Live Coaching: How To Grow An Agency to $2M

You're at $500,000 in annual revenue, right? The goal is $2 million a year. If you come out of this conversation solving 3 things, what would those be?

Number 1 is how to be able to go from where the revenue isn't as stable.

Let's go predictable revenue.

More clarity on ideal customer profile and how to be able to leverage LinkedIn to generate more leads.

I like it. My guest, Jay Singh, is back on the podcast. So we can talk through how to scale his agency and more importantly, how to do so in a way that doesn't result in a business he hates. If we want to hit this goal, then we need to get really, really clear on who we're serving so that you don't end up with this chaos of jumping around. What content could you create that would tell that person we should chat?

It could be some like audience discovery features. Like, how do you know what to build for your audience?

If you just stay within the software niche, you could write about a ton of that.

Yes.

And it immediately positions you as the person.

The person. Yeah, I love that. I don't think I've really cracked how to be able to extend contracts longer.

I guess if we solve just these two things of predictable lead gen and we're there, let's get to $2 million.

I love this. This has been awesome.

All right, Jay, welcome back to the show.

Thank you.

So what is Casper Studios for anyone who hasn't caught up on your journey so far?

Yeah, so Casper is a product studio that helps founders to be able to design and build products. We help larger companies to be able to implement AI into their workflows. And then we also use those learnings to be able to design and build our own products, which then I try to share on social media to be able to acquire more customers. So I'm trying to implement some of your flywheels work right off the bat here.

Yeah, I like it. Okay, so you're at $500,000 in annual revenue, right? And then what we've got written up on the board, the goal is $2 million a year, right? You have two other sub-goals within that, one around team size and one around profit. Talk about that.

Yeah, I think if I can keep the team smaller, the better. I think that's where some of my own personal lifestyle goals lie in. I don't really want to scale a really big team. I want to keep it small. I want to keep it focused.

Is that like 5 people, 10 people?

Yeah, anywhere between, less than 10 makes me feel like I can manage that correctly while also being able to work with clients and not spend all my time with just internal administrative pieces. And then the margin, the margin piece like that kind of works back from the lifestyle goal that I have to, you know, over the course of the next couple of years, either retire my parents, retire, you know, myself and my family. I think the 50% margin on a $2 million annual revenue business feels, feels right for that.

That sounds good. If you come out of this conversation solving 3 things, what would those be?

I think number 1 is getting some guidance in terms of how to be able to go from right now where the revenue isn't as stable.

Okay.

To be able to kind of create a little bit more recurring revenue for the business.

Let's go predictable revenue.

Or predictable revenue. Yeah, exactly. At the moment it is, you know, it's pretty tough to be able to go from one month of, you know, $50,000, $60,000 of monthly revenue down to, you know, $20,000, $30,000 up to $80,000. Like, you know, being able to set the right systems in place to manage that and have a little bit more projection over the course of a quarter or a half in terms of what that revenue looks like will be important.

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so the first thing to solve is predictable revenue. I went a little more broad than recurring revenue. Yeah. Because there's lots of revenue that's quite predictable but doesn't technically recur.

Sure.

And so we can get into how to take agency revenue and make it more predictable.

Love it.

What would the second thing be?

More clarity on my ICP.

Okay. For anyone who doesn't know the acronym ICP, what is that?

Ideal customer profile. Okay. In other words, who are you selling your services or products to? I've been lucky enough to kind of grow our business on the back of my LinkedIn audience, and there comes pros and cons of that. I've been really only focused on inbound lead generation, and, you know, it makes it easier to be able to find customers. But then sometimes I'm working on quite a wide variety of customers, and so I don't have like a specific focus yet. And I think that can end up hurting the business over time.

Okay, I like it. And what would the third thing be?

I think it's how to be able to leverage my LinkedIn to be able to generate more leads even better, potentially even kind of building out systems that we can focus on outbound to my audience and to get your guidance on that.

Okay. This is going to be a good topic because two sides. One, I am trying to focus very heavily on LinkedIn. So there's lots of things that I've learned in other areas I'm trying to apply to LinkedIn. You spent 5 years working on LinkedIn.

I also worked at LinkedIn. Yeah, exactly. I'm more of a power user now than I ever was.

Yeah, exactly. It's always fascinating how like now that you're on the outside, you're like, yeah, okay, but here's how I'm going to use the product.

Exactly. All right.

So these are 3 different things that we could do or that we'll dive into and try to solve in the next 45 minutes or so.

Amazing.

No pressure.

Yeah, exactly.

One thing that I think about a lot in scaling from 500,000 to 2 million, I feel like the times I've seen people do this, a couple things go wrong. Usually they try to brute force it. And so it's like, okay, I just need twice the number of projects. And if those projects are scattered across a ton of different customer types, then there's very little automation or systems or processes. And so it just, it turns to chaos. And then what happens is people try to tame that chaos by expanding the team, right? And so then they're like, all right, we'll bring in more people. And then you expand the team. One, team members create chaos without a lot of really great systems around it. And then two, it's expensive. And so something that I see all the time in both creator businesses and agencies is maybe a $500,000 in revenue business that's doing 40, 50% margins. So like a quarter million a year in profit, something like that. That's pretty great. And then scaling to this $1 to $2 million where the margins then shrink to 10 to 20%.

Exactly.

So I've often seen where someone doubles revenue and is taking home the exact same profit.

