The ups and downs of starting an agency
This is how I feel like startup life is:
Monday: “We’re in way over our heads…”
Tuesday: “Wow, things are starting to fall in line again!”
Wednesday: “Why did I start this business?”
Thursday: “Woo Hoo!!! We landed another customer!”
Friday: Can we handle another customer? Ahh there’s so much work to do, how am I going to complete it all?? Help!
Every day of every week is a roller coaster of emotions.
One day you feel like you’re in way over your head, and the next you overcome some challenge and feel like you’re on top of the world.
Here’s an example:
When we almost gave up on our business
A few months ago, when our course flopped (after we spent 4 months working on it), we nearly called it quits.
Yes, we had built a pretty sizeable audience of people who read our blog every month, but we couldn’t figure out how to monetize our business for it to be worth it to completely go in on it full-time.
We tried various forms of training, and while we were landing “brand name” startups, we weren’t making that much money.
After our course launch week, both Devesh and I were having serious thoughts about what to do next because we were hoping to make at least $40k on our first launch, and made a little over 1/4 of that. :(
I remember getting a phone call from Devesh saying “I can’t spend anymore time on Grow and Convert because I have to focus on the business that pays my bills.”
For those that don’t know, Devesh also runs the agency GrowthRock. It makes good money.
Devesh was thinking about selling his stake in Grow and Convert to me because he was “over it.” He was tired of spending time on a business that wasn’t making money and sacrificing potential income for a business that did.
But after a couple days of self-reflection, he came up with the idea to do this agency. At first I was apprehensive of the idea because it sounded like a ton of work and I didn’t think Devesh was serious being he already had another agency, but he insisted we at least test the idea.
Two weeks later, we had our first client and were off to the races. Longer version of that story here.
I wanted to share this story because it shows how hard a startup is, one day you can go from thinking you’re going to quit, and one small tweak in the business can lead to success.
We went through over 4 iterations of our business to get to the point we’re at now. Here’s the service we offer.
Fast forward to today, we landed our 3rd agency client after 1.5 months with no sales team and no outbound sales.
We started working with our first 2 clients on June 1st.
After we landed our first 2 clients, we agreed to not take on anymore clients for at least a month so we could make sure we nailed the operations and execution for them.
On the operations side, we’ve had a bunch of ups and downs.
We underestimated how much time goes into onboarding a client, and we had hoped to get 2 pieces out for our clients in the first month. But unfortunately, scheduling interviews, going through revisions, doing the background research on the client, and getting approvals, takes longer than we thought. So we’ve over communicated where projects are at with our clients, and we’ll have 4 posts created and promoted for each client in month 2.
We’ve also had some pieces come back from our writers that we weren’t happy with and have had to redo them. Part of the process… which again pushed some timelines.
However, most of the operations issues are solved now, which laid the groundwork for us to be able to keep scaling.
And today, I’m excited to announce that we signed our 3rd client. :)
Devesh also shared a couple of days ago how we were bummed we hadn’t published anything yet (for the reasons we stated above).
But today, we published our first piece and I’m damn proud of it.
Take a look at this beauty: How Much Do Freelance Developers Cost Around the World? (2017)
Here’s a screenshot from inside the post:
Devesh analyzed data from 5,302 freelance developers, hired an excel expert to make this crazy pivot table thing and analyze the raw data, then hired a designer to create these nice data visuals to make it easy for people to read, and then wrote summaries of each section.
Now that we have the first piece published, and that we landed our 3rd client, we’re feeling on top of the world!
That is, until the next set of challenges arise tomorrow.
