#38 - Brennan Dunn of RightMessage
[#38] - Building with your audience with Brennan Dunn.
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 personalization. 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 with 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
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, freelancing, email, business, copywriting, writing, called, customers, audience, product, conor, podcast, software, lead, reply, sales page, company, thinking, pricing, helped
SPEAKERS
Conor McCarthy, Brennan Dunn
Brennan Dunn 00:01
Long Road would be the arduous scraping your knees bunch and trying it out and failing or you hire the sherpa, us and we guide you easily and safely 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 their businesses. 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 starting a business, about how they found their first 10 customers and got off the ground, so that you can learn what works and what doesn't. Check out my website at ConorMcCarthy.me for more details. My guest today is Brennan Dunn. I've interviewed quite a few serial entrepreneurs in this podcast and Brennan stands out as someone who went from the world of software into freelancing, and back to software again. He founded a project management platform called Plan scope, then jumped into creating the famous freelancing community called Double Your Freelancing before turning his attention to Right Message, which helps you uncover who's on your website, what they do, and what they're looking for from you. We get into all of these businesses in great depth today. On this podcast, Brennan shares loads of interesting learnings from his extensive experience starting and growing these businesses and from watching others do the same. For instance, we cover how to listen to and talk to your audience, how to build with your audience, making the leap from non SaaS to SaaS businesses, bootstrapping a SaaS, positioning your product in real time and the importance of segmenting your market and enriching what you know about your audience. Lastly, Brennan shares the absolute best way to fund your next trip to Ireland. So please do enjoy this episode with Brennan Dunn and thank you so much for listening. First of all, Brennan, welcome to the show and thank you very much for taking the time to be with 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 your current business?
Brennan Dunn 02:08
Yep. So currently, I'm running day to day two different companies. One is called Right Message, we do lead segmentation and audience kind of enrichment for lack of a better way of putting it. Now that's a horrible way of elevator pitching it. But my other you know, I do that I co founded that company about five years ago. Now I'm also involved in a more of a personality, kind of driven business called create and sell, where it's really just a weekly newsletter, backed by a few different video courses on email marketing, and just kind of marketing in general for the Creator audience. And before that, though, I I started a company called Double Your Freelancing. And I'm still technically the owner of it, but my wife actually runs it these days. And I also have started and sold another software company 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 did agency 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 built business, like serial entrepreneurs have built a number of businesses. So maybe let's go back in time, even to the start of Double Your Freelancing, let's say yeah, and maybe we could just talk for a second about what it was like to get your first customers for that business.
Brennan Dunn 03:33
Yeah, so funny enough with that business, it really, it was more of an accidental business. Because I had, I was running Planscope, which is my first software company that I started after leaving my agency and not wanting to do work with clients anymore, I wanted to do the whole get a lot of people paying you $20 a month. So I started plan scope, which was a project management, software for freelancers and agencies. So I started writing content publicly about things I've learned building an agency and things on pricing and getting clients and things like that, hoping that it would drive customers to Planscope. Well, that didn't work as well. What did work though, was people saying can I get more of the content? Can I get more help on you know, getting clients or writing proposals or what not. And that actually led to Double Your Freelancing emerging as from the from the content marketing arm of this software company called Planscope into a proper business and when it came to getting the first customer that really, the honest truth was I had been doing the content marketing side of things for originally Planscope, but then it morphed into this newsletter. And I didn't have any paid products for that outside of Planscope. So what I actually ended up doing funnily enough, since your your Irish went to go at the time to this, this conference in Ireland called Fun conf. I don't know if you ever heard of it? Yeah. So this is about 10 years ago 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 thing about monthly recurring revenue is it's, it's predictable in a nice way. But it's also very steady. So if you have to suddenly get to Ireland, and pay for an expensive conference, your partner doesn't always enjoy, you know, you're coming up with you know, that that reason for especially one of the conference is called Fun conf. So I ended up pre selling a e-book at the time called Double Your Freelancing, right? Which my thinking was, I was reading a lot about pricing, people seem to like it, they