Because Business is Personal

Building Websites and Enhancing Conversion Rates with Builderall's CEO Pedro Sostre

• Mike Caldwell • Season 1 • Episode 17

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Pedro Sostre, the CEO of Builderall, shares his personal journey and the vision for the company. He discusses the challenges and misconceptions of entrepreneurship, emphasizing the importance of resilience and adapting to the ever-changing market. Pedro also highlights the improvements made to Builderall, including a cloud-based infrastructure and conversion boosting tools that can be used on any platform. Builderall is an all-in-one platform that offers a range of tools to help entrepreneurs improve their online presence and conversions. It is often compared to website builders like Wix and funnel builders like ClickFunnels. Builderall differentiates itself by providing a comprehensive suite of tools in one platform, eliminating the need for multiple integrations. The platform also offers a customer success program to provide personalized support and guidance to users. Builderall's pricing is competitive, with plans starting at $17 per month. The company is focused on creating personal connections with its users and helping them achieve their business goals.

Takeaways

  • Entrepreneurship requires resilience and the ability to adapt to the ever-changing market.
  • Success in business is not guaranteed and often requires trial and error.
  • Builderall has made improvements to its platform, including a cloud-based infrastructure and conversion boosting tools.
  • The platform allows users to build websites and utilize tools that enhance conversion rates.
  • Builderall's vision is to enable entrepreneurs in every household. Builderall is an all-in-one platform that offers a range of tools to improve online presence and conversions.
  • It is often compared to website builders like Wix and funnel builders like ClickFunnels.
  • Builderall differentiates itself by providing a comprehensive suite of tools in one platform.
  • The platform offers a customer success program and personalized support to users.
  • Builderall's pricing is competitive, with plans starting at $17 per month.
  • The company focuses on creating personal connections with its users and helping them achieve their business goals.

Chapters

00:00
Introduction and Personal Background

03:22
The Vision for Builderall

11:53
Improvements to Builderall

25:33
Building Websites and Enhancing Conversion Rates

29:39
Introduction to Builderall and its Focus on Improvement

33:03
Customer Success and Personalized Support at Builderall

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Mike Caldwell (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to another edition of Because Business is Personal. Today I've got a pretty cool guest. This is Peter Sostra. He is the, well, for me, the new CEO of Builderall, an all -in -one marketing platform that I used to use back in the day. And he's gonna tell us about how it's changed and what he's doing to bring things into 2024 and beyond. So welcome, Pedro.

Pedro Sostre (00:24)
Hey Mike. Hey Mike, thank you for having me. I'm excited. I'm excited to chat.

Mike Caldwell (00:30)
Yeah, so I should have warned you about this before we started, but because business is personal, it's the name of the podcast. I like to ask somebody, ask my guests something personal about them that has nothing to with builder all or marketing or work at all. What's something personal about you that most people wouldn't know or maybe find interesting.

Pedro Sostre (00:49)
goodness. Heads up would have been nice here. lot of things. You know, like I was saying, I love the title of this podcast, because I think everything is personal, right? I mean, these are our lives. We choose to spend them running businesses or not. And it all kind of flows in the same place. So let's see something interesting. I have five I have five kids.

Mike Caldwell (00:52)
Yeah, sorry about that.

Pedro Sostre (01:16)
And my oldest is 28 and that usually catches people off guard. He's also like a lot bigger than me and so people see him and he just doesn't look like he would be my offspring. But yeah, a lot of kids and I love being a dad. It's my favorite part of life, I think.

Mike Caldwell (01:35)
So 28 is your oldest, what's your youngest?

Pedro Sostre (01:37)
My youngest is five months. Yeah. So I've got two at home. My youngest boy is 19 and he's with me. He's going to college right now. And then my daughter who was just born, she's five months. Yeah.

Mike Caldwell (01:39)
Five months, holy moly. So how many are at home still?

very cool. Yeah, because you don't look much older than 28 yourself. If you got rid of the gray in the beard, you could easily pass for 28.

Pedro Sostre (02:00)
Yeah, I'm older. I'm older.

Yeah, thank you.

Mike Caldwell (02:08)
All right, so very cool. All right, so let's jump into the business aspect of it. So, but a bit on a personal side. So can you share a bit about your journey to becoming the CEO of Builderall? And like, what attracted you to this role?

Pedro Sostre (02:21)
Yeah, so, you know, kind of stumbled into entrepreneurship. I didn't come from like an entrepreneurial family or anything like that. I, I, I had a, a one uncle who I credit with like, you know, the seed, right of, of, had a lawn company, like a lawn and maintenance company. was like, okay, let me, let me try that. Right. He's got his own business. He makes his own hours. That's kind of cool. And so I, you know, when I was 18, I, I,

bought like the basics, right? A lawnmower. I borrowed a truck from my mom, and I just started cutting grasses like door to door, right? So it's pretty grueling, but you could make your own fork, you make your own like, like, future. And I enjoyed it. But then, you know, I had my first child and then had a second child on the way. And I realized, okay, this isn't great. don't have health insurance, I don't have retirement. I need to get a real job, right? That was how I thought about it back then.

