Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible>. Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're to start a founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:20 All right. Welcome back to another episode of rogue startups. It's episode one 81 and today I have on shy Schechter from right message shy. How's it going? Good, thank you. How are you? I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Uh, it's just into the summer vacation here. The kids first week out of school, so everyone is adjusting to what our schedules are and where people are working and how all this stuff. It's a, it's a mild disaster, but we're managing so far you get long vacations, which I guess is better for the kids than for the grownups. But yeah, you get fair on vacations. How late this, is this still going? Another couple of weeks. Yeah. Oh right. Yeah. You get to six weeks in the summer, I think you get a lot more, right? Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, so compared to the u s we get very little and I think it's nice like what, you know, whatever, six or eight weeks in the summer, I think it's really nice for the kids and for the parents because the alternative, like in the u s it's like three months, like 12, 12, 13 weeks.
Speaker 1 01:20 And like kids go back to school and they've forgotten how to learn and the parents are like totally burnt out. I like it. Like here in France, um, the kids have about eight weeks off in the summer and then through the year they have, uh, four different two week breaks. So it's really nice. Like they kind of go to school most of the year and kind of stay in the groove. So it's nice. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. Like you forget everything you learned in the last year when you're off for three months. Yeah, yeah. No, I go away for a week and I'm like, where's the, where's the keyboard on this thing? I don't know what to do. So welcome to the parenting podcast. People thought this was a startup podcast. No, it's true. It's where we were talking before we started recording that. I mean we're gonna, we're gonna talk a little bit about right message and what you guys are doing there because it's really cool.
Speaker 1 02:01 We're using it at Casto dose and I think it's performing very well. And you guys have come up with some really cool stuff recently, like this week. But I want to talk to begin with a little bit about kind of what your, what your team looks like. You guys raised. So you're, you're partners with Brennan, Don and right message. You guys raised some money to start with instead of kind of going the pure bootstrapping route, we'd love to kind of talk about how that went, what your team looks like now and what the dynamic is with having a little bit of money in the bank and how you guys think about that. Yeah. Okay, cool. So the first thing I should say is we didn't plan to take money. Okay, interesting. If we get back to the kind of the beginning, right message started as very much a site, evening project, right? So it was kind of, Brendan and I had been talking a lot about this idea of personalizing a marketing website and we'd both kind of, we both got there over the years by both of us had
Speaker 2 03:00 software developer backgrounds and then had moved into marketing. Yeah, he, he had, he built up a website called double your freelancing. He was, it kind of teaching a lot about what he was learning about, about content marketing about well that good stuff. And I had moved from a software consultancy I was running as I learned more about marketing and how to market my own business. I started moving into, into helping people with their marketing as well. And what both of us were seeing was this kind of this idea of if you take a bit of, if you use a bit of software on a marketing site, you can make really cool things happen. <inaudible> and so we were chatting about this and Brendan's like, and both of us by this point had been kind of consulting, helping people set up cool segment segment their audience, personalize their marketing website, increase conversions that way.
Speaker 2 03:47 And he's like, there should be a product where people can do this without us. Right? Yeah. So, you know, we had all these, we had all these marketers who their, their minds were blown that this stuff was possible. But unless they had the budget to hire us as consultants, they weren't able to do it. We could kind of Brendan and put together this little Eh Java script that he would give to get that working in their site and these markets that I don't, I don't know what, I don't know what to do. Where do I, where do I install this Java screw? What do I do? Um, and so we're like, there needs to be, there should be a product where, where you can just, you can point and click and you can set this stuff up without, without needing to code. And the idea was I'd build it in a couple of evenings.
Speaker 2 04:25 He'd built up this audience that it would be perfect for it. It was just going to tie into drip as its email marketing platform. It was a very, very simple tool. And that was, that was all this was meant to be and it kind of grew from there. And so to answer your question about investment, it was a few months in, we kind of, we said we weren't going to build anything until we, we both learned the hard way, right? The startup, that startup thing of like we're going to build it and then we're going to launch it and then we're going to get tons of customers and that kind of early, right? Yeah, exactly. Build it and they will come. But they weren't and we both kind of, we'd both done that over the, in the past with previous businesses. And so this time we said we're not writing a line of code unless we have preorder money in the bank.
Speaker 2 05:09 And that's going to be kind of a little bit of validation. And we did that and we started building it and, and then one of our first customers came to us and was like, he's like, I know you're going to say no because he knew that we'd both always bootstrapped. That was, that was our thing. That was what we wanted to be doing. He's like, you're going to say no, but I think you should take investment because it'll speed up development. It was just the two of us. We were both had other businesses. We weren't working on this full time. This customer was basically like, I want the finished product quicker. That that was the motivation from his point of view. But also he's like, you know, it would accelerate the business. You know? No one else is really doing this like you are. And the sooner you can get out there, the better.
Speaker 2 05:49 Yeah. It was really, it was really just take money to set it to accelerate. We didn't need the money. We had a bit of income coming in from it. We had income from our previous businesses. And so we're like, yeah, you're right. You, uh, we, we don't really want to take investment. And we just got reasons why. We listed on reasons why. And we were both kind of in agreement with them. And I think they match what a lot of bootstrappers say, which was things like, you know, we, we don't want to, we want to do what's best for our customers. We don't want to have this board's watching over our shoulder and we, you know, we don't want to have to be doing things that are to please the investors when they might not be in the best interest of the customers. And so he's like, okay, um, we, I'll, I'll put the syndicate investigative investors together and we won't have any say, right.
