Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: I think I got a new title all figured out for this. I think I'm good. I think. Are you good?
[00:00:05] Speaker A: We're good. We're live. Did you.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Did you. You do. You don't have. You don't have Thanksgiving Day in Canada? Yesterday?
[00:00:12] Speaker A: No, it's. It wasn't yesterday. It's back in October. But since everyone's. All of my clients are in the US I celebrated the same one day off.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Do you eat turkey on. On Canadian Thanksgiving?
[00:00:24] Speaker A: I don't.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: I've never been to.
I've never been Canadian Thanksgiving.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: We do.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: I. My wife's Canadian.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: But we've never celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Right, right.
My. Since I'm Asian, my parents are.
They, they do turkey, but most Asian families don't do turkey. So.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Dude, I've been to Asian, Canadian, Canadian, Asian Christmas where they stuff the turkey with rice.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: With rice? Yes, Mushrooms, rice.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Some kind of secret. He was very proud of it. This very, very proud Asian Canadian man who was telling me about his, like, Canadian rice, like Chinese hybrid rice stuffing.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Recipe.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: That is the thing. It's. It's. It just makes more sense than what, like, bread? Is that. Is that what turkey stuffing is usually.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: If you like rice. That's correct.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Rice is much, much better. Try yourself.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Let's kick this off.
Welcome to Gregory Paul Show. I'm Gregory.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: And I'm Paul.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: And we break down the latest SaaS, startups, AI. Sometimes we have guests, sometimes we don't.
We decided for this Black Friday that we would share our journey as founders and entrepreneurs and help you all with your business. There's a lot of people who have been laid off recently. I've been getting calls, emails, texts from lots of people asking for help. How do they get started with a freelance business? How did Paul and I pull off what we pulled off? And so we thought you'd take you through our journey and give you some actionable tips and advice that you could use. And so, Paul, I think I want to title this from zero to million dollars.
How to have your own freelance agency.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: That's crazy. That's a good time.
Yeah, let's do it.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: Okay.
Why not? Why don't. So, you know, I think we should start perhaps with, like, your story. Maybe even back when I met you on X, you were doing freelance.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, right? Couple years. Right.
Doing the freelance developer stuff and then you try to do some other things, then you pivoted. So why don't we. Why don't we go with, like, the origin story?
About your developer free and then how you away from that?
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Yeah, right. So I'm not sure if a lot of people know about this, but I started out as a software developer. I had my own startup as the CTO.
And right around two and a half years ago when ChatGPT 3.5 came out, I noticed a massive shifting in the market. So I had a dev agency at this time as well where I was the contractor for software development jobs.
Right around when Chat GPT3 came out, I saw a massive crash in the pricing. So two things, right, AI came out. Power pandemic, low interest rate also happened. And interest rate, because interest rates was going up, people were not spending as liberally on software development costs. So like, you know, literally I saw the crash of software development MVP jobs going from 100k per project down to around 50k, down to 10k within a span of about a year and a half.
And that was just such a shocking market. And I, and I noticed it and I talked to people, everyone was feeling it.
So that's kind of the moment where I decided I had to shift away from software development, especially the types of development I was doing, which is like MVP early stage product building, into something completely different. And that thing was marketing.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
At this stage, I guess it's obvious in a lot of ways. Right. But I remember talking to you about this because we were talking about, hey, what has the impact of AI been in the business world, in the tech world? And you were like, hey, it's taking away all of the outsourced MVP work right now.
I think it's actually quite obvious. If you want to mvp, you just vibe code it.
You don't need to hire a team and spend a huge budget on it. Particularly for something early stage, maybe like later on it makes sense. But there was a massive market for creating MVPs and prototypes. And like that market's gone.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: That market's. So that market is gone.
Not completely.
There's like a gradient, knowledge level. Right. There's buyers who still don't believe that AI is production ready. So they still hire developers or traditional developers to build these things. So like, I'll tell you a story.
Just this month I was talking to a founder who had about $60,000 per month of payroll hiring a dev agency.
They got rid of all of that $60,000 dev agency and now they're literally vibe coding themselves.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Yes. The shift is real.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: The shift is massive. Yeah. So this took two and a half years for this founder to build up enough confidence and for the tooling to be mature enough for them to literally do this. This founder is not technical at all, but now they can, they can just vibe code their, their own tools.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: All right, so, so your, your MVP business kind of started to slide.
And so then what did you do exactly?
[00:06:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So I had two choices. I knew that being a developer is still a core skill that you should keep.
I had a pivot in the road where I can either go more design heavy, so work up, capture more of the value upstream, or I could go completely separately into marketing. So the, the key insight that I had there was I noticed that a lot of marketing agencies also sold dev products.
So when I kind of noticed that, I realized that if I sold, if I sold marketing, I could also come in with development.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: Right, as a. Yeah, as a, as an add on. Right.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: As an add on or upsell.
And then.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Okay, so, so let's tie this into like where a lot of people are today. Like I, I said, I'm having calls all the time with people like, hey, I got laid off. I mean, I'm in Seattle and really big layoffs at Amazon. Thousands. Right. Like 15,000. And they, they expect to lay off another 10 to 20,000 people.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: In, in January.
Right. So you're sitting there and you're like, hey, I'm gonna pivot into marketing. How did you, how did you take the first step? Right, like, so you had this dev agency. It's declining. There's not as many projects, the price of project going down. Like just the market went from what was like a good business to a really, let's call it, competitive market with dropping prices and too many people out there.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: Willing to, to do it.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: You decided like, I'm going to pivot into marketing. What was the, the thing that like kicked that off and then how'd you do that?
