InboxDone.com
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So excited to share this -
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/services/building-an-agency-from-0-to-2m-yr-zgmjCIo91womyJaQQTLM
Thanks to James Fleischmann for the feature interview. What a buzz it was to see this on the IndieHackers homepage today!
In the interview I share a short version of my entrepreneur history and break down a summary of how InboxDone was born and reached the point we are at now, just hitting $2 Mil ARR.
You can of course read a much longer version by just scrolling down on this page to see all my updates from the past few years. You can definitely see it's been a wild ride.
Yaro
It's almost a year since my last update here on IndieHackers!
The most excited news in that time is late in 2023 I had the pleasure of speaking to Lex Fridman on a discovery call -- and he signed up as a client right on that call!
Since then we've been doing our best to provide great service for him, adapting to his requests and making sure he's happy.
In the last year we also grew 50%, surpassing $100K MRR. As I type this we have just past $140K MRR. I hope by the end of the year we will hit the $2Mil ARR level.
Although all of this sounds amazing -- and it is! - as chief marketer I've actually had a frustrating year.
This year I've hired several consultants to help with our Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads and cold email outreach. None of them have worked. In fact, they all did worse than my own Google and LinkedIn ad campaigns and I'm very much a novice.
For the second half of this year, I want to test some much 'bigger' marketing experiments.
When I say bigger, I want to get our company sponsoring some big podcasts/influencers. I have a theory based on the years I've spent advertising our company that we do best when we reach more people. Like hundreds of thousands of people, rather than trying to narrow in on specific target.
These experiments will cost more, so we will likely take 3 months worth of marketing budget and spend it on one campaign. Given how much money we've spent this year on zero result consultants and ads, I'm hoping this change will deliver better results.
Yaro
InboxDone.com Co-Founder
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Inspired by you! Well-done, thanks for the update.
Last week I was attended the 11th digital nomad cruise.
The event was on a cruise ship that travelled from Genova down the south of Italy (Rome, Naples, Catania), then around the boot over to Greece and then back to Taranto in Italy.
During the one week voyage there are presentations, meetups, events on board and in the cities and towns we stopped at.
This was the first cruise I've ever been on and the first digital nomad focused event. In truth, it was an excuse for my co-founder and I to meet up in person, something we try and do at least once or twice a year. Doing it on a cruise around Italy and all as a business expense for tax purposes was just a good idea.
The experience was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the cruise ship more than I expected, seeing the water, traveling at night, watching as we slowly docked at little towns, getting on and off to explore somewhere new most days.
The end result of our founders meeting was to just keep the ship steady -- no pun intended! We like the direction we are headed in and we want to keep going as we are at InboxDone.
Now that I'm off the boat I'm heading to Lisbon to explore this emerging tech and digital nomad hub and of course -- get back to more regular working hours.
I'm going to break down five content marketing tactics that worked for us to bring in meaningful results.
By meaningful I mean they resulted in new customers signing up for our services and this continued over time. However, don't assume these same techniques will work for you.
Every business is different. Every industry is different. We also experimented with Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Outbound Email and many other marketing tactics and none of them brought in meaningful results, some zero results.
These methods may work for your business, you have to test for yourself.
We have a philosophy of running small experiments and doubling down when things work, stopping quickly when they don't. We also like compounding, so if one marketing method can positively impact another, that's worth continuing.
None of these tactics succeed without getting the fundamentals of your business right, and even then they won't necessarily work.
Knowing what you sell, who you sell it to, decision making factors, customer motivations and the competitive landscape all matter.
I won't break down how I decided to focus on email management as a service for my agency, but you can learn a lot more in this InboxDone foundation story blog post I wrote - https://yaro.blog/31858/inboxdone-email-assistant/
These foundational elements get further refined as you go, especially as you begin to sell your agency services. Even just to determine if you have a business idea that could work requires you use content marketing. You can't escape it.
Here's how we started and grew our agency to 7-figures using content:
1. Email Newsletter
Tapping into my existing newsletter from my blogging business was step one to get our first customers. Without this, we would never have been able to test the idea for my agency.
Growing a newsletter means you have to learn how to write emails that are entertaining (storytelling), educational, conduct research to find relevant data, and use copywriting to sell.
Newsletters are often a next-step channel for a content business. You reach people with YouTube, a podcast, social media, paid ads, blogging, etc and then funnel as much of that traffic as you can on to your newsletter.
Once you have a newsletter, it's a powerful resource. During the first two years of growing our agency, we continued to go back to my newsletter initially to bring in new customers and later to hire people on to our team.
