Linkology.io

After delivering all outstanding orders to clients I shut down the sales page and stopped all work on the project.

I initially said I put myself in a comfort zone with this project since it was not "new" enough but it turns out that I still managed to learn a ton - especially about myself and my own motivation.

I now believe that introspection and thinking about your own inner processes and patterns is probably the best investment one can make.

It is so easy to run in a direction that sounds good on paper and includes all the approval of society and peers but ultimately won't make you happy.

It still feels counterintuitive to shut down a successful project but doing so gives me space to focus on something new, more exciting and more aligned with what's really important to me.

After sitting on my decision to shut down linkology for another 2 weeks I finally pulled the trigger and informed all clients about my decision.

For the next 4-6 weeks we only focused on finishing up orders. I stopped onboarding new clients and deactivated the signup form.

When I started this project I was mainly frustrated about my lack of progress with dofollow which I (unfairly) blamed on my co-founder. At that point we were just not aligned about the time investment we wanted to make in order to grow our agency.

After growing Linkology to 8k/month and seeing potential to hit 10k in my second month I noticed a shift in my own motivation.

After enjoying the building process (I am not an engineer but have a similar mindset I guess) and seeing initial success I started questioning my motivation and began a process of reflection.

After a few weeks of pondering and reflecting I managed to gain clarity on a few points:

• My frustration with my co-founder came from a place of insecurity and lack of self-worth. Over the last few years in the startup community I adopted an image of what success was supposed to look like: meaning money, scale, traveling to fancy locations etc.

Yes I know, not the most mature definition of success but while I always prided myself in not chasing these goals I guess subconsciously those expectations where still there.

So in order to achieve those goals I had to start my own project and scale it as quickly as I could.

• I don't actually enjoy working alone on projects that are not tied to any of my values or that connect me with people I admire and respect. So focusing on making money was actually leading me further away from what is really important to me.

• I noticed that I had placed myself in another comfort zone. The new project was very similar to what I was doing in my main project and the learning curve wasn't as steep as I had hoped.

• On top of that I gained more clarity about the mistakes I had made in designing the business model and how it hindered growth. My main take away here is to focus much more on synergies right from the start. The compounding effects of synergies can be massive!

All of these learnings let me to the conclusion that continuing the project was actually against my own interests, even though the business was profitable and growing.

While revenue was developing nicely and I could retain many of my clients the problems mentioned below became more obvious.

It turned out that the original pricing model wasn't the only problem we faced. I had originally designed the service in a way that gave customers a lot of freedom and influence on how the service was delivered (i.e. which links we would build).

Given that the expertise varied widely when it comes to evaluating link quality and is also often a matter of "personal taste" this freedom lead to an unpredicted level of overhead and communication that had a massive impact on the ROI per hour worked.

Ultimately it would have been better to outline how the work would be executed to filter out those who didn't align with our approach. Trying to make everyone happy was not the right approach here.

Having inbound leads come in from my other agency proved invaluable since I could close many of them within just a few days. Revenue numbers grew quickly to a bit over $8k in June.

While this got me excited I noticed a few flaws in how I had set up the business.

• Having no clear customer profile resulted in a lack of synergies between those customers. We couldn't learn much about their individual niches that could be applied to future clients.
• Offering a low price tier turned out to be a mistake since margins where low but time investment to deliver the service didn't reduce at the same rate thus making this option very unprofitable. At the same time the low price tier was the most popular one, occupying resources that could have been used in other areas.

I got my first customer in late October. Since we are very specific about our customer profile for dofollow.io I could forward many leads that weren't a good fit to linkology.

This way I managed to start out with a consistent stream of leads without having to worry too much about marketing.

I spent a few days building a new sales page on Webflow and once I was happy I moved on to the backend. I decided to use SPP.co and Airtable to manage all client data and orders.

At the same time I tried to figure out a pricing scheme and ended up deciding on offering 3 packages with increasing quality and price.

I'd been running a link building agency at dofollow.io for over 3 years with my business partner but wanted to try something new on my own. At the time I felt that progress was slow at dofollow and there was an imbalance of time investment.

Also I had been reading a lot about productized services and was wondering how this might look like for a link building service.