How Coschedule CEO Garrett Moon grew Coschedule to $10.3M revenue and 8K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is garrett moon he's the ceo and co-founder of coast schedule the web's most popular marketing calendar and the fastest growing startup in north dakota as a thought leader he's been blogging and speaking about content marketing social media marketing and startup business for more than seven years garrett are you ready to take us to the top yeah i can't wait all right yeah so okay you can't come on my show and say you're the fastest growing in kansas without backing that up somehow how do you know you're the fastest growing uh well the fastest growing in north dakota and uh north dakota you know we have less than a million people in our state total so we kind of know everybody we know what's going on uh so you know it's just by proxy and um you know understand the area but uh yeah it's great to be on and um so we should so we should rephrase it you're the only software company in north dakota that i wouldn't say that i definitely wouldn't say actually uh our fargo uh is you know fargo north dakota has a great startup ecosystem and it's growing every year so we're really excited about about the entrepreneurial economy in bismarck but and in north dakota but yeah all right so tell us about the company tell us what the company does and what's your revenue model how do you make money yeah so co-schedule is your standard sas b2b company so uh you know our model is pretty well understood out there we build a marketing calendar um and marketing uh management tool for companies that are managing marketing for agencies uh that are managing you know a lot of different projects for different clients um that goes to you know content blog posts social media email marketing uh we really provide a tool where they can do it all in one place save a ton of time improve their teams communication and efficiency and all those uh sorts of things and what's the average customer paying you per month would you say uh so our plans range you know about about forty dollars a month up to about six seven hundred dollars a month um you know and then up past that and some higher plans so you know it's uh you know average customers probably between 50 and 150 bucks okay a month or so so we'll call it kind of maybe 75-ish range but that helps us kind of get dialed in now the obvious question listeners are me going is nathan why would i do this i could just use my like google calendar right so help us understand tell us a story a real story of a customer using you guys yeah so i think that's the exact problem right is that you could use a google calendar but you're also going to need uh some additional tools for actually content creation so you're going to bring in word processors you're going to need publishing tools uh your website your blog or places where it's going plus social media plus email marketing there's a lot of moving pieces once you get into marketing and there's more and more channels that we have to care about every single year so our customers really come to us and what they're looking for is saying hey we have all of these this is always called the marketing stack this broad marketing stack and everything's disconnected it's disorganized there's no clear communication with my team and we're really allowing them to start bringing all that in-house so we so you know on top of your google calendar we're adding an entire project management layer uh and task management layer communication center for your team we're also adding publish step syncing we call it so when you actually create a blog post or something on our calendar we're actually going to publish that make it go live on wordpress and then we can start to automate things from there like your social media or email marketing or different aspects of what you're doing so could the audience maybe think of this almost like a marketing version of base camp or trello yeah absolutely i think you think about it like that except for with marketing we're really about the marketing schedule so the calendar becomes really the center point for what they're doing um and then we're adding those direct integrations with the marketing tools that they're using every day got it okay give us some of the back story here uh when did you launch the company uh we launched late 2013 and uh really got off the ground uh in 2014 after we took our first round of funding um and you know again to live in our backstory my my co-founder and i were running a marketing agency we were doing website design and some customer development and we were doing all of our own marketing you know our own blog posts our own social and it was working really well for us to gain clients but you started you know we were able to kind of get a firsthand look at some of the problems that were inherent in the workflow in the industry so that was 2013. he said he really hit the ground running in 2014 but do you remember what first do you remember what first year revenue was in 2013. how low was it gosh uh you know what we probably closed the year with almost 100 customers actually in just a couple months we launched towards the end of september and probably two or three months you're probably just around 90 customers um you know so like you know a thousand bucks 1500 bucks an mrr or something like that pretty low so maybe four or five grand in total that first year and then you said you raised in in 2014 how much did you raise in 2014 and how much total have you raised to date we raised half a million dollars in 2014. total raise to date is about 2.7 2.7 million and and was that second round or third round that you did was it priced or are you still doing convertible notes uh no both both of our rounds actually were priced and you know a lot of that just has to do with the investor community in our state um and angels that were here and what they were used to seeing and the types of deals that we could put together so we never really did the convertible note round uh so most of the price rounds and pretty simple uh clean clean equity rounds so 2013 i guess that was what four or five years ago give us an update today how many customers are you serving yeah we're serving more than 8 000 customers you know 100 plus countries and growing very quickly and you know we don't really talk about revenue and stuff at this point but uh you can kind of do some you know head math yeah let me let me do some head mats to get a general range here if i take 8 000 customers times a generally we'll do a minimum so we know you're definitely above this right you said the low end of the of the rpu range was 50 bucks you're somewhat you're north of 400 grand in mrr at this point right around there yeah around there okay got it now is that because some of those are early customers maybe legacy at lower price points absolutely yeah you i mean in four years of business you always have a variety of customers and price points you always try to do your best to kind of grandfather them in and um lots of lots of war wounds and lessons learned there but um you know it's just the way it goes so give me a story about a marketing kind of tactic or thing you did where you thought the cohort that you brought in from that tactic was going to perform very well but it surprised you and lifetime return was way higher than your usual cohort or something crazy happened [Music] well i think you know even one not too long ago we we launched a not really good great feature called re-cue and re-cue is an automation tool so a lot of people are scheduling social messages inside of our tool they have been for years they have tons of blog content there req allowed them to start recycling some of those messages and reusing them to fill gaps in their social schedule so it's a really cool feature it uses a lot of the intelligence of their social stream to figure out when the best time to publish is uh to give them more traffic and uh what we love about it is obviously it's kind of one of those those great features where it's very sticky the more you more time the user invests into it the more value they're going to see over time and as they build up that content library it really sticks with them really well and i think you know the lesson learned is we had we had great user adoption right away and within the first couple months you started to see issues with user adopting the tool and that's really something that comes with every feature it's one of those for us with req where one of the lessons that we've learned is actually we made it too smart in the beginning and we've actually had to add some features to allow more manually scheduling for our users and i think you know it goes it goes into that you know age-old lesson for entrepreneurship like you really have to listen to your customer and sometimes you get moving very quickly particularly as you get larger and you you you have the ability to ship quickly you get something out there and you learn a couple months we kind of have to rebuild this this just isn't isn't what we thought it was going to be we ended up having to kind of go back fix the feature a little before we put it back out there you were number three on product on back in on april 9th 2017. you got a pretty healthy number of upvotes with 510 what how did that cohort perform how many new website visits new trials and new paid customers uh you know i don't even know um and there may have been a bump there...