389: RightMessage: From SaaS Founder Fatigue to Focused Growth - with Brennan Dunn

Brenan welcome to the show hey thanks ommer thanks for having me do you have a favorite quote something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us it's not a quote but it's something I uh I kind of learned the hard way early on which has stuck with me ever since so and that is uh no one's ever paid me to code and this is something that has carried over to my product days where I think if you're like me and you're a technical kind of founder you get obsessed with the features you

get obsessed with like the the building of it the architecture and all that stuff and the thing I had to really it's still one of these things I struggle with constantly is the realization that I learned way back when I used to do a lot of Consulting was clients didn't hire me for code they hired me for business benefit right so that's kind of my like I'm not a quote person but that's my like grounding thing that I'm always like if I could put that on a wall I should but that's that's what should be

there because I I do get distracted by like rabbit holes of code and architecture and all that stuff that that is important but ultimately isn't one people buy yeah no I love it and and I think I'm very much like you I I I find it uh coding is a great way to just disconnect do something it's therapeutic yeah therapeutic yeah um many people would think we're insane weird insan yeah there's something definitely there if you if you're built like that so tell us about right message what does the product do who's it for and

what's the main problem you're helping to solve yeah so we we help companies that do a lot with email marketing better understand segment and personalize to their email list so we tend to work with nowadays mostly Creator type people so we call them procreators which would be not procreators but Pro space creators who um who are doing seven eight figures a year uh usually selling courses or coaching um but we also have a smattering of like software businesses is medor Brands and uh even agencies who use us great so maybe just explain a little bit

how the product works because there's there's different components to this there's the experience that people get when they visit the website there's integration with uh whatever email service provider you may be using there's some level of personalization that gets delivered on the website so maybe just describe what that experience looks like and which parts of that is driven by right message and what which parts are kind of supported like you know the email marketing piece yeah good question so we're we're easy as thought of as a bridge between your email platform in your website so

what that means tangibly is if somebody from your list goes to your website and you segment them as like a customer so they're tagged with customer or whatever else that data gets pulled to your site and then you can make changes on your website depending on that so you know for example you could say like if a returning email list subscribers back on your website don't show email optin popups right like don't show the popups show a sign up for a trial you know call to action if they haven't started a trial or they're not

a customer uh likewise you can also do things like you know changing out logos depending on what industry they're in or showing a different case study or something like that so we make it really easy to pull data down and also to collect data through Behavior like what pages they're visiting what ad campaigns they came from uh what kind of content they're reading the most of what affiliate sent them along with what we call zero or not we call but what the industry calls zero party data which would be surveying so you know we can

collect this data and then send it right back up to the email platform which you can then use for future interactions on the website or to then send better more targeted email campaigns got it yeah I was reading uh something about about predictive intent the the other day and it it sounds like that's basically what you're helping to achieve in terms of figuring out when people are most likely to want to buy to engage to what they need and then getting that right offer or content in front of them something that Netflix does very well

in terms of helping us to binge watch yeah and that's that's thing too like I I always bring up the Netflix example because they don't just do the recommendation engine thing but they also go as far as to change the cover art for films to be like oh I like Robert toiro so if he's in a film and they show me that film it's probably gonna be him on the cover whereas somebody else who likes you know some other act actor would see potentially somebody else I did not know that yeah they do that it's

wild um we're not that behavioral sciency to be honest a lot of the the way that people use us is a lot more straightforward like we basically allow people to set up flowcharts or automation campaigns as a flowchart on your site so you could say like all right if somebody's on my site and they are Anonymous I want to show them my newsletter opted for but then if they're back and they're not tagged customer I want to show them my promo to be a customer and if they're are a customer I want to get them

to like a you know affiliate page or something that I have so usually what people are doing with us is to kind of use us as a routing tool to show different content you know whether those be popups or called action buttons in your nav or different hero areas or whatever else um depending on who you are and what what you should do next and the benefit of us is we we work as like a JavaScript include so it's not dependent on any content management system you don't need to use us you can keep using