Speaker 2 06:32 You'll get the money. We weren't, unless you ask for our help. We weren't, you know, and we're like, well, you know, we don't have these boards. Um, we don't have making a decision to have this board seat that's like overruling us. He's like, nope, you'll keep full control then. Yup. Yup. And we're like, okay. But you know, finding investors is so time consuming, right? You hear these stories that you basically have to stop building the product and, and stopped moving forward because you're spending your time on pitch decks and finding the investors and you know, it's, it's a real slow down before the speed up. And he's like, okay, I'll put together the a syndicate of investors, you won't do anything. They leave it to me it sounds like your ideal. We start like, we're like, okay, I guess we would never anti investment. We were anti those, those, those consequences or those, you know, and once he, once all of those were taken off the table, we're like, well now there's, there's not really a reason not to do this.
Speaker 2 07:27 Yeah, we'll give up some percentage of the company. But, but actually that's probably worth it for what we're talking about here. So, so we did and we took the money and, and he put together this syndicate for us. And once that happened, then a bunch of other people kind of came out of the woodwork with a second syndicate, ended up opening up as well. And then a bunch of direct investors, kind of people that we knew who were saying, you know, I, I know you guys, I'm not going to go through their syndicate and pay, pay cut to someone else, but I want to invest. And so that was what we did. We, we took this money, this was the end of 2017. Um, and we use that to, to hire into accelerate. Cool. Are you able to talk about kind of how much you raised and what percentage of the company you you gave up in total?
Speaker 2 08:15 Yeah, so it was about $600,000. In the end, I have this fantastic email from anchor who was the customer who, um, kicked this whole thing off, suggested we do this. It's this brilliant email. The first one he sent where he's like, I think you should. Uh, you know, I think usually there's an investment, maybe, you know, half a million or a million or whatever or whatever. It doesn't matter after that point. I know. That's crazy, isn't it? Right. That was just brilliant. Yeah. Eh, yeah. It ended up being we plan to do about 500. We ended up at a little above 600 m and percentage wise it is kind of hard to say because it was a, we used what's called a safe, it's this didn't, if you notice it's no. Okay. So it's a y Combinator created um, investment vehicle. Um, they basically made it, it's, it's similar to convertible note.
Speaker 2 09:08 Okay. Um, where it's kind of here's this money and, and your it back. Eventually the differences, you don't owe it back eventually. You're not in debt. These, the investors end up kind of pending joining the cap table based on future things happening. Okay. Interesting. The reasons, so it's that same model that convertible notes have in my understanding of it, I'm not sure, but my understanding is the way they work is that, yeah, the idea is like, it's too early to value the business when you're kind of at a seed stage. So we're going to defer the decision and next time there's an event, another investment round, or when you exit or you're acquired, whatever the valuation is there, that's the valuation that these early investors are going to get, but they're going to get it at a discount, whatever that, that valuation is, they're going to get it slightly better. Right? So it kind of, it differs the decision of how much the company's worth until later. So it's kind of hard to say, but the closest you can say is that it was about 11% or being well that that's what we might end up.
Speaker 1 10:05 That's where you might end up being. Right, right. No, that's great. I mean, so, you know, so we took some money as part of joining tiny seed. Um, and I thought a lot along the same lines of, yeah, the podcasting space is really dynamic right now. Um, we are already in the market, but if we took a little bit of funding, we could accelerate our growth, invest in both the product and marketing like you guys have, um, and do it in a super, super easy way. I mean, uh, my involvement in taking this money and joining tiny seed was about,
Speaker 1 10:39 I don't know, an hour of work, probably total including a couple of calls with, with Robin INR and filling out an application too to get like a terrific opportunity. Uh, I think as like a no brainer. It sounds like you guys were in a similar boat where, you know, this person was basically like, I'll do all the work, we just want the product and I'll do the work to put together some to get to, to get some money for you guys to accelerate your growth. So I think if you're in that kind of situation, like, like you guys probably saw, it takes away a lot of your objections as a founder or founders to, to, to not taking investment. Right,
Speaker 2 11:12 right. And I, I guess that was one of the things that you have to do as an entrepreneur. Always kind of, you read things from first principles, you can't, you can't keep these assumptions in your head of like, I don't like investments, so that's not a good thing to do. Right, right, right. Let me kind of, you reason it, like, why don't I like him? Well, why have I shied away from that in the past, break it down and, and you know, reason it from first principles and ended up saying, well actually no, this is this, this, this all in all is is a good move. Yep.
Speaker 1 11:39 If you can not spend two years raising money and start building a product and give up total control of, of your interests in the company and the board seat where someone's breathing down your neck all the time. If you can not have to give all that stuff up, then I think it's fantastic opportunity to accelerate the company. Like you guys are saying. So. Yeah. Cool. Yep. Um, and so how many people are you now on the team?
