SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Unstack CMS All In One Hits $10k MRR, Adding $2500/mo, 16k Uniques from ProductHunt Launch
20 Oct 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So that puts out about 20 grand a month in revenue. So currently we're probably just about half of that, about 10. Okay. You are listening to conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed to subscribe, go to get latka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews.
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Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Grant Deacon.
He is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Unstack, the no-code content management platform designed for marketers to build and scale digital businesses without developers. We love them, but they're expensive. Prior to Unstack, Grant was a co-founder and CPO, CEO of Grapevine, an influencer marketplace with 200,000 plus creators, which was acquired in 2018.
All right, Grant, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do this. First off, congrats on getting a company sold in the influencer marketing space in 2018. I know a lot of these companies now that are just sort of flat or stuck at like 5, 10 in ARR. How'd you get out? I mean, you played that right. I think the market was changing really fast.
A couple of things we saw, obviously the wild garden platforms, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, were changing the rules all the time. That's actually part of like why I'm excited about Unstack. So I think for us, You know, we wanted to position the business for exit with a company that could, you know, continue to unlock the value with some of its other assets and things like that. Yep.
And this was this was Ideanomics, right? Back in 2018. Yep. And it was like, I think, a $2.4 million acquisition deal. So the interesting thing about them, they had actually already owned a significant stake in the company. So the final price was a bit higher. But that was sort of what, you know, to buy out the company as a wholly owned subsidiary, that was around the purchase price, yeah.
So just to repeat that back to you, they might have already owned 20% of the company. So they were really buying the other 80% for $2.4 million. So the valuation was actually higher. Along those lines, yeah. Interesting. Okay, let's now focus on new business, right? So Unstack, when did you launch it? What year? We really got it going early 2019.
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Chapter 2: What led Grant Deacon to launch Unstack after selling Grapevine?
So there's a 30% lifetime recurring revenue share for customers that people refer to us now. Interesting. So how much, like last month, how much did you pay out to affiliates because of that 30% cut? That's pretty new, that program. So I think small dollars, maybe $500. I think we just rolled it out this summer. But I think people really like it. We're seeing a lot of people sign up for it.
And then going back to your other strategy that you mentioned early on, content marketing, you're starting to gain serious steam with terms like best SaaS websites or beta page or SaaS websites, things like that. You're moving up in the ranking, which are driving you sort of new clicks per month. I mean, is this intentional or is it sort of accidental?
Well, I mean, we're using our own platform to dog food growing our own SaaS business, right? So we're very much in it with our customers who are also doing the same thing. And so, you know, for us, we're just practicing what we preach, you know, focusing on smart content.
You know, we look at content twofold, like especially now, you know, it's all about educating, you know, our audience, you know, building trust with them. But then also the long tail of that, you know, starting to rank for the terms that our customers are, you know, out searching for. So obviously we're in, A space where there's, you know, there's a lot of competition on certain keywords.
We try to be smart about where we start and kind of increase our ambition, you know, over the long term for higher volume, higher competition keywords. Yeah, well, I think your best performing post, our favorite B2B SaaS website is 2019 edition. That thing's due for an update and, you know, double down on the traffic you guys are getting from that. We've got one, but yeah, yeah.
You've done some other sort of great sort of hacky smart things, right? Since, you know, over the past 15 months on in July of 2020, you launched on product hunt, you got 3900 or 3300 upvotes. That is not easy. I'd say that's top 1% easily on product hunt. How did you I mean, that doesn't happen by accident. So how did you sort of strategically plan that launch?
So we actually had a, I wrote up kind of a brain dump of everything that we learned and did and everyone we talked to and feedback we got. You know, I think even at one point, you know, Ryan Hoover gave me some direct feedback like, hey, this is too market-y, like you need to kind of like taper it back. And so we tried to be really considerate from all those conversations.
We put a lot of work into it. So you can get all of that on our site, all the tools and tips. I think a couple of things that really worked well for us. Where is it, by the way? Sorry, where is that? Is it on the blog? Do you know the blog title you put that under? Yeah, it's slash blog slash product hunt playbook. Oh, yeah, I got it.
