This Content Agency Will Change The Game for Founders

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of The Crazy Ones. This week I had a business idea, and it's a business idea that I think could be really fun and it could be really profitable really quickly. It's a business idea that I think could get to be on pace to cash flow $1 million a year within the first year of running the business. If that's not a hook, I don't know what is. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pitch the business to you. And my hope is that this pitch will do a few things. First, it will help you understand all of the ways that I look at a business opportunity, every angle from the challenges to the opportunity to the thesis to kind of what's the go-to-market and what's the, the plan to get there. Second, it's going to allow you to see how I storytell a business opportunity in real time. Maybe it'll inform how you pitch your business to investors or just storytelling and selling in general. And the third is it will force you to think critically about this opportunity. I want you to be an active listener in this episode, and I want you to have questions and pushback as you're listening to my pitch. And so what I want you to do is listen to this episode, listen to it actively, and have questions and pushback. And once you have those things, I want you to send me an email to thecrazyones@morningbrew.com and we'll talk through all of it. This episode, the idea here is that it is the start of a conversation with you. It's not just a one-way dialog. So let's do this thing. What's up, everyone? I'm Alex Lieberman. Yo, this is Jesse Pujji. And this is The Crazy Ones. I had this idea because I've noticed a lot of agencies recently, agencies that you work with offshore video editors in India, in the Philippines, where they basically help you create TikTok content, Instagram content, even YouTube content. And I just thought there's another angle to this content agency that really hasn't been explored nearly enough. So the business idea, very simply, is a content agency for founders of startups and business executives. And more specifically, it's an agency that focuses on founders and execs' text-based content, a.k.a. Twitter, LinkedIn and newsletter, and we'll leave the other stuff to the other agencies. So IG, TikTok, those things can be worked on by other folks. Here's the thesis of my business idea. The first major point of my thesis, why I think this is an interesting opportunity, is I believe that founders and executives are starting to realize and are just going to continue to realize the importance of humanizing their company and their brand through social content. But they're not necessarily going to have the time or the skill to create it. So why do I think that founders and executives are going to realize the importance of this? First, building an audience is only getting more valuable as the internet becomes noisier. It's easier than ever to create content, which means that it is harder than ever to stand out. So the cost of attention is higher. Also, if you want to get in front of your audience through paid marketing, paid marketing is way more expensive today than it was last year and the year before that and the year before that. The second reason that I think founders and executives are waking up to this is we have seen proven value of founders or solopreneurs investing in their content and in their brand via text and having amazing things occur from it. One example is a buddy, Sahil Bloom. He basically focused for a year on creating content on Twitter, and he was just relentless about quality content. around mental models, how complex things work, financial topics. And in doing so for, let's call it, 2 years straight with a thread or 2 threads per week, Sahil was able to raise a venture capital fund. He was able to sign a book deal, and he now owns the pieces of several businesses because of his engaged audience that he now has. Another example for you is this guy, Nick Huber. Nick Huber has the Twitter handle Sweaty Startup. He is known as the guy with a huge self-storage business. So his business is owning a portfolio of self-storage facilities around the country. Nick has attributed, I think, 95% plus of all of his investors in his self-storage business, which now I think is valued around $100 million. The vast majority of his investors he got through creating content on Twitter about his self-storage business and how to evaluate self-storage. storage deals and when he decides to sell properties, etc. One more example for you, and this one's going to hit close to home. My co-host Jesse Pujji. Jesse has his startup studio that's called GatewayX. He has Growth Assistant, he has Unbloat, he has Kahani Growth Assistant, which is his marketing assistant business where he basically has offshore assistants who help with different marketing tasks. Work with companies that need that help. My understanding is that Jesse got a very significant portion of his customers, especially his initial customers, from creating threads about this exact topic on Twitter. So all this to say, it has been proven that tactical content that has a very clear goal in mind and a very clear content niche in mind leads to ROI where it is truly measurable. The third reason I think founders are waking up to this is that content creates leverage for founders. It allows them to be the mouthpiece for their business so that their company can be their own PR versus rely on PR companies. It allows founders and businesses