Although we don't use my newsletter for the agency anymore, we've just started building our own company newsletter (long overdue!). We're also looking into tapping into other newsletters as a growth channel.
2. Website Content (Sales + Organic Search Traffic)
Typically this is step one for a new agency. With no website you have no place to send potential customers to.
I got away with just using my email newsletter as a starting point on the strength of my existing relationships with my audience to get our first customers. We built the website later.
I did this because I wanted to save money and not build something until I knew the agency had a little traction. You may able to do this too if you have an existing audience, or you may need to start with at least some kind of landing page to send people to.
An agency website is a focal point for success. The copy -- words you use -- and other media including images, video and the overall layout determine how people perceive what you do.
Your main selling points are on your website. Your differentiation, social proof, trust building elements, sales triggers and the basics like service deliverables, pricing and contact methods are all there.
These core elements are critical, yet on their own they don't bring in customers. They convert visitors into customers, but with no one visiting, you won't get customers.
Your website becomes a marketing tool when you work on SEO. Publishing articles targeting the right keywords, along with videos ideally, and building incoming links over time, will lead your content to appear in search engines.
Agencies are especially great businesses for SEO because when you sell niche services, you can go after niche keywords that are not as competitive to rank for. A lot depends on what niche you decide to focus on, but as I mentioned before, the competitive landscape matters, especially when it comes to ranking in Google.
My agency focused on SEO from the day we built the website, and still continues today.
At first it was just me writing our key pages and generating 'easy' backlinks, for example links from my blog to my agency website. I did this more than once, writing articles about my agency and referencing it in blog articles when relevant.
This helped us to at least appear in the first few pages of Google for our targeted keywords. From there we had to build up more links to increase authority, and create more niche content to go after more keyword phrases related to the services we offered.
I won't break down this entire strategy here. What's important to know is the process of creating content and building links is not quick and takes quite a lot of effort to produce the necessary articles. I like this though, because it means most people won't bother to do it. Effort is a competitive advantage.
One question you might be wondering is how we continued to build incoming links to help with SEO. One of the main tools we used was Podcasts...
I must have hit some kind of word count limit for posts here at IH, so'll continue with the next three points in a comment below...
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3. Podcast Marketing
As our company grew, we started to have a little bit of cash available for marketing.
I was excited because up to this point every marketing process was completed entirely by me. That's not what I wanted long term, but I knew at the start it had to be that way to keep our costs down (bootstrapping!).
I appeared on a few podcasts during our first year of operations, tapping into relationships I had with existing podcast hosts. Most of these interviews did not lead to customers for our agency, but every now and then I'd get a chance to talk on a show with a larger audience, for example - Entrepreneurs On Fire (https://www.eofire.com/podcast/yarostarak/) - which sent a customer or two our way.
Despite most of the podcasts not resulting in new customer signups, I was happy to do them because it created awareness for our business and added additional backlinks to help with SEO (compound marketing!).
Once we had a small marketing budget, my co-founder and I discussed options to spend it. We decided to bring on a podcast guesting agency to approach shows for us so we could do regular appearances, hopefully bringing in clients and increasing our search engine authority with backlinks.
It was the two-for-one benefit that made me think it was the best choice, especially as we needed to build our search authority over time.
I did a few calls with different agencies and we eventually settled on Podcast Connections - https://podcastconnection.org/. We signed up for a subscription and I a few weeks later I began confirming appearances on podcasts.
Podcasting is a multi-faceted content marketing tactic. You confirm a booking, you record the interview and then the show is published weeks or months later.
Sometimes when a show drops you instantly get interest from potential new clients. On several occasions even the show hosts who interviewed me became our customer.
While it's impossible to know exact results when it came to SEO from link building, given our search rankings slowly improved over time, I believe the podcast links helped.
It wasn't the only factor, as I also built links using other sources, but podcast appearances really help with consistency, even if they aren't usually the most authoritative links.
Let's not forget that appearing on a podcast is creating content. You get to talk about what you do. It's an opportunity to practice your storytelling about your business, to sell using your words, and to experiment with different ways to explain what your business does.
This regular practice of interviews helped me to refine our messaging, leading to changes to our website copy, and later, helping with the copy for our Google Paid Ads...
4. Google Paid Ads
We didn't start Google Paid Ads until year three of our business. Our budget was small. We were investing in podcasting and our internal team was growing, thus much of our free cash went to existing operations and marketing.
