This AI Saas Makes $7m per month | GoHighLevel

Manav: Meet Shawn Clark. He's the CEO and co-founder of GoHighLevel, one of the fastest-growing all-in-one platforms used by agencies everywhere. He's built a tool that replaces ten pieces of software, earned massive traction, and today he's here to share the playbook. Shawn, how are you doing today?

Shawn: I'm doing great, thanks for having me.

Manav: Amazing. So before I hound you with questions about AI and AI agents and different software, I wanted to start from the beginning — how did GoHighLevel start?

Shawn: Sure. So I had a prior SaaS company in the accounts receivable space, and I really wanted to help small businesses with that. What I learned is they all wanted the same thing — they wanted more customers. When I started HighLevel, I did it with our CTO and co-founder, Varun, and we built this basic app that did two-way text messaging and reputation management, and started selling it to small businesses. But we very quickly ran into the fact that they didn't have time to learn how to put the technology in place. So we were in this weird spot — on one hand they'd say, "This is great, we need it," and on the other hand, "We don't have time to do it."

Lucky for us, we got a cold call, a random call, from a guy who was working with one of our customers at the time. He told us, "Look, if you want to help these small businesses, you need to help the agencies that help these small businesses." What we realized was, what we were doing wasn't working — so we pivoted. We said, "All right, that's all we're going to do — we're not going to help the small businesses directly, we're going to help the agencies." And it was a bit of a miracle, because that really was the truth. There were all these amazing people in the background already helping small businesses, and we just didn't know they were there — nobody knew, because they don't get the credit they deserve. Thankfully, that door opened for us, and we were able to focus on those folks. The rest is history.

Manav: Amazing. Just to give people watching some context on how big GoHighLevel is right now — can you share some numbers? How many countries, how big?

Shawn: We serve about 3 million customers today. And we're bigger than HubSpot, if that helps.

Manav: Wow, okay, that's incredible. I've heard really good things over the last couple of years — GoHighLevel has become really good.

Shawn: That's the goal.

Manav: And I think what people find interesting is instead of jumping between ten different pieces of software, you just have one dashboard. And on top of that, you can add sub-accounts.

Shawn: Oh yeah, 100%.

Manav: That's one of the greatest features out there.

Shawn: I agree, it's awesome, and it's really in recognition of agencies. If you're an agency and you've worked in this industry for five minutes, you have five clients, and you're logging in and out of five different pieces of software, different usernames, all that. And most of the time it's not five, it's more like twenty-five, because they have software for this and software for that. If you put it all in one stack, you create this beautiful ability for the data around that customer to be seamless — from the CRM to the landing page, the analytics to the payment systems, all in the same system. That data orchestration is what makes something like ROI tracking possible. "I bought this ad, I paid ten cents or a dollar-fifty or twenty-five dollars for this click — what did I actually get out of it?" You can't do that in any system unless all the data is in one spot. And then, going up a level, if you have five clients, you can jump in and out as the agency very seamlessly, without worrying about logging in and out of a bunch of different software.

Manav: You were working on a different software company, Invoice Sherpa, before this.

Shawn: Yeah, that was my previous SaaS company.

Manav: What was that company about?

Shawn: A lot of small businesses send out invoices and don't get paid on time. That was really about automating the invoice reminders that go out to those clients.

Manav: And what made you decide to switch from that to GoHighLevel? Was it just a bigger idea?

Shawn: Yeah. I had about a thousand small business customers, and I'd taken that product as far as I could figure out how to take it. I really wanted to do more, and when I talked to my customers then — same as now — they all wanted more customers. I couldn't do that with that product, so I knew I needed something else. Right around that time I got a random cold call to actually buy the company, and I ended up selling it as a way to get out and free up time to work on this.

Manav: Got it. Let me ask you a question you must get a lot from agency owners: how do I acquire my first 100, or first 500, or first 10,000 users?

Shawn: Very, very simple: walk out your front door. Go to every business around your community. Stay local. Don't focus on a niche at all — focus on every business in your local community, because they all want the same thing: more customers. Go ask them, "Hey, do you want more customers?" No one's ever going to say, "No, I don't want more money, I'm good, thanks." Everyone wants more customers. So if you can do that for them, you're golden.

