Starting A Bootstrapped Digital Marketing Agency At Age 24 [$500K/Year]
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hello! I am Gaurav Sharma, the Founder of Attrock, a Digital Marketing Agency. We help businesses all around the globe build their brands online and scale up.
I started the agency in 2014 and haven’t looked back ever since. The agency started out by providing highly tailored solutions to all my clients, who are primarily based out of the USA or Europe. We provide SEO, content, email, affiliate, and influencer marketing services to SaaS and eCommerce companies.
Over the years, we’ve scaled the business to generate revenues of half a million dollars annually.
Unlike most other agencies that tend to offer tiered pricing packages, we prefer to give our clients the choice to choose what they want and customize our offerings.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
In 2012, I started my career with an Ireland-based digital marketing agency and worked with them for 2 years. During my stint, I saw that they used to sell Gold and Silver SEO and content packages, but we had 100s of unhappy clients because they were just selling backlinks at cheaper rates and not providing any value to the users. They were more focused on acquisition and less on retention.
And I was always thinking the other way around because the customer lifetime for that agency was just 3 months, which was dramatically low. I realized that by providing value, I could increase it to years.
I asked myself — who would like to leave you if you are bringing them results?
So, when I started my agency at the age of 24, I started giving brands a personalized experience with custom plans and packages curated exclusively for them after a careful analysis of them and their competitors’ websites.
This helped skyrocket the customer lifetime and reduced my acquisition cost, too—our clients rarely left us. We also started getting more word-of-mouth clients due to the superior service and years spent in building our brand. With years of practice and hard work, this strategy has become a win-win for us.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
We provide digital marketing services and specialize in SEO, content, affiliate, and influencer marketing. We set out designing our services with a clear mindset of tailoring them as per the requirements/goals of our clients.
Unlike cookie-cutter solutions, we wanted to develop a very customized experience for customers. And that’s why we went through plenty of tools and strategies that could help us create this experience for them.
But that wasn’t always the case.
We initially started out by trying to do everything for the clients, from link building to website audits and content marketing. I was the whole and sole of the business for the initial two years, before my first hire.
Until then, I was doing it all myself. We eventually realized that this approach needs to be tweaked. It was all too complex, and we were stretching ourselves thin by going all over the place, so we embarked on improving our services by keeping things simple.
Ever since then, we simplified our offerings, and now we take a very targeted approach toward helping our clients surpass their goals. Our bouquet of services includes SEO, content marketing, influencer marketing, email marketing, and lead generation, among others. Our customizable offerings include a mix of these based on client requirements and goals. We also accommodate special client requests on an a la carte basis.
The result is a highly curated plan of action and a roadmap that we adopt to help our clients accomplish their goals (and even surpass them!).
Investing time in educating our clients helps them better understand what we’re doing and builds their trust.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Attrock is a completely bootstrapped company, and so we had humble beginnings with a tiny team and a 200 sq. ft. office. We started slow, and our goal was to build a solid portfolio before we started to scale up. And our initial years went into building this reputation.
The first few clients we onboarded were all agencies or freelancers based out of the USA. And to build our portfolio, I offered pro bono services for the first few months. Once they started trusting my capabilities, they started paying for the services rendered. I still recollect my first paycheck of $100 from 25th October 2014—very special. My main mode of getting these clients was cold outreach—it’s a practice we still follow.
It was only after a few years that we started receiving traction through referrals due to the value delivered to our existing clients. And while I never dreamt of achieving this scale back when I started this business, it grew organically over the years. Our team now operates out of a 6000 sq. ft. office.
While we had a simple website when we started out, it’s gone through several iterations to reach its current state as we grew. The initial website was built by my friend, and it had basic messaging talking about Attrock, but we didn’t have a laser-focused branding and positioning strategy for the website back then. That’s the reason the website underwent so many iterations and was revamped completely.
The major lesson I learned from this is to have a plan of action ready when you’re launching a business or product. One of the core things I focused on was to have a solid UVP. Come what may, my focus was laser-sharp on delivering what the client wanted. In fact, in the first few years of the business, I wasn’t making any money.
Everything the business earned was going into the business and serving the clients. It helps you take advantage of the opportunities better and scale your business faster. And that’s what I try to work on now.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Right from the time I launched Attrock, the central ethos of the company has been all about keeping clients happy. And it’s something that’s been the key to our success. We ensure that everything that’s in the Statement of Work is delivered on time. And if something’s amiss and we end up missing the deadline, we make up for it by providing something extra to the clients. It helps keep our clients happy.
