65. From Content Agency to $70K+/Month SaaS Company

0:00You have to show potential. Mentors don't want to invest their time into someone who doesn't make progress between meetups or they don't think it's going to get high leverage on their time. And then the mentors actually like it. You think that you're like stealing time from them, but you know, successful people like to give back into other promising people. And so it's, it's actually like a very good use of their time. Nick Jordan first built his writing assessment automation platform to support his growing content agency. He soon realized this could be a helpful tool for other business owners and developed his assessment system into the skill assessment platform WorkEllo, which launched earlier this year.

0:38I'm your host, Alex Freeman. And today on the Upflip podcast, I'm getting Nick's insights on how to start a SaaS company and grow it into a sustainable business. We'll also hear his insights on writing content, hiring writers and building an online community. Let's get right into it. Nick, thanks for joining us. Alex, thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I've been looking forward to all week. When did you start Workello and what kind of motivated you to do that? Yeah, so we started Workello about a year ago. And since then, we've helped connect content teams over 1000 writers.

1:08And I built my content agency from one to 45 writers and editors in about 18 months. And our growth is only limited by how many good, talented writers and editors we could hire. And so I spent 1000 hours trying to figure this out. And at the same time, I was figuring this out. I looked at our community of 10 ,000 members, and I saw that none of them had figured it out. So I condensed our 1000 hours of learning into a really simple SaaS product. and now anyone can hire like a 45 person content team. How did that community help you kickstart Workella's growth once you launched it? So I started building the community three years ago because I knew I was going to launch a SaaS product.

1:44And if I had a community, it'd be easier to sell. And at the time, I didn't know what that SaaS product was going to be, but I just knew I was going to have a SaaS product. And the community enabled me to drive, I think, 30 paid annual plans before we launched. I gave people a PowerPoint demo and took money on the phone. and then got us to 100 paid customers within the year. Wow. Now taking that a step back, how did you go about building that community over those three years? Yeah. So what I saw is that it seems like Facebook is the number one place for communities at the moment. LinkedIn's tried, but it doesn't give them much love on the newsfeed.

2:19And so the groups are pretty inactive. Forms are dying. Reddit's actually a good place. But Facebook, what I like most about it is that's where people are and it gives you discoverability. It just puts you in the newsfeed. So what I did was I went out and I built my brand in other communities. I went out and built my brand on LinkedIn and I would funnel people to what I call indoctrination content on my website. And they'd read it and they'd be like, Nick is the best set SEO. This is the only way to approach it. And then they jump in the community. Incredible. I guess that all factors into the kind of the startup budget for launching WorkEllo.

2:51What was that startup budget and where did the money go? Yeah, so almost entirely development. development. I think the MVP cost maybe 30 to 50k. And, you know, we spent a lot more since then. And besides that, it's just the founder's time. Incredible. I think the SaaS products are certainly they've achieved some sense of a buzzword status. And a lot of people are like, SaaS is the way to go. What are you working towards if you're opting to go into a SaaS business like for WorkEllo? What are average monthly revenues and margins on that revenue? Well, margins are super negative because the cost of development is still higher than what we close every month.

3:25I expect us to be, you know, default dead, meaning if nothing dramatically changes for the next 12 months. And during this time, basically, I bootstrap the SaaS with my agency revenue. So tell me about that, because that can be a very scary thing to look at as an entrepreneur. How do you make sure that you are on the right track, even though you are like still in the midst of expensive development costs? You know, there's this thing that someone way more famous than me called, I think it's like the SaaS valley of death. And basically, SaaS requires a very high capex. You have to invest hundreds of thousands.

4:02If you're not technical like me, you have to invest tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars into a product to see if anyone likes it. And I feel pretty confident making that investment because I'm solving a problem that I had and that I have people who have also raised their hand and confirm they also have. And so that enabled me to kind of, I guess, be more confident making that big investment. Is sustaining that capex the most challenging part of starting a SaaS business? Or are there other challenges that maybe I'm not thinking of? The capex is difficult to sustain when you don't have enough customers.