Wordpress or web flow or whatever else and that that's been kind of nice and compelling for a lot of people too great give us this sense of the size of the business where you in terms of Revenue number of customers size of Team yeah so we're at about 20,000 in Mr uh which I'll get into more of that later as to why we're not higher and we have about 250 paying customers and our team right now is three and a half effectively so three full-time and then a part-time person helping with design right now one

of the reasons I I wanted to to invite you onto the show was one one I think is an interesting product but is it's a very interesting story as well where the you there have been a lot of ups and downs on this journey and I think that for you know a lot of the times I'm talking to Founders who are you know 10 20 million in ARR and there's useful lessons to learn there but a lot of people listening to the show are at much earlier stage trying to get to you know the first

100K in ARR or something like that and I often hear from people it's like hey we want to we want to hear more of the the stories of you know people who are just you know ahead of us rather than you know building sort of an eight or nine figure business and with your story in particular I think there's some really interesting lessons that hopefully we can distill down and help people listening to this kind of go away and on the one hand get some some maybe motivation or inspiration if they need it and two

some ideas on you know when things aren't working how do you turn things around what do you do and and you know some of the things that you've done over the last year uh to take the business that was effectively like I think you said for a year year and a half almost two years there was stagnation there was Decline and then you turn things around and the businesses started growing again so I think there some really really helpful useful things to unpack there so uh I'm going to try my best to make sure that

we cover all those things let let's start with uh where the business was founded so I think it was 2017 where did the idea come from yeah so I had at the time I was kind of known for this course you know video course on email marketing and one of the bonuses of this course was a zip file with a bunch of JavaScript in it that allowed people to put the JavaScript on your site tweak it a bit and then you could use that to like change content in your website using jQuery um you know

like change different headlines or whatever else depending on data that you had in your email platform so I was teaching people how to do things like oh email marketing done right one component of that is to segment your list oh why don't we make it so if they're segmented by industry maybe change up your sales page to have like testimonials for that industry right so I included some boilerplate code that they could use the problem was the most people who bought my course were people doing email marketing and they look at as zip file full

of JavaScript files and they're like what is this so one of the uh one of the customers of that course was a guy named aner Paul who at the time owned a company called teachable and he's like stop screwing around can you just make this a SASS and I was like sure like that sounds great but you know money time all that kind of stuff and he he said well what what how about this I will help organize some fundraising you bring on somebody to work on it with you and yeah let's make that happen

so that that's exactly what ended up happening now we raised about half a million dollars in 2017 to convert a zip file of JavaScript into a into a functional software as a service business what a great story yeah I find a I found a tweet from you where you said like right before right message was right message it was a bunch of custom JavaScript that managed to sync with drips API and and I think it's it's hilarious that Anor was like no that's too H it's like wasn't it if I remember but he he was

the guy who built the first version of teachable wasn't he yeah know he he was the owner founder of teachable yeah yeah well so most of our customers were the ones saying the JavaScript thing was too hard because a lot of them were again people who were just using drip to send they weren't web developers or anything like that right Anker knew what it was and he's like what if you put a hosted front end to this thing that we like and set up strip behind it to charge people monthly like that sounds like a

good plan doesn't it that's so that's the origin story of the conversion if you will from a zip file to a software business did you have when you raised that seed round did you have any customers at that time uh of the course yes of the no we we raised it before we had anything for the SAS so why do you think you were able to to raise that money I mean it it wasn't huge but it's not an insignificant amount of money to raise half a million dollars yeah you know to be honest we

could have raised more potentially um we we had offers to do more but we thought that's what we needed and so why I think it helped and again this isn't a toot my own whatever thing but I I had a successful exit before it wasn't a huge exit but back in 2015 I sold my first business plan scope and since then and be before then I had I've always been good at the whole like going to conferences and networking with the right people kind of thing so the fundraising effort honestly like I didn't have a

