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In this episode of Confessions of a B2B Marketer, Tom shares insights on the income report of Fame, bCast, and Abney, three successful businesses that achieved remarkable growth since October 2022. Tom explores the strategies these companies used to achieve their success, such as vertical integration, cost reduction, and offering better services at lower costs. Additionally, Tom discusses some of the latest industry innovations, including McKinsey Solutions, HockeyStack's AI-powered features, Fame's coaching package, and Abney & bCast software tools.

Fame is a leading B2B marketing agency that specializes in helping businesses of all sizes achieve success. By leveraging low-cost solutions, Fame has been able to provide its clients with effective and cost-efficient marketing strategies that have helped them reach their goals. In today's competitive business environment, it is essential for companies to find ways to maximize their marketing efforts while minimizing costs.

Fame understands this need and has developed a range of low-cost solutions that can help businesses achieve their goals without breaking the bank. One of the most effective low-cost solutions offered by Fame is content marketing. Content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable content such as blog posts, videos, infographics, eBooks, and more in order to engage potential customers and build relationships with them.

Content can be used to educate customers about a company's products or services as well as build brand awareness. It can also be used to drive traffic to a company's website or social media pages in order to generate leads and sales. Fame also offers search engine optimization (SEO) services which are designed to increase a website's visibility on search engines such as Google and Bing.

SEO involves optimizing webpages for specific keywords so they appear higher up in search engine results pages (SERPs). This helps businesses get more organic traffic from potential customers who are searching for related terms online. SEO also helps improve the user experience on websites by making them easier for visitors to navigate and understand.

In addition, Fame provides social media management services which involve creating engaging content for platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube etc., managing customer interactions on these platforms, monitoring conversations about the brand online etc., all with the aim of increasing brand awareness and driving sales through these channels.

Finally, Fame offers email marketing services which involve sending out newsletters or promotional emails directly into people’s inboxes in order to keep them informed about new products or services being offered by the company or any other relevant information they may find useful or interesting.

Email campaigns can be tailored according to customer preferences so they only receive information that is relevant and useful for them personally – this helps create stronger relationships between companies and their customers over time while also increasing conversions from these campaigns due to better targeting capabilities provided by email software tools like MailChimp etc..

Overall, Fame leverages low-cost solutions such as content marketing , SEO , social media management ,and email campaigns in order help its clients achieve success with their B2B marketing efforts . By utilizing these strategies effectively, businesses are able to reach more potential customers at lower costs while still achieving great results .

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Thanks for listening and hit me up if you have any questions!

Episode transcript

where I think fame is working is because you offer something better for lower. The focus on lower costs of vertically integrating the supply chain and pretty much doing everything, keeping everything in house. Hello and welcome to another income report. The last one came out in about October, so that's four months down the line. A lot has happened. Today we're going to go through, as we always do, the numbers.

We're going to cover Feb numbers for all businesses. For every previous income report there's been two, fame and Bcast. Fame is a podcast service business for B2B companies. Bcast is podcast hosting for high growth podcasts, but now they're actually a third. And so we'll get into that. We'll also go through each of those three cover updates and numbers.

We'll cover a couple of business lessons that I've learned specifically related to fame in comparison to two other businesses that I think are pretty cool. One is Trader Joe's, a supermarket in the US, and the other is Ryanair, UK based or Ireland based, low cost airline. And then we'll also make a comparison to McKinsey as well. That's a very modest comparison, as I'm sure you understand.

We'll give a shout out to our brand new sponsor Hockey Stack that will come to the end, and then we will also just summarize everything that we cover. So that is what we are doing today. So let's jump in with the numbers. The very first income report released November 2020, Bcast was at $250 MRR and fame was at $14,000 MRR. We scroll through and then there's been around five until we get to October 2022.

So that's about two years of income reports, two years of growth. At that point, Bcast was on around just approaching $5,000 MRR and fame hit $140K.

So Bcast, I guess we can call that a 10X over the two years, just over 10X. And actually the same for fame. So two years 10X, not too bad, I don't think. Now let's jump in and understand the numbers where they are today. So Bcast has grown slowly, probably around $550 or $5,500 MRR. We'll get into kind of why that happened, why that growth is a bit slower a little bit later.

Next up, fame is currently on a grand total of $183,000. So that's jumped up from $140K to $180K in two, three months. So that's solid growth. And then as I mentioned, the brand new one, Abney, which is a podcast written asset creator or podcast AR, you upload your audio, it spits out written assets, is approaching $1,000 MRR.

So that's a brand new business that was launched or brand new product that was launched in December. So those are the headline numbers, but let's just give a high level overview of what really we've been focused on. Then we'll dig into each of those businesses. So the core thing or the core update really from October is that the main focus of the group or myself has been on fame.

And the reason for that is right now, I see they have the biggest potential for growth. And so what we've been doing to drive that growth is nothing crazy, no new products or this kind of new product.

I'll get into that in a second, but it's really just been incremental improvements to the operations of the business, the culture, the process that we deliver for our clients, and then also the growth team, which is now three of us for fame.

So we've just been making small, tiny little improvements, ideally every day or every couple of days to improve all of those areas, which is ultimately leading to more client happiness, which is the main goal of the business. And if we do that, then that leads to more revenue.

So that really, if I had to summarize the last three to four months, would be the headline or the thing that I've been most focused on is just small incremental improvements. More incremental improvements for fame. So let's jump through each of the three businesses and we'll start with Bcast. And quite an interesting case study here.

We, in the last income report, explained how we introduced a free plan, which we did, ended up getting a lot of users, not necessarily the kind of users that you really want to have, because people could come on, create an RSS feed, distribute the show to their podcast, to all the directories, essentially for free. There was obviously limits.

But what we got is people essentially piggybacking on the SEO of the domain, because when you set up a podcast, you can also get your own mini website and then using that to drive SEO traffic to offers. So we had a insane increase in organic traffic from around a thousand clicks a day to close to 10,000 clicks a day.

But the problem was that none of those clicks were really valuable for us as a business.

And then, of course, all the downloads on that content or all that web traffic was costing us money. And so we didn't see the uptick in value for the company. There was also an uptick in value for users that wanted to implement that approach. But we weren't able to capture any of that value for Bcast.

And so we ended up turning off that free plan, still honoring that free plan for users that were real that weren't spam, but no new people can create a new account. And so that is probably why we haven't seen the growth in MRR is because we had that switch. We were expecting people to come to free plan and upgrade, but that didn't really happen.

And so then we've turned that off and now people are coming back in. And in order to get into the tool, they have to pay. And so that's why growth has increased a little bit in the previous weeks. So that's the Bcast update. Then next up, we have the new product called Abney. The website should be going live relatively soon. It's Abney.ai.

And what this does essentially allows a podcaster to upload audio, click a button, and then the written assets for the shared produce. So this is the name, the description, a blog post, the transcript, title options, and also keywords that are featured in the episode. And so what this can do is essentially save podcasters probably hours of their time that they were spending producing that first draft of the written assets.

We still typically recommend that a writer or the host does review those written assets because it doesn't get everything right all the time. But you will be pretty astounded by the quality of the writing that it does produce. It also gives out social posts for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook as well. And so we started working on this probably around November time and then released the product in November, December.

And it's approaching $1,000 MRR. The pricing is a small monthly subscription based on how many builds, that's what we call them, you need to do. And so we were able to reach that level around 400 users and then around $1,000 MRR without any really promotion, apart from me on my LinkedIn personal profile writing a post about ABNI. And then also we directed a bit of traffic from the Bcast website over to ABNI as well.

So we reached that $1,000 MRR, which I think is pretty cool without even a website. And in theory, that growth is going to speed up once we have the site and we actually start doing some marketing. But that is kind of a new product to add into the mixture as well.

So, of course, if you have a podcast and you want to save time creating written assets, then we'll put the link below. There is a freemium plan where you can build one episode per month for absolutely nothing. So please go and try it out. All feedback is welcome. Please share that with us so we can tweak and improve the tool.

And now on to fame, which, as I've said before, is probably around 90 percent of my time and focus. So probably the biggest insight here, as I mentioned, we grew from 140 to around 180, well, 180 to 200 in Feb, so from October to Feb. And the key insight here is actually a LinkedIn post I did a few weeks ago, which says they took 18 months to get to 20k MRR.

And then in the month of February, we added 20k MRR. And so the key insight here is that growth compounds.

If you have something that's working, it's super important just to keep focused on that thing, because if you're doing it right, that thing will get easier and easier to do over time, because the small improvements you make to marketing, the small improvements you make to the service or the operations will compound and will actually make it relatively easy for you to become the best at marketing in your space or the best at delivering the products or service in your space, if you just have enough time with those small improvements.

And so that probably is the key insight. Other numbers and updates, we had record clients added in January and February. And ideally, that's going to still continue. Maybe I'll do a separate episode on growth and how we've managed to do that for fame. We have grown from 30 full time to 45 people full time. We still just do the same thing.

We do the one single thing, which is B2B businesses can come to us and we'll start a grow a podcast for them. We do everything that the client will just host the show typically. And so some of the insights here that I've had recently is that in comparison to some other much bigger and better businesses than us and how they've worked is informed the strategy for fame.

So the first one is Trader Joe's. And the reason I love the Trader Joe's story is, A, I actually remember going to Trader Joe's in New York around 15 years ago and being amazed at the experience. But what they've done, they're a supermarket in the US.

But what they do is they have around 4000 skews, so 4000 different products compared to supermarkets in the UK or in the US, like the main ones that may have 20, 30 or even 40,000 skews or products.

Now, what this means is that this increased cost or the increased complexity of having to deliver and support those products brings more chaos, more confusion, and therefore will increase cost. And so the thing that they offer has less value. And so what Trader Joe's has obviously is more simplification, therefore more streamlined operations, less confusion, less cost, and therefore can offer something that's better for a lower price.

And so if you combine that with the fact that Trader Joe's also don't buy stuff from other people, they make all their own, or they use all their own products, their own branded products. And so what this means is, again, they're able to cut out these middlemen in the supply chain and therefore can deliver something better, again, for a cheaper cost.

And so there's this simplification and vertical integration of their supply chain, which enables them to deliver a better experience at a lower cost. The other thing I think they do is kind of unrelated is that they then produce those products and services, better products at a lower cost, and then also take some of the extra money that they saved and use that to hire better people.

And so if you go to Trader Joe's, the experience, they're going at interactions with the team there, with the people that are working, it's typically better because these hire paid people, better skills, more enthusiasm, etc. So I think that's super cool. But to compare that to what we do with Fame is, again, we simplify. We only do this one single BTB podcasting process, whereas other competitors maybe do multiple things.

What this means is we have lower complexity, lower operational overhead, and therefore can offer something that's better at a lower cost. And the other thing that Trader Joe's do, as I mentioned, is they integrate the supply chain. What Fame has done is have taken those things that a normal podcast agency may pay for, e.g. the hosting software and some software that helps write assets, and we built that ourselves.

So we've integrated that part of the supply chain. There are fewer people to pay a profit in that process, and therefore we can offer something that's better at a lower cost. And so if you think about Bcast and you think about Abney, other agencies are probably paying and therefore giving profit, giving margin away to other providers where we don't need to do that. So that's another comparison.

In the same way, Ryanair, again, I think a really, really awesome business, they just have this absolutely relentless focus on cost. They are the lowest cost provider, especially in Europe. I'm not too sure about the US, but they don't compete because Ryanair wouldn't do that. Because having to fly in the US would mean they have to increase their prices, and so that would go against their strategy.

But one of the things that Ryanair do is that they take their profits and they use that to buy planes they actually own, or they have the highest number of percentage of ownership of planes versus other competitors in Europe. Other people in Europe would lease these planes.

Now, obviously, buying the planes takes up the capital. What that means is that they have less debt and therefore have to pay less interest on their debt because they own the planes. And what that does is, again, enables them to reduce cost, to get more scale and to therefore make more profit.

And so similar with fame, exactly, again, we have taken profits, used that to invest into the production or to the development of these products that we can then use to offer a better service at a lower cost.

So really, if I had to summarize why I think fame is working, it's because you offer something better for lower. And we do that because the focus on lower cost is vertically integrating the supply chain and pretty much doing everything, keeping everything in house. We don't use marketing agencies and the growth team, all of our team members, we don't use other providers or freelancers.

Everything is in house, so we can lower cost, have more control.

Now, one more reason why I think fame has worked or is working is that we have, I think, a good understanding of acquisition costs and lifetime value. I think that we are possibly the best in the space or we can pay the most in the space because we have the highest lifetime value.