4:36But if you have a ton of customers, you can sustain quite high spends on development. So I think for most startups, it's a combination of high capex and then low acquisition. If you look at the average SaaS monthly plan, it's like 100 bucks. You need a lot of monthly plans to make up for that 200K invested. Yes. And in the early days of WorkEllo, did you encounter any failures or mistakes that you had to recover from? Yeah, for sure. It's all iterative. I've been in early stage companies for the last 15 years. So I've developed quite a thick skin for what people might call failure. It's just another day in the office for me.

5:14So you show up, you get punched in the face, and then you show up the next day, and then you do that for 15 years. And eventually it clicks. Quick reminder for our listeners, you can find more advice on how to start and grow an online business on the Upflip blog. Just follow the link in the description below. And if you enjoy listening to our podcast, we'd love it if you can head to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts to rate and review our channel. Reviews help us grow our audience so we can keep making great episodes like this one. Nick, can you kind of briefly give us an overview of the WorkEllo platform?

5:44Like who's the target user? What are the main features and tools that it offers? Yeah. So WorkEllo helps companies hire better, more affordable writers. Hiring a writer for content or copy is one thing that most organizations will do. And they'll do it earlier in their company lifecycle. And they'll do it without any processes. And it's actually very difficult to find a good writer because 95 % of the people applying for your job are going to be unqualified. You know, writing is the lowest barrier work from home job. So everyone with a crummy job is applying to work at your company as a writer.

6:17And it means you're just flooded by applicants who can barely speak English, let alone write as a profession. And so the trick is, how do you go from hundreds of candidates down to a handful that are actually good? You can't trust the portfolios because these days, portfolio content is oftentimes fake. You know, candidates will submit portfolios that aren't their content, or it's been heavily edited by an editor. And then a lot of people are hiring via Facebook groups or Reddit or LinkedIn and candidates are just coming from everywhere. So Virgo essentially allows you to ingest 400 candidates, send them all pre-hire assessment tests, and then pop out the other side with a handful who are the best and who you can't afford with just a couple minutes of work.

6:57Wow. I mean, that seems like a massive time saver, an important step for anyone trying to hire content writers for their sites. How important is having good content writers for other businesses? I guess, can you assess like how necessary is it to be utilizing something like WorkEllo to make sure that you have the best in place? If you think about marketing, marketing is 90 % content. It's just different channels. Even AdWords is content. It's that four words in the box, and then they click onto a landing page, which is filled with content. So every aspect of marketing is content. Everyone needs content marketing.

7:33Everyone's investing in some sort of content, whether it's email marketing, it's their website, it's SEO, it's blogs, it's guest posts. Marketing's content. How often are you rolling out new features for the site? Not as fast as we would like. We try and split our time between major feature releases and then smaller things that we can push out the door. So we try and push the live every two weeks, but sometimes the changes are really incremental and you might not notice that if you didn't file the bug support with us. When you're considering making some of those changes, maybe rolling out some of the bigger feature additions, how do you decide what to add and what is the verification and testing process?

8:13So right now we've accelerated our roadmap. We have this really high profile customer who's piloted the product. They like it, but we don't have some features that we weren't planning on building till later in the year. And now we're building them. And we're okay doing it because it was already on our roadmap. And we know that we kind of need this feature set to reach parity with some of the more mature players in the space. But generally chasing features because a high profile client who hasn't given you money yet or customer isn't the right way to do it. I'm not sure if I'm a particular expert on product prioritization.

8:41Can you talk to me about pricing structure? How did you determine your own pricing structure? And what advice do you have for someone who's starting their own SaaS company on deciding what to charge for the service? Yeah, so this is my second SaaS. The first one, it's called Cluster AI. And it's a really great product, but it's a terrible business in large part due to the pricing model. People love the product, but they only need to use it once or twice a year. And so people sign up, they pay me$100, maybe$200, and then they churn. One of the things that I didn't realize as a first-time entrepreneur is a lot of entrepreneurs will...

9:15They'll basically just build their product based off of what has the most product founder fit, what naturally lends to their existing skills and network. But what I've learned is that the product category you choose will have a huge impact on what your award is. And what I've come to realize is that if I am as successful as I was on my first product, this next product will generate 10 times as much economic benefit to me and the other stakeholders simply because it has a better pricing model and a better billing model. Now, if I understood you correctly earlier, you don't have a programming or developer background.

9:53One, how do you build a SaaS company without that background? And what are some of the key skills that someone needs to have to succeed in the SaaS space? You know, I've been working in software for 15 years, and I have done product management in some sort of capacity in prior organizations. And so I was able to, you know, not start from zero. What are those key skills that someone needs to have to succeed in the SaaS space? Yeah, I think for me, when I was looking at what product to build, going back to product founder fit, because I'm not an engineer, I didn't want to build a very technically innovative product.

10:29I didn't want to have to do a bunch of R &D and invent things. A lot of apps on the internet are what developers called CRUD apps. Create, read, update, delete. And they're basically just workflow products. And so the product that I chose had to be simpler as a non-technical founder, just because it's all the money is coming out of pocket. I I can't burn my sweat equity there. And I think choosing a product that you're actually able to ship and that aligns with your prior background is an important consideration. But in terms of product development, you just have to be detail-oriented. The more detail you can go in your diagrams and your user stories and your mock-ups are all going to reduce your costs on the development side.

11:08What's the number one reason that SaaS companies fail? The default, the status quo of a new app is zero users. Most apps that launch will get zero users. And so because of this, I think in the past, development had been the most important skill set. But I think today with the cost of development decreasing, you know, there's all these no code tools that marketing becomes the differentiator. Then how do you scale revenue as a SaaS company? I mean, even just to keep up with CapEx spend, how do you scale that revenue? And then I guess eventually, how do you achieve profitability? You know, I think it really depends on what market that you fit in.

11:43If it's an enterprise product, you have to have enterprise relationships. And maybe, you know, I worked at an employee number eight at a startup that grew to 200 people bootstrapped in, you know, we got all of our initial business from Microsoft pimping us out to Microsoft customers, because Microsoft didn't have a product that filled this gap that their customers needed to fill. That doesn't exist with Workello. And so, you know, we're leveraging the community of people who see me as an authority and building content teams today to kind of get our initial users. but we're betting long-term on SEO and YouTube.

12:12On the SEO side, I led an SEO project that went from zero to 1.5 million organics a month. And so I'm pretty confident that I can replicate that success again for myself. I think it'll become our number one acquisition channel. YouTube is hopefully number two in the next 18 months. How are you managing the community now that the product is there and still kind of being developed, but how do you manage the community today? And how does that differ from pre-product? Pre-products, the way it differs is I promote the product a little bit more, but it doesn't change the way that I manage it. I have the agency that's bootstrapping a product, and I have actually another product and I have a course.

12:49And so I just go out and I build the Nick J brand. And depending on how much money you have, you segment yourself into my consulting services, my SaaS products, or my course. I think that the best way to grow a community is to give value 99 % of the time. You know, there's very little sales messaging. I never use the at everyone. There's no hard sales. It's all, do you want to accomplish this big SEO goal? Well, here's a 5 ,000 word guide. And my tool is 500 words of that. Is it possible to launch a SaaS company without building a community first? Or do you need to really build that community before you try and bring a product to market?

13:26You know, I think it is possible to build a SaaS company without communities. I think most SaaS companies don't have communities, but then they need to figure out another acquisition channel. Is that cold outbound? Are they going to wait around for a year for their SEO to kick in? Are they going to do Facebook ads? If a community is an acquisition channel, and if you don't have it, you just have to figure out another one. But a community is a great acquisition channel. I highly recommend it to everyone. It's a lot of work. Do you have advice for those other acquisition channels and what might be the best strategy to start with?