And the cool thing about staying local is trust. Sales really comes down to like and trust. Think about why you hire a dentist or a plumber — at some point you believe they can do what they say they can do. It's no different selling to a local business. The nice thing about local is you have a common connection, and that starts building the bridge of trust you need. People who think, "I'm going to niche down into dentistry and take over the world of dentistry" — you're not going to do that, because you'll end up on Zoom calls with people who don't know you, don't like you, don't trust you, and have nothing in common with you. That's a terrible place to start.

The other thing is, local businesses already buy local, serve local, think local — they like local, and they want someone local to help them. Most small businesses don't call national companies unless they have to. The person who fixes their lights, the person who fixes their toilets, the person who supplies a lot of their goods — they're all local. Even the largest dental supply company, a publicly traded, national, multi-billion-dollar company — Patterson Dental — the rep still drives up in a van every day. From the local dentist's perspective, it's just "the guy in the van," and they call him whenever they need more dental stuff. That's where you should focus. That's how you get your first 100 customers.

Manav: That's great advice. What do you tell people who want to start with Facebook ads or cold calling, cold emailing?

Shawn: Good luck — don't do that, it's a bad idea. Get out from behind your computer. Go meet people. Go to BNI meetings, go to Chamber of Commerce meetings. You're not going to meet local business owners by running Facebook ads and cold emailing. You need to show that you're present, because at the end of the day, even if I hire you and believe you can do the work — how are you going to support me? If I have a problem, a question, how do I get hold of you? Do you show up? Are you a real person, or just somebody on a computer I have no idea where to find?

That's not gone away just because technology has made it easier to connect. Look at how humans evolved as a species — it's not "I smoke-signaled the guy down the valley to come help save my village." We lived in the village together — that's how we created strength. Like a lion or a tiger or a bear, we all lose as individuals against those animals, but as a team, we win. If you want to win, you have to appeal to the human side of people. Get out from behind your computer. Go to the local Chamber of Commerce and say, "I'll do a free presentation — how to market your business online." Totally free — we actually have a help article on exactly how to do this, with a slide deck. You just show up and show people you know what you're doing, and they'll trust you a lot more. They'll say, "Ooh, can you do that for me? How much can I pay you?" You'll get tons of customers. I don't just know this because I'm telling you — I've seen it hundreds of times. So don't start with cold outreach. It's the wrong way to start.

Manav: That's a great reminder for business owners out there — proximity is power. You can go in a five-mile radius and find customers.

Shawn: Yeah, exactly. And by the way, that doesn't mean you're trading away world domination — that's total nonsense. I always love the example of a company we actually compete with, Podium. If you listen to their founder's story, he started on the BYU campus and walked around until he literally couldn't walk any farther — he sold every business in his area first. That gave him a base, a revenue base, a real business he could make money on. Then he took that money and moved to the phone. Fast-forward to today, they've got thousands of customers, probably international — I have no idea. But the point is, they started by walking around. Walking around is never a limiter on your future. It's always the opposite. The people who say, "No, I refuse — I'm going to sit at this computer and cold-email my way to success or bust" — most of the time it's bust, and it doesn't go well. Please don't make that mistake.

Manav: One interesting thing about how you grew HighLevel is the referral system. How did that come about?

Shawn: Like most great ideas I've been part of, it came to me for free, and I thought it was terrible at first. My third co-founder — actually the marketing agency owner who cold-called us, who we had a shared customer with — said, "We really should do this," and I said, "That's a stupid idea." I went out and bought the cheapest referral software I could find, figuring I'd be throwing money away. And as always with the ideas I think are worst, it turned out to be one of the best.

It's funny, because it's exactly how an agency should approach growth too — back to the local thing. You get one business in your community who believes in you, you do a great job for them, they talk to other business owners, and you can incentivize that. "If you recommend somebody and they sign up, I'll give you a free month" — a lot of people are happy to do that because they already have connections with other businesses. That's exactly what we did too: "Did we do a good job for you? If so, is there anybody you know who might use the software?" It's amazing how connected people are. We all know this as consumers — where do you get your best recommendations? Not Amazon — your friends. "Hey man, I bought this, tried it out, it's amazing, you should check it out." And what do you do? You go buy it. Not because you scrupulously read reviews or watched a thousand YouTube videos — because your friend, who you trust, had a good experience and thought of you. That's the same thing happening here, just on the business side.

