Reedsy Update: Our Non-Linear Journey To Reaching $24M ARR
This is a follow up story for Reedsy. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hello! I’m Ricardo Fayet, one of the four founders of Reedsy. As you may remember from our first Starter Story, we’re an online marketplace connecting authors with some of the world’s top publishing talent — from editors and proofreaders, to cover designers, illustrators, ghostwriters, book marketers, and literary translators.
Reedsy’s overall aim is to make it as simple as possible for authors to publish beautiful, professional books. We achieve that both through our marketplace as well as our treasure trove of free tools and educational content — like our 50+ free online writing courses.
Right now, we help produce close to 2,000 books every month through our Marketplace alone, and almost two-thirds of the 3,000+ freelancers on there have at least one ongoing project. In short, we provide recurring work for a lot of independent publishing professionals!
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
The business has grown quite a bit since our first interview here in January 2021, though growth has never really been linear for us.
There are two keys to growth: having a strong product that people want (and will enjoy using) and finding the right marketing channel(s).
Reedsy operates in a very specific niche but we’re not immune to global events: the first year of the pandemic saw a period of massive growth — a trend that slowed down after April 2021. This sort of makes sense: the pandemic led to many more people writing, or recovering uncompleted manuscripts they’d tucked away somewhere.
This accelerated growth certainly took a turn once restrictions were lifted in most countries. People could once again travel, meet with friends, and return to their outdoor hobbies — instead of writing and publishing books.
Still, when it comes to user signups, the overall picture in 2021 was quite positive when compared to a similar period in 2020:
In 2022, both traffic and conversions remained more or less at the same level as in 2021:
One of the main reasons for this has been our continued growth on the content marketing and SEO side of things — though again, it hasn’t been a linear one.
As you can see, organic traffic took an important dip from May to December 2021, which certainly didn’t help counter the trends brought about by the end of the lockdowns. That said, we learned quite a few lessons in the process, and now feel more prepared than ever to keep growing our organic traffic and revenue.
One channel that did very much lose its luster, however, was paid to advertise — specifically the retargeting ads we run on Facebook. Thanks to our SEO efforts, we have a huge audience of writers visiting our blog every month. This makes it very easy (and cheap) to run retargeting ads on Facebook to remarket to that audience and make sure they’re aware of our paid services (the marketplace).
We’ve always optimized these ads for a specific conversion event: authors requesting a quote from professionals on our marketplace. As this is the goal that ultimately brings in revenue, it’s also the one that matters most to us.
Because this conversion event is somewhat far down the funnel, we’ve been heavily impacted by the several privacy changes that Apple rolled out in 2021. Our average cost per conversion rose by around 200% between January 2021 and January 2022, with the first visible dip in conversions happening in May — right after Apple’s rollout of iOS 14.
How much this was a result of the Apple privacy changes was hard to guess, so in mid-2022 we decided to implement server-side tracking through Google Tag Manager and the Facebook Conversions API.
The effect was immediate: by tracking conversions on our servers vs. only relying on browsers, we were able to see 30% more tracked conversions, and our cost per conversion on Facebook ads went down by 50%.
If you rely on Facebook ads to grow your business and haven’t set up server-side tracking via the Conversions API, I highly suggest you do so right away. I found an excellent video on YouTube that details the process step-by-step.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
As I mentioned, 2021 was a tumultuous year for Search Engine Optimization, with numerous Google Core Updates, which impacted us, and forced us to rethink — or rather, adapt — our strategy.
For some time, Google had been adamant about the importance of page speed and Core Web Vitals, so we focused on improving the performance of our blog and landing pages. While this is a good move for the future, it didn’t prevent us from getting hit by the June/July Core Update.
There was a lot of speculation around those updates — with some experts claiming they were about page performance metrics, and others saying it was about relevance, authority, etc. Since we’d taken care of our page performance before, we decided to focus on improving our relevance, prioritizing laser-targeted link-building tactics where we could control the anchor text (e.g., guest posting).
