314 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2024
    1. it's not your position to beg for hosting. If past clients don't see the value in your minor maintenance then it's best to let them go
    2. We just sent an email and said due to the price increases of our CMS we are having to increase our monthly hosting fees from $--.-- to $--.-- Should you have any questions or concerns please don't hesitate to reach out to us. No one has said anything YET.
    3. I have built in a margin that I am happy to wear despite any future changes to reward loyalty to my current clients.

      again, this keyword "margin"

    4. I am planning on giving them a 30 day notice for each renewal and with the transparency of “platform increase” and if they can no longer afford it, I’ll tell them to pay for their own hosting with Duda so they don’t lose their site.

      Natalia see this price increase also as an opportunity to get rid of bad clients, that would have probably leave her sooner or later anyway.

    5. I am struggling a bit figure out how I am going to justify this price increase to them. Spefically I am struggling with the people who have simple brochuer sites

      IDEA: 2. Letter of information to Duda’s client for price increase. We can list a few options if they don't want to continue using Duda: like switching to Brizy. We can hack it by letting them use their affiliate link (so they'll still win).

    1. I’d never use Duda for SEO either, it’s crap for that.

      is Duda that bad for SEO??

    2. Marco Celli their support group and support system has been much better than Duda’s as well. I’ve never seen it where the owner or CEO still answers the Facebook support group, even when their company is worth over $100mm. Also escalating tickets and such has been a breeze.

      again, the founder's implication in small things it's well perceived

    3. Makena Delaney is Brizy just a WP builder? Like Elementor? Or is it more than that?

      again, another concern that we need to address in the FAQ section

    4. Ben MungerMakena Delaney plus I’ve also got to know the owners and they are very supportive especially with all of our transfers. for Brizy so far!

      you're going to see a few times mentioning "the owners" or "founders". this is really important for them

    5. Dewayne Anthony Black yes! But is honestly really cheap. I think like 50 bucks for up to 20 pages. But don’t quote me exactly. But it’s more than reasonable

      this is a really good way to address their concerns

    6. Ben Munger ooooooh okay so excited that you’re loving it. I might have to pick your brain on a couple of things. I’ll ask the support team first but I might need help

      IDEA IDEA IDEA: Slack Group dedicated to ex-Duda, they can help and support each other

    7. Makena Delaney Brizy is awesome! I’ve moved over a bunch of sites for my agency and white label agency partners. Highly recommended. No white label fees like Duda. Huge savings. We also have been testing the site’s on page structure and optimization/ page speed because we have dozens of SEO accounts and they all perform just as good as Duda, which was a major concern for us.

      This comments are GOLD, we need to save them somehow in a dedicated page and feature them on the landing page. It's public info.

    8. Bruce Smith what’s your email? I can connect you to one of the founders! I’m hoping to spend some time this afternoon playing in the editor

      I like that after her main comment she took it private, not promoting Brizy too much.

    9. I had a meeting with one of the founders of Brizy today and he’s just worked out a deal for us for making a transition because of the price increase! Message me if you want to know more.I don’t know much about the platform yet- just exploring today. But I was really impressed overall!

      Makena is on fire, she is a Top contributor on the group, so no small thing.

    10. every couple of years there needs to be a " Push and shove and niggle" its what keeps us sharp and competitive. It can give us a reminder not to be complacent, I am driven so much on managing clients like I might lose them, but its also a two way street, I also need to feel the love from my clients. In this case? It was a good "blew" as we say in Australia but some of it? Was a little over the top and nasty. But we are all grown ups, some will stay some will go but in the end I pray we all succeed. Onward and upward hugs to all.

      good keywords for specific countries: "blew" & "over the top and nasty".

      I believe this needs to be saved as a good copy for our next price increase.

