I know I’m going to be asked this question at some point:

“Why did you start writing the “behind the scenes” part of your business on Medium instead of on Grow and Convert?”

The simple reason: We wanted a slight separation between the Grow and Convert site (where we write case studies on marketing) and the Grow and Convert publication (where we share a our journey of us growing our business).

Now thinking of it, the simple solution to this problem would likely be to rebrand this publication project to a different name to avoid confusion…

But nonetheless…

Medium felt like a place where we could share a raw, more personal side of our business without the pressure of spending days editing posts, worrying about grammar, etc.

Our site is a place where we’re known for case studies that are lengthy and detailed.

We didn’t feel comfortable sharing short, unedited pieces of content on our site.

Writing here has nothing to do with distribution benefits, SEO, etc.

In fact, since I wrote my first post on going viral on Medium, I think the platform has since become saturated with a lot more writers, thus making it harder to see the same distribution effects as before. (The advice in the post still works though- you just have to be better at content promotion than you did before).

Going off topic for a second:

That’s the benefit of being an early adopter to a new platform — when you’re one of the first users/contributors, you get increased benefits for participating.

For example:

A couple of my friends own Pura Vida Bracelets. They were one of the first brands to really leverage Instagram as a marketing channel and one of the first brands to use influencers to drive growth. Because they were an early adopter of the platform, they’ve benefitted greatly. Month over month, they’re rated by Instagram as the top 5 most engaged brands on their platform. It’s was one of their main growth drivers in the beginning of their business, and without capitalizing on that channel, I don’t think they’d be where they are today.

Why am I sharing this? Because when I wrote that post on Medium, I attribute some of the large traffic numbers to being an early adopter and capitalizing on the smaller community of writers writing here.

Back to the main subject of this post — Medium vs. Grow and Convert.

I often hear that people want to move to Medium because it has “built in distribution.” I find it funny that people are always looking for shortcuts to content promotion.

If you’re using Medium because of it’s built in distribution — you’re likely not seeing any benefit from a traffic perspective from blogging here vs. another platform.

If you suck at content promotion on another platform, you’re probably still seeing dribbles of traffic here. The solution is to get better at content promotion, not to switch platforms.

I think Medium is a great platform for writing but I would never use it to run my company blog.

Here are the reasons why I wouldn’t use Medium for my site:

• I don’t truly own my traffic. SEO traffic generated goes to Medium instead of my own site where I can control the user experience.
• It doesn’t have integrations with tools that can help with conversion — therefore the traffic I’m generating is harder to monetize.
• It doesn’t help my site’s domain authority when I generate links.
• If for some reason Medium ever shut down, I’d be SOL on all of the content I’ve written.

My advice is to always own assets that are integral to your business.

Things that I think Medium is really useful for:

• It’s a clean place to write content
• It’s a great place to write content that you want to pitch to publications. This is because when you’re sending an article, it’s not coming from a brand/company you’re associated with. Medium is now synonymous with “good content” — there are a lot of great writers here and it’s becoming a trusted resource.
• It’s incredibly simple to set up. Setting up this publication took all of 10 minutes.

Because of these reasons, we thought Medium was the perfect place to share these lighter thoughts with you.

We don’t really care about driving traffic to this content — it’s more for us and whomever wants to learn from our constant spewing of thoughts/ideas.

It’s not really integral to our business. More just a place for us to share random thoughts and ideas.

And I find that I’m writing a lot more because I don’t feel the pressure that I do with Grow and Convert.

Why we started writing about our agency on Medium instead of on Grow and Convert was originally published in Grow and Convert on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is how I feel like startup life is:

Monday: “We’re in way over our heads…”

Tuesday: “Wow, things are starting to fall in line again!”

Wednesday: “Why did I start this business?”

Thursday: “Woo Hoo!!! We landed another customer!”

Friday: Can we handle another customer? Ahh there’s so much work to do, how am I going to complete it all?? Help!

Every day of every week is a roller coaster of emotions.

One day you feel like you’re in way over your head, and the next you overcome some challenge and feel like you’re on top of the world.

Here’s an example:

When we almost gave up on our business

A few months ago, when our course flopped (after we spent 4 months working on it), we nearly called it quits.

Yes, we had built a pretty sizeable audience of people who read our blog every month, but we couldn’t figure out how to monetize our business for it to be worth it to completely go in on it full-time.

We tried various forms of training, and while we were landing “brand name” startups, we weren’t making that much money.

After our course launch week, both Devesh and I were having serious thoughts about what to do next because we were hoping to make at least $40k on our first launch, and made a little over 1/4 of that. :(

I remember getting a phone call from Devesh saying “I can’t spend anymore time on Grow and Convert because I have to focus on the business that pays my bills.”

For those that don’t know, Devesh also runs the agency GrowthRock. It makes good money.

Devesh was thinking about selling his stake in Grow and Convert to me because he was “over it.” He was tired of spending time on a business that wasn’t making money and sacrificing potential income for a business that did.

But after a couple days of self-reflection, he came up with the idea to do this agency. At first I was apprehensive of the idea because it sounded like a ton of work and I didn’t think Devesh was serious being he already had another agency, but he insisted we at least test the idea.

