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I'm a PM at telos now, but before this I was the founding engineer at a startup that sold for $15M in 18 months. Sharing bc I think this is relevant for founders here. The founders had been running this playbook for years. One had 8 successful exits, the other had 3. When they hired me, they told me exactly how it would go. I was skeptical, but it worked exactly as they said. Here's the playbook: Step 1: Pick a legacy industry (this is the most important step) Find an industry as far from Silicon Valley as possible. The key criteria: customers and competitors should not be able to build anything themselves. Ideally, you or your co founder has domain expertise. If you don't, find a co founder who does We sold to benefits brokers, the people who handle 401(k)s and HSAs. Other good verticals: oil and gas, medical SaaS, logistics, construction tech. What to avoid: anything where your customers are technical. Dev tools would be a terrible choice. If your buyer can look at your product and think "I could build this," you're in the wrong market. Step 2: Build a product and raise money, but not for the reasons you think The uncomfortable truth: the product doesn't have to be great. You shouldn't waste too much time making it perfect. The product is the least important part of this playbook. What matters is legitimacy & credibility. Raising money signals to people in these industries that you're a real company, not two people in a garage. Most people in legacy industries don't know Sequoia from some random angel syndicate, so don't waste time chasing name-brand VCs. Just raise around $1M and move on. Hiring a few people also helps. It makes you look like a "real" company. The whole point here is building trust and brand recognition within the industry. Step 3: Sign design partnerships with potential acquirers I know most people on the internet advise against design partnerships, but for this playbook they're essential, with one critical caveat: your design partners need to be companies that could eventually acquire you. We partnered with 4 big names in the employee benefits space. If you can, get them to invest in your company. Give their CEOs board seats. You're not optimizing for product feedback here. You're optimizing for relationships and positioning. Step 4: Build deep rapport over 12+ months This is the step that takes the longest, but it's what makes everything else work. Our CEO was talking to all 4 design partner CEOs on a weekly basis. You need to understand what initiatives they have going on, what they care about, what keeps them up at night. You need to become a trusted advisor, someone they see as a technology expert who actually understands their space. If these companies have subsidiaries, start meeting with them too. Cast a wide net within the org. While this is happening, you can talk to other customers and generate some revenue, but honestly, revenue is the least important metric in this playbook. Step 5: Identify the opportunity If you've done steps 1 through 4 correctly, this part is actually easy. In our case, one of our design partners had a subsidiary that grew rapidly. They suddenly needed an AI solution to handle some stuff around the benefits they were selling. What they needed was adjacent to our product, but not exactly what we built. This is the sweet spot. They had a problem. We had the team, the trust, and enough product to be credible. Instead of offering to build them a feature, we offered to sell them the whole company. If you can create this dynamic with multiple design partners at once, even better. Deal heat is real. Step 6: Close Call it an acqui-hire, call it a quick sale, whatever. Close the deal. You'll probably need to stay on afterward to build the solution you discussed, but that's fine. You just sold your company for 8 figures. TL;DR Go into a narrow legacy industry where buyers can't build Build credibility as a tech expert and domain expert Sign design partners who could be acquirers Build deep rapport over 12+ months Identify an adjacent opportunity Sell the company, not a feature I know this seems counterintuitive. This playbook basically does everything most people online advise against. Don't obsess over product. Don't focus on revenue. Do design partnerships. Optimize for relationships over growth. If you're trying to build a billion dollar company, this is NOT the playbook for you. Many people here are swinging for that, and that's great. But if you want a low 8-figure exit in under 2 years, this works. I've seen it with my own eyes. Happy to answer questions. submitted by /u/rdizzy1234 [link] [comments]