would reply back and, you know, engage with me and ask for more information. And, this is back when the time was really an open book and saying, if you want to jump on a Skype call with me, how about it. And also, this was when Skype was still really popular, I guess. So that led to me, effectively selling I forgot the exact year. I actually wrote a article about it way back when, but if something around 20,000 ish, dollars and pre orders for this ebook I had to create that allowed me to fund my trip to Ireland. So that was the first time I did that. And really what I did with that, and why I think it worked well, and how I got customers was I was cadence. So every week like clockwork, people got an in depth, original piece of content for me. And this was before, I think the modern newsletter rush. This was back when I kind of had, in a way a monopoly on teaching freelancers. I mean, this was 10 or 11 years ago now. And I was doing it over email, predominantly. So what I ended up doing was I really optimized for sales in a very casual way. So what I mean by this is, I didn't have a sales page or anything like that. Instead, what I would do is at the end of every weekly newsletter, I'd put a little PS that said, I'm thinking about writing a more in depth, you know, framework, if you will, on pricing, and sales for freelancers. It's still something I'm exploring, but if that might be of interest to you reply, and I'll share a bit more. So it was kind of like a, it was a bit of a teaser in the sense that if they wanted to find out actually more about what I was thinking they had to kind of opt in again, in a way, this time through an email reply. So people would reply to that. And then what I used that for was to really, you know, suss out exactly what would be in this book. So people would reply, and then I'd have like, a canned set of bullet points that I would just reply back with, after that, of here's what I'm thinking is this, you know, I'd love to hear also a bit more about kind of what's your history when it comes to, when you get a new client lead? What is it you do? How do you go about thinking about the project and pricing and proposal writing, and so on. And what was really nice was I ended up just eventually dropping my paypal email address and saying, if you want to preorder this, send it here. And I'll make sure you get it. And also, as I'm writing the book, every week, I'll send another email to you, that's really just summing up what I've worked on that week. So it wasn't just I'll take your money run. And hopefully you'll get a PDF at some point, it was more of a you're paying for a building kind of not in the open entirely, but a a behind the scenes access to me creating this resource that I think you'll really enjoy. And when the resource is finalized, you'll get the finished product. And that's a lot to that. And now that book has turned into a video horse and now it's had more 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 than my software company has afforded me so I could go to Inishmore off of Galway
Conor McCarthy 09:19
That is such a great story. It's like the the hero's journey, Y'know, the Joseph 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 emails but yeah.
Conor McCarthy 09:32
Yeah, that's that's so interesting, and now of course, building public is a thing now, it's a big thing but you were really doing it through email from the from the beginning. You were listening and 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 getting into Plantscope and getting into Let's Double Your Freelancing was doing you know, I ran an agency, got it up to 11 employees and, you know, did the whole, like I was effectively the salesperson for the company. And I was used to email exchanges back and forth. And one thing I thought was really interesting was well, what if I could, instead, instead of just sending out these broadcast emails and expecting them to be effectively read only, what if I incentivize people to actively reply to them, especially if it's, if it could lead to something potentially bigger, like them pre ordering this thing I might be working on. So you know, my thinking was always and still to this day is, is keep your ear to the ground and listen, and build systems that enable you to listen better. So I do this. Now, when somebody joins my list. I specifically call them out and ask them, hey, you know, thanks for joining us, let us know in a sentence or two about who you are and what you specifically need me to send you over the next few weeks, so you don't unsubscribe. And then that leads to really, I have a whole notion of database. Now this is auto populated, because I'm doing this through a forum instead of a reply. But I have a whole, like, if I want to figure out what to write, just go into notion go to this table. And as people join the list, it gets populated and it's kind of voice to customer raw data that I can then 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 an evergreen asset that can then be pushed to the site, it can be sent out to the list. Yeah, I mean, and that's, that's kind of been 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 is like just those conversations you have, and to track them and record them and to be able to answer to one person, I suppose in the style of which of course, everyone, like if one person has a problem, lots of people have the problem. How did you, when it comes to copywriting itself, and it's a bit of a left turn, but we don't have to talk about it for long, but have you always just kind of honed your own style when it comes to writing? Or have you ever done any kind of training in it?
