MessageDesk Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

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 our product development team he also led the sales team aware they scaled from nothing in mrr and q2 220 20 to 15 kmr and 270 customers by next quarter so approaching that here quickly josh your area takes 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 do you 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 um we get charged about less than a penny per message sent and we charge about three to four cents to our end user so there's not a huge expense there in the grand scheme of things do you know how many sends happened last month yeah so we do about a hundred thousand cents a month wow okay got across how many customers today uh 266 266. okay take kate to me 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 in really the same time okay very cool and and what were you originally hired to do 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 i was actually doing software engineering working in the code base developing features because at that moment we were just such an we were such an mvp product that 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 um we have two official plans one starts at 39 dollars a month one ninety nine dollars a majority are at the 39 uh range with you know about 25 to 30 percent of the 99 range that's right 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 guys launch so we officially went to market in february of 2020. um ending february we had 200 in mrr so from there until now it's been consistent growth you know in the world of sas it's so crazy because there's companies that in that same timeline might do you know a million in mr arr so we're not that big we're not growing that fast that's that's our goal though very cool okay so uh february is going to 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 um 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 that we know 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 uh scheduling text messages that is business intent which is interesting scheduling text messages what's the second highest keyword you remember um text to pay text to donate stuff like that you know things that are business intent around text messaging you know scheduling is usually cloyed with like appointment reminders follow-up stuff like that you know 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 out rank them yeah i mean it's a it's a game for sure you know there's definitely a strategy of going after keywords that have um high buyer intent but maybe low search volume whereas our competitors they might have the money to just put ads on these keywords and whether 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 you know for us we typically show up you know third fourth or fifth in those searches so we're not first all the time but being third to fifth you get you know 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 like go deep on these keywords you're where your better funded and bigger competitors won't go as deep um 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 you know a lot of sms people will offer text to pay but it's not through an accounting system so for most small business owners if they're using quickbooks online our competitors aren't actually a solution for them there's no route in which they can do that which for us we just piggyback off quickbooks so when you text to pay it's just plugged into your accounting you don't we're not creating extra work when it comes to year-end financial balance sheets and all that it's almost like an invoicing to like freshbooks right on desktop but you're doing that just for text messaging tech symbols yeah exactly interesting okay it makes a lot of sense to me um talk to me about funding have you guys stayed bootstrapped or raised so we raised a pre-seed round we've done just over uh half a million dollars in funding to date um we were bootstrapped up until you know mid-2020 so so pre-seed 500 grand raised and do you have any idea was it on a note or price or maybe not because these are uh it was a convertible note round okay normal note okay very cool uh do you know the cap that was on it um i do not know okay so cool any plans to raise more capital to keep fooling growth or no yeah i mean we're looking to do our seed round sometime at the end of this year 2020 or early 2020 or not 20 30 geez 2022 early 2022 probably more realistically um you know for us we're growing consistently you know about a thousand dollars a new mrr each month so a new round is really just money in the bank we can start competing with our competitors at the advertising level and really try and jump our conversion rates at that first initial touch point from 15 of people that search to get into like 45 50 so that's really where that money would go so for us it's not an absolute need to grow it's just a matter of can we grow faster with the cash on hand how much cash is on hand uh right now we have probably just over a hundred thousand dollars in cash on hand does that make you guys nervous um not really because we're making you know about 15k a month and we have a really low burn rate you know most of our staff you know honestly most of our staff are college interns that are either working as you know for free because only working in less than like 20 hours a week our paid staff there's only two or three people that are really paid and then our co-founders all aren't taking any money right now so it's like seven people total but that are full time and really three are paid so our burden rate in that sense is not bad and um we aren't you know we're very confident in our growth to becoming cash even you know breaking even in the coming months so it's like that's it's really where if we raise a seed round it's all for extending our growth not really to extend our runway do you have other ideas of ways to extend growth besides you know more competition on these seo keywords anything else yeah i mean for us we were really hoping in 2020 to do trade shows alongside our big integration partners you know quickbooks connect is a big one xerocon happens in australia freshbooks is someone we're looking to integrating with sometime soon and we never got the chance to do that obviously because of covid unfortunately so we're hoping this time around those become a huge growth level just because if you use quickbooks online we become an immediate you know no-brainer solution we can automate all of your invoicing through text message you know for 40 bucks a month and that's a really easy sale um but when you have to do it through organic content you can't always guarantee the people searching use quickbooks online right so it's been a lot harder going that way yeah what about churn 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 um you know our churn rate month to month is about six to seven percent you know in early uh in our early days first couple months when we're 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 you know a consistent text messaging need and that's really what separates us from the rest of the sms field most people are going after text message marketing as their kind of content strategy and kind of their target market for us we're going after operational messaging so if you're a real business your operations aren't just you know one month out of the year they're 12 months so 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 233 customers to other things or is that arpu really stuck between that 50 50 to 200 300 range so right now it is kind of stuck um we are developing additional features additional things to move to you know there is this in the text messaging world there's a lot of directions we can go you know do you go omni channel bring on like social media channels as a solution like instagram and facebook messenger do you go the route of like doing text and email um we actually just launched a chat bot that businesses can put on their website that's going to be an upsell opportunity um 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 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 around for some of these experiments how much do you think you might raise in q4 this year or q1 next year um our goal is around two million dollars in funding if we were to do it um you know 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 you know we're trying to get as much mrr right now before we even start that conversation that's really where we're at yeah what do you think again mr2 before the raise we're confident we can get to 20k mrr um you know that's really our end goal for the year you know 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 yep this all makes good sense josh any any uh exciting products besides the chatbot coming up you want to talk about um 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 and all of this happens through their mobile phone which we've seen convert payments at about 50 to 60 faster rate than doing it through email or you know mailing an actual invoice to someone very cool exciting products we hope you break that 20k mark for now though let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book uh the four by scott galloway number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um steli at close and zeb at click up yep number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business uh zapier is pretty awesome um and obviously click up we use that every day here number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i'm trending towards seven before this interview it was a lot less but um 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 wishing for years ago when you were 20 i wish um i knew a little bit more about the go to market strategy nailing a niche um you know 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 twenty thousand dollars a month in revenue and q4 this year's thing go out and raise two million in a traditional seed round we'll see what happens josh thanks for taking us to the top thank you nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't 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