SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
MessageDesk Hits $15k MRR, Targets $2m Seed Early 2022
04 Sep 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So we officially went to market in February of 2020. Ending February, we had $200 in MRR. So from there until now, it's been consistent growth.
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Chapter 2: What is Message Desk and how did it start?
Hey folks, my guest today is Josh Merriman. He's the revenue operations manager at a company called Message Desk, where he aims to align sales and marketing goals with their product development team. He also led the sales team where they scaled from nothing in MRR in Q2 2020 to 15K MRR in 270 customers by next quarter. So approaching that here quickly. Josh, you ready to take us to the top?
Heck yeah, let's do it. All right. So what is Message Desk? What are people paying you for? Yeah. So we're a business text messaging platform that helps small and medium-sized businesses grow their customer base, market affordably, earn more online reviews, and get paid faster through business text messaging. And are you built on top of Twilio's sort of rails?
So we're actually built on top of Bandwidth, which is a Twilio competitor. Interesting. Is that your biggest expense monthly? Um, not really, just because we're the way we price, we're kind of taking that into account. And we get charged about less than a penny per message sent, and we charge about three to four cents to our end user.
So it's not a huge expense there in the grand scheme of things. Do you know how many cents happened last month? Yeah, so we do about 100,000 cents a month. Wow. Okay. Got it. Across how many customers today? 266. 266. Okay. Take me to the story. You were there at Day Zero. Now you're not a founder, but it sounds like you're part of the founding team, right? Yeah.
So I'm officially employee number two. We have four co-founders and I am the second employee. Me and the first employee came at really the same time. Okay. Very cool. And what were you originally hired to do? Do you So originally I came in, I was a marketing person when we were interviewing and all that, but I had a background in web design and web development.
So my first three months on the ground was actually doing software engineering, working in the code base, developing features, because at that moment we were just such an, we There was no reason to do marketing and sales yet. It was like we had nothing to sell. So it was all hands on deck from product development wise. And what are customers paying per month today on average?
So right now our average revenue is about 52 bucks. We have two official plans. One starts at $39 a month, one $99. A majority are at the $39 range with about 25 to 30% of the $99 range.
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Chapter 3: How did Message Desk grow from $200 to $15k MRR?
That's around 266 times 52. I mean, what you're doing 13, 14 grand a month right now in revenue, right? Yeah. And that's up from nothing about how long ago. When did you launch? So we officially went to market in February of 2020. Ending February, we had $200 in MRR. So from there until now, it's been consistent growth.
In the world of SaaS, it's so crazy because there's companies that in that same timeline might do a million in MRR, ARR. So we're not that big. We're not growing that fast. That's our goal, though. Very cool. Okay. So February is when you get going 200 bucks a month, now much larger than that. How did you get those first 200 customers? Do you remember?
So all of our sales and marketing is all through organic, just content. So we are literally just ranking on Google for keywords and people are finding us naturally. It's actually kind of funny because we're based in Reno, Nevada, but we don't have any customers in Reno, Nevada. All of our customers are in all the other states.
So now we're kind of going to this local outreach because it's just a lot easier now that we have a full product. We have kind of our niche kind of aligned. What's your top keyword that you guys intentionally are ranking for that's bringing in trials and customers? Scheduling text messages. That is business intent, which is interesting. Scheduling text messages. What's the second highest keyword?
Do you remember? Text to pay, text to donate, stuff like that. Things that are business intent around text messaging. Scheduling is usually employed with appointment reminders, follow-ups, stuff like that. The casual front desk workflows. Text to pay is like the field service, home service people that are trying to literally get paid while they're on site.
Yeah, and how do you, like when it's like scheduling text messages, I imagine there's a lot of very large companies with higher domain authority than you also trying to rank for that. How do you beat them? Like, how do you outrank them? Yeah, I mean, it's a game for sure. You know, there's definitely a strategy of going after keywords that have high buyer intent, but maybe low search volume.
