Top 3 Priorities When Starting A New Business

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of The Crazy Ones. This is Alex, and I'm back with a Founder's Journal style episode. Today I'm going to talk about my content agency that I started because of an accidental tweet that created a business and now is a very real business that's very much really happening. So I'm going to talk through where the business is today, the priorities, the biggest roadblocks, the questions I'm thinking Most about, and my goal of this episode is for you to be able to see what kind of the thought process is around an early stage business and how things are prioritized, how things are worked on. And hopefully this helps inform how you're building your business. So let's hop into it. What's up everyone? I'm Alex Lieberman. Yo, this is Jesse Pujji. And this is The Crazy Ones. Don't you just love the sweet sound of success? Ah, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify. A tiny business dream becoming a reality. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you're selling vintage concert posters or handmade Fabergé eggs, Shopify makes selling online and in person as simple as saying cha-ching. Packed with industry-leading tools, Shopify gives you complete control over your business and your brand without having to learn any new skills in design or code. And get this, Shopify covers tons of sales channels. You can even sell across TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. New to selling? Shopify offers 24/7 help and an extensive business course library, so you'll feel supported every step of the way. Now it's your turn to get serious about selling and try Shopify today. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/crazyones, all lowercase. That's shopify.com/crazyones. shopify.com/crazyones. I've talked about this content agency a little bit in previous episodes, but if you don't know about it, I'm going to just provide a quick recap basically on March 21st of 2023, I put out a tweet. And you have to understand, when I tweet or when I post something on LinkedIn, I don't have this like rigorous strategy where I have like content pillars and then I'm putting out content and then I'm looking at my analytics and then I'm not doing all this stuff for my personal brand. I'm very much just firing from the hip. I fired a tweet from the hip, I think, because I saw some founder who had been focusing on their content brand over the last few months. They saw a ton of great results. They were seeing business results. And I was like, people are going to start waking up to the fact that when you build a trusted audience as a founder or as an executive, it has very valuable implications and creates amazing optionality for your business. And so the idea in my mind was like, there should be an agency that does this. So I literally just wrote, if the following apply to you, DM me. And I wrote, You're a founder or an executive. You believe deeply in building personal brand. You don't have the time or skill to create content and grow your brand, and you'd pay $5,000 to $10,000 per month to have a skilled content creator build your personal brand. That's it. And I ended up getting 75 DMs from executives, CEOs, founders, VCs saying, hey, I would love this service. I had demand for a business that literally I hadn't thought anything about 10 minutes prior. So then what I did is I did a follow-up tweet where I was like, oh shit, now I have people who want a ghostwriting service, but I don't have any ghostwriters because I'm not going to do it myself. So then I put out a tweet for ghostwriters saying, hey, I have 75 clients, I need writers for them, apply here to be a ghostwriter. And as of recording this, I have 234 ghostwriting applications. So all of a sudden, I now have a ghostwriting business. I have The amount of demand I have for this business can make it a multimillion-dollar business as is. And so now I'm kind of like, this is the definition of building the plane as it's flying. So I want to just give you some facts of where the business is today since putting out those tweets, what my priorities are, and kind of the biggest questions I'm asking myself as I'm building this. First of all, where we are today is this business does not have a name. It does not have a logo, except I did actually try an AI tool to create a logo and it did a fantastic job. It's— what was it called? I think it was, yeah, logoai.com. I came up with a name for the business. I don't think I'm going to end up using it because I think there are already businesses with this name. I was going to call it Niche Media, and the logo that it created is actually incredible, like way better than I could build myself. So that was pretty cool. But No logo, no name, not incorporated. So this business is very much just like an unofficial, unstructured, non-legal existing agency at the moment. Right now I have 3 clients purposefully. I have one copywriter handling all 3 of these clients. This copywriter is someone who I knew previously. It's someone who left their full-time job to copywrite full-time. These three clients are paying me between four thousand and eight thousand dollars a month. I give an introductory price to the initial client for four thousand just because I didn't care about profit at all. I passed through the entire cost of the client to the ghostwriter because my view is I just want to get the process down. And just so you have a sense of who these first clients are, first client I brought on is a public company CEO. He's the CEO of a microcap stock on the Nasdaq. He has a holding company of media and e-commerce businesses that he's acquired. He started working with the agency a week and a half ago. The next client is a VC-backed founder whose business provides SaaS or software as a service for flooring businesses. Very specific, but that gets me very excited about the niche that he can own. And the third client is an entrepreneur who owns a 7-figure self-storage data company. Wow. Basically, just the way I'm thinking through these clients is there is a short-term goal for all of these clients. So for the first one, it's being known as the digital holding company guy. For the second one, it's being known as the vertical software as a service guy. For the third one, it's being known as a self-storage expert. So my goal is to build up their authority in their niche over the first 3 months, and then in the second 3 months, or months 3 to 6, that's when I want to really start actually generating business results. For so for the first client, it's raising capital or finding businesses to buy since he has a holding company of companies they acquire. For the second client, the the flooring software guy, it's finding customers for his business. And