What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How do they make decisions both at their companies and in their
personal lives? And what makes their businesses tick? Today, I'm talking to Nat Eliason,
the founder of Growth Machine. Nat, what's up, man?
Not too much. I'm having a wonderful Monday over here and excited to chat with you.
Excited to chat with you as well. Did you know that you are only the second person I've
had on the podcast who not only runs an agency, but runs an agency that helps other businesses
grow? The first being our mutual friend Julian over at Bellcurve.
Oh, nice. That's right. I saw you interviewed him. Julian's a good friend. We work together
on a couple of projects now. Yeah, he's a good guy. I talked to him back and I think
episode 17 or 18. But let's talk about you. You run a company called Growth Machine, which
is an agency where you help companies get more traffic and more customers. More specifically,
the way you do it is by helping them with something called content marketing, where
you're literally writing articles and blog posts for your clients. And then you get these
articles to rank at the top of Google. The end result is that your clients end up getting
a ton of traffic from all of these people who are searching Google and landing on the
articles that you wrote. Is that a good description of what you guys are doing? What am I leaving
out? No, that's basically what we do. I mean, we
take over a lot of the content production, or refurbishing of existing stuff and get
it in those top few spots on Google and then kind of help them optimize the conversion
metrics around that new traffic they're getting. And who exactly is Growth Machine? Is it just
you by yourself or do you have a team working with you?
It started as just me back in September 2017 when I decided to kind of go the agency route
with it. I've been doing some consulting before. The consulting, honestly, was more of a pain
than it was worth, and nobody was ever able to implement the advice that well. So I kind
of switched to the agency model where we could do everything for them. And started that in
September. It was just me for the first four months. And then around January, we hired
our first full-time employee, Nora, who's amazing. And then we brought on two more full-time
people soon after that. So there's three people full-time with me now. We're hiring another
person. And we've probably got 40 or 50 contractors who work with us as well between article.
Yeah, it's actually kind of a crazy hub and spooky model within the company. We just have
a few core full-time people. And then we've got tons of contractors for mostly article
creation. That's the main one. Because we have to find somebody or two or three people
who are experts in the niche of every client we work with. So we can't just have one writer
do all of the articles. Because we work with people doing ketogenic diets and team productivity
management and meditation. It's just very different areas. And our strategies work pretty
much across all of them, but we have to get new writers. So we have a huge team of writers.
And we've got promoters and some people who help with editing and image creation and all
of that. So it's very siloed out at the first steps in most of the processes.
How much revenue are you guys generating nowadays? And how many customers do you have? Because
50 contractors on top of your full-time staff, on top of yourself, is a lot of people to
support. And I know you guys are entirely self-funded.
Yeah. Well, that was the scary thing with bringing somebody on full-time at the beginning.
Because I never really worked on something with multiple people or where I had to pay
salaries quite like this. And then it started with literally just me transferring five grand
from my personal account to the business account to pay freelancers with. And I learned really
quickly that cash flow in a business like this is tricky because most of your clients
will not pay you on time. It'll take 45 days to pay you. So even if you build the beginning
of work, you have to do two or three payroll cycles before you get the money from the clients
that you're going to use to pay your employees. So it's tricky to get it up and running in
the beginning, keeping it bootstrapped. But we grew really quickly. And this month, we're
going to do about 85K in revenue just nine months after we started.
Wow.
Yeah.
I am in the wrong business.
It's been super cool. And luckily, we've always been profitable. So I was able to bank money
in the beginning to start bringing on other full-time people and make the cash flow stuff
work out for the tricky first few months of them being on the team. But now, I can't imagine
doing it any other way. It was so hard when it was just me trying to wear all the hats.
And everybody who's on the full-time team is way better at the thing that they do than
I am. So it's just a much more efficient, better process. We all get to have fun together.
And yeah, business is growing. So it's been great.
Yeah. There's a lot in there that I want to talk about. I want to talk about how you hired
and structured your team. I want to talk about how you even started working on this idea
in the first place. But first, I want to talk about growth. Obviously, you're an expert
at growth. And it's hard to overstate how important the skill is because every business
needs to grow. If you're not growing, then you're either stagnating, or you're declining,
and neither one of those are comfortable positions to be in as a founder.
How did you build up your skill set and get to the point where you were confident enough
to tell clients, hey, I can help you grow your business. I can get you to the top of
Google?
Yeah, it was really just... Honestly, it kind of started on accident. I started a blog in
college because I got a philosophy degree, which I knew wasn't going to land me any kind
of useful, interesting job. But I was really interested in the entrepreneurship and marketing
stuff. And so I had done a startup thing in college just to try to get into entrepreneurship.
It basically failed wonderfully after a year. And I realized that part of the reason it
was hard for that to succeed was that I didn't know anything about marketing. And being a
college student with not much cash flow, the easiest way to start learning marketing at
the time seems to get into content marketing.
So I started just a blog under my own name, started writing articles about random stuff.
And then that pretty quickly led to me doing an internship with Zapier, which is an amazing
product and company for anyone who doesn't know about it. It lets you automate stuff
between different tools. And they have a phenomenal content marketing team that was very focused
on SEO. So I got to work with them during my senior spring in college and learn a ton
of their SEO skill sets and techniques and add it to my own abilities.
And then I got... As the Zapier internship was ending, I got this opportunity to go work
with Noah Kagan, the guy who started AppSumo and what was then called Sumomi in Austin
because Sumomi was starting to grow and he wanted to hire the first in-house marketer
to work on the marketing for the product so that he could focus on running the business.
And content ended up being a huge part of the strategy there.
So I had to learn a ton of content marketing. He put me in touch with people like Brian
Dean who were just the absolute experts in the field so I could learn from them a bit.
And I kind of got that sandbox to play with for nine months with the Sumo blog and ended
up growing that one from about 5,000 a month when I started to 170,000 visitors a month
by the time I left. And that was a mix of SEO and getting really good guests and growing
the email list and kind of just a whole stack of content marketing.
And at the same time, I was still working on that personal site that I started in college.
And through applying some of my SEO stuff to that, it was getting about 200,000 visitors
a month by that point. So that was growing a lot too. And I was like, okay, cool. My
personal site has actually grown or had actually grown at that point into being a business.
And so when my job at Sumo ended, I traveled for a year and a half basically using my personal
site as a lifestyle business and getting to kind of go all around the world and just write
articles and use that as my main business and income.
