Update: How We Plan To Hit $2M In Revenue Next Year

Karl Hughes

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Published: March 31st, 2022

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Karl Hughes

Founder, Draft.dev

$90K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Draft.dev

draft.dev

from Chicago, IL, USA

started May 2020

$90,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Karl recommends to grow your business!

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Wor... Michael E. Gerber

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Want more updates on Draft.dev? Check out these stories:

1. How I Started An $8K/Month Technical Content Marketing Agency (2020) ➜

This is a follow up story for Draft.dev. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 4 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

I’m Karl and last year during the pandemic, I started Draft.dev. We create technical marketing content (mostly blog posts and tutorials) for companies that want to reach software developers.

We’ve gone from just me to 40 clients and over 100 freelance writers in a little over a year.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?

Initially, I was set on Draft.dev being a nice little lifestyle business, but it’s clear that there’s more here. We’ve been continuing to improve our processes with an eye on hitting $2 million in revenue next year.

Market demand for technical content has been growing. More developer tools companies are out there getting funded and we were featured for our work in the space in TechCrunch in July.

I’ve been able to hire a team of full-time people to handle most of the day-to-day operations so I can focus on sales, culture, and long-term business building. Finding good people to help me out has been huge as it’s allowed me to improve our processes, learn more about our ideal customers, and pursue media opportunities like the one in TechCrunch.

In June, I wrote about how we got our first 30 clients. Since writing that post, we’ve continued to get a lot of inbound interest from referrals, but we’re also starting to see more organic traffic thanks to intentionally pursuing specific keywords and building backlinks.

I wrote more about our SEO process in this post.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

Market forces are one of the biggest factors in how quickly your company will grow.

I don’t want to downplay my prior experience and network in Draft.dev’s success, but the fact is the developer tools market is a $40 billion industry growing by 20% a year. It’s very poorly served by existing content marketing providers, so we’ve been able to just ride the wave.

That said, I’ve met some of our competitors and while they’re doing well, many of them struggle to meet demand at scale like we have. I chalk this up to being obsessive about process and saying “no” to clients more often than I say “yes.” Way too many service companies just snap up any revenue that comes their way instead of staying focused on their core offering.

Finally, I’ve learned that no matter how uncomfortable it is, I have to learn to trust others on my team to do things without me. Yes, they make mistakes that I wouldn’t have, but they learn from those mistakes and get better from it. If I were checking every piece of work, we would have stalled out months ago.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

Initially, I was set on Draft.dev being a nice little lifestyle business, but it’s clear that there’s more here. We’ve been continuing to improve our processes with an eye on hitting $2 million in revenue next year.

The long-term goal is to build a fantastic, all-remote, mostly asynchronous business that helps thousands of engineers improve their careers through writing and hundreds of clients create authentic, education-first marketing content. I’m not sure exactly what that will look like, but I’m looking forward to the ride.

Have you read any good books in the last year?

Managing the Professional Service Firm was a really insightful read for me because I’ve never even worked in a professional service business before running Draft.dev. The book is a bit academic, but it’s also helpful to hear about the accepted best practices in my line of work so I don’t have to start from scratch.

The other book that impacted my business this year was Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork. While I don’t plan on raising money and making a billion-dollar business like Neumann, hearing how gutsy he was while building WeWork was inspiring. I know the book is supposed to be a critique of his often obsessive habits as a founder, but it also made me realize that I could probably take bigger risks than I initially thought I would.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

My biggest barrier so far has been my own fear and lack of confidence. For example, I’ve been nervous to hire people until I knew we could afford it, but this causes us to get behind. Now I’m realizing that in a company growing this quickly with a full sales pipeline, I have to step off the ledge and start the hiring process a bit ahead of revenue.

I’ve learned that no matter how uncomfortable it is, I have to learn to trust others on my team to do things without me. If I were checking every piece of work, we would have stalled out months ago.

The other thing that’s been incredibly liberating is having a great team to back me up. As I mentioned above, it was really scary to let other people start doing pieces of my job because I knew they wouldn’t do it at my level on day one. But, after a few weeks, they almost always took the role to a whole new level.