Any advice on going from $3K MRR to $20K?

What you probably don't want to hear: There are a million ways to go and it depends on your company, product, market, target group, business model, customers and many more factors what will be the right way for you.

That being said, here some things to think about that could have a huge impact:

• Build a Referral Engine. Get your customers to refer you to their friends & contacts.

• Ads. If you can make that channel work, that baby can scale fast.

• Content Marketing. Find a topic that you're uniquely qualified to talk about that solves problems your target group wrestles with. This won't have any impact in the short run but can pay huge dividends in the long run.

• Influencer outreach. Get influencers to recommend your product. But don't mass send out a "Hi, tweet out my awesome product http://.... kthxbye" email. Influencers get 5 of those a day. Be humble, personal and create value first.

• Sponsor niche blogs & email newsletters

Great resources for the topic of Online Marketing / Growth Hacking are the blog of sumo.com and neilpatel.com

Good luck!

Hello @JoshAnderton.

When you say double-down, are you saying you have some viable singles-down upon which you want to double-down on?

So, anyway, I will be making some assumptions (apologies if they are incorrect), will not go into excessive detail (forum post after all), but the following is how I suggest you approach this:

1. Audit: channels, messages, segments, total members, total membership types, as well as grouping them in the appropriate manner: who, where, when, how, and links between them, and links to others that share characteristics that deem them viable potential beachheads.

2. Potential beachheads need to be assessed in regards to value add, propensity towards something that will benefit you, degree of difficulty to reach, purse size, degree of problem afflication, size of potential benefit from solution, etc, etc.

3. Find out your numbers on things like: net burn rate, CAC for each membership type (Free, Blogger, Business, Enterprise), payback period of CAC for each membership type, runway, MRR growth rate, etc. Last 6 months will do. Other things not covered by numbers, such as customer satisfaction, etc.

Traction tactics will provide spurts of growth, you can rinse them for a while, then you’ll have to find something new. Fairly obvious really, however I mention this because in my opinion you are not ready for scalable acquisition. Of course this remark has holes in it, based on a plethora of assumptions:

1. You don’t know your growth levers (right message, right channels, right persona’s, right segments, right time, etc);

2. You are unable to formulate (or predict) the output based on inputs.

3. You also, from what I have seen on your site, don’t have much funnel collateral at any stage. (Don't mean for this to sound harsh, obviously it will take time).

So if the above is true, and you still attempt to scale, you’ll scale yourself out of business. By all means get a benchmark if you want, will be handy down-the-line.

As for actual traction tactics, all over the place, you’ll know the caveats when it comes to past and present application of such things, which is why I won’t cover them. What I will say is let the past illuminate you, but not incarcerate you.

A lot of the tactics taken out of their time and place, with no appreciation of the things that came before the application of the tactic, with no regards for the context are highly unlikely to provide the same results.

We hear the soundbites when it comes to tactics, the headline, the romance; I did this, went to bed, woke-up, I was killing it, crushing it, made $x, bought a house, bought a flash car, it didn’t change me, etc, etc. Outliers, anomalies, blue-moons; exist, but we call them by those terms for a reason.

I would actually look at controlled growth, for you still have a lot to learn about all aspects of your business, so I would seek to maximise.

Some might consider the following a tactic, I don't. From from your current users:

4. What characteristics (and other things that permit segmentation) your current most valuable users share?

5. Who are your potential evangelists?

6. Who are they connected to?

7. Who are their audiences?

8. Approx size of audiences

9. Relevance of audience to your service (other things I listed above in point 1 and 2)

10. What carrot do they need to preach and share?

11. Desired results(although this should be fairly low due to other things not mentioned in this list but elsewhere in this post)

I would then look at assessing them in terms of easy wins, least amount of effort coupled with what needle am I looking to move.

But all within the tenet of controlled growth, an eye on your metrics, and maximal learning potential so you can discover things that down-the-line will form part of a scalable approach.

For the things you discover, a quick test to validate is recommended, for obviously you will need to ascertain your growth levers.

There are some things I consider foundational that you should be doing:

1. Content Marketing

2. Your own blogging (strictly it should come under content marketing, but permit me to be pedantic. I did have a quick perusal of your blog.)

3. Off-site SEO (Edit: and on-site)

Anyway, have spent a tad too long on this post, so…

Cheers, Ace.

What were your most efficient channels so far?‬

Hey Josh,

Love the product and have a few suggestions for you. At EmailOctopus we regularly have a number of customers asking for sign-up solutions, so have a few ideas based on that.

1. Why should (or do) users use Upscribe? Double-down on that messaging, everywhere. Your tag-line, adverts, social media. Become known for something, rather than just being another player. As you well know, the sign-up form space is busy, previously you had the 'Medium' market and I note you've moved into more generic sign-up boxes. But why should someone use you? Your tagline explains what the product does, but not what it does better than other alternatives. Fortunately (for once), the marketplace is a busy one, so you can quite easily find just by Googling or speaking to a few customers what their pain points were with alternatives. For us, loads of people hate MailChimp's pricing when they go above 2000 contacts - hence why we really double down on the pricing messaging.

2. Revenue doesn't just have to come from your own product. The users you're aimed at at present find it hard to pay for a sign-up box, but they find it very easy to pay for an email marketing platform. Your client list, even including free users, is worth a lot. Every single one of those is a customer of MailChimp or AWeber, some paying hundreds of dollars a month. Alternatives to those platforms offer affiliate schemes giving up to 30% on MRR - you're in a trusted position by many users - if another platform could work better for your users and make you money, recommend it.

Just my two cents from the perspective as a new user: you've got a lot of referrals to your service, all focused on an embeddable newsletter sign up for medium.com

When signing up now through one of those referrals, it immediately asks to sign up for a plan. Since you're still in the growth phase, it might be more sensical for you to offer a very minimalistic "always free plan" similar to zoho.com's strategy. You could for instance limit the amount of new subscribers per month which can be added before an upgrade to a new plan is required (even informing them that they have reached the limit, and x new subscribers would be added as soon as they went pro).

As the services is setup right now from the sign-up, I am sure that you will see a large drop-off in your funnel at the "Please choose a plan to continue" step.

1. Talk to your customers. Every day.

2. Clearly understand their pain points and what does your offering solve for them.

3. Do targeted cold outreach to people like your existing customer who pay you the $3k MRR.

4. Double down on content that attracts similar people like your ideal customers.

5. Find a way to turn your loyal customers into referrals. - This might be the road from $20k to $100k and tops :)

What I've done that helped is:

1. Find a channel that really works (in my case, SEO) and double down on that to get it automated and working well for you. For some it's ads, for others it's affiliate.

2. Raise your prices to charge better for the services you offer. When I did this, I killed churn and my customers are all much happier.

3. Find a coach/mentor to help you break through mental blocks of scaling, hiring, etc. Still very much working on these!

Reading traction too. I suggest you find another marketing guy. I have interviewed 36. You need to see 98% are copy cats of yesterdays campaigns. Occasionally someone can show results, go with them as test only. Expect to spend $2K on a campaign worth testing. Always commit short term, never buy into this bullshit they tell you. It takes six months for content marketing to gain traction. If you hear that run away. As results should show in no longer than three weeks.