So I got a job and I was telling another like a long company owner that I was getting out of the business and I was like, yeah, you I'm going to have to shut it down because I'm, you know, I'm going to take it up for whatever, you know, insurance. And, and that was, that was actually a really interesting moment because he said, well, what do you mean shut it down? He's like, I'll buy it from you. And it was the first time I realized, okay, you can build something and not only does it bring you, you know, revenue and cash that you can pay your bills.

but it actually has value and it becomes a thing of its own. So when I was 19, I sold my lawn company again, really small, you know, really small exit. I think he promised me he bought my company for like $20 ,000 now 19 years old, 20 ,000 dollars, a huge amount of money. was like, wow, this amazing. He paid me half and then he disappeared. you know, but but it was still like

Mike Caldwell (04:07)
Sure.

Pedro Sostre (04:13)
I had already opened my mind to this sense of like, wait a minute, if you're an entrepreneur, you're building something and yes, it pays you, but it has value and it becomes something of its own. So that was the kind of spark I needed to really get the bug, right? I still, did take the job at the bank, worked there, got my health insurance and had a little bit of stability, but I started a side hustle right away. I discovered the internet back in 1999.

and for people who are young, you know, we didn't have the internet before, you know, much, much earlier than that. So it was this whole new world. And to be honest, it was amazing. Like if you knew how to build websites in 1999, it was a gold mine because there was no competition. There was, you were, you were working with a skill that was very, very like niche. And so I started with affiliate programs actually way back in 1999, started generating a decent amount of income.

promoting other people's businesses. And that continued until I kind of got tired of companies telling me how much I could make, right? Because when you're an affiliate, the company says, well, we're gonna pay you $25 per sale. And then somebody new takes over the program and they come in and say, well, hey, you're only getting $18 per sale. And then another, you know, they have a bad year and then they say, now you're only making $8 a sale. And that got a little bit taxing on me.

So I said, I'm going to start my own thing. started a company in 2008 and then was able to sell that in 2016 to a public company and that exit in 2016. So I had learned like what it was like to sell a little company back in like 1997, right? And then when I sold this next company in 2016, I was like, okay, this is going to be the big thing, right?

Selling to a public company you've got these very fancy accountants and forensic investigators and all these people come in and do an analysis to create a valuation on the company and I realized I had made so many like silly mistakes that I There was no way for me to know but but we're really easy to not have made if somebody would have just told me How to not do that thing right or do that differently or you know, actually what you think is common sense isn't really common sense, right? Or it's gonna it's gonna

Mike Caldwell (06:29)
Okay. Yeah.

Pedro Sostre (06:39)
backfire in the long run. So I became really passionate after that sale about helping entrepreneurs not make the same mistakes I had made, because that exit could have been a legacy building exit, you know, where there's money for my kids and my kids' kids. And instead it was great, but it wasn't that, right? So I got very passionate about helping entrepreneurs. And then between 2016 and 2022, I worked with probably

2 ,000 entrepreneurs at different stages of their companies, whether they were startups, whether they were small businesses, some of them were looking to raise capital. helped entrepreneurs raise about 30 to 40 million in venture capital. I helped a lot of small businesses double or triple in size by thinking about how they were doing things differently and then structure their organization so that maybe if they want to sell in the future, they're going to get the most value for it. Did that for those five years, six years.

And then when Builderall, but I'm one person, right? So being able to help entrepreneurs one at a time is not easy. So when I discovered, or when Builderall discovered me in 2022, their vision is to like enable entrepreneur in every household. And that really stuck with me because this journey that I had gone through from not knowing anything about business to discovering like the basics, kind of fumbling my way into an exit, I realized I could help.

entrepreneurs do at scale. mean, we've had 2 million people on the BuildAraw platform trying to build their companies, trying to find success. And the fact that I can now maybe bring some of that experience to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of entrepreneurs was incredibly exciting.

Mike Caldwell (08:27)
Okay, so he's kind of answer this, but what's your vision for Builderall and how does it differ from the company's path?

Pedro Sostre (08:35)
Yeah, so actually the company has always had the same vision, which was to enable entrepreneurs in every household. We didn't change that mission statement when I got involved. The path to doing it, I think, has changed a little bit just because the internet has evolved and digital marketing has evolved. So a big part of our initial history, right, those first few years was really giving people the opportunity to sell Build -A -Roll to other people, right? And that was a big component because a lot of people didn't have their own business.

when Builderall started nine years ago and they didn't know what to sell. So we gave them the opportunity to sell Builderall. And so that program was instrumental in getting us to where we are today. Now people can do, know, especially with like the rise of AI, people are doing a lot more content based businesses. They're doing Amazon publishing. They're doing, you know, there's print on demand. They can do those kinds of companies. There's a ton of ways to start companies today.

So now the platform has really shifted to doing a lot more of support on how to market and grow your business because it's so easy to build a website, right? It's so easy to put together a social media profile, but then you do it and the sales don't come and you're confused, right? It's like, well, everybody said build a website and do this thing and print on demand, but where are the sales? So as an all -in -one marketing platform, we're focused on how do we provide tools and learning so that you don't just launch it and have a website.

but you actually have the tools and the strategy necessary to bring revenue and sales to that website.

Mike Caldwell (10:07)
Okay, that is a big undertaking because you've got all these gurus online that are saying the opposite. Like I think we know if you build it, not if you'll build it, you're just one funnel away, right? You just need the funnel. And the funnel is quite often depicted as a website, as a form of a website. As long as you have that, so you gotta build the funnel and then you gotta hire an accountant. Those are the two steps, right?

