MyLands

After four and a half years launching and scaling business lines at Uber, Bradley Jacobs quit in 2018 to become a full-time independent consultant. He built his consulting practice to $25,000 per month while working just 25 hours per week. But as his business grew, he became acutely aware of all the painful backend work he was handling: bookkeeping, taxes, health insurance gaps, lead generation, website management, invoicing, proposals, and contracts. He realized countless other consultants faced the same frustrations—there had to be a better way.

Rather than raise capital immediately, Bradley bootstrapped MyLands by funding it with his consulting income. He started building in 2020 and acquired his first paying customer in March 2020. This constraint forced discipline and creativity—he couldn't afford to throw money at problems. He kept one consulting client on the side throughout this period, allowing him to "practice what I preach" and stay sharp while building the product.

Bradley's growth strategy centered on authentic content creation and building community. He began publishing educational content almost daily on LinkedIn, writing about core consultant challenges: finding your first client, pricing services, honing your niche, and contract templates. Over time, he accumulated 13,400 followers and built genuine SEO traction. But he attributes most growth to word-of-mouth—when you build a good product, people organically tell their friends. He implemented a referral program and leveraged a clever backlink strategy: every MyLands member gets a profile at mylands.co/[username], which creates a built-in backlink to the main site.

Bradley writes nearly all his own content, carving out time daily to bang out posts in about 15 minutes each. He's learned that consistency and copywriting—especially a strong hook—matter more than perfect keyword research. His best-performing post ever was about launching Uber Eats in Miami, which earned 188,000 impressions and was written in 10 minutes while lying in bed. He validated content ideas through customer interviews and sales calls rather than pure keyword research, then doubled down on topics that started ranking well.

MyLands offers a flat $50/month subscription with no revenue share, positioning it as a platform fee rather than taking a cut of customers' invoices. The company added complementary offerings like a coaching program (promising to add $10K monthly revenue) and tax/bookkeeping services. The freemium model worked well: thousands signed up for the free MyLands HQ storefront and learning track on niche-honing, and Bradley achieved a 28% conversion rate from free users to paid customers.

One area for improvement: domain authority is only 17, which Bradley acknowledges is lower than it should be given the traction. He's been strong at content creation but weaker at distribution and backlink building. He's working on a Fortune magazine feature to boost domain authority and is slowly accumulating backlinks (125 in the last 30 days).

MyLands grew from $8,000 MRR a year ago to $40,000 MRR today, across 800 paying customers. To scale further, Bradley is considering two paths: going deeper into the consultant segment or moving to adjacent customer segments. He's also focused on increasing customer lifetime value—currently estimated at $1,000 per customer (assuming ~20 months retention)—by upselling higher-tier offerings rather than just acquiring more $50/month customers.

About a year and a half ago, Bradley raised a small angel round at a $10 million cap, selling just 5% of the company for a few hundred thousand dollars. He negotiated aggressively, walking away from offers for $1M at a $6M cap (which would have diluted him 17%+). The capital let him hire an engineer and design firm to properly build out the software. Today, MyLands runs lean with four full-time employees and four contractors managing marketing, website, HR, accounting, and detailed P&L analysis. Revenue per employee is high, and Bradley remains a prolific content creator and founder.