The marketing plan that got us past $100K MRR
My name is Quentin. I am the co-founder of ManyPixels.
It took us a bit more than three years to pass the $100K MRR mark.
Here are all the acquisition channels we tried and how they performed. I will include both what worked and what did not work as I think it’s equally important. Hopefully, this can help some of you in your own growth/marketing journey.
I will do my best to be precise and provide numbers and insights as much as possible. However, as we have a lot to cover, I will try not to get into too many details. I can do separate posts on specific channels later if there is interest.
Not all these channels are equally important for us. Some were just quick experiments, while content/SEO and Word of Mouth/Referral are our main acquisition drivers.
Personal Branding, Communities, and PH Launch
Our early success was a combination of community building, personal branding, heavy discounts, and Product Hunt launches. Back then, productized services were very new, and only companies like WPCurve or DesignPickle had cracked the business model. People were intrigued and wanted to give them a try.
Most of our initial traction came from our co-founder’s already existing online presence. Robin had spent years posting about his entrepreneurial journey on different platforms (FB, Reddit, Twitter, HN).
When we launched in early 2018, he doubled down on those and became even more active, constantly providing value and insight to the different communities.
We got Product of the Day on PH on Feb 14th. It was much easier to get noticed back then. We did a few subsequent launches for the next version of our service but did not get the same visibility.
Content & SEO
SEO and content account for 50% of our traffic and about 35% of our acquisition.
We started actively creating content in early 2019 and now have more than 500 blog articles.
Here are a few things that have been doing for content
- We started with a simple SEO approach: we came up with a semantic core and targeted keywords one by one. It did give us a great initial boost, but the traffic then started to slow down.
- We then changed our strategy and move from a keyword-based to entity-based search. We adopted the topic cluster methodology, which focuses more on topics than distinct keywords.
- We now work on creating “micro funnels” by interlinking our articles. This helps keep the reader engaged with our content.
- On top of creating new articles, we also improve our best-performing ones, which has been effective so far.
- For on-page SEO, we make sure our website and content are optimized.
- As for the off-page SEO, we did a bit of link building and link exchange activities together with guest blogging but found out that it was not worth our time.
Apart from blog articles, we have another piece of content that brought us a lot of traffic and customers over the years: our Illustration Gallery.
Here are a few stats :
- 2.5 mil sessions (around 70k per month)
- 70k backlinks
- 200 customers acquired
We are now looking to replicate this success and launch an Icon Gallery in the next couple of months.
Word of Mouth & Referral
Probably the best channel there is! Just build a great service/product, take care of your customers, and they will refer you.
Our onboarding survey shows around 35% of our customers come from referrals.
We don’t do much for this channel. We have a referral program through our app, invite a friend and get both $100 off, but it has not worked very well.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are, what I would consider, one of our biggest failures so far.
It’s working for our competitors, so why aren’t we able to replicate that success? We sell the same service, to the same market, at the same price.
So far, we have
- Spent more than $35k
- Worked with an agency for three months
- Had three different in-house team members taking the lead
- Created dozens of experiments with different creatives and audiences
- But our CAC only got worse and worse. We were paying $2,000 per conversion as of the last six months. That’s too high to increase the budget and start scaling.
Last week, we decided to refocus our efforts on organic content and significantly decrease the spending on paid ads (around $1k/month).
Google Ads
Like Facebook Ads, we haven’t been able to scale this channel efficiently.
After many attempts, both with agencies and internally, and $30k spent over two years on Paid Search. We have now scaled down to just one branded keyword campaign.
We are currently working on a ManyPixels VS competitors website page. This page will serve as the landing spot for a paid search campaign on competitors’ keywords.
Paid Media & PR
Back in 2020, when we launched our new app and new branding, we paid a PR Distribution Service (around $1k). We ended up on Yahoo, but it did not provide us any juice.
We are giving paid media a try right now.
We did our first YouTube sponsored video here ($1,250) and our first sponsored newsletter ($3,500).
I believe in the video format and would like to keep experimenting with YouTube sponsorships, depending on our results.
