How RightMessage CEO Brennan Dunn grew 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 big churn issue for us was we were selling personalization software people bought into it but you can't personalize without segmentation so a lot of these companies came on board and they realized they didn't have the data that they needed to accurately personalize a sales page so we had a good amount of people who came on and we just frankly weren't doing enough to help them segment so that's when we started shifting towards tooling that would help people understand better who their audience is so that they could then personalize the content to them like you know for instance we would allow we sold the the software telling people yeah in a certain industry you can show social proof from that industry but the biggest issue was well we don't know what industry our people our email reader you know subscribers are in so what we started to do is build kind of attribution software on top of right message that would allow you people to self-segment themselves into you know hey welcome to our site what industry are you in why are you here uh what's your job role you know so on and so forth and all that data would get pushed up to their crm so then when they're back on the site in the future we could then make it so whether it be a marketing you know the marketing site or a specific sales page or whatever could be tailored to reflect who they are yep that okay this all makes good sense right so so when you do look at what your revenue return was over the past 12 months what would you put it at um again i'm going to defer to bear metrics um yeah but yeah i mean i mean bare metrics is saying over the last year revenue turns 16 again we're still to be honest with you we're still so like individually attentive to more qualitative stuff that i'm not putting too much stock into um you know things like turn percentages or what not just yet we're still really focused on understanding what are we selling how do we best sell it and so on because we have been we have been kind of plateauing for a few months where we've tried to figure out how do we best sell the new direction of the product and we've been getting plenty of customers coming in but we're also losing losing other customers too so you know if you look at our growth it's it's been fairly flat but it's we're still getting an influx we're just doing a uh we're still struggling with figuring out how do we keep people um which i think a lot of that is really just we we still you know the it's it's such a new thing website personalization that a lot of people conceptually understand it but it's hard to it's not a priority for a lot of people right so i mean you mentioned getting new customers right so when you look at your fully weighted cac to get a new hundred dollar a month plan what are you spending to get that customer we haven't spent a dime on any hard cost like acquisition costs well it's fully weighted fully weighted though right so including you know if you're spending your time doing sales customer support any commissions you know from reps yeah i mean we don't so we aren't um in terms of sales we don't have any sales people it's just myself co-founder and uh we have a part-time designer more people on the um uh three people yeah three okay got it yep and sorry engine who's doing the engineering the co-founder shai oh got it okay so there's so it's it's one you know two co-founders you're the business guy he or she or kai he or she is the engineer he's the engineer and then you've got a designer yes yeah so we're not really i mean to be honest with you we're not i don't know what our overhead is in that sense for getting a new customer for instance somebody just i mean it's your time you're spending your time blogging podcasting you know yeah correct i mean we're both sharing support but i'm focused on growth he's focused on product yep yep so i mean you could take essentially assume your entire salary was dedicated towards cac divided by new customers per month and kind of back into something but to your point the court it's very early correct yep so how do you go you know if we talk a year from now how do you go from 30 grand a month to 60 so what we're focused on now is once we figure so we've been doing a lot of more manual selling so a lot of our customers have come through just a lot of kind of like educational stuff that we've been doing on the back and so articles case studies us talking to them um what we're really trying to do is i i wouldn't say that we've hit product market fit in the sense that we have a really good way a compelling way of showing somebody why they should switch from say sumo or optinmonster or whatever to us so we're working on that and um long term our goal uh in the next year is just going to be to continue continually i mean that's what we're you know shy's actually here in virginia this week he lives in london and um we've been just heads down talking with customers trying to really figure out that positioning so that we can hopefully get to the point where we can be past this learning stage and really start to buckle down on can money accelerate your learning are you looking at potentially raising capital now to run some experiments i think the problem is the while we did raise money and we we had a bigger team who was more helping with r d like building out the product and everything else we were burning a lot of money but pointing in the right wrong direction i think so you know while i i don't i wouldn't want us to throw money the problem until we know how to best solve that problem if that makes sense but yeah but that's that's part of that you see that this chicken nagging egg game happens all the time though right it usually what you see is whoever runs the most tests the fastest wins because they find the winner quicker right so it's always a balance of like who can increase their testing velocity and sometimes money is the answer to that sometimes it's just creativity you don't know what you would test yes yeah so i think like to answer i mean to answer the question full circle i think that we wouldn't we wouldn't raise money at this point or scale the team at this point because i think we're so right now we're so individually tr working together with our current customer base base and subscriber base to figure out positioning wise are we in the right place or do we still have some adjustments that need to be made um and it for me at least seeking new money or seeking you know more people to help would be more of a distraction at the moment at least i mean let me let me let me give like a real example right like turn's an issue right a lot of times turns an issue because the onboarding is weak right so you need more engineers to get more