How we grew from zero to 8k MRR in 1 year

I own a digital marketing agency https://digiexpert.com.au in Sydney and currently we have around 30 clients on-boarded in last 1 year with a recurring revenue of 8k per month.

People and posts in indiehacker always inspired and motivated me and hence I am writing my experience to help others.

So here is my journey...

I tried a lot of things before but nothing worked, I always took the experience as my assets. I started by improving myself, reading books in personal development, a lot of videos about the same mainly about improving myself in terms of health, wealth, relationship, and lot of other factors.
Took me a year to get to a schedule, having positive mindset, and opened myself for opportunities, this improved a lot in my life.

One day one of my relative came to me and asked me if I could guide him with his career, he was in IT and after the master's degree its really difficult almost near to impossible for a student visa holder to secure a job or internship in Australia, that's the opportunity I was looking for where I could teach him all my experiences and start something which I tried couple of years ago. I proposed partnership to which he accepted and we both started working together.

Within a month we found a person intending to startup a new Business and we proposed to grow his business for a nominal charges (website development for just $200 and seo for $1000 per year that too he paid after 6 months), for 3 months I trained my partner and finished our first work, that client saw our potential and referred another client to whom we charged $400 again it was too much work for us but we just wanted to build our portfolio, try and test things.

Next month we got another recommendation and got a big work around $2k, with this we got a chain of recommendations.

In 6 months the first business we worked with started receiving a lot of leads online such that's he hired one employee.

The third business we worked with was paying $1500 per month to another digital marketing agency in Sydney for 1.5 years and he wasn't getting any results, at that time he was getting at most 1 lead once a month and the business was in verge of closure. We took over for $500 per month and within 3 months he saw results, currently he receives 12-15 leads per week and he hired 3 employees to cater to the demand. He still pays the same amount to us.

There are lots and lots of success stories with our clients.

We helped a lot of startups and with strategies we applied they saw good amount of growth in their business.

Few months ago, we purchased a digital marketing agency based in Melbourne, that didn't go as expected but got some clients on-boarded with us.

One of the important strategies we used was not to increase out rates when our clients business grew, rather we gradually kept increasing our rates for every new client, this worked out really well.

With the results we had, and over to it the discipline and honesty we kept, clients are more than happy to recommend us to their friends and family.

Our motive was always to grow client's business and we constantly kept researching and applying new ideas and never looked at how much clients pays.

One thing we learned is helping businesses grow will help you grow.

After adding case study of 4-5 clients we never had time to manage our own site as all of our clients are from word of mouth.

We did created some in house tools which made our life easier and also invested in some saas application development which will show some growth in future.

Suggestions I would give:

• Strive to give your best in whatever we do.
• Don't worry about money, spend time in trying different things and give as much time as possible
• Keep learning and up to date with the industry
• Always be honest with your clients and charge only for what you work
• Always think of growing clients business and ways to improve it.
  You will grow with the growth of your clients.
• Keep looking for opportunities, we recently had a client from food industry, we created website, seo, advertising and now we proposed pos system for his cafe for cheap, we'll create the pos system under our branding and resell.
• Apply Spiderweb strategy in business