Rebuilding after his ARR plummeted by $600k

Trevor Longino built a marketing and GTM agency called CrowdTamers and grew it to $700k ARR in two years. Then, the market shifted and it tanked.

It took a lot of work to rebuild, but he's in the high six figures again and holding strong. Here's Trevor on how he did it. 👇

The big swing

Six years ago, I got extremely ill. I had what looked like COVID, but before it existed. I had just started working with Chinese nationals from Wuhan province. They returned from a business trip, and I got deathly ill.

I was in the ICU for two weeks. My lungs shut down. Doctors installed shunts into my lungs to drain fluid. I was very sick, and my wife was eight months pregnant with our twin daughters. When I left the ICU, she had our twin daughters.

I realized, "You've had your brush with death. You have kids. Mortality has spread its shadow over you. Now's the time to figure out: Why are you on this planet?"

I'd already had good success joining companies, serving as their CMO, and scaling them to a couple of million dollars a year. As the company grew, politics became a bigger part of its operations than performance, so I would leave because that wasn't my vibe.

So, I could either keep joining companies or I could make a big swing. I took a big swing and asked: Can I help a thousand founders make a million dollars a year by the end of 2028?

I started teaching, building, educating, and evangelizing how several simple marketing systems I built — the Million Dollar Marketing Engine, the Content Engine, and others — can get businesses in front of people, prepare them to buy, and start conversations likely to result in sales.

And I launched my marketing and GTM agency, CrowdTamers. It had a couple of really good years, a couple of really bad years, then returned to really good years. We're currently at a high six-figure ARR.

Inherently revenue positive

I like agencies because they are inherently revenue positive. It doesn't take much to offer and charge for a service.

So, to get started, I yoloed into, "Well, I've been a freelancer before. Let me just do it, but bigger." I achieved about $300k in ARR on my own. Then, I tried to pivot to an agency model in February 2020.

By March 2020, I lost every client and I realized, "Oh no, this isn't as easy as I thought it would be."

I had to rebuild the business from scratch. Then I achieved about $700k ARR within two years.

Charging by the hour is a sucker's game

We don't charge by the hour because in the world of LLMs, that's a sucker's game. If we charged by the hour, we would charge $5k-$9k/mo, like other content creation agencies, to create all your content marketing. Instead, we charge $1.5k/mo because we charge for the outcome, right?

AI abstracts away our hours, and the more AI helps, the fewer hours it takes to complete work that used to require 30-40 hours each month to create client content.

So, we charge a flat fee. We grow revenue through discovery, onboarding clients at a very affordable price, and then expanding services. Two-thirds of my clients upsell in 90 days because our work is good.

Small infrastructure investments

I favor flexible systems rather than hardcore tech pieces. I heavily rely on Claude Code + Obsidian; they serve as my amanuensis, craftsman, secretary, and automation engine, powering much of what I do.

Within my company, we use Notion for all documentation and client delivery; Slack for discussions; Canva for design; and Descript and Opus Pro for video.

That's the whole stack. My total infrastructure spend is approximately $400/month for an agency running high to mid to high 6-figures. Infrastructure investment is incredibly small.

A three-prong approach to growth

We use three mechanisms for growth at CrowdTamers:

1. The content engine: We create, publish, and promote content, driving people through a several-stage system. They come to my website and sign up. I spend about $500/month on pure advertising, which generates about $12-18k in return every month. That's one engine.

2. Knowledge sharing through workshops, events, and partnership funnels: I share the systems, ideas, and tools I created with anyone who wants to learn. I give them away for free. My business isn't based on unique ideas; it's based on executing them well. My ideas are unique enough that if you try to tackle a CrowdTamers-style content engine on your own, you will spend significant money, time, and effort replicating it. Of course, you can do it on your own, and I encourage you to do that if you wish. But if you'd rather achieve results in 90 days than spend a year learning how to do it well, that's why CrowdTamers exists.

3. Referrals: Past clients or well-connected individuals refer business to us. I consider it a badge of honor that 6-8 past clients have returned at a new company or a new stage in their current company's existence, saying, "Hey, we need help again."

Why most GTM systems fail and how to succeed

Indie hackers face a marketing crisis. The difficulty of shipping software has become logarithmically easier every year for the past 30 years, and we've reached a point where anyone can ship the same feature set.

Every builder needs to master combining all marketing pieces to build a moat — not with features, but with confidence that you want to service this crowd. The more visible you are in conversations, and the more conversations you close into revenue based on your unique differentiation, the more moat you will build. Software features and pricing can no longer build this moat. People will buy from indie hackers only if they believe that the indie hacker brilliantly focuses on the problem they want solved.

Most GTM systems fail because they’re built around channels, not people. I use a framework I call the 3 Cs to scale effective systems: Crowd, Conversations, Confidence.

• Crowd: Know exactly who you’re talking to. Understand them deeply: What keeps them up at night, what language they use, where they hang out. Spray-and-pray doesn’t scale.

• Conversations: You don’t need a funnel, you need responses. Whether through content, cold outreach, or paid ads, the goal is to get someone to talk back.