Cold Outreach
We have done a little bit of cold emailing and got the following results.
Leads bought (UpLead and other) - 5571
Money spent - $3,161
Emails sent - 16,672
Sales Calls - 15
Deals Closed - 7
I am sure that this could be an effective and scalable channel with more dedication. We just haven’t been focused on that a lot.
The key here is to meet the prospects at the moment of intent (i.e when they are looking for a designer). It can be on job boards, design platforms, etc. We have had more success doing that than with generic cold emailing.
Organic Social
We have been posting consistently on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We haven’t seen an increase in traffic.
The #1 thing on my To-Do list for acquisition now is to start creating founder-led content on LinkedIn, forums (like I am doing now), and possible Twitter.
Leadgen, Email Marketing & Marketing Automation
In the past years, we have used multiple marketing tools and CRM. I have spent countless hours interconnecting them and ensuring we had the same updated information on all fronts. Then we finally moved to Hubspot, and everything became 10x easier.
Everything now takes place in Hubspot: forms/lead capture, website chat, email marketing, and automation.
We use forms throughout our website and blog to promote our downloadable content. These forms get us about 150 leads per month.
We then have a bunch of workflows and automated emails that trigger depending on where you sign up.
Here is how many emails we are sending out per month.
Affiliates
We offer 15% recurring commissions to our affiliates.
There are our metrics for 2021.
Many people subscribed to our program (around 250), but very few are serious. I would say that 5-6 of our affiliates are responsible for 90% of the conversions.
Conclusion
That’s it. I hope this post can help some of you.
I am sure plenty of similar companies were able to get much better results while doing significantly less and using only 1 or 2 channels. But this has been our journey so far.
I will keep writing about the ins and outs of ManyPixels here and on Twitter if you are interested.
What an incredible post. Anybody sharing their actual growth tactics should get their name on the entrepreneur trophy.
My toes curl and I cringe - When I see, cold email outreach generating 15 sales calls with a 50% closing-rate on 5,571 contacts, I can only think of a single word.. Potential.
Use your new experience to write better copy to cover specific pains. Spend some time finding list of your target customers and combine it with LinkedIn outreach. Then, I bet this channel can drive tremendous growth with a freelancer or part-time managing it.
+1 to this. I'm a marketer, but that was the number that stood out most to me. A lot of untapped opportunity there, and if anything it's probably the simplest to scale.
True. I could/should probably focus on this channel more.
What's tricky, though, is finding high-quality leads. I feel like everyone is buying the same leads from the same sources/SaaS, and those get submerged with cold emails.
I don’t think you need to worry about leads getting other cold emails. I get like 10 - 20 every day. I still read the things that are relevant and catch my attention.
Instead you should worry about getting the leads that would most likely have a pain related to your services; spending too much on freelancers, not having creative in time, having a lot of tasks but unable to hire full-time.
Then you need to craft your copy well enough to catch the attention of the prospect and trick them into think for 5 seconds if that is relevant for them. It all depends on the writer, but I like to go long-form but with the classic AIDA model.
Absolutely, playing around the pain point with solid copies does wonders.
Congrats man! An excellent post, great insights.
I have +6 years of experience in paid media (especially Facebook Ads and Google Ads), I would to take a look at those accounts if you want :). I currently manage a 1M USD budget at my job, and I love to check campaigns and learn about the failures and successes of different accounts.
Let me know :)
Cheers
Not sure if/when we will get started with Paid Ads again but I will keep that in mind. Thanks!
Huge congrats and an amazing achievement, Quentin!! Thanks for sharing your learnings! :) Hope everything is well with you!
Thanks for the great article. Can you please explain more about “keyword-based to entity-based search” ?
Too long to explain it in detail here, but I am planning a big article about our entire content/SEO strategy.
Great insights, thanks for sharing! 🔥
Looks like your cold outreach has potential to improve, I'm happy to offer insights from what we're doing at https://www.coldemail.studio/ in exchange for some insights on your SEO / content marketing? Worth a quick chat? 🙂
Congrats on the success 🙂. You mentioned that you paid a PR Distribution Service $1000 and ended up on Yahoo. Which service did you use?
