I’ve had one of the hardest working weeks of my life, and on Friday, my long-time business partner & great friend Andrew Langhorn delivered a brutal assessment of how I’m spending my time with Content Army.
While running around like a headless chicken trying to run sales, marketing, reposition the business model, and service our existing clients, Andy dropped some scathing criticism of my plans for running regular coaching cohorts.
He thinks it’s a huge waste of time and not a scalable business model.
He also thinks I should seriously consider refocusing on Magnet Monster and that it will create more leverage for both of us in the future.
Here’s where Content Army is today, why I’m struggling with this business, and why I’m keeping faith in the process.
BACKGROUND:
In October last year, we soft-launched Content Army as a founder-led content marketing agency offering a done-for-you service for agency & SaaS founders to scale their personal brands.
We quickly started picking up traction and signing clients between Blake Imperl (handling sales), myself (fulfilment) and Andy (finance/operations).
Then Blake hit me with a (sort of) bombshell: he wasn’t able to continue due to time commitments when his son was born in March and his existing full-time position. I was truly devastated he left the company.
To make matters worse, we started to see client churn around this point as well.
Rather than a problem with the service (it’s great, thankfully), we realised that this business may have a low LTV due to founders simply wanting to “dip their toes in the water” and try content rather than fully commit to it.
That’s the wrong attitude to have with content marketing and it led to many quitting around the 3-4 month mark due to unrealistic expectations of lead gen.
That’s when I had a lightbulb moment for many founders, they simply wanted to learn the STRATEGY & SYSTEMS and manage it themselves.
No problem! I’ll teach them personally how to replicate our system by running quarterly coaching cohorts where I guide them over 3 months to implement it in-house.
But the cohort business model has a MASSIVE problem: it requires substantial lead flow to make it economically viable (I’m charging people only $1250 per month for 3 months to teach them step-by-step how to create a habit-driven content marketing strategy).
Even if I run 10 clients per cohort, it’s only $12,500 per month.
We have clients at Magnet Monster who pay us this each month!
Financially speaking, it’s difficult to argue with Andy that this sucks as a business model.
And because after every 3 months the clients are supposed to continue on their own, it requires a monstrous marketing & sales engine to keep pumping people into the quarterly cohorts.
To make matters worse, I feel as though my pivot to talking about content marketing has set me back years and left me struggling to gain traction.
I built my audience talking about email marketing for DTC brands and was a true master at my craft.
But now I’m back to square 1, trying to build something from scratch that’s doing just over $10k per month and could easily enter a precarious cashflow position.
And I've been creating posts daily based on fleeting inspiration, not eating my own dog food that I preach to clients.
That's not what I envisioned when we started this company: I wanted to spend 80% of my week creating epic content and leveraging my personal brand to scale the company.
Funny thing business, isn't it? It never goes to plan 😉
And all the time I’m spending trying to figure this out could theoretically be reinvested into running an already successful agency that I have built previously that is doing great.
WHY KEEP THE FAITH?
There are two fundamental reasons I’m not going back to Magnet Monster full-time right now.
- Wiehan Britz is the better man to lead the company: appointing him as CEO was something we did not take lightly, but was the right move and still is. I can’t selfishly go back when he’s doing such a phenomenal job in my absence
- This is the key one: I truly believe, in the depths of my soul, I was born to do this. I live and breathe content marketing, it’s what I’m great at, and it’s something I’m passionate about helping others unlock their potential in the same way I transformed my life
So I’m going to pursue this for now, and maybe naively hope it will all figure itself out. That’s just what entrepreneurs do, right?
And the reason for persisting with the cohorts is simple: The more agency & SaaS founders I help get started with content, the more money will come as a byproduct of that process. That’s why the cohorts are ridiculous value right now: because if I teach 100 agency & SaaS founders how to become consistent creators, there’s no way I won’t scale this business and generate a lot of money.
I'm playing a long-term game here where I want to provide as much value as possible and help people with the bet that I'll have plenty of opportunities to grow it financially in the future.
I just need to reposition how I speak to their pain points from my own personal experience and show them I can help them.
And I 100% unequivocally believe it will. Trust me, you're going to see a massive improvement in my own content this coming week!
What do you think of Andy’s view? Should I go back to focusing on email marketing and adding more value to Magnet Monster or should I focus more on the agency side of Content Army & courses instead of the cohorts?
Would love for you guys to help me figure this out too!
CREATOR JOURNEYS PODCAST #01
Did you see my first episode of Creator Journeys with the LinkedIn machine himself, Adam Robinson?
I'll be posting a comprehensive summary of all the lessons I learned from Adam in the coming week, but you can always watch the full hour back of content here for yourself.
Adam dropped so much wisdom and experience on how we found his voice and was able to scale from 20k to 80k followers in less than a year once he nailed his positioning.
And he's doubling down on content to the point where he spends 80% of his WEEK as the CEO of 2 SaaS companies investing in content.
If that doesn't show you the opportunity at your fingertips right now when it comes to creating, I don't know what will.
This is the biggest opportunity of our lifetime as digital entrepreneurs. We just have to be brave enough to seize it.
SOCIAL JUICE FOR THIS WEEK
- Every agency owner needs to take action on this NOW or they'll end up as dust in 3 years
- Have you seen all the posts this week about how email marketing agencies are dying? Here's my thoughts on the current state of play
- Yotpo are currently crushing it with a staggering company-led success story rebuilding its reputation in the public domain. Here's how they're executing and why other SaaS companies need to follow their lead
That's all for this week! The next Newsletter will drop on Sunday and be the same every week going forward.
Let me know if you enjoyed this one by responding directly to this email.
