How I Pivoted From Flat and Unhappy to $6m and High Growth

Please help me and welcome him Chris Brisson from sales message to the stage. Chris, come on.

Hello, everybody. I hope everyone is doing awesome. Actually, a fun fact. So I met Nathan, this is probably 2012, 2013 at infusion con. And he walks up to me and he says, know in typical Nathan fashion, hey man, what's your revenue? How much are you doing? Well, I'm freaking out going who is this guy? I don't know who he is. He's asking all these awkward questions. And so this is you know, eight whatever ten years later,

he's still asking these hard questions. So appreciate it. Nathan, thank you for having me. Looking forward to it. So my name is Chris Brisson. I'm the co founder and CEO of a company called Sales Message. And in this talk, there's gonna tell you sort of the the journey, the story, some of the stuff that's working well for us, some tactical but more of, you know, the entrepreneur journey which I think we've all all gone through. So

I'm gonna talk about how I pivoted from flat and unhappy to 6,000,000 and high growth all completely bootstrapped. And here I have no hair but now I have hair. So anyhow, alright. So over the next twenty minutes, I'm gonna talk about really sort of three things here. One is the pivot. And if you've been an entrepreneur, you've probably created a company and you realize maybe it's something that you didn't really like. And I want to talk

to you about this company that actually still exists today. It's called Call Loop. Talk about that journey and realize that wow, this is this horse is not the horse that I wanna bet on for my ultimate future. And that journey, how I lost a year and a half of time, $150 working on a product no one wanted. Maybe you've done that. And really the one question that really changed everything. Then we're gonna talk about the product

vision, really dive into sales message, our vivid product vision, how we can paint your future, how we've done that, what I call the platform game, how we can quantify product market fit and really the vision for the overall product. Ship early, ship often, how MTP can be like the unlock to really grow your business. And then I'll talk to some keys to scale and keys to success. One thing I call stack the line. And this is

how you create a multi pronged SaaS company, Not just one product but multiple products that can continue to sort of, allow a lot of expansion revenue. People and then we'll talk about some pricing. So let's, get into it. And actually, Nathan, I think these might be the the old slides. Bro, sorry. 4,000 slides. Either way, we'll we'll dive into it. So, this is 2009

and prior to this, I was doing a lot of internet marketing, created courses and different programs and I really enjoyed software. We created a couple tiny little software products and I had the idea for, wouldn't it be cool if you could do like voice broadcasting the same way that you could do email auto responders? And that was like just this little idea. And this guy Ronnie posted a comment on my blog at the time. It was

chrispersand.com. And here's what he said. And so this sort of blog comments turned into a partnership to create this product called Call Loop. And Call Loop, the sort of original idea was just that. Hey, how do we create a voice broadcast autoresponder, right? So very basic and this is the landing page. I got invited to pitch at the VentureBeat event. And I didn't know anything about raising money, raising capital, nothing like that. So I go to

San Francisco on Market Street and I'm in front of like 400 of the best investors in the world and I bombed. It was so embarrassing. And I'm still trying to get that footage because it'll be like the best thing ever. Anyhow, so we started this company and Call Loop just sort of 2009 if you think about the idea came out 2011 and we had a whopping $6,400.20 12 and it was just this slow grind. And it

was just debilitating to be honest. And so as much as I was looking to grow this company, it just wasn't something that you know, wasn't I wasn't happy. I was very sort of depressed you know. I raised $90,000 in like 2012 and I'm like, man, I just took somebody's money and it's not a lot of money but this thing sucks. It's not gonna really grow in scale. So in 2015, I wrote this three part series. But

before we do that, I wanna share with you guys what I call the bubble gum strategy. And hopefully if I press play there we go. What did he say? This way. So let me know if this is how you feel about watch folks. Sounds coming. Perfectly Please keep up with the tour. This

is one of the oldest stamped tunnels we have.

Arty. Arty, here.

