Hit Subscribe State of the Business August 2024
This is a transcript for Hit Subscribe's monthly state of the business meeting. This transcript has been edited for clarity, listen to the recording here and view the deck here.
State of the Business:
For August of 2024, here’s the state of the business. Starting with news and announcements: I love this slide from last month because it continues to be true—we have a lot going on. We’ve had a couple of substantial reorders, and we’re in talks for a potentially massive order. This seems to be reflective of the market, which appears to be doing well. It also feels like this might be the time of year when people are gearing up to make their typical fourth-quarter budget runs, or whatever people are going to do. So, things seem to be good.
Calling back to last month, we announced that we were hiring for an SDR role. We have tentatively found someone, so we’re not looking to hire for that position anymore. I don’t have anything firm to announce yet, but we’re not actively searching. I appreciate everyone who reached out with suggestions—thank you. Interestingly, nobody reached out more than an unbelievable amount of people! I wasn’t even the one who posted the ad, but my inbox has been overwhelmed. Apparently, 70% of all commerce is just sales development representative staff augmentation, and who knew? But I don’t think my inbox will ever be the same. So, if you’re ever looking to do something like this, even if you’re not the one actually posting the ad, prepare to be utterly overwhelmed.
Anyway, enough complaining on the personnel front.
Milestones and Celebrations:
This marks two years for Melissa, who is responsible for our MarTech practice, which includes technical SEO, implementation, tooling, analytics setup, and things of that nature. That’s two years of salaried employment! Before that, she was doing a fair bit of contracting and helped set up their Airtable system, El Dorado. She’s also been contributing and writing blog articles for something like six years now. So, thank you to her for her contributions.
Also, I want to remind everyone that the standing offer for anyone who wants to be on the team page as an author, editor, or staff member is still available. Just let us know. You can reach out to Gabby, who I believe is on the call, and she can get that queued up. I’m still the one putting those up on the site, so feel free to reach out and err on the side of participating—we’re happy to have you.
Opportunities and Incentives:
Now, opportunities and what’s in it for you. I’ll start with the usual: If you facilitate a warm introduction to a prospect that we don’t already have a relationship with, we can give you a 10% rev share for the first year of revenue with that client. So, if a client comes in and orders $50,000 worth of services in that year, then you’d get 10% of that—$5k. This can be a fairly substantial payday.
There’s another option: If you refer an employer to us and there’s a conflict of interest where you don’t want to collect money, we can offer them a discount because you referred them. Whichever you prefer, we’re open to it.
With that in mind, I want to talk about something relevant right now. We actually have sales conversations going with someone who made a referral, so this would be applicable to this referral program. This month, I’m planting the seeds for scenarios where you might refer someone to us. Unlike the technical SEO work I’ve been doing lately, this has to do with content fulfillment. We have a situation where someone needs a lot of content in a relatively short time. This is something we’re uniquely good at.
If you imagine a scenario where someone says they need 200 blog posts in the next quarter, trying to handle that internally or through freelancers could overwhelm their team. They could turn to an agency, but most agencies would need to carry a massive bench of staff to handle it, which isn’t ideal. Our looser bench model, where we have a pool of people who can hop on and off projects, is a much better fit for someone with this kind of demand. So, if you hear a content manager or someone in digital marketing talking about needing a high volume of content quickly, that’s a uniquely challenging problem we’re well-equipped to solve—with the help of all of you and the relationships we’ve built.
Showcase Files Concept:
We’re revisiting the showcase files concept. Tracy is helping out on this front, coordinating with you on publication, syndication, and so forth. This is a campaign we’re queuing up to support our sales and marketing efforts. The idea is that if we approve articles you create—tutorials on using developer tools—we’ll pay you at your normal author rate and put them up on the site. If that activity leads to business with the developer tool in question, we’ll also pay you a rev share.
I want to say that I’m entirely at fault here. This ties in with our SDR hiring attempt. We definitely need help on the sales front. Some of you have expressed interest and ideas—we hear you. I need to go through and do a lead scoring exercise. Once we onboard an SDR, this process will speed up. But for now, it’s been sitting in my backlog, and I’ve had some PTO recently. So, if you reached out to Tracy and want to know where things stand, the reason nothing has happened is me. I’ll try to look at it this week and get things moving again.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about or haven’t reached out, feel free to inquire. Tracy might be the best person to contact, as my Slack is a wasteland of unread messages and confusion. I might miss your message, so reach out to Tracy if you’re interested in writing a tutorial for our blog and maybe getting a rev share if the developer tool does business with us.