Pedro Sostre (10:19)
Right. Yeah.

Right.

Mike Caldwell (10:36)
And yeah, I think once we get into it, we realize there's a lot more involved. So what you're trying to take on is a big chunk, right? So what challenges have you faced in that regard?

Pedro Sostre (10:47)
Yeah, I mean, think it's an easy promise to make, right? And it's easy, you know, back in the, even in the early days of the internet when, you know, there's the guy in his garage with the Ferrari in the background, you know, whether it's rented or not, I won't comment. But, you know, the whole idea of like, look, all I did was this thing and it worked and now I'm rich, right? And that message has been going around for probably for millennia. And on the internet, it's gotten exposed. And the truth is, yeah, you really can.

be really successful, right? And, and the idea that like, you don't have to have gone to college, you don't have to be a lawyer or a doctor, the ability to create wealth really does exist. So I'm not going to say that doesn't exist. What they undersell is maybe that maybe either the difficulty, or the time it takes are probably both, because it's it's a lot easier to sell a program when you promise someone you know, you do this thing for 30 days, you're going to make you know, a million bucks. That's an easy promise.

They're selling something, they're not trying to build maybe a long -term relationship. lot of these experts or gurus that you talk about, know, the long -term relationship isn't the thing, right? So it's easy to promise something and then it doesn't work and they just go somewhere else. But there are truths to what they say, right? It's true. You're one funnel away. The problem is you might test 18 funnels before you figure out what that one funnel is, right? It's not like you're gonna build one. And sometimes it happens. You build one, we've had people come in,

to build it all and like they launched their TikTok account. They had no idea how to do anything and it just blew up and they were making $30 ,000, $40 ,000 a month. I've seen it. And that person is gonna go out and tell everybody, look, all I did was this. But the reality is they got lucky, right? And the first thing they did happen to work. There's other people that maybe they have to create eight different TikTok accounts or two different Facebook accounts or try 17 different websites or different business names. There's all different ways to get there.

So what we like to talk about is really like resilience and the path of like, if it doesn't work when you first try it, you keep going and we're giving you different tools, right? To make sure that you know what to do at each step because it is very disheartening when you've put effort into something you might spend months, right? Hopefully not more than like two or three months, but building out that first set of things, right? Your website, your funnel, your email marketing campaign, all those things. And then it doesn't work. And then you're like, man, this was a lie.

But it's not a lie, it just means like the path doesn't go like this, right? The path to success is a little more like this. You've got some wins, you've got some losses, and at the end of the day, if you stick with it, generally, you can see success.

Mike Caldwell (13:28)
I've got a YouTube video with I think 1 .4 million views now. And based on that video, I've got the channel has like over 10 ,000 followers. This video was me showing how to make a self -watering seed starter. So you get a two liter pop bottle, you cut it in half, you flip it. Anyway, you put a string down and water there and dirt up here. There is nothing special about this video. I just put it in my basement. I didn't try hard. The lighting's terrible. The sound's terrible, but it went viral.

Pedro Sostre (13:51)
You

Mike Caldwell (13:58)
And so I was thinking, hey, I should probably start a course on how to create a viral video because I've done it. So I've got 1 .4 million views on that video. And then my next most popular video has 200 views. But that's just, that's what's happening, right? Like somebody will get will have that ridiculous 1 .4 million view success to say, hey, I know how to create a viral video. Look how easy it was for me to do it.

Pedro Sostre (14:04)
Yeah. Yeah.

Wow

That's crazy.

Mike Caldwell (14:27)
And for $97 a month, I'll show you how, right?

Pedro Sostre (14:30)
Right, exactly. And this is across all industries really. mean, there's a number of these, but there's one music artist in particular, think her name is Alessia Cara, that she was 17 or 18, maybe even 16, and one of her YouTube videos blew up and she ended up getting a record label and she's got Airplay now. She's considered, I'm gonna say YouTube artist, not a real artist, but she's...

She's at that level where everybody's like, wow, all she did was do a YouTube video. And I like to tell people, if you go to her channel and you go to all videos, she was posting videos for like four years from when she was like 12 years old, like every single week. She's got hundreds of videos before anybody ever like knew who she was. And if she had given up at 50 videos or a hundred, I remember, I used to remember what the exact number was. It was like, I think it was like 320 videos before.

she was actually known, right? Like if she would have given up at 100 videos or 200 videos or 319 videos, whatever that number is, she never would have made it, right? So it's not that she made one video and got popular. She made one video that got popular after making 320 that didn't get popular, right? So it's like, we gotta keep that in mind when we hear these stories of like 16 year old, you know, singer gets famous off a YouTube video, there was a lot of work.

Mike Caldwell (15:35)
Yeah, yeah,

Pedro Sostre (15:56)
and trial and error that went in before that one video that did really well. If you just keep thinking, I just got to make one video, you're going to miss the point.