And then eventually, people saw what I was doing with my site. They had seen the stuff
I had been doing at Sumo before. And they started asking, hey, can you help us figure
out the content marketing for our business? I mean, one notable one is that while I was
doing the Zapier internship, I was working with another guy, Justin Mares. He's the co-author
of Traction. And he runs a business now called Kettle and Fire.
And we had done a project together called Programming for Marketers, which is kind of
teaching marketers technical skills. And then as that project wound down, he was getting
started with Kettle and Fire. And so he eventually reached out to me and said, hey, can you help
us just figure out our content marketing strategy for Kettle and Fire and then help us hire
someone? So we got to work together for a few months. That was super fun. Got their
kind of strategy rolling. And then they hired a really great content marketer. And she took
it from 20,000 a month to 150,000 a month in visitors within 8 or 9 months.
And getting a couple of those wins doing the consulting made me feel like, OK, well, maybe
I could actually just start a business to do this for companies because it worked out
great with Kettle and Fire. But a couple of the other sites that I worked with as a consultant,
it just didn't go anywhere. They had a really hard time implementing it. They took the advice
and then didn't do anything with it. And that was super frustrating to me.
So I figured, OK, well, let's just start a business handling everything for them so that
they don't need to hire in-house or try to figure it out on their end. And that was kind
of where growth machine came from.
So that was just a long-winded way of saying that if you really want to get good at growth,
what you need more than anything is a philosophy degree.
Yeah, exactly. Get a philosophy degree and then kind of stumble onto SEO randomly. But
the first time that an article of mine popped up on Google, I had no idea what SEO was.
I wasn't really trying to do it. It was just like I woke up one day and suddenly my site
had gone from 10 visitors a day to 200. And that was just crazy exciting at the time.
So that kind of made me be like, OK, well, how did this happen? And then, obviously,
how can I replicate it across other sites?
But to be fair, I mean, I love that you're saying that I'm amazing at growth and stuff,
but I feel like I'm really just good at one very specific thing, which is growing sites
through search-focused content. Because growth is such a huge umbrella. And I picked that
one specific thing to get really good at and build some brand around. And that's worked
out very well.
I want to dive into some of the details behind exactly how you got good at this one specific
skill.
Yeah.
And maybe some of the lessons and the skills that you picked up working at all these different
jobs, what would you say was the most impactful role or phase of your career in terms of learning?
I mean, the only really long job, honestly, was the Sumo one. Because I was there for
eight or nine months, and then I've kind of been doing my own stuff ever since. I learned
a ton with Zapier too. I mean, they were amazing, and they treated me super well. And Danny
Shriver was the guy I was working with there. And he's just awesome at all things, marketing
him and Mackay. And they really took a lot of time to help me learn the content marketing
SEO stuff. And then Noah at Sumo invested a lot in helping me just learn all of the
content marketing, copywriting, email marketing.
But I feel like I'm learning the most now, doing this stuff where we're actually getting
to work on 10 or 12 sites at once. Because with Zapier and with Sumo, it was just one
site. And you only had one data point for if your hypotheses were good or bad. Now,
if we have an idea to test something, we can do it on 10 sites at once, most of which are
getting a few hundred thousand visitors a month. So we get really good feedback on our
experiments. And that's made it really easy to quickly iterate on our assumptions. And
it's been really fun to see the strategies work across multiple sites and multiple niches.
So I really feel like this has been the biggest learning experience of all.
Yeah, it can be crazy effective when you're able to experiment so much. And as somebody
who runs just one single website, I've got to say I'm a little bit envious to the position
that you're in with Growth Machine.
But at the same time, you're getting to talk to all these people and read all these write
ups. So you're getting a ton of good data from that too, which is probably kind of cool.
Yeah, I'm definitely expecting some free SEO services after this interview, Nat.
Exactly.
So let's talk about your blog, because it doesn't sound like you had any particularly
strong direction for it other than I just want to start writing. How did you go from
there and grow it into something huge?
Yeah, I mean, it was really just like, hey, I'm going to write about whatever stuff is
kind of interesting to me. So I was reading a lot of books about, you know, like psychology
and kind of decision science type stuff back when I started. And so I wrote about things
related to that in the beginning. And then just as my interests have shifted and changed
over time, the stuff that I write about has shifted and changed too.
So eventually, I started writing some of my marketing articles there. I started writing
some travel stuff, some finance related stuff when I was doing the digital nomad stuff.
There's a whole section of the blog dedicated to sex stuff. Like it's really varied and
very much just kind of whatever I felt like writing at the time, I've tried to resist
the urge to obsess over the SEO too much because I find that at least for my personal site,
if I just try to write stuff that could rank highly for a good keyword, it's never quite
as good as the stuff that I'm just interested in. But what I will do is if there's something
I'm interested in writing about, I'll write about it. And then I can go through afterwards
and see if there's a good way to tweak it to fit a search term. And sometimes there
is, sometimes there isn't. But the articles that do, you know, have targeted keywords
that they can get a lot of traffic for do really well. And they help prop up the ones
that are more just, this is interesting to me. And I feel like writing about it.
A lot of people listening probably are scratching their heads because they have no idea what
SEO is. They don't know what keywords are. They don't know how any of this stuff works.
Can you give us the high level Nat, Elias and overview of what SEO is and how you do
a good job at it?
Yeah, I think that it's easy to overcomplicate it and to obsess over the tons of little variables
you can tweak. I mean, the way that we usually think about it at Growth Machine is just sort
of the, you want to write the best or most useful article on a given topic on the web.
And so there's really only a few parts to it then, which is finding out what people
are searching for. And there's a lot of ways you can do keyword research. You can use expensive
tools like ARFs. You can use free stuff like keyword planner that, you know, just some
way to figure out are people looking for this? Yes, no. And then once you have topics that
people are looking for, how do you create the best article on that topic? And that's
honestly the hardest part of it because most people are much worse at writing and explaining
things than they think they are.
And so you'll get this issue where like a director of marketing or, you know, a solo
founder will start to, you know, quote unquote, try to do content marketing where they say,
oh, I'm going to write a blog post a week. And then, you know, hopefully that brings
in traffic. And then strategy usually doesn't go that well. It requires a fair amount of
time and energy and honestly money to like really do it well and make it work. And so
I, you know, I'm very much of the opinion where it's like you either go all the way
with it and you've got somebody where it's basically their part time job, at least if
not full time, or you kind of like don't do it at all.