Right. Which is like, that just sounds like a lot of work for nothing. Right.

And there's just so much more stress in that. Now there's times where you're trying to cross a chasm here and you're trying, you know, you're trying to leap ahead.

Right.

And so you're gonna make an investment or Like that's normal in business.

Yeah.

But there's just a lot to be careful of.

Yes.

In scaling this.

Yeah. I think revenue at times could be a vanity metric on your point. And I think another way to frame this is how do you scale an agency from X amount of profit to Y amount of profit? Right. Could have been another way to be able to kind of look at this because I do not want to build a $2 million business making the same or only marginally more in profit. Right.

Well, let's write down those constraints. We'll just do it a little smaller on here.

Yep.

'Cause then we know what we're optimizing for.

Yep.

I'm thinking about, okay, we wanna sell predictable revenue, ideal customer, and then I wrote down leverage LinkedIn, but really you mean scalable lead generation.

Exactly.

You just have something that's working, and so that's why—

Exactly.

You narrowed it down a little bit.

Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Okay, let's go to the ideal customer because my gut feeling is that if we want to hit this goal with these constraints, then we need to get really, really clear—

100%.

—on who we're serving so that you don't end up with this chaos of jumping around Exactly. Like the needs of the creator is different than the needs of the company like Kit. Exactly. $40-50 million a year in recurring revenue would be entirely different. Totally. I guess I'm realizing I could represent both of those customers, right? The creator. I could be like the creator, you know, with a half million dollar a year business. And then I put a different hat on. Right. And I'm like, okay, well, as a 90-person team, it's very different things, but you would service in entirely different ways. Exactly. Exactly. Let's just start by mapping out some extremes of the projects. Okay. What's the ICP of the largest project you've done? Right.

Those end up being more oriented around strategy and/or a redesign of their product or just nitty-gritty AI implementation. It's either like, hey, we have a product, can you help redesign it? Because they've already been in business for a while from an AI-first perspective. Or can you just come in, work with that customer service team that's sitting in the corner there manually, you know, going through their work and be able to automate some of their workflows? Not the sexiest stuff, but something that could really help the bottom line. Okay.

So you're saying the large ones— actually, I want to switch markers with you because we want to get some, some fun colors. Okay, let's do it. You know, we both like design. Exactly. All right, so let's go large. And so you said this. So there's AI redesign.

Thinking from first principles, what AI looks like for their product. It's product strategy, it's discovery that leads to redesign. And then what was that other one that you had? More like implementation of AI. Nathan introduces me to their finance team and is like, hey, please make this business a little bit more efficient.

Are those large projects profitable? Do you want to do more of those?

Yeah, I would love to do more of those.

Okay. Yeah. So yes, we like those. Yeah. Longer.

They're longer, a little bit longer term.

Okay. Yeah. What about the painful projects?

Yeah, those are, those are the— I love my early-stage founders, but yeah, like those are the, those are the people that are just about to start a company. We are helping them build their business from the ground up. I'm jumping in on strategy, product. My designers are helping them design things. We have our engineering team working on building AI. Proof of concepts. We are effectively their team that they are not paying as well. And so those have been some of the more demanding customers. And the price points are so low because even if they raise a little bit of capital, they just don't have that much to spend.

Okay, so this is important because you could describe 80% of the words you just said could be turned into like, oh, this is the most exciting.

Right. Yeah, right. Fair enough.

But when you're Then you're like, but then they're the most demanding. Yes. Maybe the hardest to please. Yes. And you're getting paid the least. Exactly. Yeah.

It is fun. I like, I do really enjoy it. I feel like I can really provide, I feel like I can provide most of the marginal value there. Right.

But it's not the customer profile that's gonna get you to—

It won't be. Yeah.

No, that makes sense. What about, let's just go fun. Yeah. What are the ones if you were running this business? Yeah. Purely for enjoyment, right? Yeah. What customer fits within that?

I mean, you were alluding to it. Ironically, it ends up becoming like some of those early-stage customers too. That being said, I'm having, I'm having more and more fun here. Here's my middle ground. It's a founder that has scaled up their business and has a decent amount of revenue and/or funding that they can actually take the same energy that the early-stage founders have, but then you're almost like reinvigorating yourself because you can think about things from first principles for AI. The joke of someone being in founder mode, the Brian Chesky founder mode energy. It's like you who has been building the business, building it successfully, is now excited about AI and wants to partner on that. So you get the You get the energy of the early stage, but then you get the budgets and the longer-term contracts of maybe these larger companies. Well, you also get reach, right?

And reach. Because— In what way? If an established founder has an idea, they put money behind it, they bring it to life, well, they might roll it out to thousands or tens of thousands of people. Yeah, right. Instead of the early stages, like, hey, how, okay, now I'm coming back to you and like, I have a discovery problem, I have a marketing problem. You're like, okay, well that's not actually what we help you with.

Right, right, right.

I mean, this is where I love to be. People will ask like, oh, when are you gonna sell Kit? And I'm like, you don't understand. I have my absolute dream scenario because I get to come up with ideas in a market, an industry, and a community that I absolutely adore. And then when I roll something, I have a full team to build anything I want. And then when I'm ready to release it, it goes out to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who give me feedback and use it in the wild and all of that. And I'm like, I'm having a great time.

This is the best.

And I get paid plenty of money to do it.

I can tell you're having fun. I can tell you're having fun.

And so I like that. That makes sense. The established, established founders. Yeah. Are there any other angles that you would look at of You know, some of these big categories, we look at the ideal customer.

I think it kind of goes back to maybe even how you define yourself. It's some of our customers that are coming in are also like pretty established creators. So they are early stage in a sense that they're building a product for the first time, but their business is probably doing themselves at least like, you know, half a million to a million a year minimum. Some of them are actually like quite larger creators that have like full operations teams and everything around them. So honestly, like the established founders, it could also be established creators, right? I don't know if you need to make necessarily— well, you can push back on this. I don't know if you need to make a distinction between founders and creators if they have, if they have like a scale. Yeah, exactly. Okay. I mean, because those are businesses, as you know.

Yeah, it's, it points to a different type of customer. Yeah, right. Because one thing I want to get into is we talked about leveraging LinkedIn. Yeah. Is who specifically we can go after. Exactly. And so there's a big difference between trying to— let's not use me as an example because I live in both buckets. Right. Let's take Wade Foster from Zapier. Right. He does not— actually, he does more content now like a creator. Now that I think about it, he's— if you go to his LinkedIn, he's like, hey, look at what we're doing with AI agents inside of Zapier.

They're crushing it.

Yeah, it's awesome. But Let's say him not putting out that level of content. Right. Right, he is an established founder operating a SaaS company at scale. That's very different than say an Ali Abdaal. Yes. Right, or someone who is very much a creator who's built a business around it. Sure, right. And you're gonna target them very differently. Yeah. Message them very differently.

They're hanging out in different places.

Yeah, I would want us to pick one or the other. Right. Yep. You don't have to. We could probably make a Venn diagram and find the overlap.

But we should. I think we should.

How many projects have you done for creators? You know, let's use established for both, right? Okay. Established creators and established founders. Yeah.

Yeah. I'd say, you know, our projects are like the last couple of months. I've been in business for a year, so I'd say of like the 10 or so clients we've worked with, I'd say it's, you know, like 4 are established founders, and I'd say like 3 are established creators.

So it's pretty even. It's not like you're getting more traction in one space or the other. Yeah. If we were to go back to predictable revenue. Yes. As the lens. Yeah. Which market is going to serve you? Like which market is going to lead to better revenue?

One thing that I've been thinking about is like who, who, who needs our services the most and like where is our skill set not a commodity? One example of that is me moving to New York. In San Francisco, if you worked at LinkedIn for 5.5 years and they're like, cool, what else? So did everybody else. Yeah, exactly. And you're kind of a commodity. In New York, it feels like I actually can pull on my experiences and provide value. And it's actually the speed of the customer cycle, the value I can provide to them feels like it's a little bit higher. The reason why I say that is The established founders, you know, they're doing maybe their Series B, Series C, they have like a decent amount of revenue. I don't know if it leads to predictable revenue because we could maybe come in and help for a quarter, like maybe 2 quarters. And like, even if we do a good job, there's likely going to be some pressure internally to say, hey, like, why don't we just like take all this great work and then just pass it over to the team internally?

You might get them a step function and then they may just take it.

They want to take it internally. We've seen some of that.

Happen already. Which makes sense.

Which makes a ton of sense.

From the kit perspective, that's what I would do.

That's what you would do too, right? Yeah, exactly.

Because I've got 30 engineers already.

Exactly. And so take the innovation and then like test it out and see what's working. And then once it's working, then hey, like, thank you, here it is. Like, please create all the right documentation and let my team like integrate it internally.

Right. That'd be a big success.

That would be a big success. Wouldn't lead to that. And so, and so the reason why I'm mentioning that is like, I wonder if the established creators may not have access to the type of talent that we're providing. Yeah, that's also kind of, I wonder, part of the dimension here.

That's interesting because—

Maybe work with them for a longer term because they don't know who else to access in that, who has our skillset.

These are made up numbers, but here for the established founders, we might do a $50,000 project to achieve some step function goal and then we'll run with it ourselves. The creator, it might be like, hey, let's bring an idea to life for you. And then for $10,000 a month, Yeah. For ongoing for a long period of time, 'cause maybe we build a business that's making $100,000 a month. Exactly. And off of their audience and all that. So yeah, that's interesting.

That's kind of somewhere where I've been trying to figure out.

So we're honing in on this creator as a target, which I like. Is there a way that we could get more specific with the creator? Like who's a creator that would be, a really good fit and then maybe a creator that would not be a good fit, either generically or if a name comes to mind, that's great too.

I'm gonna try not to use some of the names that are kind of circulating in our prospect list right now. Yeah, it's really a hard thing where you're like, but that person, if you're watching this, you are the ideal creator. Yeah. I'd say I'm trying to think of like people that I really respect, but also aren't necessarily just like, you know, classic name brand kind of stuff.

Well, I mean, name brand is helpful. Like, I— Sure, yeah. Let's go to two different examples I can think of. Let's go Sahil Bloom and Cody Sanchez. Yeah, right, right. They both putting out a prolific amount of content. They have vastly different team sizes. Cody's like 25 people on the team. Sahil's 1, 2, you know. Wow. That's crazy.

He's running it that efficiently. It's amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. Very, very different approaches. Sure. As you think about those two individuals. Yeah. Is there another dimension that would tell you here's why one would be better versus the other? Yeah. What are you helping them achieve?

