# He Built A $2.5M/Year Business In 2 Years

Channel: Starter Story
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6kCkGmJc9M
Duration: 14 min
Language: English
Words: 3529
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/i6kCkGmJc9M

---

[0:00] Carl Hughes built a $2.5 million year business in just two years with one strategy putting ourselves in people's minds as the premium provider he invited us into his home in Chicago to show us exactly how he did it and how he found a niche where he could charge tens of thousands of dollars per month to just a handful of clients but before he started the business Carl was plagued by self-doubt I just didn't have the confidence to think I could do it I didn't believe I was the kind of person who could start their own company now he's running multiple million dollar businesses with a 10year goal to hit a

[0:31] $100 million in total revenue and his plan to reach that goal has nothing to do with starting new businesses I got to meet a couple people who had done this thing called entrepreneurship through acquisition in this video Carl shares what most people get wrong when they go to start a productize service and he gives a step-by-step breakdown of how he would start all over again with nothing I initially started draft dodev not even as a company there was no website there was no landing page I'm Pat walls and this is starter story yeah thanks for having me dude good to see you Pat tell me about who

[1:02] you are and what you built my name is Carl Hughes I run draft. deev primarily and then actually just recently bought a second business I'll start with draft. Dev what we do there is we create technical content aimed at software Engineers for marketing purposes so this is for companies that want to reach software developers we've grown in 3 years to over $2.5 million in Revenue we've got a full-time team of six or seven and then hundreds of contractors literally hundreds around the world in 54 countries so that's where I'm at today wow and so how does that work how does the service work draft. essentially what clients will do is they'll come to

[1:31] us and buy a package of 12 24 48 pieces of content that they're going to publish on their site typically blog posts tutorials things like that and then what we'll do is go through the process of finding or using our writer pool who are all software Engineers that are practicing day-to-day to write this content for them pair them up with good editors they'll clean up their work we have Tech reviewers and staff so full-time Engineers that also check their work and then we get stuff back to clients on a weekly or twice a week basis yeah and what's the type of client or company that pays or something like

[1:58] this yeah so when we started out is a lot of early stage startups that were just kind of trying to get their first marketing efforts underway now what we tend to do is work with bigger more established companies so some of our headline clients might be places like red panda Cloud flare Dropbox we've worked with a lot of big Brands who are trying to reach Developers for one reason or another and so any company that wants to sell things to developers usually it's like software tools like idees or um testing tools or could be security tools all that kind of stuff you want to sell to a really technical

[2:28] audience and so you have to build Authority with them you have to build trust and one of the best ways to do that is through content whether it's written or video or you know some mix of both tell me about your backstory how did you get into this business back in college I studied mechanical engineering and minor in business I initially thought I'd go work for a really big company I did internships with GE and seens like huge companies multinational um and it was the most boring I've ever done in my life so like I was like I got to get out of here my dad was an

[2:53] entrepreneur I had an uncle who was an entrepreneur they were smalltime local business owners but like you know they had that freedom they had the lifestyle that I was looking for more I started to look into that I started look into internet entrepreneurship I learned how to code on my you know my free time I started picking up some freelance gigs making WordPress sites just for on the side so I came out of school I moved to Chicago I worked with this small company called uloop I was there for a couple years and then I got a job as the first engineer at a company called packback I

[3:16] left about four years into that to go join an early stage startup called the grade Network and then about 3 years into that Co hit and that was just the game changer that's kind of forced me into entrepreneurship so I was looking for something to do like I got to fill my time a but I also want to make some money and contribute to the family I initially started draft. deev not even as a company there was no website there was no landing page there was nothing it was a single page on my personal website called Carl's writing and I would send that around to people and say Here's a

[3:43] bunch of things I've written recently would you pay me to write for you I sent that around to all these people in my network I I reached out to people randomly I started to have phone calls with people who worked in these fields uh called developer relations which I never even knew about before that and I started to figure out that oh maybe there is more demand for this and there is there is something here so you know that kind of started in 2020 with me freelancing writing a few articles here and there within 3 months I had way more work than I could handle and I started

[4:07] to hire people and I you know sort of phased out of my old job so your Niche developer relations content is super unique how did you find this Niche and what's your advice to others that are watching that are looking for the right Niche yeah when it comes to finding a niche it wasn't super intentional on my part I didn't have this like formula where I was going out there and figuring out exactly what I'm looking for but it was more like is this something I like doing in interested in and as I talk to customers are they willing to actually pay for it it's really easy to miss that