We'd already done some very small paid ad experiments with Twitter and LinkedIn Ads, both of which returned no significant results, so we stopped.
For the Google Ads experiment I had $500 to play with. I was more confident about Google than Twitter and LinkedIn because I'd already seen results from organic Google traffic, and thus had ideas about what keywords to run ads to.
I should have started paid ads with Google first, but for some reason I felt less intimidated by Twitter and LinkedIn so tested them first (it helped that I had some free LinkedIn Ad credits too).
Google Ads don't require much content. Small simple ad boxes with a headline and short description area are all that is required.
With not much space, you have to use your copywriting skills and knowledge of your target customer to come up with effective copy. I had three years of actively running marketing for our agency I could draw upon, but of course until you test, you never really know what works.
As it turned out, coming up with copy and keywords was easy. Figuring out which keywords brought in relevant traffic was much harder.
With a small monthly budget, I had to settle in for a slow testing process. Each week I'd check in, see where the clicks were coming from, and then slowly begin what would end up take a year to really figure out -- eliminating the wrong keywords.
The problem was that we were paying for clicks to go to keywords that didn't bring the right visitor.
Some of these were easy to spot - for example there is a furniture company called 'Inbox Zero', which is clearly not the same as Inbox Zero as it pertains to an empty email inbox. By placing negative keywords for words like 'desk' and 'chair' I could take care of this problem.
Other misaligned keywords were harder to spot. For example, determining which searches are people looking for an email management tool that is software, which we are not (we're an agency with human email assistants), versus looking for a virtual assistant to help with email.
There are many more examples like this that I slowly figured out over months. It took a long time because I'd have to make changes, then come back a few weeks later to see the impact once there was more data. We're still working on improving accuracy today, but at least I can say thanks to a year or so of work, we started to get clicks that led to customers.
5. Compounding (The Marketing Flywheel)
I could review other sources of traffic we used to get customers. From referrals to organic social media like Facebook, to existing clients roping in their co-founders or other teammates into our services -- there have been many surprising and not surprising ways we've attracted new clients.
However, I think the one best answer I can give that actually led to a 7-figure agency is compounding over time.
As our company grew, we could devote more internal resources to improving our SEO. We hired a writer and a video/slide presentation creator, so we could keep producing new articles and a video version of our best articles, which we publish to our YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@inboxdone.
Google likes to see videos in content, so this helps with our rankings. YouTube search becomes a traffic source too.
With growth comes more money to spend on ads, so we incrementally increased our ad budget. This not only helps with the obvious - more clicks on our ads - but the learning time shrinks, as we can get much more data in a shorter period of time with more money to spend.
We recently hired a consultant who has taken over ad management from me to improve our tracking and conversion.
The more people you reach (general awareness) and the more clients you have, the more referrals you attract. This is why most successful service businesses eventually point to referrals as one of, if not their most reliable source of new clients.
It's still not our largest source of new clients, but it sure is a nice feeling when someone shows up out of the blue ready to buy from you.
Podcasts, which today often include video versions published to YouTube, compound as well, with more episodes out there for people to discover.
We've had several people sign up as customers after listening to interviews I did on shows that were published many months prior. You never know who is listening to all that audio content you created over the years.
You add all these things up and your marketing flywheel starts to spin faster, and as a flywheel should -- carries momentum.
Content Marketing Over Time
It's easy for me to write an article like this after more than five years growing our agency. The truth is that for many years, especially the early ones, I felt frustrated to the point that I lost motivation many times.
We didn't have positive signs every week. Some days you lose clients. You spend money on marketing and nothing comes from it.
You have growing pains internally as you work to build systems and hire a team. You have to deal with the fact that an agency is a human-being powered business, which means you have a lot of very human problems to deal with. This is not software you are selling!
While I've listed content marketing tactics, there are other elements that played a critical part in our growth. Our service got better because our hiring systems and training got better. We implemented some big changes, like assigning two assistants to every client from day one. We changed pricing structure several times. We completely overhauled our website.
I could go on and on. It was not a simple process. Growth was not a straight line.
Making the choice to keep experimenting and keep improving, even in the face of no improvement or even negative events, is the key.
You have to believe you have something of value that people will benefit from. Then you need to figure out how to sell it and make decisions with actual data from testing.
Content has been vital throughout this entire process. It's how we got our first test clients and how we still get clients today.
I spent many years calling myself a blogger and promoting the lifestyle of earning a living from your content. Today I still blog and use the same content marketing skills (plus some new ones!), yet I am simply one function in a business that does what it does with or without me.
