Call Loop

Chris Brisson came up with the idea for Call Loop in 2009 and began developing it with a co-founder in 2010. The concept was straightforward but powerful: create a platform that would do for SMS and voice messaging what MailChimp did for email. However, building the product would take time. Brisson wasn't a software developer himself, and his co-founder had a full-time job making six figures. Instead of jumping all-in, they moonlighted on the project, with Brisson running information products and a consulting company on the side.

The soft launch came in mid-2011, but the road to get there spanned three years of nights and weekends. To accelerate development, Brisson and his co-founder decided to bring on additional help. They structured deals around equity rather than cash—neither had the capital to pay salaries. They raised $90,000 from two investors at a $1.25 million pre-money valuation (7.5% equity each) around 2011, shortly after the product launch. Brisson also contributed roughly $10,000 of his own money. By 2015-2016, the team had expanded to include two full-time developers and a full-time customer success person, plus contractors. To keep costs low, Brisson hired developers from the Philippines, enabling the company to invest roughly $100,000+ in development and people while remaining bootstrapped in spirit.

Call Loop's customer base became remarkably diverse. Early adopters ranged from brick-and-mortar stores buying $50/month plans to high-volume lead generation companies buying tens of thousands of credits monthly. By February 2016, the platform had processed somewhere around 1,000 unique credit cards that month alone, with a cumulative 2,000-3,000 paying customers since launch. Notable enterprise customers included CareerBuilder, Hyatt, and Zig Ziglar's organization. The company was sending 300,000-400,000 text messages monthly on average.

The biggest surprise was that Call Loop's revenue model didn't fit neatly into SaaS metrics. While some customers paid monthly subscriptions, many others—especially high-volume users like Brisson's friend Nathan—bought credits in bulk on a pay-as-you-go basis. This hybrid model made traditional SaaS metrics like MRR difficult to track and essentially useless for benchmarking. Brisson reinvested heavily in product, recognizing that while Call Loop worked, it wasn't great—some of the underlying technology dated back to 2010-2011. He began exploring how to pivot the product into marketing automation (inspired by Active Campaign's evolution from basic email to a full platform) rather than competing purely on text-messaging commodities.

One significant life event: in 2015, Brisson bought out his original co-founders' equity stakes. They had become silent partners after the first 1.5-2 years, not actively contributing. While he couldn't disclose the exact amount, the buyout was less than $100,000 and freed him from the psychological weight of sharing future upside with inactive shareholders. This negotiation taught him lessons about vesting cliffs and equity structures he hadn't known when the company started.

By 2015, Call Loop had done $385,000 in top-line revenue. In 2016, trailing the first three months, Brisson was on pace to do between $450,000-$500,000 annually (roughly $32,000-$37,000 per month). The platform had become viable and growing, but Brisson was laser-focused on the next evolution: adding marketing automation features, integrations, and expanding use cases beyond simple text broadcasts. He believed that as text messaging became commoditized (competitors could enter with venture funding and disrupt on price), Call Loop's defensibility would come from tooling, feature depth, and integration—the hallmarks of a true marketing platform.