Manav: Did you raise funding initially, or did you use your own capital to build this?

Shawn: Own capital. And by the way, anybody who says, "I'm just starting up, I have this great idea for a software product, I'm going to go fundraise" — that's the dumbest idea. First of all, you don't know yet whether you're creating a sustainable model. Second, early fundraising is where you give up the most equity, because you're literally going to someone with money and saying, "I have an idea, almost nothing else, and I want your money to make it real." If they're willing to do that, they'll do it in exchange for an incredibly high price, because they're pricing in a high chance of failure. If anyone ever pitched me that, I'd say, "All right, I want 51% of your business" — and honestly I'd probably just say no, because I don't want to lose money. And fundamentally, that's what you're doing.

Let's say your idea does go really well — you're still setting yourself up for future failure, because you've given away tremendous value for very little money. You'd be better off getting money from friends and family, or working a part-time job, whatever it takes — because if you have a great idea, and this is what we did, you can stay profitable the whole way through. And here's the magic: if you do take money later on, you get a lot more money for a lot less equity, and you get to stay in control. Give money away early, and I promise, go look at founders who did — they end up as essentially employees in the companies they built, because they had to sell it all away to keep the lights on, grow the sales team, buy more Google ads, whatever it is. They end up owning two or three percent of their own company. That sucks.

Manav: That's a fair point. In your experience running GoHighLevel, what's one of your favorite success stories from a customer who joined and just took off?

Shawn: Oh man, I've seen a million of them, and they all follow the same pattern. I remember one guy who took a video and said, "Today's my last day at the car dealership — my SaaS just hit 20 customers, I'm out of here." To me it's really about the people who are able to step out of something they don't want to be doing and take a lot more control over their lives. I can think of examples of people who sold their SaaS for tens of millions of dollars, and that's awesome, those people are fantastic — but a lot of them are really just compounding on something they'd been building for a long time. What I love even more is the number of people who can start from zero and get to something meaningful very quickly, building their own business on top of HighLevel. That's way more exciting to me than anything else.

Manav: What kind of companies are these? Social media marketing agencies, email marketing agencies?

Shawn: No, no, no — these are SaaSpreneurs, man. The old agency model is dead. Trading money for time makes you basically a low-paid employee. What you need is to create software-based systems, incremental recurring revenue with 98% profit margins, where adding another customer isn't a bespoke custom website or a bunch of custom social media posts. These are people creating recurring revenue businesses on top of HighLevel, exactly the way we tell you to do it.

Take inbound voice AI, for example — it used to be missed-call text-back, now it's inbound voice AI. You go to a small business and say, "I'm going to give you more customers off the calls you miss every day — when you're out on the job, when you're closed, when your receptionist is greeting someone at the door." Simple stuff like that is worth a lot of money to small businesses. I always ask people the same question: have you ever called a business and not had them pick up? Of course. Were you calling to chitchat about the weather? No — you wanted to buy something. But when they didn't pick up, and you had a real need — your toilet's overflowing, you want a new roof — what did you do? You called the next guy on the list.

If you put a solution in place using AI to answer those calls 24/7/365 when the business misses them, it takes just one converted customer to justify charging $300 a month. The average plumbing job, roofing job, dental client makes way more than that — convert one a month and it's a very low bar, but for most of these businesses you're delivering ten, twenty, thirty new customers. And you set it up once — you're not doing custom work for them every month to keep it running.

Compare that to the old model — "I'm a Facebook ads guy, I run ads for dentists" — $3,000 a month plus ad spend. Those guys got murdered on churn, and not because they were doing a bad job. It's because small businesses don't sit down and do the math. The dentist looks at that $3,000 bill and thinks about the new Mercedes on the lot down the street — kill this bill, and boom, the Mercedes is his. Three grand is just too much money for most small businesses to sustain, and it becomes a mental hang-up even if you're making them tens of thousands of dollars — they're just not going to see it. When your offering is software-based, you can bring the price way down, and suddenly you look like a utility bill, like the phone bill or the power bill. You don't have a target on your back the way you would as "the Facebook ads person" or "the website person." You just look too expensive.

