Hit Subscribe State of The Business June 7, 2024
State of The Business June 7, 2024
This is a transcript for Hit Subscribe's monthly state of the business meeting. This transcript has been edited for clarity, see raw notes and listen to the recording here and view the deck here
So, news and announcements for June of 2024. This is actually going to be a fairly easy slide deck to run through. Not too many announcements.
One thing I did want to say is I got a notification from, I think, the government of Michigan that Hit Subscribe is seven years old now. Amanda is listed as the—forget the role—like the person of record on the business. So that's cool. The business is seven years old. And actually, stay tuned if you're interested. I have queued up another book for publication, and Amanda has edited that. So that's going to come out soon. The Eric-Amanda dynamic was actually one of the motivations for founding this business. So it's kind of fun to have that happening again.
Anyone interested, the book is going to be called "SEO for Non-Scumbags." We are giving it away for free as part of our marketing collateral. So if it interests you, and you're listening to this later, you can absolutely go consume that and there is no charge. Or if we do charge for it, because I guess the publisher tells me some platforms require you to set a price, we are going to pick a charity and just donate all of the proceeds.
Next up is another slide that I'm just leaving on here. For anyone watching, listening, or reading the transcript later, if you want to be on our site, just let us know. We will put you on the site. And that's it, at least in terms of business announcements.
So, opportunities. So as always, the referral program is on here. If you refer us any business, we will give you a 10% revenue share of the first year of business. If you're working for a company and you don't feel comfortable taking that rev share, the other thing we can do is instead of paying it to you, we can give your company the rev share, so to speak.
So, if you're working at Acme Inc., and you feel like it would be weird for you to take a cut of doing business with Hit Subscribe, the other thing we can do is say, "Hey, dear friend of Hit Subscribe, because you referred business to us, we will give your employer, Acme Inc., a 10% discount on the first year of service." So that can be a nice way for any of you out there listening or watching that don't exactly feel comfortable taking money. It's another way to have a warm referral benefit.
So, every month now, I am trying to do some common referral scenarios. We tee this up and say if you introduce people to us, you can make some money. I think it's good to also tee up a way to actually make an introduction so you understand. And the one I'll highlight this month is one that Aaron and I, in looking at businesses, have run across. It is fairly common for people in Dev Tools to stand up a site on something like Jekyll or Ghost or whatever. The other thing that we see that is fairly common is if you do that, sooner or later you will regret that decision and decide to move to WordPress or Webflow—it is almost always one of those two. If not that, then by the time they get big enough to have internal IT staff, they will do some kind of custom headless thing that runs, but it will be one of those three.
Nobody is going to go from seed to B round, or later, and keep running whatever technical founders do—static site generators. They will not do that. So sooner or later, they will want to move to something that their marketing staff can actually operate that isn't constructed in Markdown and doesn't involve deploying every time you publish a blog post. So, if you see an early-stage company and they are using a static site generator, there is a good chance that at some point in the future they will not want to do that anymore. One of the things we can absolutely do is make sure they don't lose any SEO juice as they make that migration.
So, for you out there that might want to refer business, if you see a dev tools company that is using a static site generator, and especially if you get the sense that they might be planning a migration away from it, that is a great moment to make an introduction because we can specifically ensure that they don't lose traffic through SEO when they do that.
Another thing that I want to mention here is the showcase files. So I've been threatening this for months, and Eric Goblebecker and I had been talking about it. This is a thing that we're doing, and it is actually technically live now. So Theo wrote this blog post in here. This is a screenshot from the Hit Subscribe blog, and we paid him for it. I assumed, Angela, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he was offered the standard author compensation rate. That is certainly the goal. So, the idea is if you are interested in writing a blog post showcasing how to use a dev tool that we are not currently working with, we will pay you for that. Hit Subscribe will essentially become its own client and pay authors and other contractors as applicable to create content. We will publish it to the blog.
Over the last month, we have been ironing out distribution of that. So, I think I put it up on our Dev.to, and we want to publish these on some other places and promote it on socials, tag the brands, etc. So we're spinning all that up. But it is a real thing. It exists. We are interested in paying those of you who are authors and creating content like this. We will get more sophisticated about socializing the dev tools that we're talking about. For now, we have this glitch site. I, a couple of months ago, put up three brands: Code Anywhere, Short Loop, and Seaglen's Air. Aaron and I are working on a backlog of other brands that we would put up there for showcase purposes.
But the TLDR is, if you are an author and you want to write about a developer tools brand, there is a decent chance we will pay you to do that. If it is one of the brands that we've identified as potentially being a good fit for Hit Subscribe, we will kind of, no questions asked, pay for that. If you have a proposal—like, you know a dev tool, say you work with—this isn't a good example because we're not going to go pitch this to Microsoft, but let's say hypothetically you worked with Visual Studio, and you want to do some kind of showcase about Visual Studio, you could come to us and say, "I have this idea for a showcase." We might turn around and say either, "Yeah, absolutely, we will pay you for that to put it on Hit Subscribe," or we might say, "I'm not sure that's a great fit for our business as a client, but if you publish it on your own blog and you bet on yourself, and you get their attention, and they reach out to you and you refer them to us, we will still give you the referral bonus."
So, to be clear, in either of these scenarios, whether we pay you for it on Hit Subscribe's site, or whether you just go off on your own and write whatever you want, in either case, if your work results in us getting the attention of that company and then doing business, we will pay you the aforementioned 10% revenue share. This can be a great double dip—to get paid for writing for Hit Subscribe and also to really get paid if we do business with them. And I say this on pretty much every stage of the business, but just to give you an idea, I forget how much we paid out over the years, but it isn't crazy. I think so far this year, we have paid out $6000 in referral bonuses. This is a thing; it happens, and you can make a good bit of money doing it.
So, TLDR here, if you have a tool that you would like to show off your knowledge of and demonstrate how to use it, approach us. Err on the side of reaching out to us and proposing it, and we'll talk from there.