13:53Or does it differ based on what the actual SaaS product is? Yeah, I think it differs. And it also depends on what market you're playing in, what your price point is. I'm an SEO. So I plan on leaning heavily on SEO. Actually, six years ago, I was a sales guy. And I quit my high status tech job to sell SEO at minimum wage because I knew to sell it, I'd have to learn it. And then once I learned it, within the next five years, I could start a SaaS company using SEO. So I talked to so many founders who aren't SEOs, and they say most of their leads come from SEO. So I think SEO is really big for most startups.

14:26This is going to bring us to a section of our show we call our Fan Blitz questions. These come from our YouTube community. You can go to youtube.com slash upflip, join the community and post questions to future podcast guests. Nick, we're going to try and get through about five questions and right around a minute here. Are you ready? I'm ready. All right. You've answered some of these already, so it should be pretty quick and easy for you. Number one, where do you find your clients? I flex on social and I booked 300 amount meetings last year from flexing on social and then funneling people to my indoctrination content.

14:55And from there, YouTube, Facebook, and email list. Is all the revenue from the company being poured back into development? A lot of it is. I just got off a call with another agency owner on how much to invest back in. And I said, I'm not a good model because I'm probably investing too much of the excess back into the business. Tell me one secret of business that will make me a billionaire. You know, Naval Ravikant said careers are measured in decades, not months or year. So every opportunity in front of you is, if you're successful, you get the opportunity to work at the next level. So crush whatever's in front of you and look five years ahead.

15:29If you could instantly change one thing about your business, what would it be? Man, I think I might trade all of my SEO skills for PPC skills because I'm jealous of those guys' ability to create revenue on demand. Last one here in the FanBlitz questions, if you could sell your product to one celebrity, who would it be? Alex Ramazi, for sure. You know, him and Layla talk a lot about hiring and we have a hiring product and I'd love to work with them someday. We're working with the email service provider of GymLunch. So we're one step away. We just need to cut out the middleman. That is our FanBlitz questions.

16:01Again, those come from our YouTube community. You can go to youtube.com slash upflip. Join the community and post questions to future podcast guests. Nick, just a few more questions from me here. You bring experts to your Facebook group for Q &As. I'm curious, how do you reach out to those experts and get them to share their knowledge? What's the arrangement you make with them? So basically, it's this philosophy I learned five years ago. I was in Seattle and me and my business partner at the time were like, we want to level up our network. Well, what we did was we built the biggest marketing meetup and we built the biggest entrepreneurs meetup in Seattle on meetup.com.

16:34And once we developed this platform, we could now reach out to people who would typically ignore us in any other circumstance. And we could say, hey, we have this big platform. we want to give it to you so you can, you know, get shine. And that enabled us to talk to people and get to know people that would have never, ever responded to us. And I carried that same strategy forward today. We just had an AMA with the VP of marketing at SEMrush. And we'll have a bunch of other people who I really look up to and admire and probably wouldn't respond to me and jump on a call with me because I have this platform to give them.

17:02Now, what does exceptional customer service look like for a SaaS business? And how are you providing that at WorkEllo? You know, ultimately, customers are hiring writers to accomplish a goal. And that goal is generally marketing based. And so the hiring writers part is just a piece of the thing that they're trying to do. And so what we do is we help them because we have experience building an agency, building SaaS products, scaling content velocity, crushing SEO, we can actually advise them on all the pieces that don't encompass our software product, just as well as the pieces that do. So for my next couple questions here, I want to kind of lean into your knowledge as an SEO expert and just give us an overview of how writing content helps an online business grow their audience and revenue.

17:45So I took five projects from zero to 100 ,000 organics a month without building backlinks or technical BS. The biggest one went from zero to 1.5 million organics a month without building backlinks or technical BS. All we did was for whatever keywords that we wanted to rank for, we would publish the highest quality, most valuable page of content Google could show for those keywords. And we're basically in a really positive symbiotic relationship with Google where Google wants webmasters to treat their users well. And we treat Google's users better than anyone else will treat them for the keywords they're searching.