Hey Reddit, so I ran this affiliate thing for legal leads and pulled in $293,890 over six months. Took some testing, but it worked out. Here’s how it went down.I used paid Facebook ads—Facebook, Instagram, all their placements about $132k total. That got me 2,532 leads at $150 each and 255 calls worth $31,340. Revenue hit $293k, though some leads went unpaid if they’d been submitted by another publisher in the last 30-60 days. Sold everything to an aggregator, not direct to lawyers. The big shift was going Spanish instead of English. English market’s crowded—everyone’s doing it. Spanish had less competition, cheaper ads, better conversion rates. Cost per lead dropped from $70 to around $50, and the leads were solid, closing more deals. Made a real difference. What worked? Manual bidding and AI UGC ads Manual bidding kept my costs steady—no surprises. AI for user-generated content cut ad production costs from $150 a pop to $15, and production went from days to maybe an hour with edits. Lead quality and CPL stayed the same as human-made ads. I’ve been playing with AI for like 10 years, so it was an easy call. Setup was simple: targeted Spanish speakers on Facebook, ran Spanish UGC ads, built a Spanish landing page. Conversion rates went up, costs went down. If I had one tip, it’d be this: look at less competitive markets. Switching languages can flip your costs if you’re smart about it. Test manual bids too—saves you cash. That’s it. Questions, let me know. (edited for clarity on ad spend) submitted by /u/vvineyard [link] [comments]

Hello Everyone, After getting an amazing response on two case studies posted earlier, I decided to share another one of my projects that grew from $267/m to $21,853/m in 19 months. In this post, will try my best to cover each and everything so that you can replicate the same process on your sites as well. Quick Overview of Site's Valuation When we started: ~ $13,350 Current: ~ $1,092,650 I will explain later in this case study why this multiple is higher (50x) than the industry standard of 30x (which applies mostly Amazon affiliate sites and other kinds of online businesses ). Previous Case Studies Amazon Affiliate Website from $0 to $7,786/month in 11 months! Amazon Affiliate Site from $118/m to $3,103/m in 8 MONTHS (SOLD it for $62,000+) In this post, I will take a highly data-driven approach so you know EXACTLY: what, why, how, when of all the steps taken. For example... How the research and planning was done? What was the number of articles and why? Content writing guidelines Uploading, formatting, onsite SEO instructions Outreach, backlinks and PR Conversion rate optimizations (A/B testing) However, if you still have ANY questions, feel free to ask. I would answer EACH one of you. This is an AMA. :) So, let's dive right in... Background of the Website Broad Niche: Technology (software mostly) About: Work from Home (WFH) [We got lucky because of COVID, the search traffic is increasing with time] Type of content: WFH guides, product reviews, success stories of entrepreneurs (viral) etc. Physical products promoted: work stations, chairs, accessories related to WFH etc. Digital products promoted: Virtual team/project management tools, SaaS subs etc. (most money from here) Note: Can't share more information about the site because of the NDA. I am very thankful to the client for giving permission to share this case study. Quick Overview of Stats (the month we made $21,853) DR: 56 Traffic: 499,383/m (Jan. 2021) RPM: $43.76 (earning per thousand visits) - this is combined for affiliate and display ads Countries targeted: United States (primarily), EU, Canada Primary source of traffic: Search Engines but we are working to create proper emailing lists too Summary of what we did to get here... Metric Before After Difference/Increase DR 44 56 12 Articles/Posts 31 1261 +1230 Backlinks (RDs) 323 (content-dofollow) 496 (content-dofollow) +173 Traffic 13,827 499,383 +485,556 (3512% ) RPM (earnings/1000) ~ $19.31 ~ $43.76 +$24.45 (127% ) Revenue/m $267/m $21,853/m +$21,586 (8085% ) A/B Testing No Yes Applied Month July 2019 Jan. 2021 19 months Note that the RPM is combined for affiliate and display revenue. Research and Planning Combined search volume of all keywords: ~ 750,000 Average search volume per keyword: ~ 610 Total keywords: ~ 1230 Total traffic achieved (in 19 months): 485,556 (this represents the increase and ignores the already existing traffic) Success rate of traffic achieved (in 19 months): 64.74%. This basically means that based on our keyword research plan, the combined search volume of all keywords was 750,000 and we hit a success rate of 64.74% in 19 months which is a traffic increase of 485,556 Note: The