[00:08:24] Speaker A: Yeah, so it wasn't, it wasn't like I wake up one day and decided to do that thing. So like I had the dev agency, right. I was still, I had about two or three different contracts paying me relatively okay hourly rate. So I was still doing that, but at the same time was constantly look on the lookout for my next idea with a. Within marketing. So right around beginning of this year and end of last year, I started noticing Reddit, Reddit content was being boosted on Google. That was number one. So there's a fundamental shifting SEO that I was noticing.
Two, I was just noticing the patterns of people on Reddit was shifting. So for example, my wife's not a Redditor. But she's more and more going on to Reddit to read product reviews.
So the combination of those two things kind of made me realize that Reddit is now a platform where people are going on there to make shopping decisions.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: Yeah. So, so I remember this. I think it was like right when I had started vibe your SaaS.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:35] Speaker B: Because what I remember.
Did you text me or message me? Because I remember you're, you're. Did you have something go like really viral on there? Because I remember I got onto it to some degree based on your suggestion.
I remember we were talking about the SEO impact. That's how it came up.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: Yeah. So like it was a, it was a combination of multiple things. So one is I kind of used Reddit as a piece platform to teach myself how to write content.
So, you know, a lot of people use medium substack. I kind of used Reddit because I've been on Reddit for a really long time. And then I used that to just kind of teach myself how to market myself as a dev agency owner.
And I had quite a few posts go super viral on Reddit.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: Oh, dude. I, so I remember that. I remember when I first met you, you showed me. Yeah, you had, you had a post 500k agency, right?
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:10:34] Speaker B: That was like number one in. I remember that now. So, so prior to, let's say the explosion in interest on Reddit, you had already been pretty successful at creating content that was good at getting spidered into.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: Google, getting into Google and also just getting people to notice and interact with the content. Right. So like I, I tried a whole bunch of different things in 2023. So I knew that I wanted to do marketing around like 23.
I tried like YouTube, I tried tick tock, Instagram, I tried all the video platforms and I tried.
That's when I started on Access Wall.
I, I also use Reddit as like a way for me to write law form content.
So just the fact that I noticed it was indexed in Google and also people on there were.
I could get in front of millions of people instead of waiting for the algorithm.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, because I remember that when you came to me, we're talking about like the God at this point. It was kind of the early days of the Reddit Google AEO SEO craze.
And you're like, look, I remember you're like, look, it's really, it's really easy. This is all you gotta do to get your thread, your Reddit thread into Google.
And at the time it was true because I remember I was like okay. And I had marketing for startups, like the number one.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I had the number one hit in Google for a while because of you on your, your feedback and encouragement. I remember that, I remember that. So, yes, you started doing this. You, you kind of like, from my perspective, you kind of cracked the Reddit code. So how'd you take like, you know, your skill from having fun and, and doing a good job on social media and, but, but selling that, like, I think that's the reason. Let me just go into, I just want to. The context here, I think is like, let's assume there's all these people and they're, they're generally good at something, they have some kind of skill. Yeah, right. Like, and that's important part. But like, like my friend was a designer and he's trying to figure out what to do or I know a lot of people, marketers and content writers, those type of things. Right. So they got skill and then you were like, hey, Reddit, there's an opportunity. So how did you start marketing that? As a, as a service?
[00:12:57] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So I think I definitely got lucky in a sense that there's a lot of market demand for this thing. So right around the beginning of the year, lots of people have also realized that AI SEO was starting to be a thing and Google content, Google's SEO were boosting Reddit content.
At the back of that is clicks were disappearing. So a lot of people's traffic from Google were disappearing.
And so you saw like two lines, right? Your clicks from Google were going down and you also saw Reddit traffic source from AI and also Reddit go up. So a lot of people flooded into the market of looking how do I, how to get their content onto Reddit. So my first few, first few clients were exactly that. They saw the trend and they were looking for somebody to do, help them do that.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: How did you find them?
[00:14:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So it was for the first few, it was just me on social media. So X, A few were referrals.
One early, early B2B, like, like a small size business that's relatively more established came from LinkedIn. So it was just a lot of social.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: So yeah, yeah, because I think this is the part where like a lot of people struggle is like, okay, I've got some skills, like what do I, what do I need to do? Like, how do I secure a couple of early customers?
[00:14:34] Speaker A: So okay, looking back, it was super obvious, right? Social works when lots of people are searching for something and not a lot of people are Talking about it.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Right. There's a lot, there's a lot of demand for Reddit, but there weren't a lot of experts who had like, and you had proof, like, here is a link that I, I content I produce that got millions of views. Is a, is a, is a top post in terms of like its appearance in Google or the types of things.
[00:15:06] Speaker A: That they were looking for.
[00:15:07] Speaker B: So you could show them examples.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. So my early stage content on both my X and LinkedIn were exactly that. It's like, here's what I did, here's how many impressions that I got. Here's the outcome.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Did you just like send people that on, on LinkedIn? Like how did you do that on LinkedIn?
[00:15:26] Speaker A: No, it really, it's just people are actively searching for this on LinkedIn.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Oh, and they found your profile.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: Yeah, because there were a lot of people that's doing this.
Right. So like my content were just always in the top two or three that shows up.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: So now you had a lot of visibility.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: I had a window of about like two or three months that there was a lot of flooding demand coming in, but not a lot of people were actively talking about it yet. Now that's completely different. I don't think that opportunity exists anymore.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: Yeah, okay, so, so you got lucky. There was like a lot of demand timing and, and, and you had the solution.
But what did you do bring them on though? Like how did you like, let's talk about some of the, the strategies. Right, Because I do think that like people, I know, I think people are even successful at perhaps like finding a person or finding people who want to work with them, but they struggle to like close to like get them across finish line and get them to, to pay them.
