology Award winner?

Koby Hastings 24:42

Technology Award winner.

Kenneth Kinney 24:45

That's such a coders response, because I wouldn't, I would take whatever the money that came with the basketball, football or or Baseball Hall of Fame.

Koby Hastings 24:54

I think if you win an award in business, a business related awards, you're actually did. Something and providing value to the world. I love sports like it's all like, I live here, I go home. I typically watch sports, but I think it's adding value to others in the world from the business side.

Kenneth Kinney 25:11

All right. Number four, and you are in an absolutely beautiful state. I've driven to Lexington into Louisville, many times. Would you rather spend time at the lake or in the mountains, because you got great lakes and great mountains?

Koby Hastings 25:25

Yeah, I'd say in the mountains for sure.

Kenneth Kinney 25:30

Okay

Koby Hastings 25:31

Yep.

Kenneth Kinney 25:32

Got to get a cabin, all right. Number five, and the most important question that you're going to be asked today is biscuits or cornbread?

Koby Hastings 25:39

Biscuits all the way with gravy on it.

Kenneth Kinney 25:41

Good man. All right, so Koby, where can people find out more about you? Learn about SalesRiver, Leadrilla, see you speak and more.

Koby Hastings 25:51

Yeah, SalesRiver.com. Leadrilla.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Koby Hastings and yeah. Thus far in 2024 you'll find us at a handful of conferences, mostly in the insurance world, ICMG, Medicarians, a handful of others. And then you can find us at Digital Marketing conferences and whatnot. But check out our websites and reach out.

Kenneth Kinney 26:18

All right. Koby, thank you so much for being with us today on A Shark's Perspective.

Koby Hastings 26:23

All right. Thanks Shark.

[music]

Kenneth Kinney 26:30

So there was my conversation with Koby Hastings, the founder and CEO of both SalesRiver and Leadrilla. And he's also a Kentucky entrepreneur, Hall of Fame awardee. Let's take a look at three key takeaways from my conversation with him.

Kenneth Kinney 26:41

First, what a love about meeting, learning from and working with various entrepreneurs like Koby is that they're always hungry. Koby builds one business. It becomes self sustaining and performing well. But does he slow down and ride that out or keep growing in more directions? He keeps growing and building. That's a trait we all need more of. So keep growing.

Kenneth Kinney 26:58

Second, this is one of the most confusing things for technology companies, agencies and many, many brands. How do you tell someone what you're doing in less than 10 words? Koby brought up the differentiation of creating a category, but then figuring it out along the way. Good reference to what ride sharing would have been to us before Uber. You know that your product or service solves problems for your customers, but remember that clarity and simplicity are necessary for helping people understand what you do, so that they can buy from you and buy faster.

Kenneth Kinney 27:25

Third, never forget that market position isn't always the biggest concern for companies big and small. Peel back the many layers of any company anywhere. Well, there's the brochure, and then there's the people small companies to big. Keeping focus on your people is just as necessary as creating great technology improvements. A well oiled and high performing machine still needs great mechanics to service the engine to help you grow.

Kenneth Kinney 27:49

Got a question? Send me an email to shark at Kenneth kinney.com.

Kenneth Kinney 27:54

Thank you again for the privilege of your time, and I'm so thankful to everyone who listens.

Kenneth Kinney 27:58

I'm always working on my own entrepreneurial journey. I just love the oceans more than the rivers and lakes. So let's dive in when you join us in the next episode of A Shark's Perspective.

(Music - shark theme)