Mike Caldwell (16:05)
Yeah. Yeah. One of the big marketers out there used to offer a, like he could, he would give you his funnel and make $17 ,463 a day and he'll give you this funnel. And anyway, so I was having dinner with his team and we were talking about that. That, that funnel did make $17 ,000 one day, but

Pedro Sostre (16:32)
Ha

Mike Caldwell (16:33)
It did so on a 15 to $16 ,000 a day ad spend. So this was a funnel that was about 10 % profitable. So for most marketers that might have $100 a day to spend on ads, right? Like if they have this funnel that would even work for them, and it probably wouldn't work for them as a different funnel, different niche, all that other stuff, right? They're still looking at it's not $17 ,000 a day with their marketing budget, they're gonna make $10 a day. Right? And this is stuff that that's not

Pedro Sostre (16:41)
Mm

Yep. Yep.

Mike Caldwell (17:02)
shared because it's not sexy. It doesn't sell.

Pedro Sostre (17:05)
It's not sexy. It's it's and in fact, maybe it's a little scary. But I think that if you know the reality, it kind of sets you up in a better place. So funny enough, you know, I talked about the company that I sold in 2016. We grew that company from zero to like several million in revenue within two and a half years. So it's a really quick, really quick scale up. I bought that company back nine months ago.

And it had, you know, the company who bought it sort of, you know, didn't go where they wanted it to and series of opportunities later, I was able to buy it back. And it had been shut down for a year. So the idea of like, I'm the same guy who built the same company. What is it? What's, you know, 2008 to now, whatever number of years that is, right? Same, same person, actually, I'm smarter now, much smarter now than I was back then. It's still the same exact company.

I cannot get the thing to move. We're getting sales, but it's nowhere near what we had before. Why? Because the world is different, right? In 2008, Facebook ads were like blossoming and you were able to get great returns on Facebook ads. And you can still get great returns on Facebook ads, but not like you could in 2008. So it's even the same person with the same company. It's a different, every year, everything changes.

Every year the market changes, the audiences change. And I say that to point out the fact that I could sell people this idea. I could sell a course how to build, it was an e -commerce apparel brand. I could have put together a course how to build a multimillion dollar e -commerce apparel brand in two years and sell to a public company. I could have made that course. I could have sold it to thousands of people. Chances that they actually accomplish that.

at a different time in history with a different audience is very, very slim. So it's not to say that these truths don't exist, right? That thing happened. I did that. I learned something from there. I teach people some of those tenets, but the promise that you could do exactly what I did if you just have the things I did doesn't exist any ever because of the fact that every year technology changes, every year consumer behavior changes, every year the market dynamics.

Like you've got macroeconomics that affect everybody's buying power and how people spend their money. All of that changes all the time. And it means that the strategies that worked before don't necessarily work today. It doesn't hurt to learn, but you've got to take it with a grain of salt.

Mike Caldwell (19:40)
Mm

Yeah, one of my one of my earliest stories when I got into media buying, I was doing lead generation for a realtor in Florida. And I was crushing it. Like just I was getting him leads for pennies like just as my head just got so big because I was the best business. Right. And then a realtor in California said, Hey, can you help me get leads on a can I help you? And so I hacked. This is the same as your story. I hacked my own funnel. I just I just

Pedro Sostre (19:58)
Yep, yep.

Yeah.

Mike Caldwell (20:12)
copied and pasted and moved it to California. my gosh, I lost him so much money because we were making the same offer in California that we were making in Florida, completely different audience, right? I thought an offer is an offer is an offer, but no, you got to take, and this is where empathic marketing comes from. Like you have to take the time to understand your audience and every audience is different. And so we were able to change the offer and I wasn't able to make it work, not as good as in Florida, but we're, we're, we're showing a positive return on ad spend.

Pedro Sostre (20:18)
That's good.

Mike Caldwell (20:43)
But yeah, this whole idea of funnel hacking and having success once and teaching courses, it's a bit deceptive for sure.

Pedro Sostre (20:52)
Yeah, and again, I don't want to say funnels, like, you may get a funnel. And I still think it's a really good thing to do is start with like a funnel that's worked for somebody else. You know, it's when you think that this is like a magic bullet, and it's going to solve all your problems. To me, it's like, it's like health, right? I was thinking about, I thinking about health the other day. And like how you, if you, if you try to, you know, you've got your, your amount of sleep that you get, and then are you building muscle? And then are you, you know, is your nutrition, right? There's so many different aspects.

But the easiest thing to sell is like, just take one pill a day and that's gonna fix all your problems. That's what everybody wants to do. They wanna like take one pill a day and don't worry about all the other things. This pill is gonna fix everything. It's the same with business, right? There is no one magic pill that's gonna fix everything, right? But it doesn't hurt to take the pill and still do all the other things, right? So I like starting with funnels. I like starting with temp. I mean, I don't remember the last time I built a website that wasn't based on a template.

Mike Caldwell (21:42)
Yeah, yeah.

Pedro Sostre (21:50)
Right, but it doesn't mean that one template that worked for somebody else is gonna work for me. Right, but you start with the template and then you learn and you customize and you iterate and you commit to solving a problem that you're really passionate about long enough to see success in that area.

Mike Caldwell (22:07)
All right. Let's move over to the platform a little bit now. So before we started the call, I told you my backstory of how I was like one of the builders builder, was earliest, you know, adopters builder, all one point. cause I remember it went to 2 .0. So I think we're on seven, right. The seventh iteration. Yeah. And so we'll talk about, you know, we'll definitely, definitely promote that. but yeah. So when I started with builder all back when it launched, had a lot of issues, lot of bugs, things weren't

Pedro Sostre (22:22)
Yeah, 7th's coming out this month, Everybody should attend the launch event, by the way. It's gonna be amazing on September 24th.

