How Unstack CEO Grant Deken grew Unstack to $120K revenue and 200 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is grant deakin he is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and ceo of unstacked the no code content management platform designed for marketers to build and scale digital businesses without developers we love them but they're expensive prior to unstacked grant was a co-founder and cpo ceo of grapevine and a new influencer marketplace with 200 000 plus creators which was acquired in 2018. all right grant you ready to take it to the top yeah let's do this first off congrats on getting a company sold in the influencer marketing space in 2018. i know a lot of these companies now that are just sort of flat or stuck at like 5 10 in a r how did you get out i mean you played that right i think the market was changing really fast a couple things we saw um obviously the wild garden platforms facebook instagram youtube uh we're changing the rules all the time uh that's actually part of like why i'm uh excited about unstack so i think for us you know we wanted to uh position the business for exit with a company that could you know continue to unlock the value um with some of its other assets and things like that yep and this was this was ideonomics right back in 2018 yep and they it was like i think a 2.4 million acquisition deal they so the interesting thing about them they had actually already owned uh a significant stake in the company so the the final price was was a bit higher um but that was sort of what you know to buy out the company as a whole own subsidiary uh that was around the purchase price yeah so just repeat that back to you they might have already owned 20 to the company so they were really buying 80 the other 80 for 2.4 million so the valuation was actually higher along those lines yeah interesting okay let's now focus on new business right so on stack when did you launch it what year uh we really got it going uh early 2019. uh my co-founder and i uh kind of came out of the gate full time in may so we've been at it you know about 15 months okay 20 yeah mid-2019 and i mean what was the sort of how did you build the conviction to say you know what i'm going to launch another company it's going to take three to five years the rest you know my life to do this we'll give you the conviction well one i think i'm a glenn for punishment but i think i think putting that aside for a second you know i love building you know products that help people uh with with grapevine it was all about you know those creators had very limited options for monetizing their audience and so we gave them kind of especially when we started we gave them a new way to really unlock value from their audience um towards the end of that though you know i wanted to start thinking about serving a constituency that i really identified and cared about and that's entrepreneurs founders and marketers to a large extent who are kind of like the unsung heroes of a lot of these organizations um i've built a ton of websites on a ton of different platforms i've built full marketing stacks you know soup to nuts uh and scaled up some pretty pretty big you know digital presences um and the consistency i found whether it was for me or for any sort of entrepreneur out there is like you start putting together a bunch of tools inevitably like you get stuck like things kind of evolved to be like a frankenstein sort of system and then you're pulling in like contractors and consultants who are like touch and go we've all kind of you know been in that situation before so i kind of set out to be like hey i really love this persona you know the founder of the marketer how can i build sort of like the ideal like platform that i would want if i was starting something new and that's kind of like the genesis that you know started on stack and we had um we had a few other entrepreneurs that were like hey i would use this like you know when can i get it and so that kind of kicked things off so how did you get your first 10 customers uh first-time customers were probably just through like my personal network you know talking to people who are kind of oh i have this pin or hey a friend of mine actually just asked me about this like let me connect you um it's been fairly grassroots since the beginning so a lot of our customers come from uh referrals you know obviously we're doing a lot of content marketing but uh referrals have been a huge driver for us uh how do you incentivize referrals so originally we we didn't you know it was sort of like a goodwill loyalty thing um i think as we kind of built some of that goodwill and like earned that trust with our customer base we actually rolled out a a lifetime sort of recurring referral program um so there's a 30 uh lifetime uh recurring revenue share for customers that people refer to us now interesting so how much like last month how much do you pay out to affiliates because that 30 cut that's pretty new that program so i think uh small dollars you know maybe maybe you know 500 bucks you know i think we just rolled it out uh this summer uh but it's uh you know i think people really like it we're seeing a lot of people sign up for it and then going back to the other strategy that you mentioned early on content marketing you're starting to gain serious steam with with terms like best sas websites or beta page or sas websites things like that you're moving up in the ranking which are driving you sort of new clicks per month do you i mean is this intentional or is it sort of accidental well i mean we're using our own platform to dog food growing our own sass business right so we're very much like in it with our customers who are also doing the same thing um and so you know for us we're just practicing what we preach you know focusing on smart content you know we look at content twofold like especially now you know it's all about educating you know our audience you know building trust with them but then also the long tail that you know starting to rank for the terms that our customers are you know out searching for um so obviously we're in a space where there's you know there's a lot of competition on certain keywords we try to be smart about where we start and and kind of increase our ambition you know over the long term for for higher volume higher comp uh competition keywords yeah well i think your best performing pros post our favorite b2b sas websites 2019 edition that thing's due for an update and you know double down on the traffic you guys are getting from that you also do we've got one uh but yeah but uh yeah yeah you've done some other sort of great sort of hacky smart things right since you know over the past 15 months on in july of 2020 you launched on product hunt you got 3 900 or 300 upvotes that is not easy i'd say that's tough one percent easily on product hunt how did you i mean that doesn't happen by accident so how did you sort of strategically plan that launch so we actually had a i wrote up kind of a brain dump of everything that we learned and did and everyone we talked to and feedback we got um you know i think even at one point you know ryan hoover gave me some direct feedback like hey this is too markety like you need to kind of like taper it back and so we we tried to be really considerate uh from from all those conversations and we put a lot of work into it um so you can get all that on our on our site you know all the tools and tips i think a couple things that like really worked well for us where is it by the way sorry where where is that is it on the blog do you know the blog title you put that out under yeah slash blog slash product hunt playbook oh yeah got it let me just read let me just tell people how successful this was real quick so yeah 3300 up votes you got 16 000 unique website views and you got 600 new signups and a nice bump in mr what was the bump like a couple thousand mrr yeah that's about right actually uh the interesting thing about product yeah so all that's true we also got i don't know if i mentioned this in the article there's a lot of some like a overwhelming amount of uh inbound vc interest from that so if that's something that you're exploring as a founder like we weren't expecting that at all um so that was one thing we also got a few different uh like pr write-ups from it as well and like another competitor in the space wrote like a huge article like uh you know about us and comparing us so there was some nice like overflow from some of that as well that's interesting um okay got it so so there's an mrr bump there so walk me through sir what this costs to use people can sign up for free and then what's the average customer paying per month yeah so it ranges anywhere from free as you mentioned up to um you typically around 99 we're doing a lot of experimentation with pricing we have you know larger like enterprise companies who are spending quite a bit more we have agencies who have kind of you know uh local licenses that you know are kind of in the sort of 500 plus range a month but generally you know when we're selling the founders uh selling the marketing teams or product teams within larger companies they're probably around 100 bucks a month yep and about how many customers you have today uh today uh...