Give me your cup. Out of my mouth? I don't care any gum. Just give me some gum. Look what's happening here. Yeah. Just talk to him. I'll catch up.

Damn.

So so anyhow, this really represented like what call loop was. Like as much as we were Stop it here. There we go. So as much as like I wanted to fix this product, fix this problem, it was like, oh my gosh, we're putting bubble gum and tape on this and every problem that we tried to solve or fix, it just turned into a complete nightmare. So I went through basically a period where was like, I don't

want this. And so I wrote a three part blog series, where I was just like, I need to tell this story. And and the idea with this was the subject line I sent it to our whole list about 35,000 people, customers, users, maybe there's people in the room that were on that list and got this. And the title was The Death of Call Loop. And it was a journey and a story of me just saying, you

know what, I built this business that I secretly despised. And if you've ever been in that place, is a not great place. But what came from this and people were commenting, I tried to find the comments this morning on Disqus. But I couldn't find them and people were hating me. People were saying this is the best thing ever. And it was just a very weird moment. But it was like the most impactful moment I had in

my sort of entrepreneurial journey. The end of the story was you know it was a three part sequence, two days I went out. And the third part was follow my journey as I reinvent this business from the ground up as a second chance startup. And so I posted it, I had a hundreds of people sign up for this email list and then I freaked out. I'm like, oh my God, people wanna follow this journey of me

inventing and reinventing this business and documenting this whole journey. And so about, you know, brought brought in a new co founder guy I worked with before and I said, alright man, let's get let's get going with it. We started working on it for a month and then about a month and a half later, I said, hey, how long is it gonna take? And he's like, a year and a half. I'm like, shit. We need to do something. So I was like, hey, I've got this other idea. Let me go ahead. Let's let's try and launch this. So it's called Kick a Conference. It was sort of like Uber Conference for

marketers and we launched it a year and a half later. A lot of money later, we made a whopping $1,500. Spent a year and a half or a year building this product. It's a great product. And so I pulled this up on my email and this is December or 10/21/2016 and my goal was generate a thousand dollars in sales. Horrible. So But what happened was through this whole journey I just I said, alright this is not

working. But if I were to start over, what would I do? You know if I were to draw a line in the sand and just say you know if I were to reinvent this entire business, what did I learn? I realized like this conference call thing but people call loop was still going. You know we're generating revenue and I would always hear what people wanted and said okay well what could I create in order to sort

of solve their problem? And so about fifteen, thirteen days later whatever it was, I said all right let's stop building Kick a Conference because it's obviously not working. And let me just try and sell this new idea which SalesMessage was really an idea I had in the summer and I was like trying to play around with it. And I said, alright, before we write a line of code, let me go ahead and pre sell this. So

I popped into Photoshop, I created some slides, I sort of mocked up the product, I sent an email to her list and did a webinar. And the webinar turned into $3,100 in sales. More money than we made in a whole year and a half trying to sell this other product that we spent a lot of money with. So this is where the idea of sales message came from was like, oh, okay. Well, let me put it

together. I don't touch it because I don't wanna waste any time or money and we pre sold it, right? So today here's where we're at. So we did $36,003.61 2. We'll probably hit between 7 and eight. You know this is sort of our trajectory right now. But we're on this really really fast growth path and it's all been bootstrapped. We didn't raise any money and in fact I just started taking a salary. I didn't need to.

Call loop still runs actually. And so I wanna talk to you guys about the vivid product vision. And so Cameron Harold, you know I read this book years ago. I met Cameron years ago and he was actually the impetus for me writing this whole blog series is he actually was using it and he's like call loop sucks. And that was like, oh my god. Because he was speaking and it wasn't working and all this sort of

stuff. And so that was he was actually responsible for really helping me, pave this new path. But his book, The Vivid Vision, what it talks about is if you were to look out three, five years in the future, what does it look like? And to go through that exercise to really understand what do I want to create one for myself, for a new company, but also what does your product look like? And so one of the

things for us is you know, if you've read Jim Collins, know he talks about the bee hag, the big hairy audacious goal. And so our big vision which is you know three, five years down the future, it's this. Sales message is the leading global all in one omni channel messaging platform for sales marketing support teams. Cool. We are not there. But we at least know where we're going and so we can start to quantify this vision.