Two weeks later, we had our first client and were off to the races. Longer version of that story here.

I wanted to share this story because it shows how hard a startup is, one day you can go from thinking you’re going to quit, and one small tweak in the business can lead to success.

We went through over 4 iterations of our business to get to the point we’re at now. Here’s the service we offer.

Fast forward to today, we landed our 3rd agency client after 1.5 months with no sales team and no outbound sales.

We started working with our first 2 clients on June 1st.

After we landed our first 2 clients, we agreed to not take on anymore clients for at least a month so we could make sure we nailed the operations and execution for them.

On the operations side, we’ve had a bunch of ups and downs.

We underestimated how much time goes into onboarding a client, and we had hoped to get 2 pieces out for our clients in the first month. But unfortunately, scheduling interviews, going through revisions, doing the background research on the client, and getting approvals, takes longer than we thought. So we’ve over communicated where projects are at with our clients, and we’ll have 4 posts created and promoted for each client in month 2.

We’ve also had some pieces come back from our writers that we weren’t happy with and have had to redo them. Part of the process… which again pushed some timelines.

However, most of the operations issues are solved now, which laid the groundwork for us to be able to keep scaling.

And today, I’m excited to announce that we signed our 3rd client. :)

Devesh also shared a couple of days ago how we were bummed we hadn’t published anything yet (for the reasons we stated above).

But today, we published our first piece and I’m damn proud of it.

Take a look at this beauty: How Much Do Freelance Developers Cost Around the World? (2017)

Here’s a screenshot from inside the post:

Devesh analyzed data from 5,302 freelance developers, hired an excel expert to make this crazy pivot table thing and analyze the raw data, then hired a designer to create these nice data visuals to make it easy for people to read, and then wrote summaries of each section.

Now that we have the first piece published, and that we landed our 3rd client, we’re feeling on top of the world!

That is, until the next set of challenges arise tomorrow.

Startup life.

The ups and downs of starting an agency was originally published in Grow and Convert on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s been one full month. I have to send out month two’s invoice. I can understand why they want to have some conversations about our publication schedule for July.

Maybe they are thinking our plan should be “Actually publish something in July.” I agree with them. That would be a good idea.

But…

I’m not that worried.

We should be able to publish 4 pieces for each client in July. Despite me going to Europe for a week (yes!). We’ve done the leg work in June to figure out what “good content” for each company should be (Most companies fuck this up royally, which means it doesn’t matter if you publish 15 posts in one month, when they all suck, you’re back at square one.)

We’ve carefully figured out who in the world we should be writing for, sourced stories, interviewed some heavy hitters including Rand Fishkin of Moz (that was cool), key engineers in companies like Cars.com and DirecTV, and even done some cool data analysis to build a piece that analyzes freelance developer rates from around the world.

All this is a hell of a lot better than the normal “10 ways to…” or “7 things that…” horseshit that other companies are putting out.

Plus our superpower has yet to be unleashed: content promotion. Once we publish the first piece, we’ll set it loose like my dog Tubbs in front of a bowl of Benji’s left over chicken and rice (which can legit be Benji’s lunch for 2 to 14 days in a row).

So, this client anxiety should drop considerably in the next week when the traffic starts flowing.

As will mine. Cause it’s one thing to sell something. It’s another to sell it and have the customer say “Wow that was worth every penny.”

You can get rich without that “wow” moment, but, in my book, that makes you a charlatan.

We don’t want to be charlatans, we want to build an honest, great business.

So a lot hinges on what happens in July. I think we’ll do well for them, but we could fall flat on our faces and things could get really rocky after that.

Let’s see.

Maybe we should publish something was originally published in Grow and Convert on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

But that’s what Devesh and I did.

While it seems funny in hindsight, it’s the opposite perspectives that challenge each other to be our better selves.

In 2015, we happened to show up at a marketing dinner, and the conversation started something like:

What do you do?

Me: I run marketing at a startup, my speciality is in content marketing.

Devesh: Oh interesting, I run a conversion optimization agency, I’ve been writing a lot of content, but haven’t been getting any business from it. I don’t think VPs read content online.

Me: Of course VPs read. You just have to know the content that they’ll be interested in.

Long story short…

This ended up being the topic of conversation for an hour. At the time, I hated the job I was in, and was thinking about leaving to do my own thing.

I told Devesh, “I think I’m going to go to Asia because it’s cheap to live, and then I’m going to write a book on content marketing.”

He replied, “That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. If you know content marketing so well, then why don’t you just start a blog, and grow it, to show people that you actually know content.”

I said, “That’s a great idea! Why don’t you do it with me?”

And that’s how Grow and Convert was born.

The reason that I wanted Devesh to start Grow and Convert with me is because he had the skills that I lacked.

