Origins of a $5 Million ARR Software Company (Yelp Hack)

The software is called MoveItPro, and their pitch goes like this 👇

The #1 moving company software

Increase your revenue and profitability with the best moving and storage software for moving companies. MoveitPro is a one-stop shop for everything to do with the operations of your company.

📝 Notes from a recent interview with founder Jason Bergenske…

In 2011, Jason took over a moving and storage business in Orlando, Florida, which his grandparents had started in 1968.

He quickly became frustrated that the business was still being run with pen and paper instead of modern software.

So he started looking around for a solution.

He couldn’t find a good software solution, so he decided to build his own…

It wasn’t smooth sailing right away. Jason went through five different teams before he found developers he could rely on to build what he needed.

But a couple of years later, he had spent over $75,000 on development and only built about 10% of the features that he thought his business needed.

Most people would see that as a failure, but for Jason it was a big aha moment 💡

He reasoned: if it’s so hard for me to build software to run my company, it must also be really hard for other moving and storage companies.

So he decided to go all in on the software, and invested another ~ $200,000 😱 – funded from the profits of his existing business – to build a product he was happy with and felt confident he could sell to other companies.

Jason ultimately spent 5 years building the software before he got his first paying customer. 

Waiting that long and investing that much money before landing a customer is usually a recipe for disaster 😕

But in this case Jason was able to test out and perfect the product in his own company before offering it to others.

Essentially, he was his own first customer.

And it worked out well, to the point where MoveItPro now earns $5 million a year in recurring revenue 💰

Jason’s first real customers were friends who owned other moving companies.

Beyond that, he used a clever hack to find customers via Yelp.

He would go on there and “request a quote” from other moving companies, but attached to the quote he would explain about the software and how it might be helpful.

Jason explains the clever part…

When someone does request a quote on Yelp… it sends a push notification directly to the owner of that [company’s] cell phone and… Yelp penalizes that owner if they do not respond to the message within a certain amount of time.

The result…

We started messaging hundreds of moving companies throughout the United States and we probably signed up 50 moving companies in a matter of two months.

Looks like Yelp still has this feature.

Could be a good way to pitch your products or services to other businesses 😉