My Journey To Building A Million Dollar Start Up

January 09, 2020 is when I made the decision to enter the world of entrepreneurship. I invested $2,500 from my savings to start my first business called Spark Your Resume which was a resume writing & career coaching firm I operated for 3 years. The company grew from myself to a team of 30+ full time employees and contractors and made $500,000 in revenue before closing in March of 2023.

March 1, 2022 I made the decision to join my competitors to build a tech start up called WriteSea. WriteSea raised $2.5M on December 14, 2022 from Atento Capital, Collab Capital, Bronze VC, Bolster Ventures, Visible Hands, Expert Dojo, and some angel investors. We are currently raising a $3M seed round to grow at an exponential rate in 2024 and beyond. We pivoted our entire business model on March 1, 2023 and below is a highlight of what we’ve been able to accomplish from March 1, 2023 - December 31, 2023 (9 months).

WriteSea’s Traction to Date

• Leveraging strategic white-labeling and partnerships with leading job boards and talent communities, we've established a $1.65M+ revenue run rate.

• A thriving base of 700,000 candidate profiles acquired at zero cost, demonstrating the compelling value proposition and market fit of our platform

• Successful global integration with 17 job boards in 2023, amplifying our reach and effectiveness

• A landmark $40,000 contract with a premier community college secured within just 60 days of launching our dedicated SaaS career services portal.

This wouldn’t have been possible without having the right tools in place. In today’s issue, I want to share the tools we use to make the magic happen in the Marketing sector of our business, I hope you enjoy.

Marketing Technology (MarTech)

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Definition: A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a system or software that helps businesses manage interactions with current and potential customers. It centralizes data from various communication channels, enabling companies to streamline processes, improve customer service, enhance customer satisfaction, and increase sales by fostering better customer relationships.

Apollo

• Description: Apollo is a comprehensive sales intelligence and engagement platform designed to enhance and streamline the sales process for businesses of all sizes. It combines a powerful database with over 200 million contacts and a suite of tools that enable sales teams to efficiently find, connect with, and engage potential customers. Apollo offers features such as lead scoring, email sequencing, and call recording, integrated into a user-friendly interface. This platform also provides actionable insights and analytics, helping teams to refine their strategies and improve their outreach efforts.

  Benefit: Ideal for organizations aiming to supercharge their sales pipeline and increase conversion rates, Apollo stands out with its advanced AI-driven insights, robust contact database, and seamless CRM integrations. It simplifies the prospecting and engagement process, allowing sales teams to focus on high-quality leads and personalize their approach, ultimately boosting sales efficiency and effectiveness.

• How I Use Apollo: I leverage Apollo to find my ideal customer, capture their attention via email, and automate 90% of the process with email campaigns. I also use Apollo to schedule demos with our prospects and manage our sales pipleine.

Go High Level

• Description: Go High Level is a comprehensive marketing and sales platform designed for digital marketers and agencies to consolidate their marketing tools into one platform.

• Benefit: Enables businesses to streamline their operations, automate marketing campaigns, and provide superior customer engagement through unified communication tools.

• How I Use Go High Level CRM: I leverage Go High Level to manage all of our partner marketing efforts for Managed Career Services. So the 17 job board partners we have, I manage all the marketing campaigns, consultation bookings, websites, marketing automation, and reporting/analytics inside of Go High Level. I also built the entire marketing infrastructure on Go High Level in which I can duplicate across all partners which makes onboarding easier when we obtain a new client. I wouldn’t be able to maintain 17+ job board partners without this tool. If you manage multiple brands and need a system to run your marketing efforts, this is the tool for you.

2. Email Marketing

Definition: Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves sending emails to a targeted group of consumers. Its main purposes are to promote products or services, build relationships with potential and current customers, and engage with them in a way that encourages customer loyalty and repeat business. This form of marketing can include newsletters with updates on the company or promotions of sales and exclusive deals for subscribers. Effective email marketing campaigns are tailored to the interests and needs of the recipients and comply with legal standards regarding spam and privacy.

Mailgun

• Description: Mailgun is a powerful email service provider aimed at developers, offering scalable, reliable email sending and receiving capabilities via API.

• Benefit: Perfect for startups needing to automate email communications, ensure deliverability, and analyze performance with detailed analytics.

• How I Use Mailgun: I use Mailgun as our email service provider across all our partners and our own brands (WriteSea & Job Search Genius). Mailgun allows us to send 3M+ emails on a monthly basis due to us having our own dedicated IP address. A dedicated IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique numerical identifier assigned exclusively to a single hosting account or domain on the internet, unlike a shared IP which is used by multiple domains or users. In the context of email marketing, a dedicated IP allows for the sending of email campaigns from a unique address that is solely associated with your domain or brand. This can improve email deliverability and reputation since the IP's email sending history is entirely within your control. Businesses with high email sending volumes or those looking to build or maintain a strong sender reputation often opt for a dedicated IP to avoid being affected by the potentially poor practices of others on a shared IP. WriteSea has a dedicated IP address that we leverage to maintain a high sender score, meaning that 99% of our emails will reach a recipients primary inbox vs. their spam.