Because the only way that you can consistently create the best articles on the internet about
a subject within a given within like an umbrella of topics is if you've got someone dedicating
a lot of time and energy to it. Because the third part of it is that you also have to
promote it right to try to get some traffic to it. Once it's ranking, you know, that brings
in a lot of traffic, but it's really hard to get something ranked if people aren't already
reading it, which means you also need to be putting energy into social promotion or building
an email list or going on podcasts or whatever you can do to get people to go read your stuff
so that it can start to rank. But I mean, if you can find topics people are looking
for if you can write about them in extremely useful authoritative ways, and then if you
can get people to read your content and link to it, you will probably do very, very well
at SEO, assuming you're not in like a hyper competitive field, which is which most people
are not.
I think it's so easy for somebody listening to this to go out and want to start a blog
and start doing some research about SEO and then immediately get lost and the 10s of thousands
of articles that exist that have been written about how to get good at SEO and all the millions
of little variables that you can tweak. How did you go about navigating this minefield
and learn about SEO on your own? And how should other people go about learning if they want
to get serious about this?
Yeah, I would say that I mean, the first thing to watch out for is what you just alluded
to, which is that there is an absurd amount of content out there on SEO. And 99.9% of
the people writing about it really don't really know what they're doing. And they're just
churning out articles. And unfortunately, just because something is the number one result
for an SEO topic doesn't actually mean it's the best article, because Google isn't perfect.
And so you still have to do some work to find good articles and good writers on a subject
and try to make sure that you're not overly complicating the process.
I would say if you want to learn about SEO in general, I think you could basically just
read Brian Dean's blog and watch his YouTube channel. And you wouldn't really need to go
anywhere else. If you are curious about it as it blends with content marketing, I would
very selfishly promote the growth machine blog, because we do write about it a lot.
I talk about it a lot too. But honestly, the way I learned was really the trial and error
and reading a lot of stuff from primarily Brian Dean. His stuff is really good. And
just being able to read his articles, try to apply it on my site for a Sumo article,
and then see what happens. After two years of playing around with it, that was enough
to get really, really good, where with growth machine, we can go into a site that's already
getting a decent amount of search traffic. And we can pretty reliably increase it by
50% to 200% within three months. It's just a lot of repetition and a lot of practice
and a lot of experimenting with what actually moves the needle and what doesn't.
I would caution people with the whole reading and researching phase, because it's so easy
to just waste tons of time doing it. If you can find one good source and consume everything
from that one source and then just go start experimenting, that's probably the best way
to learn.
What was the first thing that you wrote on your personal blog that sort of blew up and
opened your eyes as to how much searches and optimization could really help grow your site?
Yeah, this was an article. I started my blog in September 2014. In February, I wrote an
article on doing a five-day water fast. I think to this day, if you Google five-day
water fast, it's still number one or number two. It looks like I'm number two right now.
It moves around a lot. It was really just like I had heard about water fasting as an
interesting thing to try. I figured, okay, this would be a cool experiment to just see
if I can go five days without food.
I did it and I took pretty detailed notes as it was going. Then I wrote up this article
about it afterwards, put it on my blog, was not expecting it to do anything. I literally
knew nothing about SEO. Then this was the one where a few months later, I woke up one
day and suddenly there were 200 people a day reading it. I was like, whoa, okay, what happened
here? This is weird. Then that made me way more interested in SEO as a channel to go
after because the blog was getting more people per day than it would before when I published
a new article and I was doing no extra work. Normally, if you have a non-SEO blog, you
have to work to get traffic to every article and every old article. If you have an SEO-focused
blog, then the articles you get to rank just keep getting traffic basically forever until
somebody makes a better one.
That water fasting article alone gets about 2,000 visitors a day to this day, like three
years later. If you think about what it costs to buy ads, if I was selling a fasting product
and I was buying ads on that keyword, I'd be paying probably at least $2,000 a day for
that traffic, but I get it for free every day.
That was a crazy realization that, oh, wow, if you can actually get good at this and do
it for a large portfolio of topics, that can just drive an insane amount of value for your
business or your personal site or whatever else you're trying to sell. It's a pretty
cool channel if you can crack it.
Was there a point where you looked at what was going on and you thought to yourself,
hey, maybe I should make some money off of all this traffic that I'm driving to my website?
Oh, yeah. This is the fun part of my site, which is about, I think, a year after I started
it, I was having a conversation with a friend about sex. He was talking about trying to
last longer in bed. It was something that I had done a bunch of research on previously
and still had some notes lying around in my Evernote and stuff. We had talked about it,
and then at the end of that, he said, oh, you should just write an article about this
and put it on your site.
My first reaction was, oh, God, no, I'm not doing that. But then it kept sitting around
in my head for a while. After a few weeks, I drank a bunch of wine one night and wrote
the whole article in one go, published it before I could sober up and change my mind.
First, the article hit the front page of Reddit. I got something like 40,000 visitors in 24
hours, which was insane. It was more traffic than the site had gotten in the past year.
I got in 24 hours. That was like, okay, that's awesome. Then within a month, I was on the
first page of Google for a last longer at bed. Then that article was suddenly getting
up to 1,000 visitors a day. Now it gets like 3,000 to 3,500 a day. It's done that pretty
consistently for the last two years.
I was like, shit, this is a lot of traffic. It seems like a valuable topic. What I noticed
was that within the article, there was a recommendation for an app that was on the App Store for helping
women practice Kegel exercises. I noticed that there were about 200 clicks per day going
to that app. I did some back of the napkin math and I said, okay, I think she's charging
$2 for her app. I was like, if I'm sending 200 people a day to the App Store, to her
app, and if 20% of them end up buying it, that's going to be $40. It's like $80 a day
for her. I'm helping her make, what is that, $2,400 a month. I'm seeing none of that value.
I'm getting a small affiliate commission from iTunes. Then I said, okay, well, there's
really no app in the App Store for men for doing Kegel exercises. There are a bunch of
them now because I think other people realize that this one was doing well.
I just decided, okay, I'm going to make an app for men for doing Kegels and all feature
it in my article and some of the other articles that went up afterwards. I ended up getting
connected with a guy who was on my email list. I sent out an email saying, hey, I'm looking
for someone to help me build an app. This guy had been reading my stuff for a while
and he knew how to get a good app built, but he didn't know how to do any marketing. He
really wanted to learn marketing, so he said, hey, I will get the app designed and built
for you at cost if you will keep me in the loop with all the marketing stuff you're doing
for it so I can see how you're growing it and if I can use you as a case study for my
other clients. I was like, awesome, that's a great deal.
We got it built for $4,100 total, which is really cheap in the app world. It's pretty
hard to get a good app built for that much. It was a fairly simple app. We got it done
in about a month and a half, put it up on the App Store, linked to it from my site.
