How RightMessage CEO Brennan Dunn grew RightMessage to $139K revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is brennan dunn he's building a company called write message and it's also the founder of doubleyourfreelancing.com prior to that he started and sold another sas company called plan scope all right brennan you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right tell us about right message what's the company do so right message originally started out as website personalization software so the idea would be you could change content in your website based on who somebody is and that now we're kind of shifting more towards segmentation so helping people understand who their audience is what they need what they want or what what they're looking for and so on um and we're even now kind of going head on against like sumo and optimonster by uh coming up with call to action software that allows people to self-segment themselves so why are they here what do they need yeah what are they looking for and then getting all that data to personalized content and along with getting it up to your email marketing software interesting so are you uh uh is it pure play sas or is there a consulting aspect of this i mean it it is sas but we have had people who have won it done for you so we've done that kind of on the side but it's by no means anything we really make public okay so give me a general sense i mean if someone's going to sign up for this thing is it the same pricing it's going to be the opt-ins of the world it's like 10 20 grand 20 bucks a month uh usually well our rp is about 100 bucks a month but plans start at 30 and we have people paying in the few hundreds a month so walk me through that right so why will someone pay a couple hundred versus 30 what do you upsell against on traffic so the pricing is based on your total monthly uniques so the more the bigger your site the more you pay why is it the right number you know we had noah on when he was you know thinking about a lot of sumo product pricing he really struggled with how like what thing to price against and i think right now he still is using website impressions but it was by no means an easy choice and potentially not i mean it might change even yeah i mean we to be honest we just picked something to scale off of and that was it um we don't really have we we do actually have two proper tiers one of which lets you do full website personalization the baseline tier lets you just do call to actions so we do have separation there but they are both ultimately still tied to uniques yep okay interesting give us some backstory here when'd you launch company we launched it january of 2017 i believe it was okay 2017. and do you remember how you got your first couple customers yeah we built up a list so we um basically were doing a lot of we were sending out a lot of content just over email telling people what we were building in the open and then we did a big launch kind of info product style when we when we went live um sold annual plans that got us i think to about 8k mr or thereabouts uh pretty much a week into it um and then yeah i mean that's how we got the first uh a lot of those people frankly came from i've been doing guest posting and podcasting and stuff on the topic i spoke at a lot of events and that just kind of built up an audience of people who are eager for it well how did you actually build that audience so let's say a year before launch you were speaking at an event what would you do at the event to start building that wait list for for right now yeah so we did have a we did had a very simple sales page that was basically just a explainer of what we're building with an email opt-in and what i would do is whenever i'd go on whether it be on a stage or on a podcast or whatever i would just point as many people to there we didn't really have an incentive i didn't have like an email course or a lead magnet of any sort it was basically just a if you like what if you like what you just heard and you want to follow along with what we're building go here so we built up a few i think we were at 2000 or so when we launched okay on your list yeah on the list okay and then how did you engage i imagine this eight thousand dollars in mrr and sales right or about what is that ninety six thousand dollars an arr um this came from your list plus affiliates or what were the other traffic rates yeah it was a hundred percent the list oh just your two thousand person list yeah oh wow okay interesting what price point did you pitch them on so i believe our minimum i don't remember exactly but i think it was averaging about 800 for the year so we didn't we had totally different pricing back then but we just sold annual packages with a promise that we would do concierge setup so you buy a year up front and we'll work with you individually to get you set up what was the um okay what was the form factor with which you introduced this did you get them on a webinar or was it just an email sent to a landing page it was all over email we just basically had a proper kind of time sensitive email campaign that went out open and closed card it was coming correct yeah i think it was about a week long that we opened that cart okay um and people i mean it basically went from the only way to buy was up front for a year uh with the concierge and then the second that ended it just became monthly plans that people get set up to on their own got it so the communication was open cart now concierge 800 per year closed cart and then you won't get any concierge set up and then it basically launched you know whatever hundred bucks somebody comes like a normal sass yeah yeah yeah interesting okay good way to see the company now have you continued to say bootstrap or have you raised capital we didn't raise some money we raised about half a million from uh people like nathan barry of convertkit um conquer of teachable uh pulsing and others um just friends of mine frankly who wanted to fund us uh we did that more for strategic purposes so we integrate with convertkit we also integrate with drip and we raised from them too or from rob walling um so we raised a bit of money just to kind of get up get us off the ground but we're operating as bootstrappers i mean we're not chasing you know the next round or anything like that right now we're basically operating as bootstrappers who had some r d money up front interesting okay so half a million bucks raised what did you raise it on a safe or a convertible note or what is it safe safe okay now or have you got have you spent that to the point now where you drove enough growth where you're now break even again profitable yes so we are profitable at this point and uh yeah i mean we're just kind of slowly but surely growing that's great and when you say profitable you talk like you're talking like 10 or like talking 10 grand a month in profit or 100 grand or what no i mean we're our total mr at the moment is 30k a month um our i mean we're basically our expenses are probably 20k so yeah we're bringing about a 10k a month profit that's good and how many customers today uh just shy of 300. 300. okay great now how are you getting new customers today obviously did the initial launch but how are you adding them today mostly through content um so you know a lot of uh just basically writing articles building up an email list pitching them over email what's your email what size at today six thousand six thousand okay now are you blogging on your own platform or your guest posting elsewhere we are we've done some guest posts but for the most part we're keeping it on our own site and then we'll effectively rewrite the article for someone else um so but we're starting it on our own site okay got it so 300 you said you have about 300 customers right now yeah okay so 30 000 bucks a month there that's good now where were you exactly a year ago in terms of mrr um it's all in barometrics it's all so we are oh if you go to write message.barometrics.com you can see everything we are one of their open startups um yeah so you know off the top of your head that way yeah i can tell you um i mean a year ago we would have been uh what were we let me just run the report 17 yep yep yeah this is good now so now that i have the link i'm also running a report so this is great yeah you were at uh uh right around seventeen thousand one hundred ish um but there was a dip because you were doing in august 2018 about twenty one thousand dollars per month what what tell me about churn the the...