Introduce Yourself and Your Six Figure Business
This group is designed for people who have founded businesses and have achieved a magical six figures in annual (recurring) revenue.
Would you care to introduce yourself?
- who are you?
- how did you get to six figures?
I'm an outlier for the group, along with @louisswiss. Alchemist Camp isn't up to six figures this year, but I've done it twice previously:
The first time was a house painting franchise when I was 19. I sent direct mailers in my area. I also looked for houses that needed my services and left door hangers offering free painting estimates. While doing estimates, I figured out what people wanted and the price of the job, and I sold them on it. It took 20-30 hours a week during the spring. Then I hired 3 crews of two painters plus a job site manager each, started training them, started doing the work and kept marketing during early summer (~75 hrs/week). I was a pretty bad manager and honestly it's not easy to manage high school students. I had problems producing as much as I sold and had to turn some of the work over to neighboring franchisees.
Lesson learned: focus on profit over revenue!
The second time was a language school for children (with 2 partners). At the very beginning 100% of sales came from parents walking in off the street. Fortunately, I was a very experienced bilingual teacher at this point, having already taught 1,000+ children. Parents could see my competence and confidence when giving their children placement tests and I was able to close almost 70% of placement tests I gave. As we expanded in our 2nd, 3rd and 4th years, it became more of a slog. I was a better manager than as a teenager, but was still mediocre at best. My partners were great, but I failed to push hard enough or invest enough in training the teachers we hired. I couldn't bring myself to fire an underperformer, either. As a result, our rapid growth in years 1 and 2 slowed down and we probably only grew 10% in the 4th and final year, all while I was working as hard as I possibly could on the whole academic side of the school.
I'm proud of the work, the lasting goodwill from the students' parents years after and one tiny publication by OUP. Ultimately, though, it was a painful experience that lead me to programming, desperate for a way to make a scalable business with lower capital costs.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Awesome Rosie, looking forward to this!
I'm probably an outlier for this group, in that I've reached 6-figure revenue with 3 different companies but am currently not running a 6-figure business 😅 (hope that doesn't disqualify me).
Attempt #1 was Gymhopper - a B2B SaaS business in the fitness space. We took some money from angels, did everything wrong, but somehow managed to make it to 6-figures in ARR and sold the business to a competitor after a few years. Acquisition was basically just field sales.
Attempt #2 was an online jewellery store (closed in 2016). Acquisition was mainly word of mouth, channel sales (collaborating with retailers) and some paid Facebook/Insta stuff. Stupidly, we just let this business fizzle out, as neither of us had the time required to do it properly.
Attempt #3 was (or is) a consulting business. I started off doing anything CRO-related and started specialising in social proof optimisation. Clients have all come inbound via word of mouth from friends and past clients. Technically I still run this business, but haven't accepted any new work since ~May of this year, as I'm focussing 100% on other projects.
I run Fantasy Football Calculator, a site that has tools and advice for fantasy football. I've been running it part time for about 15 years now. It's revenue is mostly subscription revenue with some advertising. Subscription revenue has been steadily increasing year over year.
No full time employees, just my part time work and other contractors.
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/fantasy-football-calculator