slide deck or I've never done any anything like that it was really just fired off an email to daythan Barry hey thinking of doing this you rob Walling hey thinking of doing this you it's all people I knew friends of mine so it wasn't like it was more of a friends and family kind of thing than me doing like you know actual [ __ ] fundraising so I I I did have an advantage there I admit but yeah I mean the fundraising part was relatively easy now I remember where the first time I came across

you was I think I heard a podcast more than 10 years ago talking about Planos scope it was like yeah it's like we're showing our age now yeah all right so you you raised this money and uh what what did you do in terms of like how did it how long did it take to build the SAS version of this this JavaScript you know code that you had and and you know what was the journey to getting to those first 10 customers yeah so what we did was we raised the money and then I kind

of went off and tried to use the money by building up a team right so while that was happening Shai was working on the initial kind of MVP if you will of the product and we it I want to say we I think we incorporated in November of 2017 and I we launched in about January so it was about four months or whatever that is um from Like official incorporation with the money in the bank to selling something so what we did was we um I was kind of recruiting with the money you know using

the money um and then also we put together a very simple kind of teaser page that was effectively a 500w sales letter that had an op in for at the bottom and how we showed instead of told with this page is I wrote some custom JavaScript with some like drop- down fields or drop down forms where you could say like drop down of Industry to whatever drop down of email platform you know choose convert it choose drip choose help whatever and it would change the text in real time as you did that and that was

kind of like our way of saying like our tool will let you do that imagine if you knew this person is this or this person is that they're looking at a sales page or page or whatever and this is what would happen obviously it wouldn't be as overt but this is effectively what would happen so we actually built up an email list of a few thousand people I think it was at about three or 4 thousand people by the time we launched with that and I I kind of also while doing that got invited to

speak at a few different events and I couldn't Point people to sign up for a product so I just said hey like go here and you know drop your email address and then I just kept emailing it once a week and kind of built a newsletter you know around this kind of idea of personalized marketing and it was nice cuz by the time we launched in I think it was January or February of 2018 um we actually hit like 10,000 in Mr pretty much within a month I want to say and we did that by

because my background alongside plans scope was selling like courses I used to have a company called W freelancing where I sold a bunch of courses on freelancing and stuff so I kind of treated the launch of the product like I would launch a course so there was urgency there was like a you know a pricing scheme that if you bought launch week you'd get a good deal and stuff like that so we actually had a nice like burst of momentum you know we had this new team being developed and we we actually were growing really

nicely and like 20% month over month and I want to say about a year into it we were pretty much at about 35,000 in Mr which I was really happy about but then reality started setting in and and I realized I couldn't just keep doing like the whole like digital product launch strategy stuff for software business and you know the whole audience thing could only go too far and a lot of what ended up happening was we realized okay the tool we built it people were wanting it because it's cool it seemed interesting but we

didn't really have a lot of case study data to back it up with at the time and on top of that a the only way to personalize your website is if you have the segment data like what industry someone's in and a lot of our customers were like how do I get that information right like you know we're kind of like you know if this then that and we're the than that but they didn't have the athit so we were like oh you know we kind of had this uh I don't know this kind of

issue where our our our rocket ship was you know starting to kind of falter and um yeah from there we you know little after that we uh quickly had ran out of that money never got that continuous 20% month over month that would have made it so we didn't you know run out of money and uh we kind of reverted back to effectively being a operationally a bootstrap team with myself and my co-founder and you know we were living off the money we had and we kind of pivoted the product to then also allow for

segmentation so we could satisfy the if this part but it it really it wasn't it wasn't just growing the way we wanted it to and we were struggling we were kind of lost in the wilderness for a bit and then we both kind of got de demotivated and we didn't go separate ways and we were still like tending to the product at least the you know support system and stuff like that but there wasn't no forward M momentum on the product there wasn't momentum on the growth side or the development side or anything like that

for years and we just kind of like you know we we shot up and then we kind of you know Peter down over time okay great so I want to just let's let's kind of talk a little bit about that so first of all the getting to the first 10K in Mr and then getting to around 35k happened fairly quickly but in many ways you had been working on this for much longer than that because you had been building credibility and Authority in the email marketing space you had already been building an audience before you

