Building an agency from $0 to $2M/yr

Yaro Starak has been around the block, building everything from e-commerce to education businesses. His latest project, an agency called InboxDone, recently hit $2M/yr.

Here's Yaro on how he did it. 👇

The first million

I've been an entrepreneur since I was 19. My first business was a website about the Magic: The Gathering trading card game, where I built up an e-commerce store and card trading community. After that, I had an online agency where I helped university students connect with contractors who offered editing services.

In 2005, I discovered the world of blogging and very quickly dived into becoming a content creator. I started a podcast, wrote an email newsletter, and then released my first course in 2007. That was the beginning of an education business and I spent the next decade selling my own digital teaching products and coaching. This was when I broke seven figures in income for the first time.

Today, I am the cofounder and Chief Marketing Officer of InboxDone, which has been my business for the last eight years. Our agency sells one service: We provide executive assistants who take over replying to emails, managing schedules, and completing other tasks and processes for busy entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders.

We're just about to hit the $167k per month income level, which I believe qualifies us to say we're a $2M/year business; although, of course, it will take a full year for us to reach that as we only just hit that monthly number.

Starting InboxDone

The idea for InboxDone actually started all the way back in the early 2000s with my previous editing agency business. At the time, I was basically a one-man show, running a lot of the core functions for that business, except for delivering the main service that I hired contractors to do. This meant that I spent a lot of my time inside my email inbox.

I realized if I ever wanted to travel, have freedom – all the things that popular books like "The 4-Hour Work Week" talk about – I would have to delegate managing my email to someone else. So that's what I did. I hired a friend who was about to become a mother, and she took over managing my inbox and replying to emails for me. 

This was a life-changing moment. I went from having a lot of work to do to only a couple of hours per week. The day-to-day operations were managed by my friend because she managed all the emails and routine tasks. 

Although I had this idea all the way back in the early 2000s, I wasn't able to act on it until around the year 2016 because I was so busy with my online education business.

In 2016, to test whether this idea could work, I partnered with one of my email executive assistants at the time. Her name is Claire, and she became my cofounder.

We did a very simple experiment to see if this business had legs. I wrote an email to my newsletter offering a service where the same people who managed my email could manage your email. In response to that email, five people showed interest, three of them booked calls, and two of them signed up for a $1,000/month plan to manage their inboxes. Everything grew from this start.

Start with services

Our initial service offering was straightforward because my cofounder had already been delivering the service for me and my education business. 

The big question was whether the systems and processes that we developed to manage my email would apply to other people, especially because entrepreneurs have different businesses, different tools, different ways of operating – even different personalities!

One thing we did that was smart was to not just offer general virtual assistant services like so many other agencies and freelancers provide. We focused on executive assistants and made email the core problem that we solved.

The great thing about starting with a service is you don't have to build anything. There was no software to code. There was no product to purchase like an e-commerce business has to do. We simply delivered a service and were paid for it upfront each month — immediately. We had cash flow straight away. 

That being said, because I already had some money in the bank and some assets, I made the decision to not take any money out of this new company and instead use what little profit we had to pour it back into marketing for growth. 

It wasn't until our fourth year that our business finally had enough cash flow and profit that I started to take income from it.

My cofounder was able to take income straight away because she initially delivered the core service that we offered. This was fantastic because we could validate that there was enough income to both pay the contractor (first my cofounder, today our team) and return profit as an operating company. 

Paying a premium

Our revenue model is very simple: We charge a monthly recurring fee for our services. That monthly fee can expand or contract based on the number of hours clients need help from our executive assistants. 

The entry point is our standard $1,995/month plan. We also offer a full-time hours plan at $4,995 per month. 

When I started this business, I knew one of the key strengths we would have is that the service we offer targets a problem that never stops. Everyone gets emails every single day. 

That being said, in order to make this business work, I knew we would need a certain type of talent because email is difficult to handle. You cannot just put any kind of low-cost overseas virtual assistant inside your inbox and expect to get a good result. 

Over the years, we have steadily increased our prices. This was necessary because we've increased the amount we pay our team in order to continue to attract and retain talent. Our team is predominantly North American (Canadians and Americans) whom we pay American rates, which is far higher than the $5-$10/hour paid in countries like the Philippines and India. 

Paying customers are the only validation

When I was coaching entrepreneurs, I noticed my clients kept running into the same problem. People underestimate how hard it is to attract a paying customer. They just don't do enough to reach people with their offer.

Often these people get excited about what they're selling but not how they're going to sell it. It's so easy to get caught up in the software you're building, the product you're designing, or the service you're offering and underestimate that most of your time, especially early on, is going out there and finding your first, second, third, and fourth customers.

You only truly learn when you have paying customers. These people tell you whether what you have is valuable, how much they will pay for it, why and how they're using it, and help you to reach new clients. 

I read so many business books early on and continue to do so today. They're motivating, they get me excited to build my business, but they never do the most important thing. They do not give you real experience of actually serving customers. 

Growing to $10k/mo

To start with, we had one advantage: My existing audience from my newsletter, blog, and podcast. This was enough to get our first two beta test clients. 

From there, I was able to continue leveraging my own audience, including my social media following on Facebook and Twitter, to grow us to the point where we had about 6-7 paying clients. This got us up to almost $10,000 a month within a year.

