May 26, 2022 • 42 mins
Wondering how best to grow your audience or perhaps, how to fund your next trip to Ireland? If so, this week's podcast is a must-listen for you! This week, joining Conor on the show is special guest and serial entrepreneur Brennan Dunn. Brennan is the co-founder of RightMessage, a platform for online businesses to enhance their automated segmentation and website personalisation. In this episode, Brennan walks us through his fascinating leap from consulting into SaaS, launching and selling his project management tool Planscope and the accidental beginning of his thriving community, Double Your Freelancing, where he advises 50K + freelancers and agencies across the globe.
Conor and Brennan unpack so much, including the secret to building with your audience, effective communication and truly understanding your customer's needs. Brennan also reveals what worked well when starting a new business from scratch. Main points throughout the discussion include:
- An introduction to Brennan Dunn.
- The rise of an accidental business.
- Being personable and building connections with your customers.
- The practice of creating evergreen content.
- The art of conversational copywriting: write as you speak!
- Utilising the voice of customer data.
- Re-evaluating a career and starting a new venture from scratch.
- What worked well: Brennan's proven business stepping-stone.
- Why you should borrow an audience.
- The key to real-time product positioning.
- Communicating directly and effectively with customers.
- How to elevate your customer testimonials to new heights.
- Brennan's advice for obtaining your first ten customers.
Connect Brennan:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brennandunn/
https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/
https://twitter.com/brennandunn
Connect with First 10 Podcast host Conor McCarthy:
https://www.first10podcast.com
https://twitter.com/TheFirst10Pod
https://www.linkedin.com/in/comccart/
Resources:
Book: The Brain Audit by Sean D'Souza
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brain-Audit-Customers-They-Dont/dp/0473175045
Check out my podcast partners!
Buzzsprout:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1389931
Otter:
https://otter.ai/referrals/ETRNKY16
Calendly:
https://calendly.grsm.io/ilev18qxpn1e
Produced in partnership with podlad.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Brennan Dunn (00:01):
Long Road would be the arduous scraping your knees
bunch and trying it out andfailing or you hire the sherpa,
us and we guide you easily andsafely and economically to that
promised land we want to get to,rather than having you circled
the desert mindlessly.
Conor McCarthy (00:25):
Hello, and welcome to season four of the
first 10 podcast. I'm your host,Conor McCarthy, and I help
people start and grow theirbusinesses. I do that through
joint ventures collaborations,coaching, and online workshops.
In each episode of this podcast,I interview business builders
about the early days of startinga business, about how they found
their first 10 customers and gotoff the ground, so that you can
(00:45):
learn what works and whatdoesn't. Check out my website at
ConorMcCarthy.me for moredetails. My guest today is
Brennan Dunn. I've interviewedquite a few serial entrepreneurs
in this podcast and Brennanstands out as someone who went
from the world of software intofreelancing, and back to
software again. He founded aproject management platform
called Plan scope, then jumpedinto creating the famous
(01:06):
freelancing community calledDouble Your Freelancing before
turning his attention to RightMessage, which helps you uncover
who's on your website, what theydo, and what they're looking for
from you. We get into all ofthese businesses in great depth
today. On this podcast, Brennanshares loads of interesting
learnings from his extensiveexperience starting and growing
these businesses and fromwatching others do the same. For
(01:26):
instance, we cover how to listento and talk to your audience,
how to build with your audience,making the leap from non SaaS to
SaaS businesses, bootstrapping aSaaS, positioning your product
in real time and the importanceof segmenting your market and
enriching what you know aboutyour audience. Lastly, Brennan
shares the absolute best way tofund your next trip to Ireland.
(01:48):
So please do enjoy this episodewith Brennan Dunn and thank you
so much for listening.
First of all, Brennan, welcometo the show and thank you very
much for taking the time to bewith us here today.
Brennan Dunn (02:02):
Yeah, thank you for having me, Conor.
Conor McCarthy (02:04):
Do you want to just give us a quick 60 or 90
second overview of you and yourcurrent business?
Brennan Dunn (02:08):
Yep. So currently, I'm running day to day two
different companies. One iscalled Right Message, we do lead
segmentation and audience kindof enrichment for lack of a
better way of putting it. Nowthat's a horrible way of
elevator pitching it. But myother you know, I do that I co
founded that company about fiveyears ago. Now I'm also involved
(02:29):
in a more of a personality, kindof driven business called create
and sell, where it's really justa weekly newsletter, backed by a
few different video courses onemail marketing, and just kind
of marketing in general for theCreator audience. And before
that, though, I I started acompany called Double Your
(02:50):
Freelancing. And I'm stilltechnically the owner of it, but
my wife actually runs it thesedays. And I also have started
and sold another softwarecompany called Planscope about
eight or nine years ago now.
Conor McCarthy (03:05):
You've, you've been busy.
Brennan Dunn (03:07):
Yeah, yeah and I haven't even touched on the
consulting stuff. So I didagency stuff way back when but
yeah, okay, another life.
Conor McCarthy (03:15):
This season of the first 10 podcast, I'm really
focused on people who have builtbusiness, like serial
entrepreneurs have built anumber of businesses. So maybe
let's go back in time, even tothe start of Double Your
Freelancing, let's say yeah, andmaybe we could just talk for a
second about what it was like toget your first customers for
that business.
Brennan Dunn (03:33):
Yeah, so funny enough with that business, it
really, it was more of anaccidental business. Because I
had, I was running Planscope,which is my first software
company that I started afterleaving my agency and not
wanting to do work with clientsanymore, I wanted to do the
whole get a lot of people payingyou $20 a month. So I started
(03:53):
plan scope, which was a projectmanagement, software for
freelancers and agencies. So Istarted writing content publicly
about things I've learnedbuilding an agency and things on
pricing and getting clients andthings like that, hoping that it
would drive customers toPlanscope. Well, that didn't
work as well. What did workthough, was people saying can I
(04:15):
get more of the content? Can Iget more help on you know,
getting clients or writingproposals or what not. And that
actually led to Double YourFreelancing emerging as from the
from the content marketing armof this software company called
Planscope into a proper businessand when it came to getting the
first customer that really, thehonest truth was I had been
(04:42):
doing the content marketing sideof things for originally
Planscope, but then it morphedinto this newsletter. And I
didn't have any paid productsfor that outside of Planscope.
So what I actually ended updoing funnily enough, since your
your Irish went to go at thetime to this, this conference in
(05:03):
Ireland called Fun conf. I don'tknow if you ever heard of it?
Yeah. So this is about 10 yearsago now. And I didn't have the
budget for it because I had a,you know, I had quitted the
lucrative consulting gig,bootstrapped this software
company and you know, the thingabout monthly recurring revenue
is it's, it's predictable in anice way. But it's also very
(05:24):
steady. So if you have tosuddenly get to Ireland, and pay
for an expensive conference,your partner doesn't always
enjoy, you know, you're comingup with you know, that that
reason for especially one of theconference is called Fun conf.
So I ended up pre selling ae-book at the time called Double
(05:45):
Your Freelancing, right? Whichmy thinking was, I was reading a
lot about pricing, people seemto like it, they would reply
back and, you know, engage withme and ask for more information.
And, this is back when the timewas really an open book and
saying, if you want to jump on aSkype call with me, how about
it. And also, this was whenSkype was still really popular,
(06:06):
I guess. So that led to me,effectively selling I forgot the
exact year. I actually wrote aarticle about it way back when,
but if something around 20,000ish, dollars and pre orders for
this ebook I had to create thatallowed me to fund my trip to
(06:29):
Ireland. So that was the firsttime I did that. And really what
I did with that, and why I thinkit worked well, and how I got
customers was I was cadence. Soevery week like clockwork,
people got an in depth, originalpiece of content for me. And
this was before, I think themodern newsletter rush. This was
back when I kind of had, in away a monopoly on teaching
(06:53):
freelancers. I mean, this was 10or 11 years ago now. And I was
doing it over email,predominantly. So what I ended
up doing was I really optimizedfor sales in a very casual way.
So what I mean by this is, Ididn't have a sales page or
anything like that. Instead,what I would do is at the end of
(07:15):
every weekly newsletter, I'd puta little PS that said, I'm
thinking about writing a more indepth, you know, framework, if
you will, on pricing, and salesfor freelancers. It's still
something I'm exploring, but ifthat might be of interest to you
reply, and I'll share a bitmore. So it was kind of like a,
(07:35):
it was a bit of a teaser in thesense that if they wanted to
find out actually more aboutwhat I was thinking they had to
kind of opt in again, in a way,this time through an email
reply. So people would reply tothat. And then what I used that
for was to really, you know,suss out exactly what would be
in this book. So people wouldreply, and then I'd have like, a
(07:56):
canned set of bullet points thatI would just reply back with,
after that, of here's what I'mthinking is this, you know, I'd
love to hear also a bit moreabout kind of what's your
history when it comes to, whenyou get a new client lead? What
is it you do? How do you goabout thinking about the project
and pricing and proposalwriting, and so on. And what was
(08:17):
really nice was I ended up justeventually dropping my paypal
email address and saying, if youwant to preorder this, send it
here. And I'll make sure you getit. And also, as I'm writing the
book, every week, I'll sendanother email to you, that's
really just summing up what I'veworked on that week. So it
wasn't just I'll take your moneyrun. And hopefully you'll get a
(08:38):
PDF at some point, it was moreof a you're paying for a
building kind of not in the openentirely, but a a behind the
scenes access to me creatingthis resource that I think
you'll really enjoy. And whenthe resource is finalized,
you'll get the finished product.