    11. Duda used to be loyal to the agencies. Now they only care about their enterprise accounts. Their culture and family values and their love for the smaller agencies has vanished since their last round of funding! It has become EXTREMELY apparent as of the last couple of years and I feel that MOST will agree with me.

      so many keywords and phrases here: "used to be loyal to the agencies", "their love for smaller agencies has vanished"

    12. I choose loyalty and appreciation for Duda allowing my agency to grow by leaps and bounds

      Also a few keywords here: "loyalty and appreciation", "grow by leaps and bounds"

    13. Duda has been loyal to agencies for years and protected our margins by not competing with us, like Wix does.

      I like a few keywords: "protected our margins", and "not competing with us"

    14. They do a good at SEO and a few other things but for it's Ecomm, Forms, and Membership options they are obsolete to other platforms.
    15. DUDA is obsolete in damn near every aspect. I hate to see a company shoot itself in the foot, but shoot they must
    16. t’s a 31% increase paying monthly and a 41% increase paying yearly!
    17. What value are you giving me the agency I do not have now? I can tell you it's for Profitability and not Userability.

      THIS one is GOLD: "what value are you giving me the agency I do not have now??"

      the other one is strong as well: Profitability and not Userability

    18. Justin R Sturges Idk, I’ve been looking hard at standing up a new WP environment for more reasons than just price.

      copy inspiration: "have you looking hard at standing up a new WP environment but don't have time/not ready to give up on the cloud/etc.?"

    19. Nick Kurnik I wonder if they gave their employees a 30% increase as well. You know they think it’s okay to increase the prices 30%. Do their employees get an increase crease as well? I would bet not!

      nice ad copy: "did Duda employees get a 30% increase as well?"

    20. just glad I haven’t put all my eggs in one basket. Before I transfer (back) to WP

      good copy inspiration: don't put all your eggs in one basket

  2. May 2023
    1. Most NDAs are several pages of dense text and sending your unique form ends up requiring your potential business partner to review it all over again and slowing you both down. But we’ve standardized and streamlined the process. Our NDA is free and takes just minutes for both parties to review and sign all online in one simple tool.
    2. VirtualTerms standardizes and streamlines common business agreements to make it easy for two parties to agree quickly and move on with doing business together.
  3. Mar 2023
    1. $2,000 x 1,000 = $2,000,000 per year
    2. Codie told Noah that her videos on LinkedIn were driving around 10% of all subscribers. 10%!
    3. Codie now runs cross promotions with large newsletters like Sahil Bloom, Noah Kagan, and Ali Abdaal.
    4. But, she was smart about it. She posted it in a super relevant group (Trends.co which is all about the business of businesses), and she came at it from an angle of sharing cool info with people who’d be interested.
    5. Posting in Facebook Groups was another method Codie used early on to get more eyeballs and subscribers to the newsletter. She would take one of her articles, or a business idea she was highlighting and post about it in those groups. This is similar to how Harry Dry of Marketing Examples did this. Provide a ton of value, and then let people know about the newsletter afterward. And oftentimes, she wouldn’t post a link at all and just waited for people to ask for it.
    6. Since then, I’ve found over 100 podcast appearances for Codie.
    7. Just like reaching out to her network, Codie has no fear of reaching out to people to get on their shows. I think this is based on a combination of having great content and interesting life and business experiences to draw upon, and an extra layer of confidence.
    8. Tapping Into Her Network Codie is not afraid to ask people in her life to join the newsletter. She emailed a lot of old contacts she found in Gmail and messaged friends she hadn’t been in touch with in a while.