[4:34] because a lot of people just pursue the things they're interested in that have no potential monation or they pursue only what customers want to pay for but they don't care about it at all they have no interest or knowledge in that space and that's super hard to stand out into let's talk about getting your first customer how did you get your first customer your first few customers and what would be your advice for others looking to get their first customer I don't even remember who the very first customer was but at least the first 5 to 10 were all people I had met at some point in my profession professional

[4:59] Journey before and who I had stayed in touch with I have this strategy I came up with just after college where I have a spreadsheet of about 50 people who I just want to keep in touch with who's on that list has changed over time is my interest have changed what I'm doing but I've always had like a weekly reminder just go reach out to a couple of those people and either have lunch or at least send them an email to see how they're doing do a quick call and that network list has been one of the most powerful things in my career it literally got me

[5:24] my last two startup jobs it got me started with draft dodev and so that small amount of effort as much as it doesn't pay off quickly was super helpful in the long run as starting a business talk about the fundamentals of a product High service how is your team set up in terms of employees contractors and partners again it's kind of grown over time it started off where we have a writer uh and an editor and then I would kind of sit in and do all the tech reviews is what we call them where I just see like is this technically a very strong article does it make sense is an

[5:52] engineer that's actually like pretty experienced going to buy it and eventually I hired out a full-time engineer to do those tech reviews and then a few Engineers that were kind kind of helping in out on that the team today at draft. Dev is a little smaller than we were at our Peak last year just because Tech has kind of been in a downturn uh VC funding is about a third of what it was last year so naturally we follow some of that curve um but we've still got six full-time team members and then uh hundreds of contractors that help us out with things like editing tech reviews writing uh and then a lot

[6:20] of administrative stuff too let's talk about marketing as a business scale you got it to 100K per year and then you took it way bigger to 2.5 million a year what are your main way that you marketed and scaled a business to the point it is today so it divides roughly evenly into thirds we've got about a third of our business comes in from referrals and word of mouth so that's existing clients telling their friends their colleagues that are in similar businesses or it could be an existing client has a marketing person that leaves and goes to a new company and they kind of bring us

[6:47] along for the ride and then the other third is going to be organic search and social media I kind of lump those together because they sort of feed on each other but that could be things like we write a blog post that ranks for a certain term like developer advocate what do a developer Advocate or something and then we also write a lot of social media posts that help kind of push people towards that same thing and then that last third is cold Outreach and just unknown random things that come up we've always positioned ourselves as the premium service in this Niche therefore we don't do a lot of

[7:14] discounting we don't do a lot of one-off Trials we make people sign quarterly commitments and that's all by Design like the best agencies when you look at the way they do it they don't do little one-off work for people and part of it's just a nature of our cost like our costs are pretty high per article because were paying Engineers for their time um but at the same time it's also just about putting ourselves in people's minds as the premium provider that kind of carries through to all of our marketing and so when people come to us most of the time they've heard of us through

[7:41] several different channels but you know we can kind of attribute it to one primary Channel you built this business to 2.5 million a year in basically 2 years how did you learn all the skills needed to do that one is I was the first employee at two early stage startups so I got to go with the founders on the journey from like hiring me their first employee to growing and raising money and doing all the things that Founders do in those early days and so that was super eye opening gave me a ton of insight into what it takes to actually start a business it also gave me a lot

[8:08] of confidence I think this is something that most people when and myself included when I was thinking about starting a business and trying little businesses for years before I got draft. Dev to actually work I just didn't have the confidence to think I could do it I didn't believe I was the kind of person who could start their own company and seeing Founders do that firsthand who were no different than me they weren't smarter they weren't more educ ated they were able to do it it made me realize like oh this is very possible it's not as unachievable as you might think and that's where like surrounding yourself

[8:35] with other entrepreneurs people who are maybe one step ahead of you is super powerful I spent 7 years trying to build 24 different businesses the only one of them was successful now that business makes over a million dollar a year but I could have done it a lot faster if I studied already successful businesses imagine you could read the exact steps to how someone built a million-dollar business and the mistakes they made so you can avoid them when you launch well it starts story we have a library of over 4,000 case studies and business idea breakdowns where you can do this All Back by real data for example Luke

