ConvertKit is now Kit!

Our recommended email service provider has changed their name to Kit. We're working to update our content to reflect this change. In the mean time, you may see us reference the product by either name—please know that our recommendation has not changed. You can read more about the name change here.

Nathan Barry is the founder of ConvertKit, and a good friend of mine. Just the other day he tweeted:

Yesterday @ConvertKit hit $1m MRR. Thank you so much to everyone who has helped along this journey! We've now got an incredible team of 34 supporting 18,872 customers.

— Nathan Barry (@nathanbarry) March 19, 2018

This is a huge milestone, and I want to give huge kudos to Nathan and his team for achieving it!

[Full disclosure as we dive in to this post: I am both an affiliate and an advisor for ConvertKit, and I do earn a commission if you choose to use my affiliate link (the links back to ConvertKit on this page) and stay on after the free trial. I'm proud to be an advisor, so if you have any questions about the product, please let me know!]

Now, if you don't know what MRR is, it’s monthly recurring revenue. That means ConvertKit is now making one million dollars per month, and it took them exactly 1,902 days to get there.

After sharing this exciting tweet, Nathan followed up on Twitter with some thank-you messages for the people who helped him and ConvertKit reach this milestone. In these tweets, he talked about the eight specific lessons he learned from these folks that have helped his business grow and succeed.

In today’s post, I wanted to share those eight lessons Nathan and ConvertKit followed to reach this amazing milestone. These lessons are ones you can also take with you as you build your business, no matter what kind of business it is.

Lesson 1: Go All In

One of the people Nathan credited for the success of ConvertKit is Hiten Shah, the amazingly successful entrepreneur who’s founded companies like KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, and Hello Bar.

About a year and a half into ConvertKit, Nathan was at a conference in Las Vegas, where he was having dinner with Hiten and a few other people. He and Hiten were walking and talking on the way back from dinner when Hiten stopped, looked at Nathan, and said, “You know, Nathan, I've been thinking. You should shut down ConvertKit. You're a year and a half in. You're still at $2,000 a month in revenue. It hasn't taken off, and you're going to be successful at other things. So you should shut it down and move on.”

Nathan was stunned. But Hiten continued, “Or you can give it the time, money, and attention it deserves and build it into a real business. But right now you're trying to run a few different side projects, and the focus isn't working for you. So you need to either go all in, or shut it down.”

Nathan thought about this for the next few months, then finally decided that ConvertKit wasn't going to go anywhere unless he made it go somewhere. That’s when he made the decision to go all in. At the time he had another business, NathanBarry.com, where he sold books and courses. He stopped working on NathanBarry.com, then took all his savings and put it into ConvertKit. He hired a full-time team, and started doing more direct sales. The other big thing he did was pick a niche for ConvertKit, focusing on providing email marketing for professional bloggers. (Remember, the riches are in the niches!)

From that point on, ConvertKit has only looked up. It was a lack of single-minded focus that was holding the company back from reaching its full potential, but once Nathan made the decision to focus only on ConvertKit, the sky became the limit. If you want your business to reach the next level, you need to be willing to go all in.

Lesson 2: Build a Great Product

Nathan also credits ConvertKit co-founder David Wheeler for helping ConvertKit become a great product. This is another one of the biggest reasons why ConvertKit has been so successful. You can have all the pieces in place to sell and support your product—the tactics, the strategies, the team, the influencers to promote it—but if that product isn't great to begin with, it's not going to be successful.

Thankfully, ConvertKit is a great product. What drew me to ConvertKit in the first place was the fact that it’s a product that just works. It’s easy to use and reliable, and most importantly, it fits into everything I'm doing in my business too. It’s why I recommend ConvertKit as an affiliate, and why I'm an advisor for the company.

So make sure, as much as anything, you build a great product.

Lesson 3: Get Feedback

Early on in the process of creating ConvertKit, Nathan sought feedback from a number of influencers on how to build the product the right way. Nathan called out two people—Ryan Delk and myself—as key influencers, people he connected with early on to get direct feedback on how to build his product the right way. Since I was already in the blogging space when Nathan reached out to me, I was able to contribute a lot of valuable feedback about what would make this product successful. And Ryan, having so much experience in the startup world, was able to do just the same.

So the big lesson here is that you cannot do this alone. And because of that fact, you need to connect with the right people who can give you honest feedback that’ll help make your product the best it can be.

Lesson 4: Be Transparent

Another key lesson Nathan has applied since the beginning is the idea of being transparent. Much like I do on Smart Passive Income with my income reports, Nathan does the exact same thing—just with a software company. He's connected ConvertKit’s metrics to a site called Baremetrics, where anyone can track the company’s income growth, all the way back to the beginning. You can even see new customers signing up in real time.

When you do business with other people online, whether it's with individuals or other companies, trust is a crucial factor, and there's no better way to build that trust than to be fully upfront and transparent. That’s exactly what Nathan has done with ConvertKit.

Lesson 5: Focus on Sales

The next big lesson is that you need to really focus on sales if you want to grow. Nathan credits Darrell Vesterfelt, who he hired back when ConvertKit was starting to focus heavily on sales. By putting a lot of time, effort, and money into building an effective sales team and process, Darrell was able to bring the company from $100,000 to $500,000 in MRR.