We launched it about two years ago and it's consistently made anywhere from $4,000 at
the low end, probably $3,000 to at the high end, $7,000, $7,500 a month in revenue with
basically no ongoing work just from my blog driving traffic to it.
That was just an awesome bit of side passive income that helped fund my life while I was
traveling and everything and the articles were bringing in that traffic and selling
the app every day with zero, really zero ongoing maintenance for me. We've updated the app
once since it launched and I've updated the articles a few times just as they lose rankings.
You got to tweak them a little bit. But aside from that, that's just sort of like ran without
me having to do much else and been a great source of extra income for me and cool validation
for the site and a great story to tell clients about the value of SEO.
That was really when I started to make the connection that, okay, you can take this traffic
and then you can actually sell products with it. That's what we help a lot of our clients
do now as well.
Yeah, that's nuts. That's essentially real passive income. It's pretty rare that I talk
to anybody who finds that because most businesses have this engine that requires an operator
to tend to it and keep it running. In your case, the engine was essentially Google and
so you could just sort of go travel the world and the traffic would keep coming in and you
would keep generating revenue.
Was this the only way that you made any money from your blog or did you ever find any other
ways to start generating income as well?
That was the big one or it has been the big one so far. I mean, I would technically say
that growth machine is the biggest one, right? Because we didn't grow to this level of revenue
so quickly, just on our own. I had three years of credibility built up from doing my publishing
and giving away marketing advice for free basically on the blog. So indirectly, that's
been the biggest monetization of my site.
But then there's obviously stamina of the app. There's a good amount of just random
affiliate stuff as it comes up. I don't like to promote stuff that I don't use, but I get
a lot from Amazon in particular because I take notes on every book I read and then I
publish my notes on my site.
So I've got a whole section of my site dedicated to booknotes. If you're familiar with Derek
Sivers, he does this too. I think he's got more than I do, but I'm working on catching
up to him. If you Google a lot of these book titles plus the word summary, my site will
be in the first few results. So that actually brings in just like that notes section of
the site brings in about 50,000 visitors a month. A number of them end up clicking through
from the booknotes to Amazon, like buying the book, or if you buy anything on Amazon
after clicking through an affiliate link, you give that site credit.
So every now and then someone will buy like a $2,000 camera, right? And that's 150 bucks
for me, right? Which is awesome. And that was kind of like a cool way to monetize some
of the stuff on the site. And then the other thing I do now is because those booknotes
got so popular, I have a product that I call the Brain, which is like the highly formatted
annotated version of all the booknotes that people can buy into. And then they basically
they just get read only access to an Evernote folder with like, I think I've got some like
220 books in there now with my like detailed, bolding, highlighting, personal annotations
and stuff. And people seem to like that, I think to either refresh books they've already
read or to find new ones. And so that'll sell like a couple hundred a week, maybe just from
my newsletter. So there's like a lot of little things on there that are either affiliate
deals or small products, things like that. There's always kind of like little ways you
can monetize traffic once you're getting it. It's just sort of an interesting question
of okay, if people are reading this, what would be the best product for them to buy?
And if you can ask yourself that question, once you're getting the traffic, I don't think
it's very hard to come up with product ideas for the visitors that you're getting.
You know, I don't talk to very many people who have this marketing first approach where
the first consideration is to make sure that whatever it is that you create, you can get
it in front of as many people as possible as consistently as possible. But I think it's
really smart because a failure to do that is what kills the majority of startups. It's
really hard to get people on the internet to care about what you've built. And so if
you put it off, if that's not the first thing that you consider, then you're really just
procrastinating and avoiding solving the number one challenge that stands in the way of you
and your business's success. But on the flip side, if you spend too much time thinking
about these numbers, not enough time thinking about what it is that you're actually building
or creating or writing, then it's easy to create something that's horrible. And so the
prototypical examples here might be a super addictive game or social network, or even
a blog or a publication that's super clickbaity, where your traffic numbers might be massive,
but you're not really doing something that you can be proud of. And I have to think about
this a lot with indie hackers, because we publish a lot of content as well. How do you
strike the right balance between reaching as many people as you can and also making
sure that you care about what you're putting out?
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the answer is writing extremely in depth, actionable, useful
guides and writing good SEO content usually don't go that hand in hand, unfortunately.
So that's part of why I don't try to over SEO my personal blog, because I know it will
necessarily lead to a decrease in value. Because I mean, just to give you one example, something
that Google seems to reward is people staying on your site once they come in and they read
an article, and they seem to penalize people who open up your article and then go back
to a world look for something else.
So I've got a friend, Connor, who runs a company called Baseline, where they set you up with
native speakers in South America to practice Spanish with, and you get unlimited Spanish
tutoring for 150 a month. It's a great model for people who are trying to learn Spanish.
And he wrote this massive, super useful 20,000 word guide to learning Spanish, put it up
on the site, and it wasn't ranking on the first page for how to learn Spanish. And so
he said, okay, well, I wrote this objectively really good guide, and it is a really good
guide. He's like, why isn't it ranking? And I kind of had to say, or I kind of guessed,
it's probably that it is too in depth, right? It is almost too useful that people pop the
page open, and they see this 20,000 word behemoth of useful content, and then they either save
it for later and leave, which Google doesn't like if you leave immediately, or they go
back to the search results and they say, okay, let me look for something a little bit easier.
Because they want a quick and easy solution. So in some ways, you do kind of have to, it's
not a good way to say this, but cater to the lowest common denominator who's searching
for the topic and try to write the content that will please them. And that's how you
stay top of mind on Google. So you don't want to write bad content, but you also don't want
to go too crazy either. So to give you a good example, we have a project internally, a growth
machine called Cup and Leaf, which is a tea blog. And there's cupandleaf.com, which is
the tea blog. And then there's the store, which is shop.cupandleaf, it's just a Shopify
store, super simple. And this is kind of like what you and I were talking about before,
just now with the building sites traffic first. So the blog is very focused on ranking for
everything related to tea. How to brew oolong tea, health benefits of Puerh tea, how to
make barley tea, all of those topics, getting on the first page for them and then driving
that traffic to selling actual tea.
That doesn't really lead to creating the kind of interesting blog where somebody goes from
one article to the next to the next, right? The goal is to rank for all these keywords,
have people buy tea, and then keep buying tea until they die. It's not to like create
a super interesting blog about tea. Like I'm fine with that, because that's the point.
