This is a blog series where I walk through how I built my online business, Work Hero, starting from December 2017 to the present.
The Series:
- Part 1: The Early Days
- Part 2: Gaining Traction
- Part 3: The Dip And A Shift
- Part 4: The Path To Profitability, 2020
- Part 5: What’s Working<—YOU ARE HERE
July 2020
The month started with a little slip.
We did a 2-week free trial with someone, and apparently, it did not go well- really at all.
Here were some of the issues:
-Tasks were taking too long and he wasn’t happy- but didn’t say anything
-He was not getting notified on task completions- this is not good and I can definitely see how this would be annoying
-We don’t have a button to mark the task as completed, and he was annoyed by this. I can also understand this. The system we are using (SPP.co) doesn’t offer this, but we might have a solution)
-We made a mistake with installing a couple of plugins without notifying him, and he wasn’t happy about this. For some reason, none of our other customers seemed to care, but he’s right- we should always ask about installing our plugins even if we’re sure they will help and not cause problems.
So, the month started out with a few lessons learned, and we immediately implemented the changes (besides the button) so future customers wouldn’t have to deal with the annoyances.
Sucks that he probably would have signed up if we had things running a little smoother when he joined, but I was thankful that he gave a clear critique of the issues so we could fix things.
Other important happenings so far in July:
Hiring:
Our team is coming together. We have 3 solid developers and a backup, in my partner, and keeping them busy and engaged. One of them is still working hourly, hopefully will move her to part time salary when we add a few more customers
Marketing Updates:
1. One of the things I do (but not consistently) is to email hiring managers who are looking for part time WordPress developers to see if they would be interested in using us instead. I haven’t had a lot of luck with this but I gave it another try with a hiring site called Indeed.com. I shot this company a cold email and what do you know, he responded and we’re chatting on Wednesday.
2. We are gearing up to run some Google Ads. In preparation for this, we bought this course on Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/the-ultimate-google-adwords-training-course to learn the ins and outs. It’s been many years since I’ve run successful ads with Google, and there’s a lot to learn.
Related, I’m also experimenting with a Facebook ad.
3. Thanks to Dustin Overbeck of Town Web, who gave a huge amount of feedback about my business on the Productize Community, I also drew up a detailed customer avatar (or persona, which I think sounds better). This was one of the tips he gave that I knew I needed to do ASAP. I had done one before, but it was 2 years ago and a different business!
I followed the Digital Marketer Customer Avatar Worksheet, which was super helpful, to get all the info down- Name, age, interests, gurus, books, etc. I also used one of our best customers (we’re friends on Facebook so it was easy to find out details) as somewhat of a model here.
Now I feel much more confident about moving forward with ads and eventually, back to content marketing.
Lesson learned:
I’ve learned this lessoned before, but I guess I had to learn it again! We had a 2-week trial customer at the end of her trial. She’s a health coach and a great fit for our Standard Plan. I had sent her a 10% off code earlier- but it had already expired. So she tried to use it, and of course, it didn’t work. She let us know and we sent her a new code.
4 days have gone by now and she still hasn’t signed up. The lesson is simple- humans need time constraints- just saying it expires in 24 or 48 hours would have solved this problem of now having to chase her down.
Monthly Expenses:
Salaries: $800/month (projected)
Email: Gsuite by Google $25
Hosting: $30 (Kinsta)
Canva Software: $14
Zapier (Automations): $20
Notion: $9
Active Campaign $9
SPP: $149
ManageWP: $60
Total Monthly Expenses (June 2020): $1107
Total Revenue: $1425
Profitability: $318 (Projected – 3 days left in July)
Difference +/- from June: +$215
Question of the Week
What’s the biggest or best lesson you have learned in your business?