had been building this email list so I think you know a lot of the times we we discount that but there's a lot of you know pre-work that went into laying the the foundation having this audience in in place before you were able to get those types of uh results so you rais the the 500k seed round around 2017 uh initially things are looking good revenue is growing you're you're you're inching your way towards you know what half a million in AR are and then you start to run across some of these issues you'd already

hired a team and so you have effectively a burn rate to to worry about and then is is that basically like the thing that happened like you just got to the point where it was just like okay we've got this money coming in but we're spending more than than you know we're bringing in we've gone through the money that we've raised we can't afford to keep this team around anymore that's exactly what happened yeah so we you know we we were we were making some money but our burn was higher right and we always thought

event like before it's that Quint Central kind of fer thing of like before before we run out of money our Revenue will grow is such that it it surpasses our burn and uh that didn't happen and I think the you know we we hired fast because we thought you know why have half a million dollars in the bank might as well use it so yeah I mean were kind of a victim of our own success in a way at least early success and um yeah we just realized okay so you know we kind of gradually

paired back the team and then we just had to realize okay like like both for shy and myself we wanted to take out a livable salary I mean he was in North London I was at the time in the US you know we've got families and stuff like we can't do the ramen thing so you know for that to happen that meant once we dropped both below about 20,000 in Mr so we were you know gradually declining because a lot of that early growth was people getting a great deal but then no one's going to

keep paying monthly if they don't act on that deal right so we didn't have the software at the time to really make it so a lot of people could really benefit from the product because they didn't have the segment data so when we got under 20K it's like okay that's when like again we're now just after product expense is like the server and everything else and the you know all the stuff um divide that by two and that's pretty much what Shai and I would need so that's around when we we're like okay we just

need to go back to like just you and I live off this hopefully we can keep it stay you know steady and you know even if we don't make any more anytime soon at least we're able to live off this but yeah then we both like I think it was just the lack of like growth we were seeing and everything else and not really sure what we had to do next it just we both got very deot demotivated and yeah we just kind of like stagnated again for a while and I pursued other things he

pursued other things product was still there we had a core group of customers who were still benefiting from it and loved it but we weren't doing much on the growth side so you effectively keeping the lights on you you're making sure that you can you're providing support for the customers that you have but you're not actively trying to go out and figure out you know investing in marketing or sales and growing the business or I guess evolving the product and this was that period that went over for about I think you said like a year

and a half two years what changed then because that's a long time to go through feeling unexcited about a product and a business and yet when you know we talk about what you're doing now I sense energy enthusiasm what made the shift what got you excited again what got you believing in this thing again because man I know if I'm like if I personally like I'm down about something and I'm ruminating for like three days about it it feels like forever just to turn myself around from that right maybe it's just the way my brain

works but to kind of go through that for for years and then you know turn turn things around and get excited and find a reason to put your your heart your soul and energy back into this like what what was that process like okay so I think the way I'd describe it if you will is that last year so 2023 we kind of had this Hail Mary attempt to reinvigorate things and that was to do the thing that is usually all always a horrible idea but we did it anyway which is let's start a new

code base and dramatically simplify things and have it product instead of it being a platform which it is just make it do one thing and do one thing really well and sell that so we did this and now we kind of ran into this horrible issue where we had like two code bases to support and all this stuff it just it didn't again that what that didn't work right it didn't work the way we wanted it to and at that point we were both like okay this we need to either like just shut shut things

down and kind of effectively screw over the customers you know and at the time we had what 150 200 customers who were using us and they kept paying so presumably they liked using us and we're getting benefit from the product we shut it down we sell it which selling a declining asset doesn't work usually that well or one of us buys out the other I didn't want to I I didn't want to sell it because my last time I sold a business plan scope the new owner drove it in the ground and it hurt me