Speaker 2 12:02 So we are now four full time, I should say in this, I guess is where the story gets more interesting. We have been bigger than this in the past. Okay. We grew too quickly once we took the money, which I don't think we're the only ones to do that. I think that's a it from speaking to people, it's, it's not an uncommon pattern. And I don't know if I would, it might be kind of overly dramatic to say that we agreed. I don't know whether we, oftentimes you kind of, you have to do that. You have to, you've got this money in the bank now and it's like we need to spend it. Yeah. And we, you kind of, you spend it on the assumption that you're going to grow at a certain pace and sometimes you don't grow at that pace. So there is kind of this, this constant thing of kind of how, you know, how cautious or how loose are we going to be with this money now we were coming from a bootstrap background, we're naturally wouldn't, you know, we didn't go spending on crazy things that we didn't need, but we hired in a way where as we kind of, it accelerated us in the short term and then we're still kind of seeing some churn and we're seeing some, you know, our product market fit maybe wasn't quite as right as we thought it was at the beginning.
Speaker 2 13:10 Yup. Yup. Um, and then, and then you kind of, you may have to backpedal a little bit. So that's, and that's difficult.
Speaker 1 13:18 Yeah. No, I mean for, I totally hear you. For us, we, you know, we took the tiny seed investment and haven't spent really any of it yet, um, but are actually put a job offer out to our first full time marketing hire this morning. Uh, so very excited about that and about yeah, no, I'm super jazzed about it cause I mean this person is a rock star and is going to come in and really shake things up, uh, and kind of put us on the offense, which is awesome. But it will be the first time that we will not be a profitable company since like six months into the business. Yeah. So that feeling, so I mean like I know like we took this money because we want to spend it and accelerate our growth and the goal is like whatever the number is, 500,000, 100,000, $1 million.
Speaker 1 14:02 Do you want to say I'm going to invest this money so that basically when the money runs out we'll be more profitable than kind of we are today. Right. That's the thing is like you have $100,000 or $500,000, you're going to start spending it with the runway that you know you can catch up with before the money runs out plus some kind of safety margin. And so, yeah, I mean, so I think it sounds like, it sounds like you guys were, were down that path and that math wasn't working out, that you were going to run out of money before your revenue caught up with your expenses. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. The parachute wasn't opening as quickly as we thought to it. Yeah, yeah. The ground. Yeah. And so we talked about this a little bit at um, at Femto comp this year that, that you guys have pivoted talking about kind of more of the product and product market fit II. I know the initial product was a lot around personalizing the whole website to, you know, someone comes and they come and they're already a subscriber and they're tagged with this or that, or they've had an accustom event of having an interest in this. You show them a different version of a website or a page or a call to action or something like that. Then a new anonymous visitor. Right. And you guys have pivoted from that slightly to a different kind of implementation of the same personalism personalization.
Speaker 2 15:18 Yeah. So I, to this day, I don't know whether it counts as a pivot or not, but we, we pivoted what the main thing that we were marketing is what I guess what you could essentially say is we, we took what we were selling and we made that be the kind of the higher level tier, the upmarket thing. We brought something else in at the lower point, essentially because people were, everyone was looking at and being like, this is fantastic. This looks great. It's overwhelming to me. It's kind of, it's two steps away from what I need. Right. Oh, interesting. Okay. And so we brought in the thing that we now kind of sell. If you go to our, you know, you go to our homepage, the thing that we're now talking about as what right message does is this kind of this more entry level I did where we basically said, okay, you've already got a call to action opt in forms on your website.
Speaker 2 16:09 Do you understand those? You know the, the, the, they pop up and they ask for an email address and using the, by using the kind of the segmentation engine that we had already built, we can help you make those. We can let you swap those out for something that works much smarter, that converts better. That is, it gives a better experience to your, to your visitors by bye. By doing that same thing that you, that you just described as saying kind of who is this person? Are they a brand new anonymous visitor? Will then the newsletter is probably a good thing to put in front of them if they've already subscribed. That's a terrible thing to put in front of them. Yeah. It's irritating to them, like they've just clicked through to your site. They'd been reading your stuff for years and you're like, hey, give me your email address.
Speaker 2 16:51 If it's a bad experience and it's wasted opportunity for you to pitch something that's more appropriate, that's actually gonna help them based on where they are now. And even for those anonymous visitors, even top of funnel, this idea of not everyone knows, maybe you have a couple of lead magnets, maybe you have a few things you can offer. And so can we ask them a question or can we look at what they've been reading to decide on something more appropriate to offer them? Or even if you only have one thing to offer, you only have this one entry level news lessor or free email course or whatever it is, is, is there, could you find out something about them? Maybe again, by asking them what they need help with and use that to just describe where you're offering differently and just by doing that you see conversions go up.
Speaker 2 17:37 Yeah. Because, because, because if someone's reading your, what you're offering, they like that. All they're trying to do is decide, does this work in my world? They can. This actually help me. And the more you can do to, so just to kind of connect the dots for them between what you're offering and how it's going to help them. Same as same as the sales person does in real life. Right? Right. Good sales person. You didn't read off a script, you asked some question, you find out about someone, you tailor what you're offering. So yeah. So we kind of pivoted, if you like to, to saying rather than personalize your entire website where it's very overwhelming to know where to start, let's just give you these segmented personalized kind of survey and opt in widgets for your site. Perhaps replacing the ones that you've already got from it from a third party or you've, or you're using the ones that your email marketing tool provides. But these ones can do it better for you. And that's a much easier kind of, it's a much easier entry point for people.
