My Content Writing Business Grew 50% To $783K/Year
This is a follow up story for Content-Whale Private Limited. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 2 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hello! My name is Vaibhav Kishnani. I am the founder and CEO of Content Whale, a revolutionary content writing company that serves on the motto – “To make every company a content-accelerated company.”
Content Whale is all about executing marketing strategies. We serve the mastermind's goal by curating textual and visual content to support marketing strategies. We are a team of excellent creators (Writers and designers) who bring marketing to life.
In summary, we create textual and visual content with definitive value propositions for SMBs, enterprises, and startups across industries such as education technology, healthcare, information technology, human resources, finance, lifestyle, and more.
While we provide 30+ content writing services to these industries, SEO articles and blogs are our “flagship service”. We all know that more and more companies are coming online and running Ads to gain market share faster, which is dramatically increasing the PPC (Pay per click) for Google Ads.
Hence, people are turning to more conventional methods of generating leads, like SEO, which is why the demand for SEO-optimized articles and blogs, website content, product descriptions, and copywriting is increasing. Search engine optimization helps websites rank higher and SEO-optimized content aids to that.
Last time, when I shared our story with Starter Story, I shared that I started Content Whale with a mere $35 dollars and built a $514k business in just five years. You can check the full story here.
If you are bootstrapped and set monthly sales targets, stop right away. It is not going to lead you anywhere, trust me! Keep it easy and simple for your sales guys, keep quarterly targets, and try to be more practical by increasing not more than 30-50%.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
This year, we are recording revenue of over $783K by serving 3000+ brands and delivering 50k+ impactful content pieces across our services.
What’s exciting is that we are projecting revenue of about $1.5 million in the coming year.
To be honest, revenue hasn’t grown according to our expectations. Although I would highlight that investors or buyers may see this as a red flag, most of them don’t understand that entrepreneurs sometimes fail in the execution strategy and that not every hit is a boundary or a six. Sometimes, running across the pitch keeps adding up runs, and that’s what we did in 2023.
We revamped the complete company structure to track the KPIs of all departments and individuals. We made a strict policy of “no divergence from roles and responsibilities”. So, an individual could focus only on their designated role and achieve maximum efficiency on their KPIs. The KPI overview goes like:
- For sales, it’s revenue
- For marketing, it’s cost per lead
- For HR, it’s retention & hiring
- For accounts, it’s cashflows & budget
- For operations, it’s quality and bandwidth (Depending on the nature of the business project)
The whole restructuring centered around numbers as the way of assessing KPIs. So, when we executed this numbers-focused growth strategy, it became easy to create milestones and succeed with a clear vision. Saying that we covered milestones every minute, every hour, and every day because we could see the growing numbers.
Another issue we addressed was market maturity. No matter how much money we poured into our Google Ads account or SEO agencies, we were still facing market stagnancy and slow web traffic growth for our website.
We needed to expand to other verticals to cater to more types of content demands and find a solution for website visitors to increase revenue from existing B2B content services. To address this, we killed two birds with one arrow.
We were in discussion with Bhavik Sakhedi, who owned Write Right, about acquiring his company. Write Right is a leading academic content writing company catering to the B2C market, and Bhavik Sarkhedi is known for his aggressive marketing strategies, which helped his web traffic grow exponentially in a short time.
After the successful acquisition of Write Right, we offered the SEO Head position to Bhavik, which he welcomed with open arms. Doing this, we expanded our horizons into B2C academic content writing services and increased our overall web traffic, thanks to Bhavik leading the SEO team.
The final problem we addressed is the sales goals. Sales were in bad shape earlier, as the targets were missed most months, leading to low profitability. We changed our model, and here’s a suggestion for you:
If you are bootstrapped and set monthly sales targets, stop right away. It is not going to lead you anywhere, trust me! Keep it easy and simple for your sales guys, keep quarterly targets, and try to be more practical by increasing not more than 30-50% sales target every quarter, depending on the nature of the business.
30% is considered moderate, whereas 50% is considered aggressive, according to the studies we found. If your network is good and you have a good number of lead channels, then opt for 50% growth. It will work out. Also, don’t forget to incentivize your sales team to keep doing good work and accumulating revenues.
Post resolving all three issues, we found the following improvements in the last year, according to the number-focused KPIs:
- First of all, the cost per lead was drastically reduced by 30% after implementing the right strategies brought by our newly appointed SEO head, such as better optimized performance ads, and utilizing social channels, such as WhatsApp and LinkedIn.
- Posting high-quality informative articles and SEO link building helped us grow our web traffic by 350%
- All of our strategic marketing efforts are also reflected in the number of leads and quality of leads. Quality leads increased by more than 100%.
- Our revenue grew by 170%, thanks to our quarterly target model which gave enough room for our sales team to prepare better pitches and present in front of prospective clients.
- Our customer retention boosted to 78% from 30% by building subject matter expertise for the industries we cater.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
They say challenges play a huge role in a founder’s journey while being a learning opportunity for growth and maturity. 2023 was the most vulnerable year when started and yet successful at the end.
When we expanded into academic content after acquiring Write Right, a company struggling with profitability. Facing stagnancy, we wanted to expand into the academic content writing market, and our objective was clear expansion. There were two ways:
- Either we open up an academic content writing vertical under Content Whale.
- Or we buy a company that already exists in this domain.
The decision depended on a comparison between the time and money required to reach $400k of revenue in the first year from the academic vertical or to acquire a business standing close to this number.
Hence, we decided to buy a company depending on the factors including brand name, manpower, and current revenues of that company, just one problem that needed to be solved, i.e., profitability. After the acquisition and doing complete restructuring, we had to let go of 60% of the team, and the business started sprinkling 65% net margins. That was a big game-changer!