Let me just read, let me just tell people how successful this was real quick. So yeah, 3,300 upvotes, you got 16,000 unique website views and you got 1,600 new signups and a nice bump in MRR. What was the bump? Like a couple thousand in MRR? Yeah, that's about right, actually. The interesting thing about product, yeah, so all that's true.
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Chapter 3: How did Grant build conviction to start another company?
When you raised, I assume you did that on a safe? Was it unpriced? Uh, yeah, zone priced. Uh, we actually did it as a convertible note. Um, and, uh, in terms of that, we're like a 5 million cap. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty standard stuff. Um, okay. And, um, walk me through how you think about burn today. So how much are you burning per month to drive growth? Yeah, we burn 40 grand a month right now.
Uh, that's like gross. That's an offset, you know, uh, by our growing MRR. So 30,000 net. Yeah. And so are you cool with that? I mean, is that sort of, you're comfortable with that for a while? Yeah, I mean, I think like when you take some money in outside capital and like it's an interesting balance of like, well, how fast do I spend it?
And I think when you do that, you tend to get a little bit of pressure like, hey, you should be spending that fairly aggressive to like get to conclusions or like, you know, learn things. On the flip side, I've been in other companies where we raise money and then we threw money at problems without really understanding the root drivers of those problems.
So people will throw cash at it to buy customers when they're not ready. They'll throw money at headcount when they're not ready or don't know the real problem they're solving. So I think it's finding that balance. I think for us, 40K a month is a pretty lean and mean sort of operation. Yeah, and really run rate is what we care about, right? So how much cash do you still have in the bank?
Uh, we spent about half of it. Yeah. So, I mean, so that puts you at, you know, eight, nine, 10 months of runway, something like that. I mean, and, and we're, you know, continuing to grow obviously, which, which slows that down or allows us to kind of maintain it, but add more resources to try to try to push things faster. How much new MR did you add last month? Uh, I'd have to double check.
I think we probably added like 2,500. Okay. Okay, good. I mean, so more than 10% month over month growth.
One thing that has been interesting going back to Product Hunt was like, and I know you're big on cohort analysis and we don't have our numbers totally perfect and figured out, but we did see that the churn from that particular cohort was significantly higher than our overall churn from all other cohorts. So something to be thinking about.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think Product Hunt is as bad as AppSumo. I think the AppSumo cohort is always like the really high churn. I mean, they don't even convert to annual or monthly plans usually. Product Hunt is, I think, great for a lot of other things besides getting customers. You touched on a couple of them. It's sort of publicity and it has a lot of other side effects.
I mean, you're testing on the right things, though. Talk me through your team today. How many folks? Yeah, so we're 10 total. Seven are full-time. We've got six of our 10 are engineering and product. I'm kind of like a half breed because I'm running the business on the day-to-day, but my background is actually in product and I did a stint as a UX developer. So I currently run our product as well.
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Chapter 4: What strategies did Grant use to acquire his first customers?
Yep, that's a good one. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? There's a bunch. One of the guys on our board is a guy named Ralph Foles. He's not currently CEO, but he was the CEO of a company called WordStream here in Boston. So if you can get someone you're following to also be a mentor or sit on your board, even better.
And he helps you pick off key employees from his old company, I guess. Well, that was actually a coincidental. I've been having lunch with Zach for over a year. But yeah, I mean, they know each other too, so it doesn't hurt. Yeah. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your company besides your own?
Obviously our own, but I've actually grown to really like bare metrics and profit while just kind of getting into the actual unit metrics of our business, you know, and figuring out kind of where to tweak the dials. And what's your situation? Married, single, kiddos? I am happily married, no kids. No kids. And how much sleep are you getting each night? I got to get eight. That's good.
And how old are you? 33. 33.
Chapter 5: How does Unstack incentivize customer referrals?
Last question, Grant. What do you wish you knew when you were 20? Big things take time. Be patient. Guys, there you have it. Unstack, really a tool for founders to get going for really anything they need for the business, but mainly sort of a CMS all-in-one sort of tool. They've raised a million bucks. Their net burn is 30 grand a month.
They're serving over 200 customers today, doing about $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue up from nothing about a year ago when they launched. We'll see what happens next. Grant, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you.