key
Iron
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- Feb 17, 2025
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Note: Long-ish post, this is deliberate as I want short attention span-cels to gtfo, therefore I don't expect many people to read this, however this is good, means less potential competition, and it means anyone who does read is someone worth the time to teach. I've had a lot of requests for me to share my socials, where I post and teach about my businesses. I'm not ready to do that yet, so instead I will make this post, which actually may give it away if any one of you reading follow me but fuck it. I will make this post regardless. My business has scaled from nothing to over $5k MRR in just 5 months (I project 10k MRR by the end of this year), it allowed me to move to a new country, pay for everything I need / want, and honestly, it was fucking easy. And this is coming from a 25 year old who, up to this point, worked 9-5 ever since graduating, there is no barrier to entry besides your skill-set, age, gender, LOOKS, don't matter. So without further ado, here is:
How I started and scaled my digital services company to over $5k MRR, and how you can too
Step 1: Understanding digital services and finding your niche
Digital services (as the name implies) means you provide a SERVICE to a person or business, that can be done and handed over online (these are important distinctions, you must be able to complete the service, that is to say, do the work necessary to provide the final product, then be able to hand over the service digitally), if your service requires your physical presence at ANY point in the transaction, its not fully digital, and therefor, in my opinion, not easily and affordably scalable
Digital services can fall under the umbrella of freelance work, i.e. the services you see listed on Fiverr and the likes, graphic design, social media management, etc. HOWEVER, I'd always recommend against freelance work, it is unpredictable, highly competitive, and difficult to market. True digital service businesses are:
1) Productized for building consistent and predictable workflows
2) Have a recurring pricing model (more on the benefits of this later)
3) Target a specific niche so that you are not inundated with competition
Put all this together, and you you will understand that you should be creating PROBLEM SOLVING based approach to your services, targeting a SPECIFIC SECTOR. This is how you find your niche.
Step 2: How to get started (+ my business as a case study)
So, now you roughly know how to find your niche. However, it may not be so obvious. Don't worry, its not, this section will give you a much clearer idea of how to go about picking your niche, and how to get started, and I will do this by using my own business as an example.
My business:
I provide marketing services for SME's. I landed on this idea, because I have family members who own businesses (an uncle who owns restaurants, a cousin who's a mobile mechanic), and I couldn't help but notice how woefully clueless they we're when it came to marketing their companies.
I started by helping them (for free ofc), this is where I realized there is a lot of VALUE in what I was doing. I was able to help both my uncle and cousin grow their revenue, brand awareness, online presence and search engine visibility. And this incompetence in marketing was not limited to my families businesses, everywhere I looked, I saw businesses who could be transformed with simple services. So I got started.
Getting started:
So I had the niche, I knew what services I wanted to provide. But what now? Remember the three points? Point 3 was covered. Now all I needed to do was build my business, and I built it around the core principles of point 1 and 2.
Point 1: Productization, I knew that in order to make this scalable, I needed to productize my services. But what does this mean? It means that I PROVIDE SERVICES ON A SET INTERVAL, not in a "piece meal" fashion. In my case, I provide my services to all my clients on a bi-monthly basis. This simple approach is what allowed my business to scale so quickly and easily.
Digital service business that do not use the productized approach fall victim to a fatal flaw, your clients become your worst enemy, all of them requesting different services, at different times, with different deadlines. You can see how quickly this can become a problem. If you productize, you provide your service, at set cyclical intervals (in my case bi-monthly), for all clients, it allows you to create workflows to deal with increasing demand, and automate processes that would otherwise be impossible.
Point 2: Pricing, as such with point 1, it only makes sense that I charge for my services in a monthly fashion. And just like that, you have a pricing model that creates PREDICTABLE, RECURRING revenue. One of the ways a recurring revenue model is so valuable, is that the price can be increased year on year. Use any excuse you like, a popular one is "in line with inflation jfl". The point is, increasing your price is a great strength of this model, as an example:
Company X has 100 clients at $40 / month, their MRR is $4000 / month. They increase their price to $49 / month, and just like that, they add nearly $1000 / month to their MRR, the equivalent of signing an additional 22 clients at their original price point of $40. And price increases can be frequent, many SAAS companies do it yearly.
The same pricing model that gives SAAS companies their incredibly high valuations, you've just applied to your business too, congrats.
In one swift move, we've taken a business that could've been an unscalable headache, to being a veritable goldmine.
The first few steps:
The first steps of the business we're as follows, and you must do the same:
- Ensure I could actually provide the services I was selling, and set up any systems / software that I needed
- Build a website that can accept payments (stripe integration) (not gonna get into this, there are tons of templates and boilerplates out there you can use)
- Get everything ready to go, build a CRM to track client acquisition etc.