Whereas our competitors, they might have the money to just put ads on these keywords and where they're not really competing in the actual content space. They're just paying Google to be on the first, first in that kind of ranking. For us, we typically show up third, fourth, or fifth in those searches.
So we're not first all the time, but being third to fifth, you get 20% to 15% click-through out of the total people that search it. So it's still enough there to make some money. And how else can you go deep on these keywords where your better funded and bigger competitors won't go as deep? The big differentiator is through integration.
So in the SMS text messaging world, we're the only company that's directly integrated to QuickBooks Online and Xero, which are two of the biggest small business accounting softwares. So in the text-to-pay realm, a lot of SMS people will offer text-to-pay, but it's not through an accounting system.
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Chapter 4: What is the pricing structure for Message Desk's services?
I mean, do people run one big text message campaign and leave or do they stick around? There's definitely some customers that do that. Our churn rate month to month is about 6% to 7%. In our early days, first couple months when we were going to market, it was a lot higher than that because we really hadn't dialed in our messaging.
We weren't going after the people that had a consistent text messaging need. That's really what separates us from the rest of the SMS field. Most people are going after text message marketing as their content strategy and their target market. For us, we're going after operational messaging. If you're a real business, your operations aren't just one month out of the year. They're 12 months.
For us, it's not a huge concern. It's just really about targeting at the top level, making sure we find the right people. Interesting. And do you have additional product lines yet where you're able to upsell your base of two and 33 customers to other things? Or is that ARPU really stuck between that 50 to 200, $300 range? So right now it is kind of stuck.
We are developing additional features, additional things to move to. There is this, in the text messaging world, there's a lot of directions we can go. Do you go omni-channel, bring on social media channels as a solution like Instagram and Facebook Messenger? Do you go the route of doing text and email? We actually just launched Chatbot that businesses can put on their website.
That's going to be an upsell opportunity. So there's a lot of ways to go. We're still very much in the research phase of that, of seeing where the market is, because we don't want to jump in and start competing with like intercom, right? Like that's not really ideal for us. So we're still in the very much like collecting feedback from users.
Like, what do you need that would make you more money and you would be willing to pay more for? Very cool. And obviously, again, you're going to raise money to run for some of these experiments. How much do you think you might raise in Q4 this year or Q1 next year? Our goal is around $2 million in funding if we were to do it.
The amount of MRR we have going into that negotiation obviously determines how much money you can get, how much equity you're giving away at that point. So we're trying to get as much MRR right now before we even start that conversation. That's really where we're at. What do you think you can get MRR to before the raise? We're confident we can get to 20K MRR.
That's really our end goal for the year. For us, Q4 is really where we see a lot of our high growth months because that's really when small businesses are evaluating their own tech stack and looking for new solutions. Yep. This all makes good sense, Josh. Any exciting products besides the chatbot coming up you want to talk about?
So we just released last month payments automation with QuickBooks Online and Xero. So if you're a QuickBooks Online user, you can automate your payment reminders up to 30 days before and your payment past due notices and then thank you messages that happen anytime a customer pays.
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Chapter 5: How did you acquire your first customers?
Zapier is pretty awesome. And obviously, ClickUp, we use that every day here. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? I'm trending towards seven. Before this interview, it was a lot less, but mostly seven. That's good. And situation, married, single kids? I am engaged, soon to be married. Very exciting. No kids yet? No kids yet. All right. And Josh, how old are you? I am 24.
24. Last question. What's something you wish you knew four years ago when you were 20? I wish I knew a little bit more about the go-to-market strategy, nailing a niche. We kind of approached this broad market idea thinking we could just dominate with features, and it's really not about that. It's about nailing your niche and finding the customers that would love your product.
Guys, Message Desk helps businesses do text message marketing. They were doing $200 a month back last February, now doing $14,000 a month in revenue, hoping to hit $20,000 a month in revenue in Q4 this year. So they can go out and raise $2 million in a traditional seed round. We'll see what happens. Josh, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you, Nathan.