I believe it was https://www.prdistribution.com/
Awesome. Thanks.
Awesome piece, Quentin! Thanks for sharing. Including this in Tuesday's issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter!
Awesome, thx a lot! How do I subscribe to the newsletter?
You can subscribe here!
Excellent post, thanks for sharing! Between the design templates and the blog posts, which one helps you better with conversions, and which one helps with branding/community reach?
Hard to say because no one is going to buy the service on the spot. They will first discover us through our blog or our free illustrations and buy later.
Based on our customer survey, I would say our free designs though.
Yeah, I believe the free designs reach is far greater than the blog posts... Thank you :)
Congrats on the success! Takes a lot to admit when you fail at things, but clearly, once people are in they're happy.
How's it going with lead gen? I've built our lead gen from blog content to about the same number of leads as you but found them to be pretty low quality.
Same for me, I don't think it's being very valuable for us.
I looked at the numbers. I must say cold outreach and email marketing should get you a 40% open rate. The key is to match the message with the list. Segment until you can get that working. Never sell. Always build an audience and convert them to a weekly newsletter. Then nudge, nurture and educate. A percentage will convert over time.
Agreed, we haven't been focused enough on this channel for sure.
https://blog.emailoctopus.com/how-to-effectively-segment-your-mailing-list/
Really grateful for this Quentin, for someone like me who enjoys gathering marketing insights, this piece is a trove. You appear to have ticked all the basic marketing boxes. If I might suggest a marketing hack...
I went through your website and I think it's simply beautiful. I've come across your brand before but I felt like it was something I could do without (even though I needed a designer at the time for my startup). My suggestion is this: you should launch a creative marketing campaign that is specifically aimed at demand generation. A strategic series of marketing activities that will position your brand as a necessity such that founders like me will think of ManyPixels as a must-have tool in our "startup pack".
I lead a team of creative brand and marketing strategists at thecontentadvocates.com and we practically live for demand gen. We can give you the strategy you need to acquire the early and late majority audience. You should totally check us out
Thanks, happy to help.
I am gonna check out your service now.
Awesome. We can have a chat if you want to know more about how we can help out.
Calendly.com/irhoseapori
Thanks for sharing, this is really valuable stuff!
You're welcome!
Nice sharing. I'm curious. What're your largest competitors? It seems there're lots of giants in this field. What're your advantages? Thank you.
Biggest player in the space is DesignPickle. I don't think you always need to have a comparative advantage. Most of the time the space is big enough for multiple players.
Also, your brand can always be the differentiator.
Congrats Quentin! This is such an informative read. Props to you too for sharing your failures along with your successes.
I'm intrigued about your link building strategy. It seems your off-page SEO efforts were not successful, but from everything I read online it seems that's one of the best ways to increase organic traffic. Can you tell us a bit more on why you think it didn't work?
For link building, we realized it was a lot of work to get individual links manually. You could always hire an agency to do so and pay by link (maybe we should?). But I find it hard to measure.
Creating something people want to link to, like our free illustrations, is a great way to get links.
Any ... Uh... recommendations for those who need a firm to help with link building?
Got it. I haven't done any link building myself but it sounds like a lot of work indeed...
Thanks again for the great post.
Congratulations to you and thank you for sharing these insights.
I want to create my startup but my biggest worry is the Oversaturation of the marke ? It makes feel that it is important to succeed.
What advice you can give me ?
It depends on whether you are trying to launch a tool/service to support yourself and your family or going for the next Uber.
I would not worry too much about market saturation if it's the former.
All you need is a few customers to get started.
Thank you @quentin_gilon for sharing 🙏
Happy to help!
Awesome! What tool do you use for the affiliate stuff? Trying to set up the same 15% recurring for my SaaS too :)
I use https://tapfiliate.com/
There might be some better tools, though. I would like to have the ability to track affiliates with coupons and not just links.
SEO and content still have an impact it seems. I often see people writing it off entirely.
I would say organic is the way to go, more than ever. But that's just my opinion.
