How Ness Labs CEO Anne-Laure LeLe Cunff grew Ness Labs to $352K revenue and 2.5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is anne laura the confidence the founder of ness labs an online platform offering neuroscience-based content and coaching to thousands of entrepreneurs and knowledge workers prior to nest labs she led marketing for digital health products at google she holds an msc in applied neuroscience from king's college in london all right and laura are you ready to take us to the top absolutely okay so what is nest labs is it a sas companies or software behind this or is it really a pure content sort of membership site play pure content and community there is no code behind it okay so the challenge with any membership site is stickiness how do you make sure you create new content every month that keeps people paying your monthly fee i block time every week to write content i've never missed a newsletter and i think people stick around because they know that they can count on me to show up every week with new content and the community helps a lot too because people form relationships and make new friends so they keep on coming back to chat together and what does the average member pay you per month for all this great content you're putting out it's very affordable it's only fifty dollars per year five zero yes okay got it so caught four or five bucks per month that's great and when did you launch the company so the company was launched last summer and the membership was launched in march this year so this is only when i really started to make money okay got it so so 2018 is really when you got soft launch and then really got going last year 2019 is the soft launch okay this year is when i launched a paid membership and how many folks over the past call it four or five months have you signed up to the paid membership so we just turned uh 1500 members yesterday that's incredible nice work thank you so 1500 folks i mean can we do the math 1500 folks at 50 per year that's about 75 000 in ar right now yes and it's just me so it's mostly profit we love that uh what takes the most your time i mean obviously you have to create the content where do you where do you spend money where are there costs associated with business it's mostly using because the platform is completely no code most of the money goes to using sas platforms actually that i'm paying for and that are helping me manage everything especially as a solo founder it's really good to have like you know i use member full and you circle for the forums there's i try all the time to not do anything manually myself tell me more about that no code is hot right now so walk me through your tech tech circle for forums what else memberful for managing the memberships any cancellations renewals people who want to upgrade or downgrade that all happens there i don't need to touch it the website is on wordpress which is integrated with memberfold and circle using zapier i think safer is probably the glue for everything and i would not be able to have the platform i have today if i didn't have it and finally the newsletter is using mailchimp okay mailchimp how many zaps do you have set up probably 10 or something oh okay not a ton i was expecting you to say like hundreds okay just 10. that's great yeah i try to keep it simple because again solo founder i don't want it to be too complicated and brick yeah no i love this okay so membership site 1500 customers how did you get the first 10 that's the hardest so the very first few ones were friends that i knew were very interested in the same topics and then my main acquisition channel so far has been twitter i've been very public working there in public posting articles sharing my progress i even share screenshots of my memberfold dashboard with the monthly recurring revenue and that has also attracted lots of people who kind of want to follow my success and be a part of the community how many folks do you think are paying for nest labs specifically to just watch how you build a membership site i would say five percent okay something like that i have people who explicitly told me i joined the community just because i want to see how you're doing it yeah yeah yeah it's in you don't you're not quite sure how to take that right you're like okay well i want people paying me for my neuroscience-led content but i also don't mind people paying me if they're just learning from how i'm building a membership site absolutely in my mind they're subsidizing my work so i don't really mind if it's just because they want to see how i'm doing it yep now this is great i just see you posted on twitter yesterday 1503 active members you had nine new orders and four new renewals just just yesterday uh revenue over the last 30 days was about thirty three thousand eight hundred dollars and you know translating it to mrr you've grown you know call it sixty seventy percent over just the past thirty days so incred obviously going from a dollar to two dollars is 100 growth rate as you get bigger it's harder to get the growth rate higher but where are you getting most your customers now today is it still twitter yes it is still twitter and uh i am actively growing acquisition from seo and google it's growing really really fast at this point it's still twitter that's my main acquisition channel but in terms of growth i'm really hoping that in the next few months search engine traffic is going to overcome twitter and the reason why i'm excited about this is because it's more passive for twitter i need to actively post all the time to get traffic whereas if it comes from search engines literally people coming to my website in my sleep okay one of the top keywords that you rank for you get 50 organic clicks per month from this keyword i have i'm going to read this i have no idea what this is stygian blue stuy in blue what is that wow this is one of one of my most random articles i don't know how you end up on this it's basically a type of color that lots of people can't see so this is an article i wrote about impossible