The Business Gay Podcast with Host Calan Breckon
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ColdStart: Your New Explosive Marketing Strategy
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ColdStart Your New Explosive Marketing Strategy with Brandon Teller

In this episode of The Business Gay Podcast, host Calan Breckon speaks with the Co-Founder and CEO of ColdStart, Brandon Teller.

ColdStart is an AI program designed to automate your marketing channels and decrease your marketing spend using SEO tactics. The results of ColdStart since launch have been astounding to say the least with customers increasing their conversions by over 1000% in almost every case.

Brandon is also the CTO and co-founder of Bindr, the Bisexual and Queer+ dating app. You may remember my interview with Bindr CEO Mary Richardson. Brandon has been building applications for over 14 years and has successfully scaled companies to millions of users with minimal spend and today he’s here to share some of that special sauce with you.

Reachout to start with ColdStart or find out more details!

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Key Takeaways for quick navigation:

  • [01:00] ColdStart is an AI tech that rapidly generates millions of landing pages, boosting engagement for startups.
  • [02:36] Developed from Bindr’s challenges, ColdStart aims to enhance user acquisition for dating apps.
  • [05:11] Its main goal is to optimize SEO for better product discovery and visibility.
  • [13:14] ColdStart has doubled user bases and significantly increased organic traffic for clients.
  • [15:05] Bindr’s user base grew from 14,000 to 100,000 within months after ColdStart’s implementation.
  • [18:01] It generated $250,000 in ARR during the first week, indicating high demand.
  • [20:43] Entrepreneurs should diversify strategies; ColdStart complements various marketing efforts.
  • [22:35] Setting ambitious goals is crucial; Bindr surpassed initial $10 million expectations with acquisition offers.
  • [23:47] ColdStart is expanding beyond landing pages, promising innovative future developments.

Transcripts

[00:00:00] Calan Breckon: Today’s episode is sponsored by SparkLoop. SparkLoop is the number one newsletter growth platform. I’m in the SparkLoop Partner program and within the first week I saw my email list grow by over 12,000%. That’s insane. Their newsletter growth strategies and options are the most affordable rates I have ever seen on the market. I’m no longer paying between $5 and $10 per acquired email through online ads. Now I pay as little as $1 for warm emails that stay on my list and engaged for over 30 days. Everything is customizable in SparkLoop and they will set you up with a team member to help you through the process. Head on over to calanbreckon.com/SparkLoop for more details or just click the link in the show notes. Now let’s get into today’s episode.

Welcome to the Business Gay podcast where we talk about all things business, marketing and entrepreneurship. I’m your host, Calan Breckon, and on today’s episode I have co founder and CEO of ColdStart, Brandon Teller. ColdStart is an AI program designed to automate your marketing channels and decrease your marketing spend by using SEO tactics. The results of ColdStart since launch have been astounding, to say the least, with customers increasing their conversions by over 1000% in almost every case. Brandon is also the CTO and co founder of Bindr, the bisexual and queer+ dating app that you may remember from my interview with CEO Mary Richardson. Brandon has been building applications for over 14 years and has successfully scaled companies to millions of users with minimal spend. And today he’s sharing some of that secret sauce with you. I’m excited to chat marketing and explosive growth with Brandon. So let’s jump in.

Welcome to the podcast Brandon, I’m so excited to have you. How are you doing?

[00:01:52] Brandon Teller: I’m doing great.

[00:01:53] Calan Breckon: Nice. So you have been very busy. I’m really, really excited to jump into things with you. We are going to be talking about not just one of your new startups, so we’re probably going to be talking about two of your new startups, but this one, we’re going to focus on the big one that’s kind of taking off a little bit. So to kick things off, can you share with us what is ColdStart and what does it do?

[00:02:17] Brandon Teller: So ColdStart is a new piece of technology that uses large data and AI to build out landing pages. For the coding effort of one page, you can make millions of landing pages on your website in just a few minutes.

And then we piloted this from our other startup, which was Bindr, which is. I’m sure you’re going to lead into those questions.

[00:02:37] Calan Breckon: That’s literally the next question that I was going to lead into. And I was like, okay, so. So for those of you listening, this is like an SEO kind of world that we are talking about, the tactics that we’re talking about. It comes from an SEO. All know that I’m an SEO background person. So the story behind how this actually came about is really, really interesting. So can you tell us more about how ColdStart actually came about from your other startup?

[00:03:01] Brandon Teller: Yeah. So there’s a funny slide that I have where it’s like, oh, we did all of these things, planned out a meticulous company, did this, that, and the other, Talked to all these customers, did all the things you’re supposed to do when deciding to build a company for ColdStart. And then I was like, no, just kidding. That was like the next slide in the. In the present. I did for it back in. I think it was June.