Any tips on growing a presence on social?
I am just starting now.
You want to start with LinkedIn and/or Twitter. Post as much as possible. Try to create value for your target audience.
Do you repeat post your content? I noticed that a lot on Twitter.
Great post, really appreciate the amazing insight. Sounds like content and SEO are one of your key channels. Were you able to build the content audience and SEO success due to your founders existing audience or did you grow it organically from the ground up?
Thanks again
It was entirely from the ground up.
Nice post, thanks for sharing! 🙏🏼
You're welcome!
Congratulations! That's a great achievements!
And very helpful, will use this knowledge on my project too:)
Glad I can help!
This is really helpful, thanks for sharing!
You're welcome. I will try to do more posts like that where I go into more details about our marketing strategy etc.
That's HUGE!
Random question: how do you guys handle your cancellation flows?
We have a form where we ask why they are canceling.
Depending on their answers, we enroll them into a specific email workflow.
For instance, if someone says they don't need design at this point. We will enroll them into a sequence that will email them in 60 and 90 days to see if they have new projects coming up. We mention that their preferred designer is still there and ready to go whenever they want to come back.
We will soon experience a new flow where we propose an immediate discount when someone is trying to cancel (in an effort to reduce churn, which for businesses like ours is very high).
YES! We literally do that!
Are you building the new flow on your own? Cause we got a pretty good
product that I think would be amazing for you guys, literally plug-n-play.
Are you open for a quick talk?
Yes, we are done with the development already and this should be pushed into prod on Monday.
Nice product though! Many service/product companies don't focus enough on reactivations.
Do you integrate with all the tools like Hubspot etc?
Not yet, unfortunately, we first want to have a banger product on itself and then make integrations.
But yeah, congrats and let me know if it works good for you, just know that we are always here if you ever need ahahahha
Whoa! There's a lot of insightful information here. I personally have figured out that there are a lot of advantages when a founder has an active presence on communities like Twitter, Product Hunt, Indie Hackers and Reddit. Imagine how effective that would be if each founder has such an advantage. It works effectively for the startup's marketing and sales
Yes, that was what I am gonna focus on now (never too late they say aha).
Happy to help!
I’d say maybe you need to focus on fewer tools for marketing. I get that this is a long run, and the experience is always valuable, but it’s best to focus and drive through fewer channels: “simplify to amplify”.
100% agree. And in my case, this is applicable to all parts of my business. I just did too much stuff because I was curious rather than because it was necessary.
But at the same time, I don't have regrets cause I learned a lot. This will be helpful for the next venture.
Congratulations! And thanks for being so open and sharing so many insights!
Glad I could be helpful!
Realy nice post! Super helpful. So basically we should all invest in SEO from the start XD
Regarding word of mouth, from my experience with the WBE Space, it feels great when I member refers to the community on Twitter because it validates both for me and potentially other new members that the community is cool. Buutt normally the members do not have a big audience so it does not bring a lot of people to my landing page. Did you feel the same?
I think organic is the way to go yes. Even if that takes a bit of time to see results. This is why you should get started asap, and probably even you launch.
Most of the referrals did not bring a lot of traffic as indeed they had small audiences. But once in a while, you get lucky!
I have no audience either, this is what I am working on now.
got it. thanks for the post
Impressive. Thorough. Thanks:)
Happy to help!
Amazing, thanks for sharing Quentin! And first congrats on the milestone!
It's great to see that organic (social & SEO) did much better than paid channels... I'm sure it gives a lot of hope to other bootstrapped companies.
Like others said, I think one way to grow would be to increase prices too :)
Out of curiosity, why keeping 1K/month of spend on Facebook? And mentioning in your open Marketing role that everyday tasks will be about PPC channels management?
I'm rooting for you!
The job post is not reflective of our current strategy I would say.
I would love to find someone who could make the PPC works for us at a ~$500 acquisition cost. But as explained, we haven't been able to do so (yet).
For now, we will double down on content/SEO and other organic channels: Twitter, LinkedIn, IH, etc.