to interact with their customers, and they can actually use content they create to create products and businesses because they can get recommendations, feedback. They can run tests with audience that they have. And also by creating content, it attracts like-minded or like-interested individuals, which can lead to deal flow if you're a venture capitalist or partnerships, investors or customers. If you're a founder or book deals if you're a writer. So that's the first major part of this thesis, is that founders and executives are waking up to the importance of creating content and building a personal brand, which I hate the phrase personal brand. It needs to be rebranded as something else. It feels so old school. So they're waking up to the value of it, but they don't necessarily have the time or the skill set to actually execute on it. The second big idea around this thesis, which I shared earlier, is there has been a ton of emphasis placed on short-form video agencies that create TikTok or Instagram Reel content for people by farming out editing offshore. And I think that's because there's a lot of sexiness and excitement around short-form video right now. But I feel as though text-based platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, which, to be honest, for founders and for business professionals, probably have higher ROI of generating revenue or partnerships or investor dollars. I think these platforms have been forgotten because they're not considered as sexy. So from my perspective, it's pretty evident that creating content and building a mini content empire as a founder or an executive is important. So then the next obvious question is, why doesn't everyone do it? 3 major reasons. The first is time. At the end of the day, creating content is looked at as a nice-to-have by founders and not a need-to-have. The need-to-have is running your business. Or setting your strategy or managing your team, which it should be. But my view is that you can turn content into a need to have, but you can't rely on the fact that founders are going to believe it's a need to have from day one, so they won't dedicate time to it. The second major reason that everyone doesn't do it is a skills gap. Even if a founder or an executive believes deeply in the value of creating content, they don't necessarily have the skills to make it worth their time. Creating content and running a business could not be more different in terms of the skills that they require. And the third major reason that founders or executives do not dedicate time to content is sometimes it can be hard to measure, especially if not done intentionally. Even if a founder believes in the value of creating content, they view it as a long-term investment in brand building that won't drive tangible results or measurable ROI. And so they're not willing to take a bet on something that you can't evaluate the performance of. By the way, what I'll say is all of these reasons make total sense. But here's my rebuttal. What if— what if you could give founders their time back while they still have the ability to create content? And what if founders didn't have to rely on their own skills to create content on the internet and build their brand? And what if you could set tangible goals that you can consistently measure against as you invest in creating content? Would you do it then? That is my pitch to founders, and that's what I want to create— an agency that lets founders and executives have the best of both worlds: build a brand while building a company. Here's how the process would work with founders. Step 1, I would understand what are the founders' unique experiences, knowledge, and stories that would act as the foundation of the house that is their content brand. 2, I would understand what are their specific or measurable goals that they would want to get from their content or brand. Another way to say this is I would go to founders and I would ask very simply, if I charged you $5,000 a month or $60,000 a year to build your brand and run your content, what would have to happen that would make you say that the investment is an absolute no-brainer and you actually feel like you're ripping me off as the agency? I would want that answer from every single executive that I work with. Third, I would set up a content strategy or plan based on the founder's unique experiences and knowledge, as well as the goals that they've stated to me. Fourth, I would execute on the strategy by working with great content creators that I've trained up. And fifth, I would then tweak the strategy periodically based on performance and how things are tracking to the one goal that we've discussed that truly matters to the founder or to the executive. So that's the game plan. Now let me put on a different hat. Let me put on the hat of not the founder or the storyteller or the seller to my audience, but of the skeptic. So here's the hat of the skeptic. I'm going to ask, what are the holes or challenges in this business idea? And I would say that there are 3 things that immediately come to mind. The first is that this business requires very high-skilled labor. What I mean by that is There are a lot of other agency businesses. So, you know, you have Jesse's growth assistant business. You have— we had Jonathan Swanson on the podcast. You have Athena, which is his executive assistant business. You have the businesses I described before where you have editors in India or the Philippines making short-form social content. And I would say part of the benefit of those agencies