But Bindr created ColdStart. And ColdStart was kind of this combination of me building startups over the last 14 or so years of, like, this problem of not being able to get users on your platform. I mean, Bindr was getting users. It was still having this problem of not getting enough.

We did an accelerator that said, hey, why do you think you guys are, like, hot? And it’s like, well, we’re not. We know we’re not. They’re like, well, you’re acting like it. I’m like, well, no, I know we’re not.

We. We had, I think, 14, 000 users at this point. We thought that was kind of cool, but it wasn’t. And we were like, well, if you don’t have 40, 000 users and you don’t get there, you don’t find some way of doing it, then you’re not going to ever be anything or. Or anybody in dating. I was like, oh, wow, okay, well, we got to get there quickly. And how do we get there really quickly? Because I was like, I don’t ever want to sit in a meeting like this again. This doesn’t feel good. I don’t like the way I feel. So I was like, okay. I was like, we went down over the weekend. You’re like, okay, what are all these other companies doing to get users? So we look at every big consumer app that’s out there that was kind of using customer engagement strategies to do this. Then we noticed something. We notice large landing pages, and then we notice something else, like where two People, how do we two people create a bunch of landing pages like these other companies have done and then do it effectively to beat them?

The truth was that we didn’t have a way. So I was like, well, let me pull this database I have from these other startups I built. Let’s put it in here, let’s export it out, let’s parse it in the way that we need to, and now let’s put some technology behind it to build out our site maps and everything else we need for it. And I went, oh, okay, this is working.

So the first week was like, okay, we doubled our user base that we were getting. That was good. And then we started to see kind of like a steady growth curve at that point. And this has gotten Bindr into full hockey stick growth. This probably like 25% week over week, organic user growth. And I think every competitor that we were up against, that we’re beating that has reached out to actually purchase the software. So that’s the origin story of ColdStart and how it came from Bindr.

And just to, just to say one more thing with it, it’s like, I had no idea this was a company.

I had, I don’t know how many people messaged me on Quora, message me on every weird blog platform trying to figure out how to build their startup, going, like, what? Give me a meeting, give me a meeting. I had people from Google contacting me like, give me a meeting, give me a meeting. And like I said, okay, let me show you how we did it. Let me show you how you did it. And they’re like, can I pay you to do this? And they’re like, well, no, not really. I’m kind of focused on Bindr or I’m doing this. And then it really got to a point where people are flying out to meet Mary and myself and I was like, oh, like they’re spending money, like last minute’s notice to fly cross country to meet us, to learn our strategies to use this. Well, I, I need to find a way to sell this. And that’s where we came up with the idea for the SDK and the API.

[00:06:45] Calan Breckon: Yeah, there’s a lot. There’s a lot happened there. So basically, for those listening, boiling it down is it’s utilizing Google and like search in order for people to find you organically and naturally, and creating these pages that will rank high in Google so that when somebody goes, looks up, you know, bisexual dating, lesbian dating, what have you kind of dating your Website, Bindr or App. Bindr comes up at the top and figuring out the nuances of creating that. Because I know from the SEO standpoint is that Google doesn’t like just all these junk websites. They, they actually like the information to be there. And so you’ve obviously figured out kind of the secret sauce of how that actually all works together. And we’re going to talk about more of that a little bit later. But to continue, the story about Bindr is Bindr. You know, it started out as a dating app for the queer plus community as a whole. And through that startup, ColdStart started by accident because these folks were coming to you being like, so can we please use this? Because the numbers that you’ve talked about and me knowing the history I have, I’m like, this is insane. Like, you do not see these numbers. So it makes sense that big companies would be approaching you and being like, hi, take our money. So I want to talk a little bit more about the ColdStart and kind of its SEO principles. So were you well versed in kind of the SEO world and understanding this before from your technical background, or was this something completely new that you learned on the fly, that you just figured out how to work the system?

[00:08:29] Brandon Teller: So this idea didn’t come overnight. It was not even with Bindr. It was kind of this, like, thing that sat for like a really long time. And I didn’t have a great use case to put it in because when you’re pitching this to a company with an unproven method, it’s. It’s harder to know if it’s going to work or not.