I don't think anybody is going to sit there and go, oh, let's read about health benefits
of Puerh. Let's read about health benefits of oolong. Let's read about health benefits
of green tea. And those kinds of blogs are fine too. There's nothing wrong with that.
I think where it gets bad is people who try to... So the worst version of this is people
who don't know anything about marketing, who start a marketing blog and then write crappy
little 500 word articles and then get sad and nobody reads them. Don't be that person.
But then the second kind is people who are trying to rank for this SEO stuff and they
do the seven, 800 word pretty short post. They probably paid somebody $50 on Upwork
to bang together. And that stuff's not going to rank either. And it basically just makes
the internet worse. You can do SEO focused content very well, where it's very in-depth
and very useful. And I think if you read the Cup and Leave content, it meets that bar.
They're very good articles. But it's also not going to be a crazy interesting blog that
somebody goes through and reads for an hour. And I think that's okay too. You just have
to know which kind you want. And if you want to go the route of, I think, being interesting
and being very in-depth and thought provoking, it's harder to make that an SEO focused blog
and you have to be okay with getting a bit less traffic.
If anybody's read Slate Star Codex, that's a super interesting blog. Scott Exlander is
obviously a brilliant guy. He really does his research. But I don't imagine that he
ranks very highly on Google for that much. And there's probably not a ton of monetization
from the blog. But I think that's fine because he's really interesting. He's done a great
job of that. And I think that can be more important than just getting tons of raw traffic.
Let's talk about your current business, Growth Machine. You are making $85,000 a month in
revenue now. And you just started this what, like last September. And so you've only been
at it for 10 months. That's crazy. What motivated you to start this business? Why not go work
for somebody else with your marketing abilities? Or why not start a more scalable product based
business rather than an agency?
Yeah, first, I knew I could never really go work for another company. I've been working
for myself and traveling for a year and a half. There was no way I was going to be happy
going and sitting in an office and having to do what somebody else tells me to do. I
would have been good for three to six months, and then I would have gotten bored and quit.
I knew that would happen. So it was a question of, OK, I want to start something. But I didn't
really know what kind of product business or tool or whatever I wanted to build. And
I didn't want to just pick something because I felt the need to pick something.
So I said instead, well, why don't I just build a business that builds businesses? And
then when I have an idea I want to pursue, I can just plug it into the existing structure
that we've created. And I already had people asking for help with this SEO-focused content
marketing. And so it just seemed like, by far, the easiest place to start. And where
we are now, we've really gotten the process down. And we can really, I think, apply it
super well to a ton of different industries. And we know the industries it works well in.
And that's going to let us, over time, switch more to building our own properties instead
of just having clients. Because having an agency is fun, and it's fine, and you make
good money, and the lifestyle is pretty chill. But you're still dealing with clients. And
we're pretty good about firing annoying clients. But even any client is somebody that you're
still taking orders from. And also, as a necessary function of the business, you must be making
them more money than they are paying you, or else they would fire you.
So there's some projects where we see, OK, we're obviously making tons of money for this
person through our expertise. We should just be building our own projects. And that's where
Cup and Leaf comes in, where we saw the T niche as an area where we could actually do
super well in content. So we started creating that and eventually growing that e-commerce
business. We're working with another couple of people on a, actually, I don't know if
I can talk about this publicly, but another business where we saw SEO potential. We're
working actually with another really good marketing agency on, again, I can't say what
it is, but working with them, too, to get something started.
And then I've also been looking at not necessarily affiliate sites, but sites that can talk about
an area that has a lot of traffic that doesn't need an actual product. So we work with one
company, Ridester, that we've helped them rank number one or two for pretty much everything
related to driving for Lyft and Uber. And then they're earning affiliate revenue for
people signing up to be drivers or riders on those services.
And that's actually super lucrative for him. And so my question is like, all right, what
other areas can we just take our skill set and apply it to, where eventually we have
kind of a portfolio of companies that we are growing with our internal processes and don't
need to take on clients quite as much anymore. So instead of having to pick that product
business from the get-go back in September, now I've kind of built the system that I can
plug other ideas into and test them quickly and throw them out or keep growing them and
turn them into their own successful businesses within the broader growth machine umbrella.
That's awesome. The topic of ideas comes up pretty much every episode of this podcast
because it's the phase that the most people are stuck in. They know they want to quit
their job. They know they want to start a business. They just don't know what a good
idea looks like or how to come up with one.
And one of the things that I've been harping on a lot recently is that in a somewhat weird
twist, the best way to come up with an idea for a business is to just start a business.
And then in the course of trying to run that business, overcoming various problems and
challenges and working with clients and customers, you'll come up with even better business ideas.
You're sort of doing this on steroids. You've got a ton of clients that you work with on
a regular basis. You're trying to help them grow their websites. You see what works and
what doesn't. And you can take those winning models and apply them to other areas and other
industries and add them to your list of promising ideas. But at the same time, even before you
started Growth Machine, you had your blog. And a blog is the same principle. You're putting
out tons of blog posts. You see how people react to what they like, what they don't like.
And that can give you a source of good ideas that are worth pursuing.
Yeah, the blog is awesome for that because I get a lot of random ideas from the blog
by seeing either what ranks or what resonates with people. And then also, I mean, learning...
For me too, the big metric is how good is the SEO landscape in an area? Part of why
we decided to go after T, which seems like it should be super competitive, is that the
content landscape for it is actually not very competitive. And so we figured out... We figured
that we could start to rank for it pretty quickly and then use that to drive sales.
And so if you have something like SEO that you can use to not just evaluate business
ideas but also generate them because I can kind of take a random topic that I might see
in my environment and plug it into a tool like Arefs and click around a bit and get
a good idea of whether or not I could start a site in that area and grow it to a few hundred
thousand visitors. And that's a super easy way to generate and test business ideas.
So if you can do something or if you can develop a skill like that, and you can do that with
ads too, you might be able to do that with... I mean, also programming. So if you can get
a really good sense of how easily you can build a tool.
I think Ryan Culpe, who you had on before, is a great example of this. He's just really,
really good at programming and building small teams to create stuff using Ruby on Rails
and a few other core languages. And so he can look at an idea and get a sense of how
fast he could build it and launch something and test it. And having one of those skill
sets makes it pretty easy to iterate on business ideas. Because it's kind of like you said,
you're probably not going to get the idea right the first time, so you want to be able
to come up with more of them. And also, I mean, like you mentioned too, finding the
problems you run into along the way is a great way to come up with things that other people
are probably needing help with as well.
Let's talk about the early days of Growth Machine after you first came up with the idea.
