SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1535 Nathan, I listen to the show, here's all my data!
07 Oct 2019
Chapter 1: What is Missinglettr and how does it help bloggers?
He had some success, launched Missing Letter in 2017 to help bloggers basically put together instant content marketing plans going out 12 months every time they publish a new post. Team of six based all remote around the world, 600 customers right now paying 14 bucks a month. So eight grand in monthly recurring revenue, 5.5% monthly churn. That is gross on both a logo and a revenue basis.
They did a test in terms of CAC, $150 CAC, so 11 month payback period. That didn't work out though because lifetime value is about 18 months worldwide. or 250 bucks. So he's focused on scaling first, adding 70 to 80 new customers per month.
Chapter 2: How does Benjamin Dell manage a remote team?
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Benjamin Dell. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Missing Letter, a social marketing automation company that automatically creates 12 months worth of social content for each blog post you publish. He previously owned a web agency for over 10 years, which was acquired.
And during that time, he also launched a number of SaaS startups, two of which were acquired.
Chapter 3: What is the current financial status of Missinglettr?
He's passionate about empowering businesses and brands with the tools that help them succeed. Benjamin, are you ready to take us to the top? I sure am. I've been waiting for this. I was going to say, you told me in the pre-show you're a listener. How long have you listened? Probably about a year.
Chapter 4: What is the customer acquisition cost for Missinglettr?
So probably not as long as it's been around, but I find it. So it's something so simple about listening to other people in the space. Just be honest about their numbers. Yeah. You can learn so much. Do I publish too much content as once a day too much? Do you know what? There was a time where I listened perhaps just once a week, but more frequently now, I listen every day.
Chapter 5: How does Benjamin plan to scale Missinglettr's customer base?
That's great. For about two or three months. See, he's being so nice to me because he knows I'm about to grill the hell out of him. So he's going to tell me everything I want to hear.
Chapter 6: What strategies are in place to reduce churn at Missinglettr?
Try and play every advantage I can. All right, Ben, tell us what Missing Letter does and how you make money. Okay, so we're a straight out SaaS play with a freemium model. So essentially, we empower businesses who publish blog posts
And we create social campaigns for them so that they can really maximize the ROI on each of the blog posts that they're publishing by creating this sort of 12-month drip campaign that our customers simply need to review, make adjustments if they need to, and then we drip out
that content to their social accounts, driving traffic back to their blog posts and helping them increase engagement on their social profiles. So it's all really just to help them get the most out of the investment they've put into each of the blog posts that hopefully they're researching properly and writing and putting all that effort into.
I'm going to see if you can do this interview yourself since you know all the questions I ask. So what data can you share with us? Oh God, I'm a geek when it comes to this. So I've got a notepad here with all the numbers that you might ask me. Read it to me. Should I just read them out verbatim? Yeah, go.
Okay, so team size six, we're based... So I ran an agency, as you alluded to in the intro there, that was bricks and mortar, had an office and staff. based out of it. So I told myself with the next business, I would intentionally be remote. And so that's what we are. So I'm in the UK. I have a developer in Poland, two customer support people in Serbia, a part time customer support in Canada.
And then my nomad designer travels around the world. I think he's in Thailand at the moment. Very good.
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Chapter 7: What are the future growth plans for Missinglettr?
Keep going. You're great. Yeah, keep going. So we're early stage in terms of the timeline here. So I built this kind of alongside the agency about a year and a half ago. And we had some initial early traction, nothing massive. But we had this guy who was doing the circuit in the social media circuit at conferences, and he would do a keynote here and there.
And he came across us and would start to talk about us. And so even though we weren't intending to really focus on missing at that time to get customers. So I was and this was about a year and a half ago. So straight out of the bat, it went up to about $1,000 a month.
Chapter 8: How does Benjamin Dell envision his exit strategy?
Again, very restful fish, but it showed there was some early interest. But I was entirely locked into the agency. And so I needed to find a way to wind it down and exit. And that's what really took up the majority of 2017. So October 2017, I exited the agency. And so from that point, only really for the last eight months, I've been on my team have been full time on this.
So today we're at 8,000 MRR, which is about, we've grown at 84% since December just gone, so sort of six months ago. So it's on the right track. We've got a lot to do. We're self-funded, so there's still a huge amount we need to do. But we think we've found, we've worked out what people need out of this product and really what helps them take that. And Ben, how many customers?
So we have 16,000 users, 600 are paying today with an average revenue of $14. Okay, 14 bucks a month. Yeah, yeah. Which, you know, to be frank, it needs to go higher. I mean, to be fair, we're not too far out of the bracket that Buffer play in. I think there's sort of sitting at 15 for many, many years and it's gone up a little bit to sort of 17 or 18 or perhaps 19 now.
We need to get ours up higher. But, you know, in the early days, we did a lot of deals. We sort of played around with pricing a lot. So it's partly the legacy sort of aspect of that that's dragging that ARPU down a little bit. And what about churn? It fluctuates, but it's around five and a half percent at the moment, both on logo and revenue. And that's a monthly number? Yes. Yeah.
And when people, I mean, what are you doing? You know, when someone signs up for the product, what do you know you got to get them to do in the first, call it week, to make them sticky? So it really comes down to approving that first campaign. It's all just theory until they can see the magic of a campaign and how it's turned that blog post into a sequence of optimized social content.
So that's really the key thing. If we can get them to do two or three, then that's really going to nail the chances. And what about CAC? What are you paying to acquire customers? This is the one I've always struggled with. So we experimented with paid acquisition, mostly on Facebook. And it... We're self-funded. We're not profitable yet.
So we have had to play the really cautious game we were seeing at the time. I've stopped. I've paused it, by the way, for now. We sort of played around for a few months and we found we could get a sign up. So either free or trial for about nine dollars.
But a paying customer, so someone who would convert from either trial or straight from the free, was costing us about 150, which our LTV at the moment is 250. So it was just a little bit too, if we had cash in the bank to really just beef up our user numbers, then I'd probably still be doing that today.
But we need to just sort of pause it a little bit while we really try and find some other channels at this stage. And that's what we're focusing on today. A lot of early stage bootstrap SaaS entrepreneurs have problems deciding what test to try first. Walk me through like that first AdWords test you did, even though it didn't work out, at least now you have a data point, $150 CAC, right?
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