Mike Caldwell (22:37)
So what have you done? And I'm sure it got a lot better when you started. Can you hear that? There's a greater down the road. I'll leave this out. But yeah. So what have you done to improve Builderall since you've been on?

Pedro Sostre (22:53)
Yeah, so I came in without really any experience in Builderall, but a lot of experience in marketing tools and SaaS platforms. And it was, you I knew that there was some great bones here that just needed to kind of be brought into maybe some modern infrastructure. So one of the things we did is we've migrated everything into like a cloud -based infrastructure so that one, it's more accessible to, it doesn't have like a single point of failure. So the platform doesn't crash like it used to before. Before it was like,

on dedicated servers. If, if, you know, if a tech in the data center tripped over the power cord, you know, you're going to go down and we know there's outages. mean, Netflix goes down and things go down. You can't avoid it ever like from ever going down, but it's now on this cloud -based infrastructure. So it's a lot more stable. And then from an application perspective, we've built a lot more testing in place. so that every update that happens is tested across when you've got.

I think our current count is like 180 ,000 websites and you make a change. You've got to think how it's going to affect every single one of the users that's building those websites, whether it's a brand new user, whether it's a power user, whether this is the first website they've ever built or this is their hundredth website. Every change affects everybody in different ways. Just like you were saying with marketing, right? When you're talking to someone, you've got to think about who they are. Even when you're building something for someone, you've got to think about how they think.

We've gotten way more process oriented around how we test our new features, how we manage our product, how we release or roll out new functionality. And all of it is really designed to create more effective use for our users. If you're building a website, again, you can build a website on any number of platforms. I mentioned earlier, if you could build a website in 1999, it was a gold mine because nobody could build websites. But now you've got

Wix, you've got Squarespace, you've got WordPress, you've got like every single platform has a website builder. So I don't really think there's anything special about any particular website builder, right? It's it's what you do with that website. And I think that's where we have really thought through what we bring to the table, right? So we've still got our website builder. And that's fantastic. It still has like a lot of the functionality that you and I talked about early where you could actually

build things you can't build on other platforms. And that's exciting. However, the things that really make it effective are what I call the conversion boosting tools. We've got live chat, we've got browser notifications, we've got social proof, we've got exit intent pop -ups, all these things that you add onto your website. Today, those are not as easy to do. Even if you've got a WordPress website, you're browse around for plugins for days.

And then you're to install a plugin and the next month that plugin maybe breaks or your template gets updated and doesn't work anymore. So we've put all these things into our platform and we've made sure they work. And the big, I'm going to reveal something here. You know, the big thing we're going to be pushing at the Builderall 7 .0 update is now you can use these Builderall tools on any platform. So if you've got a Wix website or a WordPress website or a Squarespace website, you can now with one line of code, get all these tools that we know from hosting hundreds of thousands of websites.

They work to improve conversions. You put that one line in the head and it's going to build in all these conversion boosting tools. And that's the kind of thing that I think we've really focused on is how to make people's work better. Right. You've already done the work to build your websites. You've done the work to build your photos. How do we make that better? No matter what platform you're on. So that's, that's kind of how we're focusing our efforts and how we're trying to deliver on that original vision.

Mike Caldwell (26:27)
Okay.

Pedro Sostre (26:42)
of like enabling entrepreneurs everywhere.

Mike Caldwell (26:45)
Okay. So you're going to build it all for all entrepreneurs, but what, who are your competitors? You mentioned like Wix and spare Squarespace. Are you going after the website builders or is it more like the funnel builders, like ClickFunnels and Cartra and Leadpages?

Pedro Sostre (26:58)
Yeah, so, I mean, we find ourselves kind of being compared with all of them, right? The benefit is that we're the all -in -one platform. So if you just want to build a website, you're to go to Wix. And then if you want to do an email campaign, maybe you're going to get MailChimp. And then if you want to have some live chat products or chat products, you're to go to ManyChat. And then you're going to have to try to find like Zapier integration to connect all those things, right? So a lot of times we're being compared to like the

the duct tape solution, right? Well, I've got this and I've got this and I've got this and I've got this. I want to put it all together in one platform, right? So whether it's like Kajabi, we have an e -learning platform that we get compared with Kajabi a lot of times, but they're saying, I don't want to just have my e -learning platform in some place. I want to have it tied in with my email marketing and I want to have it tied in with, and that's what, you know, I have my e -learning and Kajabi and I have like Klaviyo for my email marketing, but now I've got to keep going back in between those two tools and then the Zapier doesn't work right.

So I think we kind of, in some sense, kind of compete, but also play nicely with all of them, especially now with the big website update, because now you can keep your Wix website. We're not gonna make you rebuild. A year ago, you would have had to rebuild your Wix website in the Builderall platform. That's hard. That's a lot of work. It's too much. You can keep your website wherever it is, and you can just bring in the Builderall tools to enhance your existing platform.

