A story of nearly-bankrupt to a $75K business in 4m, NO BS

My co-founder & I ran a Training Company, $50k MRR (80% is from enterprise training & remaining 20% from online schools).

Everything was going well & suddenly, BAM! Pandemic took over the world and the business dynamics got disturbed. Our revenues fell by 90%. Enterprises started refusing to invest in their employees, Nobody wanted to spend on training. Base cost-cutting mode. It was like a waking nightmare in the daytime for us.

We were a team of 15 then. We can't stop paying our employees & they will not even agree to work with low wages. I knew we had to pivot at least till the old times are back.

We created video tutorials for enterprise products (Microsoft PowerBI, Alteryx, KNIME, etc). We’ve also had YouTube channels (250K+ subscribers). There is something which we knew & I thought that could be our core competency. We knew how to make software easy to learn and use.

I started researching how the SaaS/Software industry is so thin on content but they all also wanted higher LTV. So I thought what if we help software companies to make their software "Easy to learn and use". I’m a finance guy. I wanted to move the LTV when the content changes. It was July 2020. I quickly came up with the name Content Beta (if you know what beta means in finance), bought the domain & prepared a basic website. I wanted to establish it around our expertise as a "Customer Education Company" with the message, we help software companies with "Done-for-you" training content to onboard, engage & retain their users.

Obviously, it's not going to be easy coz the idea was yet on my notepad & just born online on a little landing page. I didn't know anyone in SaaS in the US or Europe. I have no clue about B2B sales experience. I didn't know how our customers would think. I was sitting in my bedroom (we were in strict lockdown), in India - miles away from my target audience. And I was hella scared.

I started with two things:

I started hanging out where my audience is

With the hope to learn about what are the problems in this industry.

• I joined Growth Mentor & spoke with various people so that I can get to know how they think & what their values are & what kind of messaging could work for them.
• I joined Slack communities & started engaged in discussion furiously. (GetLatka and PLG)
• Same with the SaaS Facebook groups.

I learned something - In a service-based business you cannot have a lot of to & fro with the clients and you need to make your client feel confident that you’re really taking away all the pain (and not that they have to work hard with you too).

We made the entire process frictionless. (Thank you ManyRequests) Here's how we do it
Step 1: Client fills request form - Product docs or loom videos and demo account credentials.
Step 2: We work on the script/storyboard.
Step 3: We produce and deliver.
Step 4: Unlimited revisions till you're 100% happy.

I found out the best coaches

For Sales - KD , Josh Braun. They taught me how to Problem > Product, Messaging, how to follow-up, etc.

For Operations - Robin and Productize community. They taught me how to streamline operations, think about the recurring, templatized business model so it becomes easy to scale

For Marketing - DGMG. Dave and the community taught me how every organization should act as a Media company and place your nets everywhere be it a newsletter, podcast, webinars, or your own social media.

Starting with cold outreached, I struggled a bit with my messaging. There were times where you sent hundreds of cold emails and got no response. (more about messaging and ideal customer profile in another article).

Months passed, June, July, August, September - Absolutely dry pipeline. Zero revenues. Got a few leads but no conversions.
Eventually, something started happening.
October - $15k
November - $5k
December - $30k
January - $25k
We created a lot of samples for free and started closing old leads.
And now I'm confidentially targeting $500k in 2021.

So here it is!
These are the top 3 things that I think have been most impactful to my journey at Content Beta.

1. Never Give up
   Never give up seems to be like cliched advice. Covid had disrupted not only my business but of everyone's but it also gave me a lot of time to think about how I can create value. A lot of people I adore, tell me that they want to create a Marketplace or a VC-backed platform or a SaaS product but If you don't have the experience of product management, you will struggle at product-market fit. My take - pick a niche, narrow down a problem and figure out an efficient way of solving that pain. Of course, starting up includes a lot of challenges but it is important to stick to your plan for at least 6 months and get early validation.

2. Problem > Product
   Before you jump on your product (or a service). Think about what problem you are trying to solve. Validate by asking people, potential customers, competitors, social listening. Once you're done with that, HIT SAVE.
   Use the same for cold messages, demo calls, follow-ups. Solving Problems (and not your product features) will win you a deal. I was lucky, I got to learn this early.

3. Cold Outreach works!
   Don't give up on cold outreach. A lot of people told me that cold email is dead, cold outreach on social media is dumb. If you do it in the right way, a more human way, it always works. And yes, it requires more hard work than before (given Gmail now quickly identifies cold outreach as spam). You need to personalize, you need to pick your prospects carefully.

Go ahead, ask a question, make them think whatever they're doing right needs to change and you can possibly fix this. All you need to do is get them to respond.

While all this looks rosy for a 6-month old Agency. I’m currently fixing the operations. How can I deliver faster, How can I templatize the process so that the business becomes more scalable, But that’s for another time.