Dramatically Scaling Traffic Using Batching: The GuavaBox Story | Agency Breakthrough Ep. 5

The biggest breakthrough at Guavabox was marketing batch days. So every Wednesday for the entire morning, from when we got in, in the morning until 1pm everyone on the team would just spend the entire time writing and primarily blogging. We'd have a prioritized list coming into the day. We'd have done the SEO research to figure out what we were going after. And you just write as many posts as you could get through. And so we did that for nine months straight. We went from a couple hundred site visitors a month, from people who were clicking on it or we were clicking on it and didn't have our IPs blocked or whatever else, to over 15,000 visitors a month in traffic. And so that was our big turning point as an agency was the consistent, disciplined, scheduled content creation that came out of those marketing batch days.

All right, welcome back to Agency Breakthrough, everyone. I just surprised Gray here by hitting record. You didn't know I could do that, but I could. Gray, how are you doing today?

Excellent. I'm, you know, I'm low on sleep. I'm high on energy. I'm excited to be here with you.

Yeah, that's the state that I was in for most of my school years and university. Yeah. By my own wish. I kind of. I just, I stayed up and played video games way too much when I was. When I was younger. Anyway, so today we're doing a kind of a shorter one and a more contained episode that'll be about one of your Agency Breakthrough stories, Gray. And today we're telling the story of Wava Box and talking a little bit about kind of what the breakthrough was there. So I thought we would jump right into that then because we're both kind of high on energy after recording a previous episode just before this. Great. What's. What's Guava Box? Anyway?

Yeah, Guava Box was almost named cyberduck. And anything with the word cyber is like that. That tells you what era this was in. That's like a very, you know, what do they say? Late aughts is ots the right phrase. Is there another for the, you know, 0, 2001 or 2000?

I've heard oughts used, but I still have not figured this out in Polish. You know, I'm not going to bore you with the Polish version, obviously, but, like, I'm glad you've got some. Something at least to go on. Yeah, let's say late odds.

All right, the late odds. So this is our first agency, and Andrew, my business partner today and I launched this out of our college dorm Room officially very beginning of 2011. So as we were just about to graduate, there were four partners originally, Andrew and I, the two surviving. The others are still alive, but no, no longer in Guava Box. The name, believe it or. I mean we struggled to come up with a name forever. The one I think smart insight, total random side point. But about the name was we knew we wanted to be something that was nebulous enough that we could change it. We didn't want it to be Gray McKenzie's web hosting and website design business, because there's a good chance that would not be what it was a complet years later. And sure enough, we spent a year in the wilderness. So we talk about that pre version of the breakthrough story, a year in the wilderness as digital yes men, saying, you want a Facebook page built? We'll build it. You want this mobile app built? We'll build it. You want a website, we'll do that. You want an e commerce site, we'll do that. Like, we'll figure out whatever if it's connected to the Internet, we'll figure it out. We weren't that good at it. There were some core things that we were good at and a lot of stuff that we were not good at. But if you had money and we could stay alive and keep paying our bills, we would kind of say yes to it and then go figure it out and obviously chronically undercharge and, and, and kind of deal with all the, all the challenges. So. But Guavabox evolved into Inbound marketing and web design agency.

Okay, so tell me. I'm really trying to follow kind of the structure that we came up with here when we kind of came up with the show in general. So first I would ask you about the scale. So Guavabox, what was the scale? I imagine quite small at that point in time because we'll get to the breakthrough moment in a moment. But tell me about the scale first.

Yeah. So started with four. About nine months in, there were three of us. Kind of stayed that way for a while. And then ultimately, once we grew kind of through the breakthrough and before pivoting over to the second chapter of our story, Do Inbound, we got up to about 15 people between employees and freelancers.

Okay, and what was the kind of time span between this, Between Guava Box starting and evolving into do inbound.

So two years after. So 2011, we launched guava box. 2013, towards the end of the year, we launched Do Inbound and then shifted a bunch of our focus there and kind of our team Also from Guava Box to do inbound at the beginning of 2015.