So a couple of reasons of how we're doing this, and this ties in with the McKinsey thing I said at the start of the episode, is that we get X amount of new proposal requests a month and a percentage of those, obviously, as with any business, are probably not qualified.

And so more recently, we've made another offer to the people that are not qualified, not for the full service because it costs between three and five grand a month, but for a one-off kind of coaching and software and information offer.

And so what this does is it means that we're able to essentially cover all the money we're spending on advertising immediately upfront because we're taking that payment ahead of time and it's relatively high margin because there's not too much of people's time.

And so what this means is that we can essentially increase the amount we're spending for customers because we're getting most of that back even before we have to pay any advertising platform for the ad spend. So that's the reason innovation that's allowed us to pump up acquisition cost, outbid people on certain ad platforms in order to win those clicks and to get more service clients.

That's the first thing that's helping on the customer acquisition side of that equation. On the LTV side of that equation, we also have, as I mentioned, Abney and B-Cast. And so what happens if companies have to leave Fame, they typically would keep paying for those two software tools because they're relatively low cost and they're already used to using them. And the process that we built integrates very well with those two tools.

So what that does is it increases the lifetime value of those clients because maybe they'll use Fame services for 18 months, but then they'll use the software for another 18 months. And so that helps with the LTV side of the equation.

And so if you couple these two things, we're able to pay more for customers, A, because we have this kind of downside at the front end, but then we'll also have this the downside again on the back end with the software tools.

And so one of the reasons I like to compare that with McKinsey is what McKinsey have recently done is introduced something called McKinsey Solutions, which is instead of having their typical consulting engagement, maybe a six month or like six of their team, super expensive, they've been offering this thing, which is slightly slimmed down, maybe a lower time, which is to go in, do the work they need to do, but then also build that or if they're doing the work, build the processes for the client to continue doing that work in the future with some software instead of with people.

It's called McKinsey Solutions. And so it's lower cost for the initial upfront project, but they get this longer recurring revenue, which is high margin from software. And so what they typically do is start going in and doing these projects with an external provider who provides the software.

Once that happens and occurs many times and is going really well, then they'll buy that software company and then they'll go in in future projects, implement that and then capture that revenue on the back end. McKinsey's revenue, annual revenue at the moment is around 10 billion dollars. And because they're a private company, they're a partnership. No one really knows how much of that revenue is SaaS.

And so what McKinsey is probably secretly hiding is massive high margin SaaS revenue that if it was on the public markets would be valued really highly, but no one knows because they're private.

And so, again, that's a comparison to fame, probably not on the same scale, but we have this down sale of software, post services, post service has been complete, which increases LTV, which then allows us to spend more to acquire customers. So that brings us to the end of this income report for February 2023. Let's give a massive shout out to Hockey Stack.

So my man, Amir, came on the podcast, I actually used to be a reader of the SaaS market case studies, came on the podcast, I went on his love the team, recently made a big hire, D'Acosta on the sales side, these guys are just grinding, grinding away a recent feature that they just released is the ability to ask for attribution reports in free text.

The AI presumably takes that, goes into the application and then finds the report you need and shows it to you without you having to configure that yourself.

So, again, if you don't know what Hockey Stack does, go to hockeystack.com. What we're essentially doing here, and I'll dig into more detail on different features in future episodes. But all you need to understand right now is the Hockey Stack will track all website activity, connects with your theorem, connects with your ad account and gives you everything you need to know to better understand B2B marketing ROI.

So again, that's hockeystack.com will be linked below.

Of course, if you have any feedback on the show, please leave that in the form of an Apple podcast rating or review, or also Spotify will allow you to review now in some geographies. That would be awesome. If you do that, feel free to take a little screenshot of that and then send that over to me, Tom at fame.so or on LinkedIn.

And then I will get you a shout out on this show. For example, we have one right here from Sophie RD 11 from Canada. Rich insights. This podcast is packed with rich insights. Tom does a fantastic job of peeling back the layers. Thank you so much, Sophie. Let's do one more from Newtonian 54. Great insights again. I got great insights into B2B marketing from Tom's impressive range of guests.

Thank you so much for listening.

I really, really appreciate it.