How I Started A $17K/Month Podcast Growth Service
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
My name is Tom Hunt and we start and grow the world's most profitable podcasts at Fame.
We sell just one single thing: a specific podcast growth process that we run for B2B SaaS and service businesses. It costs between $1-3k per month, and we are responsible for starting and growing a podcast for our clients.
We currently run this process for 10 clients and make approximately $17k per month.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
This whole thing started when I was working as head of marketing at a B2B SaaS business. We started a podcast.
The podcast was focused on the sales operations resource, and was called Sales Ops Demystified. We interviewed sales ops people.
It started to go pretty well, we got social shares, SEO value and even had some sales calls with our guests (we sold sales software). Sales Ops Demystified is now the most downloaded podcast in the world of sales ops.
I loved the process and saw the awesome results first hand, and therefore decided to go alone and run this process for other B2B brands, and Fame was born.
The idea was validated as it was pretty easy to find the first three clients, first we converted my ex. Employer to our first client, then I was able to find the other two through a blog I built on the side.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.
The design process for the service happened during the year when we ran the show for my ex. Employer, which was fortunate. We then tested the process with the next two clients and things worked in a pretty similar fashion.
Start with revenue. Don’t do things that don’t matter until you have a customer and you have made them happy.
It helped that I was actually the ideal persona for this service: a marketing lead at a B2B business, so I knew exactly how to design the service and also communicate its value.
We also built our own podcast hosting software during this process to help us save costs but also better results for clients, it’s called bCast: podcast hosting for marketers, by marketers.
Costs for a service business are pretty low, just the salary for myself, and a couple of team members, which was soon offset by the recurring revenue from the podcast clients.
Describe the process of launching the business.
There was no launch.
We simply kept providing the service for our first client, and then onboarded our next two clients. We had no Linkedin profile, no website and no Facebook profile for months.
We actually only launched our website when we had 8 clients and approx. $15k MRR. Clients typically don’t care about your brand, website or social presence if you are able to generate results for them.
The business was always financed with cash flow from the clients, no debt has ever been taken.
The biggest lesson learnt was to JUST focus on the value you can deliver to a client, if you get that right then everything else will fall into place.
Now we have clients and revenue we can do all that other stuff that people typically waste their time on at the start of the business building process:
- Getting a website
- Posting on Facebook
- Writing content
- Building systems
These things only have value if you have revenue, just like we did: take the shortest route to revenue!
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Clients have come from:
- Personal relationships
- Cold Linkedin outreach
- Client referrals
- This blog I built: SaaS Marketing
- Users of bCast
We also tried cold calling, it generated a few leads but didn’t generate any sales.
The sales process goes from the initial touch to a few phone calls with me (Tom), on those calls I will share break down how I propose their podcast should be built, regardless of whether they work with us or not. This builds trust and authority and hopefully helps with close rate!
We retain customers by doing awesome work for them, we reward clients after spending a year with us by buying them a better microphone.
Going forward we are focussing on building out our content process and ideally start to rank for podcast related keywords for longer term, sustainable growth.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Right now we are on $20k MRR, we’re aiming to hit $50k MRR by the end of 2021. We will do this by keeping all of our existing clients happy and then leveraging our existing client acquisition channels shared above.
We will also look to become more of a thought leader in the space through content marketing, I will produce more case studies of how podcasts have grown like this one.
We have spent a lot of time documenting and streamlining our operation, we use a combination of Slack, Google Drive and Trello to ensure all client work runs smoothly through our system, though we will keep doing more of this to ensure we keep clients happy.
Hire people that love things you hate - those tasks you really don’t like? Hire someone to do them for you, this frees up your time to work on building a better, more profitable business.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Start with revenue - don’t do things that don’t matter until you have a customer and you have made them happy.
Hire people that love things you hate - those tasks you really don’t like? Hire someone to do them for you, this frees up your time to work on building a better, more profitable business.
Kepp customers - once someone buys, don’t take this lightly! Do everything you can to keep them as a customer. It’s much cheaper to keep selling to someone you have sold to than selling to a new person!
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
- Webflow - for building websites
- Freshdesk - for customer comms
- Trello - for organising
- Slack - for internal comms
- Google Drive - for file storage
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Podcasts:
- Confessions Of A B2B Marketer - This is my show, I have been very inspired by my guests
- The Top by Nathan Latka - Awesome knowledge for SaaS/service business founders
- The SaaS Marketing Show - Great guests and awesome SaaS knowledge
Books:
- Millionaire Fastlane - Awesome breakdown of entrepreneurship
- Purple Cow - The BEST marketing book
- Big Podcast - Great view on how to build an awesome podcast
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Focus on making the sale, and then everything else.
Too many early stage entrepreneurs will spend time doing everything apart from what matters, making a sale and then delivering value. The more value you deliver, the faster you will grow.
Start off very manual, cold email, or cold Linkedin until you have sold the first thing, make sure this first customer is very happy with you, and then move on to finding the next one.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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