Ignore No More

Wow. 1 year?! That’s insane.

I started the agency November 1st. Launched the website the Tuesday before Thanksgiving with the 4Brandsin4Weeks challenge.

Frankly most of the time I doubted we’d make it another month.

But every month on a hope and a prayer (literally!) 🙏🏽 we made it.

• Payroll was run.

• Rent was paid.

• Projects were delivered on time.

And now that I’m taking a step back, in one year we’ve gone from

💪🏽 1 client → 14 completed projects with 6+ clients

💗 1 woman show → 10+ teammates in 12+ timezones

💰 $2K in revenue → just shy of $250K in revenue (still blows my mind)

Truly insane. A year ago I wondered if this company would pay my rent (and I really needed it to because I’d just lost my job!)

Here’s how we made it each Q 😅

Q4 2021 - living off of savings 😬

• expanded scope on freelancing gigs I had picked up during my day job
• exposure from 4brandsin4weeks - my first attempt at #buildinpublic

Q1 2022 - barely making it 😟

• referrals (2!) from the freelance gig in Q4 2021
• money (and leads) from my micro-tool launches - Conversion Loving Copy, Marketing Plan Generator (now Tangram), Saas Branding Examples

Q2 2022 - breaking even 🙂

• referral from an upgrade to my Conversion Loving Copy tool launch
• signing clients from cold emails (2!)
• turning a project-based client into a retainer client

Q3 2022 - killing it (yep, it took nearly a year to be comfortable!) 😀

• pitching (and winning) a corporate project that turned into two projects
• referrals from earlier projects for one-off projects (that turned into a retainer client!)
• retainer clients (3)

The future 👀 🚀

• partnerships with development agencies ( I have one in the works I can’t wait to announce!)
• directory listings (Clutch, I Love No Code, Webflow professional partner certification, etc)
• SEO & content (blog comes out next month)
• more referrals (we have an 80%+ delight rate)
• more leads from Twitter (i get 1 DM/mo, want that to be 5+)

Here’s to many more years to come 🥂

And to celebrate, we updated our website! 🤩

https://www.ignorenomore.agency/

I built Tangram, a marketing plan creator (not generator!) that takes your preferences, time, and company stage and provides 3 marketing channels to start with and daily to-do lists for each one as a single Notion doc.

Initially I planned on making this an internal tool to solve my constant question of "what marketing strategy would work --best-- for this client", but the more I worked on it, the more I realized that:

• there was no marketing dashboard or tool that automatically suggested marketing decision and strategy

• just about every marketing how to is a long blog post filled with jargon, not a clear step-by-step checklist, just a list of suggestions

• there’s no roadmap for narrowing down choices and channels as you grow

• this could work for all kinds of businesses, not just bootstrapped startups

So I hunkered down and built the MVP with Webflow+Tally+Notion in ~2 days!

The MVP is available to use now, and I’m running a 1-week lifetime offer until March 8th to get validation and feedback, inspired by Arnaud of BreakCold ;).

Then I’m going to build this out into the worlds first automated marketing strategy tool! So your marketing always falls into place.

Shared the story of the process in full here

Got a referral from a freelance client (before launching the agency) that converted into a paid agency client.

They are more of a small business than a SaaS, but it gives me a chance to really nail my SOP's and fine-tune my approach (while paying the bills!)

Whoop whoop! Great way to end the year with a client already slated for 2022.

Received my first consulting hour booked from a referral. I charge $150 an hour and since I'm not taking new clients until the 4Brandsin4Weeks challenge is over at the end of the year, consulting hours plus inquiry form submissions on the site are how I'm tracking conversions.

Launched Ignore No More on Twitter and IH with a promise to build 4 brands for free in a week each. Within 2 days I had the 4 companies and started growing an audience on Twitter.

Next steps are to finish SOP's for the challenge, and stay on top of marketing -> starting with Twitter and IH before jumping into SEO.