Editor:
Today we’re excited to have Shaun Clark with us. He’s the co-founder behind HighLevel, a groundbreaking platform that revolutionizes how agencies handle marketing automation and customer relationships. Shaun has leveraged his deep understanding of the needs of marketing agencies to craft solutions that streamline client management and drive growth. Shaun, it’s great to meet you.
Shaun Clark:
Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me here.
Editor:
Could you maybe start by sharing the story behind the founding of HighLevel and the vision that drives it?
Shaun Clark:
Sure, yeah. Myself and my co-founders, we’ve always wanted to help small businesses and early on we probably like a lot of people started to build a product in a way that we felt like would help small businesses the best. And we very quickly found that a lot of the small businesses we talked to, they would sort of say weird things to us. So they would sort of say, “Oh, this looks great, but we just don’t have time to implement it.” And that was a very confusing statement initially because we didn’t understand how we could build something someone would think would help them but wouldn’t bother to want to use it. But I guess all of us know that if we go to the gym more often, we’ll probably be healthier, and yet we still don’t do it. So it’s definitely a human thing. But what we were lucky in is that early on we discovered that if you really want to help the small business, you need to help the people helping the small business and those turn out to be the agencies.
And so we pivoted our product very early on and said, “We’re not going to sell to small businesses at all, because really at the end of the day, they need the outcomes of the tools, but they are not going to be the users of the tools.” And so we focused on helping enable agencies to take these tools out to market, and we created a business model around it where they can make money. And honestly, that is the whole business that we’re in today, which is we really make tools for professionals and we work hard to help those people do the best they can on behalf of their clients. So, we’re now finally helping the small businesses at a very large scale, but doing so I think in a much better way than we originally started.
Editor:
Your growth has been exponential. Everyone you talk to at the moment seems to be talking about HighLevel. For anybody who’s maybe not come across the platform before, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about it and also the advantages of using HighLevel.
Shaun Clark:
Yeah, I mean we’re now the second-largest sales and marketing platform in the world, but the reason why most people don’t come across us is again, back to the agency concept. One of the things that we saw early on was a lot of agencies would buy tools off the shelf and or tell their clients to go buy them, and then they would pour their heart and soul into these tools to make them work, and then the client would wake up one day and fire them for it.
And what we discovered was going on here is that because the tool was cheaper generally, and because the small business had no idea what really went into making it work, they had this illusion that somehow the tool was doing all the work. And so early on we allowed our customers to white label our products specifically to get away from this idea.
And we always thought, well, worst case scenario, if they do decide to fire you, at least you can continue to sell them the platform. And now that’s significantly evolved now and we’ve realized that that actually makes a lot more money for agencies than selling services ever did and it’s radically more scalable than services. But all that to say, it certainly helped the agencies retain their clients. But today it also makes it so that if you are staring right at us, you might not even know that we’re there.
But if you think about any sales and marketing platform on planet Earth, we have every single one of those tools all in one spot. And because we’re sort of agency-focused, we also have it broken out, we call it multi-tenant enabled. But the simple idea is that as an agency you can move seamlessly in and out between hundreds or thousands of clients’ accounts if that’s what you have.
And the clients can also log in, but they’re only going to see their accounts. So, it’s a very sort of multimodal system from that perspective.
Editor:
And who would you say, who were in your crosshairs? When you were devising HighLevel, who did you want to target? Which businesses?
Shaun Clark:
You’ll be surprised to find we have no master plans. So what we’ve realized early on is that the best thing we can do is get close to our customer, listen to them and follow them. And having done so now at 3 million customers and climbing, we are helping everyone and their mother. So everybody from the local plumber to the biggest Fortune 500 companies, big influencers, course creators, you name it, the platform is vast. That’s probably the best descriptor for it.
But we are good product and engineering people. That’s something we feel like is in our wheelhouse. We’re not great marketers: we’re terrible sales people. There are many things we’re terrible at, but we’re great product and engineering folks. So the platform now serves a huge variety of businesses. There’s really probably not a business out there that we don’t serve. And mostly, again, because of the agencies, an agency could have … You could be a local agency and serve 20 different types of businesses, you could be a specialized agency and go deep into a niche, but we fundamentally … Or niche, depending on who you are. But now because of the platform, we’re able to serve all those folks.
Editor:
You mentioned white labeling as well. How much of a game changer has that been to your business?
Shaun Clark:
Massive, because again, it really spoke to the need that we saw in the market, which is agencies were not getting the respect that they deserved for the work that they were doing. And honestly, the other bit, really sad part was that when they would lose the customer, the platform that the agency had brought forward would retain them because software is incredibly sticky. And we thought that was entirely unfair. And if anything, we also then as we pulled that string, I think we realized that many of the largest CRMs on the planet were getting a bucket load of customers for agencies knowingly or unknowingly in many cases. And we sort of took the challenge of, well, how can we not only change that narrative, but also how can we help the agencies make money?
And so now agencies are able to white label and resell the platform. And what we’ve done is we’ve turned agencies into de facto software companies and given them the same margins the software companies were enjoying before.
Many of our customers either have agency services as an add-on to that now, some of them give them up entirely, some of them seamlessly interweave it. But either way, it’s radically changed the game for them because they have almost no churn and they have super high margins on the software side…
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