I think, actually I wish I could say where the idea originally came from, but I just kind of always had this, like, inkling where it’s like, hey, if we do this and we like build these things right and these strategies right, we can get a lot of people to find great products. The idea is not to make people see things that they don’t want to use. That was never the idea. The philosophy behind ColdStart or Bindr or any company I’ve ever tried to put a strategy like this into the idea was like, I want people that really are going to love this product to find it. And that was with that philosophy. Being into it. That’s helped us with Google not wanting to kill the pages and like, be like, you’re doing this for the wrong reasons and you’re not trying to just beat a system. You’re trying to utilize a system to help it work better. Not only for the companies, but even for the end users that are finding these companies. Because I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a startup fail. I mean, it’s in the hundreds of companies that I’ve helped with technical work and did this. And before I did anything with my own startups, I was building startups, started my own agency, was pretty successful at it too. And it built and released hundreds of apps. But they would always fall kind of like, oh, we did our job, it was done. The app is up, well, what now? And most companies failed.

[00:10:17] Calan Breckon: Yeah.

[00:10:18] Brandon Teller: And like that, like, in turn, like, that’s so demoralizing. As a founder, I mean, it’s demoralizing to me. It was demoralizing for the people that I worked with, and it was demoralizing for, like, why aren’t people finding these things? And it’s like, well, it’s because, like, the really big companies are.

They have the market cornered in every way. I mean, they have these strategies out. They can hire a marketing team for a million dollars and do this or $10 million or $1 billion in some cases. They can do whatever they need to do to make sure that they went, because $1 billion and $100 billion company is worth it for them. But for a startup, it’s just impossible to navigate.

So really, I think that’s where it came from. And it circles all the way back to the rollercoaster website that I made when I was nine years old.

I scraped a bunch of information off the web. I built a JavaScript scraper, and then I built this into, like, a database of, like, all of these roller coasters in every obscure country you could think of, in every obscure area that you could think of, and, like, these weird names and stuff. And then I had photos tied to them and all of these different things.

And that was getting, like, at its peak, like, 5 million views a month.

I never advertised it. I never paid for any marketing tools for this. And I think that is probably where the idea started from. Like, was like, I know that these things work. If you’re providing real value and people are really interested in things in ways that you might not think of. Like, if you’re just thinking about, of like, hey, I care about this one thing, then your company’s not going to probably be that successful. But if you’re thinking about my company and all of its users care about all of these things, and I really want to focus on all these things. And like, in the analogy of the roller coasters, you’re going to, you’re going to find maybe this one roller coaster you don’t care about, but this other person does. And when you have all that information in one place, you can do that. So it’s, that’s kind of like where it started. I would say if there was an idea of where it started from, it.

[00:12:29] Calan Breckon: Was that it makes me really happy to hear that your focus is from the standpoint of this is an amazing product or amazing business or amazing founder, entrepreneur, they just need help people for people to find them. And that is the world we live in where it’s like you can have the best product in the world, but if nobody sees that product or if nobody can find that product, then you know it’s not going to go anywhere, it’s not going to do anything. And a lot of great companies go under simply because they just can’t get that connector piece of having enough funding to get those users attracted to their system. But if you have people out there looking for this product and you’ve created this way for them to search and find you easily because you are, you know, putting out these pages where they can find it organically, people who are already looking for it, it just connects all those dots really, really well. And it, you know, there has to be a way to level the playing field for small stage startups or, you know, kind of beginner companies versus these big conglomerates because they have billions of dollars to throw at marketing. So of course people know about them and, and we need a rebalance. So I’m glad to hear that you’re kind of doing your little part to kind of rebalance that eco for everybody in, in all of this. I know that there’s been some crazy stats and I know you probably don’t want to share everything, but can you share any sort of stats around the growth you’ve achieved for businesses? Because I want people to really grasp how crazy and phenomenal this, you know, product is.

[00:14:03] Brandon Teller: It’s been insane. So on the startup side, we’ve been able to double people’s growth in a day.

[00:14:09] Calan Breckon: In one day, that.

[00:14:10] Brandon Teller: In one day? Yes, in one day we were able to get their organic growth just to double, sometimes triple because they had none of the. They already had some like everybody has like a certain amount of authority with Google to get certain pages indexed. So they started getting these high value pages by our algorithm saying, hey, do these ones first. And they were hyper targeted. So of course they’re going to start getting users where they weren’t before.

That was like really awesome. And then in terms of the larger companies, like what we’re starting to see is Kind of like that 20% increase in that first month. And when you’re doing like 100,000 people in one month, I mean, getting 20,000 more people coming on, I mean, that’s just an incredible stat in itself.

So. And pretty much across the board, we’ve seen like crazy numbers.

