How Missinglettr CEO Benjamin Dell grew Missinglettr to $96K revenue and 600 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is benjamin dell he is the founder and ceo of a company called missing letter a social marketing automation company that automatically creates 12 months worth of social content for each blog post you publish he previously owned a web agency for over 10 years which was required and during that time he also launched a number of sas startups two of which were acquired he's passionate about empowering businesses and brands with the tools that helped them succeed benjamin are you ready to take us to the top i sure am i've been waiting for this i was gonna say you you told me in the in the pre-show you're a listener how long have you listened um probably about a year so probably not as long as it's been around but i find it so it's it's something so simple about listening to other people in the space just be honest about their numbers yeah you can learn so much do i publish too much content is once a day too much do you know what there was a time where where i listened perhaps just once a week but but i've more frequently now i listen every day for about two or three months see he's being so nice to me because he doesn't i'm about to grill the hell out of him so he's going to tell me everything i want to hear try and play every advantage i can alright ben tell us what missing letter does and how you make money okay so we're we're a straight out sas play with a freemium model um so essentially we empower um businesses who publish blog posts and and we create social campaigns for them so that they can really maximize the roi on each of the blog posts that they're publishing um by creating this sort of 12-month drip campaign that our customers simply need to review make adjustments if they need to and then we drip out that content to their social accounts driving traffic back to their blog posts and helping them increase engagement on their social profiles so it's all really just to help them get the most out of the investment they've put into each of the blog posts that hopefully they're researching properly and writing and putting all that effort into i'm gonna see if you can do this interview yourself since you know all the questions i ask so what data can you share with us oh god i'm a geek when it comes to this so i've i've i've got a notepad here with all the numbers read it too should i just read them out verbatim yeah go so um okay so team size six um we're based so i ran an agency as you alluded to in the in the intro there that was bricks and mortar um had had an office and staff um based out of it so i told myself with the next business i would intentionally be remote and so that's what we are so um i'm in the uk uh i have a developer in poland two customer support people in serbia a part-time customer support in canada and then my nomad designer travels around the world i think he's in um thailand at the moment very good keep going it's great yeah keep going so we're we're early stage in terms of the timeline here um so i i i built this kind of alongside the agency about a year and a half ago and we had some initial early traction nothing massive but we had this guy who was doing the circuit um in the social media circuit at conferences and he would do a keynote here and there and he came across us and would start to talk about us and so hill though we weren't intending to you know really focus on on missing left at that time to get many customers so i was and this was about a year and a half ago so straight out of the bat it went up to about a thousand dollars a month again very very small fish but it showed there was some early interest but i was entirely locked into the agency and so i needed to find a way to wind it down and exit and that's what really took up the majority of 2017. so october 2017 um i exited the agency and so from that point only really for the last eight months i've been and my team have been full time on this um so today we're eight thousand mrr um which is about we've grown at 84 um since december um just gone so sort of six months ago so it's on the right track we've got a lot to do we're self-funded so there's still a huge amount we need to do but we think we've found we we've worked out what people need out of this product and and really what you know what what happened to that and ben how many customers so we have um 16 000 users um 600 are paying today with an average revenue of um okay 14 bucks a month yeah yeah which you know to be frank it needs to go higher i mean to be fair we're not we're not too far out of the bracket that buffer um play play in i think there's there's was sort of sitting at 15 for many many years and it's it's gone up a little bit to sort of 17 or 18 or perhaps 19 now we we we need to get ours up higher um but you know in the early days we did a lot of deals we sort of played around with pricing a lot and so it's partly the legacy sort of aspect of that that's dragging that rpu down a little bit yeah what about churn um it's it fluctuates but it's around five and a half percent at the moment both on logo and and revenue and that's a monthly number yes yeah yeah and and when people i mean what are you doing you know when someone signs up for the product what do you know you got to get them to do in the first call it weak to make them sticky so it really comes down to approving that first campaign it's all just theory until they can see the magic of a campaign and how it's turned that blog post into a in a a sequence of optimized social content so that's really the key thing if we can get them to do two or three then that's really going to um nail the the chances and what about cac what are you paying to acquire customers yeah it's this is the one i've always struggled with so we experimented with paid acquisition mostly on facebook and it it we're self-funded we're not profitable yet um so we have had to play the really cautious game we were seeing at the time i've stopped i've paused it by the way for now we sort of played around for a few months and we found we could get a a sign up so either free or trial for about nine dollars um but a paying customer so someone who convert from either trial or straight from the free was costing us about 150 which you know our ltv at the moment is 250. so it was just a little bit too you know we had cash in the bank to really just you know beef up our user numbers then i'd probably still be doing that today but um we need to just sort of pause it a little bit while we really try and find some other um channels at this stage and that's what we're focusing on today a lot of early stage bootstrap sas entrepreneurs have problems deciding what test to try first walk me through like how that first adwords test you did even though it didn't work out at least now you have a data point 150 cac right so that's helpful to have that data point um how much did you spend on that and how we're able to get comfortable with that first test so comfortable in terms of a budgeting sense it's just about sandboxing it and and you know coming up with a budget that you fixed to um each month and for us it was stupidly small it was like 500 i think a month and we ran it for about three four four months i think in fact we did it for three months and then had a break and then started it again to see if we could get anything else out of it and we kind of saw the same results so we paused it again um really the tests we we you know we did the look-alikes we had this background process where we would push all of our customer data to facebook every day so that we could really over time just you know continually refine that look-alike um list and that was definitely helping and we were seeing it come down and down i just needed to make some tough decisions to really make sure that we weren't burning our runway sort of too too aggressively yeah how are you funding it right now with 8k and monthly occurring revenue and 11 or six employees that's barely enough to cover salaries or like are you not paying yourself yeah i mean it's i do pay myself unfortunately i'm i'm 36 sorry that's a question for the end i know but yeah yeah um i've got kids at school and and you know so i'm not a 21 um year old kid anymore that can afford to work on nothing so yeah there are costs um so it's it's it's largely self-funded i did exit um the agency last year and an assassi business about a year before that nothing massive but enough just to give me a bit of cash in the bank um just to sort of keep us through and we're we're not too many months away now from profitability if we maintain our our monthly month growth how much have your own money have you put into the company i would say it's it's it's less than a hundred okay fair enough that's good um good so so how do you i mean what i was like thinking about in companies like yours is like how do you use this to you know build a lot of wealth for yourself right...