Created a successful digital agency and then used that to fund my SaaS businesses. Have questions? I'll answer.
Hey IH,
I have been designing, building, marketing, and selling digital services for 2 decades yet I'm still in my 30s. I got into technology at an early age and developed my first e-commerce website way back in the late 90s, way before there were any off the shelf options.
For the last 15 years I've run a full service digital agency. We've designed and created web / mobile apps for companies like Caterpillar, Bridgestone Tires, and other large businesses and startups. We now have a very strong book of business for development and don't actively seek new development clients; but we still do a ton of web and digital marketing.
I've moved most of my development team over to Boast.io where we're working on a huge new release. We've kept this as an MVP for years and required it to hit specific milestones before reinvesting. It's been doing really well lately and we've been spending the time to reinvest in the platform and make something amazing for an early 2021 release.
Boast.io is a customer experience platform that focuses on using video as the primary and unique feedback mechanism. Collect reviews, testimonials, do surveys all with video as the core focus. Boast helps with the collection and distribution of your customer stories helping you build rapport and get more business.
Other notes: I still actively design and develop software. I love programming and can't imagine every stopping. Even though I lead the direction of my businesses, I still code. I spent years as a PHP developer until I started doing C#... then eventually found Ruby on Rails and still absolutely love it.
We are a small team, but I still consider us Indie Hackers. Everything we build has to generate revenue to warrant continuing to work on it. All our products have to pay their own bills and fund the team. No VCs, just our hard work and trying to grow our SaaS business using the same tools that you have at your disposal.
Based on the discussion boards I suspect most people will pose questions to the general public. However, if you have any questions that would garner my unique perspective of using a consulting agency to make money, build something of value, and use those earnings to invest and grow SaaS products - let me know! Post a reply and I'll get back with you.
I think you've picked a pretty good industry :) Seen a lot of successful companies that help companies get customer reviews.
Wonder how you plan to get from zero to (10-100) users. Do you plan on focusing on a specific platform (like the Slack app store), or just do pure cold outreach?
Yeah got started in it a couple years ago, it's been really slow. Far from blitzscaling.
90% of what the app is as of this second I built over a long weekend.
I had some specific financial targets in mind that I needed to hit to warrant investing more time and energy into it. If it didn't have the features as-is to solve some folks problems then it didn't make sense to spend even more time and energy on it.
I have a content writer that writes a blog post a week based on topics we collaborate on and a handful of strategic SEO landing pages that generate enough traffic to get trials and convert them into sign ups.
I'm using Hubspot and have some solid marketing automation setup for the trial users. We're converting 25% of the 14 day trials to paid.
I've now hit that financial goals for MRR to warrant reinvestment and have been doing a major rework of the product. You'll be able to create multiple page custom surveys, collect multiple videos, do NPS, and other surveys as well, and have some request sequences and automation built in. Boast.io/next
I'm now building what I always wanted to create, but we had to figure out the marketing and client acquisition first before I would invest more into development.
So, content marketing and SEO for what we've got to date Going forward we'll be doing some strategic cold outreach. We'll have some killer integrations, and we'll target organizations that can plug into our platform with little effort. Hunt them out and then cold outreach. Hope that works. ;)
We'll also continue what we've been doing too.
hey Ryan, super inspiring. I’m building an agency too and hopefully in time use revenue from it to self-fund a product.
It’sa competitive space - dev/design agency work. Would you be open to sharing a part of your secret sauce on how you managed to carve out a good business. Were/are most of your clients word of mouth and personal network? Did you do anything other than build relationships to bag clients like Caterpillar and other large and small startups?
I’m trying not to compete on price. It’s still early days for me, so I’m curious how you built a strong (predictable) book of business.
Absolutely.
To start. When I started my agency Web Ascender, we were initially trying to build a DIY website building platform. This was before Wix, Squarespace, etc. We had a platform but no idea how to market and sell. We were coders.
I went out into the community and started going to business mixers, networking events, "Chamber of Commerce" events, and anything I could to talk to people. I had some folks interested and every one of them did not want to do the work. They were like, sounds cool but can you just build it for me?