And that's a lot to that. Andnow that book has turned into a
(08:59):
video horse and now it's hadmore than 10,000 people buy it
in the last 10 years. So yeah,eventually ultimately, it's done
for me on a bit more money thanmy software company has afforded
me so I could go to Inishmoreoff of Galway
Conor McCarthy (09:19):
That is such a great story. It's like the the
hero's journey, Y'know, theJoseph Campbell You know, this
island off the coast of Ireland.
How am I gonna do it?
Brennan Dunn (09:28):
The montage bit I don't know what part that would
be, must be the weekly emailsbut yeah.
Conor McCarthy (09:32):
Yeah, that's that's so interesting, and now
of course, building public is athing now, it's a big thing but
you were really doing it throughemail from the from the
beginning. You were listeningand asking questions.
Brennan Dunn (09:45):
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I yeah, I mean, it was
more of a because before that,to really be fully transparent
my background before gettinginto Plantscope and getting into
Let's Double Your Freelancingwas doing you know, I ran an
agency, got it up to 11employees and, you know, did the
whole, like I was effectivelythe salesperson for the company.
(10:07):
And I was used to emailexchanges back and forth. And
one thing I thought was reallyinteresting was well, what if I
could, instead, instead of justsending out these broadcast
emails and expecting them to beeffectively read only, what if I
incentivize people to activelyreply to them, especially if
(10:28):
it's, if it could lead tosomething potentially bigger,
like them pre ordering thisthing I might be working on. So
you know, my thinking was alwaysand still to this day is, is
keep your ear to the ground andlisten, and build systems that
enable you to listen better. SoI do this. Now, when somebody
joins my list. I specificallycall them out and ask them, hey,
(10:53):
you know, thanks for joining us,let us know in a sentence or two
about who you are and what youspecifically need me to send you
over the next few weeks, so youdon't unsubscribe. And then that
leads to really, I have a wholenotion of database. Now this is
auto populated, because I'mdoing this through a forum
instead of a reply. But I have awhole, like, if I want to figure
(11:15):
out what to write, just go intonotion go to this table. And as
people join the list, it getspopulated and it's kind of voice
to customer raw data that I canthen say, you know, Conor wrote
in and said, blah, blah, blah,blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah. And then I reply,basically in an e-mail to you.
But I'm also using that as anevergreen asset that can then be
(11:36):
pushed to the site, it can besent out to the list. Yeah, I
mean, and that's, that's kind ofbeen my MO for many, many years
now.
Conor McCarthy (11:42):
Wow. That's, that's so that's it's an immense
trove of gold, right? There islike just those conversations
you have, and to track them andrecord them and to be able to
answer to one person, I supposein the style of which of course,
everyone, like if one person hasa problem, lots of people have
the problem. How did you, whenit comes to copywriting itself,
(12:06):
and it's a bit of a left turn,but we don't have to talk about
it for long, but have you alwaysjust kind of honed your own
style when it comes to writing?
Or have you ever done any kindof training in it?
Brennan Dunn (12:17):
Yeah, so you know, before doing what I do now, my
university background was Istudied the classics. So ancient
Greek and Latin literature and alot of literature, a lot of
reading and writing, which ledto a very Oh, way of writing
(12:38):
that isn't really conducive toonline marketing, sort of that
way. So I had to I had to changethe way I wrote to be, I think
more, you know, my thinking nowis just right, like I speak. And
I've, I've gotten a lot of helpreally over the years
specifically from people likeJoanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers,
where she she put out a forgotwhat it was called. But before
(13:02):
she's doing what she was doingnowadays, she used to be pretty
active on Hacker News, and wrotea series of ebooks on like, I
think, yeah, well, now it's nowshe's called Copy Hackers. But
it was it was basically called,like, you know, how to hack
copyrights. Right? Like so forif you're a developer or
engineering minded person, howdo you think about tapping into
(13:26):
human psychology through copy ina way that makes sense to the
coder basically, is kind of washer thing, which resonated a lot
with me. So, Joanna has beenbeen amazing over the years and
just getting me a bit moreknowledgeable on like, the
proper frameworks of, you know,of historical copywriting. So
(13:47):
what what the greats havepioneered and you know, ABC and
all the different acronyms thatthat exists in the copywriting
world. She helped to kind ofdistill that down into something
that was, yeah.
Conor McCarthy (13:59):
Yeah, I'm always fascinated with, with copy and
how people go about learning itbecause it is, in the absence of
you, in person, your words, doall the the speaking and the
talking, so to speak.
Brennan Dunn (14:11):
Yeah. Well, I think one of the things I love
about the when you have thesethese systems in place that get
language from readersspecifically, I mean, one of the
things I do is I have an emailcourse for Double Your
Freelancing it leads to a paidproduct. So people opt in an
email course. And then they getnine lessons and then they get
pitched in the product. What Ido with the email courses
(14:33):
intentionally rooted in the samepain points and problems that
the product is so when peoplejoin the email course, it's on
pricing. I asked him a modifiedversion, that question that I
mentioned earlier, thatspecifically about what is the
pricing challenge that you'rehoping that this free course
will help you overcome in thenext 10 days? So you know, I've
(14:56):
accumulated many 1000s ofresponses to that. But I don't
actively look through it as muchas I used to any longer. But it
helped give me not only anindicator of what what how, you
know, these kind of treat theseis, this is the this is the
benchmark that people areexpecting. And at the end of it,
(15:16):
I asked the same question at theend of that nine lesson email
course that says, did what Itaught you over the last nine
days, did it match what you toldme, right like that you needed
or what you thought you'd begetting in this. And what that's
given me is a whole wealth of,in your own words, voice of
(15:37):
customer data, that then my jobas a copywriter, whether it's
writing pitch emails, or salespages, is to curate that
information or that that rawlanguage in such a way that a
cohesive sales message comes outof it. So this goes again, back
to Joe in a way but one of thethings that she said that really
struck home with me was the bestcopywriting is curation, not
(16:00):
creation. So you're insteadcurating the visceral pain
points that people have said toyou about why they feel like
they're being held back in theirin their consulting business?
And then why is it not growingthe way they want? And why are
they losing project afterproject, and then instead of
going in a vacuum and thinking,I'm going to use some
(16:22):
copywriting framework to write asales page start to finish?
Instead, it's more of anexercise of, here's all these
various pains that people havesaid, what are the major macro
trends that I can latch on to?
And then how do I turn whatthey've told me into a response
in the form of a sales page? Andthat's always been, I think, the
easiest way for me, because thenmy job is less about creation.
(16:44):
It's more about organizing. Youknow, these things that people
have told me directly?
Conor McCarthy (16:52):
That's fascinating. Yeah. Because,
well, in the other case, if youwere just trying to create out
of thin air, you would just beguessing really, yeah. And you
would more than likely getaround. An educated guess. I
hope you're enjoying thisepisode, and that there's some
actionable and insightful advicethat you can take out to your
business, helping you identifyand create those first 10
(17:14):
customers is what I do. So ifyou like what you hear on this
podcast and want moreinformation, including a bunch
of free resources on how to findyour first 10 customers and grow
your business, check outFirst10podcast.com, that's 10
one, zero, or find me on Twitter@thefirst10pod. Now, you
probably hear what I'm about tosay on every podcast you listen
(17:36):
to and it makes a really bigdifference to the show. If you
find this podcast in any wayuseful or enjoyable, I'd be so
grateful if you left me a reviewon iTunes, it really does make a
big difference in terms of otherpeople discovering the podcast.
Also, if you leave a review, youwill get to see your name and
the review in lights. What I'lldo is, I'll design your words
(17:56):
and post them online, taggingyou and your project along with
it. I know it's a pretty sweetdeal. Okay, let's get on with
the show. Okay, so so thenDouble Your Freelancing. So you
grew that and that that becamequite successful. I was there a
point at which you said, Okay, Iwant to get out of this, or I
need to get out of this orsomething else has come along, I
(18:17):
want to, I want to spend my timeor how did it work?
Brennan Dunn (18:20):
Yeah. Well, I did miss software. So I missed
having a software business. AndI was approached by a few
friends of mine who run verysuccessful companies saying can
we throw money at you to buildbecause what I done is I built a
kind of a bespokepersonalization platform for
(18:41):
double your freelancing wherethe idea was if a copywriter is
on my website, they're lookingat the double your freelancing
sales page. They would seetestimonials from other
copywriters instead of a mixedbag of like designers,
developers and so on. And alsothe language would be very
copywriter-y. So Y'know I'd usewords that they tend to use like
fee, rather than rate or budgetor something like that. So what
(19:07):
I end up would end up doing wasI ingest data that I'd get
through serving, and then usethat to influence sales pages
specifically. So you know, oneof my friends Anker, CEO of
teachable Nathan Berry andConvertKit and a few others,
basically got pulled togetherand gave money to start up a
(19:29):
company that would basicallysalsify, that custom code I'd
done. So brought on a cofounder, technical co founder
who helped me build it, raisethe money, hired a team to the
whole, like startup thing, stilldoing that now, but we're now
operating more as bootstrappersrather than infinite growth. And
yeah, I mean, that there wasreally I mean, the the year I
(19:51):
quit doing Double YourFreelancing it was hard, it was
very difficult for me because itwas a solo business just myself.