Brennan Dunn 12:17
Yeah, so you know, before doing what I do now, my university background was I studied the classics. So ancient Greek and Latin literature and a lot of literature, a lot of reading and writing, which led to a very Oh, way of writing that isn't really conducive to online marketing, sort of that way. So I had to I had to change the way I wrote to be, I think more, you know, my thinking now is just right, like I speak. And I've, I've gotten a lot of help really over the years specifically from people like Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers, where she she put out a forgot what it was called. But before she's doing what she was doing nowadays, she used to be pretty active on Hacker News, and wrote a series of ebooks on like, I think, yeah, well, now it's now she's called Copy Hackers. But it was it was basically called, like, you know, how to hack copyrights. Right? Like so for if you're a developer or engineering minded person, how do you think about tapping into human psychology through copy in a way that makes sense to the coder basically, is kind of was her thing, which resonated a lot with me. So, Joanna has been been amazing over the years and just getting me a bit more knowledgeable on like, the proper frameworks of, you know, of historical copywriting. So what what the greats have pioneered and you know, ABC and all the different acronyms that that exists in the copywriting world. She helped to kind of distill 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 it because it is, in the absence of you, in person, your words, do all 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 these these systems in place that get language from readers specifically, I mean, one of the things I do is I have an email course for Double Your Freelancing it leads to a paid product. So people opt in an email course. And then they get nine lessons and then they get pitched in the product. What I do with the email courses intentionally rooted in the same pain points and problems that the product is so when people join the email course, it's on pricing. I asked him a modified version, that question that I mentioned earlier, that specifically about what is the pricing challenge that you're hoping that this free course will help you overcome in the next 10 days? So you know, I've accumulated many 1000s of responses to that. But I don't actively look through it as much as I used to any longer. But it helped give me not only an indicator of what what how, you know, these kind of treat these is, this is the this is the benchmark that people are expecting. And at the end of it, I asked the same question at the end of that nine lesson email course that says, did what I taught you over the last nine days, did it match what you told me, right like that you needed or what you thought you'd be getting in this. And what that's given me is a whole wealth of, in your own words, voice of customer data, that then my job as a copywriter, whether it's writing pitch emails, or sales pages, is to curate that information or that that raw language in such a way that a cohesive sales message comes out of it. So this goes again, back to Joe in a way but one of the things that she said that really struck home with me was the best copywriting is curation, not creation. So you're instead curating the visceral pain points that people have said to you about why they feel like they're being held back in their in their consulting business? And then why is it not growing the way they want? And why are they losing project after project, and then instead of going in a vacuum and thinking, I'm going to use some copywriting framework to write a sales page start to finish? Instead, it's more of an exercise of, here's all these various pains that people have said, what are the major macro trends that I can latch on to? And then how do I turn what they've told me into a response in the form of a sales page? And that's always been, I think, the easiest way for me, because then my job is less about creation. It's more about organizing. You know, these things that people have told me directly?
Conor McCarthy 16:52
That's fascinating. Yeah. Because, well, in the other case, if you were just trying to create out of thin air, you would just be guessing really, yeah. And you would more than likely get around. An educated guess. I hope you're enjoying this episode, and that there's some actionable and insightful advice that you can take out to your business, helping you identify and create those first 10 customers is what I do. So if you like what you hear on this podcast and want more information, including a bunch of free resources on how to find your first 10 customers and grow your business, check out First10podcast.com, that's 10 one, zero, or find me on Twitter @thefirst10pod. Now, you probably hear what I'm about to say on every podcast you listen to and it makes a really big difference to the show. If you find this podcast in any way useful or enjoyable, I'd be so grateful if you left me a review on iTunes, it really does make a big difference in terms of other people discovering the podcast. Also, if you leave a review, you will get to see your name and the review in lights. What I'll do is, I'll design your words and post them online, tagging you and your project along with it. I know it's a pretty sweet deal. Okay, let's get on with the show. Okay, so so then Double Your Freelancing. So you grew that and that that became quite successful. I was there a point at which you said, Okay, I want to get out of this, or I need to get out of this or something else has come along, I want to, I want to spend my time or how did it work?