Devesh has a PhD in Material Sciences, specializes in conversion optimization, is super process oriented, can do weird things in excel that I don’t even know about, he creates growth models, he’s good at presenting on camera, he’s an extremely good editor, a great interviewer, he hates promoting content, he hates going to events, he likes doing contracts, accounting, he likes sitting in his office and working, he’s married, he has a dog, he’s never worked a W2 job in his life…

Then myself, I have a bachelor's degree in integrated marketing communications, I only build process when it breaks, my superpower is driving quality traffic and awareness to sites, I hate excel and everything about it, I don’t like getting in the weeds in analytics, I’m bad at presenting on camera (don’t let Devesh make impressions of me), I don’t like editing, I’m good at promoting content, I’m a big extrovert and love networking, I hate contracts, legal, accounting, I’m single, I don’t have any animals, my whole career has been in W2 jobs besides one failed startup…

Essentially we’re complete opposites, but that’s what makes the partnership work.

My first startup failed because my business partner and I were so similar. We couldn’t divide and conquer. We always wanted to do the same work.

This startup works because we think differently, like doing opposite tasks, and we make each other better at our jobs by approaching things from different perspectives.

Our responsibilities at Grow and Convert

I once saw in a Reddit thread someone comment that someone didn’t know what Devesh did for Grow and Convert. Largely, that’s likely because my name is the one that’s on most of our posts, I’m usually the one responding to comments, promoting content from our social accounts, networking with people, doing interviews, etc.

But I want to share all of the stuff that Devesh does behind the scenes that you may not see.

First of all, we wouldn’t have this business without Devesh — because one of the first things he said was:

“So what’s your process around content marketing?”

I said, “I don’t know, I don’t have one…”

Since we’ve worked together, we’ve come up with a repeatable process around content marketing. That wouldn’t have happened without him forcing us to figure out a process.

When it comes to writing content, oftentimes what will happen is that I’ll write an outline of an article and send it to Devesh. He tells me my post is horrible, then gives me really good feedback, then the post becomes good, and then we publish. Just because his name isn’t on an article, doesn’t mean he didn’t put just as much effort if not more than me into every piece.

In terms of our site, he’s led all of the direction in design (his business used to be called Devesh Design). He has designer that works in his other agency GrowthRock that we use for projects and freelance developers that we get to code any assets that we need.

Devesh handles all of our contractual and legal paperwork (for both G&C and Wordable), as well as manages our finances and account.

Devesh handles all of the copywriting, CTA placement and creates all of the sales pages on our site.

Devesh is our Head of Sales. Any lead that comes in, Devesh follows up with them and usually can predict when it’s someone we’ll close.

Devesh is our project manager, he somehow got me to start using Trello, and as of recently I’m actually updating it.

Pretty much without him, nothing would get done. He’s great at coming up with a process and executing on it.

On my side of things, I handle a lot of the strategy work for our site and for our clients. So when we’re on a sales call and someone asks something related to strategy, I usually step in and explain how we’d do content strategy specific to their company.

I developed the user research process (and it got much improved by Devesh’s analytical skills).

I do a lot of the content ideation.

I do a lot of the outreach to influencers for stories.

I hire and manage our team writers.

As of recently, I write all of the emails for Grow and Convert. Devesh used to write them and they were sent from my name (but as of 5 or so months ago, I started trying to write more).

Once an article is published on our site, I’m the one who’s promoting it, pitching it to journalists, contributing in roundup posts, engaging in slack communities, and networking with people I think could add value to our business, etc.

Essentially, you’ll see I’m responsible for all of the growth activities and Devesh is responsible for conversion related activities.

Hence why the Grow and Convert partnership works.

What a good business partnership looks like was originally published in Grow and Convert on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In particular, neither company is “systematized”. In other words, neither can run on their own without their owner(s). So really, I have two jobs, both of which take a lot of time.

That means today, like many Mondays, is a lot of little tasks…a lot.

• Checking on AB tests waiting to be finalized
• Answering client questions about AB tests
• Asking clients to approve AB tests
• Thinking through feedback and strategy on AB tests
• Helping a new hire walk through user testing videos

Then for Grow and Convert:

• Finalizing one content piece and sending to client for approval
• Interviewing one person for another content piece
• Discussing how the interview should be morphed into a story
• Interviewing a second person for a content piece
• Replying to feedback from client on content piece

And then sales and marketing tasks for both businesses:

• Talking through a content partnership with another agency
• Responding to inbound leads via email and phone
• Putting final edits on a blog post

Anyone who has run a service business (e.g. an agency) knows this is not sustainable. If the owner is doing all of this, the owner really just has a glorified job, not a real business.

But here’s what I’m realizing…

The root of this problem seems to be pricing.

If you price your service such that you don’t have margin to hire others to do the day to day work (“working in the business”), then you, the owner, will have to do it. Then you won’t have time to work on the business.

I really do think it’s this simple. If you have enough margin, this problem does go away. (Just hire someone awesome to do the day to day work.)

But none of this is black and white. It’s not “do I have the margin or not”. The real life situation is more like:

“I have some margin, but if I eat into it too much by hiring people, I’m taking a huge risk. What if I lose one client and then I don’t have much left over?”

This is a legit problem. We’ll discuss it next time.

Building in scalability to a service was originally published in Grow and Convert on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.