[00:16:32] Speaker A: Right, yeah. So sales. So now we're shifting into sales. Right, like the.
Yeah, so sales I think personally is just two things. One is if you are knowledgeable, if you know how to do the thing, and then second is just pricing.
So like on sales calls, because I'm very technical, I can show them exactly what I did. Right. Okay.
I do a breakdown of analysis on which subreddits that you should target. How do you craft a Reddit post that will do? Well, sometimes before I get into the sales call, I would just write the post, get it ranked on Google and just show them the result.
Oh yeah, yeah.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: So write a post like on spec for the customer.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
So like I did that for the first, let's say 15 sales calls.
And yeah, it was super simple. Right?
[00:17:33] Speaker B: Yeah, that. Okay. I actually love that idea. Like, doing work on specs.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Do the work. Yeah.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: Do the work in advance. Yeah.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: Obviously don't do a lot of, like, you know, don't do work for free. But writing a post when you're confident takes you 15 minutes, let's say.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: And then how many, how many calls did you have to have to, like, close a couple of customers? Let's say the first three or five.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Just one call and done.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: The first one closed.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: So, right.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: Because. So the combination of two things, right. The pricing was really, really low. As in, when I first started, I. I charged 500 per month.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. That's really important feedback too. And I've given that to a lot of people I know.
And I guess, like, I would even abstract this out and say, like, when you think about pricing in general, and maybe this is even the right way for people to think about it. Like, yeah, like, you can't come from, like, I need to fill this gap of how much money I used to make. You have to come from the bottom, which is like, how much can I realistically sell this for so someone will close. And in the beginning, if you don't have a lot of examples, you don't have a lot of credibility in this, like, area.
You're new and the customers are new. Like, low pricing is what I recommend to everybody to get a few things across the finish line. That was even how I handled vibersass. I first launched it. Like I, I was. Maybe I'm more typical because you were very lucky with the timing, which absolutely everyone should try to figure out. Right. Like, make sure you're in an area or a growth industry that, that there's demand for and if you can find an opportunity, like, that part's really important.
But, like, when I launched fiber SaaS, like, it wasn't really, like, there was a lot of demand for it. I had a following and I just kind of nailed the vibe coding trend and rode that. And so. And it was kind of mysterious what I was doing. Like, my landing page didn't really say a whole lot. It just was kind of vague and it, I just made it look really cool. And I figured, like, whatever, like, just throw this out there. I went with this, like, wacky kind of like what I would call a challenger brand. Right. Like, it was unprofessional by design. Right. Like, I wanted to appeal to early stage companies, so I had a very specific kind of target audience and I was very lucky. I launched it and people were intrigued by it. So I had, like, 50 people signed up, and I had actually go through.
I actually called every single one of those people who signed up that was willing to take the call.
And it was a lot of calls. But in the first week, I did close two customers, like within seven days of launching that.
Launching that landing page.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: And I did the same thing you did. Like, I, I had some pricing in mind. Like, I can't remember what I originally put it at, like twelve hundred or a thousand. It was really low. Thousand bucks or something.
[00:20:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: And I, I couldn't really get them to close at that. I could tell in the conversation. So I basically just said to them, like, well, what do you want to pay? Whatever number they came up with, I basically agreed to it. It was like, hey, that's great. You're going to be like my first customer. Let's just like work together and see where it goes. And they both, they both closed. And then I was like, awesome. Actually, part of the. Them closing, I said, well, I would like you to be a reference for me for other customers. And they were like, they were totally into it.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Yeah. So low pricing. Maybe we both really believe in that in terms of, like a strategy for launching.
And then. Yeah. So, okay, so.
So let's, let's break down or let's summarize what we spoke about so far. Like, find an opportunity that you're knowledgeable in and you have skills in.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: Then find customers. They're all over social media, LinkedIn. Right. Hopefully you have something that they're looking for. If you don't have something they're looking for specifically, like, you got to make a lot of noise, get out there.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Let people know exactly, exactly what you're doing. Social media, Social media work, when you know that people are searching for it, it's something in demand, and you can't have a unique enough offer to stand out.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: And then it kind of sounds basic. Right. But it's, it's literally, that's. That's what it exactly is.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And I loved your idea. I didn't do exactly that, but the spec idea, like, just go and do it for them. I think that's what I would recommend to, like, designers, even content people, like, write a case study, like create content for them. I have done it with other people where I had some customers come in. They want me to do some, like, X Twitter stuff for them, and I just made the account for them. They didn't have an account for their company. They only had personal ones. And so I remember, like, literally the night the Night before the first call, I'm like, kind of like, what you did? I was like, what would really impress these guys? I'm like, oh, I know. I have a cleaned up email that I've never used and a bunch of stuff. So I went and created the account for them and download all the graphics, just set it all up so like it looked cool and looked like they're pro. A very professional looking.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:22:33] Speaker B: Corporate Twitter account. And they loved it. They were super excited about that.
[00:22:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I totally think that's, that's the way to go.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: Okay, so, okay, you got, so let's assume you close a few customers, you're not making a lot of money, but you're doing a lot of work. Right, Right. That's, that's the next, that's the next phase.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: It's like, wow, I'm doing a lot of work and I'm not making a lot of money. So how do you, how did you, how did you solve that problem?
[00:23:00] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so yeah, there's a lot of things going on at this stage, so you got to work hard. That's, that's number one. You gotta be willing to take on a lot of low paying customers while delivering really good work. Right.