Speaker 1 18:30 Yeah. So this is something that I find fascinating about what you guys are doing and we're, we're looking at getting into a, an aspect of the podcasting market that is a, would be like a new implementation of, of podcasting. Uh, and something that I'm scared about or thinking a lot about how we could roll it out is how are we going to educate our customers or potential customers to adopt this new way of thinking about something that they already do in a different way. So like you guys are saying, you were saying at the beginning, personalize your whole website by customer, you know, behaviors and interests and stuff like that. And it sounds like that was just too much. It's like blowing people's mind. They don't know where to start. Tough to implement and get on board, but then you, you dial it down or back or however you want to say it too. Okay. It's an opt in form. You already have opt in forms on your site or you should at least, and we're just going to make them smarter now. Um, it's like a, a, a lower mental hurdle for your customers to get over
Speaker 2 19:29 100%. Yeah. It's this, it's, yeah. It's the next stepping stone. It's kind of your, yeah. I guess marketing is always education, right? It's always, and if someone's already kind of very solution aware then that it's just educating them on why your product is better, but when people are a little or a step earlier, it's kind of how, how much education are we willing to do? Right. You can, you can, yeah. The constant contact or some of that, some of the really early email marketing tools, their marketing was literally, they had to go around and persuade people why you should email people. Yeah. And that's the, it's a huge education hurdle and yeah, you can choose to do that, but especially if you're bootstrapped or you're close to, it's, that's a difficult game to be playing too late to, to change the entire perception of, of, of, of the market.
Speaker 2 20:21 So yeah, I guess it's, you want to be looking for this is what we found anyway. We wouldn't be looking for what could we do? That was just one step ahead of what people are doing now. When we, before we pivoted, pretty much a hundred percent of our customers where they had to switch to us from, they were doing nothing before. They weren't doing, we didn't have a competitor that they were moving from. Yep. Which kind of the you might naively sink is, is a really great place to be, right? You have no competitors. You get all the market, but in practice, if they're not doing something already, it's then you have to, you don't just have to persuade them why your product's better. You have to persuade them why they should start doing this thing at all and persuading anyone to start doing something new is very difficult.
Speaker 1 21:08 I think especially, I mean, you had that hurdle and you had the, I can imagine the implementation of personalizing your whole website or even your homepage is massive for someone to think about implementing a, you know, if that four different versions of the copy and images and calls to action, all this stuff that just like for me, I, I did, I said, that's cool, but I'm never going to do that because that is way too much work. Uh, I have questions about SEO and all this kind of stuff that I'm sure you guys looked at the implementation that your customers had to go through and said, yeah, this is this w even if we convince them that it's the right thing, getting actually getting it done is got to be just hard.
Speaker 2 21:46 Yeah. And the, and the frustrating thing from our side was that we knew that if you actually sit down and do it, the implementation was not nearly as difficult as it sounded interesting. And that was, that was really frustrating for us. We were like, this is, you know, you can start doing this in 10 minutes and see your conversion increase, but that's 10 minutes after you've got your head around what you should be doing in those 10 minutes. That takes a lot longer. So it was kind of, and of course you've said there, you know, I would never sit down and do that. People when it's, when it's customers and you're trying to sell people to kind of try and try to be overly nice and they don't say, I'll never do that. They'll say, oh, I'll come back to it in a few months. Right. It's never, I'll never come back. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 22:28 Interesting. Interesting. So since you guys have kind of started to focus on, you call it right, CTA
Speaker 2 22:35 well, yeah. Well I'll just interject briefly. We now that that's become the main thing. We just call it right message. Okay, cool. Yes. Well while we were building it, we did call it rate CTA. Okay. Sorry.
Speaker 1 22:46 The, the, the CTA, the, the Papa widgets. Now inline widgets are, are kind of the, the main entry point that, that you're kind of talking to customers about. Um, I know your growth has changed quite a bit since you've refocused on this, right?
Speaker 2 23:02 Yeah. So kind of when we shipped that we grew like 40% in that month. Yeah. Amazing.
Speaker 1 23:11 All like new customers or bringing back previously churned or
Speaker 2 23:16 it was a combination. Um, it was, some of it was new customers, some of it was Chan was previously trans because a lot of people had head, it wasn't, it wasn't like we always do things iteratively, so we had kind of shipped bits of what they're CT of what then became this CTA builder along the way, the customers. And so we had a lot of people who are trans saying like, you know, I like to see tas that we have, but it doesn't do this yet, but it doesn't do that. So once we actually shipped the full CTA platform, we can just go back to those people and say, there's some really good advice I wish I had learned earlier. Be really be really like good at tagging. Why people churned so that you can revisit it as soon as you have the thing that they needed.
