SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
RightMessage Hits $360k Revenue, Co-Founders Going All In
27 Jun 2020
Chapter 1: What is RightMessage and how does it work?
If you look at our growth, it's been fairly flat, but we're still getting an influx. We're still struggling with figuring out how do we keep people, which I think a lot of that is really just... It's such a new thing, website personalization, that a lot of people conceptually understand it, but it's not a priority for a lot of people. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka.
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My guest today is Brennan Dunn. He's building a company called RightMessage and is also the founder of DoubleYourFreelancing.com. Prior to that, he started and sold another SaaS company called PlanScope. All right, Brennan, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do it. All right, tell us about RightMessage. What's the company do?
So WriteMessage originally started out as website personalization software. So the idea would be you could change content in your website based on who somebody is. And now we're kind of shifting more towards segmentation. So helping people understand who their audience is, what they need, what they want, or what they're looking for, and so on.
And we're even now kind of going head-on against Sumo and OptinMonster by... coming up with call-to-action software that allows people to self-segment themselves. So why are they here? What do they need? Yep. What are they looking for? And then getting all that data to personalize content along with getting it up to your email marketing software. Interesting.
So is it pure play SaaS or is there a consulting aspect of this? I mean, it is SaaS, but we have had people who've wanted it done for you. So we've done that kind of on the side, but it's by no means anything we really make public. Okay, so give me a general sense. I mean, if someone's going to sign up for this thing, is it the same pricing as kind of the opt-ins of the world?
It's like 10, 20 bucks a month? Usually, well, our pool is about 100 bucks a month, but plans start at 30 and we have people paying in the few hundreds a month. So walk me through that, right? So why will someone pay a couple hundred versus 30? What do you upsell against? Depends on traffic. So the pricing is based on your total monthly uniques. So the more, the bigger site, the more you pay.
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Chapter 2: How does RightMessage differentiate itself from competitors?
Open and close cart? It was coming. Correct. Yeah. I think it was about a week long that we opened that cart. Okay. And people... I mean, it basically went from the only way to buy was upfront for a year with the concierge. And then the second that ended, it just became monthly plans that people could sign up to on their own. Got it.
So the communication was open cart now, concierge 800 per year, closed cart, and then you won't get any concierge set up. And then it basically launched, you know, whatever, a hundred bucks a month. It becomes like a normal SaaS. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Good way to see the company. Now, have you continued to stay bootstrap or have you raised capital? We did raise some money.
We raised about half a million from people like Nathan Berry of ConvertKit, Ankur of Teachable, Paul Singh and others. Just friends of mine, frankly, who wanted to fund us. We did that more for strategic purposes. So we integrate with ConvertKit. We also integrate with Drip and we raised from them too, or from Rob Walling.
So we raised a bit of money just to kind of get us off the ground, but we're operating as bootstrappers. I mean, we're not chasing... you know, the next round or anything like that. Right now we're basically operating as bootstrappers who had some R and D money up front. Interesting. Okay. So half a million bucks raised. What'd you do? Raise it on a safe or convertible note or what?
It was a safe. Yeah. Safe. Okay. Now, or have you got, have you spent that to the point now where you drove, drove enough growth where you're now break even again, profitable? Yes. So we are profitable at this point. And, uh, yeah, I mean, we're just kind of slowly but surely growing. That's great.
And when you say profitable, you talk, you're talking like 10 or like talking 10 grand a month in profit or a hundred grand or what? No, I mean, our total MR at the moment is 30K a month. I mean, we're basically, our expenses are probably 20K. So yeah, we're bringing about a 10K a month profit. That's good. And how many customers today? Just shy of 300. 300.
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Chapter 3: What pricing strategies does RightMessage use?
Okay, great. Now, how are you getting new customers today? Obviously, you did the initial launch, but how are you adding them today? Mostly through content. So a lot of just basically writing articles, building up an email list, pitching them over email. What's your email size at today? 6,000. 6,000. Okay. Now are you blogging on your own platform or you're guest posting elsewhere? We are.
We've done some guest posts, but for the most part, we're keeping it on our own site. And then we'll effectively rewrite the article for someone else. But we're starting it on our own site. Okay, got it. So 300... You said you have about 300 customers right now at that $100 ARPU? Yeah. Okay. So $30,000 a month there. That's good. Now, where were you exactly a year ago in terms of MRR?
