How Missinglettr CEO Benjamin Dell grew 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 there's many different ways to do that um how are you thinking about again generating additional wealth for yourself through this company so i i do plan to exit that that's that's something that we're we're actively working towards at some point we're very far off that today um but we've got a view that within three to five years we can we can grow it to a to a considerable um point or a point that at least is going to give us that wealth that we can then you know move on i'm for my sims i'm an ideas guy i'm always thinking about the next idea so um you know i i if we can exit and have some you know sizeable amount of money in the bank to then focus on the next one that is the long-term view today we we think we've got a really really interesting challenge ahead of us a really fascinating problem and a market that you know is showing us that they they need this product uh still a huge amount opportunity on the table if you look at convertkit they're going after a different product of course but they're going after um a very very similar market and they've seen massive growth um primarily through their affiliate channels and everything else so there is still a lot more opportunity on the table that we're really excited about how many customers are you and new customers are you adding every month um so new users about 500 new customers new paying customers about sort of 70 to 80. 70 to 80. okay you're at 500 today okay so so healthy growth that's good very good um if somebody offered you 200 grand today to sell the company do you sell no well yeah so in your mind you've kind of come up with a number of like you want to get at least this big to sell for at least this amount what's that number and why is that number important to you yes two million minimum is is where it would need to be um it's it's it's multifaceted one there is a there is an opportunity here and i can see where this can go so it can go way way beyond that so we need to at least prove we can get it to a stage secondly you know an options pool with with my staff and for a couple of them and i want to make sure that they get something meaningful out of this as well um but quite frankly i where where i expect the business will be in a few years after we've really explored and and you know solve the problems that we think are there to be solved that's where i would expect it to be um quite frankly but um you know it's a difficult one to call really all right ben good stuff let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um carnegie by um uh peter crass andrew carnegie from the robber baron era is it a is it a what is that his biography yeah yeah so it's a biography um yeah it's called carnegie and it's by peter cress number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now yeah i mentioned him before the company nathan barry from convertkit yeah that's great he was let me see if i can pull up quickly his interview he was on recently um convert here it is of course he's on the bear metrics open um uh initiative so he's sharing all his numbers here we got some numbers thankfully that they do not show on that like he's generating 240 grand in revenue per employee right now which is above the average of 130 70 137 grand in revenue per employee um by the way guys when you want to look up data like this just this is what i'm doing right now you go to getlacka.com in the upper right you type the company name and it'll pop up all this data so um anyways yeah nathan barry's great guy not number three is there a favorite online tool you have for building the company um yeah it's profit well by price intelligently yep also also a great tool uh number four how many hours of sleep to get every night um between six and seven so 6.5 i suppose and what's your situation married single kiddos uh married three kids and you said you were how old uh 36 36 all right last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um i was thinking about this i think one one thing i would tell myself is that a constant that you can guarantee throughout your life is that you are going to get bombarded with advice either solicited or not from people who who have the best intentions and at the end of the day you have to build up an intuition of your own um and invariably that's just through testing and actually doing yourself not just reading but actually going out there and doing it so the advice would be just experiment more be bold and see what works guys use your own intuition first other people's advice second he had some success launched missing letter in 2017 to help bloggers basically put together instant content marketing plans going out 12 months every time they publish a new post team of six based all remote around the world 600 customers right now paying 14 bucks a month so 8 grand a monthly recurring revenue 5.5 monthly churn that is gross on both a logo and a revenue basis they did a test in terms of cac 150 so 11 month payback period that didn't work out though because lifetime value is about 18 months or 250 bucks so he's focused on scaling first adding 70 to 80 new customers per month ben thank you for taking us to the top thanks very much pleasure