I personally tap out at around 10 customers. So like at one point I had around 10 people that were paying me somewhere between $500 to like $1,500. So maybe I was making like six or $7,000 a month, which is good enough to like sustain yourself, but you're also dealing with like 10 clients at a time. So that's when you start, you need to start raising price.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Do you know what, it's funny because I remember the day when you were like, hey, I got the 10, 10k a month.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: And I was like, that was a great day.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: I was very proud of you. Yeah. So it's interesting you have a slightly different strategy than I do because I actually take on lots of customers and I've been able to make it work like more than 10. I agree that 10 is probably ideal, but, but I've been able to manage a lot more depending on how you structure things and, and do things and stuff.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: So.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: But I think that's an excellent number to aim for. Okay, so you got, you got six. So how did you get from six to ten?
[00:24:26] Speaker A: 10K a month?
Yeah, so I started raising the price. Right. So started at 500, raised it to 10, a thousand to 1500 within a span of two to three months.
[00:24:42] Speaker B: Yes. It's kept increasing the price. And then, like, were you still doing a lot of marketing and sales calls and. And generating leads?
[00:24:49] Speaker A: So I think, like, so during that time, I was still really lucky. It was just coming from referrals, from social media, posting people, booking calls directly with me.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: Wow, that's great. Yeah, I mean, I tell everybody in my own personal approach. I mean, I'm in marketing my whole life, right. I'm like, you never, ever stop marketing, ever. You never stop sales. You never stop marketing. And I have, and I've written about on my newsletter, like, my, My.
I don't know if I was this explicit about it with, like, my structure of, like, how I approach organizing my week, but, like, Friday's a day where, like, I do say this. I don't take any customer calls generally on Friday, because I reserve it to do all kinds of other things that I need to focus on. And most of that is, like, my own content, my own work, whatever I need to do to set things up to just ensure that, like, my marketing engine and my sales engine is running. And I feel like that's one things I see a lot of people do is they maybe get a few customers in the door and then they get way too focused on servicing the customer.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: Not focused enough on servicing their business.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Correct.
So I. I still struggle with that literally every single day is how do you switch back and forth between marketing, sales, and also execution work?
I personally find that really, really hard. Really hard.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: Yeah. I know a guy that wrote a newsletter about it, so.
Oh, funny. Okay. So.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Okay. You got. You got to.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: 10.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Do you want to. Do you want to summarize any tips from that? Because.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, sure. So I can summarize actually, really quickly. It worked for me too. Like, I guess, dude, I guess my advice with everything in the world always starts with, like, know who you are and structure things that work for your personality. I think you have a little bit different of a personality. I do. So for me, I know that I am incredibly disciplined. I'm very, very methodical, and, like, I like things to be all thought out and planted advance and which some people find very uncomfortable. So that's. That's me. I know that the way I do that is, like, I divide up my week and I set different days to do different things. And within. Within those days, I have calendars and time frames about how I manage stuff. Right. So I decided that Friday is the, like, no kind of customer call day. And I try not to take any calls. That's why we made this on Friday, because I was like, that'd be a cool day to do our live stream. And Friday I'm relaxed in sense, like I'm driving my schedule. I don't have to like worry about people canceling or changing or any of that. So that one's really important for me. Like Friday's always like my day.
And then I had some customers beginning.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: That were in Europe.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: And so I only made two days a week where I would get up really early and talk to them.
Like Tuesday and Thursday, I think. So Monday, no like 6am call or anything ridiculous like that. The other thing I did was like no partners, customers, no one in Asia. Zero.
Like I committed. And at the time, because the way things played out, like I had partners and people I work with in Europe. And so okay, I can get up early. I like to get up early. I'm an early person, morning riser. I don't like to stay up late. So like that worked really well for me. So because of that, I made a really strict rule.
Nothing in Asia, because Asia, where I am in the west coast, in California, I'm on California, in Seattle, it's late at night and it's not good for me. Like I don't like doing things at nine o'clock at night. I'm tired, I make mistakes, I'm cranky. I say mean things in emails that I never should say. Like, I just know that about myself. And so that was a really hard rule for me. Like no contractors, no matter how talented you were. Like just that was a rule.
And that was for me, that's a. Yeah, really important.
Right? Maybe some days I'll change it, but like not how many customers in Australia.
Like so. So that part was important. And then I don't do it as much now, but at a point when I was really new and trying to meet people, I made Wednesday and in person day and I would go to co working space in Seattle and I would meet with people in person.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: So and the other thing I do with my time is like I put lots of things in my calendar and I have like pretty strict process to how I do things.
You know, when I was posting on Reddit, when, when we first connected about the growth of Reddit, I had a calendar update every morning that said post on Reddit at like 7am or something for 30 minutes. And I would follow that and I'd go on Reddit and I'd post a lot of. And it worked really well for me. In fact, like I had a bunch of stuff go crazy viral.
Millions and millions of Views and it drove. Some of the first customers came directly from Reddit. They told me they saw myself on Reddit and that's how they found me. So I know, I know for sure that it worked.
[00:29:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so for.
It's really cool that you work almost the exact opposite that I do.
I'm. I'm basically like, I can't follow a schedule at all.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: You make it to our live stream.
[00:30:05] Speaker A: Correct, but barely there. There's like certain things that I know that I have to show up for. So I'm, I'm like chaotic.
Chaotically. Or like organized chaos, which is. I know I have. There are certain things that I'll always do.
Uh, I just make sure that I check in. But then that also hits like a limit, right. That basically, like, I have a, I have a mental model of all of the delivery work that I need to get done in a single week.
And it tops out at like 11 or 12.
Yeah. That's why I can't do. Handle any more than 11 or 12.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Yeah. So like, that's why I would, that's what I was saying. Like, be sure that you would know who you are. Don't just copy someone's approach.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: Because like, it's not going to work for you if you have a different. Like, if calendars don't work well for you, then do something else. Right. Like, so what do you do to stay organized then? Do you have like, do you do a task list? Like.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Yeah. So like every single day I have a mental list of two to three things that I want to get done.
