Stuck at $300k ARR until pivoting to an unlikely industry took his product to the next level

Jimmy Rose grew Content Snare $300k ARR, where it plateaued and wouldn't budge. So he researched industries that he could expand into and then pivoted in an unlikely direction.

Now, it's bringing in $1M+ ARR.

Here's James on how he did it. 👇

Working for people who don't give a damn

My career started as a control systems engineer, which is a fancy name for writing code to automate machinery. But I grew tired of working for people who didn’t give a damn. My business partner and I just wanted out. We wanted to build something of our own.

In 2010, we launched our first business — software in the SEO niche, which we sold in around 2022. From there, I cofounded a digital agency specializing in website development and software development. This exposed us to a lot of problems begging for software solutions.

In 2014, we built a product to pull Stripe transactions into Xero (long before Xero offered the feature). We sold that in 2017.

Then, we built our latest venture, Content Snare, which is currently at $1M ARR.

Market research and validation

While running the agency, we knew we didn’t want to do client work forever so we were always on the lookout for new product ideas.

At some point, I read some advice about talking to potential customers without any idea in mind — just let them talk about their biggest problems. I sat down with 15-20 agency owners and asked them to talk about their website design process from start to finish. Every single one of them spoke about how much of a pain it was to get content from clients.

The emotional responses and stories these agencies shared were somewhat validating, but we wanted money on the table to be sure. I started a Facebook group and newsletter for web designers to build our initial audience. We pre-sold a heavily discounted annual plan to them with nothing more than some UX designs. We only allowed 25 pre-sales at about $100, and they sold out quickly.

That was enough of a confirmation for us. It wasn’t a lot of money, we just wanted some validation.

So, Content Snare started as a tool for web designers to streamline client content collection, and has since pivoted to professional services like accounting.

Today, we serve over 1,600 customers, growing by about 50% annually.

Building an MVP

The process of building started with basic UX designs, which cost $1-2k. The code took around six months using a mix of our in-house dev team and an agency — though, the latter introduced technical debt that plagued us for years.

We built on Ruby on Rails for the backend and Angular 2 for the frontend. I’m not sure if it’s the best choice, but every framework has its challenges. 

Ruthless prioritization

The project was entirely self-funded, supported by income from previous products and client work. 

And we were still running the agency, so time had to be split between client work and the new product. To handle this, I’ve always been a fan of daily theming. That's where you dedicate a whole day to something — like 3 days on client work and 2 on the product each week.

We were also pretty ruthless at only building stuff that would address the problem in a minimum viable way. Although we slipped on a few things and, even today, I wonder why we built some things so early.

Prioritization frameworks like RICE or ICE are game changers for staying focused on impactful work. We use these to prioritize feature development as well as marketing projects. The output is a list of projects or features ordered by importance, so you just start at the top and work your way down. It becomes so much easier to know what you should be working on.

Automation has been another massive advantage. Tools like Zapier and Make have saved us countless hours by automating processes that would otherwise require multiple hires. To learn more about this, check out my Indie Hackers post on it. 

Pivoting to new industries

Sometimes it only takes one change to make a huge difference to your growth, like finding a home in a new industry.

The most challenging period at Content Snare was a prolonged plateau at around $300K ARR.

Everything seemed fine. Churn wasn’t too bad, we were getting loads of amazing feedback, and our site got plenty of traffic — but somehow, we just weren't growing. 

Mentally, it was pretty rough. It seemed like we were doing everything right but with underwhelming results. I started working on other things, like a YouTube channel and a Zapier course, because I almost lost faith in the product. 

The breakthrough came by finding a new industry to serve. 

Through SEO, we had acquired a small percentage of industries outside our main target of web design, and we figured the answer was in there somewhere. I spoke to a ton of customers and business owners in my network. We had spreadsheets evaluating about 30 industries trying to work out which one was the most likely to succeed.

With some insane timing, in one week, two accountants told us our product had completely transformed their business. A week later, an email arrived from someone interested in acquiring us for the accounting industry.