versus the one I'm describing is it's relatively low-skilled labor. And what I mean by that is the jobs that have to be done by the employee or by the, the freelancer or by the offshore assistant. They don't require that much training or skills to execute on the tasks. And what that means is your time and money spent on training people and your time and money spent on finding the labor should be less than my idea. Now, I can flip that. Into a positive by saying once you are able to find the labor and train them up, the process of doing that actually becomes a moat to this business because it creates friction for someone else to have to recreate that, recreate this. So you know how I'm thinking about finding high-skilled labor. I think that there are a lot of people that are actually very high-quality content creators who are being severely underpaid in their industry. And actually this offers a great opportunity for them to make supplemental income on top of their job. The people I'm going to be looking for are offshore English speakers, so people who are kind of expats in other countries where the cost of labor is lower. The second, and I think this is actually where the biggest opportunity is, is copywriters and creatives. So people who write ads for ad agencies or brands, I think generally it's an underpaid group of people. And so that's who I'd go after. And the third is college students that are studying English or comms or advertising and want to get real-world professional experience. So that's the first hole or challenge in the business and how I think about it. If I was asked, what are you going to do about this? The second is someone could easily argue, as I said before, that it takes a while for results to happen. And I think that could be the case depending on the goals you set. So let's just say you set a goal of I'm a real estate agent. I want to create content around doing real estate deals or evaluating properties, and I want it to lead to $50,000 worth of commissions for it to be worth it. That will take some time to achieve. I don't know if it's a few weeks, a few months, a year. I don't think it'll take much longer than a year. But I think what you have to do is you have to be realistic about hitting that— the one goal that matters, but have intermediate goals. That provide your client a sense of how you are tracking. So to me, things like follower growth, things like engagement rates, things like DMs or replies that you're getting from people who are really enjoying your content, I think you have to very transparently provide that information to your clients on a regular basis, especially in the early days, and explain how this shows that you are tracking against your long-term goal of generating $50,000 in deals for them to maintain confidence in basically what you're pitching to them. Now, the third pushback, and this is the one I'm least clear on until I actually start pitching people and providing the service, is I could see someone saying this is a tough economic environment and no matter how hard you try, people will not invest in content or personal brand right now. While I don't agree with that because I actually think that people will be trying to generate revenue as much as possible and also to try to take control of things. Right? By building an audience, you put control over your audience in your hands versus in the hands of Facebook or another platform that you are renting audience from. First of all, if you create the right goals for someone and you achieve those goals, it will be impossible for them to say no because it will generate revenue for them if that is their goal. Or another way to do this, say I'm seeing a lot of pushback from clients on the pricing. I could think about what would it look like to offer the first month or 2 at a discount or at cost. So whatever it costs me to pay my content creator on the other side of the marketplace. I will offer my service to my client at that cost. I'll prove value and then I'll ramp up price once they see value and they feel like they've been de-risked in some way. So those are the pushbacks to the idea. And if you have other ideas of what holes or challenges with this business I may face, again, shoot me an email at thecrazyones@morningbrew.com. Okay. Let me just talk about the rough unit economics for a second. Again, I'm focusing on top of market, so I'm focusing on startup founders and probably like mid to late stage founders, and I'm focusing on executives, executives of Fortune 500 companies or like mid-market private equity size companies, my view would be I would charge clients anywhere between $5,000 to $10,000 a month or $60,000 to $120,000 a year. I know it sounds like a lot of money, but if you set the right goals and you choose goals based on the client's answer to the question, what would have to happen such that this amount of money is an absolute no-brainer? Then I am putting the power in my hands to execute on a content strategy to deliver those goals. And I know if I deliver those goals, they will feel like this was a no-brainer. So let's just say I charge a client $5,000 a month. I believe I could pay a writer $2,000 a month, and I'll explain to you why. Let's just say for $5,000 a month, a client gets one thread per week. So let's call that like a longer form post, and that can be posted on Twitter as a tweet thread. It could be posted on LinkedIn as a longer post. And even if we start a newsletter, maybe that could be an upsell. That's their weekly newsletter is that longer form