- Created business socials
And that was basically it, just like that I was ready to start approaching businesses to offer my services, which brings me onto:
Step 3: How to get clients
I will save my fingers and link this video instead, as its a great starting point. However its important to note, familiarize yourself with warm and cold outreach, as this is where the majority of your clients will come from. Recommendations are few and far between in my experience and organic discovery from my own digital marketing (of my own business) yields less clients than cold outreach.
USE these principles, and my example, to create your own niche, find what you're good at, or what service you can provide, and start building.
Good luck <3
How I started and scaled my digital services company to over $5k MRR, and how you can too
Step 1: Understanding digital services and finding your niche
Digital services (as the name implies) means you provide a SERVICE to a person or business, that can be done and handed over online (these are important distinctions, you must be able to complete the service, that is to say, do the work necessary to provide the final product, then be able to hand over the service digitally), if your service requires your physical presence at ANY point in the transaction, its not fully digital, and therefor, in my opinion, not easily and affordably scalable
Digital services can fall under the umbrella of freelance work, i.e. the services you see listed on Fiverr and the likes, graphic design, social media management, etc. HOWEVER, I'd always recommend against freelance work, it is unpredictable, highly competitive, and difficult to market. True digital service businesses are:
1) Productized for building consistent and predictable workflows
2) Have a recurring pricing model (more on the benefits of this later)
3) Target a specific niche so that you are not inundated with competition
Put all this together, and you you will understand that you should be creating PROBLEM SOLVING based approach to your services, targeting a SPECIFIC SECTOR. This is how you find your niche.
Step 2: How to get started (+ my business as a case study)
So, now you roughly know how to find your niche. However, it may not be so obvious. Don't worry, its not, this section will give you a much clearer idea of how to go about picking your niche, and how to get started, and I will do this by using my own business as an example.
My business:
I provide marketing services for SME's. I landed on this idea, because I have family members who own businesses (an uncle who owns restaurants, a cousin who's a mobile mechanic), and I couldn't help but notice how woefully clueless they we're when it came to marketing their companies.
I started by helping them (for free ofc), this is where I realized there is a lot of VALUE in what I was doing. I was able to help both my uncle and cousin grow their revenue, brand awareness, online presence and search engine visibility. And this incompetence in marketing was not limited to my families businesses, everywhere I looked, I saw businesses who could be transformed with simple services. So I got started.
Getting started:
So I had the niche, I knew what services I wanted to provide. But what now? Remember the three points? Point 3 was covered. Now all I needed to do was build my business, and I built it around the core principles of point 1 and 2.
Point 1: Productization, I knew that in order to make this scalable, I needed to productize my services. But what does this mean? It means that I PROVIDE SERVICES ON A SET INTERVAL, not in a "piece meal" fashion. In my case, I provide my services to all my clients on a bi-monthly basis. This simple approach is what allowed my business to scale so quickly and easily.
Digital service business that do not use the productized approach fall victim to a fatal flaw, your clients become your worst enemy, all of them requesting different services, at different times, with different deadlines. You can see how quickly this can become a problem. If you productize, you provide your service, at set cyclical intervals (in my case bi-monthly), for all clients, it allows you to create workflows to deal with increasing demand, and automate processes that would otherwise be impossible.
Point 2: Pricing, as such with point 1, it only makes sense that I charge for my services in a monthly fashion. And just like that, you have a pricing model that creates PREDICTABLE, RECURRING revenue. One of the ways a recurring revenue model is so valuable, is that the price can be increased year on year. Use any excuse you like, a popular one is "in line with inflation jfl". The point is, increasing your price is a great strength of this model, as an example:
Company X has 100 clients at $40 / month, their MRR is $4000 / month. They increase their price to $49 / month, and just like that, they add nearly $1000 / month to their MRR, the equivalent of signing an additional 22 clients at their original price point of $40. And price increases can be frequent, many SAAS companies do it yearly.
The same pricing model that gives SAAS companies their incredibly high valuations, you've just applied to your business too, congrats.
In one swift move, we've taken a business that could've been an unscalable headache, to being a veritable goldmine.
The first few steps:
The first steps of the business we're as follows, and you must do the same:
- Ensure I could actually provide the services I was selling, and set up any systems / software that I needed
- Build a website that can accept payments (stripe integration) (not gonna get into this, there are tons of templates and boilerplates out there you can use)
- Get everything ready to go, build a CRM to track client acquisition etc.
- Created business socials
And that was basically it, just like that I was ready to start approaching businesses to offer my services, which brings me onto:
Step 3: How to get clients
I will save my fingers and link this video instead, as its a great starting point. However its important to note, familiarize yourself with warm and cold outreach, as this is where the majority of your clients will come from. Recommendations are few and far between in my experience and organic discovery from my own digital marketing (of my own business) yields less clients than cold outreach.
USE these principles, and my example, to create your own niche, find what you're good at, or what service you can provide, and start building.
Good luck <3
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