colors and they are colors that only some people can see and you can force yourself to see them by looking at two colors consequently very very quickly so that's what it is about i have no idea i was ranking this high for this word yeah that's i'm using ahrefs to look at this right i'm looking at some of your top keywords you also rank really high for the key term life lessons you get about 50 clicks per month from that now are these i guess i'm asking this because i'm curious are these intentional do you look up the keyword you want to rank for and then write for it or do you just write it and you happen to start ranking for something you want i'm absolutely terrible at choosing topics based on this the only seo optimization that i do is inside of wordpress i write an article first and then i just make sure that i'm not doing any newbie mistakes so i just make sure the links are all right the titles are okay the url is fine so it's basic optimization but as so far i have never written an article based on the traffic i would get from it really really interesting now you've managed according to your pop-up on the website powered by mail munch it looks like you've grown your your email list about 20 000 folks is that accurate i should update it i'm at 25 000 now that's great okay so and again that's all coming really from twitter mostly yes wow okay so so talking about your email frequency you mentioned mailchimp as part of your tech stack how frequently do you send out emails and what's your open rate typically i send an email every week and the open rate is between 45 and 50 that's huge that's a really big open rate so so tell me the last email you sent out what was the subject line uh the last one was i think it was outer states of consciousness where i was looking at psychedelics fascinating okay see i don't know i know nothing about this world so i can't even ask any scientific questions about it unfortunately i wish i was more educated but i can't um so you send that email out to 24 25 000 call it 10 11 000 open it what do you promote in that thing do you send them back into your content or what i have several sections the first section is all of the new articles that i've written on the website which are free the second section are links from all around the internet interesting stuff that i found that i haven't created and the last section links to content that is in the community and the paid membership and this is also one of my acquisition channels where i tell people hey do you like the free content well there's even more behind that paywall so if you want to support the newsletter and be part of the community you can join the paid membership here i mean you probably know every week when you send that newsletter you're going to get x amount paid converting to a 50 a year plan how many do you typically get like 5 10 20 new new paid signups per email send yeah that's about it yeah so maybe 10 new at 50 bucks each so every time you send an email you make 500 bucks basically which is great yes and compared to the model that i had before where i was relying on sponsorships this is so much better it's way less work and it's way more reliable tell me about that what was the the you know the sponsor that paid you the most how big was the sponsor deal i think 1500 was the highest i got but that was a one-time thing most of the time it was 200 or 300. i completely stopped doing them now because i tried to figure out how much money i was making per hour and that didn't make sense for all of the time i was spending back and forth working on the copy etc it makes much more sense for me to just craft really good emails every week and to link to the membership that's so smart and you're building a real asset here right that's the main thing i'm curious what's going through your head i mean in my opinion you know um you know you know social capital today is what comes before right like financial capital it used to maybe be the other way around you could raise financial capital to buy attention you can't do that anymore so you're doing it i would argue like the trendy way the right way the higher leverage way what's next for you i mean really when you build a big audience like what you've built your only bottleneck is you need more stuff to sell you got to create more great products yeah so i recently launched a an online course the 30 000 i made in the last 30 days are from the course that i launched and so you're very right that building an audience first is a really good way to go about it because i announced the course i launched it it was only available for two weeks to buy and i made 30 000k in a month which is half of what i did the since march since i launched a membership so that was really good and in terms of plans for the future i want to keep on building an educational platform so i want to launch more products for people to teach themselves the content that i write about i want to make it more interactive and i want to grow the community i mean i can imagine all these big b2b sas brands or even b2c brands like calm for example they're always looking for somebody like you who can be like their celebrity spokesperson who also brings like a distribution channel with them now the way for you to do that and keep a leverage for yourself is to build a neuroscience based version of calm with all of your beautiful personality and tactics built in which way do you think you're gonna end up going it's so interesting you're mentioning calm because i was on their podcast a few months ago and my website crashed actually so they did think the same thing that i would be a good guest on their podcast and yeah i i see it more as something where we collaborate together because everything i wrote about is at the intersection of lots of different areas of research so i'm not really trying to own a specific space and i think it's much better both in terms of growing my audience and providing value to people to collaborate with other people who are working in adjacent spaces and and name some of