Brennan Dunn 18:20
Yeah. Well, I did miss software. So I missed having a software business. And I was approached by a few friends of mine who run very successful companies saying can we throw money at you to build because what I done is I built a kind of a bespoke personalization platform for double your freelancing where the idea was if a copywriter is on my website, they're looking at the double your freelancing sales page. They would see testimonials from other copywriters instead of a mixed bag of like designers, developers and so on. And also the language would be very copywriter-y. So Y'know I'd use words that they tend to use like fee, rather than rate or budget or something like that. So what I end up would end up doing was I ingest data that I'd get through serving, and then use that to influence sales pages specifically. So you know, one of my friends Anker, CEO of teachable Nathan Berry and ConvertKit and a few others, basically got pulled together and gave money to start up a company that would basically salsify, that custom code I'd done. So brought on a co founder, technical co founder who helped me build it, raise the money, hired a team to the whole, like startup thing, still doing that now, but we're now operating more as bootstrappers rather than infinite growth. And yeah, I mean, that there was really I mean, the the year I quit doing Double Your Freelancing it was hard, it was very difficult for me because it was a solo business just myself. And in 2016, it made $684,000 and I decided to stop doing it. Which, yeah, again, partner wasn't too too keen on. Especially since I took a proper new startup founders salary, oh, for RightMessage. But anyway, yeah, so I started, I started RightMessage and it was a bit of a challenge because I couldn't, I couldn't use the cheat code of hitting the Double Your Freelancing audience and saying, sign up for this new thing I've done. Because while there could be some on the Venn diagram of people who, by person, website, personalization software and freelancers, there might be some overlap. It's not begun in any respect. So in a way, I was starting from scratch, and that I had to think, Okay, well, what do I do? I've got, I'm building product. I've been in this position before I'm building a product. I have an audience, but it's not the audience for this product. Where do I start? And that's, that's, I'm sure that's what would you get into now? But yeah, 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 talked about, briefly, a lot of people leveraged their previous audience to jump into something new. And so they have a little, like a little group of people ready, ready to buy ready to start with? So yeah, I mean, what was the what did you get right? 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 I was selling an online course. So I did the usual urgency tactics, and really pushed the people pre ordering the software before we had it ready. And because you see this a lot with specifically software companies, where they'll have like a, a teaser page, where you put in your email, and then it goes silent. You don't hear anything until they launch, if they launch. And then six months down the line, you get an email from some random startup company and you you've forgotten who they are, and you opt again. So what we did was we sent out weekly emails that talked about the problem domain that we'd be solving and kind of some early data that we had to share from our own experiences. And the work we've done, were went on a consulting basis doing this stuff with other other clients, because while I was doing Double Your Freelancing, both myself and my business partner, we had done a few one off consulting gigs with companies like teachable to pilot, the stuff that I've been doing on my own site Double Your Freelancing on other companies, just to make sure that, you know, it wasn't just a one off thing, that and so but it got us a bit of experience and a bit of data and a bit more of diversity than just, hey, it worked for me. So yep. So you know, we wrote it weekly, we kind of use this as a way to really figure out what the product backlog had to include by sharing what we were thinking with people and really encouraging dialogue, and back and forth. And that worked well. So that that worked. And like I mentioned, when we launched properly, we had proper urgency around, if you sign up, you know, this week, you'll get a lifetime deal at this price. And that that allowed us pretty much within the first month to get close to 10,000 monthly recurring revenue, which was really good because it was a new business, it was I couldn't you use that old, you know, the old audience or the old customer base, that definitely helped in how we got the people onto the email list, was we, one of the things that stuck out to me from Brian Harris, I don't know if you know who he is. He's very big on