Let's jump into the breakthrough story then directly tell me what was the breakthrough at Guavabox that, you know, we wanted to. That, you know, that we could talk about here. Like, what was the problem? How did you approach it? What did that change for you?

I mean, the first problem was we made $31,000 as a company. Not made in. In terms of profit, like made in terms of revenue. In 2011, I was the only one who's full time, fortunately, but still my paycheck or my, you know, my distributions that year were $16,000 pre tax. So I was not supremely well paid. I was probably adequately paid for the conf, you know, for. For what we were doing at the time. But it was, hey, here's really kind of me going solo, everyone else with other things going on. But after graduation, I went full time. Cause I felt like, hey, the business is not going to be around in a year if nobody goes full time. And I'm excited about this because even if this flops and there was kind of an expectation, hey, this will probably. We'll probably fail at doing this, but it'll be a great education in terms of business and we'll get to make some cool connections as we go through it. Well, it started out we're primarily selling to our network and then, you know, anyone who we can get in touch with. But there's basically no site traffic, there's no sales process, there's no funnel, there's no, you know, how do you actually acquire customers? How do you acquire a first customer? And then how do you deliver? And then how do you acquire customers at scale? And then how do you deliver at scale? Those are like the hurdles that every agency is getting over. And somewhere along the lines is how do you actually make sure that you're making money on that and how do you take care of people? Well, and there's. There's just a series of lessons in the agency learning curve. So our big holdup was we didn't have a way to acquire customers that weren't just related to us or, you know, there was something, some second connection somewhere, you know, said, oh, yeah, I think, you know, these crazy guys fresh out of college can probably be that cheap and inexpensive. So that was the problem. We also were unclear on what we were. Like I mentioned before, we were doing all these different things. And so we've been following HubSpot for a while. And middle of 2012, we made the craziest investment. And we spent 20% of our last year's revenue, more than that of 25% of our prior year's entire revenue of the company. To invest in HubSpot and say we're going to go all in in terms of inbound marketing. These are the services that we're going to start packaging and offering to our clients, and we're going on software and do this for ourselves as well.

So am I getting that right? You went kind of all in on inbound marketing, both internally and externally. This is what we do for clients and also this is how we're going to grow ourselves.

Yeah, exactly. Kind of the internal stuff was like, it was really bought as a desire to package up from. I mean, we took a class, Andrew and I took a class fall semester of our senior year called Content Marketing. The very first version, Internet content marketing was the version of this class. First, first version of that class ever taught. And we were both excited about it. And so we love this idea of content marketing. We were reading Content Marketing World, we were reading Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, you know, like a bunch of these early Internet content marketers. And so it was. HubSpot was kind of like in that direction where we wanted to go anyways. And we wanted a way to package that up and figure out how to try and sell that and position that in the. In the marketplace. So the first desire was, hey, how can we have a, you know, something coherent to sell to, to clients that hopefully will. Will make sense for them and is aligned with where we want to take this thing. And then secondly, we gotta figure out some way to grow. And so hopefully we can tap into this and figure it out. And there really wasn't a lot of Western Pennsylvania. We were working with a lot of industrial manufacturing companies. And believe it or not, HubSpot was not big in that market at that time. Sure. Still not big in that market, in that market today. But so that was kind of what led up to the HubSpot engagement.

I'm curious about one thing because I'm trying to get into your mind at the time you're sitting at kind of, you're listening to this class or you're getting that knowledge about Internet content marketing on the Internet. Get out of here.

Web 2.0. Yep.

Yeah. And so did it just literally pop in your mind that this is something that we can both, like, we learned about this kind of just now, and this is something we can both do and sell, or is it like too much of a leap and you had to kind of master it first and then start offering to clients. How fast was that?