And like everything else doesn't matter.
I make sure I get those two or three things done.
Like everything else just, it's, it's, it's a, it's distraction. So like, yes, I can get distracted, but I have to get like these, these couple things done.
[00:31:33] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so let's get back to like. So, okay, so we've talked about zero to. To one. Basically. Like, how do you do that? Yeah, low pricing. Just, just, just call everybody, you know, talk to everyone. You know, focus on the marketing you're good at. Right. Okay. And then you can. And then anybody should be able to get to like three, four, five customers. Paying them couple hundred bucks to 2,000 bucks, I think is probably the only of that stage. So you should be able to do that, sustain yourself.
Then we've talked about going from like 6 to 10. And for you that was.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: I would say, I would attributed to lots of referrals. The correct Timing.
[00:32:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:17] Speaker A: Is also important. Lots of people are still piling in looking for the service that I'm offering. And then. Yeah, it's referrals.
[00:32:24] Speaker B: Yes. Okay. And then, and then going from like 10k a month beyond.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: What does that look like?
[00:32:33] Speaker A: So I think that's when you start needing to start to build systems.
Systems as in like, okay, yeah, you're doing something right and people are sticking around for longer than three months.
You know exactly what you need to deliver to keep these people around. That's when you could start either building systems like automation or start hiring people to take over that work for you.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: So yeah, I did a little bit of both. Let's say 50. 50.
[00:33:04] Speaker B: You brought something that we didn't actually talk about. I think it's really important and I thought a lot about this when it comes to like a lot of the things happen in marketing is like focusing on a skill or an area, a service that's repeatable.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: And yes, this part's really important because like when I. So I've had, I actually think about the other day. I've had in addition like all this stuff I've done full time, full time jobs I've had.
[00:33:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: I, I've also had three different side businesses, side hustles that I've scaled like well over a hundred grand.
So I would say there's three distinct businesses I've started and, and you know, two of them I gave up because I liked working full time and I didn't want to do those things so I did them on top of my full time job and I liked doing it. And this is the first time we're like, okay, this is what I'm doing full time and I expect to continue doing it. Right. So I would call this my third. I don't know if it's a startup, but my first, my third attempt at like starting a business or. Yeah, starting business that, that scaled. And then the repeatability thing is really important because like the second time when I had my agency brands in, which was like a big success but I wasn't very proud of it because I was just kind of like maximizing revenue and I didn't have like a vision for it and I kind of took on any project and I took on projects that were like one offs and that was like not a great business.
So I used to be a creative director, I was a good designer, I took on design projects. There's some people that call me randomly, like, can you do this infographic for me? And like I'LL do it cause I like them. Yeah, but like the design business from my perspective is not a great business. Like people come in, they ask for them and then they go away. Websites too is one of the reasons like I don't focus on websites as a business. They become, they come in and then they start to become larger and larger projects and then they go away. It's not like a repeatable, it's not a repeatable product. And that was why like I eventually like pivoted brands end into a content marketing agency. Because I saw that like content in general is a fairly stable business that people need on an ongoing basis. And I would recommend that like anybody, if you're trying to do this agency, freelancer type of approach, find a type of product that you can sell on a like recurring basis. So now with like Viper SaaS, it's a full stack agency for startups. We do a lot of things but it's primarily focused on like content, social media, there's some automation things and stuff and ways to scale it. But I focus primarily on the repeatable things that people need to do. Marketing, demand generation and go to market. Like I try to really avoid websites. Right. Like I've made a lot of websites and I like doing them actually but I just refer people to a partner or someone I know who is fantastic at them. But I don't want to take on website design and I typically try to avoid really big one off projects that end.
[00:36:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I completely agree there. So I think that's kind of like the main difference between a side project and a business is just how repeatable the process is.
Right. Like a side project or a side hustle might not be able to, you can't replicate, you can't hire somebody to take that over for you.
And then if you're starting agency as well it really at the end of the day is some sort of a labor arbitrage. So can you find people that pay you more money and you can hire somebody for cheaper than the cost?
[00:36:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And maybe way to tie this in for when, when scaling over 10k a month. Right. When you get to 20, 30, 40, 50k a month.
[00:36:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:54] Speaker B: Like ideally you need it to be repeatable. So that part.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: Ideally has to be. Well it's has to be repeatable. It's okay for you to not know what that is is you can use leverage a lot of like the price discovery to do that. Right. Like at one end of scale is you're very, very creative.
Every single piece of content or deliverable is unique from other things, but then you need to charge a ton of money for that to make it worthwhile on the other end. It's like completely product productized. You're just coming off of assembly line, so you might charge at a very low price, but then it's highly deliverable. And then usually the answer is somewhere in the middle.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with all that. And that's what I've been coaching or kind of coaching, talking to a lot of my friends about is like, how do you productize what you do?
And that's why this part I think is super important. And you don't need to figure it out in the beginning. Right? Just get some projects. That's how I started. Just like take on some stuff like, yeah, I got to design projects the beginning because like I just needed the money and, and I was good at them and I was able to get them right. And so I knew that wasn't like a repeatable business, but there's a way to do it. I've even recommended to people like, make it like a design service. So, and if you, if it's design service, you want to focus on like marketing graphics, things that people need an ongoing basis. Banner ad websites are generally not something people need every month, right?
[00:38:29] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: So think about that and like how do you productize that? Right. I think any of your services coming up with a productized way where it's like I charge this amount of money a month, these are the general deliverables that you get. And like, I want you to keep working with me for, for a long time. And if you use that as like your kind of guiding principles, like that's the focus, right?
A consistent payment. It's like a SaaS. It's exactly like a SaaS service.