reputationally because I was so tied to that product I didn't want to shut it down because again I knew a lot of these you know the customers I mentioned these were like people I knew from my other because I've got other income sources besides direct message I I sell hes and I've got like a book and all this other stuff these were kind of the the a lot of the Fanboys if you will of of me of my stuff and I didn't want to screw them over so the only option was either he buys me

out and tries to like make it better or I buy him out he didn't want to buy me out and I was really wanting to buy him out so that's the direction we want and um so yeah I ended up basically cashing in a lot of my savings personally to buy out his equity which again as a declining asset it meant just like if we were to sold it on the open market I got a what I think was a good deal and then yeah so I was like okay I bought this thing with my

own cash so what do I do with it and the big change that happened I think was the realization and you know I talked about this kind of briefly earlier uh before we hit record was that what if like we were getting rejected because people saw our our thing as too confusing and I knew we have an onboarding issue we have like a product ux issue we have all these issues so I thought okay what if I just go to people who I would love to be a kind of a flagship right message customer and

say hey pay me to consult you don't even need to use right message but you pay for right message and you pay for my consulting fee and I will use this tool that for a lot of new people's kind of confusing on your behalf and make it work really well the way it's supposed to so I did that and I did that again and again and again and that's been brilliant because we've now have some of the biggest named creators on the internet using right message and on their website under our widgets it says is

powered by right message and we have all these people now we get people all the time because they sign up and we ask a about like you know how do you know about us and uh they're like oh Justin Welsh or Matt Gray or Dan go or Ben Mir or something and it's these people with hundreds of thousands of people on their email list who make millions a year in sales they're all now these great Advocates of ours um because they're using us so that to me has been the biggest like I'm using that momentum

to say okay now I can use this money and this momentum to make it so it is self- serve they were really good you know good experience for self- serve customers because I don't want to be doing I don't want to do like if you remember bounce exchange their model where they had like optin software that the only way to use their optin software was to hire the agency to do like the copyrighting and the design work for their internal tool I didn't want it to be this weird Services Company that happened to have intellectual

property under the hood I wanted us always to be a proper you go to the website you sign up for a trial you buy it kind of thing but I think this momentum over the summer that started and the case studies we're getting now um like we just for just a Welsh we helped him increase overall conversions for his course launch by 38% which was hundreds of thousands of dollars now attributable to our software and now we're like we need to just shout this everywhere and really you know so it's that's been the big inflection

point I think for us is um I think my co-founder and I when we started we did the kind of quintessential we don't want to talk to people go to the website if you want to talk to us we have a support email address but I was much more willing now that I had my own money behind it to say like I'm happy to sit on demos all day and just grind it out to sell people just so I don't look like an idiot in front of my wife and being like hey I blew our

blew our retirement on on buying this like failing thing that I had started so you went from a software as a service to software and a service but it's still not that I mean you can still buy it independently but yeah right right this this was basically a way for you to it's basically a growth strategy and it it helps you raise some additional money to to to fund the business um and and you were you you were telling me earlier that it's it's basically the the same Playbook that Nathan Barry used with convert kit

and um did did he kind of you know him did he kind of help you kind of with this or was that something that you had just seen I've known Nathan for years I mean he's an investor in write message and he and I used to do teach joint workshops and stuff before I remember getting a call one day from him saying hey I'm thinking of starting an email platform I was the first person to help him hire I think one of his Freelancers by betting their GitHub account so like he and I go way

back and um I remember seeing how he struggled a lot early on with with convertkit like I mean now it's doing what like 2 million a month or whatever it is or three um it's doing great now but when you look at the like it was floundering at a few thousand a month for a while and the the big inflection point for him was he didn't partner up officially but like he got in terms of like Equity as far as I know but Pat Flynn of Spar passive income basically championed conver to his email list

and got all the wab be Pat flints to start using conver kit so that's exactly kind of the Playbook I'm using um because what they did after that is then you know Nathan went to every peer of Pat Flyn and said hey Pat's using convert K us should too um and then he did the same with like the fitness space and the food blogger space and all the stuff and that's kind of what we're doing now is we're like a lot of the biggest players in the kind of pro space Creator space are um are