It was pretty cool. I mean, there's a breakthrough before the breakthrough here where there's a whole story of our college lacrosse experience and how we did content marketing and had real life success there. And that led to the business, which I'm happy to go into, if that's interesting now or later, wherever you want to chase that one. But no, HubSpot was first. We need to do it. I think there's always been, and sometimes to our detriment in terms of revenue. But Andrew and I have always been, I think on the scale of most entrepreneurs, we're probably more responsible, less aggressive. And that has, you know, historically, I think, slowed down our growth. I'm not sure that I would teach other people the same thing. But an element there of, hey, we need to figure this out for ourselves first before we go in good conscious, take this to someone else and say, yeah, pay us at the time three grand a month to go do this.

So there was the element. Okay, yeah. So you mentioned the breakthrough before the breakthrough. We sat on one thing for today. Let's stick to that one thing then for today. There's a specific breakthrough moment at Guavabox that, you know, you mentioned we might talk about in this episode. Let's jump into it. What was the breakthrough moment?

Yeah, so the biggest breakthrough at Guava Box was this content batching or basically introducing marketing batch days. So every Wednesday for the entire morning, from when we got in, in the morning until 1pm, everyone on the team would just spend the entire time writing and primarily blogging. We'd have a prioritized list coming into the day. We'd have done the, the search, you know, the SEO research to figure out what we were going after. And you just write as many posts as you could get through. And some days that was a half of one, and some days that was three blog posts that you could write. We'd get em scheduled and we'd get em published. There's email in there. There was a very, very small amount of social, um, but it was super heavy on the content production Today. If we were doing that, I think we'd split our efforts and we'd do content production and content promotion. But really SEO was our big channel and we spent very little time intentionally pursuing other links or doing anything other than just writing the content. And at that point in time that started to pay dividends pretty quickly. And so we did that for nine months straight. We went from, you know, a couple hundred site Visitors a month from people who were clicking on it or we were clicking on it and didn't have our IPs blocked or whatever else, to over 15,000 visitors a month in traffic, which blew up our pipeline. Our site was converting at about 3% from visits to contacts. And then obviously, you know, some percentage of those were converting into the sales opportunities and the deals that were being created. And so that was our big kind of turning point as an agency was the consistent, disciplined, scheduled content creation that came out of those marketing batch days.

And then I've got around 1100 follow up questions about that. Let's start with how did the batching start? Like who was the first to say, and how did it happen that you decided, okay, what, going to meet on Wednesday and just write for four hours straight until our eyes and fingers bleed and see what happens?

I don't know, I don't know who suggested that. I know that there wasn't any resistance to it. It was, hey, we need to work. You know, it's the common pain point of hey, we're trying to fit our own marketing efforts which going in on HubSpot was tied to the realization that hey, we absolutely have to take this seriously and go hard on the, on our own marketing if we're ever gonna grow past our very small network. Um, so there was, but we were trying to fit it into a sales call here and you know, building a website. And this is the classic, hey, we sold a project. That's great. Now let's go head down, heads down for two months and you know, build it and launch it and then get to the end and realize, shoot, we don't have the next project because we haven't been doing that. Now we need to go sell again and go into sales mode. So this, this is a stair step that happens to so many agencies of we gotta market and sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. Oh, we got a lot of work now we gotta just deliver, deliver, deliver. And oh no, we're running outta steam. We gotta go back into, you know, sales mode. And so you've got the, the stairstep approach to agency growth that happens all the time. And that's exactly the hamster wheel we were stuck on. So trying to build away a move towards a retainer model which came with the inbound marketing and kind of classic HubSpot playbook at that time. And then two, we've got to have steady deal flow if we're going to be able to deliver on this. So everyone was on board for the, for the batch days. We kind of rotate through who was taking point on what. You know, I gravitated a little more heavily towards SEO at that point in time. So the research made sense for me to do. Andrew did a ton of our writing and had some of our best performing content was stuff that he wrote really well. The content branching system was really well received and it was a lot of, you know, we just talked to Marcus Sheridan and it was a lot of they ask, you answer type of, type of stuff.

Okay, I was going to ask next, could you tell me and the listeners, primarily the listeners, more about how you picked the topics other than SEO research. Like what specific steps did you take to surface the best topics?