[9:06] joined starter story in Doven to our case study about a newsletter that makes $25 million a year just one month later he launched his own newsletter and did $5,800 in Revenue in 30 days it's simple he studied what works implemented it and avoided the mistakes of people that were just a few steps ahead of him so if you're serious about finding a business idea that works and making your first dollar 10 times faster check out the first link in the description we're running a special right now for anyone coming from the channel anyways enjoy the rest of the video peace I also got a lot of experiential practice by starting

[9:37] little side projects that never really took off so I had a ton of these like at least 10 of them that I I actually have some documentation around of like what I tried to do in the business uh how it didn't work what I did learn from it all these little experiences add up and they stack up on top of each other so I think it's important as an entrepreneur even if you're struggling and going through a million different little iterations of projects and you're not hitting your stride like that's okay that's part of the journey and you have to accept that and just keep trying anyway if I hadn't

[10:04] kept trying then we wouldn't be here right so draft. Dev massive success in 2 years what do you think made it so successful I was able to do it part-time and kind of get myself like make sure it was viable before I went full on into it I think that would have been really tough to put the pressure on myself to like go 100% fulltime Market timing was a big factor Co had just happened all the tech companies that were doing marketing had to redirect their conference inperson budgets into something cuz they were all getting funding still they still had a lot of

[10:32] money to play with as we started draft. Dev all of a sudden there's just you know hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars being dumped into Marketing in a in content in the developer space and we were so Niche and so specific that we built trust much faster than a company that was just a general purpose content agency would have done so with draft. Dev you prove that the model works and now you bought another product High service can you tell me more about that yeah for sure Pat last year when draft. Dev was growing I was able take a whole month off when my second son was

[11:00] born and I I kind of had this like existential crisis like what am I doing and what do I what am I building this for like what's the point because I had kind of achieved the goal that I set out to at the beginning which was take a month off and the company runs without me I got to meet a couple people who had done this this thing called entrepreneurship through acquisition which is basically going out and buying a small business and taking it over and running it and so I got together with a friend of mine I kind of sold him on this Vision we had been talking about

[11:24] doing a project together for a couple years he's like yeah I'll come along let's do it so we got the money together to put uh to kind of go in and start looking for a company we went through and talked to at least 50 to 100 Founders about their business how big it was what might make sense for them to if they wanted to exit uh and then we found three or four that looked really good we finally settled on one that that we really liked and the founder was ready to go what it showed me was a it's possible to buy another business uh B

[11:50] now that we've run it for a few months it's possible to run someone else's business uh and it lets you skip years of work and I I mean I don't want to say that's free because we obviously we paid for for it right and there's a lot of debt that's on the table but at the same time like we've now jumpstarted our second company our goal was to you know learn how this process works we're buying a company prove that we can do it and we can run it we can make it better hopefully over time and then hopefully do it again in a couple years let's talk

[12:14] about the opportunity of productized services they're kind of blowing up right now why do you think this is and why are you so bullish on them productize services are super appealing they were for me because they'll allow you to start a business that is theoretically scalable but at the same same time takes very little cost to get started with so I think they're a great place to start for a lot of entrepreneurs they're kind of a little bit of The Best of Both Worlds of like a traditional agency or Consulting model mixed with SAS and that you know reoccurring Revenue if someone's starting a productize service today what

[12:42] do you think are some of the best niches or Industries or verticals to go after I would kind of look at the way I started draft. deev what's something you're interested in and have the skills to maybe do on your own at the beginning especially if you're a first-time entrepreneur because I'll admit that you shouldn't be doing all the work forever but hiring other people is a a whole skill that you have to learn over time and you should kind of grow into it baby steps so if you're starting your first product di service find something that you could do most of the work with yourself if you had to and then that

[13:09] there is actual market demand and this again goes back to my number one advice for new entrepreneurs is talk to more potential customers and learn what are they paying for today that they're unsatisfied with and if you can get that answer out of your target audience an audience you want to work with that's how you build a producti service I think the wrong approach is go I want to do a producti design agency cuz I've seen other ones be successful but I don't know anybody who would buy from me and I don't know anybody who needs it and I don't know why those other ones are

[13:35] successful I just know they are on the other hand if you're able to go talk to 10 or 12 customers that have tried these other agencies have been unsatisfied why are they unsatisfied what did what could you do better if you redesign the service from the ground up and that's going to give you a way to differentiate and that's the name of the game when it comes to like carving your own little niche in any product service all right man thank you for having me this been amazing congrats on all your success man thank you follow this advice and you'll build a $2.5 million Dev writing agency just follow

[14:04] the

[14:11] steps

---

About this transcript
Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com).
ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts.
Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools
How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt