GlassTech.io
Greg Shankin runs two online marketing companies, with GlassTech.io offering ringless voicemail and email marketing automation alongside full-service agency work. The business was founded nine years ago in affiliate and lead generation, pivoted about a year before the interview, and had roughly 15 clients with 25 in the pipeline. The founder reported a loss of about $50,000 in the pivot year and projected about $500,000 for 2016 with five employees.
Greg's online marketing business was losing ground after Google clamped down on affiliate and CPA marketing, so the company reinvented itself around lead generation, marketing automation, and a full-service agency model.
- •Moving from declining affiliate and CPA lead generation into a recurring-revenue agency model gave the business more stable income than its previous ad-dependent work.
- •Offering managed services alongside a self-serve platform lets the company serve clients with different budgets and needs.
- •Leveraging a full-time overseas team for years kept delivery costs low enough to take on many service lines without saying no to most clients.
- •Selling automation to B2B companies with a clear, ROI-based pitch makes retainer contracts easier to justify.
- 1.Identify when your main acquisition channel is declining and start building recurring service revenue before the decline becomes severe.
- 2.Package the same technology into both a do-it-yourself tier and a managed-service retainer tier.
- 3.Build repeatable fulfillment processes with a dedicated offshore team so new clients can be onboarded without a proportional rise in cost.
- 4.Sell lead-generation and outreach automation to B2B companies, pricing retainers so clients can see the ROI.
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