Mike Caldwell (28:26)
Okay. For me, seems like, builder was one of its biggest competitive advantages, all the tools, but also your pricing. Cause I know like with the funnel builders now entry level for pretty much all the funnel up builders, it's $299. Like that's entry level. some are, some are like six, seven, $800 now. And it looks like with builder, all you can get in for as little as $17 a month.

Pedro Sostre (28:50)
Yeah, now $17 only gets you kind of the website builder and those tools. So it's $47 for what we call like our essentials plan. And that includes, you know, the email marketing tools, which is really when you get into like funnels, you have to include like email marketing automations. You've got to really, if you're in the US, you want to include SMS. you're international, you want to include WhatsApp and you need to get the essentials plan. So it is a little bit more than the 17.

Mike Caldwell (28:53)
Okay. Okay.

Pedro Sostre (29:16)
But if you just want to build your website and get some really great landing pages, like if it's a total web -based funnel without an email component, yes, you can do that for $17.

Mike Caldwell (29:25)
Okay. So now let's get into the because business is personal side. So what's Builderall doing to create like personal connections with its users? And do you have any specific strategies or initiatives you're doing?

Pedro Sostre (29:37)
Yeah, so we launched a customer success program about a year ago, and I'm very excited about that. I personally selected all of our success coaches. as I said, I spent six years working with entrepreneurs, so I got very good at plugging them into people that can help them. So lot of the people that are success coaches are people that I've worked with in the past that have been able to help entrepreneurs as well. And we have weekly meetings where you can connect with a success coach.

You can ask questions about, hey, I tried this. Exactly what we're talking about, right? I tried this funnel. I got it from here. It didn't work. What do you think it could be? You know, or what have you seen working? Or, you know, come in and say, look, honestly, I don't even know what to do as my first business. You know, should I go with like a Kindle publishing or should I try this or, you know, should I try a t -shirt put on demand company? So you can get in and ask questions to really seasoned experts, people that you typically wouldn't want to have to pay their hourly rate.

you know, to talk to them because it might be cost prohibitive. So we're connecting you to these really great success coaches. They don't just work for Build -A -Roll. I don't think we could afford the program if we tried to do that, right? They're still building like in the world. They're helping entrepreneurs. They're still doing their consulting or whatever their business is on the side. And they come in a couple of hours a week and they help our Build -A -Roll users. So I really like that platform. And then on top of that, if you need someone to help configure

you've tried it, you're running into issues, then we've got a customer success team behind the scenes, not a success coach, but a customer success team that you can actually say, hey, I'm trying to set up this email campaign, I don't know why it's not working. And they'll get in and they'll work with you to set up exactly what you need. So they'll hold your hand through the process. And I think that's valuable as well, because one of the hardest things about building a business is that it can be really lonely. You're there struggling, like a lot of times you're by yourself.

If you're married, maybe your partner doesn't understand what you're why are you sitting at the computer for six hours, you know, after work and there's no money coming in for this. Like, what's the deal? Right. It can be very lonely. Even if you have a team. One of the things I was surprised by is when when I did have when I had my company and we were doing millions a year, if I had a bad day, I couldn't really tell my employees because then they get scared. Right. And if we had a great night, not a day, but let's say a month. Right. If you had a bad month.

You know, you're struggling to pay the bills. You don't want your employees to be a part of that conversation. Similarly, if you have a spectacular month and you tell too much to your employees, then they all want to get raises because they don't understand that next month might also be another bad month and you need to save up the cash, right? So it becomes very lonely and having someone who knows business that can connect with you and chat really becomes like a lifesaver in a lot of circumstances.

Mike Caldwell (32:30)
Yeah, I was one of my earlier testimonials. I was working for a bootcamp gym and they were they were super frugal $10 a day ad spend. And when right before the the testimonial video is doing with him, I said, just out of curiosity, how many how many signups we get yesterday. He's like five. They got $547 signups for a $10 ad. Yeah. And so I'm like, so what do see in the future? It's like, moving forward, we'll be getting five a day.

Pedro Sostre (32:53)
on a $10 spend.

Yeah, yeah

Mike Caldwell (33:02)
No, no, like, like two weeks, whatever last week, remember that day we had no sales like that. We're not gonna be getting five a day. So yeah, it's definitely dangerous to, to share the goods that the highs and the lows because of the way they're interpreted.

Pedro Sostre (33:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, there's a business mindset. And I have an entrepreneur, maybe it'd be a good future podcast for you, that I met him probably about five years ago. And smart guy, he had built a business, they were making a few hundred thousand a year. And he reached out to me because he was like, hey, I'm actually pretty happy. I make a decent money for myself.

I keep hearing all this stuff about startups and like, why should I care about that? Right? Like, should I even be interested or should I just be happy with my several hundred thousand a year and my money that I get to take out of that, which is a good amount. Right? And we started talking about like the business mindset and growth and like, look, it's great to be content and it's great to be happy and to have gratitude for where you are. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking to the future.

and how investing more can create more growth and then creating a plan. This guy went from doing a few hundred thousand a year, I think he's going to something over like three, maybe three or four million in 2024. And he messages me all the time is just like, I'm so glad you changed the way I think, you know, it's like I didn't do much for him. I didn't tell him how to grow his business. In fact, like, I don't even know how you know, I've never built a business like he's doing. And he's the expert in that.