success rate of traffic will increase a lot and is expected to cross even 100% because the search volume of WFH related keywords has risen significantly due to COVID . Moreover, our rankings are improving due to an increase in DR, aging of content and social shares) Approach: Choose broad keywords based on the brand of the site Use Ahrefs to scrape all the " having similar terms " and " questions " list of words Filter the lists to remove cannibalization, irrelevant keywords, duplicate content and anything that doesn't make sense Group similar words together (Tip: If you have doubt about two similar keywords whether they should be targeted in one article or different articles, you should see if there are 3 or more results on the 1st page of Google that are ranking for both these words. If the answer is yes, then you can also rank for both these words in the same article. However, if you can't find 3 or more same results for two different queries then you should also make unique pages for each one of these keywords) Organize the keywords into proper silos and categories Note: We didn't really pay a lot of attention to the KW difficulty. Our approach was and still is to completely dominate each and every registered query related to a certain topic. We went big on the content part, we knew it would work and we were right. This approach was different from my previous case studies where we just wanted to make money and didn't really care about being the biggest guys out there. However, most of our keywords still have a KD of less than 4 (we produced this content at the earliest phase of content production). Content Articles before: 31 Articles added: 1230 Articles after: 1261 Average words per article: 1349 Total words produced: 1,701,089 Approach: H1, URL, and SEO Title must include: main keyword and ot

Hey everyone, I posted this in another subreddit and I got some heartwarming messages that it inspired them, so I'm going to share this with you, hopefully it can inspire some of you as well. (I don't have anything to sell, don't worry.) I’ve been doing Amazon KDP (Amazon's self publishing platform) since August of 2024, a little over a year now. It is possible to do it on the side, I didn't because I started with nothing. Literally. No money, living out of my car, and I needed to do something about my situation. I want to share my full experience scaling this from $0 to $150K revenue. The lessons I learned, and why I think KDP is nowhere near saturated as many claim. My hope is that this post will give you value, motivation, and perspective, especially if you’re just starting out or feel stuck. A Little Background I’ve always been into business, ever since i was a kid flipping Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh cards and other collectibles, plus video game currencies, items, accounts. Over the years I’ve tried everything: forex, stock trading, affiliate marketing, SEO blogs, dropshipping, customer acquisition/lead generation agency, CPA marketing, SMMA, POD, and of course KDP. Just to keep in mind, this is not my first time doing KDP. My first attempt was in 2019, but my account got banned in early 2020 for a few (frustrating) reasons: I used a term, that a few months later got filled for trademark and Amazon flagged me, even tho the trademark was just pending and was rejected later. Got hit with a “similar cover” strike ( I should have fought it, probably would have won. Not sure why I didn’t.) Published a book called “Snarky Nurse Coloring Book” with the idea that the book was snarky (snarky quotes), not the nurse. Tt got reported by a brand called Snarky Nurse or something similar. After the third strike, Amazon didn’t let me appeal or explain myself, they kept sending the same generic response that the decision is final and nothing could be done. After all this I didn’t do anything, I got comfortable, had plenty in savings, some other life events happened during covid that I lost any motivation to do anything, until life forced me to start again. Disclaimer: I’m not smart or special. Many people make much more with KDP than I do. But I’ve failed a lot, learned from my mistakes, and treated this like a real business. What I’ll share is what worked for me. Hopefully you’ll learn something useful from it and get some clarity on how you should approach this business if you decide to give it a shot. Quick Stats: Started: August 2024. Books Published 148. (1 book every 3 days or so) Total Revenue: ~$150,000 Ad Spend: ~$16,000 Employee Costs: ~$24,000 Tools & Subscriptions: ~$2,500 TikTok Marketing Videos: ~2,000 Profit (before tax): ~100,000 Last month, I made ~$32,000 revenue, with ~$10,000 in expenses. Lessons, Tests & Observations: Quality vs. Quantity. I’ve seen many YouTubers talk about focusing only on quality and to be honest I don’t fully agree. I started with quantity, not because I believed in mass publishing, but because I wanted data. I uploaded many somewhat decent quality books at first (most didn’t even hit 10 sales) and they helped me to identify which niches and formats had potential. Then I moved to more medium quality books, they took me 2-5 days each, in niches that showed potential and these confirmed the winners. I then outsourced even better versions and that’s where most of my revenue came from (excluding the unicorn). So it’s not quality or quantity, you need both to optimize your business. Amazon ads. I’m a numbers guy, I love data, tracking, testing everything. With amazon ads you obviously get more sales, but you also get an 20-30% bump in the organic sales. Sales boost your BSR, help you rank higher, which gets you more sales, more reviews, and all of this combined, a stronger foundation in the algorithm, making it more difficult for competitors to outrank you. So yes, ads are worth it, even beyond direct ROI. There’s another reason why I find ads even more important than getting sales. To be honest I didn’t even start them with the idea to make money from them directly. As I said, I love data, and amazon unfortunately shows you almost no valuable data at all. Running ads helps you a little bit as you can see the impressions you get, how many clicks you get and how many conversions, enough signal to see what’s working and what isn’t. It’s not ideal, but this is what we have to deal with when it comes to amazon. Keywords. Always use relevant keywords, leave fields if you don’t have anything relevant to add. I tested adding trending but not relevant keywords on a couple of books that had ~20 sales a month each. Sales dropped to 4 and 6 the first month and 1 and 0 on the second month. Removing those irrelevant keywords didn’t restore the sales. Only running ads brought them back. Unrelated words hurt your relevance score, which can tank your book entirely External ads. I had some experimentation wit

I used to think a flatlined business meant I needed more features. When my directory submission SaaS sat at four hundred MRR for three straight months, I opened VS Code by default. New reports. New filters. New onboarding tweaks. Nothing moved the needle. Traffic was low. Conversions were average. I was polishing a product nobody was really seeing. The uncomfortable shift started when I forced myself to stop building for a month and just study how other small founders actually grew. I went through a bunch of case studies on FounderToolkit and the common thread was brutal. The winners were not the best products. They were the ones that had one or two channels completely dialed in and an offer that made saying yes feel cheap compared to the pain. So I treated my business like a growth lab instead of a feature factory. First step was picking a main channel. I chose Reddit because my customers already hang out there. Instead of link dropping, I behaved like a regular user. Answered questions, shared numbers, told exactly what worked and what failed in my own launches. Only after building some trust I started mentioning the product in context. The crazy part was people asked for the link themselves. At the same time I realized my “we are on a few sites” directory strategy was a joke. I went all in and listed on every relevant directory and niche showcase I could find, using curated lists instead of guessing. Most of them send tiny trickles individually but stacked together they turned into a predictable stream of visitors. A couple of them hit and keep sending signups months later without me doing anything. The last sacred cow was pricing. I stopped pricing based on what felt safe and started thinking like my buyers. Indie founders will try a tool if it is obviously worth more than it costs and the decision feels low risk. Tiny tweaks there had more impact than any feature I shipped last year. The controversial part is this. For a stalled business, opening your editor is often the worst growth move you can make. You probably do not need a better product yet. You need more people seeing it and a clearer reason to buy right now. submitted by /u/Key_Theme5886 [link] [comments]