post. And then let's just say the other 5 weekdays we do 1 shorter post each day. So that's 5 shorter posts a week. My assumption is 1 thread a week will take 1.5 hours for the content creator. That is 6 hours per month for the shorter posts. My estimate is that it'll take 30 minutes per shorter post. Since there are 5 short posts per week and it's 4 weeks a year, that's 20 short posts a month. So there's 4 threads a month, 1 per week, and 20 short posts a month, 1 every weekday. In total, that comes out to 16 hours per month of writer's work. So if I am paying a writer $2,000 a month and they are working for 16 hours on this client, that's the equivalent of them getting paid $125 an hour. Again, This is an oversimplification, but I wanted to just start running some back-of-the-envelope math. And so my goal, like I said earlier in the episode, would be to get to $1 million in cash flow in a year. So then I asked myself, what do I need to be doing in order— how many clients do I have to have to generate $1 million in cash flow a year? And the answer is pretty crazy when you're playing with this high dollar price of a product. You need only 27 clients. Let's say I'm charging $5,000 a month. Let's say again, it costs me $2,000 a month. So my margin is $3,000 a month. So my margin is $36,000 a year. At $36,000 a year to get to $1 million a year in cash flow, you only need 27 clients. So those are the, the quick unit economics on the business. Now I just want to share a few other things before I finish up. How am I going to validate this idea? Well, as of recording this episode, I've already kind of validated the idea. So what I did, I put out a tweet 2 days ago basically to see what would appetite be for this product. So I tweeted out and I put on LinkedIn the following. I wrote, if the following applies to you, DM me. First, you're a founder or an executive. Second, you believe deeply in building personal brand. Third, you don't have the time or skills to create content and grow your brand. And fourth, you'd pay $5,000 to $10,000 per month to have a skilled content creator build your personal brand? I put that out and within 24 hours, 25 people said that all 4 bullets apply to them. So that's when I was like, okay, there's something interesting here. Like if I'd got 0 responses, that would have been telling. If I got 5 responses, that would have been kind of like annoying because it would have been in between being very telling and not telling at all. So that was step 1 is validation of is it worth me putting any more thought into it? And any more thought means like me writing out a one-pager of the business and recording this episode that I'm recording now. Step 2 of validating is going to be me picking one person who I think is the perfect test client. So let's just say a founder of a business. The business is doing anywhere north of $10 million a year in revenue, and I'm going to set up the process to service their needs. So I'm going to be very hands-on with this first client. I'll go through the process myself of setting their content strategy and finding out their goals. I will go out and source a writer for them, and I'll make sure the writer's trained up. I will review all content that goes out the door. I will monitor performance on a weekly basis and make tweaks to the content strategy and how it's being executed. And I will do it just at cost. So I'll do it just at the cost of the writer that I find to prove the model. Once the model feels good, I'll understand how much my existing writer can handle, as in can they handle this one client or more than one client? And I'll go start sourcing other supply, as in other writers that can facilitate demand that I get through my go-to-market strategy very quickly. My go-to-market strategy is stupid simple. I've covered it in a past Crazy Ones episode. We'll link to it in the show notes so you can check it out. I basically go about things with the hub and spoke model. So I think about what are the distribution channels I have access to that get me in touch with the exact customer that I want. And the exact customer here I get again is a founder or an executive whose business is doing north of $10 million a year in revenue. And so using the hub and spoke model, One hub would be a text group that I'm in with 300 founders who sold their businesses and are either running a new business or they're looking for their next business or they're looking to build their brands. The second would be leveraging my own social accounts, so using my LinkedIn or my Twitter to create weekly threads around content strategy and building your own mini content empire. And then I would have a call to action at the end leading people to show interest in my agency. And that's how I'd start drumming up demand in the early days. And so that is my business idea, which is a content agency for founders and executives focused on their text-based content. Now, I would love to hear from you. Send me any questions or critiques about this business idea. Seriously, anything goes. I want my idea to be challenged. I will not take offense to anything. I want it to turn into a conversation with our listeners. Shoot me an email to thecrazyones@alexlieberman.com. At morningbrew.com. And also let me know what you think about this format of not only shorter episodes, but pitching business ideas and then analyzing them, because we haven't done this before and I'd be interested in knowing if you want us to do it in the future. As always, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.