borrowing other people's audiences. So you know, what we would do in the early days was we would go to audience of people are people who had audiences that were, you know, people who like conversion optimization, so the growth hacker he kind of crowd along with people who are into like AV testing and things like that. And we would do guest posts. I did a whole conference speaking tour where I think I did about eight different events giving a talk at each one about the underlying problem domain that we were entering. So website personalization and conversion optimization when it comes to that, like personalizing content, and so on. And that allowed us to get quite a few 1000 people on the list, pre launch, and that's where when we launched that's how we were able to get well beyond the first 10 customers just by, you know, having built out that excitement, and really not just you know what, when we do a guest post when we do a going on podcast, or we'd go and speak at an event. It wasn't about the software it was about the you know, what is the problem? The problem is the One Size Fits All messaging is making it so a lot of people on your email list or a lot of people on your website are trying to figure out themselves, how does this apply to me? So what if you could instead start thinking, How do I tailor, maybe the featured case study or the headline, or something like that to be more reflective of something I might know about the person viewing. So if you're a copywriter, you see a copywriting headline, if the reason you join the free email course early on, was you keep losing proposals? Well, that's what the headline when pitching the product reflects, instead of maybe pitching or reflecting something about value pricing or you know, pricing on your value or something which which the product, the product equally helps both needs. But I might have one need, and you might have a different need. So the positioning of the product ends up being dynamic. So it was really talks about how you can think about positioning not as a static thing that your entire business or your entire product is positioned. Instead, it's how do we think about positioning kind of in real time. And that's what the talks were about that build up the excitement and the interest, so that when we came in with the product, we didn't need to both educate them, like I had, then about why they need it, and then try to sell them on the actual product instead of the education was already done. The problem space was already established, the potential was already kind of highlighted. And now we just came in with an offer of like, hey, if you've been nodding your head with the stuff I've been saying about dynamic positioning, and this and that, we baked this into this 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 kind of almost a wholesome way to to approach it because that you've seen this as well, where it's like, you got to get pitched an idea 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 matter of, and this is something I still try to internalize we have an email course on RightMessage that does the same thing these days, where we want to do exactly what I just talked about, and then leave people with, to go back to the Joseph Campbell example, you mentioned, to leave people with the shortcut versus the long roads, long road would be the arduous montage of scraping your knees bunch and trying it out and failing and this and that. Or you hire the Sherpa, us, and we guide you easily and safely and economically to that promised land you want to get to, rather than having you circled the desert mindlessly for many years trying to figure out how to do this. So it was always like with RightMessage our thinking was, we show people how important it is to get data from your CRM in your email database on your website. So you can say, Conor, I know he's in Ireland, I know this about him, I know that about him. And what we're going to do is when he's looking at our product sales page, we're gonna take bits and pieces like the industry he's in or whatever else, and swap a few things out. So practically speaking, to do that, you can either go out and hire a developer and kind of build the, the integration between your website and your, you know, database and do all that yourself, and you're probably going to get mess, you're gonna mess up a few times, and you're going to need to deal with maintaining it. Or you come over and pay us 100 a month and we'll do it for you. And that's basically how it was pitched at the end.
Conor McCarthy 28:32
And what do people say about the product? And this, I asked this at a very, almost a tactical way. Because whenever I talk to founders who are trying to put together a positioning or some kind of value proposition, the way they think about it is not how people describe it, if that makes sense. So what would people say about RightMessage?
