SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
744: Companies Pay Her $10-100k to Text Customers Funny Messages
07 Aug 2017
Chapter 1: What is Bitesize and how does it drive revenue through text messaging?
Founder of Handshake, rebranding his bite size back in 2013, did just 200 bucks in revenue. Last year, 2016, over 300K, got a team of six folks, $125,000 raised. She's helping folks in an entertainment and political space launch one-to-one human engaging text campaigns, 6% average reply rate.
Chapter 2: What challenges does Bitesize face in building a customer database?
The way she makes money from that is it's 25 cents per text. Her cost per text are 16 cents on the high end of data. And then a two cents to Twilio.
Chapter 3: How does Bitesize ensure compliance with texting regulations?
So, you know, call it making five, six, seven, maybe eight cents per text. They're growing rapidly. This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 4: What is the process for sending interactive text messages with Bitesize?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 5: How does Bitesize measure the effectiveness of text message campaigns?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. This is episode 744. Coming up tomorrow morning, Jose Callasso joins us. And with $1.5 million in revenue, the simple question I have is, hey, Jose, are you the new PowerPoint? Hello, everybody.
Chapter 6: What revenue model does Bitesize follow for its services?
My guest today is Jess Lee. We met up many, many months ago in San Francisco, and she was so kind to give me a tour of the 500 Startups office out there. But today, she's the founder of a company called Bite Size, where she's helping brands drive revenue with text message conversations. Jess, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, so excited.
Chapter 7: How has Bitesize evolved since its launch in 2013?
Very good. So, hey, listen, is Bite Size the same thing as Handstack? Yeah, we're rebranding. Okay, so guys, if you're listening to this and you want to actually see the company online, you go to handstack.com, but you're rebranding to Bite Size. So Jess, what does Bite Size do?
Chapter 8: What are Jessica's future plans for Bitesize?
Yeah, so Bite Size helps brands drive revenue through interactive text message conversations. Give me an example. Sure. So a movie studio wants to release a new movie and they want to reach a million moviegoers, right? So what we help do is, you know, how email and Facebook nowadays is so oversaturated.
So we help them reach people by text message and it'll be a fun, entertaining text message that comes from a movie character and you can actually talk to a movie character. That's pretty cool. Like it takes the form of Captain America if Marvel is using you. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of hype over conversational commerce. Right.
And the really important thing about our tool is we help them drive revenue by driving them after the conversation to a Fandango link. Great. They can buy the movie tickets. let's chat more about that in a second in terms of how effective that is. But first email marketing and the other comps you used, those aren't valuable unless you first build your email list.
How do people build a database of cell phone numbers to even use bite size on? Yeah. So that's one of the big challenges because texting has been known to be so spammy, right? You think of any business texts you get, it sounds like a robot. Um, and people don't really like getting those things. And, um,
What we do is provide that phone data, help our clients find the phone data, and so they can text their target audience without having to collect the phone numbers one by one. Okay. Legally, how is that allowed? Yeah. So our texting tool is what's called the manual texting. So under the FCC, there's a law called Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
And with that, you can't randomly generate numbers with algorithms or send text without human intervention. So what we do is we So we help clients send those tags with human intervention, many, many human interventions so that they are all touched by human before it's sent out. So tell me about how a human, let's role play here. I'm Marvel. I'm paying bite size.
The new Captain America movie is coming out. I'm using you. You have five phone numbers of people that I think are going to come buy a Fandango ticket to go see the new movie. Tell me how your humans engage with me. Yeah, so it works like an iPhone group chat. You make a group, you add the people to the group and you click send. You can't schedule the text or anything like that.
People reply and you get these replies on your app and then you get to reply to them from there. So you can have a continuous conversation. People listening right now are going, Nathan, come on. The most thing I hate about Facebook is when people add me to random groups I never asked to be added to. I don't like Jess's idea. So Jess, what's your response rate on this?
And how do you measure the negative sentiment that you might create? Yeah, so for those texts, the different thing from group texts and ours is that you don't get all the text messages that other people are sending. So it still seems like a one-on-one text from the consumer's point of view.
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