Building, failing, rebuilding, and then hitting $30k MRR in a year

Brennan Dunn built RightMessage, but it nearly crashed and burned. So, he rebuilt it from scratch. Now, roughly a year after the relaunch, it's at $30k MRR.

Here's Brennan on how he did it. 👇

Building and rebuilding from scratch

I'm Brennan Dunn. I'm an American living in a small market town in England with my wife Laura and our kids.

I'm working on RightMessage. It's a website personalization and segmentation platform. We help businesses show the right content to the right visitor based on what we know about them. So instead of everyone seeing the same generic headline, someone who runs a SaaS company sees a headline about SaaS growth, and someone who runs an e-commerce store sees something about increasing AOV.

We integrate with email platforms like Intercom, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, HubSpot, and about a dozen others. When a subscriber clicks a link in your email and lands on your site, we already know who they are and what segment they fall into. We use that data to personalize the site and any offers shown in real time.

The other big piece is surveys and quizzes. Most businesses don't know much about their audience, and there's only so much you can pick up about someone based on on-site behavior. We make it easy to ask the right questions, store the answers, sync everything back to your email platform, and then use that data to personalize both your site and your emails.

We had a hard reset a few years back. We were failing and nearing "crash and burn." So, I bought out my business partner and spent the next year rebuilding the product from scratch. A little over a year ago, we relaunched. Now, we're at about $30k MRR and growing.

Finding the problem

It all started when I wanted to maximize conversions at a company that I later sold, called Double Your Freelancing — courses, events, etc. for freelancers and agencies.

I had a large email list (50k+ subscribers) and sent everyone to the same product landing pages. Freelancers, agency owners, consultants, newcomers, and those earning $500k+/year all saw the same copy, testimonials, and recommended package.

I knew from my consulting background that the message matters more than the medium. A freelancer doing $50k/year and an agency owner doing $2M/year have completely different problems, even if they're both trying to e.g. close more proposals. But my website treated everyone the same.

I started hacking together a solution for myself using custom code, Liquid templates in emails, and a bunch of duct tape. It worked. Conversions increased significantly. This put me on the radar of companies like Gumroad, Teachable, and others, who then hired me to implement it for them.

Then Ankur Nagpal (former CEO of Teachable) called me, asking if he could invest so I could turn my solution into a SaaS. The rest is history.

Building and pivoting

The original version of RightMessage launched in 2018. I had a cofounder, money in the bank, and a team. The early product focused on one thing: It let you swap content on your website based on data from your email platform.

We quickly discovered that outside of the enterprise, few companies — especially "creator" types (our initial ICP) — had much segmentation data. We had built a glorified "if this then that" for dynamic websites: e.g. if industry=finance, then show the finance testimonial.

When we realized how few companies had this data, we decided to enter the survey/quiz funnel space. And now we've built a complete end-to-end solution for generating leads with personalized CTAs -> getting in-depth data with surveys and quizzes -> personalizing email campaigns -> personalizing the website when identified people return on-site.

A monorepo stack

Here's our stack:

• Backend: Laravel (PHP) with MySQL, Redis for caching and job queues (running Horizon), and Elasticsearch for event indexing and analytics.

• Frontend: Vue 3 with TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Pinia for state management, TanStack Query for server state.

• Marketing site: Statamic for content management and a bit of Vue.js.

• Infrastructure: Standard stuff. S3/R2 for file storage, Pusher for real-time updates, Stripe for billing.

• AI: We use Claude (Anthropic) for our AI features, and this proxies through OpenRouter so we can change models quickly.

• Monitoring: Sentry for error tracking, Laravel Pulse for performance monitoring, PostHog for product analytics.

The project is a monorepo with separate apps for the API, the admin web app, and the marketing site, plus shared packages for the UI component library and the visual flow builder.

The challenge of pivoting

The full rewrite that I mentioned was the biggest challenge we've faced. I spent a year rebuilding RightMessage from scratch while still supporting existing customers on the old platform — despite not having many of them. That meant a year of zero new features for paying customers while burning through savings.