    9. They can be broken down into a few categories: Using her personal network Social media posts Getting on podcasts Running live webinars
    10. 1. Growth Experiments….on speed. I’ve talked about others using experiments and trying to grow their audience in different ways. But Codie set out to get 10,000 subscribers in 30 days…and hit the goal. She wasn’t messing around. ? 2. Other People’s Audiences. Whether it’s podcasts, social groups, or interviews, Codie is great at getting in front of other audiences to grow her brand. ? 3. Twitter, but not in the way you might think. Codie didn’t pass 10k Twitter followers until after she hit 100k subscribers. She used it in a really interesting way that I’ll dive into.
    11. 9-Day Challenge – low-ticket offer to help you learn the basics of buying businesses. – $49 Buying a Small Biz course – 1-year access to their mid-tier course around buying small businesses. – $1,497 Private Mastermind Group – their premium group for people looking to purchase businesses using Codie and Ryan’s methods. – $8,800 per year
  4. Feb 2023
    1. Used by 25,000+ creators and supporting 8.5+ million end users in 95 countriesBootstrapped to $20 million ARR and 140 employees (and growing!)
    2. With a very stable product-market fit and a large swath of data, we are evolving our approach by bringing in data and growth experts to take  a more data-driven approach in our next phase.
    3. 50% should be big product roadmap features delivering on product vision and constantly reshaped by understanding core users’ needs50% should be some combination of responding to customer needs and solving UX issues evident from customers interactions with the product.
    4. Write good content that educates and your audience wants to read and learn from.Do good keyword research and find the right keywords to write about.Make sure your on-page SEO is on point, meaning your website is fast, bounce rates are reasonable, and you keep improving the page. (Ahrefs, by the way, gives you a nice report of ways to improve your page.)Do organic outbound, meaning go out to related blogs and other websites with strong domain authority and build links (meaning get them to link to you and you link to them). This will give your website more power and Google will begin to see your website as an authority.Keep at it. It’s a long play, but pays off!
    5. Early on, using the power of SEO and leveraging our blog for thought leadership really got us off the ground. I pushed SEO very hard at Uscreen, especially in our earlier years.
    1. Instead of Rezi marketing directly to students - the university recommends Rezi to the students.
    2. This is the B2B2C model. A B2B2C is a particular business model where a company, rather than accessing the consumer market directly, does that via a partnership with another organization. Yet the final consumers will recognize the brand or the service provided by the B2B2C.
    3. Roughly 5% or 2,500 users come from B2B2C RMS deployments.
    4. Roughly 20% or 10,000 users come from AppSumo.
    5. This year Rezi has had approximately +20 media placements in The New York Post, CNBC News, Entrepreneur, Engadget, The Next Web, Mashable, and more.
    6. Here's a look at the past 16 months of search engine results:
    7. Consistent Growth | Post - 4/10/2020: 1. Established an SEO strategy, 2. rebuilt the website and 3. hired an external SEO consultant.
    8. Okay, back to our SEO strategy - We first hired Nathan Qaurrie as our team's dedicated writer - Nathan has a professional writing background focused on the education industry.
    9. To escape the "resume-builder" circus above - we turned to our focus to mirror the product messaging that brought our partners the most success. Mainly focusing on the unique feature of how Rezi uses (simple) AI to create a significant advantage by optimizing content with potential keywords found in the job description. The results are fantastic:
    10. Since September 2019, we've released three significant products on Product Hunt.
    11. We certainly weren't ready for Reddit in November of 2019 when we accidentally went viral as a consequence of a /r/IAMA post going nuclear.