I would probably still want to qualify by revenue in some sense first, right? Or spend, or some indication that they are fitting our ICP. It's easier to do that for a Series B founder that's raised $50 million or is doing $20 million of annual revenue. It's easier to kind of find those people, I guess, and they're more in my network. The creators, is there a similar mental model of you have X amount of revenue and then Y amount of reach, but probably revenue as a main metric so they can afford our services more. They probably, if I'm thinking critically about who we've already worked with, they've already, and where we're helping, they've already built a business. They built a product, now want to venture into software development and product development. They may have already reached the scale of the other 6 business models that you speak about where they've already increased, they've already done their sponsorship revenue and they're getting marginal returns on that. They've already done their newsletter revenue, they may be getting marginal returns on that and they're looking for the next big swing for themselves. And then where we're helping them is building a software product that can kind of be a business for them.

Right, the way that I would sum that up is I'm gonna say ambition.

They have ambition, yeah. Yeah.

Not that a creator who's like, hey, I just wanna write the next book and grow my audience. Which is ambition. That creator has an ambition. So this is not the best word for it. Yeah. You know, but it's someone who they're looking to build probably long-term wealth. They're looking.

Yes, right.

To go from $500,000 to $2 million and maybe far beyond that. So I think about Ali Abdaal in this example.

He built the mobile app, I think, for voice journaling or something like that, right? Getting in front of him when he wanted to be able to build that, he would've been the perfect guy to do it. Yeah, VoicePal. VoicePal, yeah.

It's a great app. I use it. Great. But he's got an audience, he can get out in front of them. But he's saying, hey, I have a clear vision for how this audience can turn into $5 to $10 million a year in revenue. And maybe I want to exit, that sort of thing. Another example would be, you know, James Clear did his habit tracking app. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that was in partnership with Andrew Wilkinson.

He's a big inspiration for me, for what it's worth. BC, BC kid too. Yep. Canadians get sick of that. Exactly, yeah. But it's like that, how do I present myself to those individuals before they make a decision to be able to build out their product? Because I know that we can crush that. Like I know that we can provide a lot of value to them.

Yeah, how much is this, the focus on creators, is it creating, are we building new products that they'll sell to their audience? Versus streamlining processes in their business?

That's a great question too. Predominantly it's been we're helping them build a product that they can now kind of use as, you know, to get to $5 to $10 million and like scale it. But like, you know, it's one very large creator right now. I think, you know, they have over like 20 million followers. Like we're actually exploring which one do we start with, right? Do we do maybe a little bit of internal implementation, maybe prove our worth a little bit? And then like kind of like earn their trust to be able to design and build a product. Or maybe we talk to them and they're like, no, I'm ready to go. I just want to build. Let's go.

So, I mean, if the idea— if we just took what we've established in 20 minutes and said— We've covered a lot of ground. Our ideal customer, right, are creators who— creators at scale and revenue already who have ambition to 5 or 10x their business from here, right, by building a new product they want to sell to their audience. Yep. Does that feel like the right ideal customer?

I mean, how would you, like, I want to say yes, but how would you challenge that perspective, especially when like, these folks are becoming more of my network, but these are the people that are kind of already in my network because, so when you think about like leveraging like outbound sales motions in your audience, like one of them, one of them I'm like learning how to be able to best serve them and the other one I'm, already feel like you know. Or like I am, and I'm like, I understand their pain points a little bit better potentially. But that's changing pretty rapidly as well.

You know, I do feel like you're at a stage now where you can find the commonalities between the established creators and the established founders. Yeah. Right? And then you find people like me who live in both worlds, or someone like Wade from Zapier who established founder, but he's like, you know what, this creator thing, Like, let me dip a toe in that water, right? Especially as he's excited. You know, I'm just speculating because I haven't talked to Wade about this, but for Zapier, they've been around for a long time and they're pushing forward a ton of AI innovation and all of this. Yeah, but like maybe someone who is a customer of them 5 years ago is going to miss out on that, right? And they're going to jump straight to a Lindy or something else, right? When Zapier is just as good for this. Yeah. Yeah. And so I could see the established founder going, hey, let me try to reach customers in another way. And so let me put on a creator hat to try to help make this transition in the market. Right, right, right. So I would want to figure out what these two groups have in common. Yeah. And then probably explore both. But what we know is that we're not really interested in doing AI implementation for the middle manager at the large $200 million a year company, right? You know, or that sort of thing.

Yeah, likely, likely not right now. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like there's just a lot to— there's a lot to attract, right?

This is because we're saying, hey, we can get predictable revenue. Yep. Established founders or creators, predictable revenue, have a bunch of fun. Yes. And avoid the pain points at the early stage. Yeah.

And avoid the pain points of the enterprise. Which, right, like procurement processes. That's a whole other episode in itself. And I bought a lot of, I bought software on behalf of LinkedIn prior, and I know it's a pain in the butt. And so I'm worried about that a little bit if I were to kind of—

Yeah, whereas here, if you sell— Yes, it's faster.

The cycle is like, yeah, exactly, exactly. That makes sense. And if it comes inbound, like maybe we work on it or maybe not after the show, we just say sorry.

Yeah, I think that, you know, as we scale, it's not going to be like we come out with something ideal And then you say, you know what, everything outside of the circle, we're gonna just immediately say no to it.

Yeah, exactly. 'Cause like you have a business to run.

