Missing Letter

Benjamin Dell built Missing Letter starting in 2016 alongside his web agency Bricsom Water, which he'd run for over a decade. He spotted a gap in the market: bloggers were investing significant effort into content creation, but weren't maximizing the ROI through social distribution. The product's core insight was simple—automatically turn each blog post into a 12-month drip campaign of optimized social content that readers could review, tweak, and schedule.

Bell built Missing Letter as a side project while still fully committed to his agency. The early traction was modest but meaningful. About a year and a half before the interview, a social media conference speaker who'd discovered the product started giving keynotes mentioning Missing Letter. That single endorsement pushed MRR from zero to roughly $1,000—a modest start, but proof of concept. However, Bell remained locked into the agency for most of 2017, unable to focus fully on the SaaS play. He spent the bulk of that year winding down and exiting Bricsom Water, finally going all-in on Missing Letter in October 2017.

The first wave of customers came almost entirely through word of mouth from that initial conference speaker who became an informal evangelist. Bell didn't aggressively pursue growth channels at first; he was too busy managing the agency exit. Once he could focus full-time on Missing Letter (starting November 2017, eight months before the interview), growth accelerated. By the time of the interview, the company had 16,000 free users and 600 paying customers at an average of $14/month, generating $8,000 MRR.

Bell experimented with paid acquisition on Facebook, running a careful test with a fixed $500/month budget over three months. He managed to drive signups at $9 each (free trials or direct conversions), but paying customers cost $150 CAC against an LTV of just $250—an 11-month payback period that was too tight for a bootstrapped company. The CAC test revealed that lookalike audiences were helping drive costs down incrementally, but without venture capital to fuel growth, Bell paused paid ads to focus on organic and referral channels. He found that onboarding was critical: getting customers to approve and generate their first 2-3 campaigns was the key to retention and stickiness.

With 84% growth over the previous six months and adding 70-80 new paying customers monthly, Missing Letter is on a strong trajectory. Bell is self-funded (less than $100K invested) and approaching profitability while maintaining full-time salaries for his distributed team of six across the UK, Poland, Serbia, Canada, and Thailand. He's targeting a $2M exit valuation within three to five years, enough to reward his team with meaningful equity while giving himself capital to pursue his next venture. The market validation is clear: ConvertKit and Buffer operate in adjacent spaces with similar pricing, and Missing Letter is seeing genuine product-market fit with 5.5% monthly churn and healthy organic growth.