Message Desk

Message Desk was built to solve a specific pain point for small and medium-sized businesses: they needed a way to communicate with customers via text message for operational messaging—appointment reminders, payment notifications, follow-ups—not just marketing campaigns. The founders recognized that while SMS platforms existed, none were truly tailored to small business operations or deeply integrated with the accounting software these businesses already used.

Josh Merriman joined as the second employee and first hire alongside another early employee. Initially hired as a marketer, he spent his first three months doing software engineering and feature development because the product was still such an MVP that there was no point in doing marketing yet. The team built Message Desk on top of Bandwidth (a Twilio competitor) and strategically pursued integrations with QuickBooks Online and Zoho—two of the biggest small business accounting platforms. This gave them a unique differentiation: when customers needed to collect payments via text, Message Desk could automate it directly into their accounting system, whereas competitors couldn't.

Message Desk officially went to market in February 2020 with $200 in MRR—their first customers came almost entirely through organic search. Rather than compete head-to-head with well-funded competitors on broad keywords, they targeted high-intent, lower-volume keywords like "scheduling text messages" and "text to pay." Even ranking 3rd-5th on these searches converted 15-20% of searchers. The organic strategy worked so well that by the time of this interview, they had zero customers in their home state of Nevada but had customers across all other states. They consistently ranked for business-intent keywords and leveraged their QuickBooks integration as the primary differentiator in content.

Pure organic SEO proved incredibly effective, but it required patience and niche focus. Early on, their churn was high (they didn't initially target the right customers), but once they narrowed their focus to businesses with consistent, recurring operational messaging needs—not one-off marketing campaigns—churn dropped to 6-7% monthly. They recently launched a chatbot feature and payments automation with QuickBooks Online and Zoho, which showed 50-60% faster payment conversion rates than email or traditional invoicing. Their average revenue per customer sat around $52/month, with most customers on the $39 plan and 25-30% on the $99 plan.

By the time of this interview, Message Desk had grown from $200 to $14,000 MRR across 266 customers in less than a year—consistent month-over-month growth of about $1,000 in new MRR. The team remained lean (7 full-time people, mostly college interns, with only 2-3 paid staff and founders taking no salary) and had raised $500k in a pre-seed convertible note round. They were bootstrapped until mid-2020 and maintained just over $100k in cash on hand with a very low burn rate. Their goal was to reach $20k MRR by Q4 2021 before raising a $2M seed round, with plans to compete more aggressively on paid advertising and explore adjacent product lines like omnichannel messaging, though they wanted to avoid competing directly with established players like Intercom.