Yeah, we broke it up into two different categories. So we basically said, hey, there's pain based keywords and there's solution based keywords. So solutions based is. I've already identified what I want. Nobody was really searching for inbound marketing. We were, you know, I think we're second or third for inbound marketing agency because we optimized for that. So we were, you know, today we've. You could scroll forever and probably never find guava because that's still, that's not still a. And it's also incredibly competitive today. At the time it was, you know, there were a couple hundred other, other partners out there, but SEO was, was part of our jam. But a lot of people were looking for SEO services. That was the, the thing and I don't know why we did this, but we were focused on some local stuff. And so we wrote these posts. You know, one was called five Lies Pittsburgh SEO companies like to tell.

Specifically Pittsburgh.

Specifically Pittsburgh. So Pittsburgh SEO company was like, hey, we're in the Pittsburgh area, we're going to target this keyword. There was enough search traffic because at the time when you were looking for an SEO company, you looked at city you were in and then who's the SEO company locally? You know, the bigger brands were for a geographic agency. Well, that did great because one, it was the number one result for Pittsburgh SEO company very quickly. Um, and then two, the click through rate on that was extremely high. Who's written the article on five lies that these SEO companies like to tell? Um, so that was a solution based keyword though someone's already self prescribed. The SEO is what they need. We then need to have the conversation and say, hey, SEO is a part of it. You gotta get traffic to your site. But what happens once they're on your site? How do you take, take folks you know from click to. To cash and and so that was one bucket. The second bucket of keywords was pain based keywords. So. And you're, you know, probably have gone down this road before, but basically asking the questions of how, how long? Like, you know, the kind of the open ended questions of how do I solve these problems, how do I do this, what's the best place to do this, what's the best way to do this? Um, and so we kind of pick and choose from both of those. We section up our, you know, what's the content that we're writing into, what's really top of the funnel stuff. So we have one. In fact, if you googled Facebook top Facebook contest apps, I'll do that right now. You know, that was something that we were running some of at the time and we are now we're not the featured snippet, but we're the top result below that I'm not logged into my guava box profile. Be curious if other people are there. Facebook contest apps, top five apps for your next contest that drove a lot of traffic. Extremely top of the funnel, not necessarily related. Some of those people actually were a good fit. Other folks were not at all a good fit. So it's kind of like unrelated. We're just driving traffic. They might be relevant, might not be relevant. The kind of consideration folks in that middle of the funnel who are looking at, hey, do we want to do inbound or do we want to do something else? And then the decision stage, folks who are, hey, we want to work with an agency, do we want to work with a guava Box or do we want to work with some other agency out there?

Gotcha.

So anyways, that was kind of the grid that we used for keywords.

Okay, interesting. It's a nice model because it's very simple. Right. It's easy to follow. I think it's easy to get kind of lost in the weeds here when it comes to, I mean, I've seen so many frameworks categorizing keywords in so many different ways. Sometimes it's as easy as that. The next question I had was, what was your approach towards quality versus quantity? Like how did you set the bar of okay, let's just get this out the door versus well, this needs to be actually so good that we're kind of winning this keyword from what you're saying, the competition was lower at that time. But tell me about that. What was the mindset regarding it just put things out there versus we got to have the best content.

So I've always brought a Pretty process oriented and detail oriented mindset to what we've done. So we operationalized the batch days really well. There was from a project management perspective, this eventually lived in do inbound once we built it. Yeah, the blog post is the ultimate deliverable. What needs to happen. There's a writer, there's an editor, there's kind of the optimizer and then there's ultimately the publishing. And the fifth step is promoting that after it. So each one would go through that same process. There was a checklist for each one. Because of where competition was, we probably should have. I think there's an argument that we could have just pumped out more content and been a little bit less picky about. Did all the, did all the images have alt text and yeah. Did everything else line up perfectly in the cta and there's a custom image designed for every post but they all went through that same, that same process and we just use a simple template for featured images. I remember getting probably a ton of agency owners can relate to this. Yeah, the email from Getty Images saying, hey, you used a web, used this image, Someone forgot to check the license on it and you owe us $1,200 because you used this image you weren't supposed to use. Um, so yeah, a lot of lessons learned along the way and refinements had to get made to the, to the process.