So global, what does it look like? Well we wanna be in these countries, right? What does omni channel look like? Well we wanna be in these channels, right? What does it look like for sales team? And so we can start to really move into this larger vision that the hard part is your team doesn't know where you're going. And so how do you sort of tell the story about, hey guys, this is where we're going. This

is what it looks like. Here's how we get there exactly. And so big vision, you know, you sort of track that back and then you can quantify quarter over quarter. How are we moving towards this big goal? So the one thing that we did and I would encourage you to as well is look at what's a model in the marketplace that you can model. So HubSpot for us is our model. What HubSpot did very well is,

they sort of took the approach of we have sales, you have marketing, you have customer support, you have operations. And through that, you have SMB, you have mid market, you have enterprise. And so what they built is essentially their sort of flywheel version of that. And so, hey, we're gonna go in the marketing hub. We're gonna go on starter. Starter is SMB. What do they need from a product perspective? What do we need to create to

drive that traffic? What do we need from a sales process? So all these quadrants expand into the entire organization. And so we can start to model like, hey, we're gonna go deep on the marketing hub. We're great in SMB. Let's move into mid market and then over time we can build out to enterprise. But you have to have product market fit to then get to go to market fit, to then get to growth in mode and

scale. And so we're not gonna go to enterprise because we can't win deals. Why? We don't have SOC two and all these other things that they require to even be in part of the deal. So what we call as a platform game, this is a very basic version of it. But what we do is go, hey, what's our vision for the future? What products do we need to create? And then from a high level, how can

we work backwards and really get to a line item of here is exactly what we're going to build so the team can start to play a game. How do we play a game of success? So what we did is we just mapped it out and we said, hey, here's these features and we just color coded it. Now these all link over to a further document of something I'll get into MTP and whatnot. But grays, we haven't

done it yet. Yellow is a Pareto principle of 80% complete. So we call MTP table stakes in advanced. This is our quantification of how we reach this tipping point of are we ready for go to market? Sure you can build a product and a feature set but you may not be ready to market it and get customers because they go, oh do you have that? No. Do you have that? No. Okay. Well we'll go with somebody

else. So you wanna get some more yeses. We'll talk a little bit about that. So we just quantify this. Again, this is as a team, when you show your whole team, we're at 40 some odd people right now. Guys, where are we at and what can we quantify quarter over quarter and start to knock this down? Hey, you know what? Let's go a little bit deeper on calling. What else can we do? Well, we've got a

whole list of ideas and product feature set that we can build. And so there's this great quote. This is from one of the guys over at Facebook and says, pressure plus iteration is evolution. And so we have sort of taken this approach. My co founder Sergei, he sort of helped sort of evolve this and built our whole development team. But MTP stands for minimum testable product. So the idea with this

is you've got features, you've got a backlog, you've got stuff you want to build. But how do you move towards a fast iterative pressure focused approach that over time you evolve and then you can start to move up market with that feature set. So MTP is like what's the bare minimum we can create to test? Let's bring in some customers, let's test this bare minimum and then, let's start to evolve from that. The next step and

this is all feature stuff. I'll show you guys what it looks like, is table stakes. What features are necessary to win deals against the competition? So if somebody comes to you and says, hey we're talking to so and so. Do you do x? No. Do you do this? No. Do you do that? Okay. Well, but we're gonna go over here. And so those are these just what are the table stakes features you have to have in

order to even be in that conversation to win a deal. And then the advanced side is distinct differentiators. What can we engineer or create that is different and unique in the marketplace that nobody else has? And so there's this idea called a unique mechanism, really stemmed from the marketing space. What is something unique that no one else has that you can coin or trademark or create that they don't have this sort of positions you differently in