But he's like, you just change the way that I think about how I should invest and how I should make projections. it's not just sitting around waiting for customers, but actually being the driving force in the growth of the company. And just that mindset change took him from whatever it was. think it was like $600 ,000 a year to $3 million within like three years. And he's like, that little change changed everything about how I work.

Mike Caldwell (35:06)
wow.

Pedro Sostre (35:11)
And so sometimes it's just thinking about it differently that really makes the difference.

Mike Caldwell (35:18)
So let's get into to wrap up a plug for what Builderall has coming up. I know you've got a big launch plan. What can you share with us now? Some teasers to get people to show up to that event.

Pedro Sostre (35:30)
Yeah, so every year we do kind of a launch event and we increment and we try to release some exciting features. This year, I kind of spilled the beans earlier, the big thing is that now you can use Builderall on any platform, right? So whether you're on, like I said, WordPress or Squarespace, or if you've got a GoDaddy website that you built and you just don't want to have to redo it, you can now get Exit in 10 pop -ups, browser notifications, live chat, social proof, like a number of tools that you can plug in.

The exciting thing is it's free. Like that plugin that you can install on any website is absolutely free. And you get all these tools. Now there's limitations. I think you've got like on the exit intent pop up, you've got something like 50 ,000 impressions or something like that. On the live chats, you've got like 500 live chats. Obviously there's resource costs for us, right? I mentioned we're in the cloud that costs money. know, interactions cost money, but we tried to make it so that anybody can start to get value from that. you're

Mike Caldwell (36:06)
Okay.

Pedro Sostre (36:29)
If you're doing 500 live chats on your website, you're hopefully making some sales and you're making some money, right? And then you can upgrade to whatever, the $17 plan. It still doesn't cost you whole lot of money, but now you don't have limits on those things, right? So it's really, it's free. It's giving people a chance to understand the benefits. I'm not making you commit to pay me something until you actually see that this generates more sales. When you realize that like, and we believe in it because we do it.

Mike Caldwell (36:35)
Right, yep.

Yeah.

Pedro Sostre (36:58)
You know, we do it every day. We have our exit intent pop up on our website on Builderall. When that gets taken down for whatever reason, like in between promotions, sometimes they'll turn it off for a couple of days and our sales will drop. And I'm messaging our marketing director, what's going on? How come, you our sales are down 30 %? He's like, they didn't put the exit intent pop up back up. You know, it's like, you see it immediately. I know, and again, maybe you don't notice it when you've got hundred visitors to your website, right?

or so it's gonna take some time for that, for you to kind of feel it out. That's why I wanna make it free, right? You have a website, you don't really know how it's working, you just know that you're not getting a lot of leads, install all these tools, talk to a success coach to find out like what's the best strategy. And then once you start to see results, then let's talk about what, you know, now let's create a real funnel, right? What's the next steps? How do we take this? Like how do we start using that strategic thinking to get you from where you are now to where you could be, which again,

could be hundreds of thousands and you're happy. could be millions. It could be an exit. Right. I think that's up to you. That's up to the entrepreneur. Some people are very happy with like a lifestyle business that makes them 100, 200 ,000 a year. And that's a great, that's a great way to live, you know, but maybe you want to make millions. Maybe you want to have an exit. There's a path to all of those things. And that we do have like the $250 plan that includes all these other tools that now you, you know, when you're ready to go to that step, make sense. Right. But I don't want to

Mike Caldwell (38:24)
Right.

Pedro Sostre (38:25)
have people come in, if you come in and you try building a funnel on day one, and you don't really know what your value proposition is, and you don't really know what your offer is, it's a waste of time and money for you to start at that level, if you haven't done the work ahead of time, right? So we're really doubling down on our vision to help create an entrepreneur in every home. think, know, especially now with the gig economy with like the

opportunities that exist for starting like digital businesses. It's just becoming the future, right? AI has opened up this path for like, I think millions and millions of people who really before could have never done that, right? People are selling coloring books on Amazon, you know, by using AI to generate the coloring book pages. Like there's so many opportunities now that we want to double down. We want to be the place that people realize they can get not only like the tools, but the support that they need to see that growth in the future.

Mike Caldwell (39:24)
very cool. I'm going to launch this podcast episode as soon as I can. if people are listening, so for people who's here before, when is the event?

Pedro Sostre (39:36)
It's on September 24th.

Mike Caldwell (39:38)
September 12th, so we've still got a couple weeks away.

Pedro Sostre (39:40)
Yeah. And you can go to builderall .com slash builderall7 and you can RSVP and get like a calendar notification so that when you, so you don't forget, you know, you'll also get an email reminder. We've got a whole automation setup that's pretty robust. had a conversation I posted on Instagram the other day. We had a, watched like when our customers come in, I like to see like how many touches that it took to get them in.

Mike Caldwell (39:56)
Okay.

Pedro Sostre (40:07)
because that sort of proves out this concept of a funnel. had a customer sign up the other day. He entered a funnel 18 months ago and he's received 67 emails from us and he finally converted the other day. And I think that's amazing. you know, and mind you, the way our funnels work, you know, which should most funnels should work is like they're smart, right? So if the guy stops opening emails or he unsubscribes or whatever, he drops out. But this guy over the course of 18 months just

Mike Caldwell (40:07)
Okay.