for the third guy, still trying to figure it out, but it's likely going to be investors for his self-storage company. Other just level set on where we're yet we're at. As I said, we have 234 applications for copywriters. I have 30 applications for CEOs, which I'm going to talk about in a second, and I'm going to talk through priorities now. So I basically have 3 priorities that are my only focus for this business right now. Priority number one is to create a scalable, consistent, quality content process. Said differently, I want to make sure there is a system that allows me to have $1 million per year of cash flow, so of profit, which means $4,000 of profit per client per month, which means I need 28 clients. I need to make sure there's a content system that allows me to scale outside of this single ghostwriter. Like I said, I have 3 clients right now. They're all being serviced by this one ghostwriter. The reason I haven't taken on any more clients right now is I'm not trying to maximize profit at the moment. I am trying to make sure we build a a process of getting content from our client, creating great content, and creating leverage for our ghostwriter so that we can get to 28 clients minimum and the machine doesn't break. And so the things that I'm thinking about are what are going to be all the ways that we get great stories and great, rich, specific content from our clients for their niche? What are the, the different responsibilities we're going to offload from our ghostwriters and give to someone who acts as kind of a quote unquote account manager, because my concern is that there are only so many great ghostwriters in the world. And I would say historically ghostwriters could only service maybe 3 or 4 clients. And I want to create a more automated process such that ghostwriters can service 10 to 15 clients and the quality of the content doesn't change at all. And to me, you do that through someone serving as an account manager. You having more automations and leveraging AI for the initial drafting of client— of content. So that's priority number one. That's what I'm focusing probably 75% of my time on with this business is a scalable, consistent quality content process so we can get to 28 clients or $1 million in cash flow a year and the machine doesn't break at all. And I'd like for it to actually scale well beyond that. Second priority is having a bench of ghostwriters that can support the 28 clients. So this current ghostwriter I'm working with, I think, can support my first 5 clients. I want to have a bench of 8 other ghostwriters that I've vetted, that whose work I trust deeply, who kind of I can always pull from as I'm onboarding new clients. So if I get 8 ghostwriters I trust, then I know I can support 28 clients worth of demand. So that's priority number 2. And then priority number 3 is finding a CEO to run this business. You know, people wonder, like, you're just starting this business now. Why do you want to find a CEO? There's 2 reasons. One is because, as I've talked about in the past, I have an aspiration to start many businesses because I think that best suits the way my brain works and the diversity of experience that I want in building companies. The second reason is with this business, with this ghostwriting agency, I think there are 2 things that I am most uniquely qualified to do. I think the first thing is generating demand, meaning I think that just by me creating content on Twitter and LinkedIn, I can generate unlimited or close to unlimited demand from clients such that clients should never be the bottleneck in In fact, like supply or ghostwriters should be the bottleneck. And so to me, every minute I spend being the CEO and running this business is a minute I'm not spending creating content on Twitter or LinkedIn to generate demand. And then the second thing that I think I'm uniquely qualified to do is to stay super close to the product and the product being the content that we create for our clients and making sure that it continues to stay high quality at scale so that we're not churning through clients. Because if clients are only staying for a month or 2 months or 3 months, this entire business breaks down. And so I'm working on finding a CEO to run this business. I had 30 people apply. There are 7 who I am definitely interested in and I want to set up conversations with. You know, crypto conversations are too often about who's up and who's down and all of the drama on Twitter. But most conversations about crypto miss how it's going to change everything, which is why I recommend listening to the brand new podcast Validated from the Solana Foundation. Each week on Validated, host Austin Federa pushes aside hype cycles and financial advice to bring you conversations about the biggest ideas shaping the internet. Look, when it comes to blockchain, the thing people talk about most, the price, is actually the least interesting part, which is why Validated stands out because it explores the philosophical and technological questions about cryptocurrency, NFTs, DeFi, and beyond. All while sharing stellar perspectives from some of the world's leading Web3 journalists, analysts, and experts. So whether you're a technology enthusiast just beginning your crypto journey or already active in Web3, don't miss out. Follow Validated on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and let them know I sent you. Let's hear it for the little wins, like holding a yoga pose for a few seconds longer than last time and realizing your own strength. This summer, Think wants to help you accomplish even more by fueling your mind and body. Think is helping you transform positive thoughts into positive action. Boost your mental and emotional strength by joining their Stronger Than You Think series on Instagram and TikTok. Connect with other like-minded people through virtual yoga, guided meditation, and daily mindfulness practices, and treat yourself to thoughtful nutrition with Think's high protein bars. Follow the Stronger Than You Think series for your chance to be featured on Think's social channels. You could even win samples of new Think Bar flavors, high protein brownie crunch and keto chocolate peanut butter pie. Get started at strongerthanyouthink.info/thecrazyones. That's strongerthanyouthink.info/thecrazyones. Now, what are the biggest hurdles that I see coming up with this business? I'm going to talk about these hurdles in terms of priority or how soon I see us facing these as challenges. So the first big hurdle is a supply constraint. As I mentioned, there are a lot of ghostwriters and there are a lot of bad ghostwriters. The ghostwriters that I work with have to be great because if the content isn't great for our clients, then we have a high churn agency that's not actually a business. And so to