And in 2016, it made $684,000and I decided to stop doing it.
Which, yeah, again, partnerwasn't too too keen on.
(20:12):
Especially since I took a propernew startup founders salary, oh,
for RightMessage. But anyway,yeah, so I started, I started
RightMessage and it was a bit ofa challenge because I couldn't,
I couldn't use the cheat code ofhitting the Double Your
Freelancing audience and saying,sign up for this new thing I've
(20:32):
done. Because while there couldbe some on the Venn diagram of
people who, by person, website,personalization software and
freelancers, there might be someoverlap. It's not begun in any
respect. So in a way, I wasstarting from scratch, and that
I had to think, Okay, well, whatdo I do? I've got, I'm building
(20:53):
product. I've been in thisposition before I'm building a
product. I have an audience, butit's not the audience for this
product. Where do I start? Andthat's, that's, I'm sure that's
what would you get into now? Butyeah, that's positional.
Conor McCarthy (21:08):
Please keep going, this is good stuff. No,
and just maybe to help frame it?
Yeah. I mean, as we talkedabout, briefly, a lot of people
leveraged their previousaudience to jump into something
new. And so they have a little,like a little group of people
ready, ready to buy ready tostart with? So yeah, I mean,
what was the what did you getright? Or what did you get
wrong? I guess.
Brennan Dunn (21:28):
So I think what we got right was we originally
treated it, I treated it like Iwas selling an online course. So
I did the usual urgency tactics,and really pushed the people pre
ordering the software before wehad it ready. And because you
see this a lot with specificallysoftware companies, where
they'll have like a, a teaserpage, where you put in your
(21:49):
email, and then it goes silent.
You don't hear anything untilthey launch, if they launch. And
then six months down the line,you get an email from some
random startup company and youyou've forgotten who they are,
and you opt again. So what wedid was we sent out weekly
emails that talked about theproblem domain that we'd be
solving and kind of some earlydata that we had to share from
(22:12):
our own experiences. And thework we've done, were went on a
consulting basis doing thisstuff with other other clients,
because while I was doing DoubleYour Freelancing, both myself
and my business partner, we haddone a few one off consulting
gigs with companies liketeachable to pilot, the stuff
that I've been doing on my ownsite Double Your Freelancing on
(22:33):
other companies, just to makesure that, you know, it wasn't
just a one off thing, that andso but it got us a bit of
experience and a bit of data anda bit more of diversity than
just, hey, it worked for me. Soyep. So you know, we wrote it
weekly, we kind of use this as away to really figure out what
(22:55):
the product backlog had toinclude by sharing what we were
thinking with people and reallyencouraging dialogue, and back
and forth. And that worked well.
So that that worked. And like Imentioned, when we launched
properly, we had proper urgencyaround, if you sign up, you
know, this week, you'll get alifetime deal at this price. And
(23:17):
that that allowed us pretty muchwithin the first month to get
close to 10,000 monthlyrecurring revenue, which was
really good because it was a newbusiness, it was I couldn't you
use that old, you know, the oldaudience or the old customer
base, that definitely helped inhow we got the people onto the
email list, was we, one of thethings that stuck out to me from
(23:42):
Brian Harris, I don't know ifyou know who he is. He's very
big on borrowing other people'saudiences. So you know, what we
would do in the early days waswe would go to audience of
people are people who hadaudiences that were, you know,
people who like conversionoptimization, so the growth
(24:05):
hacker he kind of crowd alongwith people who are into like AV
testing and things like that.
And we would do guest posts. Idid a whole conference speaking
tour where I think I did abouteight different events giving a
talk at each one about theunderlying problem domain that
we were entering. So websitepersonalization and conversion
(24:26):
optimization when it comes tothat, like personalizing
content, and so on. And thatallowed us to get quite a few
1000 people on the list, prelaunch, and that's where when we
launched that's how we were ableto get well beyond the first 10
customers just by, you know,having built out that
excitement, and really not justyou know what, when we do a
guest post when we do a going onpodcast, or we'd go and speak at
(24:48):
an event. It wasn't about thesoftware it was about the you
know, what is the problem? Theproblem is the One Size Fits All
messaging is making it so a lotof people on your email list or
a lot of people on your websiteare trying to figure out
themselves, how does this applyto me? So what if you could
(25:08):
instead start thinking, How do Itailor, maybe the featured case
study or the headline, orsomething like that to be more
reflective of something I mightknow about the person viewing.
So if you're a copywriter, yousee a copywriting headline, if
the reason you join the freeemail course early on, was you
keep losing proposals? Well,that's what the headline when
(25:30):
pitching the product reflects,instead of maybe pitching or
reflecting something about valuepricing or you know, pricing on
your value or something whichwhich the product, the product
equally helps both needs. But Imight have one need, and you
might have a different need. Sothe positioning of the product
ends up being dynamic. So it wasreally talks about how you can
(25:50):
think about positioning not as astatic thing that your entire
business or your entire productis positioned. Instead, it's how
do we think about positioningkind of in real time. And that's
what the talks were about thatbuild up the excitement and the
interest, so that when we camein with the product, we didn't
need to both educate them, likeI had, then about why they need
(26:12):
it, and then try to sell them onthe actual product instead of
the education was already done.
The problem space was alreadyestablished, the potential was
already kind of highlighted. Andnow we just came in with an
offer of like, hey, if you'vebeen nodding your head with the
stuff I've been saying aboutdynamic positioning, and this
(26:32):
and that, we baked this intothis product, here it is and it
worked really well. Yeah.
Conor McCarthy (26:37):
Wow. That is, that is phenomenal. I love that
that's such a, it's such a kindof almost a wholesome way to to
approach it because that you'veseen this as well, where it's
like, you got to get pitched anidea first. You don't get
pitched on the problem first,which of course is the whole
reason we're here.
Brennan Dunn (26:55):
Yep. Yep. Yeah, it just allowed us to separate out
and really it became a matterof, and this is something I
still try to internalize we havean email course on RightMessage
that does the same thing thesedays, where we want to do
exactly what I just talkedabout, and then leave people
with, to go back to the JosephCampbell example, you mentioned,
(27:16):
to leave people with theshortcut versus the long roads,
long road would be the arduousmontage of scraping your knees
bunch and trying it out andfailing and this and that. Or
you hire the Sherpa, us, and weguide you easily and safely and
economically to that promisedland you want to get to, rather
(27:38):
than having you circled thedesert mindlessly for many years
trying to figure out how to dothis. So it was always like with
RightMessage our thinking was,we show people how important it
is to get data from your CRM inyour email database on your
website. So you can say, Conor,I know he's in Ireland, I know
this about him, I know thatabout him. And what we're going
to do is when he's looking atour product sales page, we're
(28:01):
gonna take bits and pieces likethe industry he's in or whatever
else, and swap a few things out.
So practically speaking, to dothat, you can either go out and
hire a developer and kind ofbuild the, the integration
between your website and your,you know, database and do all
that yourself, and you'reprobably going to get mess,
you're gonna mess up a fewtimes, and you're going to need
to deal with maintaining it. Oryou come over and pay us 100 a
(28:23):
month and we'll do it for you.
And that's basically how it waspitched at the end.
Conor McCarthy (28:32):
And what do people say about the product?
And this, I asked this at avery, almost a tactical way.
Because whenever I talk tofounders who are trying to put
together a positioning or somekind of value proposition, the
way they think about it is nothow people describe it, if that
makes sense. So what wouldpeople say about RightMessage?
Brennan Dunn (28:50):
Yeah, so that's, you know, funnily enough we,
when we started out, we we didexactly what I just talked about
the whole websitepersonalization thing, where
we've come to what we'verealized over the years, is that
in order to personalize, youneed to have segment data. So I
need to know Conor's in thisindustry. Most companies don't,
they don't segment in anymeaningful way. They don't know
(29:13):
how they don't have the data. Soslowly, we've been shifting away
from our core focus beingwebsite personalization to
audience in Richmond. And sowhere I'm going with this is
that we just did an exercise afew weeks back where I emailed
pretty much everyone from Create& Sell, which is one of the
(29:34):
businesses that my weeklynewsletter company or thing and
I said, Hey, if you're readingthis newsletter, you are the
ideal customer of RightMessage.
But I know most of you aren't,because I just there's, you
know, 2700 people on our list onthis list, 200 customers on
RightMessage, obviously there's,you know, there's a difference.
(29:56):
So, what I wanted to find outout was, had you heard about
RightMessage? Because I domention that, I don't push it
hard on that list, but I domention it from time to time?
And if so, what is it you thinkit does? And if you've used it,
what made you sign up? And ifyou haven't used it, why haven't
you signed up? Right? So it wasa very simple thing. And I got a
(30:17):
great amount of responses tothat. But the thing that really
struck home to me was that thebig thing and this is something
we're still trying to workthrough the big objection people
had was personalization, websitepersonalization. So thinking I'm
going to change this case studythis headline, this net, that
seems like a lot of work. That'slike a redesigning my website
(30:38):
kind of amount of effort interms of planning and strategy.
And then instead of oneheadline, I have five different
headline variations multipliedthroughout my entire site. And
you know that that was the bighold back, we want it to be less
enterprising, more self serve.
So if we were enterprise, itwould be fine. Because we could
(30:59):
just say, look, we'll we'll dothe we'll do the strategy work
for you like part of buyingright message would include the
consultation elements, and youknow, this and that, that you
need, and maybe copywritingassets and whatever else that
you need to do this, right. Sowe've been slowly shifting
toward being more of a leadgeneration and survey and quiz
(31:21):
platform. So that people can getthe segmentation data that they
need, in order to then reactthat by personalizing your
content, so we can find out,this is the problem that they're
struggling with. This is theirindustry, this is why they're
wanting to lose weight. This iswhy you know, whatever. And
then, because we realized we hada bit of a chicken and egg issue
(31:43):
early on where we were, it wasworking, we had customers. But
it was really hard to grow,because so few people had the
underlying data that they neededto personalize. So where I'm
going with all this is thatwe've started to realize that a
lot of people who know aboutRightMessage, see the old right
message, see the heavy,intimidating, a lot of strategy
(32:08):
work needed, I don't even knowif this will pay off. I don't
have the time, I just want tobuy something and have it work
for me immediately,RightMessage, which was our
version one. And we've done a,frankly, a pretty poor job
recently of trying to repositionourselves, not not dynamically
like I was talking about butholistically as a different
(32:30):
product that does somethingdifferent, that still does that
stuff. But the focus is more onsaying, go beyond just a first
name and an email address onyour email list. Find out
individually, what people want,why they're on your list, who
they are, and so on. So that youcan then use that on a macro
level to know what I need tocreate content about what I need
(32:50):
to create products about. But onan individual level. How do I
tell Conor? This is why heshould buy this thing versus
Jane why she should buy thatthing if that makes sense.
Conor McCarthy (33:01):
No, it does. It does. Thank you for sharing that
because it's actually not oftenthat we get into stories of of
pivoting or or repositioning orwhatever you want to call it. So
that's really interesting tohear how and why that's
happening.
Brennan Dunn (33:15):
Yeah, I mean, it really frankly, it boils down to
the original position would'veworked fine if we made it more
of an agency model with likehigh touch sales and that kind
of thing. And I did that for awhile early on in the early
days. But I really just havealways liked people just showing
up with a credit card, buying ontheir own without needing to
(33:35):
talk to me.
Conor McCarthy (33:36):
Yeah, that's pretty, pretty attractive.
Brennan Dunn (33:39):
Yeah.
Conor McCarthy (33:40):
What I'm finding interesting is that,
RightMessage, the way you'rethinking about it, and the way
you're repositioning it, is allabout kind of going deep on who
your customers are and what theyneed, and I suppose where
they're situated in the world.
And you seem to have a realtalent for talking to customers
through there, like numeroustimes in this conversation
(34:03):
anyway, it's, you've talkedabout reaching out to people
asking questions, listening tofeedback, changing things as you
go, when it comes to customerconversations, what but can you
share about how to do them well,or how to do them right?
Brennan Dunn (34:18):
So I don't know if you've heard of Sean D'Souza.
He's a New Zealand author, hewrote a book called The Brain
Audit and it's basically, hespoke at my event back with
Double Your Freelancing when Iwas doing conferences, and he
gave an incredible talk on likethe red bag framework or I
(34:44):
forgot what he calls it. Thebasically the long and short of
it is when it comes to somebodywho has a very elegant way of
teaching people how to go aboutcoming up with like, effective
testimonials, effective casestudies, effective copywriting
that is rooted in the, theactual needs that people have,
(35:07):
or the actual reason that peoplelike, you know, the thing that
immediately initially drew me tohim was he talked a lot about
how a lot of testimonials arethings like basically fluff like
oh RightMessage is such a greatcompany backed by a great team,
like that doesn't actually helpme. That might help me from like
the customer support angle, butfrom the will paying the money,
(35:27):
get me more money back. Thatdoesn't answer that question for
me, right. So he had a wholeframework on how to go about
asking the right questions thatwould lead to somebody so when
you're reaching out and saying,Hey, Conor, I would love a
testimonial or, you know, I'dlove to feature you as a case
study. Instead of just gettingConor doing the usual thing,
which is I think what a lot ofus do have like, you know, we
just want to say something thatlike, Oh, I love I love the
(35:49):
company, I love the brand blabla bla bla bla, like, he had a
certain way of asking the rightquestions that would then
ultimately be turned into theperfect ROI Focused testimonial
if that makes sense. So anyways,Sean D'souza's stuff is
brilliant. And, yeah, he layslow, but he's he's got great
(36:09):
stuff.
Conor McCarthy (36:09):
Okay, okay, I'll definitely check that out. Yeah.
I saw that Rob Fitzpatrick also,what he said about you was when
he was looking for, whenever heis searching for something on
email marketing, if he includesyour name, he'll get the best
answer.
Brennan Dunn (36:24):
That was nice.
Yeah, I was like, can I use thaton the homepage?
Conor McCarthy (36:29):
Which is great, and this was the case in point,
it's a great is a greattestimonial. Speaking of books,
are there any other books thatyou would recommend for people
who are starting businessesgrowing businesses?
Brennan Dunn (36:39):
So I'm gonna I, I don't read a lot of nonfiction.
I don't read a lot of businessbooks. I should, I do read a
good amount of nonfiction, butusually history, don't read a
lot of business books. So I'mactually horrible to ask that
question to. But um, yeah, Rob'sstuff is great. Rob Fitzpatrick
with Mom Test, which is afantastic book. And then he has
(37:01):
a book on workshops and one onwriting books. Yeah, to be
honest, I'm, I just don't read alot of business books.
Conor McCarthy (37:10):
No, I like it.
You just get to it, you actuallyjust go and build a business?
Brennan Dunn (37:13):
I think to be honest, a lot of them say the
same thing. And they could bedistilled down to a blog post or
two, to get across what they'retrying to say. Yeah, but
publishers want, you know,60,000 words so.
Conor McCarthy (37:25):
Yes, unfortunately, there is the
okay, I've got it after threepages. It's like, I've got it
but there's a whole book here.
As a last question, I usuallyask my guests. What advice would
you give to someone who wassetting out today to find their
first 10 customers?
Brennan Dunn (37:40):
Yeah, I think the best thing would be to do the,
you know, where can you go toget in front of people who have
already done the hard work ofgetting your ideal customers? So
the the way that I think ismakes does the easiest way to do
that, I think, and this workedfor us at ripeness, too, was
it's hard if I just coldapproach somebody and say, can I
(38:03):
go on your podcast? Or can Iwrite a guest post for you?
Because who knows what thisperson is? And are they just
gonna promote the heck out ofwhatever they have? Will they
give anything of actual value?
So what I found worked well,historically, for me has been
kind of like that nine lessonemail course I talked about
right that I've done. You know,with Double Your Freelancing,
it's called charge what you'reworth nine lesson email course.
(38:24):
And what I would do is, I wouldgo back to when I was doing the
podcast rounds, and doing guestposts and conferences and stuff
like that, I would, I wouldbasically pitch an abridged
version of the email course asthe thing I want to talk about
on the show. So I go to the hostand I'd say instead of just
saying, Hey, I'm Brennan, I'dlove to go on your show. I know,
(38:45):
some stuff about freelancing.
Instead, I'd say, I've, I've gotthis nine lesson email course a
lot of people have reallyenjoyed. It's about, you know,
here's, here's the page thatgoes into more detail about it.
But, you know, it talks abouteverything from how do you go
about quantifying the value of aproject to how do you turn that
into a specific price or set ofpackages, and so on. And I'd
(39:06):
love to focus in just on thequantifying the value of a
project like so I'd love to comeon your show. And since you've
talked a lot on your you know,on previous episodes about this,
Nat I'd love to show yousomething that I teach in the
course, that is a really goodframework that anyone can use to
figure out when a client comesto you and says I need a website
designed, how to figure out whatthat website is worth for the
(39:29):
client. And that historicallyhas gone over really well
compared to just the ambiguousI'd love to go on your show
because it shows something ofpackagable value that you know,
Brennan's gonna come on and he'sgoing to share this and you will
look better to your audiencebecause now they can quantify
the value of a project lead orsomething.
Conor McCarthy (39:49):
Hmm. So that is that is so important and I've
gotten a lot of, of the of thosekinds of Hey, Can I be on your
show type emails. Yeah, and it'sjust you know, it's yeah, it's a
it's a tricky one because it'skind of like, to your point
earlier about, let's saytestimonials, like when you're
reading a testimonial, you'rethinking, well, what's in this
(40:11):
for me like, how do I use thisproduct? How do I use
RightMessage to get mesomewhere? And what you've just
described, there is a greatframework for showing, for
helping someone else throughthat, like that thinking process
of well, how can I use this? Youare giving them all the answers.
Brennan Dunn (40:28):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And by the end of it,
too, I don't do this anymorenowadays. So I don't have, I'm
not going on and talk aboutpricing. But I used to have
freepricingcourse.com. So I'dend the conversation with
Y'know, yeah, over the last30-40 minutes, we just talked a
good amount about quantifyingthe value of a project, If you
want to go deeper, I have a freenine lesson nine day email
(40:50):
course that goes a lot more indepth, and I was able to over
the last half hour. And thatwould be my funnel, if you will,
where people would go into thatthat would then work on
establishing the underlyingproblem, like we talked about
before, establishing thatproblem talking about the need
to rid yourself of that problem,pointed the solution and then
(41:10):
come in with that Campbellesqueshortcut versus long road. And
the shortcut leads to theproduct, the paid product, and
that's that was basically mymethod of growing, that business
was just doing that again andagain.
Conor McCarthy (41:24):
I love it. I also love that we reference
Joseph Campbell a couple oftimes in this call. I like that
a lot. Thank you so so much foryour time and for sharing all
that expertise that you'vegained over the years. You're
very kind.
Brennan Dunn (41:38):
Of course yeah.
Conor McCarthy (41:39):
All right. Talk to you soon.
Brennan Dunn (41:40):
Thanks, Conor.
Long Road would be the arduous scraping your knees
bunch and trying it out andfailing or you hire the sherpa,
us and we guide you easily andsafely and economically to that
promised land we want to get to,rather than having you circled
the desert mindlessly.
Conor McCarthy (00:25):
Hello, and welcome to season four of the
first 10 podcast. I'm your host,Conor McCarthy, and I help
people start and grow theirbusinesses. I do that through
joint ventures collaborations,coaching, and online workshops.
In each episode of this podcast,I interview business builders
about the early days of startinga business, about how they found
their first 10 customers and gotoff the ground, so that you can
(00:45):
learn what works and whatdoesn't. Check out my website at
ConorMcCarthy.me for moredetails. My guest today is
Brennan Dunn. I've interviewedquite a few serial entrepreneurs
in this podcast and Brennanstands out as someone who went
from the world of software intofreelancing, and back to
software again. He founded aproject management platform
called Plan scope, then jumpedinto creating the famous
(01:06):
freelancing community calledDouble Your Freelancing before
turning his attention to RightMessage, which helps you uncover
who's on your website, what theydo, and what they're looking for
from you. We get into all ofthese businesses in great depth
today. On this podcast, Brennanshares loads of interesting
learnings from his extensiveexperience starting and growing
these businesses and fromwatching others do the same. For
(01:26):
instance, we cover how to listento and talk to your audience,
how to build with your audience,making the leap from non SaaS to
SaaS businesses, bootstrapping aSaaS, positioning your product
in real time and the importanceof segmenting your market and
enriching what you know aboutyour audience. Lastly, Brennan
shares the absolute best way tofund your next trip to Ireland.
(01:48):
So please do enjoy this episodewith Brennan Dunn and thank you
so much for listening.
First of all, Brennan, welcometo the show and thank you very
much for taking the time to bewith us here today.
Brennan Dunn (02:02):
Yeah, thank you for having me, Conor.
Conor McCarthy (02:04):
Do you want to just give us a quick 60 or 90
second overview of you and yourcurrent business?
Brennan Dunn (02:08):
Yep. So currently, I'm running day to day two
different companies. One iscalled Right Message, we do lead
segmentation and audience kindof enrichment for lack of a
better way of putting it. Nowthat's a horrible way of
elevator pitching it. But myother you know, I do that I co
founded that company about fiveyears ago. Now I'm also involved
(02:29):
in a more of a personality, kindof driven business called create
and sell, where it's really justa weekly newsletter, backed by a
few different video courses onemail marketing, and just kind
of marketing in general for theCreator audience. And before
that, though, I I started acompany called Double Your
(02:50):
Freelancing. And I'm stilltechnically the owner of it, but
my wife actually runs it thesedays. And I also have started
and sold another softwarecompany called Planscope about
eight or nine years ago now.
Conor McCarthy (03:05):
You've, you've been busy.
Brennan Dunn (03:07):
Yeah, yeah and I haven't even touched on the
consulting stuff. So I didagency stuff way back when but
yeah, okay, another life.
Conor McCarthy (03:15):
This season of the first 10 podcast, I'm really
focused on people who have builtbusiness, like serial
entrepreneurs have built anumber of businesses. So maybe
let's go back in time, even tothe start of Double Your
Freelancing, let's say yeah, andmaybe we could just talk for a
second about what it was like toget your first customers for
that business.
Brennan Dunn (03:33):
Yeah, so funny enough with that business, it
really, it was more of anaccidental business. Because I
had, I was running Planscope,which is my first software
company that I started afterleaving my agency and not
wanting to do work with clientsanymore, I wanted to do the
whole get a lot of people payingyou $20 a month. So I started
(03:53):
plan scope, which was a projectmanagement, software for
freelancers and agencies. So Istarted writing content publicly
about things I've learnedbuilding an agency and things on
pricing and getting clients andthings like that, hoping that it
would drive customers toPlanscope. Well, that didn't
work as well. What did workthough, was people saying can I
(04:15):
get more of the content? Can Iget more help on you know,
getting clients or writingproposals or what not. And that
actually led to Double YourFreelancing emerging as from the
from the content marketing armof this software company called
Planscope into a proper businessand when it came to getting the
first customer that really, thehonest truth was I had been
(04:42):
doing the content marketing sideof things for originally
Planscope, but then it morphedinto this newsletter. And I
didn't have any paid productsfor that outside of Planscope.
So what I actually ended updoing funnily enough, since your
your Irish went to go at thetime to this, this conference in
(05:03):
Ireland called Fun conf. I don'tknow if you ever heard of it?
Yeah. So this is about 10 yearsago now. And I didn't have the
budget for it because I had a,you know, I had quitted the
lucrative consulting gig,bootstrapped this software
company and you know, the thingabout monthly recurring revenue
is it's, it's predictable in anice way. But it's also very
(05:24):
steady. So if you have tosuddenly get to Ireland, and pay
for an expensive conference,your partner doesn't always
enjoy, you know, you're comingup with you know, that that
reason for especially one of theconference is called Fun conf.
So I ended up pre selling ae-book at the time called Double
(05:45):
Your Freelancing, right? Whichmy thinking was, I was reading a
lot about pricing, people seemto like it, they would reply
back and, you know, engage withme and ask for more information.
And, this is back when the timewas really an open book and
saying, if you want to jump on aSkype call with me, how about
it. And also, this was whenSkype was still really popular,
(06:06):
I guess. So that led to me,effectively selling I forgot the
exact year. I actually wrote aarticle about it way back when,
but if something around 20,000ish, dollars and pre orders for
this ebook I had to create thatallowed me to fund my trip to
(06:29):
Ireland. So that was the firsttime I did that. And really what
I did with that, and why I thinkit worked well, and how I got
customers was I was cadence. Soevery week like clockwork,
people got an in depth, originalpiece of content for me. And
this was before, I think themodern newsletter rush. This was
back when I kind of had, in away a monopoly on teaching
(06:53):
freelancers. I mean, this was 10or 11 years ago now. And I was
doing it over email,predominantly. So what I ended
up doing was I really optimizedfor sales in a very casual way.
So what I mean by this is, Ididn't have a sales page or
anything like that. Instead,what I would do is at the end of
(07:15):
every weekly newsletter, I'd puta little PS that said, I'm
thinking about writing a more indepth, you know, framework, if
you will, on pricing, and salesfor freelancers. It's still
something I'm exploring, but ifthat might be of interest to you
reply, and I'll share a bitmore. So it was kind of like a,
(07:35):
it was a bit of a teaser in thesense that if they wanted to
find out actually more aboutwhat I was thinking they had to
kind of opt in again, in a way,this time through an email
reply. So people would reply tothat. And then what I used that
for was to really, you know,suss out exactly what would be
in this book. So people wouldreply, and then I'd have like, a
(07:56):
canned set of bullet points thatI would just reply back with,
after that, of here's what I'mthinking is this, you know, I'd
love to hear also a bit moreabout kind of what's your
history when it comes to, whenyou get a new client lead? What
is it you do? How do you goabout thinking about the project
and pricing and proposalwriting, and so on. And what was
(08:17):
really nice was I ended up justeventually dropping my paypal
email address and saying, if youwant to preorder this, send it
here. And I'll make sure you getit. And also, as I'm writing the
book, every week, I'll sendanother email to you, that's
really just summing up what I'veworked on that week. So it
wasn't just I'll take your moneyrun. And hopefully you'll get a
(08:38):
PDF at some point, it was moreof a you're paying for a
building kind of not in the openentirely, but a a behind the
scenes access to me creatingthis resource that I think
you'll really enjoy. And whenthe resource is finalized,
you'll get the finished product.
And that's a lot to that. Andnow that book has turned into a
(08:59):
video horse and now it's hadmore than 10,000 people buy it
in the last 10 years. So yeah,eventually ultimately, it's done
for me on a bit more money thanmy software company has afforded
me so I could go to Inishmoreoff of Galway
Conor McCarthy (09:19):
That is such a great story. It's like the the
hero's journey, Y'know, theJoseph Campbell You know, this
island off the coast of Ireland.
How am I gonna do it?
Brennan Dunn (09:28):
The montage bit I don't know what part that would
be, must be the weekly emailsbut yeah.