You gotta, yeah. But you know, hey, this is where we're going.

Then it just, I can really lean on that.

And every step takes us closer to that.

Exactly, exactly.

So I like that. Okay, so we're going established creators/founders.

Yep.

We'll play with both of those and just see what deals come in and all of that.

It's funny 'cause there's an interesting flywheel, as a little bit of a tangent to try to install some of your flywheel thinking. When we work with these founders, established or even early stage, once we're kind of like done designing and building their product, they also come to us for growth ideas. That's my, like, you know, partnerships, BD, sales in my background at LinkedIn. And like, I'm growing my own business on LinkedIn. And so they're kind of looking for access to creators to work with, to be able to actually distribute their product. And so there's a, it's a little bit of a tangent from ICP conversation, but there's this flywheel of we work with established founders, they want to be able to distribute their product. How? They go work with the creators that are also on our network. Creators get like equity, they get, you know, like good rev share or whatever, you know, and then they start distributing the product that then helps. I don't know, how do we position ourselves in that kind of flywheel?

Let's sketch that out. We'll just use the bottom part here. What did you say? So it's like build for founders? Let's say you build for founders.

Yeah. How do founders grow their product today in 2025? They likely need to go think about their creator strategy. They're either doing it themselves, like you said, with the Zapier team, or they need to go partner with creators. But there's a, the distribution today is gonna be through audience building. Yep. Or become one themselves, right? Like, you know. Yep.

Okay, so you're building for founders, they're turning to grow with creators. And then what would come next?

I mean, ideally, like, you know, business, like revenue goes up, like creators and founders win because they're distributing something to their audience that they, you know, like there's some success like with both. I don't know if that— This might be just the—

we could turn this into a real flywheel later. Just hang out with the idea. But I think it's like scale, revenue, and relationships. Yes, exactly. Because here, here's what's interesting to me about this is the more projects that you're building and you stay involved, you're not like, hey, we made this thing and then we're handing it off. Exactly. Then they're like, all right, how do we grow? And you're growing with creators. So you're gonna be building this relationship with the creators. Yep. You're gonna be pulling in creators you already know. Yep. Yep. And you're really helpful in that process. Right. And then it's just like, hey, we're all winning together. Yes. And then that adds to your reputation. Yep. All of that. And so then another creator comes along and you're like, oh yeah, actually not only do we pair up founders and creators in order to do this, we help creators become founders. Yes. And so this is a very loose flywheel, but it's a revenue and relationships flywheel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love it. Love it.

All right, so now let's dive into predictable revenue and then I want to get into how we're scaling lead generation as well. But how do you, Like what's unpredictable about the revenue? What are the challenges that you've got into here?

Yeah, these connect. Okay. Because the lead gen is not as predictable either. Yeah. And so if lead gen is in a good spot, I can close a percentage of them and then we end up being able to work on those contracts. And then so it's like this isn't that predictable. And then the contract lengths themselves end up becoming relatively short contracts. I don't think I've really cracked how to be able to extend contracts longer. We did sign two 1-year-long contracts with early-stage founders last year, and that was going to give us, you know, almost like $250K of annual recurring revenue. But they both ran out of business given early-stage stuff. And so since then, I haven't been able to kind of revert back to to the engagement model where it makes sense for the business and it makes sense for us to have a longer-term engagement outside of honestly like 3, 4 months, even if we're successful.

Okay, so yeah, we need to figure out how to get the contracts longer. I guess if we solve just these two things of predictable lead gen and longer contracts, we're there. Yeah.

Does that take care of it? I think so. Yeah. And that's also giving us the confidence in the systems that we have in place Instead of right now where honestly it's a little bit random. It's like who comes in on my LinkedIn feed and how do I convert them to a customer, you know?

Right. I guess in addition to short contracts, you could have repeat business. Yes. Right. And we want more of that.

Or like expanding like to other services maybe. Kind of touches on this a little bit. It's like, you know, you help them with design and product strategy and maybe you can help them with, you know, distribution or I don't know.

Right. Right now you really have two products that people buy. They're either paying you to help them build out or redesign a software product. Yep. Or to refine— Internal, external, internal. External, internal. Okay. And so it's nice, like as far as repeat business, you can sell one and then the other. Yeah, totally. Back and forth. That's good. So long as we're going to the— Right people. The right people. So part of this actually is short contracts and repeat business. Are those both solved by reaching the right people? Ideally. Or what else? Like that'd be the cop-out, like easy, like, oh yeah, we just get to the right people and then we'll get both of these things because they'll do longer contracts, bigger projects. Right. But what guarantees that we get repeat business and longer contracts from these right people?

I think it goes back to the skills gaps that we're filling for them. Okay. The insights from those early customers is that there was no way that they'd be able to find a team like ours and pay us the amount that they were paying us. And so it was like this middle ground of they really need us because they may not be able to afford hiring like a million-dollar AI engineer from OpenAI. Right. But it's in our sweet spot where we're doing it profitably. And so it's kind of, it's a similar sentiment as maybe why more this audience versus this one, because they may need us more as an analysis versus again, like you said, like, great, thank you for your work. I'm just, I have, you know, 40 engineers that will just go build this internally. Yeah, that's really interesting. So are we actually really providing them more value than, you know, the other two cases?