Neverbounce

• Description: Neverbounce is an email verification and list cleaning service that helps improve the quality of email lists by checking each email for validity.

• Benefit: Reduces bounce rates and improves email campaign effectiveness by ensuring emails are sent to valid addresses only.

• How I Use Neverbounce: I use Neverbounce to validate all emails that I scrape from LinkedIn to ensure all email addresses are real and active. If I didn’t do this, I could potentially hurt my domain reputation by sending emails to inactive accounts which would be considered a “bounce” email. I only send emails to the “valid” email addresses Neverbounce provides me.

Mailsuite

• Description: Mailsuite is an email tracking extension that notifies senders when their emails are opened and read, providing real-time alerts and detailed read receipts.

• Benefit: Enhances email communication strategies by offering insights into email engagement, helping to optimize follow-up timing and content.

• How I use Mailsuite: This tool is a game changer. You ever wonder if someone read your email or clicked on any links you sent them? With Mailsuite you don’t have to wonder any longer. I use Mailsuite every single day. It notifies me via email when someone opens my email or clicks on any link inside my email. It also reminds me to follow up with the recipeint if I haven’t received a reply from. I can set 24 hour, 48 hour, or 72 reminders for follow up emails. It’s one of my favorite tools to leverage for email communication.

GoDaddy

• Description: GoDaddy is a web hosting and domain registration company, offering a range of services to help businesses establish and maintain their online presence.

• Benefit: Provides startups with a user-friendly platform for domain registration, website hosting, and building, making online business setup easy and efficient.

• How I Use GoDaddy: I use GoDaddy to purchase website domains. It’s a very user-friendly platform and easy to navigate. I highly recommend GoDaddy to purchase all your domains.

SenderScore

• Description: SenderScore is an email reputation service that rates the trustworthiness of an email sender's IP address based on factors like spam reports and sending behavior.

• Benefit: Helps businesses monitor and improve their email deliverability by understanding and optimizing their sender reputation.

• How I use SenderScore: I leverage SenderScore to monitor our IP address reputation.

GlockApps

• Description: GlockApps is an email deliverability and spam testing tool that helps users identify and fix issues with their email campaigns before they send them.

• Benefit: Improves email campaign performance by offering actionable insights to increase inbox placement rates and reduce spam complaints.

• How I use GlockApps: I use GlockApps to test my content deliverablity. Email marketing only works if your recipient receives, opens, reads, and takes action on the content sent to them. But before they can take action the email has the be delivered and that’s where GlockApps comes in. Providing me with a detailed report on how my email is delievered across all email service provdiers such as gmail, yahoo, outlook, aol, etc.

3. Social Media Management

Definition: Social Media Management is the process of creating, scheduling, analyzing, and engaging with content posted on social media platforms. It involves overseeing a brand's or organization's online presence and interaction with audiences, aiming to grow an organization's reach, reputation, and engagement through strategic content creation and communication.

HypeFurry

• Description: HypeFury is a social media management tool designed to help users automate posting and increase engagement on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, & Instagram.

• Benefit: Streamlines social media strategy by scheduling posts, amplifying reach, and engaging audiences efficiently, saving time and increasing visibility.

• How I Use HypeFury: I use HypeFury to create content for Twitter & LinkedIn specifically and then cross promote the same content to Instagram and Facebook.

4. Content Management System (CMS)

WordPress 

• Description: WordPress is an open-source content management system that's highly customizable, making it suitable for everything from blogs to sophisticated websites.

• Benefit: Offers startups the flexibility and scalability to grow their online presence with thousands of themes and plugins, supporting a wide range of business needs.

• How I Use Wordpress: I use WordPress to build and manage all of my websites. I have a web developer on my team that manages all my websites for me. His name is Mudassar Raza. We’ve been working together for 3 years now and he is amazing. You can connect with Mudassar Raza on LinkedIn here.

BlueHost

• Description: BlueHost is a web hosting service known for its reliability and strong integration with WordPress websites, offering a variety of hosting options.

• Benefit: Provides startups with affordable and scalable web hosting solutions, including one-click WordPress installations and 24/7 support.

• How I use BlueHost: I use BlueHost to host all of my WordPress websites.

Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Pick My Brain: If you want personalized advice on how to build a million dollar startup, schedule a 1:1 session with me here.

2. Check Out My Podcast: If you want advice on how to find your ideal customer, capture their attention, get them to pay for their product or service, and automate 90% of the process, listen or watch the Spark Your Succcess Podcast.

PS. I couldn’t fit my entire tech stack into one email, so if you want to know the other tools I use, reply to this email or comment on this post “part 2”.