me, I have to ask myself, How do I make sure that I have enough good ghostwriters? And I think the answer is I need to find good ghostwriters that the world hasn't yet found yet. Like, I need to unlock new supply that hasn't been found. And I have a few ideas for where I can find great supply. The other thing I have to do is to make sure that great ghostwriters who come and work through my agency don't churn, don't leave the agency and start their own business. And I think the way to do that is I have to provide enough of a service to these ghostwriters in terms of getting giving them enough leverage to handle way more clients than they could handle on their own, doing all the account management and the noncreative stuff that they don't enjoy doing, handling billing and all the back office stuff. Basically, my product for ghostwriters has to be robust enough that they view the agency's cut, my cut, fair and worth them giving up. So that's the first big challenge that I'm thinking about. The second one is client churn. Meaning content is inevitably a long game. I've been creating content on LinkedIn for the last 9 years. I've been creating content on Twitter for 4 years. It takes a lot of time for your content to drive ROI. And so I think the way that you avoid churning clients is first you need to set realistic short-term goals. You need to lock clients in for long enough contracts to be able to see any results. So I think Moving forward, 3-month contracts are going to be the minimum for clients. And I think we need to focus their content and their niche around intermediate-term tangible business goals that they want to hit. So said differently, for the person who has the vertical SaaS flooring business, the intermediate goal that I want to hit for him is to generate customers which are flooring retailers or flooring wholesalers that he can sell to. To me, if I can generate real business every single month that are— that the dollar value of that is orders of magnitude greater than what he pays me as an agency, he'll continue to stay with the agency. Now, I'd call the danger zone the first 3 months because I don't think it's realistic to generate a ton of business in the first 3 months. And so to me, it's about setting the right expectations of him becoming an authority in vertical SaaS and flooring and focusing more on impressions, DMs, replies, some of the softer metrics just in the first 3 months. And then I think the other way that you avoid client churn is you focus on high-dollar-value clients, meaning clients— if I generate business results for them, their customers have high lifetime value, so it's easy to generate enough revenue for them that it is way more than the $8,000 to $10,000 I charge them in a month. So mostly focusing on B2B clients. The third challenge, and this is the long-term challenge, but this is the ultimate goal with the agency, is my long-term vision for this agency is basically I'm getting paid to build up authority and audience for executives in their specific niches to drive business for them. But the long-term goal is, to me, the lottery tickets are I want to work with these founders and executives and VCs who I'm helping build audience for and launch new businesses for them. So the analog is like Nick Huber built up a huge audience on Twitter as Sweaty Startup. He was known for self-storage content and he was known for kind of like boring business content. And now he's launched 5 or 6 new businesses for his audience that he has on Twitter. He launched a cost segregation business. I don't even know what cost segregation is, but it's for his audience. He launched a property insurance business. He launched an offshore assistant business. And his audience on Twitter is the best marketing and distribution channel for all of these businesses. I want to build up the audiences for the next Nick Huber, and then I want to launch businesses off the back of their audiences. And I want to do it by testing ideas for businesses with their audience before actually launching them. So we mitigate the risk of there not being product-market fit. And, you know, I would say the challenge is, are clients going to be down to partner with me on businesses that we launch on top of their audiences versus just doing it on their own? And to me, the solve has to be— and I have to figure this out long term— which is I need to convince clients that audience building is really hard and it's important enough that they want an audience-focused co-founder, almost like you think about a technical co-founder involved in whatever business they launch off the back of their audience. So those are the 3 big challenges I'm thinking about as a business. Constraint of supply. So not having enough good ghostwriters, client churn in the early months, and clients being down to build businesses off the back of their audiences long term with me. Later today, I actually have a call with my ghostwriter and a potential CEO for the business. And they're going to be— we're going to be trying to refine the content process together because like I said, priority number one is building a sustainable, scalable quality content process. And so some of the questions that we're going to be answering during this call are what do we want to ask a client during their onboarding conversation? How many posts worth of content do we want from the client during this onboarding call? Where are the files being stored? Are we capturing just audio or audio and video? Who is responsible for the onboarding call? How often are we having follow-up interviews with our client to get more stories from them? So those are some of the examples. So that's where the business sits today. As I mentioned, there's a ton of demand. I'm really excited about it. The long-term vision is building audiences with hundreds of execs, VCs, founders using my ghostwriters and then building businesses on top of the audiences that we build for these clients. And my 3 priorities right now are a scalable, consistent, quality content process, having a bench of ghostwriters that can support 28 clients or $1 million a year in profit, And finding a CEO to run this business. And so if you have any questions about the content agency, or if you want more episodes like this, just shoot me an email at thecrazyones@morningbrew.com. But I hope this was instructive for you. I hope it gave you insight into kind of how my brain works through prioritization and tackling roadblocks in the early stages of a business. And I will catch you next episode of The Crazy Ones. Take it easy, everyone. Thank you guys so much for watching this episode of The Crazy Ones. If you're an entrepreneur or a builder and want more great startup content, make sure to subscribe on our YouTube channel or wherever you get your podcasts.