Conor McCarthy (09:32):
Yeah, that's that's so interesting, and now
of course, building public is athing now, it's a big thing but
you were really doing it throughemail from the from the
beginning. You were listeningand asking questions.
Brennan Dunn (09:45):
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I yeah, I mean, it was
more of a because before that,to really be fully transparent
my background before gettinginto Plantscope and getting into
Let's Double Your Freelancingwas doing you know, I ran an
agency, got it up to 11employees and, you know, did the
whole, like I was effectivelythe salesperson for the company.
(10:07):
And I was used to emailexchanges back and forth. And
one thing I thought was reallyinteresting was well, what if I
could, instead, instead of justsending out these broadcast
emails and expecting them to beeffectively read only, what if I
incentivize people to activelyreply to them, especially if
(10:28):
it's, if it could lead tosomething potentially bigger,
like them pre ordering thisthing I might be working on. So
you know, my thinking was alwaysand still to this day is, is
keep your ear to the ground andlisten, and build systems that
enable you to listen better. SoI do this. Now, when somebody
joins my list. I specificallycall them out and ask them, hey,
(10:53):
you know, thanks for joining us,let us know in a sentence or two
about who you are and what youspecifically need me to send you
over the next few weeks, so youdon't unsubscribe. And then that
leads to really, I have a wholenotion of database. Now this is
auto populated, because I'mdoing this through a forum
instead of a reply. But I have awhole, like, if I want to figure
(11:15):
out what to write, just go intonotion go to this table. And as
people join the list, it getspopulated and it's kind of voice
to customer raw data that I canthen say, you know, Conor wrote
in and said, blah, blah, blah,blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah. And then I reply,basically in an e-mail to you.
But I'm also using that as anevergreen asset that can then be
(11:36):
pushed to the site, it can besent out to the list. Yeah, I
mean, and that's, that's kind ofbeen my MO for many, many years
now.
Conor McCarthy (11:42):
Wow. That's, that's so that's it's an immense
trove of gold, right? There islike just those conversations
you have, and to track them andrecord them and to be able to
answer to one person, I supposein the style of which of course,
everyone, like if one person hasa problem, lots of people have
the problem. How did you, whenit comes to copywriting itself,
(12:06):
and it's a bit of a left turn,but we don't have to talk about
it for long, but have you alwaysjust kind of honed your own
style when it comes to writing?
Or have you ever done any kindof training in it?
Brennan Dunn (12:17):
Yeah, so you know, before doing what I do now, my
university background was Istudied the classics. So ancient
Greek and Latin literature and alot of literature, a lot of
reading and writing, which ledto a very Oh, way of writing
(12:38):
that isn't really conducive toonline marketing, sort of that
way. So I had to I had to changethe way I wrote to be, I think
more, you know, my thinking nowis just right, like I speak. And
I've, I've gotten a lot of helpreally over the years
specifically from people likeJoanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers,
where she she put out a forgotwhat it was called. But before
(13:02):
she's doing what she was doingnowadays, she used to be pretty
active on Hacker News, and wrotea series of ebooks on like, I
think, yeah, well, now it's nowshe's called Copy Hackers. But
it was it was basically called,like, you know, how to hack
copyrights. Right? Like so forif you're a developer or
engineering minded person, howdo you think about tapping into
(13:26):
human psychology through copy ina way that makes sense to the
coder basically, is kind of washer thing, which resonated a lot
with me. So, Joanna has beenbeen amazing over the years and
just getting me a bit moreknowledgeable on like, the
proper frameworks of, you know,of historical copywriting. So
(13:47):
what what the greats havepioneered and you know, ABC and
all the different acronyms thatthat exists in the copywriting
world. She helped to kind ofdistill that down into something
that was, yeah.
Conor McCarthy (13:59):
Yeah, I'm always fascinated with, with copy and
how people go about learning itbecause it is, in the absence of
you, in person, your words, doall the the speaking and the
talking, so to speak.
Brennan Dunn (14:11):
Yeah. Well, I think one of the things I love
about the when you have thesethese systems in place that get
language from readersspecifically, I mean, one of the
things I do is I have an emailcourse for Double Your
Freelancing it leads to a paidproduct. So people opt in an
email course. And then they getnine lessons and then they get
pitched in the product. What Ido with the email courses
(14:33):
intentionally rooted in the samepain points and problems that
the product is so when peoplejoin the email course, it's on
pricing. I asked him a modifiedversion, that question that I
mentioned earlier, thatspecifically about what is the
pricing challenge that you'rehoping that this free course
will help you overcome in thenext 10 days? So you know, I've
(14:56):
accumulated many 1000s ofresponses to that. But I don't
actively look through it as muchas I used to any longer. But it
helped give me not only anindicator of what what how, you
know, these kind of treat theseis, this is the this is the
benchmark that people areexpecting. And at the end of it,
(15:16):
I asked the same question at theend of that nine lesson email
course that says, did what Itaught you over the last nine
days, did it match what you toldme, right like that you needed
or what you thought you'd begetting in this. And what that's
given me is a whole wealth of,in your own words, voice of
(15:37):
customer data, that then my jobas a copywriter, whether it's
writing pitch emails, or salespages, is to curate that
information or that that rawlanguage in such a way that a
cohesive sales message comes outof it. So this goes again, back
to Joe in a way but one of thethings that she said that really
struck home with me was the bestcopywriting is curation, not
(16:00):
creation. So you're insteadcurating the visceral pain
points that people have said toyou about why they feel like
they're being held back in theirin their consulting business?
And then why is it not growingthe way they want? And why are
they losing project afterproject, and then instead of
going in a vacuum and thinking,I'm going to use some
(16:22):
copywriting framework to write asales page start to finish?
Instead, it's more of anexercise of, here's all these
various pains that people havesaid, what are the major macro
trends that I can latch on to?
And then how do I turn whatthey've told me into a response
in the form of a sales page? Andthat's always been, I think, the
easiest way for me, because thenmy job is less about creation.
(16:44):
It's more about organizing. Youknow, these things that people
have told me directly?
Conor McCarthy (16:52):
That's fascinating. Yeah. Because,
well, in the other case, if youwere just trying to create out
of thin air, you would just beguessing really, yeah. And you
would more than likely getaround. An educated guess. I
hope you're enjoying thisepisode, and that there's some
actionable and insightful advicethat you can take out to your
business, helping you identifyand create those first 10
(17:14):
customers is what I do. So ifyou like what you hear on this
podcast and want moreinformation, including a bunch
of free resources on how to findyour first 10 customers and grow
your business, check outFirst10podcast.com, that's 10
one, zero, or find me on Twitter@thefirst10pod. Now, you
probably hear what I'm about tosay on every podcast you listen
(17:36):
to and it makes a really bigdifference to the show. If you
find this podcast in any wayuseful or enjoyable, I'd be so
grateful if you left me a reviewon iTunes, it really does make a
big difference in terms of otherpeople discovering the podcast.
Also, if you leave a review, youwill get to see your name and
the review in lights. What I'lldo is, I'll design your words
(17:56):
and post them online, taggingyou and your project along with
it. I know it's a pretty sweetdeal. Okay, let's get on with
the show. Okay, so so thenDouble Your Freelancing. So you
grew that and that that becamequite successful. I was there a
point at which you said, Okay, Iwant to get out of this, or I
need to get out of this orsomething else has come along, I
(18:17):
want to, I want to spend my timeor how did it work?
Brennan Dunn (18:20):
Yeah. Well, I did miss software. So I missed
having a software business. AndI was approached by a few
friends of mine who run verysuccessful companies saying can
we throw money at you to buildbecause what I done is I built a
kind of a bespokepersonalization platform for
(18:41):
double your freelancing wherethe idea was if a copywriter is
on my website, they're lookingat the double your freelancing
sales page. They would seetestimonials from other
copywriters instead of a mixedbag of like designers,
developers and so on. And alsothe language would be very
copywriter-y. So Y'know I'd usewords that they tend to use like
fee, rather than rate or budgetor something like that. So what
(19:07):
I end up would end up doing wasI ingest data that I'd get
through serving, and then usethat to influence sales pages
specifically. So you know, oneof my friends Anker, CEO of
teachable Nathan Berry andConvertKit and a few others,
basically got pulled togetherand gave money to start up a
(19:29):
company that would basicallysalsify, that custom code I'd
done. So brought on a cofounder, technical co founder
who helped me build it, raisethe money, hired a team to the
whole, like startup thing, stilldoing that now, but we're now
operating more as bootstrappersrather than infinite growth. And
yeah, I mean, that there wasreally I mean, the the year I
(19:51):
quit doing Double YourFreelancing it was hard, it was
very difficult for me because itwas a solo business just myself.
And in 2016, it made $684,000and I decided to stop doing it.
Which, yeah, again, partnerwasn't too too keen on.
(20:12):
Especially since I took a propernew startup founders salary, oh,
for RightMessage. But anyway,yeah, so I started, I started
RightMessage and it was a bit ofa challenge because I couldn't,
I couldn't use the cheat code ofhitting the Double Your
Freelancing audience and saying,sign up for this new thing I've
(20:32):
done. Because while there couldbe some on the Venn diagram of
people who, by person, website,personalization software and
freelancers, there might be someoverlap. It's not begun in any
respect. So in a way, I wasstarting from scratch, and that
I had to think, Okay, well, whatdo I do? I've got, I'm building
(20:53):
product. I've been in thisposition before I'm building a
product. I have an audience, butit's not the audience for this
product. Where do I start? Andthat's, that's, I'm sure that's
what would you get into now? Butyeah, that's positional.
Conor McCarthy (21:08):
Please keep going, this is good stuff. No,
and just maybe to help frame it?
Yeah. I mean, as we talkedabout, briefly, a lot of people
leveraged their previousaudience to jump into something
new. And so they have a little,like a little group of people
ready, ready to buy ready tostart with? So yeah, I mean,
what was the what did you getright? Or what did you get
wrong? I guess.
Brennan Dunn (21:28):
So I think what we got right was we originally
treated it, I treated it like Iwas selling an online course. So
I did the usual urgency tactics,and really pushed the people pre
ordering the software before wehad it ready. And because you
see this a lot with specificallysoftware companies, where
they'll have like a, a teaserpage, where you put in your
(21:49):
email, and then it goes silent.
You don't hear anything untilthey launch, if they launch. And
then six months down the line,you get an email from some
random startup company and youyou've forgotten who they are,
and you opt again. So what wedid was we sent out weekly
emails that talked about theproblem domain that we'd be
solving and kind of some earlydata that we had to share from
(22:12):
our own experiences. And thework we've done, were went on a
consulting basis doing thisstuff with other other clients,
because while I was doing DoubleYour Freelancing, both myself
and my business partner, we haddone a few one off consulting
gigs with companies liketeachable to pilot, the stuff
that I've been doing on my ownsite Double Your Freelancing on
(22:33):
other companies, just to makesure that, you know, it wasn't
just a one off thing, that andso but it got us a bit of
experience and a bit of data anda bit more of diversity than
just, hey, it worked for me. Soyep. So you know, we wrote it
weekly, we kind of use this as away to really figure out what
(22:55):
the product backlog had toinclude by sharing what we were
thinking with people and reallyencouraging dialogue, and back
and forth. And that worked well.
So that that worked. And like Imentioned, when we launched
properly, we had proper urgencyaround, if you sign up, you
know, this week, you'll get alifetime deal at this price. And
(23:17):
that that allowed us pretty muchwithin the first month to get
close to 10,000 monthlyrecurring revenue, which was
really good because it was a newbusiness, it was I couldn't you
use that old, you know, the oldaudience or the old customer
base, that definitely helped inhow we got the people onto the
email list, was we, one of thethings that stuck out to me from
(23:42):
Brian Harris, I don't know ifyou know who he is. He's very
big on borrowing other people'saudiences. So you know, what we
would do in the early days waswe would go to audience of
people are people who hadaudiences that were, you know,
people who like conversionoptimization, so the growth
(24:05):
hacker he kind of crowd alongwith people who are into like AV
testing and things like that.
And we would do guest posts. Idid a whole conference speaking
tour where I think I did abouteight different events giving a
talk at each one about theunderlying problem domain that
we were entering. So websitepersonalization and conversion
(24:26):
optimization when it comes tothat, like personalizing
content, and so on. And thatallowed us to get quite a few
1000 people on the list, prelaunch, and that's where when we
launched that's how we were ableto get well beyond the first 10
customers just by, you know,having built out that
excitement, and really not justyou know what, when we do a
guest post when we do a going onpodcast, or we'd go and speak at
(24:48):
an event. It wasn't about thesoftware it was about the you
know, what is the problem? Theproblem is the One Size Fits All
messaging is making it so a lotof people on your email list or
a lot of people on your websiteare trying to figure out
themselves, how does this applyto me? So what if you could
(25:08):
instead start thinking, How do Itailor, maybe the featured case
study or the headline, orsomething like that to be more
reflective of something I mightknow about the person viewing.
So if you're a copywriter, yousee a copywriting headline, if
the reason you join the freeemail course early on, was you
keep losing proposals? Well,that's what the headline when
(25:30):
pitching the product reflects,instead of maybe pitching or
reflecting something about valuepricing or you know, pricing on
your value or something whichwhich the product, the product
equally helps both needs. But Imight have one need, and you
might have a different need. Sothe positioning of the product
ends up being dynamic. So it wasreally talks about how you can
(25:50):
think about positioning not as astatic thing that your entire
business or your entire productis positioned. Instead, it's how
do we think about positioningkind of in real time. And that's
what the talks were about thatbuild up the excitement and the
interest, so that when we camein with the product, we didn't
need to both educate them, likeI had, then about why they need
(26:12):
it, and then try to sell them onthe actual product instead of
the education was already done.
The problem space was alreadyestablished, the potential was
already kind of highlighted. Andnow we just came in with an
offer of like, hey, if you'vebeen nodding your head with the
stuff I've been saying aboutdynamic positioning, and this
(26:32):
and that, we baked this intothis product, here it is and it
worked really well. Yeah.
Conor McCarthy (26:37):
Wow. That is, that is phenomenal. I love that
that's such a, it's such a kindof almost a wholesome way to to
approach it because that you'veseen this as well, where it's
like, you got to get pitched anidea first. You don't get
pitched on the problem first,which of course is the whole
reason we're here.
Brennan Dunn (26:55):
Yep. Yep. Yeah, it just allowed us to separate out
and really it became a matterof, and this is something I
still try to internalize we havean email course on RightMessage
that does the same thing thesedays, where we want to do
exactly what I just talkedabout, and then leave people
with, to go back to the JosephCampbell example, you mentioned,
(27:16):
to leave people with theshortcut versus the long roads,
long road would be the arduousmontage of scraping your knees
bunch and trying it out andfailing and this and that. Or
you hire the Sherpa, us, and weguide you easily and safely and
economically to that promisedland you want to get to, rather
(27:38):
than having you circled thedesert mindlessly for many years
trying to figure out how to dothis. So it was always like with
RightMessage our thinking was,we show people how important it
is to get data from your CRM inyour email database on your
website. So you can say, Conor,I know he's in Ireland, I know
this about him, I know thatabout him. And what we're going
to do is when he's looking atour product sales page, we're
(28:01):
gonna take bits and pieces likethe industry he's in or whatever
else, and swap a few things out.
So practically speaking, to dothat, you can either go out and
hire a developer and kind ofbuild the, the integration
between your website and your,you know, database and do all
that yourself, and you'reprobably going to get mess,
you're gonna mess up a fewtimes, and you're going to need
to deal with maintaining it. Oryou come over and pay us 100 a
(28:23):
month and we'll do it for you.
And that's basically how it waspitched at the end.
Conor McCarthy (28:32):
And what do people say about the product?
And this, I asked this at avery, almost a tactical way.
Because whenever I talk tofounders who are trying to put
together a positioning or somekind of value proposition, the
way they think about it is nothow people describe it, if that
makes sense. So what wouldpeople say about RightMessage?
Brennan Dunn (28:50):
Yeah, so that's, you know, funnily enough we,
when we started out, we we didexactly what I just talked about
the whole websitepersonalization thing, where
we've come to what we'verealized over the years, is that
in order to personalize, youneed to have segment data. So I
need to know Conor's in thisindustry. Most companies don't,
they don't segment in anymeaningful way. They don't know
(29:13):
how they don't have the data. Soslowly, we've been shifting away
from our core focus beingwebsite personalization to
audience in Richmond. And sowhere I'm going with this is
that we just did an exercise afew weeks back where I emailed
pretty much everyone from Create& Sell, which is one of the
(29:34):
businesses that my weeklynewsletter company or thing and
I said, Hey, if you're readingthis newsletter, you are the
ideal customer of RightMessage.
But I know most of you aren't,because I just there's, you
know, 2700 people on our list onthis list, 200 customers on
RightMessage, obviously there's,you know, there's a difference.
(29:56):
So, what I wanted to find outout was, had you heard about
RightMessage? Because I domention that, I don't push it
hard on that list, but I domention it from time to time?
And if so, what is it you thinkit does? And if you've used it,
what made you sign up? And ifyou haven't used it, why haven't
you signed up? Right? So it wasa very simple thing. And I got a
(30:17):
great amount of responses tothat. But the thing that really
struck home to me was that thebig thing and this is something
we're still trying to workthrough the big objection people
had was personalization, websitepersonalization. So thinking I'm
going to change this case studythis headline, this net, that
seems like a lot of work. That'slike a redesigning my website
(30:38):
kind of amount of effort interms of planning and strategy.
And then instead of oneheadline, I have five different
headline variations multipliedthroughout my entire site. And
you know that that was the bighold back, we want it to be less
enterprising, more self serve.