How did you get this business up and running and get your first customers in the door?
It really just came from people who were already in my network and were asking about it. Because
I had a couple of people who had reached out and said they wanted me to kind of consult
them on getting it started internally. And I just went back to them and I said, Hey,
I don't want to do the consulting because it doesn't go well. But what if you pay me
the same amount you would pay me to be a consultant for you, but instead you get all of your articles
created for you, you get them promoted, you get them SEO optimized, you get tracking and
updating on how your plan is going each week, and you get weekly check-ins where we can
talk about other marketing related stuff.
And that was a pretty easy sell to both of them. We went from zero to one of them. We
were charging $6K a month and the next one we were charging $7K a month. And so basically,
the day we started, we had $13K a month in revenue. Because them saying yes was what
made me say, Okay, I'm going to start the agency. That seemed like pretty good validation.
And as soon as they said yes, I reached out to a few people who I had worked with before
and I said, Hey, I need help creating content for these guys. Do you think you can help
with the management or help with the promotion or help with the article writing? And a lot
of them were set up within the first two weeks. And by the week three, we were putting out
content for these guys and helping them start to rank. One of them went super well. And
we got them a lot. They had a pretty popular YouTube channel.
And so we were literally just taking their popular YouTube videos and creating articles
based off of them, and then getting them the number one and number two spot on Google whenever
someone looks for something relative to their brand. And that was a great strategy. So that
works super well. And for the other one, it just didn't work very well at all. They ended
up having a really competitive niche that we just didn't do a good job in. But we ended
pretty amicably and they still refer us to other clients. But as soon as those first
two were in the door, I just started reaching out to other people and trying to build more
of those relationships. And we had... We typically do three or four months initially. So once
somebody's locked in, it's like, all right, we're going to have that revenue for three
months, hopefully, so we can keep growing. And so I think by December, I think in December,
we did like 38K in revenue. And it just kept growing.
And this is still just you by yourself working on the business full-time and maybe a few
contractors that you'd hired as well.
Yeah, me plus a few of the contractors in December. But that was when it was hitting
the point where I was just working pretty crazy hours and super stressed and things
were starting to fall through the cracks. And I knew that I was going to run into issues
if I didn't solve the problem before we brought on another client. And luckily, I had talked
to a friend, Zach Oberon, the guy who run... Or he's one of the co-founders of Book in
a Box. And he told me to hire someone for general management and strategy and client
relationship stuff before I thought I needed them.
And so I started that process before we had the money to hire someone for it and then
ended up growing the revenue to a point where it made sense to hire them. And then worked
out a good salary structure where she could start semi part-time and then her salary would
go up with each new client she managed. And then she was able to come in on January right
when I was sitting my breaking point. And so it just timed itself out perfectly.
Right. And I want to talk about how you've been able to structure your business so that
it could grow without you having to drive yourself into the ground. You mentioned earlier
that you've hired three people to work with you full-time. Who are these people? And what
are their roles look like?
Yeah. So the way our business works with a client is that there's really three things
we do. We design the SEO strategy that fits their business. We create all of the articles
and publish them on their site. And then we promote all of the content that we're creating
for them, help them get back links, help them improve on-site conversion.
So we now have one full-time team member for each of those roles. So the first person that
we hired, Nora, she basically leads all of the strategy and a lot of the client relationship
side. So she's the one telling them, hey, here's the keywords that we want to go after.
Here's how we want to do it. Here are the writers who think it would be a good fit.
Here's the whole content plan. And then checking in with them for tweaks to the plan as we're
going and all of that. She was the first person we hired.
And then Brian handles all of the promotion at the end of the process. So he actually
doesn't do as much of the promotion himself, but he works with a small army of freelancers,
each of whom is specialized in a certain area. So we've got a Reddit guy, a Facebook guy,
a Twitter person, a Pinterest person, a... What else do we have? I think we've got a
LinkedIn person. We've got basically one person for each social network, and then one person
who can mine emails for publications for reaching out for backlinks.
And so as articles go up on client sites, Brian is taking those articles and feeding
them to the freelancers best suited for that article. Because not all articles will do
well on Reddit or Facebook groups or Pinterest or make sense to reach out to for backlinks.
So he's kind of determining the best mix of promotion channels per article and setting
them into the funnel that way. And he also does all the reporting. So he handles, okay,
how did the traffic do this week compared to last week and the week before? How are all
the keywords ranking and puts together those reports that we send to the clients every
Monday?
And then Heather is right in the middle of the process, where she is actually the one
interacting with the writers and giving them their deadlines, their article guidelines,
editing their writing and then publishing it on the client site. So she's kind of making
sure that all the articles are amazing, that they're delivered on time, that they fit the
client voice and handles pretty much all of that implementation.
So with each client, they're kind of getting a full time or they're kind of getting a dedicated
strategy person, editorial person and promotion person plus me kind of hovering around the
proximity helping in whatever other ways are useful. And that's been a really good way
to break it up, especially with how many freelancers and contractors we have for helping with the
very specific parts of the process.
How do you go about finding the right people to work with? Because I'm sure there's a ton
of people online who have some experience with promoting and distributing content. There's
a ton of people online who have experience with editing content. How do you make sure
you hire the right people? And what are your tips for other people who might be listening
and who need to hire for their small business?
We've used weworkremotely.com for all of it so far. And it's been awesome. They seem
to have a really big newsletter and pretty much all of my job postings there get picked
up by all of the other job sites for some reason. So it's kind of like getting to post
on all the other sites for free. And they have very consistently driven like 200 plus
candidates for each role. And not all of them are qualified, obviously, but so we're hiring
for another editor right now. And we got something like 500 applicants and 70 or so of them moved
on to part two of the application. And I expect we'll interview maybe 10 or 12. But Nora,
I found through weworkremotely, Heather through weworkremotely, Brian, I'd worked with before.
So I knew him from that and I reached out to see if he was interested. But I think that
platform has been great since we are an all remote team. We're not local. And since we're
bootstrapped, we don't want to have to pay a headhunter 20K for an employee who may or
may not work out. And then in terms of assessing them, the biggest thing that we look for is
how much of the thing they're going to do they have done before or how much they've
done close to it. So with Nora, I was basically hiring her to be me. She needed to be able
to grow these sites and know what she's doing with them. And I could teach her some process,
but she needed to also have pretty good familiarity with the full stack of skills. And the thing
that really stood out in her application was that she had grown her own cooking blog and
health food blog from zero to 150,000 visitors a month in about a year. I was like, Oh, awesome.