Speaker 2 23:59 And how did you guys do that? I know you use help scout for your kind of support stuff. How do you, how did you tag people? Yeah, so we generally we just tag them and help scout. Okay. We've just, just just be organized with those tags. Um, so someone that was actually, now, now it's bit different now we use the Ben Metrics constellation tool. Some people don't counseling through help scout anymore. They kind of think through that which is, that helps cause that kind of keeps things organized. You can, you can pull reports from there. But yeah, just have, have something that a and the same for feature requests and this is something I'm not good at. I W I if anyone knows of a tool that does this really well, I would love to find it. But something where kind of when people make feature requests that you can just keep a really good grasp on the fact that those particular people wanted that feature so that you can tell them when you have it.
Speaker 2 24:46 So we use feature up vote, so feature upvote.com and it's great. So it's basically like a, an open forum type of thing where people can go and suggest new features and then other people can go and comment and or up vote to them. Awesome. Yes, that's what I want. Yep. Whether it's, yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. So we, we use it, uh, so it just, feedback.gaseous.com someone comes in and says, I want a thing in like email and help scout. And we say, great, go add it to feedback dot <inaudible> dot com so that other people can upvote it. And when something gets to the top of the queue there, it goes straight into a, into development for us. So it just takes back to decision making things. I've seen things like it kind of more at the enterprise level. This looks, yeah, this might be what we need.
Speaker 2 25:29 That's great. Yeah, for sure. No, because we had the, we had the same problem managing customer feedback is, and we're like a, you know, relatively like low price point, high number of customers, especially like considering our wordpress plugin, um, type of scenario. So we had, you know, some months, hundreds of new requests and you're like, I can't possibly tackle those people and help Scott and go back and evaluate it and clear all the ones out that we've already, you know, fulfilled or decided not to do or something like that. So, yeah, this is, this is a good way to keep track of that for us. We don't keep track of cancellations or failed trials as well as we should. I'm interested, can you tell me more about the bare metrics cancellation tool? Like how does, how does it work in the app and does it work for trials as well?
Speaker 2 26:15 Eh, yeah, so it does what for patrols as well? It's, Eh, it's, it's essentially, it's a widget that they give you some code to put into your app, uh, when the cancel button is pressed. And so instead of that cancel button triggering your, you know, at some kind of endpoint in your app that goes off to stripe and says, kill the subscription or kill the trial, it pops this, this form up to them with a multiple choice question of would you mind telling us why you're canceling a text field where they can elaborate on that? And then when they press council on that than the widget like kind of sends a little signal into your app to say, now now do the actual cancellation. Gotcha. Okay. So they're just, it's just this kind of interstitual is on the way. That's a capturing that, that data and then, and then you do the cancel however you were doing it before.
Speaker 2 27:03 Yep. Gotcha, Gotcha. Interesting. Okay. So that's nice. Cool. Cool. I'm sorry. So yes, go back. You asked about whether new customers came from. A lot of them were, were churns that then we reached back out to them. Some of them were, uh, were new customers of them are new customers. And then some of them were also, we, some of them were people. We told everyone on our list that we were bringing, that we were bringing this new thing out, did the old stuff, the full personalization suite was going to become much more expensive. The new things were coming in at a price point, similar to where you used to be able to get the full suite. Now you're only going to get the cts. So there were also some people who had clearly been, they'd been following along on the, on our list. They were, they'd been on the fence. They were those people who said, I'm going to sign up one day for the full thing. And this was the kind of the urgency they needed to save. Well, yeah. Now, now is the time to get in because at least now I'll get the full package. You said, well, you know, we'll grandfather that for life.
Speaker 1 27:59 That's great. That's great. And like 40% growth in a month from all those people coming back in. That's amazing. That's a good, that's a good month. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know that, uh, since you guys released some of this functionality that some of the competing tools like email marketing tools or opt in tools are, are kind of hot on your hot, on your tails. Um, and in some cases like kind of blatantly copying what you're doing. How is that unfolding like emotionally for you guys? Uh, and, and from a, from like a strategic <inaudible> and actionable standpoint?
Speaker 2 28:35 Yeah, it's a great question. So yes, there is a lot of, you know, you sometimes you get something where a competitor does something and you're like, yeah, may, maybe that's just coincidental. We thought of it, he thought of it fine. Um, some of it, for example, where a competitor look at him, part of what we, part of the code that we use to the point that it still had the RM for right message in it, then you're like, okay, I didn't miss the coincidence. Amazing. But I mean, you have, you have to just the frozen, we didn't follow what they're doing that much. We normally hear about these things from customers. They see more of what our competitors are doing then than we do. Uh, but we, we, we don't sit there pouring over what they're doing because we know where we're going with this.
Speaker 2 29:25 We kind of, we work incredibly closely with customers on what we should be doing next. And I think that's, I guess it's often easier to watch the competitors, but it's not as, I mean, we've, we've always, we, we probably didn't do enough. We probably still don't do enough of it. I don't think you can ever really do enough of it. But the more that we, the closer we work with customers, we get on calls with them. We do all that kind of that stuff that you kind of, you hate. But you know, you should do in the early days. Now. I love it. I used to hate that, but it's just,
Speaker 1 29:58 sorry. No, it's magic isn't it? I mean, you get on, you got on a call with the customers or exchange a bunch of emails and, and the peeling back the onion of kind of what they need and why is his magic. Yeah.