My marketing manager wants to keep 1 campaign on (at $1k/mo), we will re-evaluate at the end of this month, and if no conversions, we will turn it off.
We are indeed gonna raise of price in the coming weeks, with the launch of our new software/platform.
Thx a lot! Appreciate it.
Quentin, thank you very much for sharing.
I really appreciate that you took the time and explained all the points clearly.
I am glad that was helpful!
Congratulations on this success! Very inspirational.
One thing worth mentioning: this is now the 3rd or. even 4th post about a successful on demand graphics design company in the last few weeks! This should be a great insight for all of us: even if there are already successful companies in our markets, we must not be afraid of starting our own - the market is big enough.
And also the other way around: if we find a rather unique market and suddenly a competitor is following us - so what? There is place for multiple businesses.
Sorry for hijacking your post ;-) Great work, keep updating us, stories like yours help me tremendously through my struggles.
Happy to help!
You are right, we have this notion that competition is inherently bad and should be avoided at all costs. I would disagree, it should be embraced.
We never mention the market size. Graphic design is a $14 billion market in the US alone. Surely there is room for a lot of successful companies.
Congratulations on the milestones! Informative post.. shall definitely take lessons from them.
You're welcome! Happy to help.
Thank you for taking the time on writing this! I'm a software developer currently working on my first SaaS, and I'm scared about marketing, SEO, and all those concepts related to sales, but you gave here a lot of insights I will definitely follow, thank you very much and congratulations for the 100k!
Happy to help! If you are a solo founder I would just start with posting on Twitter and LinkedIn every day. This will get you some visibility.
Yes! In fact, the whole purpose of my SaaS is growing on Twitter XD, since I realized that for building in public and have an easier journey as a solo founder it's kind of critical having an audience, that's why I decided to build a SaaS to actually help you grow on Twitter. I'm launching the beta today! if anyone wants to test it you can follow me on Twitter and get the latest news there
Love these breakdowns! Thank you Quentin!
(marketer here 👋🏽) What advice would you give founders who are debating whether to learn and DIY or outsource their marketing?
You're welcome! Hope that helps.
Every time I tried to outsource/work with an agency it ended up not working out.
Unless it is for a very specific channel (Paid Search for instance), I would recommend doing it in-house.
Another mistake that I did was to hire people to do it right away instead of really giving it a go myself. Then it's difficult to evaluate this person's performance because you don't have clear benchmarks.
Nowadays, what works really well is organic self-promotion on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and forums. I would focus on that.
As an agency owner, this hurts!
What issues did you run into trying to work with agencies?
And how long do you recommend founders DIY before outsourcing (if they go that route).
I only worked with two agencies, so maybe I was unlucky.
I guess the main issues were
they did not take enough time to understand our target customers, our service, and our value proposition
they were focused on one channel. Then when it did not work, they said it was because marketing is now an omnichannel approach.
But again, I was probably unlucky.
I would advise founders to understand how it works and get a clear understanding of the results/output they can expect from someone else doing it. It would be best if you had clear expectations before they start the job. Otherwise, it won't be easy to gauge their performance.
Aah gotcha!
I'm sorry you had such bad experiences. That would be super frustrating!
Yeah, understanding the company thoroughly (should be) a non-negotiable before starting a project.
And a focused omnichannel approach from the beginning is the best way to go.
Great advice, thank you! I'm hoping to eventually have a benchmarks option to the dashboard for Tangram (marketing strategy and execution tool I'm working on) so founders know what's working and what to expect from the get-go.
This is really helpful! What % of time do you think your marketing efforts have taken? Thanks!
I am pretty bad at marketing and was mostly focused on the tech and operations so delegated all of those to a team (1 marketing manager, 1 content manager, and 2 content writers).
However, I am now more involved in marketing activities. I would say 25% of my time.
Great post! Did you find the content marketing team on upwork or build it in-house? Also how much are you spending/did you spend on producing the 500+ articles over the years? Thanks
Thanks!
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
Yeah Brett is killing it!
Do you have the link please?
https://www.designjoy.co/
https://www.manypixels.co/