She's already really good at this. That's a huge green flag. And then with Heather,
she was going to be doing all of the editing and publishing. And when you work with 10
clients and they're each doing about three articles a week, you have to be able to edit
and publish 30 articles a week. It's a lot of work. So you got to be pretty quick. And
she had run editorial for a local newspaper where she was doing like 50 articles a week.
So that was also just super awesome. You can meet this expectation. So once we had that,
that was a really, those were really good signs for them. And then the other biggest
thing was just like quality and clarity of communication in email and on the app. Because
since we're a remote company, you have to be really good at communicating over text.
And you're not always going to be able to go tap someone on the shoulder. You have to
be good at explaining what you're thinking through Slack and email. And so watching out
for that was big too. And then just how fun they seemed if they were enjoyable to talk
to. Because we still have weekly meetings and everything. We want to have fun and enjoy
hanging out. And so just making sure they were good culture fits as well was a pretty
big part of it.
If we don't count that point in time where you started getting overworked and had to
make your first hire, what would you say are some of the toughest challenges and hardest
parts about running growth machines so far?
I think the hardest thing is... Well, so I guess I'll give two answers. One, there's
like a psychologically difficult aspect, which is that when you work with very few clients
with very high values individually, it's a little bit nerve wracking sometimes. Because
if four people decided that they don't want to work with us anymore next month, I'd be
in a really stressful state. Because that could be a third of our revenue just gone
overnight. And that would be scary. We've never had something like that happen, but
that is one downside of this type of work. You have a bit more volatility in revenue.
But I think the most difficult thing day to day is just staying on top of different client
expectations and relationships and finding really good writers who can produce on a consistent
basis content that meets their quality without being way out of budget.
That's I think the hardest part of this. And that's where a lot of people struggle with
their own content plans and with their own content marketing is that it's hard to find
good writers who can stick to a deadline. And we're lucky that we have built up a huge
network of them. But we occasionally have to fire writers who can't hit deadlines or
who clients are unhappy with. And then we have to get somebody new in. And we've got
our deadlines with them because they're expecting a certain amount of content for what they're
paying each month. And that's where things can really start to go crazy.
The promotion and the planning side are fairly reliable because we have more control over
that. But with 30-some writers in the system, you're going to have at least one or two kind
of like little fires each week at this point. And so we're still figuring out the best way
to manage that.
How do you find customers nowadays? Because in the early days, it seemed like your first
clients came from the audience that you'd built for yourself via your blog. But now
that you've matured as a business and things are a little bit further along, have your
methods of finding customers changed? Or are you still relying on content marketing?
Mostly content marketing. That is what brought them in from my site. That's what we're selling.
And so I think we have to do a really good job of it ourselves. I've tried doing direct
outreach. It doesn't work for us very well.
Personal referrals are honestly tricky because you don't want to say no to your friend's
friend, but you also don't want to do a bad job for them. And I think we've taken a few
projects that we shouldn't have because they're personal referrals. And so now, it's just
really like people find our content either from other people sharing it from our blog
or from our guest posts. We did a guest post on the Arefs blog last week or two weeks ago.
And that drove like 50 leads. And a decent number of them were pretty qualified that
we're talking to now. And so that's a really good indicator that if we can get on good
blogs with this good in-depth content that I think I have some reputation for, that helps
show that we can drive a lot of value for these businesses.
And people come in much more qualified. Having read an article where you talk about doing
the thing they're looking for help on, then if you email them asking them to hire you.
Because we charge 8K to 10K a month. It's a pretty hard thing to cold outreach someone
on. They need to kind of already want to have that level of help.
So it's really just like keeping that content machine going. We're trying to publish an
article per week on our blog, trying to do more of the guest posting. And then obviously
all the old stuff on my site helps drive it too. So that's really been the main thing
now. It's like we're just continuing to double down on content marketing. It's what's always
worked for us and it's what works for our clients.
Yeah. And that's super cool because the things that you learned from working with your clients,
you can apply to your own blog and vice versa.
One of the books that you've read and that you reviewed on your website is Peter Thiel's
book Zero to One. And one of the big points that he makes in that book is that successful
companies are almost always really monopolies. The competition is terrible because it drives
down prices and it's hard for you to stand out.
How do you think about your competition with Growth Machine? Are you guys a monopoly in
some niche? Do you worry about the competition? And why do customers choose you and your company
over some other company that can theoretically help them set up their content marketing and
their SEO?
I mean, this sounds cocky but I honestly don't think that there is another agency that can
do quite as good of a job of creating content that makes product businesses more money.
If there is one out there, I haven't come across them yet. And I've been looking for
people who feel like direct competitors to us and there just don't seem to be that many.
There are a lot of SEOs who will do advice and say, hey, you should do this thing. You
should write this article. And there are content agencies who will just pump out articles for
you. But in terms of agencies that can just come in, take over your blog or part of your
blog and then grow it to hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, I don't really know
many others right now. And I'm not super worried about other competitors coming up.
Because naturally, there will be if it's a good market or if it's a good area and there
should be some more competitors. But we've got a really developed system at this point.
And we've got a pretty decent name brand and we've gotten some great clients. And I just
feel like by going for the top of the market, charging a lot, but doing a really good job
and just trying to have an amazing system in place, we've really priced ourselves out
of a lot of competition. Most SEOs are charging maybe 2K to 5K a month. Our minimum package
is 8K. And that weeds out a lot of companies that just don't have the money to invest in
it or who aren't as serious. And I think that's part of why we get to have really great clients
in a lot of cases because the clients are willing to pay more and who know that they're
paying for results, not just articles. They're just more savvy. They're better to work with.
And from the responses we get to our content, it feels like people are looking for this
and they haven't found many people who can do it well. And I just think that that expertise
and branding is kind of how we build our monopoly in that sense.
Yeah, it's really great that your customers are willing to pay you a premium for your
services because it's actually worth it for them. And they can calculate that it's worth
it for them because you're in an industry where the value you provide is really easy
to measure. I mean, if I pay you $10,000 for your services and you generate $30,000 worth
of traffic for me, then that's a no brainer. I'm going to do that again. I talked to a
lot of indie hackers who were kind of stuck because the value that their business provides
to their customers is really fuzzy. It's really hard to explain. It's several steps removed
from how their customers make or save money. And so the customers don't want to pay or
at least they don't want to pay a lot. And it makes things hard on the founders, I think.