So if we were enterprise, itwould be fine. Because we could
(30:59):
just say, look, we'll we'll dothe we'll do the strategy work
for you like part of buyingright message would include the
consultation elements, and youknow, this and that, that you
need, and maybe copywritingassets and whatever else that
you need to do this, right. Sowe've been slowly shifting
toward being more of a leadgeneration and survey and quiz
(31:21):
platform. So that people can getthe segmentation data that they
need, in order to then reactthat by personalizing your
content, so we can find out,this is the problem that they're
struggling with. This is theirindustry, this is why they're
wanting to lose weight. This iswhy you know, whatever. And
then, because we realized we hada bit of a chicken and egg issue
(31:43):
early on where we were, it wasworking, we had customers. But
it was really hard to grow,because so few people had the
underlying data that they neededto personalize. So where I'm
going with all this is thatwe've started to realize that a
lot of people who know aboutRightMessage, see the old right
message, see the heavy,intimidating, a lot of strategy
(32:08):
work needed, I don't even knowif this will pay off. I don't
have the time, I just want tobuy something and have it work
for me immediately,RightMessage, which was our
version one. And we've done a,frankly, a pretty poor job
recently of trying to repositionourselves, not not dynamically
like I was talking about butholistically as a different
(32:30):
product that does somethingdifferent, that still does that
stuff. But the focus is more onsaying, go beyond just a first
name and an email address onyour email list. Find out
individually, what people want,why they're on your list, who
they are, and so on. So that youcan then use that on a macro
level to know what I need tocreate content about what I need
(32:50):
to create products about. But onan individual level. How do I
tell Conor? This is why heshould buy this thing versus
Jane why she should buy thatthing if that makes sense.
Conor McCarthy (33:01):
No, it does. It does. Thank you for sharing that
because it's actually not oftenthat we get into stories of of
pivoting or or repositioning orwhatever you want to call it. So
that's really interesting tohear how and why that's
happening.
Brennan Dunn (33:15):
Yeah, I mean, it really frankly, it boils down to
the original position would'veworked fine if we made it more
of an agency model with likehigh touch sales and that kind
of thing. And I did that for awhile early on in the early
days. But I really just havealways liked people just showing
up with a credit card, buying ontheir own without needing to
(33:35):
talk to me.
Conor McCarthy (33:36):
Yeah, that's pretty, pretty attractive.
Brennan Dunn (33:39):
Yeah.
Conor McCarthy (33:40):
What I'm finding interesting is that,
RightMessage, the way you'rethinking about it, and the way
you're repositioning it, is allabout kind of going deep on who
your customers are and what theyneed, and I suppose where
they're situated in the world.
And you seem to have a realtalent for talking to customers
through there, like numeroustimes in this conversation
(34:03):
anyway, it's, you've talkedabout reaching out to people
asking questions, listening tofeedback, changing things as you
go, when it comes to customerconversations, what but can you
share about how to do them well,or how to do them right?
Brennan Dunn (34:18):
So I don't know if you've heard of Sean D'Souza.
He's a New Zealand author, hewrote a book called The Brain
Audit and it's basically, hespoke at my event back with
Double Your Freelancing when Iwas doing conferences, and he
gave an incredible talk on likethe red bag framework or I
(34:44):
forgot what he calls it. Thebasically the long and short of
it is when it comes to somebodywho has a very elegant way of
teaching people how to go aboutcoming up with like, effective
testimonials, effective casestudies, effective copywriting
that is rooted in the, theactual needs that people have,
(35:07):
or the actual reason that peoplelike, you know, the thing that
immediately initially drew me tohim was he talked a lot about
how a lot of testimonials arethings like basically fluff like
oh RightMessage is such a greatcompany backed by a great team,
like that doesn't actually helpme. That might help me from like
the customer support angle, butfrom the will paying the money,
(35:27):
get me more money back. Thatdoesn't answer that question for
me, right. So he had a wholeframework on how to go about
asking the right questions thatwould lead to somebody so when
you're reaching out and saying,Hey, Conor, I would love a
testimonial or, you know, I'dlove to feature you as a case
study. Instead of just gettingConor doing the usual thing,
which is I think what a lot ofus do have like, you know, we
just want to say something thatlike, Oh, I love I love the
(35:49):
company, I love the brand blabla bla bla bla, like, he had a
certain way of asking the rightquestions that would then
ultimately be turned into theperfect ROI Focused testimonial
if that makes sense. So anyways,Sean D'souza's stuff is
brilliant. And, yeah, he layslow, but he's he's got great
(36:09):
stuff.
Conor McCarthy (36:09):
Okay, okay, I'll definitely check that out. Yeah.
I saw that Rob Fitzpatrick also,what he said about you was when
he was looking for, whenever heis searching for something on
email marketing, if he includesyour name, he'll get the best
answer.
Brennan Dunn (36:24):
That was nice.
Yeah, I was like, can I use thaton the homepage?
Conor McCarthy (36:29):
Which is great, and this was the case in point,
it's a great is a greattestimonial. Speaking of books,
are there any other books thatyou would recommend for people
who are starting businessesgrowing businesses?
Brennan Dunn (36:39):
So I'm gonna I, I don't read a lot of nonfiction.
I don't read a lot of businessbooks. I should, I do read a
good amount of nonfiction, butusually history, don't read a
lot of business books. So I'mactually horrible to ask that
question to. But um, yeah, Rob'sstuff is great. Rob Fitzpatrick
with Mom Test, which is afantastic book. And then he has
(37:01):
a book on workshops and one onwriting books. Yeah, to be
honest, I'm, I just don't read alot of business books.
Conor McCarthy (37:10):
No, I like it.
You just get to it, you actuallyjust go and build a business?
Brennan Dunn (37:13):
I think to be honest, a lot of them say the
same thing. And they could bedistilled down to a blog post or
two, to get across what they'retrying to say. Yeah, but
publishers want, you know,60,000 words so.
Conor McCarthy (37:25):
Yes, unfortunately, there is the
okay, I've got it after threepages. It's like, I've got it
but there's a whole book here.
As a last question, I usuallyask my guests. What advice would
you give to someone who wassetting out today to find their
first 10 customers?
Brennan Dunn (37:40):
Yeah, I think the best thing would be to do the,
you know, where can you go toget in front of people who have
already done the hard work ofgetting your ideal customers? So
the the way that I think ismakes does the easiest way to do
that, I think, and this workedfor us at ripeness, too, was
it's hard if I just coldapproach somebody and say, can I
(38:03):
go on your podcast? Or can Iwrite a guest post for you?
Because who knows what thisperson is? And are they just
gonna promote the heck out ofwhatever they have? Will they
give anything of actual value?
So what I found worked well,historically, for me has been
kind of like that nine lessonemail course I talked about
right that I've done. You know,with Double Your Freelancing,
it's called charge what you'reworth nine lesson email course.
(38:24):
And what I would do is, I wouldgo back to when I was doing the
podcast rounds, and doing guestposts and conferences and stuff
like that, I would, I wouldbasically pitch an abridged
version of the email course asthe thing I want to talk about
on the show. So I go to the hostand I'd say instead of just
saying, Hey, I'm Brennan, I'dlove to go on your show. I know,
(38:45):
some stuff about freelancing.
Instead, I'd say, I've, I've gotthis nine lesson email course a
lot of people have reallyenjoyed. It's about, you know,
here's, here's the page thatgoes into more detail about it.
But, you know, it talks abouteverything from how do you go
about quantifying the value of aproject to how do you turn that
into a specific price or set ofpackages, and so on. And I'd
(39:06):
love to focus in just on thequantifying the value of a
project like so I'd love to comeon your show. And since you've
talked a lot on your you know,on previous episodes about this,
Nat I'd love to show yousomething that I teach in the
course, that is a really goodframework that anyone can use to
figure out when a client comesto you and says I need a website
designed, how to figure out whatthat website is worth for the
(39:29):
client. And that historicallyhas gone over really well
compared to just the ambiguousI'd love to go on your show
because it shows something ofpackagable value that you know,
Brennan's gonna come on and he'sgoing to share this and you will
look better to your audiencebecause now they can quantify
the value of a project lead orsomething.
Conor McCarthy (39:49):
Hmm. So that is that is so important and I've
gotten a lot of, of the of thosekinds of Hey, Can I be on your
show type emails. Yeah, and it'sjust you know, it's yeah, it's a
it's a tricky one because it'skind of like, to your point
earlier about, let's saytestimonials, like when you're
reading a testimonial, you'rethinking, well, what's in this
(40:11):
for me like, how do I use thisproduct? How do I use
RightMessage to get mesomewhere? And what you've just
described, there is a greatframework for showing, for
helping someone else throughthat, like that thinking process
of well, how can I use this? Youare giving them all the answers.
Brennan Dunn (40:28):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And by the end of it,
too, I don't do this anymorenowadays. So I don't have, I'm
not going on and talk aboutpricing. But I used to have
freepricingcourse.com. So I'dend the conversation with
Y'know, yeah, over the last30-40 minutes, we just talked a
good amount about quantifyingthe value of a project, If you
want to go deeper, I have a freenine lesson nine day email
(40:50):
course that goes a lot more indepth, and I was able to over
the last half hour. And thatwould be my funnel, if you will,
where people would go into thatthat would then work on
establishing the underlyingproblem, like we talked about
before, establishing thatproblem talking about the need
to rid yourself of that problem,pointed the solution and then
(41:10):
come in with that Campbellesqueshortcut versus long road. And
the shortcut leads to theproduct, the paid product, and
that's that was basically mymethod of growing, that business
was just doing that again andagain.
Conor McCarthy (41:24):
I love it. I also love that we reference
Joseph Campbell a couple oftimes in this call. I like that
a lot. Thank you so so much foryour time and for sharing all
that expertise that you'vegained over the years. You're
very kind.
Brennan Dunn (41:38):
Of course yeah.
Conor McCarthy (41:39):
All right. Talk to you soon.
Brennan Dunn (41:40):
Thanks, Conor.
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