• Confidence: Build trust over time by being useful, consistent, and legit. Show them you understand the problem better than anyone else.

Confront reality quickly

That said, my "system" has been less about formal market testing frameworks and more about building feedback loops that force me to confront reality quickly.

Here's how I'd frame it — it's deceptively simple:

1. Offer before you build. I learned to sell the outcome before systematizing delivery. With the Content Engine, I essentially did bespoke content work for clients, but I kept noticing the same pattern: Founders wanted consistent content but couldn't commit the time. So, I asked, "What if I could get this down to one hour of your time per month?" and watched their reactions. The ones who leaned in became the design partners.

1. Track what people actually pay for vs. what they say they want. Early CrowdTamers had a broad menu — paid ads, SEO, full-stack marketing. But when I looked at what renewed and what churned, content-adjacent services had stickier clients. The $1M Marketing Engine was aspirational; the Content Engine was what people actually kept paying for.

1. Instrument your delivery for patterns. I don't run formal A/B tests on service offerings, but I pay attention to friction. Where do clients push back? Where do they ghost? Where do they get excited? The Content Engine emerged because I kept seeing the same bottleneck: clients loved the output but hated the input process. So I engineered the input down to almost nothing.

1. Set kill criteria in advance. This one I learned the hard way. I ran several unsuccessful outbound campaigns for too long in early 2025 because I kept thinking "one more tweak." Now I set explicit thresholds: if X hasn't happened by Y date, I stop and reassess. It's not about being rigid—it's about preventing sunk cost fallacy from eating months of runway.

Self-imposed challenges

After overcoming a challenge, most founders realize that the real obstacle to overcoming any challenge is almost always themselves.

The only way to overcome these self-imposed problems is by trying, failing, and taking enough runs at it. Luckily, it's getting faster and easier to go from attempt to failure to attempt again.

I cannot stress enough how much opportunity lies everywhere around us. It's everywhere you look. You can go out, get a Claude subscription, have Claude write all the pieces to create a piece of software, and launch it in a day. What used to take $10M and half a year's work to ship is now the price of a value meal at McDonald's and one day of your weekend.

Indie hackers need to take advantage of this momentum. Because if they don't, somebody else will.

You must move faster.

Tanking the business

Here's an example. In 2023, CrowdTamers did somewhere around $700k. In 2024, we did $120k. Same team, same skills, same services. The market moved, and I was too slow to catch up.

My product, services, and offerings didn't fit the shifted market, and the service I offered kind of did its job. We kept the company kind of stumbling along for 18 months until I finally overcame it by trying and trying and trying and trying. I was on literally 150 sales calls over those 18 months, probably more. Failing, failing, failing, and failing.

I went to events. Failed. I went on podcasts. Failed. Everywhere I went, I was wrong. Eventually, I discovered that combining awareness content with consideration content would drive people with discipline through a multi-stage engine, increasing their familiarity with me over time. In a very small, controlled way that I own, every dollar I invest now returns $7, $15, or $28. But overcoming that challenge required me to move far enough away from my old business to make money again.

Nail your vector

Software ate the world, and now AI is eating software. The only thing you have of value is what makes you stand out from the average of humanity.

That requires three things: Speed. Perplexity. Burstiness.

I'm using LLM terminology here. In LLM terms, "perplexity" measures how much a body of writing deviates from what an LLM would typically generate. "Burstiness" measures how different a particular phrase is.

Consider your current vector as the LLM's neutral vector. This represents an LLM's lowest creativity and temperature settings; running it produces this current vector. Your perplexity measures how much your work, in general, deviates from that main vector. Your burstiness measures how much your current actions shift the vector. It's the angular velocity relative to the current direction.

If you model this, and your vector includes your movement velocity, your vector as an indie hacker should not be 90 degrees off everyone (that's too insane), nor just one degree off. LLMs can achieve plus or minus one, five, or even eight or nine degrees off what everyone expects.

Consistently shift your vector away from everyone, but also recognize this is a 3D or nD space. You can move your vector anywhere, so find where opportunity exists and no one currently fights over it.

So be different. Be fast and consistent. And above all, start.

Neither your software nor your features makes you sellable. Your revenue will come from your focus and skill in solving a particular, narrow problem for a particular, narrow set of people.

What's next?

My goal is to help 1,000 founders make $1M/year. I'm a quarter of the way there, 5 years into my 8-year quest. Momentum takes time. I haven't given up on achieving my goal.

In February and March, I'll be speaking about how "AI + Content + Marketing" fundamentally changes how your business finds and wins new customers to 7,000 people across a series of events with the Founder Institute. If just 10% of those people implement and learn from what I share, I'll have already made up the whole difference.

Hopefully, some of what I'm sharing might be useful for you and help you make it happen.

You can find me on LinkedIn, X, and on YouTube. Crowdtamers.com is my website.

And by the way, my YouTube channel is called Launch Today because you should launch something today. If you're not launching something today, you're falling behind. Launching doesn't mean a feature. Launching might mean a marketing effort. Launching might mean a new video. Launching an email to a list you haven't sent things to in two months. Launching can mean anything, but launch something today that will shift the vector of your perplexity.

Do something bursty today!