From $15/hr to $2M/yr in six years with "beef as marketing"

Jeremy Redman went from making $15/hr to having four six- and seven-figure businesses within six years. His primary focus, TaskMagic, has only been around for two years, but it's already at $4M in total revenue.

Here's Jeremy on how he did it. 👇

Unemployable

I’ve been fired from almost every job I’ve ever had; something about listening to people, I’m not sure. 

I moved to LA with nothing and started working for the movie studios before going into startups. I was making $15/hr and had six figures in debt on my 30th birthday.

Now, at 36, I have no debt, an office on Sunset Blvd, a 7-figure tech company built from nothing, and a house in the hills.

I’ve been sharing my journey for the past 2.5 years on YouTube as I’ve built three six-figure no-code tech companies and one seven-figure tech company from nothing.

Filling a gap

My product, TaskMagic, started as a browser automation tool. It can automate most things that a human can do — the clicking, the typing, the copy/pasting.

We filled the gap that Zapier left behind. Ever wanted to just click that button or type in that field inside Zapier? Well, we allow you to do that.

The MVP was just a Typeform on a Webflow site where people would say what they wanted, and we'd manually set up automations in the background.

These days, we have apps too. So we can do what Zapier can do and what we do. All for only $49/mo. Not the highway robbery Zapier charges.

We're at over $4 million in total revenue.

My other product, mailead.io, which was built with Bubble. It helps freelancers and small teams get more customers by automating cold outreach. The platform offers unlimited B2B leads for your business for only $999. We just launched this on AppSumo on Black Friday 2024 (last week). We've made about $250k so far.

A "lucky" pivot

I built all four of my companies on the back of Zapier because I’m not technical.

But then, Zapier took TaskMagic out of their App Store during the week that we launched it on AppSumo.

Originally, a big part of our plan was to use them to connect apps; i.e. work with them. We automated browser actions like clicks and typing. We didn’t have APIs or app-based automations — that's what Zapier is.

So we needed Zapier and we thought we could just push our customers to them. But they called us a competitor and kicked us out. I took this  personally, but more on that later.

Three weeks into a workaround, we noticed a Zapier alternative clone that launched on AppSumo and it started to steal our sunshine. But, it just so happened that this clone was open source! I immediately called my CTO and we integrated the open-source clone into TaskMagic.

I posted on the AppSumo landing page that something big was coming and that now, everyone would have a seamless experience between API-based automations and browser-based automations.

We went on to be the 3rd or 4th highest-selling product of all time on AppSumo. We actually broke their single-day sales record. 

I don't know what that's called. "Luck" that a Zapier clone launched right then? But then again, I’d argue you have to have the skill and ability to take advantage of opportunities like that. You have to be ready to pounce.

A friend and a credit card

Building TaskMagic didn't happen overnight and it wasn't any kind of overnight success. It still feels like we were always "stealing from Peter to pay Paul". But a very near and dear friend of mine, Matt, gave me $2500 because he believed in what I was doing. Between that $2500 and about $20,000 in credit card debt, it was enough to get us through to some sales. 

I'm not the type of person who focuses a lot on "planning" at the early stages; or at all, really. So that cuts down on the time to market early on. If you move fast you’ll always figure out the right way to go, and you’ll have actual data to make decisions from.

You can plan intensely for months and still make the wrong choice. Instead, I focus on what I need to do in order to sell.

I also think about how I can get sales before I deserve them — i.e. presales. We were making presales within the first two weeks of having a form embedded in a Webflow site for TaskMagic.

Upsell your LTDs

We are still experimenting with the business model but have landed on a consumption-based model with some form of recurring payment. We give one unlimited workflow for free. Unlimited steps, unlimited apps, unlimited runs. That’s a lot of value. And if they want more flows it’s only $29/mo for unlimited flows.

But I'm not sold on it.

As a consumer, I love paying once to use something. I’ll pay two or three years up front to not pay monthly, and if it’s usage based, I’ll buy more usage as I need it. Doesn’t that make more sense? I’ll prepay the usage upfront and when I need more I will prepay more.