now using us and now I can confidently say like you know can name drop these people and say they all trust us and we're helping them make meaningful amounts of money here are some examples and case studies of it and I I think that's going to be our uh ultimately our Saving Grace so who was the first let me say that carefully Pro space Creator not one word uh that you signed on who who was that and how did you go about getting that deal done because I've seen a lot of people try to do

these things and fail miserably at it so what did you do differently so funny enough it was Pat Flynn and I knew him again I mentioned conferences earlier because he and I played craps at a table in Vegas um from at the Afterparty of like a or after after conference where we were both at so I think like I've really tried hard to build up really good professional relationships SL friend I'm friendships I say professional but these are all people I you know text and all that stuff so you know these are people that I

I genuinely like his people um and yeah I think like he he was the first one and the more recent ones like I've named Justin Welsh and Matt gry and everyone else those are all since the summer of 2023 um so they're all kind of recent as as of our recording so Pat was the first one I I think I don't know Pat I've you know known about him for many many years but he's just to me he just seems like a genuinely nice guy there was there was a time back I remember like uh

I went down to San Diego and I was thinking about we were actually thinking about moving there at one point and I thought who do I know in San Diego that could tell me about where where to you know it's kind of good places for families to kind of move to and stuff and I didn't know anybody and I thought well Pat flynns kind of knows about San Diego right so so just randomly I just sent this email to him cuz I used to listen to his podcast and stuff and and I'll never forget he

actually replied and he listed out a bunch of communities and places to go and see and stuff and it was like he didn't know me from from Adam and and you know he took the time to do that so I think he's he just kind of just you know showed me he really is a a very genuine guy so I'm glad that uh he was also there well their whole team like there's so many great people SPI I mean obviously the face of it is is Pat but um yeah I mean M Arland who's I

think the CEO now I want to say like I think Pat lately has been like more he's not managing the team as much and Matt's been doing that Matt's a great friend too I mean they've got like yeah they' they've got it all put together well so good company good brand and then so going to Justin Justin Welsh was that just off the back of just saying hey you know we've we've been working with Pat or no so I think one of the things that really has helped a lot is I have a course you

know that that earlier course used to be called mastering drip I now have mastering conver KET right and that's something I've had for years and I got a DM from from Justin once uh I want to say like last spring or something where he was like hey um I've heard good things about your course I'm looking at the sales page I don't have time to go through a course can I just pay you um and it pretty much boiled down to that and I think that's one of the the things is like the course and

the email marketing training for me nicely and perfectly complement like it provides the the why behind the H right so I kind of look at it as like if if this if I'm if the software is the pickaxe the the training is the map of where to go and swing the pickaxe right so I actually have found that that's something we haven't really talked about yet but that's been a huge kind of component I think of all of this has been like I'm about to release a new course on segmentation which I'm teaching how to

do it with right message or you could do it with type form or you could do with Tally but obviously with right message I want you to use that oh and by the way if you buy the course you get a credit equal to what you paid for the course for a write message so like there's a lot of uh I think there's a lot of room for not just going like for me if I'm just selling website personalization or segmentation software you need somebody who already knows that they need that before they're willing to

even you know commit to your product whereas if I do something that's more training where it's like hey here's how to better think about better understanding your audience what that means what you could do with this so on and so forth and it's a video course then that's kind of the gateway drug in the right message for me so my like whole grand plan for marketing is not going to be doing like the traditional SAS marketing stuff it's going to instead be how do I build a lot of great training stuff and have these great

big case studies that can push in the training as examples and teach it and all that kind of stuff and have all roads lead to write message and that's basically my plan for the year when it comes to growth so you've got um these basically these Pro creators uh that you're working with is helping you build the credibility you're getting case studies from those so people can now not just see the functionality of right message they can actually see it in practice um having powered by right message on these people's websites probably doesn't hurt either