[00:38:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:56] Speaker B: But it's like for your service, right?
[00:38:58] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: And so you just think about how do you frame it like that and how do you present it in a way to people that it's like a service that they buy and, and that they get a monthly basis. I love what you just said too about like from ultra custom to fairly templated and that that took me a long time like to figure this spectrum out. And I even have customers that fall in different spaces. And to some degree that's what defines my kind of pricing tiers. Like I have like kind of a low tier where it's fairly templatized.
I spent a lot of time like building out templates, thinking through like how I approach go to market, building like a marketing plan that's fairly cookie cutter for people and I kind of know it for the most part. If you're a B2B SaaS company, you're bootstrapped. You're a solo founder, you got three guys. Like I kind of know what you need to do and that stuff is pretty straightforward and I can really templatize that stuff and they get a ton of value from it. But as you grow in scale, you need a little bit more customization to what. To what you're doing. So. And I think that's exactly the right way to think about like from a pricing perspective and how you scale. And I think that could be applied to a lot of businesses. Like how do you get really templated and like low cost and you have to make it more custom and charge more.
[00:40:21] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. And then there's a lot of like there's a lot of contradictory things along this. So like that's one massive piece that I had to learn is just how to templatize and figure out where my pricing lands in the market. And the second thing is like, so I'm gonna say something that's completely contradictory to what I just said.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: Okay, I'm ready.
[00:40:46] Speaker A: Low risk paying clients usually demand the most.
Right.
So like businesses that's paying or as you charge more and more money, the larger clients they become, they usually demand or less.
[00:41:02] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really interesting point. My experience has been that lower cost people, I never had trouble servicing them but they churned, they go out. Right.
Which is fine too. That's why it goes back to my like always have a massive pipeline, always be out there marking. You never know when a big customer too is going to turn. So you need to correct. Always have a lot of demand.
But yeah. In general can't get rid of them.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: Yes. Right. So this is like, this is like a problem for service companies is the lower.
Because the lower end to your customers things are not working as well.
So you have to try a bunch of different things versus the higher paying clients. It's okay.
Usually they know exactly what they want. So you just have to deliver the thing.
Yes, right, exactly. So it's like. Yes, there's a pricing grid where you do less work for lower paying but then the client is. Their expectation is almost reverse. Where the lower paying people demand more things from you at the higher paying people, they know what they want. So you can align really fast.
[00:42:20] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's great feedback. I agree. I even go as far as say like so what I've been recommending to everybody is just get a lot of customers in the door and let some people churn.
And what's happened for me is like I've had some people who like, they're not the highest paying customer, but they've been with me for like a really long time and it worked really well. And it gets to a point where it's not a lot of work to service them and they're really happy because like they get exactly what, what they want and for them the switching costs become high.
So, so it is possible to have the same experience, at least in my experience possible have like lower tiered customers who are excellent customers. I just think you need to have a lot of them and find the ones who are, who are good.
Maybe there's maybe 10% where I think you're totally correct that like large customers, they're bigger budget, they're, they're further along in their business, they're more organized, they, they generally have a good sense of what they're looking for and they look for a great fit and then they don't turn. Right. So you're just going to have a higher percentage of them who stay.
[00:43:25] Speaker A: Yeah, this is a really good conversation because like so you can, if you just focus on the service. So do good work, right? Get referrals, charge more money. That'll get you to like 10, $20,000 a month and then going from 20 to let's say $80,000 at the million dollar mark. You need to start thinking about how to productize your, your agency and service.
So like the way that I think about those lower end customers that are still paying with me for a really long time, they're as if they're productized as in, you know, I'm sure everybody has subscriptions that they still pay like 20, $30 for that they haven't used in the last like, I don't know, two, three months.
Right. A lot of, for example, a lot of, I'm sure a lot of AI tool. A lot of their revenue is coming from people that just forgot that they subscribe to this thing.
Right?
So like you can charge at the lower end.
The thing that you're giving them is access to you, your product or your agency for like knowledge.
So the thing that you can offer these people is whenever some new piece of thing that you know, works, you can think back to them, be like, hey look, here's a cookie cutter thing that you can do now and you'll get immediate value.
But that might not happen every single week. Every single day.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So you made some great points too. And let's, let's provide a little more clarity here. So like to get to a million dollars.
Right. So obviously it's very hard to do, although I'd say it's not impossible at 1500 bucks a customer. Right. So generally you need to find a way to have a service that you can charge more for.
And, and Paul and I have talked to like a lot of solo founders, agency people who do similar business to us and, and we all I think agree on a couple of things regarding like pricing and regarding this is that there's a nice like sweet spot of, of monthly fees from a thousand to up to like I'm going to use the number 8,000. Yeah. The reason that's like the ceiling is like beyond that they can typically hire a full time person.
And so you have to be able, doesn't mean you can't charge more, you just have to provide more value than they would get or there's some reason that you have something that they want that they're not going to get from a full time person. But if you stay within this like sweet spot of like 1, 3, 5, 6, it's typically going to be cheap, cheaper that if they hire someone and if you're competent, which is where we started. Right. You have to have a great skill. You have to be like really good in your area.
It's going to be way better than they could get for anybody at that price. So in that price range they're more than willing to work with a contractor who is consistent, has their business well thought out.
[00:46:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:23] Speaker B: And is delivering a great service. Right. So in that price range you can easily get to 20, 30 customers that are paying anywhere from like a thousand and that's how you get to a million dollars. Like it's not, it's not that difficult to do and I've talked to a lot of people who have done this.
[00:46:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I agree. Right. So at that point the argument you have with yourself and I have this is just like, okay, your margin is going to be lower than doing it yourselves. Right. You probably have a couple people that's delivering the work and then what's the next thing? Because you can probably take this model all the way to two to $3 million a year.