      r

    12. 47,611 visitors landed on the Rezi website7,239 created a Rezi account. 3,844 created an anonymous guest Rezi account

      r

    13. In April, we launched a Resume Management System (RMS) to bring organizations the ability to assist their users with the same proven resume experience as our users.

      r

    14. we developed Rezi in a module way that allows for white-label deployments without much headache.
    15. Our development is almost entirely lead by the marriage of the feedback from Rezi users and Rezi's knowledge of the resume
    16. This graph is our user growth since September 2019. On June 26th, 2020, we crossed 50,000 users. Without a marketing budget.
    1. We don’t use paid advertising We don’t use spy pixels and retargeting We don’t use session recordings We don’t do popups and other intrusive calls to action We don’t pay anyone to promote or recommend us We don’t use a chat bot to engage you or convert you We don’t participate in any link buying for SEO purposes
    2. We focus on a small number of things, but we try to do them as best as we can: Build a great product that people enjoy using and want to recommend. This is the key, as nothing else would work without a great product. We publish content on our blog and social media, communicating what we believe in and stand for. We take a stand and hope it resonates with as many people as possible.
    3. $83,637 MRR ($1M ARR) thanks to our 7,000+ paying subscribers!
    4. April: Import from Google Analytics ($76,312 MRR)
    5. They announced that they will kill Universal Analytics and that there’s no way to import historical stats to their new GA4 version. We’ve experienced an immediate increase in interest in Plausible following this news. March was our best month yet, with $8,247 in net MRR growth.
    6. January: “Google Analytics violates GDPR” ($55,411 MRR)
    7. More than 30,000 read the post within the first 24 hours of publishing. In the five days following the post’s publishing, our trial signups increased by more than 100% compared to the previous period.
    8. We had some interesting data that compared the level of blockage between Google Analytics and Plausible, so we decided to publish a little study with the details in “58% of Hacker News, Reddit and tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics”.
    9. Google is infamous for not having any customer support, so we’re doing our best to give people that contact us a friendly, timely and helpful response.
    10. We looked at the topic from our angle in the “Google AMP is dead!” blog post, and it was a hit. More than 35,000 people read the post within a couple of days after publishing.
    11. More than 16,000 people read the post during the month, and we got a lot of attention. This is an example of a different way to approach content marketing.
    12. Google announced their FLoC initiative which is a topic we have a lot of thoughts about. So we published a blog post on “how to fight back against Google FLoC” to increase awareness.
    13. We got more than 1,000 visitors and 15 trial signups from Product Hunt on the launch day, but only a few days later, we got fewer than 20 visitors from there.
    14. We launched on Product Hunt. This is typically a big event for startups. Product Hunt was worthwhile, but it’s not our core growth strategy
    15. We got another Hacker News moment when our post on “how to pay your rent with an open source project” brought us more than 35,000 visitors in a single day.
    16. This opportunity came as part of our outreach to different influential websites. Most sites ended up ignoring our messages. It isn’t easy to send so many emails and hear nothing back, but this one fabulous mention from a very relevant site was worth all that silence.
    17. More than 25,000 people visited our site on the day we published the post. We broke all our records in April: most traffic, trials and the biggest MRR increase.
    18. The post went to the top of Hacker News, and it helped us spread the word about Plausible to more people than ever before.
    19. Content marketing and Hacker News are essential to our growth even to this day.
    20. With content marketing, we get the word out to more people, increase brand awareness, and get links and social media mentions, which eventually results in higher rankings in search results.
    21. We had our first traffic spike by getting more than 2,500 visitors in one day. It was thanks to the “You probably don’t need a single-page application” blog post making it to the front page of Hacker News.
    22. We had 60 active beta users at this point, and some decided to stick around and pay for our service too. We ended the month with our first paying subscribers and $64 MRR.
    23. Our marketing in the early days was focused on building in public. The latest updates and milestones were posted on our blog, Indie Hackers and Uku’s Twitter account. All the early users came from these updates.
    24. ten months to get to $500,000 ARR, and now eight months later, we’re at the $1 million ARR milestone.
    25. It took us nine months to go from $400 to $10,000 MRR
    26. It took us 324 days to reach the first $400 monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
    27. More than 7,000 paying subscribers trust us, and we’re actively counting stats on more than 50,000 websites with more than a billion monthly page views.
  5. Jan 2023
    1. I use Sendy to send my emails. mail-tester to make sure email does not reek of spamminess. I make sure to use emails from alternate domains.
    2. I am starting to build in public because I want you to know about Proxycurl.