We struggled with finding a market for our CMS and then got into consulting.
Back then our DIY builder was created on top of DNN (DotNetNuke)
So we built and created website marketing pages around that technology because we knew it inside and out. We blogged, did some content marketing, and started getting leads from around the world for help with that specific technology. This is what allowed us to have success and get bigger name customers. It's a .Net platform and lots of big businesses use Microsoft and have IT teams, so they wanted to run something they could host on their windows servers. They found DNN, looked for people who could build stuff on it - there we were.
Now we don't do any more DNN, have switched to WordPress and Ruby on Rails for any custom development.
What's nice is if you do great work, and build a good rapport with people you work with - when they go to work for another company; they bring you along. So we would have IT guys, or marketing people at our clients that would get a new job at a bigger and cooler company. Be dissatisfied with their current vendor, and bring us in. That's how we collected most of our big logos.
For an agency in 2020 there are a couple things I would think about:
If you have any more questions I am happy to answer. Thanks!
Hi Ryan! Thank you for sharing your story and insights - this is super helpful! I am currently more toward the beginning of your story and am looking to start a design agency (I lead an in-house "agency-style" team and am looking to take what I've learned to the open market).
I did have a question for you - A lot of what I read online about starting an agency is to serve a specific niche. Did your agency start out serving a specific niche/industry? Or did you just jump right into being a full-service studio?
I work within an HR team, and am considering offering services as a "design agency for HR teams" - offering specialized strategy, design and marketing services to teams who traditionally don't have access to those types of resources.
Hey Ryan, thanks for this channel to ask questions. This is really a super inspiring post for me to read as I have plans to set up my own agency to put food on the table while working on a few SaaS ideas I hope to get to ramen profitability by end 2021.
I just wanted to ask as a person just starting out, what do you think would be the best way to approach new customers for digital service work in 2020?
I am right now considering doing sample works to present, cold outreach, content marketing, and SEO to hopefully get my first client.
While I do hope to be able to pursue this line of work full-time, the people around me are doubtful given that I do not have deep experience, a personal brand, or a network of clients who trust me. Any advice on how to start out?
Hi Bryan, if you don't have a history of success yet you can balance that with a guarantee of some sort. When approaching a new customer for digital service, realize that they get a ton of SPAM with non specific items everyday. I GET THEM - people with the same canned email of all these issues that are not even close to true, it's just a hope that something scares or catches their eye and they respond.
When you reach out, do enough research to provide them value.
If they open it, if they read it, it will probably resonate. Make it easy for them to take the next step which is most likely a brief discovery call to review their report and see if you would be a good fit.
Try to put yourself in their shoes:
They probably already have or used a developer for something. They may still have a great relationship with them. In your marketing you may say something like: "We are comfortable working with existing web and design teams to focus on what we do best like X, Y, Z" Make them think they can use you without killing any of their existing relationships.
They are afraid if it goes bad that they'll lose business or look bad to their boss. Most people are less concerned about the money then you think. But, having a guarantee of some sort is a good option. Make sure YOU only work with reputable businesses otherwise people may intend to abuse your guarantee no matter what. I have had success vetting people who are not a good fit. This is very important.
Inspire them. What would their business look like if they got X more leads, if they had a successful newsletter, if they had a referral network, if they collected a couple dozen videos with Boast.io and used those to build more rapport and make more sales (plug for my product haha).
Hope I touched on some areas of value, if you have more questions let me know and I'll try and put together some more details, write a detailed blog post or record a video. I'm open to sharing any and all strategies and secrets.
Thank you so much for the in-depth answer Ryan!
The definitely gave me a different perspective to how I would approach it and pitfalls I would need to watch out for as I begin. That was the main overwhelming worry for me before starting out. As for more questions, I think I'll only know what I don't know once I really sink my teeth into the work and start doing it.
If you do write something or film something, please let me know! I would love to read it/ watch it and share it!
Posted this to put something on my featured profile. But really I've been running a digital agency and SaaS businesses forever. If you have questions from hiring, to taxes, to development, to hosting... to closing deals - I've probably had to do it and probably have some opinions about it. :)