[00:47:13] Speaker B: Yeah, right, Absolutely right. That's some of the things we've talked about too. Like some basic things that I want people to know that Paul even taught me. So like I was billing everything from like I had this like 90s agency mindset where I was like tracking hours. Yeah. I want all the old people out there who like came up through that model to understand that like just coming up with a productized approach where you throw people on stripe and you just charge them like a monthly fee and you have like a set delivery. I have like a, there's, there's some deliverables somewhere that's basic. Like every month we're going to deliver this and you just like focus on that. You don't worry about hours. Like that was like a giant unlock for me because all of the like invoicing and measuring and tracking and hourly management, all that stuff went out the window. I didn't have to worry about any of that. And if you start thinking in that way, then you're like, throw people on slack so you don't need to have an hour meeting. It's like, just send me a message. Just upload something asynchronously here. You work in a more kind of like modern way for lack of a better, better term. So there's a lot of tricks like that you can use that will reduce the overhead of like man, you know, having a million dollar agency that requires a bunch of people. Right. Like if you, yeah, if you have like, so you remove all the billing and accounting stuff, like automate all of that meetings, all that stuff. Like you should talk to people in person and shot meetings. But like you don't get over, invest in it. And you can use slack asana, other tools out there to kind of like manage, manage that. And if it goes well and you guys are like working well together with the customer in general. What I've seen is like the meetings start to kind of drop off. They're like, oh, we don't even need to meet this week or we'll just catch up later. It starts to become very operational and so a lot less of your effort and energy goes into customer management.
Which goes back to my original thing, like get lots of customers and the ones that like are not working for whatever reason, like, do not worry about it, let them churn. I think that was like a huge lesson. Like when I worked in a big agency, like we would refuse to do that for variety of reasons, but I always thought it was bad and I, I would recommend to people, like if it's not working out for whatever reason, like let them go. But that means you need to be 100% committed to marketing and building your pipeline and making sure that like you have people to fill that gap.
[00:49:40] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
So I, it's like you'll you'll be able to do this to get to about like a million dollar mark, I think.
[00:49:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:49:54] Speaker A: And then at one point everything will just change once again. Right, Right. Like this is, this is what I already figured out and I think it's just starting a business.
So for example, what you just said, get everybody onto Slack, charge them in a productized way. But then right now I'm also thinking like, it's actually detrimental for me as a founder to be able to always be available on Slack to all of my clients.
Right. At the, at one point you need to hire like an operator that takes this over.
And I'm only focused on, let's say marketing and sales to bring new leads into the pipeline. So at that point it's like, okay, if you want to talk to me, then I'll have to upcharge. And then that shifts all the way back to the hourly invoicing thing again where maybe you get like 10 hours a month face to face with the, with a, with a specialist.
[00:50:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:56] Speaker A: So the really, the. So really the answer is just like you have to do a bunch of like pricing, discovery and just talk to people, talk to your customers all the time.
[00:51:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I, no, I, I agree. 100 and like I said, everyone I've spoken to is like, it seems like it's pretty straightforward on the Internet. To do this.
It takes a year. You've got to be really good at what you do.
There's enough tools out there, you can scale it and you get to like a half a million and you can do it 100 by yourself. You get to a million. It probably takes some contractors or whatever to get larger than that. You have to like have big reputation, be able to like charge perhaps a premium which people will pay if they think your service is awesome and you're delivering great work.
And 10 million is when you need full time staff. So to get like, let's say from 5 to 10, like you need a full time general manager, maybe a full time like, let's call it like executor, like whatever it is. Like operator. I think media buying. Yeah. Creative, whatever it is. Like you'll need someone who's like real talented and they'll have to be compensated well because the business will start to hinge on the output it.
[00:52:11] Speaker A: The pipeline. Yeah, totally agree.
You said something that's super important, which is brand and trust. So like everything that we said so far is you have to. It's all founder led.
As in the founder is the person who's showcasing the trust you can execute, you're doing sales calls, you're the one who's marketing on social media, jumping on podcast, all of that. And then the way for you to scale is you've built up the trust of branding enough that you could, you could just, you know, let executors take that over a little bit.
And it really depends on who you are. Like, for example, I'm not an operator or I, I'm not, I'm not organized enough to be an operator.
So I would definitely need to hire an operator to hand over like the day to day thing. But I feel like for you, your operator, maybe you're, you will supplement somebody to do like the sales or the marketing. I'm not sure.
[00:53:20] Speaker B: You haven't decided yet. And then I, you know, my business too is a bit of a mixed model where, like, I don't know if I want to do consulting forever. Like, I don't have this ambition. Well, that's not true. I like doing consulting. I want, I do want to do consulting forever. Do I want consulting to be my primary business?
I think I can confidently say no. I actually do want to do consulting forever.
I love coaching and working with like early stage companies and young entrepreneurs. Like, I, I get so much personal satisfaction out of it that I actually don't think I will ever stop.
[00:53:58] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:53:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't think I'll ever stop doing that. Like, even the first customer I ever had, like, he paid me like one time, he's a kid, they didn't have that much money and I still like have calls with them and work with them and like when I have some time, basically pro bono, just because, like, it's like you're the first person I ever brought on and I love you and I think you're amazing and I think like, maybe even this business won't be successful, but maybe you'll be successful in the future. So it's just something I do because I like to coach.
I like coach young people. But my ambitions are bigger than that in terms of like, I would like, this is actually a great segue into something I want to share.
I do want Vibers that's like long term to be a community product and I want it to be more sponsorship driven. I actually thought a lot about this because there's a lot of different models I could adopt for it.