    3. With SEO and cold-email outreach, we grew the company to our first million dollars in revenue in 2021.
    4. So I purchased a Crunchbase Pro subscription and performed a search for all recently funded companies in the space of marketing/sales automation, recruitment tech, or web scraping. Then, I exported the results in .csv format with their corresponding general emails and began a series of cold email outreach to their general emails.
    1. Well what works best is Google Search ads, its expensive but they deliver new users non-stop and I was able to drive down the cost per lead a lot. Besides that post on free platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook into relevant groups and tell them about your tool or service.
    2. Do SEO, but only low cost SEO. Don't buy expensive guest posts, instead you can offer to provide great content in exchange for a backlink to your website.
    3. Create a lot of content for marketing and post on popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Linkedin, Instagram & Forums.
    4. Leverage your network. Reach out to your network of friends, family, and colleagues for advice, support, and resources.
    1. we found it impossible to get responses from cold outreach
    2. In recent months, churn has increased. We're currently averaging 7% churn
    3. Social proof played a huge part in growth. It got the ball rolling. No one wants to buy a product that has no other customers. The journey to gathering ratings, reviews, customer success stories, case studies, brand logos, and testimonials was a long one.
    4. We also hired a B2B SaaS copywriter who was able to translate customer data and quotes into converting landing page copy. Better copy helps our audience learn why we're the right product for them.
    5. This is because people find us primarily through a Google search and set up demo calls with the referral solutions on the page.
    6. Although you shouldn’t rely on places like ProductHunt and Hacker News, don’t underestimate what a good amount of traffic can do for you. Hope for the best, but expect for the worst. For a long-term approach, we've now invested into things like SEO and content. If you're an early-stage SaaS, I recommend doing the same.
    7. When we launched the first version of GrowSurf in late 2017, I posted all over the internet to well-known outlets like Hacker News, ProductHunt and BetaList.
    1. When the article is about 80% done:
    2. Here is a breakdown Harry created about where his subscribers come from across social platforms.
    3. Quick caveat: all of these mentions of “Twitter” can be replaced with “LinkedIn” if that’s the platform you have more traction on. Don’t send the link to the Twitter thread if you’d get much more reaction on LinkedIn.
    4. Once the article is published:
    5. At the very end (and nowhere before), he plugs his newsletter. It got 124 comments on just that one subreddit and probably hundreds if not thousands of visitors to his website.
    6. Of course, he spent time becoming an active member in all of these groups before posting his own content.
    7. And at the end of the thread, he links back to that article and the newsletter.
    8. And as soon as he hit publish on the Twitter thread, he embeds a link to the thread in his email and an email to his newsletter.
    9. By teasing out the best tip from the article, he’s getting people framed for the content. Once the full article is published, people are already going to be intrigued to read the rest of the post.
    10. Many Facebook groups look down on self-promotion (i.e. sharing your own links), so he does something really smart and just shares the tip with little callouts in the corner of the image.
    11. Every time Harry publishes an article, he promotes it in multiple places:
    12. Most people just send everything back to their newsletter, and they miss out on this additional layer of traffic.
    13. Promoting his Twitter thread it gives that post a boost of engagement, signaling to the algorithm that these are valuable. More people share it, and more new people see it.
    14. He doesn’t just post a Twitter thread – he then links to it from his newsletter and embeds it into the article.
    15. Improve the copy on your landing pages and forms
    16. Here is a breakdown from one of his articles showing the percentages of where people opted into his email from.
    17. One of the ways Harry has improved his conversion rate quite a bit is by adding more ways for people to sign up.
    18. In the beginning, he was charging only $2300 a month for a sponsor, but I’d have to hope he’s increased that since.
  6. Dec 2022
    1. Launching your product is not something that happens just once, it should happen again and again.
    2. I have also asked past contracting clients if I can do blog posts for them and they were more than happy too!
    3. Building free tools is a great way to start sending traffic to your site.
    4. Signup to all startup directories such as betalist, startup ranking, Crunchbase, Launching Next, Indie hackers
    5. With all my content I hit forums such as Reddit, Hacker News, Quora, email list, Facebook groups, Slack groups.
    6. I like to hang out in Facebook groups related to video editing and marketing. This gives me a good insight into what makes this industry tick.
    7. Make and write content your users actually care about and also things they might search for. Here is a good example - we rank really well for "Social Media video aspect ratios 2019".
    8. Our blog posts have brought about 40,000 visitors to our site over the last 3 months.
    9. share your product on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, discord, slack groups