Yeah, the skill gap I think is really interesting. Yeah, and so finding people, if you want that repeat business, then finding people that you can really help them. Yes. You can really partner with them long term.

Exactly.

And they don't already have a CTO or VP of engineering or someone like that.

Right, right, right. Or if they do, like we could help them too. But they don't, like they probably don't have like a full on like team.

That makes sense. All right, so let's think about how we can do leverage LinkedIn for scalable lead gen for these people. So why don't you write up here just for scalable lead gen? And so we're looking for, I guess this is a great time to put in these attributes, right?

So we're looking for established creators, you know, looking product incubation ambition or, you know. Yeah. I remember the podcast with you and the creator who wrote the MBA or personal MBA. Yeah, Josh Kaufman. Yeah, and I remember him saying like, I just want to— I don't really want to do— like, I just want to keep like generating royalties off my book. I'm like, great. Like, that's amazing. I want to do something like that too. He sold a million copies of his book. Yeah. And it keeps increasing. Yeah.

Working well for him. But not my niche. He's not in our ICP. Exactly. Okay, so we're going to leverage LinkedIn for scalable lead gen to reach established creators who want to build products. Yeah, it's like want to build businesses.

But I mean, yeah, like the product-led businesses. Yeah.

And the reason I didn't say businesses is because they've already built businesses. Exactly. And I think a lot of them, if I think of like an Ali Abdaal or a James Clear, they know what the product can become if it really takes off. Exactly. But they're probably not committing to that being the next phase of their career yet. Sure. Yeah. It's a bet. Because if they— Yeah, exactly.

It's an experiment.

Yeah. Because if they were committing to that, they would have hired, like, hired— Exactly. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Yeah. And so in this case you're like, no, we're building a product, right? And if this works, right, if this gets to $10K MRR, yeah, forget it, we're shutting down. Yeah. If it gets to $30K MRR, we're thinking hard about it. Exactly. If it blows up to $100K. Yeah, we're raising, we're going.

Yeah, exactly. You know, we're going all in on this. Yep, yep, yep.

And so, all right, so with that profile of who we're looking for, I'm really curious, what content could you create that would tell that person, right, we should chat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. I love that. Why did you want to build a product yourself?

I mean, I love building products. I mean, just seeing them come to life. Yeah. Inspiration from other people is a big thing. Right. So to answer my question with your question, I would say one piece of content I would want to see a bunch of profiles of creators who have done it before. Who have done this, whether you help them or not. Yeah, exactly. Right? So a LinkedIn carousel that would crush it is 5 creators who have launched products off of their audience. I love it.

Yeah. Why don't you write that down? Ali Abdaal. I love it. Yeah. There's actually so many of these. Oh yeah. Which I've been learning. It's outside of the main ones like Ali Abdaal and James Clear. There's a ton of folks that have been doing this. Some of them fail pretty miserably too. But okay.

So getting into that, You know, you're mentioning some of these fail. Yeah, that's a whole thing. Yeah, exactly. Right. 5 that have failed and the 4 reasons why.

That's its own content. Love it.

I mean, this is stuff in my essay, The Billion Dollar Creator, that I'm talking about this. I'm broader, right? Because we're talking about skincare lines and tequila and apps. Right, right.

Love that.

But there's, you know, if you just stay within the software niche, you could write about a ton of that and it immediately pushes positions you as the person. The person. Yeah, I love that. And then you do a deeper dive case study on here's the one that we made.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah. Or here's how we think about it.

Right, right, right. Love that.

And then we did an episode a little while ago on a minimum viable brand and how when you do outbound content or sorry, outbound sales, often it falls flat because someone goes to look up who you are. There's nothing there. And there's nothing there. And so this is the kind of thing where you want the right minimum viable brand to position you as the expert for all this, right? So if I'm looking around, okay, who should I use to do this? We've got this flywheel. Someone in the network is like, oh, you should talk to Jay and Casper Studios. And I'm like, all right, I look it up. And then the kind of content that I'm seeing is like, oh, Jay thinks about how creators should build products. All day, every day. Yeah. And he does it.

And here's the case studies of failures and why. Right.

Yeah. You know, and you could start to break down, you know, here's why James Clear's app works and someone else's didn't. Yeah. Right. Or actually, I mean, it'd be fascinating if you're like, hey, in this niche, it seems like there's a 70% hit rate on these products, at least from what I could find. And in this niche, it seems like there's a 10%. Yeah, right. Why is that?

Those are good, like breakdowns and stories and interviews or, you know, if they're down for that, you know, to talk about.

The other thing is, I think some of these questions you don't even have to answer.

Answer.

You can throw out those questions to the community and be like, you ask that question that I just did and be like, why is that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then in the comments you can speculate and other people can speculate. And then rumor has it the comments help amplify things on LinkedIn. Not as much.

Thoughtful comments, not AI-generated comments. That ruins your brand. I mean, I don't have internal data on this, but just look at your own feed and When you see those same people that are just AI generating content, it just immediately diminishes their own brand.

Right. In my mind. I think so. Absolutely. But if you have that level of engagement, then— Exactly. And that thoughtful discussion.

I love that. I love that. I love that. Meaningful. Do you think it's a big enough market? Because the TAM for established founders versus established creators. Yeah.

My gut reaction is yes, absolutely. Yeah. But let's question that. Okay. So what's an average project size for an established creator?

Anywhere between like, let's say like $50K to $80K right now.