It's all on Barometrics. It's all open. So we are... If you go to rightmessage.barometrics.com, you can see everything. We are one of their open startups. You know off the top of your head what the growth was. Yeah, I can tell you. I mean, a year ago, we would have been... What were we... Let me just run the report or 17,000. Yeah. 17. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. This is good.
Now that I have the link, I'm also running a report. So this is great. Yeah. You were at, uh, uh, right around 17,100 ish. Um, but there was a dip cause you were doing in August, 2018, about $21,000 per month. What, what, what tell me about churn. The big churn issue for us was we were selling personalization software. People bought into it, but you can't personalize without segmentation.
So a lot of these companies came on board and they realized they didn't have the data that they needed to accurately personalize a sales page. So we had a good amount of people who came on and we just frankly weren't doing enough to help them segment.
So that's when we started shifting towards tooling that would help people understand better who their audience is so that they could then personalize the content to them. For instance, we sold the software telling people, yeah, if they're in a certain industry, you can show social proof from that industry.
But the biggest issue was, well, we don't know what industry our people, our email subscribers are in. So what we started to do was build kind of attribution software on top of WriteMessage that would allow people to self-segment themselves into, you know, hey, welcome to our site. What industry are you in? Why are you here? What's your job role? You know, so on and so forth.
And all that data would get pushed up to their CRM. So then when they're back on the site in the future, we could then make it so whether it be a marketing, you know, the marketing site or a specific sales page or whatever could be tailored to reflect who they are. Okay, this all makes good sense, right?
So when you do look at what your revenue turn was over the past 12 months, what would you put it at? Again, I'm going to defer to Bear Metrics. But yeah, I mean, Bear Metrics is saying over the last year, revenue turned 16%. Again, we're still, to be honest with you, we're still so individually attentive to more qualitative stuff that I'm not putting too much stock into...
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Chapter 4: How did Brennan Dunn acquire his first customers?
We're still really focused on understanding what are we selling, how do we best sell it, and so on. Because we have been plateauing for a few months where we've tried to figure out how do we best sell the new direction of the product. And we've been getting plenty of customers coming in, but we're also losing other customers too. So if you look at our growth, it's been fairly flat.
But we're still getting an influx. We're still struggling with figuring out how do we keep people... Which I think a lot of that is really just... It's such a new thing, website personalization, that a lot of people conceptually understand it, but it's hard to... It's not a priority for a lot of people. You mentioned getting new customers, right?
So when you look at your fully-weighted CAC to get a new $100 a month plan, what are you spending to get that customer? We haven't spent a dime on any hard costs like acquisition costs. Fully weighted though, right? So including if you're spending your time doing sales, customer support, any commissions from reps. Yeah.
I mean, we don't... So we aren't... In terms of sales, we don't have any salespeople. It's just myself, co-founder, and we have a part-time designer. So... So four people on the team? Three people, yeah. Three. Okay, got it. Yep. And sorry, who's doing the engineering? Co-founder, Shai. Oh, got it. Okay. So it's one, two co-founders. You're the business guy.
He or she, or Kai, he or she is the engineer. He's the engineer. And then you've got a designer. Yes. Yeah. So we're not really... I mean, to be honest with you, we're not... I don't know what our overhead is in that sense for getting a new customer, for instance. I mean, it's your time. You're spending your time blogging, podcasting, etc. Yeah, correct.
I mean, we're both sharing support, but I'm focused on growth. He's focused on product. Yep. Yep. So, I mean, you could take essentially assume your entire salary was dedicated towards CAC divide by new customers per month and kind of back into something, but to your point, the cohort, it's very early. Correct. Yep.
So, so how do you go, you know, if we talk a year from now, how do you go from 30 grand a month to 60? So what we're focused on now is once we figure... So we've been doing a lot of more manual selling. So a lot of our customers have come through just a lot of educational stuff that we've been doing on the back end. So articles, case studies, us talking to them.
What we're really trying to do is... I wouldn't say that we've hit... product market fit in the sense that we have a really good way, a compelling way of showing somebody why they should switch from, say, Sumo or OptiMonster or whoever to us. So we're working on that. And long term, our goal in the next year is just going to be to continue.
I mean, that's what we're... Shai is actually here in Virginia this week. He lives in London. And we've been just heads down talking with customers about trying to really figure out that positioning so that we can hopefully get to the point where we can be past this learning stage and really start to buckle down on. Can money accelerate your learning?
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