Manav: You gave one really good idea — inbound voice AI. Any other ideas that come to mind?

Shawn: Sure — a chat widget on the website, the same inbound conversational AI idea. The concept is you want to catch what I call the remnant leads — leads that are just being missed. We've all been to websites that are super confusing, lots of links. That's why funnels actually work — a funnel is basically a one-page website without a menu, so people don't get confused. But when you go to a plumber's, lawyer's, or doctor's website and you're finally ready to transact, where do you go on the page? It's always hard — you click "book now," it goes to a form, the form goes to somebody's inbox, and that person never gets back to you. That sucks.

What you want is a conversation — ask a couple of questions, then move the person forward. AI is good enough now to do all that work for these businesses, and every person who walks through that chat widget, you as the provider get credit for the sale. Again, you only need a couple of sales to cover that $300 bill forever.

Manav: Mark Andreessen said software is eating the world. I like how you explain finding 98% margin software businesses that can scale.

Shawn: Yeah, well, that's what HighLevel is — that's why you can white-label HighLevel. That's the whole point, you're turning yourself into that.

Manav: Are you guys using AI for the software at GoHighLevel?

Shawn: We use AI everywhere — on the programming side, on the support side, and we've built a ton of AI into the software itself. There are AI assistants in the software that build workflows, create social media posts, build websites, handle chat, handle phone calls — you name it.

Manav: What's the next thing you guys are working on at GoHighLevel?

Shawn: Two big things. First, outbound voice AI — we're actually in private beta with a bunch of customers on that right now. The big issue there isn't really the technology, it's compliance. Everyone wants to download a random list off the internet and have a robot call and sell to all those people — but you'll get sued out of existence, and it won't even work. So what we're really working on is less the tech and more making sure you can't just dump a list in, and that proper compliance is in place, because particularly in the US, people have to actually consent to being called by a robot.

Second, we're coming out with an agentic builder that you'll see at Level Up, our big event in Dallas in October. To me, that's the next big phase for the agency world — you're going to stop selling the end product and start selling the thing that creates the end product.

Here's the big secret about agentic builders: all the big companies building them are selling them to small businesses, the same way CRMs got sold to small businesses back in the day — "Mr. Plumber, Mr. Lawyer, Mr. Dentist, buy a CRM, it'll magically make you money." We all know what happened there. They bought the CRM, and the CRM basically said, "All right, I'm a tool — I'm a hammer, I'm a saw, now go build the house." But the plumber, the lawyer, the dentist, they have an actual job — they don't have time to also pick up a second job called marketing.

AI agents are going to be the same way. Will the dentist want a receptionist agent that handles inbound and outbound calls, confirms appointments, books appointments? Of course. But will they have a clue how to train those agents, build them, evolve them over time? No idea. That's where the agency comes back in. They're not going to sell the tool — nobody knows what "an AI agent" means. They're going to say, "I'm here to get all your inbound calls answered, make outbound calls automatically, book appointments automatically — would that save you time and make you money?" "Heck yeah." The agency makes the pitch, makes the sale, does the implementation, and that creates a beautiful recurring revenue stream. Same story for social media posting, website creation, all of it — agents will handle the work, but agencies will be the ones training them, evolving them, and using them to sell and deliver outcomes for clients. Which, at the end of the day, is exactly what an agency is for: creating outcomes. Clients want more customers — they don't care that we might love websites or social media. They just want the outcome. Same as going to the dentist — most of us aren't asking what filling material they're using, we're just saying, "Ow, this hurts, can you fix it? Cool, thanks."

Manav: One of the most common issues business owners bring to me is leads — "we can't find a good list of leads." How does GoHighLevel help there?