If you don't have content marketing skills you should start learning them -- at least one key discipline like SEO or Podcasting or copywriting.
If you already have an audience as an influencer or creator, or you already have services you sell as a freelancer, consider expanding by growing an agency. Ultimately it can be a business that will one day run independently of you.
Good luck with your content!
Yaro
I haven't done an InboxDone.com update here at IH in over a year because my co-founder and I talked about how transparent I was being with revealing our revenues and we decided to be... less transparent!
I have to admit this is not my natural style as I've been blogging about my businesses since 2005 - see https://www.yaro.blog - and I've always been super transparent with numbers and behind the scenes stories.
However, I have a partner with this business and she's way more important than being able to update you here on IH - sorry folks!
That being said, I can report back some things, so let's dive in...
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Our team has grown to over 40 staff, including a fantastic management team, who work with my co-founder and I to help make running the company so much more efficient.
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We've continued to sustain growth since the last update I did over a year ago back in March. As I said, I can't give specific numbers, but I'm pretty excited to say we are very close to that magical MRR number that means you are a 7-figure business.
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The most satisfying thing for me personally is the last two years of work on the Google campaigns I set up, both paid and organic, have delivered most of our new client growth. It's stable, reliable, and took a heck of a lot of work to refine, so not easy to replicate!
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Also satisfying was the release of our new website design, which I consider a big improvement and something I worked very hard on with our web designer (I wrote all the new copy) - see www.inboxdone.com
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The hiring team continues to seek out the best of the best to join our email management assistant team.
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Due to inflation and also because we want to keep attracting and retaining great people, we've increases our base pay rate.
That's it for now.
As we head towards the end of March we are past the $50,000 a month revenue mark. We also surpassed half a million dollars in total income.
These milestones are amazing, but I'm more happy with the fact that new customers keep finding us and our churn rate remains very low, so most people are staying with us.
I think a lot of this has to do with the amazing system and team building my co-founder Claire has done in the past few years. This, combined with my own efforts building up our marketing campaigns - both organic and paid - means both sides of our company are humming along.
For me personally, this also marks a special milestone as an Entrepreneur. The biggest one month revenue mark I hit with my previous companies was $50,000, so everything from here is a new record. That being said my last company did surpass two million dollars in total revenue (albeit over a decade) so there are still records to break!
At InboxDone we are reinvesting much of our income back into growing our team. We've hired more people for our management team, including a new team member joining me in the marketing and sales side, and an additional team member joining our onboarding and client support team.
Earlier in the year we brought on a good friend of mine who worked on previous business in the HR side, to help Claire with the hiring and matching process. Plus of course we continue to hire new Inbox Managers, something we need to do constantly now in order to keep quality up and meet the growing needs of our current and new clients (if you know someone who has good communication skills, send them to our site for job openings as an Inbox Manager).
I'm not sure if we will maintain the current rate of growth once summer hits, but I am making sure to continue experimenting and improving the marketing campaigns that work, so fingers crossed we can keep this pace up right through to the end of the year. That will result in surpassing all the goals I set for 2021 by more than 50%, which would be incredible.
If you know anyone who is stuck in their email inbox all day, send them our way and we can provide them with a specialist email assistant to reply to their emails.
Yaro
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Fantastic numbers and growth rate! Are you profitable (sorry for asking)?
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Well done :)
Do you feel like it's your businses structure that's helped with this? How have you structured your company to facilitate your growth?
Targetting mostly Sales? Support? Devs?
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Just good old fashioned incremental improvement plus a virtuous cycle starting to build up as current clients upgrade and refer other clients, which then repeats.
A big part of the success has been constantly experimenting with marketing, killing what doesn't work and doubling down on what does.
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so inspired!! keep going!
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Awesome!
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Your pace of milestones is bonkers. Congrats on what looks like escape velocity!
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Yeah it does look great for the last six months. Of course for the years when we started it was pretty flat with a few jumps up and down, so you know, keep the faith!
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For the last few years January has always been a good month for us.
Usually we get some kind of marketing exposure, like a big podcast drops, and a rush of new customers sign up.
January being the start of a new year also plays in our favour as people want to star the year off by getting organized and breaking free from handling your email makes a big difference!
This year we had no major one-off marketing events happen, yet we ended up having the biggest January yet so far.
As I wrote in our December 2020 update, the flywheel in our company is turning, with incremental improvements compounding to bring us new customers. Existing customer upgrades are also making a significant impact on our revenues.