the market that you're the only company that offers that? And so the companies that can create this unique mechanism, they're they're in their own blue ocean versus a red ocean. So here is sort of how we quantify it. We love Jira, we love Confluence, everything we have is is documented. And so we get into like, okay guys, what does it look like for NTP for let's just say calling, right? Or outbound calling. Well, they need to

be able to like make a call. They need to be able to mute a call. They need to be able to do this. They need to be like all that stuff. And it's just a brainstorm session. What do you need? Hey, let's go look at other competitors. What do they have? Okay. Let's bring a list bring a list bring a list. We just get a whole big ass dump of all the stuff we can build. And

then we just start picking it out. Yeah. That's an advanced feature. That's a table stakes. That's MTP. And then we just start to build this and this gets into sprints. So how do you move quick? How do you iterate? We're pumping out stuff every two weeks that just boom boom boom boom boom and customers love it. And this creates momentum. This creates just a movement towards people relying on your business that you're gonna solve their real

problems. And so here is how you win the game. Like I talked about knows and knows and knows and knows and this a customer actually created this. And I love it because he did the work to find out who actually has what we need. And he built a whole spreadsheet. Do they have this? Do they have this? Do they have this? Do they have this? And he did all the other competition out there. And he came

to the ultimate conclusion which is like sales message solves our problem best. And so if you ever follow like Zig Ziglar, know, he says like, really the the more continuous yeses you can get, the more business you're gonna win. And so like what are these core feature sets that you can just start to knock off to get to that ultimate yes. Now I love what Todd just talked about is like, you know, this forcing function to

move up market. And we've gotten some big customers and like, my god, they just broke our system. I'm like, yes, this is awesome because we just figured out a whole new opportunity, a great business or a great feature to build to allow us to get more of those customers. And so it's like we say yes to those guys even though we know that at some point maybe they may churn but they're gonna open up so much

opportunity for us to solve these micro problems that can mean, you know, a 6 figure a multi 6 figure contract. And so so that's how we do it. So I got a minute and a half here. So let me talk about some of the keys to scaling. So one of the things I talk about is the idea called stack the line. And so what a lot of companies focus on, if you look at really the two

ways to grow SaaS companies, you know, if you follow Jay Abraham, he talks about three ways to grow your business. But in SaaS, there's really two ways. One, you get more customers, which is the hardest part. Two is you increase ARPU. And so what are the ways and strategies from which you can increase average revenue per user? And so the loneliest number is number one. A lot of companies like, cool. We've got $49 plan and the

only way to grow is to get them into 99. That sucks. Why? Because it is hard to get somebody to move into that value metric and they may not be in that next value metric to move up to pay $99 a month. Even though you're training them and teaching them. And so this is a great book. Marcos Rivera, he just came out this book. It's awesome. If you guys wanna learn everything about pricing, definitely get this

book. He actually worked for Vista Partners and so like super strategy on pricing. He says this, according to invest whatever, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70%. While the probability of selling to a new prospect is five to 20. Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more when compared to new customers. So we know this. We've heard it, right? Yes, we know our customers are the

ones that are gonna spend more money. But like, what are you gonna focus on? Are you gonna focus on a new customer acquisition? Or are you gonna build out your product line to solve more problems to improve expansion? So we call this our multi pronged SaaS. So again, we've got subscription plans, we've got transaction revenue, which for a while was like, oh transaction revenue, that's not a good thing. How do you get more towards SaaS? That's

okay. Twilio is doing pretty well. We've got seats, we've got add ons, services we're just about to introduce. And so guys, what can we create? What problems can we solve within our product to help our customers get more value? So plans, we sell numbers, we sell short codes, we sell you know all these other additional subscription products. We also sell transactional. So text message credits. If you want to you know, we sell minutes. So you do

