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...