SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
NessLabs Hits 1,500 Members Paying $75k, Software Next?
27 Dec 2020
Chapter 1: What significant milestone did Ness Labs recently achieve?
So we just turned 1,500 members.
Can we do the math? 1,500 folks at $50 per year. That's about $75,000 in ARR right now.
Yes. And it's just me. So it's mostly profit.
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Chapter 2: How does Ness Labs generate revenue from its membership model?
When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews. Right now, you're only hearing partial interviews. And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
Chapter 3: What strategies does Anne-Laure use to maintain content stickiness?
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
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My guest today is Anne-Laure Le Confuge, the founder of Nest Labs, an online platform offering neuroscience-based content and coaching to thousands of entrepreneurs and knowledge workers. Prior to Nest Labs, she led marketing for digital health products at Google. She holds an MSc in applied neuroscience from King's College in London. All right, Anne-Laure, you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely.
Okay. So what is Nest Labs? Is it a SaaS company? Is there software behind this? Or is it really a pure content sort of membership site play?
Pure content and community, there is no code behind it.
Okay, so the challenge with any membership site is stickiness. How do you make sure you create new content every month that keeps people paying your monthly fee?
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Chapter 4: What tools does Anne-Laure use to manage her membership site?
I block time every week to write content. I've never missed a newsletter. And I think people stick around because they know that they can count on me to show up every week with new content. And the community helps a lot too because people form relationships and make new friends. So they keep on coming back to chat together.
And what does the average member pay you per month for all this great content you're putting out?
It's very affordable. It's only $50 per year.
Five zero?
Yes.
Okay, got it. So call it four or five bucks per month. That's great. And when did you launch the company?
So the company was launched last summer and the membership was launched in March this year. So this is only when I really started to make money.
Okay, got it. So 2018 is really when you got soft launch and then really got going last year.
2019 is the soft launch. This year is when I launched the paid membership.
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Chapter 5: How did Anne-Laure acquire her first members for Ness Labs?
Tell me more about that. No-code is hot right now. So walk me through your tech tech. Circle for forums. What else?
Memberful for managing the memberships and cancellations, renewals, people who want to upgrade or downgrade. That all happens there. I don't want you to touch it. The website is on WordPress, which is integrated with Memberful and Circle using Zapier. I think Zapier is probably the glue for everything, and I would not be able to have the platform I have today if I didn't have it.
And finally, the newsletter is using MailChimp.
Okay, MailChimp. How many Zaps do you have set up?
Probably 10 or something like that.
Oh, okay. Not a ton. I was expecting you to say like hundreds. Okay. Just 10. That's great.
Yeah. I try to keep it simple because again, solo founder, I don't want it to be too complicated and break.
Yeah. No, I love this. Okay. So membership site, 1500 customers. How did you get the first 10? That's the hardest.
So the very first few ones were friends that I knew were very interested in the same topics. And then my main acquisition channel so far has been Twitter. I've been very public, working there in public, posting articles, sharing my progress. I even share screenshots of my memberful dashboard with the monthly recurring revenue.
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Chapter 6: What marketing channels are most effective for Ness Labs?
And translating that to MRR, you've grown, call it 60, 70% over just the past 30 days. So obviously going from $1 to $2 is 100% growth rate. As you get bigger, it's harder to get the growth rate higher. But where are you getting most of your customers now today? Is it still Twitter?
Yes, it is still Twitter. And I am actively growing acquisition from SEO and Google. It's growing really, really fast. At this point, it's still Twitter. That's my main acquisition channel. But in terms of growth, I'm really hoping that in the next few months, search engine traffic is going to overcome Twitter. And the reason why I'm excited about this is because it's more passive.
For Twitter, I need to actively post all the time to get traffic. Whereas if it comes from search engines, literally people are coming to my websites in my sleep.
Okay. One of the top keywords that you rank for, you get 50 organic clicks per month from this keyword. I'm going to read this. I have no idea what this is. Stygian blue? Stygian blue? What is that?
Wow, this is one of my most random articles. I don't know how you end up on this. It's basically a type of color that lots of people can't see. So this is an article I wrote about impossible colors. And they are colors that only some people can see. And you can force yourself to see them by looking at two colors consequently very, very quickly. So that's what it is about.
I had no idea I was ranking this high for this word.
Yeah, I'm using Ahrefs to look at this, right? I'm looking at some of your top keywords. You also rank really high for the key term life lessons. You get about 50 clicks per month from that. Now, I guess I'm asking this because I'm curious. Are these intentional? Do you look up the keyword you want to rank for and then write for it?
Or do you just write it and you happen to start ranking for something you want?
I'm absolutely terrible at choosing topics based on this. The only SEO optimization that I do is inside of WordPress. I write an article first, and then I just make sure that I'm not doing any newbie mistakes. So I just make sure the links are all right, the titles are okay, the URL is fine. So it's basic optimization.
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Chapter 7: What challenges has Anne-Laure faced in transitioning to a subscription model?
What do you promote in that thing? Do you send them back into your content or what?
I have several sections. The first section is all of the new articles that I've written on the website, which are free. The second section are links from all around the internet, interesting stuff that I found that I haven't created. And the last section links to content that is in the community and the paid membership.
And this is also one of my acquisition channels where I tell people, hey, do you like the free content? Well, there's even more behind that paywall. So if you want to support the newsletter and be part of the community, you can join the paid membership here.
I mean, you probably know every week when you send that newsletter, you're going to get X amount converting to a $50 a year plan. How many do you typically get? Like 5, 10, 20 new paid signups per email send?
Yeah, that's about it.
Yeah, so maybe 10 new at 50 bucks each. So every time you send an email, you make 500 bucks basically.
Which is great, yes. And compared to the model that I had before where I was relying on sponsorships, this is so much better. It's way less work and it's way more reliable.
Tell me about that. What was the sponsor that paid you the most? How big was the sponsor deal?
I think $1,500 was the highest I got, but that was a one-time thing. Most of the time it was $200 or $300. I completely stopped doing them now because I tried to figure out how much money I was making per hour, and that didn't make sense. All of the time I was spending back and forth, working on the copy, etc.
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Chapter 8: What future plans does Anne-Laure have for Ness Labs?
It wasn't overnight success.
Absolutely.
And Laura, on that note, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
I don't really read business books.
Any book?
Any book. How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan.
Number two, is there a CEO or a leader you're following or studying?
There's a leader. I'm so bad at these questions. That's okay.
You can pass. You can say no.
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