I don’t love the term "lifetime deal" because it assumes that the customer will never pay you again and that’s completely false. Customers will support you if you support them. So start by supporting them.

Then, offer other things that they can pay for: Future updates, future usage, or cross-selling another product or feature.

Start charging yesterday

I believe you should start charging for your product way before you think you should. Why? Because you'll hear valuable feedback.

Everyone will tell you they’d buy your product when you have nothing to sell. But then the story changes when you ask them to swipe that credit card. That's when you hear the real feedback. 

Growing to $4M in two years

We've made about $4 million in the last two years or so with a trailing 12 months of $2 million. $510k of that came from September alone. And we are profitable.

But I wanna make it very clear: We’ve never had the exponential ramp-up type of growth. No coveted hockey stick. We just put in the work every day.

Some days we have $29 in sales and some days we have $120k — that was our biggest day.

Here's how we get customers:

Cold outreach

We got our first few hundred customers just by doing cold outreach. That's where we started.

That's actually why we made mailead.io. We'd email people trying to get them to try our freemium version. We'd tell them they could move their most-used zap for free. Because why not? And we’ve been converting freemium to paid at about 8%.

We gathered feedback and played hand-to-hand combat in this cold outreach stage, and we still do so today.

We also automated DMs on Instagram and LinkedIn via TaskMagic.

Affiliates and referrals

We built a referral system early on because we know a large part of growth is people telling other people. We now have hundreds of active affiliates who have brought in over $2 million worth of sales. 

Partnerships

Small SaaS companies integrate with TaskMagic and we offer them unlimited automations for their users in return.

If a partner's customer wants workflows that don’t involve the partner's app, then they can pay only $29/mo for unlimited flows.

YouTube

We grew our YouTube channel to 6k subscribers by sharing the journey of building the company and sharing tutorials on Mailead and TaskMagic.

What’s the saying? Something like, "You’d rather have 100 passionate people who love you versus 1 million people who just like you."

Our subscribers are insanely engaged. Imagine having 6k subs on YouTube, but they are all customers. We don’t have an "audience" as much as we have passionate customers that enjoy our content.

People use social media to build an audience. I don’t. I use it to get customers. What good is an audience if it doesn’t lead to sales?

Community

We built a community called The Lazy Empire and sold to them as well. It’s now over 2k members. And they are all paying customers.

You can also use other people's networks if you don't have your own. We used the AppSumo community. Heck…come use mine. Introduce yourself at The Lazy Empire.

Beef-as-marketing

By that, I mean talking shit to Zapier. That got us to $2 million in revenue in under a year. There was a lot of pain and frustration with Zapier that we tapped into.

If you just talk shit about your competitors (and you have some ground to stand on), you’ll get people behind your cause. If the competitor publicly acknowledges you, you’ve won.

We didn’t seek it out at first — it came to us. But, like I said, they kicked us out of their connection store on the week of our AppSumo launch. We sold a Zapier connection and pitched it to AppSumo customers as a feature add-on for a higher tier.

When we couldn't offer it anymore, it made us look bad, so we reacted in kind. I followed up with this:

Episode 252: We're Coming for YOU Zapier! Here's Why With TaskMagic, You No Longer Need It

We even created moveyourzap.com to build awareness around how you can move your most used zap for free; unlimited steps, and unlimited apps for free.

Buy time

Don’t buy ads. Buy time.

Time is your asset at the beginning, and it's your biggest asset as a bootstrapper.

You may not have many resources as a bootstrapper, but you have sixteen hours in a day. And eight of them while you sleep. So cold message for sixteen hours and automate messages for the other eight.

What's next

Ya know, I want 1M users, 50k paid customers, and $1M revenue per employee. I also want that 100k subscriber YouTube plaque.

You can follow along on X, YouTube, and the Lazy Empire community. And check out Taskmagic.com and Mailead.io.