those adjacent spaces for me so there's productivity there's creativity there's just mental wellness in general mental personal mental wellness but also wellness in the workplace these are some of the areas that i talk about a lot and laura there's a lot of people that want to be famous on twitter right they just don't understand how to do it talk to me back like your first couple tweets when like nobody tweeted it and then you start getting one or two and now you get like a hundred when you post your memorable screenshot what's the secret to twitter to not be shy about what you post and to not always share only the product the final product of your work i try to work in public i think lots of people enjoy following my timeline because i share the work in progress i share the questions i share the mistakes and it's a much more authentic experience and relationship with people on twitter versus just broadcasting content without ever engaging with people and without ever having the vulnerability to show the actual process yeah this is it's i'm just scrolling to your feed right now and it's all sort of like look at the process of me doing this here's my rome research like mobile site like the improvements the sketches like your your notes what books you're eating all this sort of stuff your refrigerator yes i made pickles recently so i shared a picture of that this is so funny you get 81 likes this is really interesting i mean i know i know a lot of folks that they don't get twitter and when i watch them try and use twitter it's because they try and perfect every tweet they spend like a day trying to write like the perfect tweet when really stream of consciousness tends to do better yeah absolutely and also if you post a tweet and no one engages with it that's completely fine it's probably one of the very few platforms where you don't really get punished by the algorithm for sharing tweets that don't perform that well so you should feel comfortable just keeping on tweeting and this is also the best way to understand what your audience enjoys in terms of content yeah i mean it's fascinating to me when you post to i don't know who needs to hear this but you only need to know 20 of the features of rome to get 80 of the benefits by far one of your most popular tweets over the past 30 days no picture just text you just wonder why something that does so well yeah because i've been sharing so freely and openly that i kind of know what's going to be interesting to you people who follow me if you post once every two weeks with something as you said that you spend a full day crafting and it doesn't perform well first it doesn't perform second you didn't learn anything you need to repeat this the process more often to know what works and what doesn't yeah i love this okay what else should i know about the business that i haven't asked about i used to make most of my money with neslab through consulting and this has been a slow process of transitioning away from that to focus more on recurring revenue and this is a piece of advice i've been telling to people who've been trying to emulate what i've been doing with my website is it takes time it takes a lot of time to get to a point where you have thousands of email subscribers and thousands of people in your community that are trusting you enough to give you money for being part of this journey so it's really good to have another source of revenue whether you keep your full-time job while you're building this on the side or whether you're able to freelance or do consulting but i would say that it's very dangerous to believe the success stories of people who say they just woke up and they launched the community and two weeks later they had thousands of people in it so that's the one thing i would say about nest lives i'm very very proud of my success but it hasn't been overnight success at all yeah i mean it's very much like you could have launched your recent course and then put out screenshots on how you sent one email blast and got a million dollars in revenue but because you've built in public people have watched you over years hustle and build and build and they know that you earned the right to send one email and get thirty thousand dollars in sales it was an overnight success absolutely and laura on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book i don't really read business books any book any book how to change your mind by michael pollan number two is there a ceo or a leader you're following or studying uh there's um [Music] leader literally there i'm so bad at this question that's okay you can pass you can say no okay can i pass this one yes number three you can't say rome research what's your favorite online tool for building your community besides one you've already mentioned besides circle i can't say twitter either no twitter circle member full or rome wow you're you're being more zappier um just email okay perfect number uh three how many hours of sleep or four how many hours of sleep breaking every night between five and ten five and okay fair enough and situation married single kids uh with a partner not married living together i love that any kids no none okay and can i ask how old you are thirty thirty last question take us back ten years what's something you wishing you when you were twenty that i didn't know i didn't need to follow the career path that my mom wanted me to follow and that i could take more risks and things would be all right don't follow mom's career advice you guys heard it here first from anne with nest labs maybe the perfect example of how to build social proof first a great community first launched products on top of it she went from sponsors to consulting to now a membership course now she's got over 1500 paying customers paying 50 per year about to break a hundred thousand dollars in terms of true ar we're rooting for you and laura thanks for coming on the top and taking us to the top thanks so much 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 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