SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
$500k in ARR with team of 4 helping consultants manage their business with SaaS dashboards
12 Dec 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com.
Guys, this company, MyLands.co, helps consultants build a better business doing $40,000 a month right now on revenue from 800 customers up from just $8,000 a month exactly a year ago when he closed a $400,000 pre-seed at a $10 million cap. So very capital efficient here. Team of four now today as he's looking to scale. He knows what he's doing.
Built out the Uber operation down in Miami before launching his own consulting company. So then built this to basically drink his own champagne, eat his own dog food. Scaling fast now.
Chapter 2: How did the guest transition from Uber to consulting?
We'll see what happens next. Hey, folks. My guest today is Bradley Jacobs. After four and a half years of launching and scaling businesses at Uber, he built his independent consulting company up to $25,000 a month using just 25 hours of his week. He then founded MyLance to help you work for yourself, whether full-time consulting or alongside a full-time job. It's called MyLance.co.
Bradley, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. Let's do it. So the real question is, are you still at Uber or did you quit and you're consulting full-time now?
I definitely quit. I quit in 2018. I consulted full time. And then now I run MyLance.
That's amazing.
Chapter 3: What frustrations led to the creation of MyLance?
Okay, so what were some of the things when you were running your consulting business that frustrated you where you were like, I got to build code for this and eventually launch Lance?
It was more about all the backend for my business. It was bookkeeping. It was taxes. It was health insurance. It was lack of a community. It was where my next lead came from. It was having a website. It was invoicing proposals, contracts. I mean, I could go on. There's a lot that I was missing and people need that support.
Yeah. So how do you price today? Is it like a percent of invoices folks put through you or is it a flat SaaS fee or something else?
It's flat subscription.
Chapter 4: How is MyLance priced for consultants?
We don't want to take a cut of your invoice. We don't want to take a cut of your project. That's for you. Pay us a platform fee and you can build your business on top of us.
That's awesome. Now, how do you upsell the platform fee? Is it feature-based upselling, seat-based, GMV-based upselling? How do you do that?
Yeah. Right now, it's just a flat fee. We just have one tier right now. That'll change in the future as we add more features. But it's just one flat fee now. We do have other options. We have a coaching program that helps you add $10K per month to your consulting business. And we also take over your taxes and bookkeeping right now.
So we have additional offerings, but the basic platform is just one fee.
That's great. What is the average customer paying per month today?
They're paying on average $50 a month.
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Chapter 5: What strategies did the guest use to acquire customers?
Okay, very cool. And I guess backstory here, what year did you officially, I guess, quit the consulting company, go all in on Lance?
So I kept consulting while I was starting MyLance in 2020. And that way I didn't have to raise a pre-seed round for the company. I could pretty much fund my life with my consulting business. And I actually still have a consulting client on the side today. I keep my skills sharp and practice what I preach through consulting. So, um, yeah, it's been a part of my life and probably always will be.
I love that. Okay. So, um, that gets going. When did you get your first paying customer on my lands? That wasn't yourself. First paying customer was March, 2020. March, 2020. Okay. And then fast forward to today. How many customers? Yeah, we have over 800 customers today. Wow.
Chapter 6: How does the guest utilize LinkedIn for growth?
Okay. So tell me that story. I mean, how do you go? That's, that's not small growth. How do you go find 799 other people to pay?
Yeah, great question. A lot of content for us. There's a huge educational component to how do I find my first client? How do I price my services? How do I hone my niche? What kind of a contract template do I need? And everything in between. And so I've been publishing content almost every day now on LinkedIn for the last few years. I have built up a little bit of a following there.
SEO has been pretty good for us. But really the biggest thing has been word of mouth. I think anytime you... You create a good product that people like, they organically tell their friends about it. So we have a referral program, but even before that, we grew a lot from word of mouth.
Interesting.
Chapter 7: What challenges does the guest face in scaling the business?
Yeah. 13,400 followers on LinkedIn. And I guess, are you writing all of your own content for LinkedIn or someone else writing this for you?
I write all of it. I will say that I wrote a lot of it when I came up with the original accelerator program. So that helps you launch your business. So I wrote out pages and pages and pages of content for our customers there. And that will go and I'll pluck some content from there sometimes just to help if I need to write something quickly. But I love writing. I actually really enjoy it.
I carve out time in my day. I can tell.
When I look at your activity feed on LinkedIn, look, what I'll say is some of these posts only get six likes and two comments, but then others really take off and get 50 likes and 20 comments. But the point is, when I look at the timestamps on this, you're very consistent. You post once every two days. I'm still scrolling backwards. I'm three weeks back now.
You post once every two days, almost religiously.
I do. I actually try and post every day.
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Chapter 8: What are the guest's future plans for MyLance?
I will miss a day here and there. And I don't really post on the weekends unless I get ambitious on a Friday and schedule everything. But I do. I have it on my to-do list every day. It doesn't take me long. I can write a post in about 15 minutes. So I just bang them out every day.
Well, it's interesting to try and reverse engineer why some of these do well and get 88 engagements and others don't do well and only get two. And I just feel like so much of this is copywriting, you know?
It's the hook, if I'm really being honest. It's that hook at the beginning. And then the content needs to be good from there. But my best ever post was actually a post about Uber Eats in Miami. I launched Uber Eats in Miami and I wrote what it was actually like to launch that business. I wrote that in 10 minutes, like lying on my bed one day, and I got 188,000 impressions.
And it was just shocking to me. But when I look back at that post... the hook was really, really strong and the content really resonated. So you still can't dictate what's going to go viral versus not or what's going to do well, but you can at least have an idea of what works.
There. Yeah. Talking about the SEO strategy, right? So there are much bigger companies than you that probably dominate the big keywords. How do you find your niche in terms of what to write SEO content around?
It's the typical long tail keyword strategy. And I will be honest, we wrote content that our customers were asking about. I didn't go do all this content, this keyword research. I just wrote what I'd heard a million times in my customer interviews and my sales calls in our community. And then I saw what started to rank higher.
And then we wrote more rich posts around that content that was already starting to do well. And yes, there's many keywords that we're nowhere close for that we could be or that are in our niche. But as you said, these big companies, they've been doing it for years. And so we have a long way to go. But long tail keywords are definitely the move. And then you need those backlinks, right?
So we're actually working on getting a piece in Fortune. right now. And that should help our domain authority a lot and help us increase up the Google.
It looks like that you're also doing something smart and that you're doing member profiles. If you're bragging about someone, they're way more likely to backlink to you, right?
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