Speaker 2 30:09 Yeah. So we kind of, we do a lot of that too. I mean, we don't really watch competitors that closely, but yeah, you hear about this stuff happening. You see when they've, they've taken stuff and it's you, you, you can, you can choose to take it as it can get you down or you can choose to take it as flattery and, you know, you just have to do the latter. What's the, it's not, there's plenty of space in the market for multiple companies. There's the, you know, the, the, um, you just have to, you have to Fussy it for see the funny side. And it is when, you know, when the, when they take something so blatantly that it is amusing. We had, there was actually one this week who, uh, sent out one competitor this week, sent out an email to their newsletter showcasing how they'd kind of do a tear down of a website and how they were making fantastic use of, of segmenting and personalizing that website was using us for that.
Speaker 2 31:06 Oh really? And you know, it was right. It was right there. If you're powered by right message. Oh gracious to say it again. That was, maybe they knew that maybe it was intentional. Maybe they were helping us out and, and you know, flattered by it. But those kinds of things are cool. It's called see your stuff in the wild. It's called as a year when it's called, when I go to a website and that I don't know about for the first time and they, they using our product. That's awesome to see. Yeah. And it's that same thing if a competitor is doing something that you're doing, it's kind of that same thing. You know, W W we're being noticed. Yeah.
Speaker 1 31:35 Backtracking a little bit too to your team and taking money. Uh, one of the big cut talking points around the, the tiny seed group. Uh, so there's nine companies in tiny seed right now is, is how to allocate the resources that, that we all have. For us it was, you know, like 70%, 75% marketing and like 2020 5% product or engineering that, that we're investing our money. How did you guys set it? So it's you and Brennan with the investment, I assume you went kind of mostly full time and into right message, but then how do you think about allocating those resources and like the decision making process of, of where to hire and what to do with that money?
Speaker 2 32:18 Yeah, so we actually met with a, like a growth coach very early on who really helped us with this. And one of the things that he did, he basically said when your company is doing about half a million a year, what do you think the org chart will look like? And we mapped that out and, and at various points in the future, like what do you think the old chart would need to look like for a company like this in the future? And then kind of saying, now let's fill those blocks. Like some of those will be filled by yourselves. You can be in more than one of the boxes in the early stages of our company. But filling that out and saying, you know, if you're, if you're going to be wearing two hats, be intentional. Know that you're wearing those two hats. So kind of mapping out that all charter for the company and, and and yeah, filling in this is one that we actually should hire someone for right now.
Speaker 2 33:05 And this one I can keep that, I can keep that hat for a little bit longer. So an in practice, what that ended up being was we hired one marketer, one customer success person, which kind of had a bit of sales in it as well. One support. And at one point we had two engineers hired as well. And like I say, we've now scaled that back full time. We just now have me and Brennan and then one on marketing and one on product and support. We kind of very intentionally said we should handle this internally. Like we should handle this, we should round Robin this between ourselves for a little bit longer cause you get, oh, there's so much value in staying in.
Speaker 1 33:46 Yeah. And so when you say keep it to yourselves, it's you and Brennan or do, does your marketing person, uh, and, and get involved in support as well?
Speaker 2 33:58 The marketing and the engineer as well. Yep. Great. Yeah. Everyone. We like ownership of it is kind of me and Brennan. Yep. But yeah, well everyone has, everyone has an account in help scout and everyone is a, everyone will, we'll do things from time to time.
Speaker 1 34:16 No, I love it. I love it. I uh, this was interviewing a, this person that we're, we have a, an offer out for, for the marketing role and was telling her, uh, Yup, you will, you'll have an account and helpscout and you will do support. It's not all the time. And I don't expect you to, to, to do a lot of technical stuff. Cause I mean the, I I W I don't want my marketing person to be a developer, uh, but I do want them to be and help scout and even just looking at the tickets and reading the language, uh, and if they can respond to something then great. Because then that allows our, our, we have a part time customer support person, uh, in the u s and really it's just because of the time zone difference. For me, I would love to continue to, to handle support.
Speaker 1 34:59 If I was in the U S I probably would, but it's six hours different to the, to the east coast for me. And it's just a deal breaker. I'm not going to stay up till 10 o'clock every night answering helpscout tickets and I don't want my customers to be kind of left hanging basically after noon eastern time when I stopped working at six o'clock here. So yeah. So Eileen helps with support, which does a bit of design as well for us, which is super cool. Um, she did all of the new stuff with our new website. Um, but yeah, so, and our two developers that are full time a both do support every day. They're in hubspot every day and they love it. They love it because they get to see their bugs and edge and it's just, it's great because it makes them super autonomous too. So we, there's a bug and help scout. They're tagged the tickets assigned to them and they own it and they go fix it or implement it or put it in our next sprint or something. And then that ticket belongs to them and when it's resolved, they respond to the customer and it makes the whole kind of life cycle of a customer complete without either myself or Eileen who are kind of, you know, heading up support, really having to get back involved in it again. Um, and I think culturally it's just fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 2 36:09 And it's great for customers as well because there is nothing worse than you, right. Writing into support and getting kind of that, that like firstline, you know, like canned response that doesn't really, they haven't really, yeah. Or, or maybe it's an authentic response, but they have to pass it up, the up the chain and up the chain and up the chain. Whereas here, if a developer looks at that ticket, it might be something that they can just go, you know what, I'm just going to fix this. I'm in a w and we've got enough kind of tests and so on in our code base that you can just, you can go in, like fix that thing or implement. If it's a very, it's something small, just go and throw it in and you're replied to the support ticket 10 minutes after it came in is I've just fixed that for you.