We did it by following just four basic rules:
- Increasing the product price, cutting unnecessary expenses, and implementing cost-effective solutions like a complete WFH model, renting out systems instead of buying, etc.
- Made proper SOPs, KRAs, and KPIs for each team.
- Setting quarterly targets that sync with the KPIs.
- Optimizing user acquisition cost.
I believe as an entrepreneur, the most important aspect of a business is profitability. It may seem hard to achieve or increase over time, but I found my solace in the right KPI formulation and implementation strategy.
So, a tip for entrepreneurs out there – Just start measuring each individual in nos. (make amendments whenever and wherever necessary) and follow them diligently, and things will themselves fall into place.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
I learned the biggest lesson in my life – In business, don’t overcommit to anything. Overambitious people always fall into the trap of setting unrealistic goals. I made two similar mistakes last year.
One was overcommitting to the workstation and got into a one-year contract with x number of seats, which I thought would increase in a year. That’s a real example of what we call a fund leakage (Expenses that are beyond control).
Our total team size is 70, 40 of whom are complete WFH, and 30 are in-house individuals. I thought it would 100% scale and all the strategies would work out right. Dear friend, it doesn’t always happen in the way you think it will.
Another one was I committed to paying the entire amount of acquisition in 1 year, thinking every day would be a full moon and we would earn from the profit and repay, so we don’t have to spend a penny from our pockets. While, on most of the payment dates, we were short on funds, and we were about to get into the debt/loan trap, our luck didn’t wear out. The business owner understood our issue, and he increased the tenure from his side to keep the financial burden low for us.
If you run a business, profitability is the key metric. Map out the revenue projection for the financial year and distribute it in quarters. Give 1000% to achieve your sales target and control the budget for each vertical to remain profitable throughout.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
We are building a niche business in textual content creation that covers a large portfolio of sixteen different types of content, including articles and blogs, website content, copywriting, thought leadership, LinkedIn posts, case studies, and so on.
We have managed to crack six of them currently, and we are looking to unlock a new service every three months. Apart from that, we are also getting into translation to cover the language diversity in textual content.
Moreover, to expand into visual content services, we launched graphic design services like UI/UX design and audit and customized PPTs.
According to the published reports, the global content marketing addressable market size is $364B, distributed among Video, Audio, and textual content. It will easily take us at least three more years to become the global market leader in this category to unlock and penetrate the market.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
Artificial intelligence has been the biggest highlight of the year. While so many content creators see AI as a competitor or a marketing killer, I stand with entrepreneurs like Neil Patel and Jeff Bullas, who believe that AI is not going to replace you but is only going to make you better at what you do, as long as creative tasks are concerned.
Hence, these are the best articles I have read in the last year, which helped me make the right decisions in terms of SEO, content creation, and overall company growth in the last year:
- AI in a Nutshell: The Evolution and Impact of Artificial Intelligence – Jeff Bullas
- A Beginner’s Guide to AI SEO – Semrush
- How to Use AI SEO to Improve Your Website – Neil Patel
- How Will AI Impact the Future of SEO in 2024? – Content Whale
- Also, if you wish to know how to not artificially increase your website’s domain ratings through low-quality backlink building, here’s a video you should see that demonstrates problems – I Increased My Domain Rating to DR70 in 72 Hours.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
If you can relate, entrepreneurs who don’t have any corporate experience face a big challenge in running businesses. If you are one of them, then don’t stress out. It took me 5 years to learn the right ways to run a business. Based on my learning, here are a few points that might help you.
Think of 3 things in business: 1) Scalability, 2) Profitability, and 3) Employee Retention.
- Scalability: To solve scalability, scout all possible lead channels or create a category by bundling up your service/product like a package. For example, we recently started UI/UX design, which is hard to sell. Hence, we started pitching entire web development to clients who came up with website content requirements, and it turned out well. Therefore, don’t hard sell your services/products instead, build a strong market penetration strategy through lead channels.
- Profitability: If you run a business, profitability is the key metric. Map out the revenue projection for the financial year and distribute it in quarters. Give 1000% to achieve your sales target and control the budget for each vertical to remain profitable throughout. I am sharing a rough insight into the budget distribution in the service industry, which might change according to the type of business and industry:
Marketing - 15%
Sales - 10%
HR, Admin, accounts - 15%
Operations - 30%
Profitability - 30-35%
- Employee Retention: In any young startup, keeping your team intact is essential for momentum and growth. Here's how to do it right:
Strategic Hiring where your HR plays an important role and knows where to find the best talent and how to bring them on board.
Build a workplace where people want to stay. Create an environment of respect, collaboration, and fun. When your team feels valued and connected, they'll be more likely to stick around.
Pay your team what they're worth. At least as per industry standards, if not more.
Give your team the freedom to do their best work. Trust your employees to get the job done without micromanaging.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are always open to working with passionate people with the right skills. We are always on the lookout for freelancers or agencies to distribute our work in the following five industries: Edtech, Information Technology, Healthcare, BFSI, and Lifestyle.
If you are a content writing agency, you may reach out directly to me by emailing your portfolio under the subject – “<Name of the agency> | <Industry Expertise>” to admin@content-whale.com.
If you are a freelancer having expertise in any of the above industries, you can reach out to our operations head by emailing her at shweta@content-whale.com. Don’t forget to mention Industry expertise in the subject.
Where can we go to learn more?
You can check us out from the following channels:
- Our Website – Content Whale
- Our Social Media – LinkedIn, Instagram, Medium
- Our Blog Page – Blog
- My LinkedIn - Vaibhav Kishnani
- Our other subsidiaries – Write Right and Estorytellers
If you have any questions about entrepreneurship, content writing, SEO, UI/UX, or anything related to my niche, drop a comment below or you can directly reach out to me!
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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.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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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