Pedro Sostre (40:37)
like fed on workshops and email content. He did visit like, he did went to like three or four workshops over the course of 18 months, email content, social media. He just, he just consumed the funnel for 18 months and then 67 emails later, he's like, you know what, this is the time to do it. You know, and, if we didn't have funnels and automations, I mean, imagine if you had a sales guy that had to call somebody 67 times, it never would have happened, right? So

The future, I think, of business, of conversions, is having automated funnels, is investing the time upfront to kind of create these journeys for people. I think, know, Builderall is going to be well positioned to support entrepreneurs for that journey in the next, you know, over the next five years.

Mike Caldwell (41:23)
for sure. I think if you pick up any of the historical marketing books, they'll say that you need like seven to 10 touches before somebody makes a buying decision. Not now. Not now.

Pedro Sostre (41:38)
There's so much information. There's just, you know, it's too easy to get distracted. There's, there's, you've got like lots of like you mentioned the beginning, lots of different gurus telling you different things. This guy probably signed up for a competitor at some point in that 18 months or signed up for a workshop or a course that not by Builderall, but by somebody else and maybe tried it and didn't work, you know, and, and that's, that's the journey. Now people have literally the entire world of

content at their fingertips. So they're going to take a little longer sometimes to sign up and that's okay. We just need to be prepared for that as companies and as entrepreneurs and as marketers to plan for that.

Mike Caldwell (42:20)
This is a bonus question that I just thought of just because you mentioned it and it's top of mind for me. So what is Builderall doing to keep pace with AI that is just, I've never seen anything grow like AI. So in different ways, right? Just the availability of it and just things that didn't work in AI yesterday, it's gonna be fixed in two days, right? It's crazy how fast. So what's Builderall doing with AI?

Pedro Sostre (42:42)
Yeah. Yeah. It's insane. It's insane. Personally, I love AI. like, I'm like all in on like the image generation and all these tools. think as a, as a business tool, we, so Builderall has an AI component called Magic Text to do the thing that we find to be very time consuming for our customers, which is like writing content. If you're creating an about page for your website, a lot of times, you know, as well as I do like

Most people are never going to read that about page, but I've seen entrepreneurs spend a month trying to like craft the perfect about page, right? So I see AI as an amazing tool. I'm trying to like keep it in its place. I don't think, you know, I've seen like the AI website generators. I don't think those are particularly good. You know, I think they miss a lot of the nuance, but for generating some content, like your about page, if you write a paragraph, Hey, I need an about page for this type of business. Here's the unique value. Generate.

You get, you know, three or four or whatever number of paragraphs of content you want, and it saves you a ton of time. And that's how we're utilizing Builderall today for our customers. I think there's a whole world of future integrations where we maybe start to expand on that, like what I call like a life of the lead or a user journey type of data. Because since we are across multiple tools, we have, we have user journey.

Like imagine if you're on Wix, right? Wix has the user information from your website visits, right? And then Klaviyo or Mailchimp has the user information from your email engagements. And then ManyChat has the user engagement from your chat information, right? And even like, for example, like Instagram has the user information from your Instagram endeavors, right? We have all of these things plugged into one platform. So I see, you know, if Mike Caldwell has a visitor who

lands on his website and then goes on his social media and comments on a, on a, on a, on one of your posts and then opens up an email. I see all of that data. So what I think we're going to be applying like I as in like Build -A -Roll, right? If you're in our ecosystem, we see all that data. And I think we're going to start applying that. you know, what is a, what can AI kind of learn from that to really create more dynamic funnels, right today?

Mike Caldwell (44:50)
Okay.

Pedro Sostre (45:05)
you're either importing somebody's funnel that works or you're creating a funnel yourself. I think AI, you you're going to seed it with some information and it's going to actually start to do some of that work of creating the funnel dynamically on a per user basis based on how they're engaging with you. I think that's the future of where AI is going to come into like an all in one marketing platform like ours. It's not here yet. I think we've got, but as you said though, it might be in six months, right?

important part is to collect all the data first and start feeding that into this system so that we like we from a programmatic perspective, right? Why did the 67 touches guy convert today? Right? What was it on that journey that triggered, you know, that we can understand, but you've got to analyze thousands of those cases to actually come up with like real beneficial AI learning.

So that's kind of where we are on that. I'm excited about it. I love AI. think it's like, I mean, there's a lot of people who are scared of it and I guess there's a scary aspect, but man, I think it's gonna continue to revolutionize things over the next several years.

Mike Caldwell (46:13)
Yeah. Well, cool. Thank you so much Pedro for being a guest on because business is personal. You've you've definitely sold me. I like to say I had a bad experience seven years ago. The builder all from seven years ago isn't the same as today. I love the old leader, but I love your transparency. You definitely know where you want to go. You know where you are. And it seems like you have a path to get from here to there. So

Yeah, Builderall is definitely a platform that I think more people need to take a look at.

Pedro Sostre (46:45)
I hope so. think it's exciting.

Mike Caldwell (46:49)
Cool. All right, well, thanks again, Pedro. And I got to make sure you get a copy of my book.

Pedro Sostre (46:55)
Yeah, absolutely. I already have it up here on Amazon. I'll buy one. I want to buy one. Actually, I'm going get the audio book.

Mike Caldwell (46:59)
God.