Additionally, we don’t like keeping our clients in the dark. We educate them about the work we’re doing for them so they can assess if we’re doing it well. Transparency is at the core of our work and we believe it’s this trust that helps us retain our clients. Our clients can reach us through Slack and we work on their questions through our CRM too. This way, we’re only a message away.
One of the other things that’s worked out well for us in terms of marketing is the guarantee we provide for our services. We guarantee performance from content, SEO, and other services, which helps us win our clients’ confidence.
Finally, to retain clients, we provide monthly consultation services and reporting. We even educate them so they can understand the exact performance from the monthly report. And if any client is on the verge of leaving, we make the offer sweeter for them—not just in monetary terms. We offer additional services to them so they can get more value from their relationship with us. This strategy has helped us get a solid retention rate of 95% over the years.
Focus on retaining your existing clients rather than acquiring new ones. Forge stronger relationships with them.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Attrock is a completely profitable company, and even during the tough economic times during COVID, we strived hard to hit break-even—no layoffs whatsoever.
In terms of our expenses, we work on a lean expense model where a major chunk of our costs are employee wages and office upkeep.
We keep our growth prospects realistic but have consistently hit 25-30% YoY growth (apart from COVID).
Our website gains traffic purely through SEO and receives 55,000 monthly targeted organic traffic with a 1:05 minute average dwell time.
As far as marketing goes, our goals remain pretty straightforward. We aim to educate the online audience as much as possible through our content. And that’s why we concentrate more on the content than the SEO aspect. We strongly believe that quality content will always rank better.
In addition to creating content, we also strive hard to distribute it well across the internet. For this, we employ social media and email marketing. Every post we publish is shared on our social media accounts and also through emails. It enables us to boost its reach. It’s this content that helps us get inbound leads too.
Along with distribution, we also try hard to take our content creation game to the next level. I regularly appear as a guest on podcasts and webinars. While it helps with networking, it also enables us to talk about our capabilities and drives inbound leads. We also share freebies in the form of e-books and other resources to help our audience.
Finally, guest posting is a cornerstone of our marketing strategy. We’ve guest-posted on over 350 websites since inception. This gives our business a great reach and builds our reputation too.
Owing to the tailored services we offer, we have an enviable 12-15 month average customer lifetime. And this also forms the basis of our strategy—we prioritize retention over acquisition by delivering better value to them consistently. This keeps our acquisition costs low too.
While in the early stages of my agency, all employees wore different hats, we now have clear distinctions between teams. We’ve got teams for content, SEO, social media, and so on, which dedicatedly work toward their set goals.
Our current clientele is primarily centered around Europe and the USA, but we intend to scale up in the future to have a truly global client base. We also hope to expand our offerings by launching courses, AI-based tools, and other cool services.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
One of the few things that have stood out for me in my journey as an entrepreneur are:
- Keep things simple. You don’t necessarily have to complicate stuff to deliver valuable solutions to your clients. Sometimes, keeping things simple works better.
- Educate your clients. Several agencies work on the pretext that they’re managing things for their clients, so throwing jargon at them is the best way forward. But I’ve learned that investing time in educating our clients helps them better understand what we’re doing and builds their trust.
- Don’t grow blindly. When we started, we began growing our team first without looking at our expenses and revenues, leading to reduced profitability.
- Don’t micromanage. I’ve learned to give space to my team and trust them to do what’s right. Micromanaging them hampers their productivity and motivation, leading to opposing outcomes.
What’s helped me in my journey are these habits:
- Prioritize your clients, no matter the cost. It’s not only about profits.
- Support your team and keep them happy.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
- Rich Dad Poor Dad - It’s one of the best books on financial management. I find it quite handy for both personal and business finances.
- 4 Hour Work Week - Growing a business means you’re always short on time for varying tasks. This book has helped me understand time management and enables me to work better. I highly recommend reading it.
- Good to Great - As the founder of a fast-growing business, it’s important to know how to grow it right. This book is the holy grail for it and teaches me to strive for perfection.
- The GaryVee Audio Experience - Gary is one of my favorite marketers and listening to his podcast helps me keep up with the latest marketing juice.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Try to find the competitive gap in your niche. Look at what others are offering and what different you can offer to solve the problem. This competitive gap analysis will give you the advantage to break through and grow fast.
Focus on retaining your existing clients rather than acquiring new ones. Forge stronger relationships with them. It can help you get a steady stream of referrals and recurring revenue.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Post: Content Analyst Job Description: Understanding the content requirements and assigning them to the right person then reviewing and delivering it to the concerned person. - Paid and Full-Time - Careers
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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