calling. If you've got carrier fees, know we have all these other transactional revenue that there are ways to move transaction revenue into subscription but you know, some things just need to live on a transaction base because it's one time revenue and somewhat, you know, volatile. Seats, add ons, so what other add on products can we introduce? One we call phone checker which looks up phone numbers. Compliance, we've got trusted calling and all these other tools that

help further enhance the product. Services. So text size consulting, you know, automations, white glove service, that sort of thing. So just share with you some of these numbers here. So what does it actually look like, right? Our customer acquisition is not that great. But our ARPU is awesome because we create products that solve problems that recur that turn into more money. And so this is a great problem to have because if you are dependent or reliant

on Facebook or Google for acquisition And if that shuts off, you're not growing. So the best place to be is how do you increase that ARPU, create the product to to generate this over time. And so it doesn't show it in here but one of the things I'll talk about is the the price hike which actually I think it might be in there. So number two, I'm up on time. I'll move pretty quick here but consistency

creates momentum. You know, like I mentioned, we are pumping out so much product all the time and our customers love it because one, we talk to them. Two, we gather their feedback. And then three, we actually build the products. And so like that is the best way to win customers long term is to listen and actually solve their problems. So one of the things that we sort of operationalized is product marketing. Cool. We've got tier one,

tier two, tier three. Is this product worthy of going to market? Is it just more of a small feature that we need to let customers know? And when you're pumping out so much stuff, you don't wanna overwhelm them. So anyhow, so we go through this checklist, it's all put in Jira, it's all tasks, it's all outsourced to the whole team on the product marketing side and it's kicked out and it's done. I had another slide in here but we'll move on. Increase your prices and learn from our mistakes. One,

actually, I think it might yeah. Anyhow, let me talk to you about this. So we started at $10 a month, right? Because we're like, let's just build this product and put it out to the world. And then we moved up to a whopping $35 a month. And you could see price increase one and we had two plans, which actually I think it took from Nathan. But it was $35 and $300 a month. And then we're like,

we took way too long. We took two years to do another price increase which happened at the end of twenty twenty one And what do you know? It went up. And so, the big lesson there is like just start like increasing your prices and increasing your value. So a couple pricing lessons learned. Don't grandfather, we did that. And we figured out a way that how we can show our appreciation to those existing customers that came in.

And one thing that you can do, it's sort of a technical issue but you know, you can leave people within a plan. But then as you're introducing new product and features, just feature gate it. And so in order for them to get access to that, they have to then upgrade to that plan. You don't wanna keep giving them new stuff for $10 a month when everybody else is spending 35. Offer annual to lock in rates. I'll

show you guys a Slack example. Slack right now if you wanna follow an awesome pricing increase. Slack is doing it right now. Just model it, awesome. Offer annual to lock in rates for twelve months.

Basically what this means is rather than go through all this complex stuff and this person's on that, just allow people to lock in a rate for twelve months to keep that price they currently have for twelve months. And then after twelve months, they move into that newer pricing plans. And and also too it's great for cash because they're gonna pay all upfront. So instead of hard hard deadline. Typically you'll see is ninety days. We did like

forty five and it works pretty well. So if you guys want break out your phone. If you wanna get Slack's example, I broke this whole thing down, documented it. So if you ever wanna go through a price increase, Slack is doing it now. I definitely recommend that you follow it. And basically what they're doing is the exact same thing. One, it's simple and they just put you into an annual to lock in that rate for twelve

months. And it's super simple. We try to complicate it way too much and in the end, were like, how do we simplify this? Oh, well let's just do that. And so, I'll share with you guys the our campaign and how we did that.

And that is all. So, thank you guys. The last twenty minutes we talked about all these fun things. So thank you so much and come and talk. Also, I'm doing a brain date at three, I think. I'm not sure where it is but doing a brain date. And then if anybody is interested, 06:30 in the morning, if you wanna go run, meet me downstairs.