Anyway, the last thing that I want to talk to you about today is about the fact that
your business is an agency. The vast majority of people that I have on the show that I talked
to on the website are running scalable product businesses and running businesses where theoretically
they can add more and more customers without doing any extra work. Whereas with an agency,
you're sort of trading all your dollars for hours, every new client means you have to
hire more contractors or do more work yourself. How do you grow this business in a way that
makes sense? And what's your plan for taking Growth Machine to the next level?
It's kind of like what I alluded to before. My goal is not to build a huge agency. It's
more for us to be a very interesting private equity company. Because trying to compete
with VaynerMedia or someone isn't that attractive to me. And I think the ceiling on the number
of clients we can work with and the way that we like to work with them is fairly low. I
think we could become a $10 million a year business doing the type of work we're doing.
But if we want to grow to $100 million a year, we would have to branch out into something
else. I just don't think the market is big enough for this type of work to get to $100
million. But if we can switch to owning significant shares of product companies and being in charge
of their content and marketing and driving sales through SEO, the way we already do with
a lot of our clients, but we're not getting equity from it, that to me is super interesting.
Because if we can really be a business that grows businesses, then we've got a pretty
cool model where we can find stuff on the Shopify exchange that we can buy for $20K,
build out a huge blog behind it, let somebody else manage the product side, and then flip
it for a lot more money down the line.
Or we can just have our own internal things like Cup and Leaf that we grow and sell products
through and we hire a manager for the product side of the business and the growth machine
team runs the growth side of the business. And that's just kind of a fun model to me
because then I don't really have to pick just one business idea to focus on. I've got that
ADHD where I want to work on a lot of different things at once. And so if we can have a few
of these that we're invested in or participating in or entirely owning, that can become a pretty
big business that can be pretty fun to work on.
And that's kind of what I'm excited about as the next possible stage is we grow the
client side of this maybe to a few mil a year, have it be super profitable, and then take
most of the profits and funnel them into our own businesses and investing in others. And
then that eventually becomes more and more of our revenue.
And I don't really know anybody else who does kind of like a private equity model like that
focused on the content marketing side of things is like super different. But I think we're
in a cool position to go after it. And so I'm excited about transitioning to that phase
of the business eventually.
Yeah, it's something I don't think enough entrepreneurs think about is how do I build
a business that's actually going to be fun to run in the long term rather than building
a business is just going to be more and more work, more and more customer support, more
and more of a headache. So that's kudos to you for going in the right direction.
Let me end by asking, Matt, what is your advice for other people who might just be getting
started or considering starting a business? Should they follow in your footsteps? Should
they start an agency over a product business? And what other things do you think they should
know?
Yeah, I've been thinking about this more recently, because I think my advice now has changed
a lot from what I would have said before. I wouldn't necessarily say start an agency,
but I would say get really good at something useful and freelance with it for a while to
make a bunch of money to invest in building a business that you either stumble upon from
your freelancing work or that you're interested in, or that you see as an opportunity. But
don't fall into the trap of trying to not spend any money, because that's where I think
a lot of people get hung up for long periods of time. And it also makes them feel like
it's more acceptable to not be making money. So I feel like where you end up seeing a lot
of entrepreneurs waste time is they say, oh, I'm going to build this cool web app. And
they spend six months working on it, not making any money from it, to building up a lot of
opportunity costs, because they could have been making money in that time. And they're
not charging for this web app, and no one's using it. But because they're not losing money,
they're just losing time, they don't recognize that they're losing money on it anyway, if
that makes sense. And I think it's an easy trap to fall into.
I mean, I would almost say either do consulting or freelancing or work on somebody else's
project for a while, build up the money so that you can invest in getting other people
to do the things that you aren't the absolute best at, and then just keep focusing on that
thing. And for me, a lot of it is just the content marketing. That is what I think I'm
really good at. I don't think that I'm an amazing manager or salesperson or any of that
I'm trying to learn. But if you can make good money doing the thing that you are good at
and then use that money to get other people to help you with the parts you're not good
at, that, to me, is a much more sustainable way to build a business without wasting a
ton of money and time trying to do everything or trying to not spend anything.
And the businesses that I've been seeing do the best in the shortest amount of time are
the ones that make money from basically day one. They're e-commerce products that start
selling their product right away or agencies that start charging money right away. I think
it's sexy to see a story like Facebook or Pinterest or whatever. It's like, oh, they
didn't make any money for years and then, oh, they're all billionaires. But it's probably
not going to happen. It might be awesome for you if it does, but I don't think it's a good
thing to bank on happening. Try to make money as early as possible.
I think that's great advice. Not being willing to spend money on your business is probably
revealing of the fact that you're not focused enough on making money with your business,
at least not as fast as you should be. And I think, Nat, you're the perfect person to
give that advice considering how you got your start with Growth Machine, making five figures
in your very first month. Nat, thanks so much for coming on the show. Can you tell listeners
where they can go to learn more about Growth Machine and about what you're up to in your
personal life?
Yes. So if you want to get in touch with me, the best place is Twitter. I'm just at Nat,
E-L-I-A-S-O-N. That's Nat Eliason, not Nate Liason. I get that a lot. That's where I'll
be most responsive. The Growth Machine site is yourgrowthmachine.com and then you can
find the blog and stuff there. Then my personal site is just natalyason.com as well. So those
are probably the three best spots to go. And I guess for one article recommendation, if
you were interested in everything we talked about, you can Google the Wiki strategy. And
it's on my blog and the Growth Machine blog. And that's like a super in-depth guide to
doing this kind of content marketing that we've talked about a lot today. So that might
be an interesting reading place for people to start.
All right. Thanks so much, Nat.
Cool. Thanks, Harlan. This was fun.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation and you want a really easy way to support
the podcast, why don't you head over to iTunes and leave us a quick rating or even a review.
If you're looking for an easy way to get there, just go to ndhackers.com slash review
and that should open up iTunes on your computer. I read pretty much all the reviews that you
guys leave over there and it really helps other people to discover the show. So your
support is very much appreciated.
In addition, if you are running your own internet business or if that's something you hope
to do someday, you should join me and a whole bunch of other founders on the ndhackers.com
website. It's a great place to get feedback on pretty much any problem or question that
you might have while running your business.
If you listen to the show, you know that I am a huge proponent of getting help from other
founders rather than trying to build your business all by yourself. So you'll see me
on the forum for sure, as well as more than a handful of some of the guests that I found
on the podcast.
If you're looking for inspiration, we've also got a huge directory full of hundreds
of products built by other indie hackers, every one of which includes revenue numbers
and some of the behind the scenes strategies for how they grew their products from nothing.
As always, thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.