how I bootstrapped my services biz to $1M run rate

hey all! I'm Joe, the 24 yo owner of AppraiseItNow.

I quit my job at Bain in December 2024 to build a tech-enabled services company, and this past month we've hit a $1M revenue run rate with just one full time employee.

Keep reading if you want to see exactly how I did this

Here's the backstory:

I was a no-coder, helping businesses do more without hiring more

Then I landed a job at Bain & Company to do some bigger league consulting work

I met the founder of AppraiseItNow a year before we were both set to start at Bain, and joined him as a 33% owner.

My job was to:

• Automate as much as possible

• Find new growth channels

For the first 6 months, nothing happened. But then things started going crazy.

We were getting 1,200 leads per month. (see below)

At this point, I had stepped away from the business due to some partnership challenges.

But I saw a clear opportunity to buy out my partner and 10X the company.

So that's what I did.

Here's exactly how.

** Before my acquisition:

When I initially joined the company as a partner, we tested a lot of new growth channels: cold email, paid Google Ads, webscraping leads.

Nothing was really working as well as we needed.

Until we decided to try a niche corner of SEO called programmatic SEO.

Context: our company offers any type of appraisal in any state. Think:

• Personal Property Appraisal in Maryland

• Equipment Appraisal in Texas

• Business Valuation in California

So we spun up over 10K landing pages with unique search terms in a wide range of appraisal offerings, across the country.

Nothing happened for about 3 months

Next thing you know, we were getting more leads than we could handle.

We were doing about $10K in revenue at this point, but I saw a huge hole in our conversion rate.

We also had a lot more juice to squeeze on the website traffic side.

I thought I could 4x conversion rate and 2x the leads to get this business to $80K/month.

So I then bought my partner out in November 2024 (hefty price tag, but already made money back)

** After my Acquisition

Once I acquired the business, I implemented the following:

• Tons of software and automation to streamline customer fulfillment process and the CRM process

  • Attio for CRM

  • Missive for email

  • Airtable for operations

  • Whalesync for programmatic SEO

  • make .com + n8n

• AI agents to automatically follow up with leads (n8n + supabase)

• Website refresh

• New service offerings

• Tons of new SEO content and landing pages

• Backlink building

• Getting rid of low value services

And in 10 months all of this led to:

• 4X on conversion rate on leads

• 2X on average contract value.

• And much much happier clients.

And we're now hitting $90K revenue per month over the past few months.

There's obviously a lot more detail to all of this here, so I'm happy to share more! Just comment here or shoot me a note.

Let me know if this was helpful :)

joe