Unfortunately, that's where things stopped. I just couldn't get any more customers from my existing audience. 

Early growth experiments

Then, I started to experiment with new methods of reaching potential customers. We sponsored a conference. I started appearing on podcasts as a guest expert. I also began to build out the content on our website with the hopes of attracting some customers organically from Google. 

The conference returned nothing and was a waste of money. Almost all the podcasts returned nothing aside from incoming links to our website, but there were a couple of podcasts that sent us one or two new clients. Sometimes the podcast show hosts even became clients.

The content I wrote for our blog initially did nothing. Over time, thanks to incoming links from the podcasts I was appearing on and also links from my blog, which had good search authority, we did start to rank higher in Google. 

Google has since then become a small but reliable source of new clients, sending us one to two per month. That being said, I can't always be sure which of those clients came from a Google paid ad or from organic search results. 

Speaking of paid ads, we began experimenting with Google paid search ads using a small budget to see if we could hit the right keywords to bring in new clients. That budget has grown over the years, however, Google remains only a small but consistent source of new clients.

Late-stage growth experiments

In the last few years, we experimented with YouTube ads and LinkedIn ads. While YouTube so far has returned nothing, LinkedIn has become as effective as Google — a small but consistent source of clients.

Over the years, we have also experimented with other one-off campaigns, including newsletter advertising, ads on Twitter, cold email, LinkedIn direct messages, and speaking at events. The only source of new clients that has moved the needle has been referrals. 

As our client base has grown, naturally the amount of referrals we get from our existing clients has increased. Today we attract new clients from Google (both paid and organic), LinkedIn ads, referrals, and connections through people who know me from my previous work as a blogger and podcaster.  

Run cheap and quick experiments

My advice for anyone looking to start and grow a company when it comes to marketing is to understand that there is no solution that works all the time. Just because someone gets a result with one channel doesn't mean it will work for you, and vice versa. If the channel didn't work for someone else, that doesn't mean it won't work for you. 

The key is to run quick and cheap experiments to see if you get any indication that something is working. Then double down on what is working, refine it, get better at it, and expand.

Go all in on one project

As an entrepreneur, I tend to think about other ideas constantly. If my current active business is not growing or not stimulating in a way I'd like it to be, I start thinking about other projects, experiments, or businesses I could start. 

InboxDone definitely had stunted growth because I wasn't 100% all in during many of the early years. That's not to say that the business was dying or failing. It was always moving forward, but not at a pace that it could have if I put all of my energy into it. 

This became quite obvious because when I did finally decide to put all of my energy and all of my focus into this one business, it immediately started to grow more quickly. The bizarre thing is, the business grew more rapidly even though I wasn't really doing much more. Because I had my entire energy oriented towards this one project, it's almost like the universe just decided to reward us with more clients!

Learning from churn

One of the biggest challenges with any subscription-based business is churn. In our case, we keep churn low by solving the problems that our clients care about the most. If we can give our clients back 1, 2, or even 3 hours per day, that's an incredible return on their investment. 

I'm proud to say that our churn has stayed below 4% for almost the entire time we've run our business. This is only possible because of our amazing team and the process we go through to match our clients with the right assistants, leading to long-term relationships.

Of course, writing this down makes it sound easy. It's not. Every single year, we've had to solve problems. We learn from what happens when a client cancels. We improve systems, continue to source great talent. All while trying to juggle the balance between how much we charge, how much we pay our staff, how much is left over to pay an internal management and hiring team, and of course leave some profit for the business. 

Choose the right industry and model

The biggest lesson I can pass on to anyone getting started or anyone new to entrepreneurship is to carefully consider the industry and business model you start with. 

My first business, selling Magic: The Gathering cards, had tiny profit margins and focused on a very small industry. I also quickly outgrew the game. 

With my second business, an editing agency, I had better profit margins and I started to build a team to help me. Yet, eventually, I grew tired of this business too because I wasn't excited about promoting what I was selling. 

With my blog, podcast, and education business, this was the first time I really felt alignment with what I was selling, the processes I had to do on a day-to-day basis, and the profit margins. I made good money, enjoyed my work, and had a small team to help me. 

Today, with InboxDone, we have a larger team (80 people as I write this), and a business that mostly operates without me being involved. It’s a real company, and something every day I am excited to continue working on.

What's next?

I've learned from my past. I'm focusing 100% on my one project, my one business – InboxDone. 

As Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), my goal every day is to figure out how we can reach new people and get new customers. 

In the short term, I'm focused on reaching larger clients. You might call this enterprise-level services. These are clients who, instead of needing help for just one or two of their team, have 10, 20, 30, even a hundred staff members who need to get time back from executive assistants. 

Hence, right now I'm spending a lot of my time learning how to reach people who are decision-makers when it comes to hiring executive assistants at larger companies. 

I continue to work with my marketing team to refine our current distribution channels that grow our core offering of email management services. 

In terms of revenue goals, I have one clear destination – to reach $1M per month in sales. I'm not sure if that's going to take us one year or 10 years, but I'm really excited about the journey to get there.  

Just head to InboxDone.com to learn about our business. You can find my blog still up and running at https://yaro.blog.