    10. from Quora are more likely to convert to using your product since they were so interested in finding the solution in the first place.
    11. launching on product hunt and also heading over to Quora and owning over 100 video editing questions related to our website.
    1. In fact, our first hire was someone to help with customer success. Their job was literally to go through every account, see whether it was set up properly and seeing results, and reach out and offer to help if it wasn't.
    2. Building up an audience first, before there was even the slightest hint of this becoming a product, was a massive help.
    3. Our approach is simple: just try to be as educational and informative as possible.
    4. Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers? High touch Selling high-touch (getting on the phone with each prospective customer, giving them a demo) in the early days worked really well for us.
    5. We made about $40k in that launch (mostly annuals). We were happy, but we knew there was still a lot of work ahead!
    6. The landing page was some long-form copy about what we were doing, with four or five dropdown boxes where you could choose things about yourself (business type, email marketing tool you use, and so on) and see the copy update in real-time, as an example of the sort of thing personalization could do. It was simple, but it did the trick.
    7. tweeting about the mistakes we were seeing a lot of in online marketing, the big impact personalization can have, and the cool ways you can get started with it, and then pointing them to a landing page.
    1. Our MRR is around $8,500, but our MRR growth rate is pretty low and flat (around 1% - again, primarily by choice). Customer lifetime value is $940, and revenue churn is 4-5%.
    2. Fortunately, InfluenceKit also has a ‘viral’ customer acquisition feature built-in. The main thing our users want to do with InfluenceKit is to generate and then share a report.
    3. Word of mouth has been our strongest marketing channel. We focus on providing ridiculously good customer support, and I think that goes a long way toward reinforcing people’s positive feelings about us. A couple of podcast appearances and conferences have helped spread awareness, but really, we’re still relying on people to tell their peers about us.
    4. Our early growth (actually, still the case today) came from word of mouth. Just bloggers telling other bloggers about us.
    1. Twitter is our biggest driver of traffic, and it is also where we are most active.
    2. All of our traffic is organic; from social media, our blog, and word of mouth since we have not yet run any advertising campaigns.
    3. The best thing that has worked for us for growing our audience is building in the open and being transparent about everything we are doing
    4. The biggest ones are Makerlog and Women Make, but we also receive lots of support on Twitter, Indie Hackers
    1. I was selling online courses about webmarketing so I was upselling systeme.io to our customers. But it is only when we launched in 2018 that we started attracting our real first users
    2. Our affiliate program has been so far our strongest acquisition channel.
    3. We've passed €77k in MRR. It equals to $85k, so it's more than $1M in ARR (annual recurring revenue) Today 99% of our customers are within the french market.
    4. It took us over 3 years to go from 1 to 1,000 customers in the English market (total active customers is 8,500)
    1. Building in public leads to folks sharing RailsDevs with their company and hiring managers
    2. I'm so tapped into the Rails community my Twitter audience is a great place
    3. Now most of my customers come from building RailsDevs in public. I share as much as possible about the company from analytics, to revenue, to the source code. The RailsDevs codebase is 100% open source.
    1. I only relied on organic acquisition channel: social medias (facebook groups, reddit, twitter, Product hunt), word of mouth & SEO.
    1. The main strategy was to use Facebook Groups to get early users. What is great about communities is that word of mouth is powerful
  7. Nov 2022
    1. Yes, LTD helps bring initial users, which helps validate the idea and demand. Have LTD as an option in your pricing table, launch your product on PH and other channels, Twitter, Reddit, Slack channels, Facebook groups, wherever your potential users are I never partner with any 3rd-party to promote my LTD, and I get 100% revenue. Can't comment on AppSumo, but I heard people ran good campaigns on it
    2. Build in public on Twitter, kinda like flywheel marketing, keep shipping new features to make existing customers excited and get more exposure to potential customers Just started SEO, mainly write blogs, nothing special
    3. No specific strategy, but launch the MVP early, build in public, listen to your users, evolve your product quickly, keep doing the same for at least 6 months.
    4. My Twitter follower count was < 1000 end last year My own SEO took a while. But in the early days, some organic traffic came from the PH post. PH did really a good job on SEO for daily featured products. I do have some early users who told me they found Testimonial from PH. I mentioned the affiliate program in the new user onboarding email campaigns. If someone is interested, they can sign up directly
    5. One growth hacking I implemented is to allow freemium users to continue to collect video testimonials even when they exhaust the 2 free credits, but if they want to access the 3rd video and beyond, they have to upgrade. I think this is the ah-ha moment that customers find value, and it's the best moment to convert them to be paying customers.
