Scaling past $8K MRR: Lessons Learned in 2023
Wait... it's already 2024?
Just the other day it felt like I was driving home full of apple pie after celebrating Thanksgiving, yet everywhere I look I see “January” and not “December” for the current month.
2023 felt like it flew by... but at the same time, it felt incredibly long, like two years were stitched together.
I think quitting my day job as a product manager to pursue Centori full-time might have something to do with it…
When the year began, I wouldn’t quite believe it if you told me where I would end up. Let’s wind back to January 2023:
- The economy was teetering on the verge of a recession
- Tech began a year-long series of layoffs
- Everywhere I looked there was a new SEO obituary posted thanks to AI
- My wife and I went to London and Paris (where I purchased a journal that I am still using today; page 1 has a "plan to work on Centori full-time")
By May I handed in a 4-week notice, ramped down at my full-time job, and prepared to make the jump to working full-time on Centori.
There’s something to be said for a full-time salary with health insurance, a 401k, and coworkers; but in the past 6 months of being an entrepreneur full-time, I can say with confidence that I wouldn’t go back - at least not at this time.
What's Centori?
For a while, I struggled to explain what Centori is, and while I don’t think I can do it perfectly (still working on that elusive product-market fit), I feel much more confident now: We provide SEO coaching to help you build a strategy, and software to help you manage it.
Our software helps you:
- Find keywords to target
- Track your Google Search Console performance for them
- Get AI-powered insights for your SEO strategy
Software on its own is fine, but at the end of the day, any SEO tool will give you similar (or the same) data. With Centori, you get a community of SEO experts to ask for help, group coaching calls each month for live instruction, and one:one coaching in our higher tier.
Where am I now?
I’m not about to go all #buildinpublic and post our Stripe screenshots - but I am incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made this past year (and grateful to those who helped make it happen).
- We broke 20 customers
- We took 12 companies through our SEO strategy program this year
- We cracked $8K MRR
- We more than doubled our revenue from last year (and broke six figures)
- We have over 500 subscribers on our newsletter (up from 293 at the start of the year)
There is so much further to go (isn't there always), but it's been a humbling year.
How I got here & what I learned
As I scrapped things together nights and weekends, all I ever wanted was to make Centori my full-time job.
Now that I am living that dream, I realize that being a full-time entrepreneur isn’t the walk in the park those self-help books disguised as business books make it out to be.
It's hard.
Not having a schedule is hard. Knowing my income could double or halve next month is hard. Doing all this alone is hard. Creating something from scratch with little references is hard.
I love it, but I wish I had a firmer grasp of that before I put my notice in. Here are the top lessons I learned this year that allowed me to quit my full-time job.
Sales is (probably) the most important thing
If you aren't selling, then you aren't building a business. Being successful at sales isn’t about having a magic sequence to enroll emails into. It’s about telling a captivating story, communicating value, building a relationship, and above all - understanding the customer’s problem and clearly demonstrating you can solve it.
My favorite sales resources are:
Building a business is a lot more than building a product
I quickly learned that building a stable and steady business is going to take more than a good product and getting the hang of sales. That helped Centori crack six figures, but getting to seven (and employing people…ahhh) will take much more.
Design matters... a lot
Design is the difference between a professional-looking website/app and an amateur one. If you can't design, buy a toolkit or hire a designer. It's 1000000x better than trying to do it yourself.
If there's one thing I could have done differently, it would be to hire a designer much earlier in the process.
Building an audience makes it easier to launch
Building an audience makes it infinitely easier to launch a product. A social media following can be great, but there's platform risk there (just look at X/Twitter). You own an email list, so invest in it and grow it. I used to doubt the effectiveness of email marketing, but when done well it seriously works.
One key: don't fall into the two common extremes of selling constantly or never selling. Create value and keep your emails short; you're not pitching every email, you are building your authority and establishing yourself as an expert to your list.
Build products that solve problems
Focus on building products that solve problems, not just products that sound good. I spent years thinking of product ideas that sounded good but it was not until I focused on solving problems that things really took off to a point where I could commit full-time.
This is a trap even large funded companies fall into. The best way to avoid it is to regularly talk to your customers. Centori started as just a software company, which made standing out from the hundreds of other software companies quite difficult. After putting my ego down and listening to people's problems, I realized that there needed to be a human element (coaching) for my customers to be successful.
Centori isn't just a SaaS business. It's also not just a services business. It's "software with a service"
Manage money strategically
Manage your finances strategically. I follow the "Profit-first" methodology - for every dollar that comes in:
- I pay myself 50%
- Allocate 30% to expenses
- 15% is set aside for taxes
- 5% goes to profit (which serves as a bonus pool, and future investment pool).
This forces you to spend your money wisely... and pay yourself!
Shipping features regularly helps too
I spent a lot more time this summer and fall paying attention to what our customers needed and building new features for the product. Many of these are things I wish I had in other SEO tools, and I’m thrilled to see them go live:
- An SEO opportunities report
- A "winners and losers" report
- A revamped keyword research experience
- Page lists and page list reports
- An upgraded website crawler
- A new nav menu
- We back up and store Google Search Console
- AI summaries to all Google Search Console reports
What I’m most excited about this year
It’s easier to write this in the comfy confines of a notebook no one will ever read, putting things in a blog post is much more intimidating.
If you asked me how this year would go, I’d tell you I probably would still be at my job and may have to face the music and wind things down with Centori or pivot.
Looking ahead to this year, I imagine there will still be a few more pivots/evolutions, but I’m looking forward to what a full year of working full-time on Centori can bring.
The platform has evolved so much in the past few months alone, so going into this year I want to make as big an impact as possible. I’ve been fortunate to work with nearly 100 companies over the last few years, I think it’d be pretty cool to help 100 more this year alone.
That’s my goal, and North Star. Here’s to an update at the end of 2024 where I can share that I actually helped 200.