And in Bindr’s case, I mean, I think everybody probably has seen we’re a little more allowed to share what we have there. Everyone’s seen the crazy growth charts of that, of that graph that we’ve shared On, I think LinkedIn at this point. And if you haven’t, I encourage you to go look for it. It’s public. But even that, that was like, that’s straight from Google search console. That’s 10% of our users, that’s 10% of our growth. Every single growth graph under Bindr looks like that right now.

So even I think that was like 100,000 clicks and a few million impressions from the technology itself. But what it does is it compounds the growth into the app stores. So in the app stores, it’s like we’re seeing the same insane metrics that are coming through. And there’s. I don’t wanna say there hasn’t been a penny paid toward paid acquisition with Bindr, but there has only been tests done. There’s only been a few thousand dollars actually spent on Bindr’s front for paid user acquisition. And I mean, they’re well on pace to their first million users now without really paying for things. And that’s just super incredible.

[00:16:16] Calan Breckon: That’s insane numbers.

[00:16:17] Brandon Teller: Yeah.

And that’s what we wanted. We’ve always been a 10x company every year. So every time we look back to 12 months prior, we want to be 10 times further ahead. And that’s always kept Bindr in that position. So if we look back 10 months, or, sorry, 12 months from where we are now in Bindr, we are 10 times larger than where we were before in every way.

[00:16:40] Calan Breckon: Can I ask, when did you really, truly implement this technology ColdStart into Bindr and what was that first? Because I don’t know how many months you’ve implemented it for. What was that first one month’s growth in users? And maybe if it’s been six months. Do you have any numbers roughly in your mind about that?

[00:17:00] Brandon Teller: Yeah. So July, I’m paraphrasing probably a few here, but I’m going back on memory. So July 2023, we had 14,000 members on Bindr.

That’s when we integrated ColdStart. And that was also when we were in the summer Founders program accelerator out of Penn State, which was kind of like the student run accelerator that was like, hey, this is your first shot. We’re going to give you some money to work on this over the summer. And we did that. So July was 14,000 users. October, I believe we were seeing like about 30,000 users. So we’re able to double that. We’re able to kind of get to that milestone of like, oh, we proved you wrong. You said 30, 40,000 users. We weren’t anything. So we were really happy about that as we finished out the program.

And then at the end of the year, I know we closed in at 40, 45,000 users. And by we had a hundred thousand users.

[00:17:53] Calan Breckon: Wow. Okay. So things start. Things started to move, move the needle. Because as I know SEO is a long game. It’s not an instantaneous overnight, which I mean it can be like you, you’ve had some experiences where overnight they’ve gotten more traction. But in the grand scheme of things, an actual SEO strategy usually looks like at least six to 12 months. Over that period of time, your website gets more traffic, more users find you. The more your pages rank, the higher rankings. It’s a whole network that goes in. But it’s good to see that like, that is a good trajectory and this is obviously bringing a lot of companies to you and who are finding you. So, you know, because this is an accidental company, has it been like an overwhelming amount of like, oh, okay, crap, what are we going to do now?

[00:18:47] Brandon Teller: Well, for anyone not listening, Callan and I are friends and he knows quite a bit. So that’s a loaded question. Yes. A lot of people have been reaching out. So that is like, I can’t explain this in any way that makes any kind of sense of what has happened for ColdStart.

And Bindr is a fast paced company. So like I was like, oh, wow, I was really excited about that, talked about it, that got a lot of attention and then a lot of people wanted ColdStart. So I’m kind of building this thing in stealth mode and just partially a side project. I don’t even know what to call it.

I don’t really think it was a company until like the last month in a lot of ways.

But it is moving so quick now that there’s just no putting that like it’s Pandora’s box is open and we, we have demo calls set up almost like every minute of the day with all of our sales team of everybody needing this in terms of like numbers, I’ll throw a real number out Here. So in October, before I posted about this on Reddit, before, we were like, hey, let’s share about the success. And we were just trying to build some hype. Before TechCrunch, we made $250,000 our first week of ARR on the first week of October just from other dating apps wanting this and needing it.

And we’re like, this is great. And then we were like filling out that. And by the time we were finishing out the month for ColdStart, it was about $100,000 a day.

Day of calls that we were doing Kellen at the conference, I think you saw, like, we were sitting there, like on the laptop a few times, just filling out order forms, and we’re still just trying to get caught up on that. We’re actually hiring right now just to build out a company to sustain the demand for this, because this hasn’t been done before and we didn’t even realize all the reasons why this hasn’t been done before.

Like, some of the things we figured out with building this technology hasn’t even been done by the billion dollar companies using these strategies.