    6. It's under $100K with very little equity loss. Money isn't my top consideration, the top thing is to get the entrance ticket to the Earnest community So far it's Twitter, then the SEO, then the affiliate program
    7. started learning web dev from a Udemy $9.99 course at the end of 2019 started building many side projects in 2020, here is a thread
    8. Sept 2021: hit $100k ARR
  8. Oct 2022
    1. YouTube is working well for us and we have over 10,000 readers of our blog every month.
    2. We run a really popular webinar program and invite guest presenters (again typically users who offer a wider view of how to successfully use LinkedIn for lead generation).
    3. we regularly work with influencers who will evangelize our product to their audience.
    4. raising awareness via social media, ads, collaboration with influencers, and more targeted campaigns
    5. constantly provides regular pushing out content, videos, and webinars to help our user base
    6. technical and support team that is great at communicating with customers
    1. In my case, out of about 100 people visiting the site, around 20-30 people will click on the "buy now" button and about 5 will go through with a purchase.
    2. Getting on the front page of HN is admittedly, luck. I got lucky with my Show HN post.
    3. Implementing PPP / VAT reduction probably increased my sales 15-30%.
    4. I reached out to recruiters and hiring managers in my network and beyond, asked for their support.
    5. I then took it to Twitter to offer free ebooks for up to 1,000 people
    6. I started writing a book after offering free resume reviews for developers, getting overwhelmed with the responses, and wrote a short PDF in response to be able to keep up with the demand.
    7. 516 customers bought the book at $15 at launch (or lower, thanks to PPP) 272 customers bought the complete package ($29 at launch, or lower with PPP: book + video Standard Resume offer )
    1. I believe the very first customers came from my mailing list of hundreds of subscribers. The mailing list itself started with a single Reddit post and a link from my blog.
    1. I realized that SEO was the best growth strategy for the tool. I created content that targeted specific keywords and published it. It took Google at least 6 months for them to start ranking the content which is when we started experiencing organic sign ups.
    1. Our first 50 customer came primarily through content marketing, email prospecting, and community marketing
  9. May 2022
    1. Our revenue has almost doubled every year too, with a consistent profit margin of around 15-20%.
    2. We also have a small internal marketing department that is focused on maintaining our online and offline image on various social media channels, and this helps attract some business leads that are far more difficult to convert than the ones coming from recommendations.
    3. Retaining customers is something we do by ensuring the relationship with them is a great one and that the team remains committed and motivated to deliver high quality.
    4. Recommendations make out most of our strong lead sources.
    5. After incorporating the company, I started reaching out to my network and letting as many people as possible know about my plans. That’s where the first contracts came from.
    6. The first product we built was for a UK-based customer called ZipHire and it was a multi-platform recruitment platform aimed at students especially.
    7. Most of our customers come from the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, and France.
    1. Build and keep the Customer Care team in-house.
    2. A solid channel partnership strategy. Salesforce, Wix, WordPress, these are all incredibly entrepreneur-friendly platforms that would allow us to compete in their app
    3. surprisingly, coming in organically, we started researching the market thoroughly, understanding our competition, and tweaking our products and services to open up new opportunities for our company.
    4. Nonetheless, in 2015, after breaking that elusive $1M ARR milestone, we attracted a $1M round of investment from a Bucharest-based investment fund called 3D Capital.
    5. To sum it up, alongside Tudor Bastea, I founded the company in 2008.
    1. As I said, I’m 10 years behind in technology. I don’t use GitHub and other trendy platforms.
    2. The only bad thing is that I’m not up to date with programming trends. Not having clients demanding to use certain programming languages and tools I’m still using the same tools I used 10 years ago. I find PHP and JavaScript-capable of solving all my problems.
    3. I’ll keep on building passive income sites and maintaining the existing 40+ sites portfolio.
    4. Most people find me through Google search.
    5. I launched my premium HTML editor with the free demo being limited to 300 words. My other free HTML editor sites are also recommending to subscribe for a pro license at HTMLG. Since then I sold thousands of licenses and even I use them almost every day.
    6. I’m going to share the story of my online HTML editor at htmlg.com. This online text editor converts documents to HTML.
    7. I develop websites, mostly online tools that don’t require too much maintenance and generate passive income with insignificant investment. I do everything alone from registering the domain name, programming, SEO, and maintenance.
    1. We tried Google Ads as well, but that didn’t work out at all. We think this was because we misread what the people who clicked our ads wanted
    2. By now we are getting 80-90% of our clients from google searches.