Speaker 2 36:48 Yeah. Yup. And Yeah, you'd lose that as you, as you scale bigger and bigger, but the longer you can keep it for, I think it's great to have in the culture. What I will say is, is I would, I wouldn't put those, what I wouldn't want, it's for something to have something like live chat, being able to distract people when they're trying to do the work. Like, you know, it makes sense to kind of say, right, today is your day where you're going to be keeping an eye on support but you don't want to be, you don't want someone being able to be constantly interrupted anytime a support ticket comes.
Speaker 1 37:20 Yeah. So for us, and it's a little bit of time zone magic, uh, so all our two developers are kind of over in this part of the world times wise. So in the morning, they never look at support and they have all morning to, to work on, you know, features or bugs or whatever engineering stuff. And then they both basically say, okay, the first part of the afternoon I'll look at help scout, see if there's anything kind of major that needs my attention. Otherwise I'll probably go back to code a and if there's a, uh, an issue that is really, really major, they'll address it and push a push a patch or something like that. If not, then they'll kind of prioritize it. And typically I think they work on bugs about a half a day a week is kind of where we've settled. Right. Which is a definitely a balance.
Speaker 1 38:02 I mean, I think, I would imagine, right. Messaging cast us are at similar points in kind of product maturity to where there's not a lot of barn fires these days. Uh, which is great. I mean, God, a year and a half ago there were a lot of fires, like all the time. Uh, but at this point like everything is really stable and for in a good way, I guess. Like things move a little slower now than they did before, which is cool because they don't have, we don't have to ship stuff everyday just to keep the boat afloat. Um, and we can be more intentional about, okay, everything's good. We're gonna work on this thing for a month and then ship this big major feature. Which is nice from a stability standpoint.
Speaker 2 38:42 Yeah, absolutely. Well that reminds me of she once, so one thing that we kind of learnt was, because we had a couple of points earlier on where, especially as we were trying to kind of find that product market fit more and more, we had points where we would just kind of, everyone who was involved in engineering was heads down building something rather big. And there's a downside to that, which is it looks like you're not making progress from the outside. So one thing we were kind of really intentional about was was kind of either showing like as you're building something out, we were, we were like just showing customers the whole time, like talking about what we were doing, where we were up to, and just keep kind of keep letting people keep a pulse next. Don't feel interested in following along. Especially when our, our market.
Speaker 2 39:28 Yeah. Some of the people in our audience, um, might have businesses that are kind of similar to ours. It was cool for them to see the progress or we would just make sure if there was some big feature being worked on that there were also some little things being shipped along the way just so that you could, yeah. It just, it just kept that kind of, that momentum and every time you can tell customers, you show them something even tiny that you've shipped, you get that, you know, you hear back from them. There's people that are excited for that feature and it just, it just spurs you on and yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 39:59 yeah. This is a balance that I think we're still trying to find is when and how to announce kind of small features versus big, big features or obvious they get their own blog post and page and email and stuff like that. Little features. I think what we're settling on now and haven't quite done it yet, but helpscout does that. Uh, and a couple of their tools is give, uh, like Wildbit does it, they give like a monthly product update email and I like that for, for like smaller things, uh, to say this month we released, you know, four or five smaller things and this one huge thing which you probably have already heard about, but these other things you may or may not have seen. And here they are and this is kind of what they're all about. Um, so I, yeah, that's where we're settled.
Speaker 2 40:43 Sorry. Yes. Notion does a really good job of Ed as well. Cool. I'll check it out. Yeah, we use notions. Are there, yeah. Again, with the like the monthly, it's a cool email. Yeah. We, we've not been disciplined enough with that. We often, but we'll even like I'll probably post tomorrow on our Facebook group just being like, here's the half a dozen things that we shipped this week that weren't exciting enough to tell you each time one happened. But actually that's some cool progress this week. Yep. So yeah, we, yeah, it's, it's good to share. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. So, uh,
Speaker 1 41:16 where do you think write messages is going? Like what is the next kind of two years look like for you guys? Time. Yeah. Or what, what is the, what is the point you can see on the horizon, I guess? Yes. So we're really
Speaker 2 41:30 cool, interesting point right now, which is the point where we have got back like we talked about at the beginning where you go from making a profit to suddenly making, making a loss each month when you take the investment, you start spending it. We've just about got back to to the black. So everything's a little bit different way. But yeah, we are, we're hovering around the breakeven profitable point now and that's very exciting. That lets you do lots of things that you kind of couldn't do before cause you were watching the bank balance dwindling and um, now now you can kind of breathe a little bit and next couple of years is just, it's for the time being. We keep going, how are we going? We've just shipped this new, you know, part two our product or new entry level product in the CTA is that seems to be going well.