And like, so that’s opened up every door that you can think of where it’s like, okay, we can save all this time for these companies, we can provide great value, and then we can create a great mission. So, like, it’s unfathomable to me that we’re in this position of this, like, high growth startup on top of this other high growth startup that in like, in terms of investors, I mean, people are way more excited about ColdStart than they are about Bindr. But like, Bindr is still a phenomenal company. I mean, thanks to the customer acquisition costs that we’re able to get down with Bindr, we know if we had just $10 million of paid acquisition right now at Bindr, it’d be larger than Grinder right now, today.

[00:21:49] Calan Breckon: That’s wild. That’s so wild. I’m so excited for all of you. Like, yes, we’re friends. And I’m just, I’m so excited for all of you. I’m gonna keep the conversation going because I could go on for hours. So besides, besides a listener listening to this coming to you to like pay at ColdStart and be like, hey, take my money. Do you have any advice to give to entrepreneurs or business owners who might be listening around their SEO strategy or their online marketing plan?

[00:22:19] Brandon Teller: So the first advice that I have is like, never put your chips in one basket. I mean, like, that’s, that’s a, that’s a Hard thing to do. And like, that’s even true for ColdStart. It’s like ColdStart is going to be the tool that could get you to a fair playing field with these other big companies. Like, if you’re like thinking you’re hearing this and you’re going, oh, I want to put on ColdStart, yeah, I advise you to do that. But keep in mind it is a tool so that your customer acquisition cost for paid ads could get down to 20 cents. So Bindr’s long move is to buy advertisements with the audience discovery that ColdStart has given them. So now that they can pay for users in a much cheaper way, the million users that they get from this is cool. And that even might be enough to sustain a dating app. But I know that their goal is to build something that is really big. I mean we’re talking biggest dating app in the top five all the time on the. On the App Store big. That’s the goal with what they’re trying to do. So that’s going to take paid acquisition, paid user acquisition. So there’s just no doubt about that. And they’re seeing this early sign. So we got featured in like a Better help article the other day along our competitors. We’ve gotten featured on Mashable and he said like, and we’re not paying for any of these. These are just like things that are kind of coming in on Bindrs end. And it’s always been this like pop culture thing that we wanted to create where it was something that would fit in seamlessly into the ecosystem of like what’s already there in dating apps. Like, we wanted it to not feel like this was something that just is like a new thing trying. Like we want it to be this big thing that is already there and it’s accepted by pop culture as it is already. We got our first. My product market fit for Bindr was always to hear a comedian say it. Now I want a big comedian to do it. But we had our first small time comedian make a Bindr joke without us prompting it.

[00:24:19] Calan Breckon: Oh, that’s awesome. That’s fantastic.

[00:24:21] Brandon Teller: Without us actually knowing it. So that’s like the. That’s my advice is like understand what your goal is for a company. Don’t think too small. I mean, I thought Bindr would be a $10 million company when I started it at most.

And like we’ve had acquisition offers for that much and then some.

[00:24:42] Calan Breckon: So awesome.

[00:24:42] Brandon Teller: This is the kind of keep that in mind.

[00:24:45] Calan Breckon: Yeah. This is the kind of problem that entrepreneurs want to get to when when they’re going through all of this. Okay, wrapping this up, where can folks go to find out more about ColdStart Yourself Bindr?

[00:24:57] Brandon Teller: So if you want to find out stuff about myself, find my LinkedIn Brandon Teller. You’ll see me pop up ColdStart and Bindr will be listed. Coldstart.Co is where you can see the website we’ve put up. We’re barely out of stealth mode with it, so just by the time this airs, this might be a little more out of stealth mode at that point. But keep in mind that that is like not the best way to understand the product. We are in a highly competitive space at the moment, so we are being careful with our product rollout strategy of like what we’re doing. But we have a lot of really cool things we’re working on. Well beyond just making millions of landing pages. It’s really, really exciting.

[00:25:40] Calan Breckon: Cool. Awesome. I’ll make sure to have all the links for all of this in the show notes. Brandon, I want to thank you so much for joining on the podcast today. I’m so excited to watch you grow and to watch Bindr grow and all the good things that are going to come from it.

[00:25:53] Brandon Teller: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

[00:25:56] Calan Breckon: Thanks for tuning in today. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button. And if you really enjoyed today’s episode, I would love a star rating from you. The Business Gay podcast is written, produced and edited by me, Calan Breckon. That’s it for today. Peace, love, rainbows.

Calan Breckon
Calan Breckon

Calan Breckon is an SEO Specialist and host of "The Business Gay" podcast. He has worked with companies such as Cohere and Canada Life and has been a guest on the "Online Marketing Made Easy" podcast with Amy Porterfield as well as featured in publications like Authority Magazine and CourseMethod.

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