Listen Up! IH - Episode 30
👆 That's Molly Wolchansky's advice to Indie Hackers who want to get to $10K MRR with their business.
Molly is the founder of the SaaS app called The Agent Nest.
It's an app that lets real estate agents access marketing content for their property listings.
Agent Nest handles both their clients digital cand physical media content.
For a monthly subscription, clients gain access to more than 3000 pieces of marketing materials like social media posts, logos, flyers, and postcards.
And you can even schedule content from within Agent Nest itslf.
The Agent Nest is doing $8K MRR as of now according to Indie Hackers product page, and it's on track to reach $10K MRR in a couple of months.
But Molly's path to success doesn't fit the traditional trajectory of an indie hackers SaaS tool.
She started as a freelance marketer, then built her own agency and eventually turned her skills into a SaaS tool.
Her story👇
The Agent Nest targets real estate agents.
They can use the content templates from The Agent Nest app to post to their social media channels.
The content pieces range from blog posts and videos to social media post templates with categories such as "holidays", "infographics", "recipes", and "local love."
Real estate agents directly use this content for running Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn ads.
The material is accessed through Canva links that agents can then edit and customize with their own name and listing details.
With more than 3000 pieces of content, and new ones added every day, The Agent Nest solves a very specific problem for real estate agents in the United States.
Agents need marketing material to build a social media presence and target prospective buyers. And they aren't as good with content creation as professional digital marketers.
The Agent Nest allows them to have a robust digital marketing strategy without relying on a marketing agency or freelancers.
It automates marketing for them.
You can get the content subscription for $32 a month, and get automated posting and scheduling for $59 a month.
This is the kind of marketing content that Molly had been creating for over 6 years in her previous career as a freelance marketer.
She started on this route when she was creating content for her mother.
Her mother is a real estate agent herself. So Molly knew the user persona pretty well.
She knew exactly what her mother needed. And she honed her content creation skills by working for her mother and then her mother's friends in the industry.
As Molly got better at her job, she started getting more clients from the industry.
That's when she started her marketing agency MoRealty Marketing.
Through the agency, she created marketing content for her clients. As a freelancer, she had a tough time managing her workload. Saying no was becoming a problem for her, and often she felt like she wasn't getting fairly compensated for the amount of work she was putting in.
She felt overworked, overwhelmed, and underpaid.
It was time for a change.
Eventually, in January 2020 Molly started her own SaaS company The Agent Nest.
Her co-founder and boyfriend Shane White is a software engineer who runs a SaaS company of his own.
He was able to write the code for The Agent Nest.
And Molly started creating content for the tool.
They even got a white label social media scheduling tool to integrate with The Agent Nest.
This allowed them to offer a higher-priced subscription with one-click automated posting and scheduling.
Since then Molly's days haven't changed. They're still filled with real estate marketing content, but a SaaS tool gives her 3 major benefits -
Over the years as a freelance marketer Molly had worked with many real estate agents. She had given classes and webinars, met with agents at conventions and events.
And worked with other agencies as well.
At every step, she had collected emails of the real estate agents she was coming in touch with.
In her 6-year agency career, she had built up an email list of 1000 people, each of whom knew her personally in real life.
When she started Agent Nest, she sent out a blast to her email list and launched a Facebook Ad targeting real estate agents.
Within the first month she had 7 paying customers and an MRR of $145.
She doubled down on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest to create content and target real estate agents.
She even started a Facebook group for real estate agents.
Molly continues to do free webinars and podcast interviews to attract a wider audience.
Today most of Agent Nest's traffic comes from Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook ads.
Molly's advice to Indie Hackers is that you're going to get frustrated in your journey, and that's okay. Don't be deterred by your failures or the success of competitors -
"...don't let other successful companies in the same field become a deterrent to your success."
"I think it is so important to tell yourself, I can. I can do this and I will do this. Just focus on your business, focus on what you care about. If you do become discouraged, don't stay in that discouragement. Use that discouragement as fuel to grow and to get better."
Lessons from The Agent Nest story 👇
Indie hacker startups you can acquire from microacquire.com or get inspired by to build your own -
Thank you for reading🙏
ICYMI : Last week I wrote about the No-Code startup Makerpad.
You can read the archive of all the posts so far on the Listen Up IH website
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Thanks to Seth King for editing this post
Google trends chart courtesy UnderTheRadar.io.
Cheers,