Jessica Lee. Nathan met Jessica a few months ago and Jessica toured Nathan in 500 Startups’ office in San Francisco. She’s the founder of Bitesize. She helps companies drive revenue with text message conversations. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – #GIRLBOSS What CEO do you follow? – Sophia Amoruso Favorite online tool? — Trello How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-8 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Everybody has the same kind of challenges and overcoming them is the REAL WORK   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:37 – HandStack and Bitesize are the same company 01:49 – Bitesize helps brands drive revenue through interactive text messaging 02:00 – A new movie studio has a new movie and wants to reach a million movie goers 02:10 – Bitesize will reach people by text message 02:20 – The messages will be from a movie character and the approach is interactive 02:42 – Bitesize will drive the person to a download link at the end of the conversation 03:01 – Building a list for text is the challenge for Bitesize 03:25 – Bitesize uses manual texting tool 03:40 – There’s a law that’s protecting consumers where you can’t randomly message people with algorithms or without human intervention 03:56 – Bitesize helps client send text with manual human intervention 04:27 – Jessica shares how an actual message happens 04:30 – The company will create a group chat, add people, and click send manually 04:39 – People’s reply will go to your app and you can continue to interact with them 05:08 – The difference with the usual group text and from Bitesize is, you don’t get to see other people’s messages 05:34 – Bitesize charges per text and data 05:42 – Per text charge is .25₵ 06:11 – Most of Bitesize’s costs is from data 06:16 – Twilio is at .02₵ 06:45 – Data charges can go up to .16₵ 06:58 – BiteSize’s clients pay them for their marketing skills too 07:15 – For a thousand new messages, an average of 6% will reply which a lot higher than social media ads 07:45 – A lot of Bitesize’s customers will send millions of texts 08:13 – Revenue is measured by campaigns: 140 for the last 6 months 08:41 – Bitesize has raised $125K from 500 Startups 08:56 – Team size is 6 09:03 – 3 in the bay area and 3 elsewhere 09:26 – Average MRR 09:58 – 50% of the campaigns are paying quarterly and some campaigns are daily 10:20 – Each campaign pays an average of $10K to $100K for the .25₵ per text messages 10:43 – 10% of Bitesize’s customers are from referrals 10:50 – Initially, Bitesize was focused on outbound sales 11:08 – “Because our product was so unique, people like to know what it is” 11:38 – Bitesize originally started with political campaigns 11:49 – Because of Jessica’s background, most campaigns are for the democrats 12:29 – Jessica believes that Bitesize is a tool that is meant to connect people in a more meaningful way than ads 13:05 – 2013 revenue is around $250 13:17 – 2016 revenue is $300K for 6 months 13:30 – They pivoted to a more commercial use case in the final 6 months 13:40 – 2017 target 13:59 – “My hope is to grow organically” 16:05 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: Texts can be very spammy but if done right, the return is better than with online ads. Messages should connect people in a more meaningful way. Growing organically is cheaper, and it creates more resonance, but it’s harder to do.   Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his pod