Brennan Dunn 28:50
Yeah, so that's, you know, funnily enough we, when we started out, we we did exactly what I just talked about the whole website personalization thing, where we've come to what we've realized over the years, is that in order to personalize, you need to have segment data. So I need to know Conor's in this industry. Most companies don't, they don't segment in any meaningful way. They don't know how they don't have the data. So slowly, we've been shifting away from our core focus being website personalization to audience in Richmond. And so where I'm going with this is that we just did an exercise a few weeks back where I emailed pretty much everyone from Create & Sell, which is one of the businesses that my weekly newsletter company or thing and I said, Hey, if you're reading this 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 on this list, 200 customers on RightMessage, obviously there's, you know, there's a difference. So, what I wanted to find out out was, had you heard about RightMessage? Because I do mention that, I don't push it hard on that list, but I do mention it from time to time? And if so, what is it you think it does? And if you've used it, what made you sign up? And if you haven't used it, why haven't you signed up? Right? So it was a very simple thing. And I got a great amount of responses to that. But the thing that really struck home to me was that the big thing and this is something we're still trying to work through the big objection people had was personalization, website personalization. So thinking I'm going to change this case study this headline, this net, that seems like a lot of work. That's like a redesigning my website kind of amount of effort in terms of planning and strategy. And then instead of one headline, I have five different headline variations multiplied throughout my entire site. And you know that that was the big hold back, we want it to be less enterprising, more self serve. So if we were enterprise, it would be fine. Because we could just say, look, we'll we'll do the we'll do the strategy work for you like part of buying right message would include the consultation elements, and you know, this and that, that you need, and maybe copywriting assets and whatever else that you need to do this, right. So we've been slowly shifting toward being more of a lead generation and survey and quiz platform. So that people can get the segmentation data that they need, in order to then react that by personalizing your content, so we can find out, this is the problem that they're struggling with. This is their industry, this is why they're wanting to lose weight. This is why you know, whatever. And then, because we realized we had a bit of a chicken and egg issue early on where we were, it was working, we had customers. But it was really hard to grow, because so few people had the underlying data that they needed to personalize. So where I'm going with all this is that we've started to realize that a lot of people who know about RightMessage, see the old right message, see the heavy, intimidating, a lot of strategy work needed, I don't even know if this will pay off. I don't have the time, I just want to buy 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 reposition ourselves, not not dynamically like I was talking about but holistically as a different product that does something different, that still does that stuff. But the focus is more on saying, go beyond just a first name and an email address on your email list. Find out individually, what people want, why they're on your list, who they are, and so on. So that you can then use that on a macro level to know what I need to create content about what I need to create products about. But on an individual level. How do I tell Conor? This is why he should buy this thing versus Jane why she should buy that thing if that makes sense.
Conor McCarthy 33:01
No, it does. It does. Thank you for sharing that because it's actually not often that we get into stories of of pivoting or or repositioning or whatever you want to call it. So that's really interesting to hear how and why that's happening.
Brennan Dunn 33:15
Yeah, I mean, it really frankly, it boils down to the original position would've worked fine if we made it more of an agency model with like high touch sales and that kind of thing. And I did that for a while early on in the early days. But I really just have always liked people just showing up with a credit card, buying on their own without needing to 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're thinking about it, and the way you're repositioning it, is all about kind of going deep on who your customers are and what they need, and I suppose where they're situated in the world. And you seem to have a real talent for talking to customers through there, like numerous times in this conversation anyway, it's, you've talked about reaching out to people asking questions, listening to feedback, changing things as you go, when it comes to customer conversations, 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, he wrote a book called The Brain Audit and it's basically, he spoke at my event back with Double Your Freelancing when I was doing conferences, and he gave an incredible talk on like the red bag framework or I forgot what he calls it. The basically the long and short of it is when it comes to somebody who has a very elegant way of teaching people how to go about coming up with like, effective testimonials, effective case studies, effective copywriting that is rooted in the, the actual needs that people have, or the actual reason that people like, you know, the thing that immediately initially drew me to him was he talked a lot about how a lot of testimonials are things like basically fluff like oh RightMessage is such a great company backed by a great team, like that doesn't actually help me. That might help me from like the customer support angle, but from the will paying the money, get me more money back. That doesn't answer that question for me, right. So he had a whole framework on how to go about asking the right questions that would lead to somebody so when you're reaching out and saying, Hey, Conor, I would love a testimonial or, you know, I'd love to feature you as a case study. Instead of just getting Conor doing the usual thing, which is I think what a lot of us do have like, you know, we just want to say something that like, Oh, I love I love the company, I love the brand bla bla bla bla bla, like, he had a certain way of asking the right questions that would then ultimately be turned into the perfect ROI Focused testimonial if that makes sense. So anyways, Sean D'souza's stuff is brilliant. And, yeah, he lays low, but he's he's got great 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 he is searching for something on email marketing, if he includes your name, he'll get the best answer.