I see.

Um, but yeah, that was kind of how, how the workflow played out.

Okay, so tell me more about and let me. I'll let you go in just, you know, in a few moments here. We did mean to make this one a little bit shorter. But like for each of the breakthroughs that we share on this show, I'm always thinking of the listeners that are like, okay, that sounds good. I think we are facing a similar problem. And that solution in this case batching sounds like something to try. Could you give people kind of a recipe for what makes a good batch day, what you need to have in place, you know, what are the mistakes that you might make here so that they can avoid them?

Number one, somebody needs to plan it. So we would rotate this role, you know, at 1:00am and working on it for a couple hours one night. Cause I was excited about it. So anyways, those are a couple of the key things.

Yeah. The words that pop in my mind related to this is like you've got focus when you're doing it and you've got, you know, this clarity that this is what we're doing now today for this first half of Wednesday we're not doing anything else. But then at the, at the end of it, the third word that came to my mind is like freedom, you know, as in you can be free from this type of work, you know, in a sense, until the next batch comes. That I think, you know, this relates back to a lot of concepts like, you know, deep work, you know, Cal Newport probably would have something to say about this being effective, et cetera. So what I wanted to ask, I mean, this immediately popped in my mind as you were talking about this. You mentioned you were doing this for nine months. So if you don't mind me asking, what made you stop?

Uh, that's a great question. So we didn't stop. Uh, we continued. But it did. I mean, it really continued until we decided to make the switch to do inbound. Um, but it did slow down. We took that chunk that was originally kind of a minimum of four and probably more like five hours most Wednesdays, and that became two hours still Wednesday morning. And the biggest reason for that was we were kind of swimming in more leads than we knew how to handle at that point. And so that led to. And the whole reason that do Inbound exists existed our project management software that was the predecessor to our work on top of ClickUp was we broke through that growth ceiling. And the next thing that started breaking was now client services, when there's more work than the three of us originally could handle. You know, after we. We had one founder lease with three founders, and then we started adding people to the team. And you figure out all these things on the delivery side that broke and that led to the strong like, okay, we've got to systematize out what delivery looks like. And then, hey, we've got a system that we think is working now. We don't have a tool that's helping us with it. Let's go build our own tool. Long, long journey from there. But that's what was the, the cause for this, the reduction in velocity. And I think that's a good lesson that we can all take away from that is start with some amount. You may need to add more hours. If we were doing this at today at Guava Box, if we were starting Guava Box from scratch, that would probably be an entire day or two half days a week that we needed to dedicate to it and that would probably calm down over time. Or we might need find that we need to do three half days and then, you know, scale it back as you start getting the results.

So what I'm hearing is that still There was this kind of ebb and flow of, you know, sales versus delivery, but at least you had that guaranteed slot of, for example, two hours, so it didn't, like, completely die down. I get that. So I have two final questions here. One I wanted to ask about is, is batching still a thing that you do or that Zenpilot does?

Yes, as you know firsthand, this is one of my. One of my favorite things to do. I try really hard to protect my Fridays, for the most part, so that I can batch on something. But, yeah, and I would actually like to do more of it as my, you know, like Paul Graham talks about the maker and the manager schedule and just the challenges of balancing both of those things. And as our team has grown and role as kind of the integrator and in a couple different seats in the accountability chart for Zenpilot right now has evolved. I have fewer of those blocks of deep work and batching. And so trying to figure out, like, that a struggle for me right now is figuring out, you know, how can I without messing up everyone else's schedules? How can I condense and push meetings together to create more opportunities to go batch? And. Yeah, it. It absolutely is.

We just had a day when we spent two hours writing content and then another three recording podcast episodes, including this one. So, yes, it's still pretty much alive. This is something that I didn't do. Like, I did it, like, once or twice at my previous company. And I still remember those days. There was one day where for eight hours, we just worked on our Wikipedia entry and we got on the Polish, admittedly Wikipedia, but we did that, you know, and now I'm finding myself wondering, why did we not do more of that? And this is even more validation than we should have.