in in terms of uh uh getting leads is there anything else that you're doing or is is it just that that one thing that you're focusing on to and just just doubling down on that it's pretty much it we're not doing any paid ads we regrettably haven't touched our blog in like over a year which I think is a big issue because I think a lot of people gaug is this thing still around by when the last block post was so I am planning on fixing that um but it's really been a matter of bandwidth

honestly and that's why a lot of like like you said earlier the Consulting Revenue I'm using as a secondary fundraising tool to hire people who can help with that kind of stuff and make it so we can have fresh blog content and everything it it sort of reminds me of the way that you're positioning the course and then offering the subscription behind that it reminded me of what Russell Brunson did with clickfunnels just going to say I I thought you might say that yeah was that an inspiration for you not really because I've I've honestly

never gone through Russell stuff I obviously know who he is but I've never bought his book I've never I don't even know what how clickfunnels I know it's I know conceptually what it is but I've never used it but yeah I mean there's probably a degree of that I've always weirdly enough even though I I'm in kind of the email marketing space I've never tried to identify as an internet marketer so I've kind of you know kind of shi away in in in a weird way from the stuff Russell's doing but yeah I think there's

probably a lot of overlap because that's that was his Playbook his like you know teach the Doom Secrets or whatever his book was called and um oh and by the way there's clickfunnels yeah yeah no I think that was I think that's brilliant because you know everybody goes into SAS and and and everybody thinks that there's one way to to sell software and you know he came along and said actually I'm going to sell an info product and on the back of that a a a SAS product and again you know what is it you

know 100 million whatever Plus business it's there's different ways to you know I mean even with convertkit Nathan had written a book called Authority which a lot of the early conver customers came from that so think it can't it does make sense I mean it's not maybe for every sass but if you've got like weo a a s like the issue with write message is we're one of the few software products that do what we do that are not in the Enterprise space so you know like our competitors are optimized Le and and stuff which

again we're not going after optimizely type customers so it's been a little of a weird thing for we've had to really educate people in order to make a case for our product when I first came across right message it sort of seemed to be targeting like SAS companies so at least that's that's the impression that I got and that's not surprising where you get a lot of products and say well we'll go after SAS companies to start with because why not right just maybe help us understand why you didn't go down that path why you

chose these these creators as your your target market what I'm trying to just understand is like how did you figure out what that that Niche was what that Target Market was and in and and where you could differentiate yourselves and did you stay away from SAS because the product didn't really work there or because you realized it's going to be much harder for for us or for me now to to clearly position this as um you know a a a differentiated or unique enough offering that would get their attention yeah so early on and even

to agree to this day we tried to cast a widenet so we mistakenly thought okay anyone who does email marketing should use right message that meant Zas it meant e-commerce it meant you know plumbing companies it meant uh creators or or whatever they weren't even called creators when we started but that's the new name for them and the yeah I I think I think the reason the Creator thing has worked well for us has been with with sast typically usually the extent of email marketing that they do is like product update emails right like a

lot of them aren't really doing a lot with thinking okay I need to have like nurturing sequences and I need to have like a Weekly Newsletter and and I need to like think about audience building and like this kind of thing of like you know sending people from the email to the website and back and forth and back and forth whereas creators do think like that especially the ones we're going after that you know they're thinking okay I've got a portfolio of courses or high-end coaching offerings and yeah if I could just you know uncover

a bit about somebody's psychographics like why are they here what are they struggling with I can change the way I pitch my thing next time to speak more directly to them and I think that makes a lot of sense to the kind of people we're going after now and equally I think that also works with e-commerce I just don't know anything about that world and I think that's actually a good thing because there have been some kind of right message e kind of companies but they're all Target tting e-commerce now so I'm like okay fine

keep them there right um and so I think and also to kind of close that out I'm a I'm a Creator myself I mentioned I I've sold well over five million in in digital courses since 2011 or however long I've been doing it started out as ebooks then shifted to video courses I've run conferences before I've I've done the whole like what we used to call info product business that is now shifted to kind of Creator business i' I've done that and I I still do that so I kind of I think know that audience

