Embarque
Julian's journey to entrepreneurship wasn't straightforward. After earning a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from UEA, he spent years as a freelance writer earning money since age 16, living a scrappy existence in London—couch-surfing, living in renovation houses, and renting a pantry as a bedroom for £380/month. Everything changed in October 2018 when he discovered the indie maker community. Within three months of joining, he was earning 2.5x his previous full-time salary working with founders and bootstrappers. This experience transformed his relationship with money and showed him how lucrative his writing skills could be in the startup ecosystem.
The idea for Embarque came in May 2020 through a conversation with Dominic Monn, founder of MentorCruise, who wanted to scale his SEO content production but hated the hiring process. While Dominic initially suggested a marketplace model, Julian quickly realized it would take too long to achieve profitability and still wouldn't eliminate vetting issues. He discovered the productized service model instead—perfect for ensuring quality control while maintaining transparent pricing and scalable offerings.
Embarque went from idea to launch in roughly four weeks, moving remarkably fast because Julian still had a full-time job and freelancing gigs. The website was intentionally unexciting but functional, built in less than an afternoon. "You don't even need a website to begin a business," he noted. When he launched, he received zero orders—a psychologically brutal phase lasting two and a half months. Julian struggled with impostor syndrome and didn't understand the long sales cycles for content marketing services, compounded by the summer months being notoriously slow for agencies.
Instead of giving up, he remained active in online communities, published helpful content, and added samples from previous work to the homepage. He learned an important distinction: as a freelancer, clients trusted his writing ability; as an agency founder, they also needed to trust his ability to hire the right people.
After 2.5 months of grinding, a breakthrough came when a founder discovered Julian on Twitter and wanted to jumpstart his SEO content production. Then VEED (a video editing platform) became a client, followed by MentorCruise. By September 2020, he'd reached $4,000 MRR. By December 2020, just seven months after launch, Embarque crossed six figures annually ($8,333 MRR equivalent).
The early growth came primarily through community engagement and word-of-mouth. His Indie Hackers launch became a top milestone for the day and was featured in their newsletter, converting three of his highest-tier clients. A case study tweet thread converted one Steer client and several lower-tier ones. He actively participated in Weekend Club, Indie London, ContentUK, Email Geeks, and the Productize Community on Facebook. Julian emphasized the power of having "evangelists in relevant communities" who naturally promoted the service with credibility rather than direct self-promotion.
Personal referrals eventually generated around $5,000 of his MRR—not easily repeatable but a reminder to nurture every client relationship through personable, reachable account management.
The biggest revelation was discovering that 80% of his clients were repeat customers paying for the top "Steer" package ($1,250/month), not the single-article buyers he'd initially targeted. This was counterintuitive: B2B clients valued vendors who could handle all the operational complexity of scaling content production—vetting writers, coordinating editors and fact-checkers, developing strategy. By absorbing that burden, Embarque could charge premium prices.
However, being too scrappy initially came back to haunt him. When he didn't invest in robust hiring processes and writer vetting, he had to turn down a major potential client. He also encountered operational nightmares: writers submitting plagiarized content, someone submitting a GPT-3-generated portfolio as their own work, and writers ghosting when they missed deadlines. These failures led to a zero-tolerance plagiarism policy and doubled-down fact-checking.
Personal obstacles also derailed progress. Julian pursued a Master's program he didn't enjoy, which consumed time and energy, forcing him to decline large orders. He openly discussed struggling with ADHD and borderline personality disorder (BPD), noting that while these conditions could drive obsessive 15-hour workdays, they also sometimes led to procrastination born from perfectionism.
A year into Embarque, Julian had grown the business to $12,000 MRR ($144,000 ARR) while largely neglecting the homepage—it still looked roughly the same as launch, just with added social proof. His acquisition efforts, while successful, were "haphazard at best" due to lack of discipline, something he committed to changing.
For the future, Julian planned to launch an SEO for Startups newsletter teaching bootstrappers how to scale without breaking the bank. He aimed to expand offerings (technical content creation, email copywriting), boost marketing through SEO and social media, and build a sales and affiliate program—areas already seeing promising early returns. By his own account, he hadn't been able to work on Embarque as much as he wanted, so the roadmap ahead was exciting.
- •Julian's authentic participation in existing communities (Indie Hackers, Weekend Club, ContentUK) where his ideal customers already gathered proved far more efficient than cold outreach or paid ads, because community members valued peer recommendations over marketing claims.
- •He discovered that B2B buyers of content services have willingness to pay premium prices when a vendor absorbs the operational complexity of hiring, vetting, and managing writers—creating genuine economic value beyond just writing quality.
- •Building in public and sharing vulnerable, human stories about the business journey (including struggles and failures) created emotional connection with followers and differentiated Embarque from polished agency competitors, driving conversions and referrals.
- •The productized service model solved a real coordination problem in his market: freelance writers and bootstrappers both lacked efficient ways to find each other, so positioning as a trustworthy intermediary with quality control created defensible value.
- •Focusing ruthlessly on repeat monthly revenue rather than chasing one-off orders allowed him to build predictable, scalable revenue; 80% of his MRR came from recurring clients, not transactional sales.
- 1.Identify 3-5 online communities where your exact target customer actively participates (subreddits, Slack groups, Facebook communities, Discord servers), then commit to regular, authentic participation—sharing insights, asking questions, and helping others without selling for at least 2-3 months before any outreach.
- 2.Design a productized service offering (fixed scope, fixed price, recurring billing) instead of custom/hourly work; clearly define what's included at each tier and ruthlessly say no to customization requests, forcing the market to select packages that scale.
- 3.Launch a public journey or case study format on Twitter or LinkedIn showing real numbers, genuine struggles, and lessons learned—aim for vulnerable authenticity over polished marketing copy, then share regularly in the communities where customers hang out.
- 4.Implement a structured hiring and vetting process from day one before it becomes a bottleneck; document quality standards, run fact-checks, and build a repeatable pipeline so you can say yes to growth without degrading the product or burning out.
- 5.Track which clients are generating recurring revenue vs. one-time purchases, then double down on the offer that produces the retention you want; if B2B SaaS is your market, design packages that incentivize multi-month commitments and set expectations for ongoing relationships.
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