Brennan Dunn 36:24
That was nice. Yeah, I was like, can I use that on the homepage?
Conor McCarthy 36:29
Which is great, and this was the case in point, it's a great is a great testimonial. Speaking of books, are there any other books that you would recommend for people who are starting businesses growing 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 business books. I should, I do read a good amount of nonfiction, but usually history, don't read a lot of business books. So I'm actually horrible to ask that question to. But um, yeah, Rob's stuff is great. Rob Fitzpatrick with Mom Test, which is a fantastic book. And then he has a book on workshops and one on writing books. Yeah, to be honest, I'm, I just don't read a lot of business books.
Conor McCarthy 37:10
No, I like it. You just get to it, you actually just 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 be distilled down to a blog post or two, to get across what they're trying 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 three pages. It's like, I've got it but there's a whole book here. As a last question, I usually ask my guests. What advice would you give to someone who was setting 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 to get in front of people who have already done the hard work of getting your ideal customers? So the the way that I think is makes does the easiest way to do that, I think, and this worked for us at ripeness, too, was it's hard if I just cold approach somebody and say, can I go on your podcast? Or can I write a guest post for you? Because who knows what this person is? And are they just gonna promote the heck out of whatever 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 lesson email course I talked about right that I've done. You know, with Double Your Freelancing, it's called charge what you're worth nine lesson email course. And what I would do is, I would go back to when I was doing the podcast rounds, and doing guest posts and conferences and stuff like that, I would, I would basically pitch an abridged version of the email course as the thing I want to talk about on the show. So I go to the host and I'd say instead of just saying, Hey, I'm Brennan, I'd love to go on your show. I know, some stuff about freelancing. Instead, I'd say, I've, I've got this nine lesson email course a lot of people have really enjoyed. It's about, you know, here's, here's the page that goes into more detail about it. But, you know, it talks about everything from how do you go about quantifying the value of a project to how do you turn that into a specific price or set of packages, and so on. And I'd love to focus in just on the quantifying the value of a project like so I'd love to come on your show. And since you've talked a lot on your you know, on previous episodes about this, Nat I'd love to show you something that I teach in the course, that is a really good framework that anyone can use to figure out when a client comes to you and says I need a website designed, how to figure out what that website is worth for the client. And that historically has gone over really well compared to just the ambiguous I'd love to go on your show because it shows something of packagable value that you know, Brennan's gonna come on and he's going to share this and you will look better to your audience because now they can quantify the value of a project lead or something.
Conor McCarthy 39:49
Hmm. So that is that is so important and I've gotten a lot of, of the of those kinds of Hey, Can I be on your show type emails. Yeah, and it's just you know, it's yeah, it's a it's a tricky one because it's kind of like, to your point earlier about, let's say testimonials, like when you're reading a testimonial, you're thinking, well, what's in this for me like, how do I use this product? How do I use RightMessage to get me somewhere? And what you've just described, there is a great framework for showing, for helping someone else through that, like that thinking process of well, how can I use this? You are giving them all the answers.
Brennan Dunn 40:28
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And by the end of it, too, I don't do this anymore nowadays. So I don't have, I'm not going on and talk about pricing. But I used to have freepricingcourse.com. So I'd end the conversation with Y'know, yeah, over the last 30-40 minutes, we just talked a good amount about quantifying the value of a project, If you want to go deeper, I have a free nine lesson nine day email course that goes a lot more in depth, and I was able to over the last half hour. And that would be my funnel, if you will, where people would go into that that would then work on establishing the underlying problem, like we talked about before, establishing that problem talking about the need to rid yourself of that problem, pointed the solution and then come in with that Campbellesque shortcut versus long road. And the shortcut leads to the product, the paid product, and that's that was basically my method of growing, that business was just doing that again and again.
Conor McCarthy 41:24
I love it. I also love that we reference Joseph Campbell a couple of times in this call. I like that a lot. Thank you so so much for your time and for sharing all that expertise that you've gained 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.