Sean Everett grew an audience from zero to 14,000 RSS subscribers and 35,000 YouTube views in 60 days with no budget. He produced 100 pieces of content monthly across text, video, and audio, testing formats then doubling down on what worked. The tools cost almost nothing: a phone, a library laptop, and optional $150-per-month subscriptions.
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Hello, welcome to a brand new year. 2023 has kicked off, so hopefully you got some good rest in. Today we're gonna talk about a case study that we designed, gosh, maybe half a year ago over the summer of 2022, and decided to put this into practice in a really difficult operating environment such that we've seen in high-growth startups. So as you can see on the screen here, and If you're not sighted, we have this in text. But essentially the challenge that we gave ourselves and the requirements list was we want to be able to figure out the steepest growth we can possibly achieve at no cost. So completely organic and profitable that anybody on the planet could do with very simple tools and an internet connection. And so the results that we achieved at a high level was 0 to 14,000 subscribers in less than 2 months and 60 days with a $0 budget. So in this case study, we're gonna walk through a little bit what that looked like. So, um, let's go down a little bit here. So how do you find growth? We say trust the process because we've done this in different operating environments and different industries. And while a lot of things are different, Mm-hmm. Maybe the market, maybe the product, maybe the sales motion, the marketing motion, whatever. The process stays the same. And that process is essentially, at its core, is exploration and then exploitation. That came from a book called The Origin of Wealth, which you should take a look at if you haven't. But essentially it's the same process. You try things, figure out what works, and then double down on the things that work. So we ended up trying pretty much every media format. We even kind of invented our own along the way and every distribution channel that we could think of online. So we did text, audio, video, music experiences, e-commerce products. We did people. Gosh, the channels we pushed this content through— text, video, blogging, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, websites, music streaming services, RSS feeds. As much as we could, right? And we figured out, um, within about a month what was working and we just doubled down on it. So here's some of the tools that we used and why anyone else can also do this. So a mobile phone with a video camera and an internet connection, or if you don't have that, you could get a computer. And we really believe in accessibility in a global population. So If you don't have any money to your name, if you are homeless, you can go to a library in your local community. And some— we just saw this this last weekend, we went to the Nashville Public Library— they have a vending machine that distributes laptops with your library card for free that you can use. And so there is a way that you can get started on the internet with no money And build yourself up, build a following up, build a business up, create your own livelihood from scratch. You can do it. It is possible. Now you can upgrade to Pro Tools on a monthly basis. That's maximum about $150 a month. That's like if you bought a brand new smartphone, brand new computer on the monthly payment plans, and then you got the pro versions of a few tools like Figma, Squarespace, Otter.ai, Zoom, Dropbox, et cetera, and then use social networks as your distribution. distribution channel. So anybody can literally do this. And so here's the growth that we achieved and some notes on that. So as we mentioned, RSS subscribers, subscribers about 0 to 14,000 in less than 60 days. YouTube views, I'm just pulling one outta there, 0 to 35,000. We had one very short form piece of content. I think it was like maybe 3 seconds long. No, I think it was 2 seconds and it got 21,000 views within a day. So, you know, Use your creativity and follow your instincts and good things will happen. The other thing to note here is we started from brand new accounts. And by the way, my dog's down here, so I'm petting him as I'm recording this because he is, he likes attention. Let's put it that way. Say hi, Brooklyn. Hi, Brooklyn. Okay. We started with very free, basically zero accounts, right? So brand new accounts we just set up from scratch. We didn't have like crazy followings. I mean, Some of the networks we distributed some stuff to, like LinkedIn, Twitter, we had some following there, but for the most part, we set up brand new accounts. And the other thing about this is we were doing B2B. So this is like professional services content, not the most exciting in the world, right? Not a huge population. Consumers on TikTok are not in love with like B2B content, but there is a place for it. So suffice to say, if you're promoting or have a consumer product or service, we think your results could potentially be higher using some of the tactics that we used. And, um, the other thing we'll say is another, you know, one of our magic tricks is distribution channels. They are, they are like magic. Um, so here's a graphic. This is a screenshot from the Squarespace mobile app. We're not lying. We didn't Photoshop this. We did some overlay here to show you how much content we were created per month. Now this is rough, but I think approximately 100 pieces of content from August and through September. And then we went to zero for 2 months cuz I wanted to see what the staying power of this was. And then I did 3 more pieces of content. So basically from about 100 pieces of content went from zero to 14,000 subscribers. I mean, that is like, that's one of the steepest lines I've ever seen in my career. Um, frankly, from a zero standing start, that's insane. Um, and then you see the retention power of this as well, like no other content. It continued to stay. And note also that the count of subscribers every month started from zero. So it's not like you got the benefit of, you know, month 1 got to 4,000. We had to start all over from zero in September and then had to grow all the way up there again. So you don't get it for free. Right? Like retention's the name of the game in this stuff. And so we were able to retain a good healthy amount. And then once we came back in in December and published 3 more pieces, you know, over the last month, month and a half or whatever, it sort of resurged that audience. It reactivated them. And that was really interesting. So there is staying power with this stuff. It does have evergreen content built in and then Here's that YouTube snapshot, which shows you that this was essentially a dead account. I hadn't published anything on YouTube. I watched maybe a couple videos every year. That's about it. And then you can see the spike here in September when we were doing some of the work, and you could see some of the posting, some of the time periods and the count down here. And then a few other pieces here. So, and then here's some of the stuff that we use. Some of these are behind our paywall, which You know, whatever. And then this is a little bit about us. Boutique firm, we've been doing this stuff, been on the internet since the very beginning. Weird background about me. If you remember Gateway 2000 computers, that's where I grew up in Sioux City, Iowa. So I've been around computers almost my whole life and been around the internet since the very beginning, AOL Instant Messenger days. So I think part of this too is I've kind of been in and around this stuff. So I was able to skip through a lot of the holes and pitfalls and things that just don't work and just really focus on the things that do. So yeah, I think that's it. If you have questions, please reach out, everettadvisors.com, give us a shout. We love to help folks and have a passion for founders, high-growth businesses, and, you know, people that operate with with core values and, and stay true to them. So that's it for me. Hope 2023 is a great year for you, and, um, we'll see you on the internet. All right, bye-bye.