Yeah.

Anyway, so last question. We're nerds when it comes to tools and processes. Are there any particular tools, like, if you were doing batching, you know, today or, you know, starting this process, is there a particular tool that you would recommend for kind of managing or, like, for the writing itself? Does AI come into play? Anything that comes to your mind?

I wouldn't let the tool be the hang up on anything. Obviously, in terms of where we'd centralize all this, like, this is going to live in ClickUp for us. Here's all the assignments here. Here's what we're working through and ultimately what we're reviewing in a show and tell at the end of that is, here are the ClickUp tasks and where each of these things stand. Because I think the biggest thing that you get out of all of this is the motiv. It's the shared motivation and the morale. Everyone has a better experience, even if it's a slow day and everyone has kind of a down day. We're all, it's. It's the feeling of being in it together. That's the exciting, exciting part really of any of this. I mean, any of businesses. You know, money can be great. Clients being happy is awesome. Recognition in the community or whatever community you're a part of is cool. But the most rewarding part is a hundred percent the relationships and the feeling of, hey, we're all in this together. And I think that's what batching helps accomplish from a writing perspective. I don't. I mean Google Docs are easy to collaborate on. I know that's your go to. And we sometimes go back and forth on like Jeff and I are deep in ClickUp docs, but it's kind of shifting over to Google Docs. I think that's, that's easy to do. I don't think I have any other specific like ClickUp would be the, the core place where all this is housed.

Yeah. These days I think we're using ChatGPT on the side too to try to kind of speed up the work. Like our session today included you doing a lot of writing and me kind of thinking a little bit more long term. Like for the type of post that you're writing today. How could we make like 70% of the work happen through ChatGPT? Because these were LinkedIn posts based on podcast episodes of the other podcasts agency Journey, and actually managed to come up with some prompts and a workflow that works here, kind of setting the stage for future batches. And I like that we have around I would plug around here. So lightweight meeting app. We were in there, you know, hanging out and kind of exchanging ideas with each other. You can minimize it so it's like super small on your screen and it allows you to kind of keep, keep that person still there but not interfering with your work. So that's kind of in the toolbox if anybody was curious around.

Co we didn't use it today. But they also have the vibes you can put on whatever vibe you're feeling. And everyone's listening to the same music. It's one more way to feel like they were kind of in the same place doing this together.

Yeah. Put on, you know, either the same playlist or around does allow you to play, you know, like these music presets and it's an opportunity to hang out. I think it's important also in a remote context where there isn't that much of an opportunity to just, like, be in this space together doing work. And this is. Well, maybe not an equivalent of it, but it does give you kind of the same feeling of like, sitting together at the office. So I really appreciated our bashing sessions today, and we should do even more of it, make it more of a habit. Okay, so we plugged that one other thing that I wanted to plug because, you know, we always have that cornucopia section. I wanted to plug the progress principle here, too. I feel like what you mentioned about, like, it felt great to make progress and to push these things live. This is what the progress principle talks about. I forget the name of the author, as per usual, but look it up. There's a great talk at Google about it. It kind of encapsulated. Encapsulates it. You don't have to read the whole book, but kind of. It boils down to this one phrase that the one thing that motivates teams the most is making progress on meaningful work. And these batches fit this definition perfectly. It's meaningful work, and there's lots of progress, and it's very visible. Things are out, and you do it together. I think that's a perfect mix.

I should have read Stephen and Teresa back in the. Back in the day, right? Isn't it Teresa Amabile? And I'm blocking on Steven's last name, but something with a K. Sorry.

You mentioned the principle.

No, I thought I should have read it back in the day. I've read it since then, but I did not read it back in the guava box days. But that would have been an easier way to. Hey, hey. Here's the. We should be batching everything that we do.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, so that was Agency breakthrough for today. Gray, did you have anything else to add on this as we wrap up?

No, that was awesome.

That's it.

That's the show. Thanks, Kuba.

Yeah. Bit of a shorter one. Everybody. Have a nice day.