It was the right call. The old codebase held everything back. But it was financially and emotionally brutal.

Our ICP shift has been hard as well. We launched in 2018 targeting course creators and info-product businesses. AI is squeezing that market. ChatGPT and Perplexity are eating their search traffic. So we've had to reposition toward SaaS, DTC ecommerce, and agencies. That's an ongoing transition.

If I started over, I'd focus on the agency/partner channel from day one. Every agency partner we activate brings multiple clients without my direct involvement. I spent too long trying to do everything myself (sales, onboarding, support, strategy calls). Having partners who handle implementation and charge their own clients for setup is the highest-leverage growth channel I've found. I wish I'd built that earlier.

I'd also be more disciplined about not building features before validating demand. I've built things nobody asked for, and I've also delayed things people were begging for because I was chasing something more technically interesting.

Being a solo founder with a young family

Being a solo founder with a young family is challenging too. I have a 4-year-old and an 8-month-old at home. I also like playing tennis and going to the gym.

This means I must be deliberate about how I spend my time. There's no room for low-leverage work. So, I've had to become good at compressing a lot into just a few hours a day.

Being a solo founder has its advantages too. I can ship fast, make decisions without consensus, and pivot because I'm the sole (benevolent) dictator.

Growth channels

As far as growth, a few channels have worked well:

Audience: An existing audience provided a massive head start. When we launched in 2018, my newsletter subscribers already trusted me. This meant we had customers before we even had anything to sell. We presold.

Content and education: I've been writing about email marketing, segmentation, and personalization for years. That content builds trust slowly but compounds. YouTube videos showing specific use cases (how to personalize emails, how to build quiz funnels) drive trials.

Demos: Our best conversion path is still a personal demo with me. When someone sees their own website personalized live on a call, the "aha" moment is immediate. The bottleneck has always been getting enough qualified people to book one.

Affiliates: We have 1,000+ affiliates earning 20% lifetime recurring commission. They went quiet for a while (my fault, I didn't equip them properly), but we're reactivating that channel now with better assets and case studies.

Agency partners: This is the growth channel I'm most excited about. Agencies offer RightMessage setup as a service to their clients. And as a solo business, when an agency manages a client account we get all the benefits (MRR) but the customer talks to the agency for support/onboarding/etc. Definitely worth the commission we pay agencies.

Newsletter sponsorships: We're starting to sponsor newsletters in the email marketing and growth space. The advantage over our own list is that we can target exactly the right ICP instead of broadcasting to a list weighted toward a declining segment.

Build for a market you understand

Build for a market you already understand.

I built RightMessage because I was the customer first. I knew the problem intimately because I'd been hacking together solutions for myself. If you're building something where you have to guess what customers want, you're at a disadvantage.

Also, if I hadn't had an email list when we launched, the early days would have been dramatically harder. Even if you're not planning to launch for a year, start writing, start teaching, start building trust with the people who'll eventually be your customers.

What's next?

Short term: Hit $40k MRR in the next few months.

"Unfortunately," we're more than profitable now since it's just me and expenses are about $1k/mo... But I'd like to start scaling up the team again, which means more money.

Medium term: Continue building the agency partner program. Formalize it more and conduct outbound recruitment.

Product-wise: We're leaning heavily into AI; we just rolled out a new MCP that customers love for "headless" RightMessage work. We already have an AI assistant that helps with strategy, AI-powered email personalization, and AI content generation. The vision is for RightMessage to look at your site, understand your audience, and suggest (or even implement) personalizations automatically.

Longer term: I want RightMessage to be the default answer to "How do I stop treating every lead the same?" Whether you're a SaaS, an ecommerce store, a service company, or whatever else, if you want more conversions with the same lead count, you should personalize. We want to make that easy enough that there's no excuse not to.

And personally: Be present for my family. These years don't come back. The business exists to support life, not the other way around.

You can follow along on X and LinkedIn. And check out rightmessage.com.