onboarding tweaks done quicker more a b test launch you know things fixed in the product you have one engineer as your co-founder right now right so like why would you not be more aggressive and go try and accelerate your learning curve on onboarding so you can decrease churn i mean it's it's really just a matter i think for us and again i don't know if how we're doing it is the right way in that sense but for for us at least the we've spent a lot of money um and in time on building any burn through the 500 we've burned through a good about we have about 50 left okay sorry runway um yeah we've got that's the actual so that's the actual story here right is you're managing basically close i mean you've got 20 can of expenses 30 you know 50 grand in the bank and you're doing 10k and kind of profit per month you need to really kind of manage this bringing on a full-time employee at 80 grand a year is not going to be a good use of your money that's exactly it yeah i mean when we get to the point where we're bringing 20 30k profit a month and assuming no more expenses up until then um then yeah that's when we're gonna we were just talking lunch uh about an hour ago shine myself about exactly that would you ever raise debt capital so you guys can preserve your equity but give you some more runway to run some experiments i'm not sure um to be honest i've always been a bootstrapper so the whole money thing is still relatively new to me if that makes sense um so you know i'm and again i this could be something that we're making a mistake at but i'm very focused right now on uh not not trying to think in terms of chasing capital whether it be debt capital or raising another say safe round or whatever else i don't even know if you can do that after you've done stuff to be honest but um yeah i mean right now i'm just trying the two of us are focused on trying to reposition ourselves the way we need to be because i don't think we're there yet and then once we get there and when we start to see the churn issues being eliminated and we know we know why we're turning it's an educational problem we've asked people we've talked to people and what we're being told again and again is we we completely 100 believe in the outcome that you're promising us but we need help on the strategy strategic side like how do we actually go about setting things up correctly with the software so that's the big thing that we're trying to tackle at this point um and i i would just be very hesitant if that makes sense to like you know raise money and then throw money at solving that largely education problem that we have i think well yeah i mean that basically says you don't know how to solve the education prop like if you had a hundred of how to solve it you would directly correlate how to spend money to solve it faster like what i'm actually hearing you say is you're not quite sure how to solve it so you don't know what you would spend money on to decrease churn exactly yes yeah yeah interesting if someone offered you 700 000 bucks all cash up front to sell the company so 200 000 more than you raised you'd probably split it amongst the three of you guys would you sell the company um probably not to be honest why i just this is um you know i have another business that i i run kind of on the side that has been taking care of me for the last seven years now and this is brown and this is see now we're getting the issue see you have a safety net so you don't have to be aggressive with the right message right message does not have to work for you to be comfortable yeah i mean there is a degree of truth to that absolutely yeah come on why not be a pirate why not cut your safety nets that'll force yourself to be a little nervous and that nervousness that energy you'll harness into making right message way more successful well that's that's exactly what we're i so right now as of actually this week my last commitments to the other company in terms of active commitments are finalized oh very good so now i am you know that you caught me at a good time and that's why shai's here in the states this week is we're planning out all right how are we going to be you're gonna stop taking salary from whatever this other company is you're gonna really be like all in on right message that's it that's a big step right and can by the way congratulations for facing it on and doing it i mean that's a big one it is yeah i mean it's it's something i uh just talking to people like nathan barry good friend of mine i mean he was at this same point with convertkit where he was splitting his time and when he went all in on convertkit that's when everything started to work out so yeah i mean i think it was heaton shaw who had to come to jesus moment with him they're all all those folks are good people to hang out with so let's wrap up here with the famous five quick answers if you can number one favorite business book favorite business book um i don't remember a lot of business or book in general uh all right book um theaters by uh plato number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um ceo uh definitely follow people like nathan barry um very i really like how he's writing convertkit um so i'd say him number three what's your favorite online tool for building right message um like collaboration tool or just practice any tool any tool you use i've been really enjoying notion i know a lot of people are so yeah number three or four how many hours of sleep are you every night eight or nine and what's your situation married single kids married two kids you get here full house man yeah all right and how old are you i'm 35 35 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew oh god honestly i uh i dropped out of school to start a business i kind of wish i would have stayed in just because i'm not going to get that time again yep guys at first there you have it right message betting on personalization about 300 customers paying a hundred bucks a month doing 30 000 a month right now in revenue up from 17 000 a month just a year ago so nice growth but they have turn problems here brennan's working on solving this with his founders three people on the team right now one designer two co-founders five hundred thousand dollars raised they are profitable so twenty thousand dollars total expenses ten thousand dollars per month in profit again as they look to figure out how can they scale with decreased churn get their product in the right place and most importantly get the thought leadership education perspective right with these customers brendan thank you for taking us to the top thank you nathan these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want to do it more so if you want to get more of this stuff make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other ceo interviews right now