That’s when we realized it had to be accounting. Focusing on that industry re-ignited our growth in a big way and brought my excitement back.

It’s funny how easy it is to be motivated when you’re growing.

No option but to market your product

One of the toughest challenges was learning to market and sell effectively.

Like many engineers, I was initially anti-sales and anti-marketing, but someone had to learn to sell and my business partner is an epic engineer so he stayed on that side. 

Early growth

Initially, we relied on content marketing and SEO targeting specific use cases, supplemented by a Facebook group, newsletter, and podcast.

These channels fed into each other. For example, blog posts promoted the Facebook group. Then, when someone joined the Facebook group there was an option to enter their email to get the newsletter. The newsletter talked about the podcast and the Facebook group. This engine was running well for a long time.

The podcast was awesome in another way, though — it helped build relationships with influential people. These people are more likely to talk to you when you’re offering to put them in front of your audience, so it opened doors and led to partnerships, guest posts on some incredible website (reinforcing our SEO), and much more. 

Growth after pivoting

As we pivoted to accounting, our strategy shifted. Now, the big channels are:

• Partnerships through integrations with industry-specific apps

• Tradeshows

• Lots of IRL events

• Networking

If you meet enough of the right people, you just start to get known within an industry. This leads to opportunities you don’t expect.

For example, there are now three partner companies (adjacent software or services) who have trained their Customer Success teams on our product so they can recommend it to their own customers. Earlier this year, we got a shoutout on stage from Xero at 17 of their events around the country. That stemmed from someone I met at an event.

It still blows my mind that this happened.

Talk to customers

Our business model is pretty standard. It’s the classic free trial to self-serve monthly subscription. There are three tiers with custom pricing for larger clients. In our space, many customers want to talk to someone, so we do 30-minute demos. I was doing those for a long time and now have someone helping out there. 

Growth has been slow but steady. There’s certainly no magic bullet that has helped us grow revenue, other than the pivot to a new industry. 

I think the most important thing we do is spend a lot of time talking to customers. This could be on demos, reaching out to top customers for feedback, or speaking with industry consultants. We hear the things they are struggling with so it helps us build things that are genuinely helpful. 

Interestingly, the number of trials we get per month hasn’t changed for a couple of years, but we’ve grown by increasing conversion rate to paid accounts and decreasing churn.

Among web designers our conversion to paid is around 15%, for accountants it’s closer to 30%. They’re also generally on higher plans. These two things make an enormous difference.

Validate your products and features

Be ruthless about validating ideas before building. Don't just rely on verbal validation — get commitments, ideally monetary ones. People will just say they like your idea to be nice and then you’ll build something that no one wants. 

Apply the same thing to features. Only build things that are going to solve problems. And MVP your features. Build the simplest version of each feature to see how (and if) people use it. We’ve overengineered way too many things. And it has cost us.

Resources

Surround yourself with people ahead of you in the journey, whether through masterminds, events, or social media. Their insights can save you from common pitfalls and inspire bigger thinking. I get most of this through the Dynamite Circle (we just call it DC) community.

As far as books go, Traction by Gabriel Weinberg is always a favorite for working out what marketing channels you should think about. 

Startups For The Rest of Us is a classic podcast and must-listen for indie hackers.

And it's worth coming back to things. Sometimes you’re just not ready for something you learn. I recently found a notebook from a conference I went to in 2017. A quick read gave me 2-3 ideas that we just weren’t ready for at the time.

What's next?

It’s funny looking back at goals. My original end goal was $500K ARR. At some point that goal changed to $1M. When we hit that it was a total non-event. I think I took a screenshot and sent it to my business partner and went on with my day. You picture that moment as being so exciting, but your goals might change before you even get there.

The next milestone I’d like to hit is $5M ARR. To get there, it’s going to be a combination of new pricing, a small sales team, and expanding the product into a couple of new use cases.

I’m sure there will be a lot of challenges here — especially around hiring and finding channels that can unlock that level of growth. 

You can follow along on X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, or my personal site. And check out Content Snare.