But if I, if I have the, like, if I maintain and continue the founder first brand, founder first approach approach, the only model that I think really works well is sponsorship. So like, I don't want to charge the founders to be a part of vibersass, I can charge as a consultant. I think that's fine. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But, like, the community needs to, like, highlight and, and represent them and make them feel good. And then we have, like, investors and, like, large, let's call them vendors. So from Amazon to Capgemini to all the different angel investors out there, and if I just represent the founders, all of those people are more than willing to pay for access.
In terms of sponsorships, I thought a lot about this. Right. Because I could turn it into an angel angel fund or have some kind of investment firm, which is a lot of people want to do when they start doing what I'm doing. But the problem is then the model becomes mixed. Where I may be competing against venture firms. You have to partner with them. If I just say I'm all about founders, which is true. I love it. I think entrepreneurship, I think startups, I think founders is the coolest thing ever I've done in my whole life. Never want to do anything else. And I just want to represent them in a way that, like, other people don't just really be founder first. All of the venture firms, all the people will be happy to do it. And sponsorship becomes a very clear model. It's like, it's almost like highest bidder. You have money, great. You can sponsor and be a part of this and you can get access to the founders and the founders are always free.
[00:56:19] Speaker A: Nice. I think that's a really good program.
[00:56:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And so. So I want to continue consulting, but I don't want it to be a $10 million, like, startup agency or something, which it could, but it's just not my.
Not my ambition. But I do want to share something since we're kind of wrapping up the call here. Yeah, I couldn't be more excited about this because I got.
I got the final confirmation from Amazon.
[00:56:45] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:56:46] Speaker B: For the second vibersas VC founder mixer. So we did the first one in San Francisco.
It was awesome. It was so painful, dude. I wanted to give up, like, just bad luck. But. But I. I went. I went through with it. I made it work. Everyone was happy. Sponsors are happy. Everyone's happy. And so based on that success, like, I reached out to Amazon and they have what they call the AWS Loft, Builder Loft. Now they change the name Builder Loft in San Francisco, and they will be hosting the event. So I couldn't be more excited than having AWS on as a.
As a sponsor.
Yes. And so March 11, we'll start at 5:30 in San Francisco and I've changed the format. Yeah, dude, this is really exciting.
Change up the format a little bit. So last time we had demos, I planned to stuff some demos, but startups can apply and we will select five for a little pitch competition and then we'll crown one of the winners the Vibrass VC Mixer founder winner for the quarter.
So get some recognition.
Yeah, I want to have a little more of a formal approach to this. It'll be myself, Arjun, my good buddy, who's my partner on the events, and whoever. The speakers that we get will be the judge. And I put your little criteria here. So I want it to be as straightforward as possible for people to understand, like, what are we looking for and how are we judging these things? And then of course, like, all you need to do to apply is just register.
Register the event. There's a check box that says a startup I'm interested in submitting to the competition and just put in your details in there and we will take a look at it and. And that's super cool. And follow up. Yeah, we'll probably do something else later on to drive interest in demos, but for the five pitches, we're gonna go through them and evaluate them and. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm really excited.
I'm really excited about this.
[00:58:55] Speaker A: And it's March 11th.
Yeah.
[00:58:58] Speaker B: That we got to look at our travel schedule. I heard like hotels in San Francisco are getting expensive again, so have to take a look there. Yeah, that's what I want. The. I want the virus has to become like a community. You know, I've got the newsletter and we're doing startup of the week now, which is really fun. And so people, if you're interested in having your startup featured, like, reach out.
Always looking for interesting people to. To be a part of it.
[00:59:26] Speaker A: Very, very cool.
[00:59:27] Speaker B: And. Or should we do it? Do we do do meme.
[00:59:30] Speaker A: Let's do it.
[00:59:32] Speaker B: Dude. I have today. Did you see the link I sent you earlier today?
[00:59:35] Speaker A: I did.
[00:59:37] Speaker B: Oh, dude, I think that's the funniest thing ever.
[00:59:38] Speaker A: I gotta.
[00:59:39] Speaker B: I gotta post that. I gotta show that one. I gotta find it.
It's basically. This is the greatest.
Oh, here it is. Okay.
It's maybe the greatest shitpost of all time.
So I did this. I wrote this like weeks ago. This joke was at a meetup in sf and I said, maybe we don't need AI for this. And the next morning I woke up and stripe preemptively banned my account. Not true. Just joke. Right.
But obviously, like, no one at Stripe understood this, because the strike agent is looking for, I guess, people having challenges. Yes. And they responded. Hi, Gregory. We can investigate your situation directly. Please send us a message. And I wrote them back as politely as I could.
Your Stripe support. This was a post, but I deeply appreciate your help. You have one of the best products out there in Saxland, and please forgive my sardonic sense of humor. Thank you for your service.
[01:00:41] Speaker A: Nervous?
[01:00:41] Speaker B: I wanted, like, as clear as I could be. Like, Stripe is the best SAS product ever. Like, I love you guys. Like, I'm just making jokes, okay? I don't need any help. And then there's some other guy, like, chiming in. Like, he's all upset. Where is it? There's another guy that's, like, he's posting crazy stuff about, like, Stripe band, his account and everything in here. Maybe he deleted it all.
[01:01:02] Speaker A: Maybe it's spam and not spam.
[01:01:05] Speaker B: Anyway, Yeah, I really had achieved something with this.
[01:01:11] Speaker A: Strive noticed.
[01:01:14] Speaker B: Seems justified. Yeah, I would. I would agree with that one.
[01:01:18] Speaker A: Perfect. All right.
[01:01:19] Speaker B: Awesome show today.
[01:01:20] Speaker A: Great show.
Okay, we'll end it here.
[01:01:24] Speaker B: Thank you.