Speaker 2 42:19 We've got some features to build out there to make it even better and we keep growing how we grow. We keep doing this. We were switching more to inbound marketing now. We did a lot of outbound early on just because, you know, at the beginning you had to go through a demo call that was the only way in, there was no self sign up. Right? And now we're moving more to like content and the kind of that traditional inbound funnel, which is cool. Um, and it's very much Brennan's like Brendan is insanely good at that stuff. So it's good that we finally get to really accelerate that. We're like, we're chatting out three blog posts a week at the moment and they're like, they're high quality and he writes them in about 20 minutes. It's ridiculous. Wow. Amazing watching him. Right. Yeah. It's insane. So I'm glad we get to do that stuff now and, and we just, yeah, we try and hit those next, those next milestones, keep working with customers, keep iterating and we'll probably start growing the team again at some point, but we don't need to right now.
Speaker 1 43:21 Hmm. Yeah. It's the nice thing about not having institutional money, but having enough, you know, a little bit of money to say we're going to do this thing dip into, uh, not being profitable for some period of time. And then once you come back to that kind of break even point, say, okay, we have money in the bank, we can go spend money again, uh, to accelerate growth again in Irish people. And No, no. Hopefully that you'll come back up to that profitable or break even point in the future. Yeah. Yeah. I listened to a one of, like, one of my favorite podcasts is bootstrap web with uh, Brian Castle and Jordan goal and Jordan and cart hook. They've taken a ton of money. I shouldn't say a ton of money from, from my, from my perspective, they take several rounds, whatever. And you know, Jordan talks about it on the show. Like when we get back to profitable, it's time to hire again and like time to, I mean they have 30 people now or something. Do you, do you think in the same way that like when you guys are getting back up to profitable at this point, you said you'll probably hire again sometime. Are you always wanting to hover around, break even or is fun strapping really like you're going to take money one time and then it's going to be a cash cow kind of business for you?
Speaker 2 44:31 Yeah, so that's kind of what we get. We're not planning on taking another round, um, or anything like that. So yeah, more, more the latter of what you said kind of. We'll see. Like right now that's definitely the case. Yep. These things aren't, don't have to be set in stone. But yeah, that's at least for the time being is kind of, you know, let's have it growing more and more and, and we'll start doing, you know, profit shares with the team and, and then, yeah, see from there, I'm sure we will hire more but we don't need to right now and we're not, yeah. We're not going to kind of do that thing where we intentionally keep going
Speaker 1 45:06 into the red. Yeah. From a stress and personal stress standpoint, I, uh, I, I think Jordan is on a, in his business is on a different kind of trajectory than, than we want to be on. Um, it sounds like you're saying the same thing that like I'm much happier growing at a slightly slower pace, but, but having the kind of peace of mind that there's a bunch of money in the bank and a good runway, that we're profitable when we get super profitable than then maybe it's time to cut back and the profitability and invest reinvest in the business some. Yeah. That's, that's the thing. It's like, it's, it'll say it doesn't happen
Speaker 2 45:42 be forever and especially that direction. It's harder to go the other direction, although it's very doable. Yeah. And then you know, and I know plenty of companies who have gone from the, the heavily invested world and scaled it back and back to something that's closer to bootstrapping almost. Um, I think Wistia, I've got stories of that and Gumroad kind of a big, um,
Speaker 1 46:06 but yeah, it's, that's the, that's the nature of it. You can, you can do that and then you a couple of years time you can decide, actually we're bored of just making money. It's, let's go lose some again. Yeah. Yeah. It is. I mean it, this is a, we've talked around this a a fair bit, but it is like a whole nother dynamic to the business that, that you have to consider. And it's not like I think either of us have the amount of money that we can go do a bunch of stupid stuff. But, but to think about profitability as a lever you can pull just like a lot of other levers you pull on your business is an interesting thing that I'm kind of just, the first time I've had to think about, cause before it was like, okay, do I have any money in the bank?
Speaker 1 46:43 Great, I'll pay myself. And otherwise the money just stays in the bank and now it's like okay there's money in the bank. If I spend it, it will be worth more in the future than that money just sitting there. Uh, so let's go spend it and kind of when and how to make those decisions. It's like a whole nother aspect to running a business. And, and SAS is weird cause it's all delayed and stuff. But yeah, it's a, it's an interesting adventure for sure. Yup. Cool. So shy for folks who want to kind of reach out, learn more about right message and connect with you and kind of see what you're up to. Where's the best place to reach out?
Speaker 2 47:14 Yeah, so for me directly, the easiest places is to find me on Twitter. I'm at shy sc, so that's at s. H. E. I. S. C. You can always email me as well, right. message.com and then company itself, right. message.com.
Speaker 1 47:28 Awesome. Awesome. Yeah,
Speaker 0 47:30 we're, we're loving it. We're gonna implement the inline cts here this week. I think can hopefully Kinda kick up, uh, kick things up a notch, if you will, in terms of kind of some of our inbound marketing. So yeah, definitely worth checking it out. Yep. Cool. Cool. Thanks. Uh, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already, head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey. Head over to rogue startups.com to learn more. <inaudible>.