Okay. Now let's say that this project works and it's happening on an ongoing basis.

Gets closer to like, you know, above like $100K, $120K.

Yeah. Yeah. So let's say you're building—

Let's say a month.

Building the MVP for $50K. Yeah. $50K. Yeah. And then you're going to scale and establish it and maintenance and all that for $10K a month. Exactly, yeah. Right? That's right. So maybe the first year we're $100K, you know, $150K, something like that. Yep. If it works. Right. All right, so then in that case, how many do we need to get to $10 million? Or sorry, to $2 million, right? We need— Not a lot. 10 to 15? Yeah, yeah. Depending on? While we're doing it? Because you're probably still taking on a few other projects.

A few other ones here and there, yeah. That's not too bad.

So are there 10 to 15 creators at scale? Let's say the entire, later the business model becomes we're actually just maintaining these. Yes. And I think $10K a month to maintain and improve an app that's doing $30K to $100K a month is pretty reasonable. Makes sense, yep, yep. You don't want to be so expensive that they're like, I just got to bring this in-house. Exactly. Yeah. But, you know, you can have that balance. So if we're talking, you know, we need $2 million recurring is $166,000 a month. And so, okay, well, that's $16,000 on maintenance. Yeah. Yeah. Or $10,000 on maintenance plus one new build every month. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yes, I think that the market is big enough, especially if you're not exclusively Focus on just established creators. Right, right, right. If you're taking the established founders that are adjacent to that, then it's—

And it's a thought experiment, but which one of these markets grows over time? My bet is actually this one. That the creators do. I mean, I think established founders, I mean, it's a whole conversations around VC-backed companies and maybe you don't need as much capital these days. And I don't know.

I think they both grow pretty significantly over time. Yeah. Because the number of people out there that have lots of ideas and incredible amounts of money. Yes. Like, yeah, that's, yeah, that's pretty huge. But then, but creators, I think, grows much faster.

And the reality is like the line between these two are kind of blurring.

It's very, you know what I mean? Yeah, they're blurry today and they're— it's going to be—

it's going to be a thing in the future. Really? Right. Right.

It's going to get so much.

Do you believe that? Like, it's like to be an established founder, You need to be established creator. To be an established creator, you need to be established founder.

I think there's tons of established founders that will do amazing things and never become creators. Right. I think the next wave of established founders, a substantial portion of them are gonna use creator techniques to get there.

Yes, exactly. Right, right.

So I think that's growing very significantly. The other thing that I wanted to get to in LinkedIn though is what this content allows you to do of the case studies and the failures and why and the breakdowns and all that. Is I really think it lets you do targeted outbound. Yes. Because then that instead of that DM or something being like, hey, have you ever thought about this? Because actually they've probably thought about it.

Yeah, exactly.

You could break it down by niche. Let's say that we do fitness, food, business and productivity as 3 niches that we want to go after. Right. We'll take all the case studies that you've done, distill them down to those, like bucket them into those niches, and then individual posts and carousels. Now you can DM these founders in the food niche and say, hey, I don't know if you've ever considered this, but a growing trend that we're seeing is food content creators building their own apps. Right, right. Here's an example of 5. If you ever want to chat, if that would be helpful, let me know. Right. That's— I'm For sure, I'm 100% clicking that link. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then if I flip through it, like I might not take the call right away. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. But you've worked in sales and BD, you know the follow-up process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that like engagement from outbound is going to be through the roof compared to the usual outbound, which is like, would you like to buy our new ERP software for—

Oh my God, it's like this long.

You're like— Right. Because like this is going to be visual. It's going to be—

It's visual and storytelling. Yeah. It's interesting because this is where my product hat goes back on. You could just start creating products for them in the outreach.

Oh, because the effort is so low.

At least mockups. You can, hey, here's the case studies for your niche and I've already built you a Replit agent or a product that can give you a sense of what this will be. Oh, that's interesting. I'm wondering— Like take it and go if you need that, or, you know, now you can work with us to actually make it a business.

Yeah. First reaction was I love it. Second reaction was I wonder if it devalues the entire offering. Potentially, right? Because a worry that I have with development getting so easy— Exactly. —is that then people say like, oh, it's— I can just throw something out quickly. Exactly. And miss out on— the product market research, the user experience, the scalability, all these things that are so important.

Yes, exactly.

And then what I think would be sad for this entire industry, right, is if someone, if the established creator says, oh, I can create AI-driven software in 10 minutes. Yeah. So I tried that, it failed. Oh, right off the entire category. Exactly. It's like, no, you just did it poorly.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

You just want to find that balance of how to make sure that nothing you do devalues the offering. Right, right. Positions it well. Yeah. Premium. So yeah, it's this premium thing. Actually, it's the other thing that creators care about very deeply is their brand reputation. Yes. Yeah. And really delivering value to their audience. I would focus on that 100%. Yep. And then I would say, hey, and actually because of how the product development world is, we can move faster and test things to deliver more value, and we can do that with less cost. But that's like the, you don't want the person who is trying to, who's excited about it because it's cheap, fast, and easy. You want the person who's excited for the outcome. And then they get tipped over to doing it because companies like yours have made it cheaper, faster, and easier.