Thankfully, the November 2021 Core Update sort of reverted our losses from the previous ones, and all core updates since have been more favorable to us (see the Ahrefs graph above).
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
So what are our main takeaways from all this?
Google Core Updates come and go, and are completely out of our control. While we should strive to prepare for them as much as possible, our focus must remain on long-term growth — improving content, relevance, page metrics, etc. — rather than trying to radically change things after each update.
We need to build more tools and dynamic directories which provide a superior user experience and generally grant us an unfair advantage in search. For example, our Writing Prompts contest and our Book Title Generator didn’t suffer from any of the Core Updates, and our literary agents and book publishers directories were responsible for most of our growth in the last year.
While SEO will always remain one of our most important channels, we need to start developing new ones to diversify our user acquisition. This year, for example, we’re looking to put more emphasis on social media and video-led content marketing.
SEO mini case-study
We used to have a blog post on “how to find a literary agent,” which converted quite well to signups, despite not ranking in the top three for its target keyword: literary agents.
To remedy this, and gain a long-term advantage in the SERPs, we decided to build a piece of content that was truly 10x better than anything else out there: a filterable, searchable, shortlist-able directory of the world’s best literary agents.
Not only did this directory win the first position for the main “literary agents” keyword, but it now ranks for hundreds of longtails related to genre and search locations (e.g., “fantasy literary agents”).
To boost its lead generation capabilities, we added a “shortlist” feature allowing users to shortlist their favorite agents directly within the directory, and receive their shortlist via email.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
We don’t make five-year plans, as things can change a lot in just one year. Instead, we set ourselves objectives for the coming months. On the product side, one of our goals is to integrate our free writing tool with our Marketplace, so that authors can hire editors through Reedsy, and work collaboratively with them within the tool.
Our free courses and educational content have greatly contributed to building our reputation over the years, so we’re looking to double down on that and release some high-production, video-led, cohort writing courses this year. Our goal is to make MFA-grade writing education accessible to as many aspiring authors as possible.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
This might sound weird for a startup founder, but when it comes to books, I almost exclusively read fiction. This year, the best thing I’ve read is probably The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (still not finished, it’s very long). I get much more inspiration (as well as general life lessons) from novels than I do from personal development or self-help books.
When I’m looking for specific advice/instructions on a particular topic, I’ll generally look for a blog post, or a video, rather than a full book.
That’s just me, of course! But if you’re like me (and don’t read much nonfiction), know that you can still very much work in tech/startups, and even start a company!
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
For me, there are two keys to growth: having a strong product that people want (and will enjoy using) and finding the right marketing channel(s). But I’d certainly say that the product part always comes first. You can have the best marketing skills in the world, but if you’re selling a product/service that customers aren’t interested in, or don’t enjoy, you might as well be Sisyphus, pushing his boulder up a never-ending hill.
So if you’re struggling to grow your business, first check how your current customers (as few as they may be) enjoy it. Run a Net Promoter Score survey — ideally built within your product, e.g., after the customer has made a purchase — and try to get both quantitative and qualitative feedback about their experience.
If you have a good product/market fit, then it’s just a question of finding one (or maybe two) marketing channels that are just perfect for growing it. Generally, you’ll recognize it as soon as you start testing it, as it will really “move the needle” for your business. For us, for example, it was SEO, and we realized it as soon as we published that first search-engine-optimized blog post.
Finding that channel can take time, so it should be your priority — even over maintaining other channels that struggle to perform. For example, if social media is bringing in just a bit of business to you, but you’re struggling to scale it, shift your focus to testing other channels, even at the expense of losing the tiny bit of business that social media is bringing to the table.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We’re always looking to hire! You can check out all our open positions on Wellfound here.
In particular, we’re looking for:
If you have some content marketing experience, I highly recommend our paid content marketing internships. First, you will learn everything we know about content growth and search engine optimization. Even better, 50% of our content marketing interns are then hired full-time, on average. It is the best path to becoming a full-time Reedsian, and an SEO ninja.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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