How Koalarank CEO Arrigo Lupori grew Koalarank to $52.8K revenue and 5 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is arigo laporti he he comes from the world of content marketing and has had many opportunities to write for interesting companies who didn't know how to strategize their content marketing efforts that's when he decided to make the switch and launch his own company called koalarank.com there you go you're ready to take us to the top yeah why not let's do it okay so what is koala rank so clarence is a content marketing service specifically made for small b2b firms so mostly sas companies and also consulting firms i personally come from consulting so i'm more tuned to helping other consultants but also sas companies and so how does the product work if someone's sitting right now and they want content marketing help and they sign up for koala rank what are they going to get right so the idea behind core rank is that you're going to get an all-in-one package meaning that sure you you know about the benefits of content marketing you've heard about it you've read all the hubspot posts about it but you don't really know how to apply it right i've seen time and time again a lot of interpreters trying to do some blog posts trying to do some little articles here and there but they don't really know actually what goes on behind it so what you do is you just click on that button uh purchase our all-in-one package we're going to create the content strategy we're going to create the editorial calendar and from there onwards we're going to produce all the content for you and we're going to make sure that you get leads from your content and those are going to be qualified these are going to be pushed directly to your sales team after you know they come through they download the content upgrade or things like that and they go to your sales is it a software play though or are you an agency no there's no software but mostly it's a process that surprise entire process that we've built over time working with different consultants and different agencies marketing agencies so yeah we help them with the process mostly so what do companies pay you per month on average to use the tool or the or the agency so it really depends on how many pieces of content they choose to go for uh because uh the prices depend so basically you can choose from two to four at the moment uh we found that those are the the numbers that are most relevant for small b2b firms so two to four pieces of content per month yeah but it's not not just blog posts it's actually the whole funnel connected to it so you actually create lead magnets so content upgrades and then you do the whole marketing automation behind so the funnels and things like that and what that cost is the baseline is 399 for the base uh the setup and then you pay 900 bucks a month for the base so two pieces of content and it goes up to 800 1800 okay so 900 a month is sort of the starting recurring price right yeah and how how many customers do you have paying that so right now we're still a small agency we have five paying customers some of them are doing the quarterly some of them are doing the monthly we we do have some partnerships right now so we have a partner that's helping us do some prospecting and we do the content marketing for them so we have a little bit of a partnership going on there but we're still small agencies so five at 900 bucks a month you're doing about five thousand dollars a month right now in revenue right there's we have a few clients that have gone for the for post uh option so actually the in the actors page is not updated so we're doing about uh 4k a month at the moment okay got it yeah 4000 nmr yeah four thousand dollars per month that's great and when did you launch the company so i launched at the beginning of 2020 so in january okay and you bootstrapped or raised yeah it's completely bootstrapped so i'm the founder i'm a solo founder and i had experience working as a freelancer on fiverr for a long time and from that experience basically i gathered a lot of feedback from clients on there and i decided that fiverr wasn't the ideal platform for me to continue pursuing this content marketing thing and so i decided to create my own thing and actually build a website from it and your best month on five or how much money did you make out of curiosity uh on fiverr my best month was exactly when i was starting with content marketing and i got about 3500 in a month but it's exactly at that moment where i was switching from content writing to content marketing and i realized that a lot of the clients that were coming through from fiverr because fiverr has this studio thing that they've released last year and they've tried onboarding me on that so basically what that is you can work with other freelancers as a studio lead so you're kind of a manager and i tried doing that but it didn't work for me so i just couldn't really find a way to collaborate with other freelancers on fiverr so i said then let's let's leave this and use the money that they've paid me on that month so the 3.5k to actually build my own and how many people are on your team today we're just two uh so not that many people here but we actually work uh so with a lot of freelancers at the moment so we we are the the thing with cola rank is that we're really in that phase where we're trying to ramp up uh the marketing strategy so actually at the moment we're we're towards the later uh parts of that but we're actually i'm actually planning a rebranding and it's coming really really soon uh just for the icon because it's really important that it's consistent across channels and then from there onwards we're going to push a big promotion um promotion strategy and and how are you getting traffic right now i mean when i look you up on ahrefs you have some some big backlinks on sites like clutch.co uh that drive you a lot of traffic same with uh is it ub dots you buy dots.com as well so what are these tactics so basically uvidoc was actually one of the clients that came in from the fiverr uh part of things so basically they came in they wanted to do some content writing but i convinced them to go you know there's a bigger part to this which is content marketing i educated them a little bit on that and so basically what that did for me is i actually started guest posting on their website so that i have an intern of things analytics platform where i could actually you know do start my career in content marketing so i did some guest posts on there uh and so that got me back linked to callrank.com and then clutch.com is just it's the directory for marketing agency it does bring in qualified leads uh from there as well and then we've done some blogging obviously we're a content marketing agency so it's extremely important and that we have uh people coming in from there as well uh we do but why don't why don't you rank though for more i mean your content marketing you really though are you ranked for one really keyword that drives meaningful traffic and there's not really any other keywords and that keyword is blogging dead i mean that's where most your traffic comes from i don't see really any other strategic blogs that are bringing meaningful traffic is that because you're early on or what's what's the thinking there that's a that's a really good question and something that i did expect as a question because yes it is because we're early on so basically as i was building coil rank i was still figuring out the business model i was still figuring out the targeting and things like that so basically right now the targeting is small b2b firms but this is something that came out over time as we were building the website and those five pieces of blog content that you see on the website yes they're a bit stuck actually the last one was published at the end of march before the kovid thing the kobe thing was a big hit for me because it kind of like you know i lost a lot of productivity so in those two months i didn't i wasn't able to uh keep uh ramping up the production but now that we're in the later parts of the rebranding and making sure that we have the messaging platform uh we're gonna we're actually starting we have the first two writers that are writing the first two new blog posts for this new targeting so what should someone willing to pay for like if they wanted to write an equivalent blog like the one you put up is blogging dead right what should people be willing to pay a freelancer to put out good sort of seo optimized content like this per post so are we talking about just content writing so just a text yes okay so a good rate would be about 300 bucks 300 bucks to write this piece of content 250 to 300 books yeah okay and you have a portion at the bottom like this is blogging dead article which i believe is taking advantage of google's new questions schema where it basically says is blogging or sorry frequently asked questions is blogging outdated does anyone still read blogs our blog is still successful is that optimized for the new schemas and if so how do you stay up to date with new schemas google puts out and take advantage of them right yeah that's actually a good question it's uh we've seen like the schema actually does improve the rankings quite a bit it's because when you go into google you have the people also search for a little box and from there you can actually get some of the questions and actually that does you know it's all about like search intent so google tries to figure out from a technical standpoint what people...