Maybe the other, I love that, maybe the other piece around trying to provide a lot of value because the framework I was trying to take was like, how do you provide value with the outreach? Part of that is content, like the case studies. Yeah, maybe it could be some like audience discovery features. So like it feels like, like how do you know, how do you know what to build for your audience? Ironically, I'm trying to think about that myself as we think about how I can maybe build a product myself to be able to diversify my revenue streams outside of the agency. It's actually kind of hard to know what to build for your audience. And maybe we can automate some of the discovery process. But again, you have to be mindful of that on your previous point around devaluing the broader service. And that's like scraping tools, like pulling in a bunch of information.

Yeah, I think that, I don't think automating discovery or making a clear path devalues it. Because you're the one saying, hey, you gotta do this right.

Yes, exactly.

Don't just rush in. You got a brand on the line. Yep. And so if, if you say, hey, we have a proven 5-step process for— yes, breaking down, for establishing what's the right fit for your audience. Product-audience fit is so, so important. And all of these people think, oh, I've got 100,000 people following me, so I can just make something, put it in front of them.

Well, those are some of the failures.

And you're like, they think that, and here's 5 examples of why.

Yeah, and you kind of look dumb.

That doesn't work.

Yeah.

What was the, I feel like MKBHD, and he had a bunch of iPhone wallpapers or something like that. Okay. And he just, like, highest quality brand, perception of him, everything he does, and everybody just tore him apart because— Oh, really? It was a cheap— Cheap, cheap product. Cheap product. It was just like, what are you doing?

Not his brand.

You know, you're reviewing the highest quality cameras and cars. Yeah, what is this?

All of this.

And you're like, this felt like a quick cash grab. Yeah, yeah. Right? And so yeah, you can say, hey, we can take you through this. And this also distinguishes you from someone's brother or nephew or whoever who's like, I spent 10 minutes with Cursor. I could build this.

And it's like, yeah, of course. Yeah, you can. You can, I can. Yeah. That's awesome.

There's way more to it though.

Yes. Yeah. The hard part is getting people to get to that point because AI tools are becoming easier to be able to build product. It's just a fact. And we're using that to advantage. At the same time, I hope that it's kind of creating, like the TAM is increasing of people that want to build product because it's so easy to do it. And then a percentage of them will realize that, you know, Cursor and Lovable is not going to be able to maybe necessarily take them fully to the next level. But honestly, it's hard to know that. Yeah. Given how fast like the space is changing, you know? Right. But the discovery, the audience research like that, yeah, like that'll be maybe later to be automated away. Yeah. Okay.

Coming back to all of this and looking at it, one thing I was thinking about in predictable revenue that we touched on, but I think is really important, that repeat business and the, you know, it's kind of in all of this, the short contracts, repeat business, the skill gap. What we're really doing is we want to be a long-term partner. Yes. And that's where the recurring contract makes a lot of sense. And so it's like, hey, here's the whole roadmap. Yeah. We're gonna launch and test this. Yep. And for $50 grand. Yep. We can do that. Yep. But then here's a whole roadmap of how every single month. Yeah. We've got new improvements coming out. Totally. And the reason this is important is because as a creator, you care about your reputation. Yes. You care about delivering value to your audience. Right. And so you're not gonna be in this position of like you threw a one-off out there. Yeah. And then, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hope for the best. Yeah, it's $100K. It's not $100K MRR yet. Like it's a failure. Yeah, it takes time, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And so I'm just looking back at this. I think that we've—

We've gotten somewhere. We've gotten somewhere. So, cool.

You know, we're scaling this goal of $2 million. Yeah. Let's go back to the constraints for a second. Yes. 50% profit. Right. 10 people. 10 people. Yeah. Our hypothesis is that we need to really focus in on— Right. Established creators and founders and this like give and take between that, that line that's becoming more and more blurred. We need to really find ways to partner with people who are thinking long-term and wanna build, turn a product into a real business. And they have an audience to do that off of. And then we want to really focus on attracting those people by putting out content that I'm pretty sure no one is putting out this content right now. Like, That's not a category.

Yeah, exactly.

I think I probably write more than anyone about that, about creators building businesses with real enterprise value. Yes, right. Exactly. And I'm not even in this sub-niche and I write about it once a quarter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, exactly. So you could absolutely own that.

Yeah. Yeah. And then not only will your content attract new leads, but then it gives you the perfect path for outbound.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we're done. Let's go to 2 million. I love this. This has been awesome.

All right. Well, I'd love to hear just a little bit about how you're feeling coming into this versus how you're feeling now after we've scribbled on the board for an hour.

This has been great. I, you know, one, one thing I've been meditating on myself just as an individual is how your own personal strengths and weaknesses enter into your business. And I definitely have, you know, that's happened for me. I like experimenting with different things. I like seeing like how, you know, different types of customers we can help. And sometimes that is beneficial. You know, it got us to here, but it probably won't get us to there. And so this has been helpful to kind of hit one of my Achilles heel, which is potentially not being as focused. And this is getting us to a place where I've been thinking about it, but because of the lack of intentionality behind it, I've been not focusing on it enough. And so, yeah, I'm excited. I'm like, I'm excited to to get going after this and really start to work on these pieces of content. And yeah, just like really help hopefully scale the business.

Sounds good. Well, thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you.

Where should people go if they are, let's say hypothetically, yes, an established creator who wants to build a product that provides real value to get in front of their audience?

Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn, Jay Singh, and then our website is also CasperStudios.xyz. Perfect. That's good. Thanks for coming. Thank you.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show, then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.