SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I Generated $250M In Leads As A One Person Marketing Team
07 Nov 2022
Chapter 1: What event does the host discuss at the beginning of the episode?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool.
Chapter 2: Who is John Doherty and what companies does he run?
It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Please welcome John Doherty to the stage. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, everybody. So what is up with, I was just talking to Nathan. I'm like, what's up with the Virginia crowd? I'm from Virginia originally. I live in Denver now, but went to JMU, go Dukes, and I know got some Hokies in the crowd.
But my name is John Doherty. I'm the founder and CEO of two companies. One's called Credo. We help companies hire the right digital agency, marketing, design, development. The other one's called Editor Ninja. We're the design pickle of copy editing. So today, I'm going to talk with you about how I generated $250 million in leads for digital agencies as a one-person marketing team.
Before I start, I'm going to let you know about two things. Number one, I'm going to swear. I can't help it. I'm going to swear. If you're offended, I'm sorry. Number two, I talk fast. Do you think Nathan talks fast, fellow Virginia boy? I once said all 42 United States presidents at that time, this is like 2003, in 8.2 seconds. So... Let's rock and roll.
So let's see if I can even get this thing to work. All right, sweet. So over the next 20 minutes, I'm going to talk to you about a few things. I'm going to show you how I generated all these leads through, number one, traffic, number two, forms and conversions, and number three, follow-ups. The money is in the follow-up, so I'm going to show you how we optimize that process.
I have always believed I'm a relationship-driven person. I'm an introvert, but I love people. So I've built my company off of the relationships and organic traffic that I've been able to generate. I learned SEO. I did it professionally for a number of years via relationships that I built in the space. So early days, I love going to visiting customers.
This is just a goofy photo from visiting my very first customer in Provo, Utah. Back in 2016, I had a lot less gray in my beard. I blame the pandemic and having a three-year-old. But Over the years, we have grown Lead Pipeline substantially. So my business, we help brands, SaaS companies, find the right digital marketing agency to work with.
I've worked with over 400 software founders in the last 18 months. I was the marketing coach in Dan Martell's Growth Accelerator for about 18 months. So I've helped a lot of SaaS companies drive a lot of traffic and grow their business. So I went out on my own in end of 2015, I got laid off by Zillow. I was running marketing at a couple of their brands.
I ran marketing a couple of their brands, one at a time. And I got laid off from there and decided to work for myself, decided I didn't want a boss. So I went and I started basically slinging leads, basically selling leads. And in that time, we have done, as you can see, last year in 2021, we generated almost $100 million in digital marketing leads. I'm the only marketing person at the business.
So today I'm gonna show you exactly how we did that. There was some talk, I mean, two talks ago and then the one before that, there was a lot of talk about SEO and content. I'm gonna talk about that. I'm gonna give you guys some tips and tricks, give y'all some tips and tricks about what you can do as well. And I'm also going to dispel some myths for you.
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Chapter 3: How did John generate $250 million in leads as a one-person marketing team?
How do you get people to actually stick around, attend demos, et cetera, and come through? To start off with, number one, you need to get traffic to get leads. It seems pretty simple, but a lot of people forget this. And a lot of people, you'll go and you'll read indie hackers or something like that, and you'll see these stories.
How I generated 300,000 visits to my site in one month to my SaaS company. I'm going to show you that you actually don't need that if you have a high enough ticket offer. But first of all, play to your strengths. I get so many questions. I've gotten so many questions over the years about, well, John, what's the best way channel.
What's the number one channel I can do to generate traffic to my SaaS site? And I say, well, what are you good at? What do you love doing? What do you know? Are you a great designer? Facebook ads and Instagram ads are probably going to work pretty well for you as long as you have budget to actually buy those. Or you can make it super profitable and fund it that way.
Or you raise a bunch of money or take a bunch of debt. Use the one that plays to your strengths and experience. So for me, SEO, content, referral. I wrote my first novel at nine years old. I've been blogging since 2001. I can crank out a ton of content quickly. And so that's how I started building the company.
We chose, and you can, if you're an engineer, marketing via engineering, you got calculators, you got all sorts of ways that you can engineer growth as well. Product led growth is super popular these days. For us, we chose SEO and referral because it's what I knew. So I'm going to share a couple of hacks with you and show you how we did that. And then relationships.
If you're building a company in a space that you know, which is really, let's be honest, the best way to do it because you probably experienced those problems a bunch of times.
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Chapter 4: What strategies does John use to drive traffic to his website?
And then you've gone and you've built a software product. Um, you should also know people and relationships have been kind of my cheat code to building this company. Um, and I'll show you an example of that here coming up. So here's our organic traffic. This is back to 2016, 2017. We went from 1400 visits a month in November, 2016 to almost 10,000 visits in October, 2017.
We saw like a five, six X lift in leads. Um, in this time as well, that was that bump that you saw went from five and a half to seven point whatever in, uh, in 27 or sorry, 21 point whatever in, um, in 2017. But we just started generating traffic via SEO. Speaker three ago was talking about content as well at the bottom of the funnel. We kind of did it all through the whole funnel.
So how we did this was pretty simple. We did six things that I mentioned here. Number one, we wrote 100 plus blog posts. in about 12 months time targeting long-tail traffic. How do I? What is? How to do this thing? Then a big thing that we did, which honestly, if I could go back, this is one of the things that I would do again if I could do this business again.
We published an industry pricing guide because I was talking to companies and they said, well, John, how much do agencies cost? How much should I expect to spend? I was like, well, I don't have the answers offhand, but I had 100 plus agency profiles where they'd given me all that data.
So let's take that data, let's put it together, let's put it into a pricing guide that no one else had published. Now, a ton of people have them, but I did it first. And we've gone back, we've updated it every two years. And so we did it last year. So we have last year, 2021 data, 2019 data, 2018 and 2017, I believe. So this got us a ton of links.
If I could go back and do it all over again, I would basically publish a big guide like this with industry data that no one else has every quarter, every three months. And that's all the content I would do. I would do that and I would promote the shit out of it. and I'd rinse and repeat and do it again.
I learned this trick from Zillow where I worked for two years, where they've built that brand, built a publicly traded company off the back of making data that is opaque, transparent. So the more you can do that, give your customers the info that they need to make smart decisions, the more you're going to win. I leveraged my relationships.
So guest posting on Moz and Search Engine Land and all these other websites where I knew people, where I knew the editor in chief, I'd email them. They'd want me to guest post. They'd cover stuff that we put out. So great way to kind of leverage relationships that I had built. Conferences. I spoke at seven digital summit conferences in seven cities in seven weeks.
2017 i was on a plane like i mean literally every week i was going somewhere else in the country detroit kansas city not even fun places to be honest with you no no offense to anyone from kansas city i actually like kansas city um i didn't love detroit but uh so spoken a ton of conferences and then also was a podcast guest podcast by the way new guest blogging is the best way if you speak well and you have interesting things to share it's a great way you spend 30 minutes you build a backlink and everyone that listens to that podcast also hears you speak
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