Shawn: Here's what I tell them: it's 2 a.m. on Christmas morning, and a hot lead calls in — who's there at your business to swoop them up and book them on the calendar? Nobody. And worse, five minutes after you close, when you're out on a job every single day — who's there to close those? Nobody. You don't need more leads, Mr. or Mrs. Business Owner — you need something to take the leads you're already missing and close them. Do you know how many people visit your website every day, look around, and leave? Tons — because no one's there to help them. If someone were, you wouldn't have to spend a single extra dollar on ads. Instead of more Facebook ads or billboards, let's just get more sales out of the traffic you already have.

Manav: For the people listening — one incredible thing that happened when I signed up for GoHighLevel: there's an onboarding flow, and you get added to a Zoom waiting room, with people onboarding people left and right. It's like a conveyor belt.

Shawn: What we know is that when we get people on calls like that, they do so much better on their ultimate outcomes, because speed to lead is really what this is all about. I don't care who you're serving or what you do — if your mission is to help somebody, and you put them in a line, make them wait, tell them you'll get back to them later, they're not going to feel helped. The sooner you get back to them, the better. That's true whether you're an agency, a plumber, or a software company.

Manav: We've talked about AI, AI agents — when you say businesses should serve customers who come to their website, do you mean through a chatbot, or something else?

Shawn: Yeah, exactly — AI chat. Everybody knows that little widget in the bottom right corner that says, "Hey, I'm here, I can help." It's a "you looked at the website, you have a question, come on down" moment. If you use AI there instead of the old "please wait" or a live agent — because nobody wants to wait — most people are asking pretty similar questions: how much does it cost, how does it work, how soon can you do this. And the reality is they want to take the next step.

With AI these days, it's not just Q&A — it's not "that's $50" and then it just sits there. It can say, "That's $50, would you like to book a call? Would you like to book an appointment?" Suddenly you're pulling people down the funnel and getting them booked, and that's money in the bank for most businesses. Most businesses will tell you, "If you get me a booked appointment, I can turn that into money." If you get someone to walk into a dentist's office, most of the time they'll leave with the filling — the dentist knows what to do with that. The lawn care guy, whatever business, knows what to do with a booked appointment. They just don't know what to do before that — and that's where the agency really shines.

Manav: One of the biggest opportunities right now is short-form video — we're seeing doctors becoming content creators, everyone becoming a short-form video creator. How do you think about short-form video?

Shawn: It sounds good to me. There are lots of ways to do it. I think it's just another example of the evolution of things — TikTok didn't exist a minute ago, now it does, and you'd better be putting content out there. I think short-form is just another content format we all need to embrace — maybe a reflection of people's shrinking attention spans, but it's just a shift in how you do it. If you were already helping a client with content creation, this is just another version of that. Our team, for example, takes my longer-form content and turns it into shorter clips — that's what a good agency should be doing. And you can use AI to help with all of that too.

Manav: One thing I like — you must have seen Alex Hormozi investing in the school.com community platform. I thought that was a great investment, because a community platform is so sticky — the community itself promotes the platform. I feel the same way about GoHighLevel: once you've onboarded all your company's information, it's really hard to switch. Kudos to you.

Shawn: Well, we didn't come up with this ourselves — we followed our customers, we always follow our customers. Our job at HighLevel isn't to come up with the next great idea, because we have the best marketers in the world as our customers. Pick the best marketer in the world, and I guarantee you they use HighLevel. What's great about that is they're the ones who tell us what the new things are, how to change the software, what to implement. We don't think of ourselves as marketing geniuses — honestly, the opposite. We think of ourselves as the worst marketers and salespeople in the world. But what we're good at is being awesome product people and awesome engineers. Put those two together, and magic can happen.

I think a lot of companies feel like they have to own it all, and that's a terrible idea, because nobody can be great at everything. It's like wanting to run faster — my advice is go run alongside the fastest runners in the world. You'll pick things up, and over time you'll run faster, even if you never run as fast as them. That's how we think about our customers — they're the best marketers in the world, so if you want to build the best marketing software in the world, go get their best ideas. Our job is to turn that into software they can use to serve their clients. And anybody who walks in without knowing what the best marketing software looks like just gets it by default, because of all the great people who came before them.

Manav: A lot of people are afraid AI is going to replace their jobs. What do you tell them?