We're well above $40,000 a month now, and there are several more potential customers in the pipeline who I suspect will sign up in the coming weeks.
In fact, we had so many new sign ups that we've had to put people on to a waiting list and stagger onboarding 2-3 weeks to make sure we can keep our quality standards up.
We are hiring more management/HR as we speak so hopefully as the year continues we can expand our onboarding capacity so we can take on as many clients as come our way.
Our team is growing, with 20 people now working for InboxDone.com, and we are constantly hiring to keep up with demand (https://inboxdone.com/jobs-apply/).
As the CMO I've been busy doing all the sales calls. For the first time in the life of the company I had eight calls scheduled in one week - if we can make that a regular event the sky really is the limit for this business.
Exciting times for sure, yet I know there are many challenges ahead of us as we manage our growing team and work with so many new clients.
Yaro
Today I had a chance to look over November's numbers and we are now over $30,000 a month in revenue, a satisfying end to the year (over 100% growth in fact).
What makes the last month especially exciting is much of the growth came from existing client upgrades. This means they are so happy with our services they want to bring us on to do more for them. Product market fit (or service market fit) is feeling better and better.
From the marketing department, which I am in charge of, I am not yet 100% happy with how things are going, but it sure is better than it was at the start of this year.
There has definitely been a shift towards a more consistent number of discovery call bookings coming in each month, but it's too early to tell if this is the new normal -- although even now with Christmas coming up this week, the call bookings keep coming in, so I take that as a very good sign.
Still, I'd like to have twice as many calls as we do at the moment, then I think we'd be operating at peak capacity for what the team can handle, if those calls turn into customers at the usual conversion rate.
I have several new outbound marketing experiments starting up as I type this, so fingers crossed these will bring in more potential clients as 2021 begins, adding to what is already working.
Overall I am very excited about 2021, feeling about as positive as I ever have for this company. Of course none of this would be possible without my co-founder Claire and the amazing team she continues to build to service our clients.
Happy new year!
Yaro
Well it feels like I was just celebrating hitting $20K a month after it took so long to get there, and less than two weeks later we have burst through 25K/month.
I signed up four new clients in three weeks, and we have another 4 in the pipeline, so it's been an incredibly strong September/October.
We've actually had to stagger our onboarding of new clients a bit creating a waitlist to make sure we can continue to match the right person on our team with each new client (quality first!).
For me personally, it's been a tremendously satisfying few weeks because all of the new clients who came on board were just so excited to sign up and seemed like a great fit for what we do.
This has done wonders for my belief in our company and the potential to help many more people.
I admit my belief has wavered during previous years, which has led me to look into making a pivot of how we position our company and the services we focus on. I'm glad we did not though, as I think, as I thought at the beginning, that by narrowing-in and being specialists we stand out.
On the hiring front we had hundreds of applicants come through, which is great because we want to find many more excellent people to join our inbox manager team. We have to find the best, test and train them, but my cofounder Claire is a professional now at this process, so I am confident in her abilities.
Of course I am not getting ahead of myself as all the new clients have to actually benefit from what we do. There will be hiccups along the way, but there is also plenty of potential for growth just within the clients we have, so opportunity is everywhere.
Personally, I'm continuing to move our marketing forward with more ad campaigns across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and keeping Google going, maybe turning back on YouTube as well. We also have our organic SEO strategy running.
I hope this burst of growth is sustained, it will make for a very exciting run to finish the year.
Yaro
It took about two years longer than I hoped, but we finally hit a big financial goal - over $20K/month run rate.
On some level it's probably a good thing it took longer to reach this point because it means Claire my co-founder could build an amazing team and a process to deliver a high quality service.
We also faced a lot of different scenarios, so we have been able to gain in confidence and set in place new procedures for things like privacy, contracts, onboarding and even the scope of what we can do for clients.
Plus we have a history we can look back on, data to draw upon for things like LTV - life time value of a customer.
Just a reminder -- we are NOT a SAAS, so that money is very much used to pay our team, but we do have a healthy profit margin too.
This means we have a solid budget for me to spend on advertising and can continue to grow.
WE ARE HIRING
We also put out some notices this week that we are hiring, since we always look to hire in advance of demand.
If you know anyone looking for a remote work part time job, send them here:
https://inboxdone.com/jobs-apply/
The most exciting thing for me personally is my advertising experiments from back in August/September are paying dividends, so I feel confident diving in and expanding the scope.
I hope 2020 can finish strong and of course we all stay healthy.
Yaro
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