even though I'm a SAS founder myself I'm more aligned I think with with creators than than other software businesses and and I think in many ways it's that's a really important factor like when when I talk to a lot of Founders who are sort of early stages and they're trying to figure out what they their target market should be and often the factors that they'll look at is you know the usual stuff in terms of do they have the problem is the market growing you know all of these things can I reach Target can I

reach these people but then the question I always ask is like do you actually like working with these people like do you want to spend the next 10 years of your life working with these people and and sometimes really the answer is like no I don't right and so I like okay well find someone find somewhere else that's why didn't go after enter I I dabbled with Enterprise accidentally we had a big Fortune 500 who somehow found us they reached out and I spent probably at least 20 hours on calls with like teams and this

and that like all these people and it never turned into anything and they just want to do meetings all day and I'm like I I just don't like if that's granted yes maybe you hire that out sure but I didn't want us like at our in our DNA I always liked I know this is is kind of the often cited example but I liked always what base camp what they used to say about like Microsoft can come and sign up for basam the max they're paying is 99 a month they can't make us change our

code base they can't keep us you know up at on Saturday building some custom feature that they need whereas when you have like a you know an Enterprise company paying you a ton of money that's kind of what they expect yeah all right uh we should wrap up uh so let's get on to the the lightning round got seven quick fire questions for you just try to answer them as quickly as you can what's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received I think for for me specifically right now it's play up here

play up your strengths because I think like like a lot of Founders I always want to here bigger than I am and I've come to embrace like hopping into my help Scout inbox and sending a thing to a customer where in the signature it's like Brennan Dunn founder comma right message and people being like wow this is a like from the guy who owns it and it's actually not just a scripted like you know outsourced support thing so I think like play up to the strengths that you are small and can do things that the

bigger players can't do it's big good advice I'm trying to live by what book would you recommend to our audience and why so my favorite Business book it's a book called badass uh badass the subtitle is making users awesome it's by Kathy Sierra who um is probably like she hasn't really she's kind of been hidden for the last few years but it's the best book I've written on usability and ux so highly recommend it for everyone what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder Focus what's your favorite personal productivity tool or

habit having kids they force me to work in a very constrained manner which makes me very productive uh what's a new crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time I'd love to build build a really good email marketing platform because I I have nitpicks with all the existing ones what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know uh I have my pilot's license you do wow I do yeah and uh finally what's one of your most important passions outside of work kind of boring now that I've

got a two-year-old but I do when the summer when the weather's nice as we were talking about earlier when the weather's nice here in England I love cycling in the English Countryside I love just Road biking and going through random Villages and nice Pub lunch at a 400y Old Pub or something like that yeah we were just for people listening like you and I were talking about how you're the you're the American who's now in England and I'm the British guy who's now here in the US although I'm American now as well so I have

to I have to play up both sides of the Atlantic now um so that's that's great so thank you so much for joining me Brandon it's been uh pleasure to to finally chat and and uh share the story of right message looking forward to seeing what you continue to do over the the rest of 2024 as you're getting more and more momentum with this business and now basically kind of you know setting out on the U new chapter as a solo founder effectively of the business this time also we should talk about you published a

book last not that long ago I think it was about five six months ago right which um is called this is personal the art of delivering the right email at the right time and I was thinking at some point like you know maybe we should get you back and just pick your brain and maybe just educate people about some of the things you teach in that book because there are some really good best practices about email marketing that everyone should be implementing and is not implementing today and and I won't mention any names but me

um and then also the the course that you you mentioned so that's called mastering convert kit and um I think the website is what create and sell. yeah create and sell is like my digital products side of my world it's a Weekly Newsletter and it's also courses yeah cool so if people are interested in that you can go and check it out over there great well well thank you so much it's been a pleasure and um you know enjoy your evening in in England and uh I wish you the best of success with with right

message thanks so much for having me om my pleasure cheers