I started a full-funnel marketing agency. When I met my roofing client, it was two guys who wanted to quit their job and start their own company. They had no name, no website, nothing. 18 months later they hit $2.2M, with $600k profit. Meanwhile, I made less than a part-time fast-food worker. Here’s what worked, and why I’m rethinking agency. I basically built a turnkey marketing department. I handle the entire lead flow + all things digital, they handle the sales and the roofs. I'm responsible for: Branding, Website, Landing Pages, tracking stack (calls, forms, automations) Google Ads + Meta Ads strategy, ad creatives and management CRM setup, management, automations, monitoring and training staff to use it. Full funnel analytics (Pixel, GA4, GTM, GSC) + automated setup of offline events data to Meta/Google Google Business Profile + Reputation Management + fundamental SEO setup/Link building Social media management with multiple weekly posts across FB/IG/TikTok Logo, Branding, Leaflets. I handled the first few months of the inbound lead calls, before I convinced them to hire a call center. Outcome (18 months): Revenue: $0 → $2.2 million 2024 (Apr–Dec): 189 estimates - $5,124,998; 44 jobs sold = $828k rev / $211k profit 2025 (Jan–Sep): 404 estimates - $14,857,432; 91 jobs sold = $1.38M rev / $317k profit Profit margin: 30% Avg job: $14–15k Close rate: ~22% Marketing cost: 2024 ad spend $30,684 + my fee $8,500 = $39,185 total 2025 ad spend $61,871 + my fee $36,000 = $97,871 total ROI: 2024: every $1 in marketing → $21.1 in revenue; $6.3 in profit 2025: every $1 in marketing → $14.1 in revenue; $4.2 in profit Marketing fees in 2025 = ad spend is 4.5% of rev + my fee came out to 2.6% of rev = 7.1% of total revenue . CAC/LTV = 3.91:1 Unconverted estimate value: $13.48M in 2025 (90.7% of quoted) vs $4.3M in 2024 (83.8%). What I did, step-by-step: #1) High intent first - Google Ads. They had very limited budget to spend at first, so I focused on the people who are already searching for someone to come help them fix their roof - guaranteed high intent, bottom-of-funnel traffic = Google Search Ads. The average price per click here is ~$60 , very pricy and hard to compete. I built out a website and dozens of landing pages to target the exact searches people were making and added dynamic text data based on searches and location like "[search term] service in [location]". I optimized the pages continuously by A/B testing. I tracked all interactions on landing pages, watched back every visitors session and consulted the heatmaps of common scroll/click areas. Basically, i did all i could to maximize the google ads click to conversion %. Important to note, that I originally went into agency space as a web dev/web designer and have solid background in making high conversion websites. In the end, i got the landing page conversion rate to ~21% #2) Fix response gap Once a lead comes in, its incredibly important that we are responsive. All phone calls need to be answered, all form fills need to be called back in less than 5 minutes. Problem = roofers/home service guys are notoriously bad at pickup up phones. They’re on roofs, driving, or quoting. But if a call isn’t answered, they don't convert and then my client sees that as a “bad lead”, which in turn looks bad on me. So at first, I took on the role of picking up the phone calls. After five months I convinced them to sign up for a call center service. Better than nothing, but still very weak. There is no incentive for call center reps, I'm convinced that if my client just hired an in-house CSR / sales admin, our overall close rates would skyrocket and the wages would pay themselves off. #3) Feed the algorithm Now that we were getting lots of "conversion" data from landing page forms or calls - it was my priority to keep feeding the Google ads machine learning algo with more data about how these conversions are actually doing. I coached client on CRM pipelines and keeping estimates/invoice data attached to leads. I then created automations to feed all the data about qualified/disqualified leads, $ value of estimates sold/unsold, etc. This is makes the Google ads/Meta ads targeting a lot smarter AND gave us fully transparent analytics, reporting exactly what's working and where we have leaks that need patching. #4) Add Meta for scale By this point we were first for our service areas in Google Ads auction insights and because its a very specialized niche of roofing, there is simply not enough search volume and our budget outgrew what Google was willing to spend. Google local service ads were also useless, as it classifies you as a "roofing contractor", but 95% of those leads are not applicable for this client. We were capped on lead volume of the high intent, bottom of the funnel traffic that Google ads brings and to increase lead flow I went on to expand to a colder audience with Meta Ads. to increase lead flow, I went to Meta Ads. Here, my strategy is much simpler - reverse

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