Cracked $2k monthly revenue after 5 years. Here's what I've learned

Hi, I'm Tyler and I am building Centori.

I hope the lessons I learned can help someone who is in the same boat I've been in. It’s not all about the revenue, it’s about the lessons we learned that got us here, and will push us forward.

I've been at this for a while and the best word to describe it is ‘slog’. I work a day job and have been building Centori nights and weekends for about five years.

It took me a bit less than three years to crack $500 in a month, a year after that to break $1000, and now seven months later I've broken past $2000 (official revenue in July was $2,023).

There’s no secret formula here. No magic strategy for LinkedIn outreach, or an email hack. Here are three simple lessons I learned that helped me take a struggling side project and get it on track.

1) The sooner you start solving problems, the sooner you make money

This one is so simple, yet it is absolutely critical to remember.

No one cares about your idea, they care about whether you can solve their problems.

The thing you need to worry about is whether those problems are worth paying to solve, and if you can get enough people to pay you to solve them.

I've written before how I tried to make a simple, easy to use SEO platform work. The short version of the story is, it didn't work. The most I ever made from the platform was $150/month.

90% of the money I made from Centori was freelance SEO work that I did to pay the bills and make a small profit.

Sure we made a halfway decent product, but the amount of time it took to get there far outweighed the benefits. The space is far too crowded, but added to that I was not solving the right problem for the right person.

My ideal customer was someone new to SEO and unsure of where to start. It takes a lot more than a 'simple easy to use tool' to help those people. That's because the real differentiator between you and your competitors in SEO is not the tool you use, but your strategy.

My ideal customers do not need another tool, they need a direction to run with.

When I pivoted from selling an SEO tool to selling SEO strategy, we exploded.

We went from $700 in monthly revenue towards the end of last year to over $2000 this summer with that one simple change. Even better is the fact that the SEO freelance work I do when from 90% of our revenue to 25%.

Instead of focusing on selling a software platform, I broke my approach to SEO strategy down into a repeatable process and sold that. I started selling one:one coaching and group coaching programs, along with monthly coaching plans. All three focused on one thing: building an effective SEO strategy, and pointing our customers in the right direction so they keep making progress month over month.

We kept up with our software as a simple tool to onboard them so they don't need to sign up for another subscription, but I've realized the true value is in the knowledge and expertise we built into the program rather than the tool itself.

The lesson here is: pay attention to what people are telling you. My favorite book on this subject is The Mom Test. It’s a fantastic, and quick, read that will set you on the right track.

2) Play your strengths rather than force something to work

If there is one thing you can confidently claim you are damn good at, lean in there.

While I was in college I worked as a TA. I was regularly told by my friends that they could see me as a teacher, which I shrugged off.

That was a while ago, yet I've come full circle: my strength really is teaching.

I love working with people and seeing them learn something new. Seeing that 'aha' moment gives me a great amount of satisfaction and seeing the results come in gives me joy.

I'm a decent product manager, I'm a so-so developer, and I'm a mediocre designer. By focusing on my strength as a teacher in the past year, I was able to add so much more value to my customers than I did in the four previous years.

The lesson is: what are you good at? If there is one thing you can do that can create value for someone else, focus on that rather than try to make something else work.

3) Simplify, simplify, simplify

There's a wonderful video of Steve Jobs after his return to Apple where he details the road ahead for the struggling company.

To set the stage, Jobs is presenting the ‘Think Different’ campaign to the company. He starts off by rallying the troops around one core concept: get back to the basics.

Great products, great marketing - get back to the basics and do them well.

As many know, at the time Apple was bloated. They were adding products hand over fist with none of them landing, resulting in a company that had a confusing roadmap and a revolving door of CEOs.

In comes Steve Jobs.

To save a dying company Jobs claims Apple will cut products rather than add more products. In fact, they cut 70% of the product roadmap, and focused on improving the quality and customer experience for the remaining 30%.

As I slogged along, I kept trying new ideas. New features to add, new ways to package the features, new price points, new names for our tiers, a blog-writing service, on-demand SEO work....

It was hard to explain what we did. In fact, I was never satisfied with my ‘elevator pitch’. We were a software company, but we also provided SEO services, and content writing through a network of writers....?

Similarly to what Jobs said in the video, neither my customers nor my team knew what Centori was.

So we simplified. I can now definitively say what Centori is: We help small brands build highly effective SEO strategies.

That's it. How we do it is through our one:one and group coaching programs, but at the end of the day what we do is help small brands build an SEO strategy that launches them ahead of their competitors.

The lesson here is: when things are not working, you can probably benefit more from subtraction than you can from addition. Rather than add one more widget to appease one more customer segment, cut things back and niche down to deliver an excellent product and experience for your best customers.

Conclusion

Three simple, yet also incredibly impactful changes led to us getting some real growth and traction this year. They were not easy changes at the time, but at the end of the day any strategy - whether it is for SEO or a product - requires you to make intentional decisions.

My hope is that we can continue to lean into these lessons and keep moving forward.

It has been a grind, and there were many times where I thought about giving up, but I am thankful for what I have learned along the way and how it has helped me become a better founder, and a better person.

Now onto the next phase!