18:20And Google rewarded us for that. And so the key to SEO is not backlinks. It's not technical BS. It's publishing the highest quality content Google can show for the keywords you want to rank for at scale. Now, is this something that is only important for high growth companies or is it important for small local businesses as well? I would say it's less important. Local businesses get a lot of their traffic from local city pages. There's just less of those to create. And then the blog posts that they do create will get in front of a national audience that can't convert into customers. And one thing that Google has shifted in recent years is favoring content written by subject matter experts.

18:55How difficult is it to overcome that if you don't maybe have access to a subject matter expert? So right now, we've felt zero impact from not having access to a subject matter expert. Most of our blogs are not published under what you would consider EAT, but we are looking to fix that. One of the things that you can do that we're planning to roll out is you can pay people to be a reviewer. And so when he published the article, it was written by X, but it was reviewed by Y. And the Y person is the expert. They have the credentials that Google might wouldn't see if they were able to verify credentials.

19:29Shifting back to WorkEllo here, how many employees do you currently have and how are those distributed across roles? So peak of 45, we currently have about 20 to 25, primarily editors and writers, very few SEOs. We've built an organization where our kind of mantra is remove SEOs from the process. SEOs should be focused on operations and systems in the more technical bits, but mostly empowering the editors and writers to create naturally ranking content, how to place keywords, how to optimize their own thing. So we're very content heavy. Where are you going to find high quality content writers and what platforms or recruitment strategies have consistently worked well for you?

20:09So if you're hiring generalists, you want to go on to ProBlogger and you want to go on to LinkedIn. Pro Blogger is about 80 bucks. You'll get 200 candidates. LinkedIn is free. Job ads, you'll get about 100. If you want niche writers, there is no job board for software development writers. There's no job board for barbecue enthusiast writers. There's no job board for pet writers. And so if you want people with experience in a topic that you're writing about, you need to go into interest-based communities. Let's say you want to write legal content, don't hire a lawyer, go hire a paralegal. And if you search Facebook for paralegal, there's 50 Facebook groups with combined hundreds of thousands of members of paralegals, and you can scoop them up for great rates.

20:49Now, it's my understanding that your co-founder started as one of your writers. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. So four years ago, she was one of my first writers. She was my first editor. And then she just kept on getting promoted from editor to content manager to project manager to director of ops. And she's the one who actually built WorkLOV.01 and hired all the people at our agency. And she's Serbian. It's an unlikely match, but it worked out really well. Well, we're coming to some of the signs early on that she was someone you wanted to kind of promote and end up working her way up through the company.

21:20Yeah, basically everything that I gave her, she could handle. She would learn, she would excel at, and then I could give her more and more stuff. And the stuff that I could give her just never stopped. She never got blocked on anything. What advice would you give for identifying and developing talent within a company? So it wasn't an accident. I knew that I didn't want to edit and my editor was going to be my first hire. So I hired 10 writers. And because I knew it would give me the surface area to find out who is the best, who is consistently on time, who is the most pleasant to work with, who I could give feedback to, and they would never make that mistake again.

21:52If you only work with one or two writers, and you need to hire an editor, well, maybe you just promote someone who doesn't really deserve the role or isn't going to do a good job. But if you're working with 10 writers and you need an editor, you're going to know exactly who to hire and it's going to be your best writer. When do you know it's time to start building a team for the company? So I knew that I couldn't accomplish my own professional goals or financial goals as a solopreneur. And so I knew on day one, I needed to build a team and I hired probably too early. But I just knew that if I were to quit my high status tech job and then do this solo thing and I made it just as much money, that was a failure for me.

22:30So I kind of knew if I couldn't build a team to hit scale, then I wasn't going to scratch my own itch. And so I just I did it pretty early, maybe month three or month six or something. And then from there, how do you determine who the first team members are that you need to hire? Yeah. So for me, I looked at what my superpowers are, and that's sales and marketing. and I looked at the thing I'm worst at and that's attention to detail. And then I looked at all the jobs in my org that required attention to detail and I identified editing is the number one thing that I liked the least, that I was the worst at and I felt like was a distraction from my superpowers.