Shawn: I think AI will replace some jobs, for sure — it depends who I'm talking to. If you're someone who wants to go out and serve clients, this is a great time for you. I've watched a lot of people go from zero to one in the agency space, and it's hard — you start off being everything: the salesperson, the marketer, the implementer. You're doing all the work for your first client. Eventually you want to scale, so you focus on sales and marketing — but who does the implementation? You have to hire someone, and that's scary, because a lot of the time that person won't do as good a job as you did, and suddenly your client relationships are at risk.

AI is here to actually do it the way you want it done, consistently. So if your mission is to become an entrepreneur, to scale a business, AI is absolutely your friend. But if your job is something repetitive, yeah, AI is coming for it, and you'd better get moving, or AI will replace you. That's true across the board — entry-level law clerk, entry-level anything — those tend to be repetitive jobs where you're learning something brand new, and unfortunately, AI is coming for those. That's not how it works in the long term; you'll either need a much broader skill set, or a much deeper one, to outpace AI. But if you're an entrepreneur, like our marketing agency customers, AI is the best thing you've ever seen.

Manav: The problem is international offshore talent is catching up to US entry-level talent because of AI, and there's a whole discrepancy happening there. We saw Trump announce plans to restrict Indian IT companies from outsourcing work to India — which has been happening for decades.

Shawn: Yeah, I mean — good luck with that. I think AI is going to come for all that work anyway. He can say and try whatever he wants, but technology will clearly outpace anything he can write and sign in an afternoon — that's not going to move the needle, in my opinion. What actually will move the needle is AI. I think the "offshore" idea in the traditional sense starts to go away, because a lot of those people will end up being the ones building these agents. We'll end up in an agent talent war, and it won't be about what country your person is from — it'll be about how good your AI agent is. I don't care who created it, I care how good it is. That's going to drive a lot of innovation in training different agents for different roles and outcomes. The real question to ask is: how much AI am I using, and how do I raise that percentage — because that's going to go from "oh, that's cool" to table stakes. If you're not doing it, you're out of business.

Manav: As we wrap up, can you give some high-level advice for entrepreneurs — about discipline, daily habits, or getting distracted by shiny object syndrome?

Shawn: The biggest piece of advice I give people I work with — and I'm biased, since our customer base is coming in to learn a tool — is: focus on the sale. Learn the very basics. Inbound voice AI is a great example: pick one feature, learn it, go make the sale, and keep making the sale, repeat the sale. Sale, sale, sale — that's the thing that can't be automated, can't be learned behind your computer. That's the biggest challenge I see for most people.

And realize that success comes from consistency — which is super boring. All the failures are frontloaded, which is the hard part. We're all the worst when we first start something, whether you're learning a new language, an instrument, or starting a business — you'll always be the worst on day one, and that's discouraging. But you really are compounding over time. It takes a lot of repetition to get where you're going, and you'll have plenty of points where you feel stuck. Just realize consistency over time is what creates success — not some big new idea, not a silver bullet. The people advertising silver bullets usually have something to sell you, which is why they're appealing to that instinct — like the "six-pack abs in six minutes" ads you see every year. It always boils down to a lot of hard work, which is why they keep selling new versions of the same promise to people who buy in and then quit once they realize how much work it actually takes. That's how it is with everything in life. If it feels like it's taking forever, it does take time — but every day you consistently move in that direction, you'll get better and create breakthroughs. Where you lose is when you quit and decide it's too hard, or that you don't have the magic sauce. There is no magic sauce — it's being consistent every day, staying at your craft, and learning from the losses as you go.

Manav: How can people find you, and how can they sign up for GoHighLevel?

Shawn: Just go to the website, that's fine. But the best way to get a feel for HighLevel is to go to YouTube and search "HighLevel" — check out our YouTube channel. You don't have to sign up for anything. You can look at all the content, see the software in action, watch interviews we do with creators and marketers who use HighLevel. You'll get a really good perspective on who we are and what we do.

Manav: Amazing. Thank you so much, Shawn, for being generous with your time. Thank you for coming on.

Shawn: Yeah, no worries, man. Thanks for having me.