Now, sometimes when you're starting a business, you just don't have the resources to do that. In that case, the most important thing is to focus your resources wisely so you can land your first big customer. This is why Nathan also thanks Joel Runyon, who was that “first big customer” for ConvertKit.

Focusing on sales also means not just finding customers, but influencers who can help bring your product to a wider audience. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I also helped push ConvertKit out there in a big way as an affiliate. I know that with my large audience and the trust I’ve built with them, if I promote a product I really believe in—like ConvertKit—it’s going to help that company grow. So, Nathan very strategically had coffee with me one day a number of years ago. He showed me the product and how great it was, and helped me actually get started with it. It became obvious to me at that point that ConvertKit was something I needed to push out to my audience too.

So, focus on sales, both by finding new customers directly and via influencers who can help you do the same.

Lesson 6: Build a Great Team

When ConvertKit started out, the company had a really small team. As Nathan has grown and scaled the company, it’s grown to thirty-four people. I've gotten to know a lot of the ConvertKit team well at events, and they all say nothing but amazing things about being a part of this company. They absolutely love what they do. A lot of them get to work remotely, they go on retreats, and do a lot of fun things together. And most importantly, they've all told me that they feel like they're a part of the ConvertKit family.

So the big lesson is, as you're building a team, make sure you’re also building the company for the team. Create a culture and an environment that people will love to be a part of, because that will really amplify your mission.

Lesson 7: Care About Your Customers

ConvertKit does an excellent job of educating their subscribers along the way as they’re learning to use the product so that they'll find success with the product. But this support and care starts right after the moment of purchase—and it’s something you can do in your business too.

One thing I've always loved about ConvertKit is they don't just have people sign up then forget about them after that point of purchase. In fact, right after the purchase is when the fun starts with ConvertKit. Right after you sign up, a member of the ConvertKit records and sends a custom, personalized video greeting, using an app called Bonjoro, welcoming you to ConvertKit and letting you know they’re there to support you as you’re getting started. It’s an incredible way to welcome someone to the fold and make them feel like part of the family. And it takes just thirty seconds to do.

How has creating these individualized onboarding videos helped the company’s metrics? It’s actually helped decrease churn in the company—people who don't continue their subscription—by a whopping 16 percent.

Lesson 8: Be Grateful

Gratitude—being appreciative of the journey and how far you've come—is a really important factor in your success as a business owner. One thing that's been apparent since the beginning is the fact that Nathan is grateful for his experience—for the people who he's worked with, and most importantly, for his customers.

It's really tough when you're in the trenches, grinding away on your business, and easy to forget why you're doing this in the first place. But when you remember why you started, and can appreciate the journey and the small wins that eventually lead up to bigger ones, it can make a huge difference.

I hope this post has pushed you to continue moving forward in your business, no matter where you're at with it. Very few businesses become overnight successes, and ConvertKit under Nathan Barry definitely wasn’t one. But by applying these eight lessons, Nathan has been able to create a great company with a great team, a great product, and great customers. And so can you.

By the way, if you're interested in checking out ConvertKit as a tool to manage your emails, here's a demonstration below.

Also, be sure to click here to get a 30-day free trial to ConvertKit to try it out!

Please note that I am an affiliate for ConvertKit and do earn a commission if you choose to use this link and stay on after the free trial. I'm also an advisor for the company, so if you have any questions, please let me know!

The post The Million Dollar Tweet: 8 Lessons to Grow a Successful Business appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

In order to understand fundamentally how the world works and how things move and interact with each other, you have to understand Physics. It's the same thing for business—in order to understand it, you must break it down and try to figure out how each part interacts with each other. Luckily, there are laws for business like there are laws for Physics that can help us understand.

If you've been keeping up with my latest posts, I've been comparing Newton's Laws of Motion to some things I've learned about doing business online. I've had a lot of fun with the first and second laws, and I'm excited to conclude with the third and final law today.

In the first two laws, I changed a word or two from Newton's laws so they would relate to business, but in the third law I won't change one word. The third law is one I'm sure you've heard before, and it's something we should be reminded of each and every day while we run our businesses, write our blogs and articles, and in general—live our lives.

Law #3: For Every Action There is an Equal and Opposite Reaction

Short and sweet: whatever you put in is what your going to get out of it.

This is true in every respect, except when it comes to money. I listened to a quick interview of Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com over at TechCrunch today, and in it he specifically tells us to reassess whether or not we need venture capital to start a business.

For most of us online entrepreneurs, we're not looking for venture capital (meaning millions of investment dollars) to start our online presence, however a lot of people think it does take a lot of money to get started. The truth is, you don't need a thousand or even a hundred dollars. You can start your online business for virtually no money at all, and as you probably know, if you put more money you put into your business, it doesn't necessarily mean you will get more in return. (I started my six-figure blog for about $95.00, which included the domain name and 1 year of hosting on bluehost.) [Full disclosure: I earn a commission if you purchase through this link.]

Money aside, the third law describes a very basic idea that you should always remember, especially when it comes to earning a passive income online. If you plan correctly, work hard and are patient, good things will happen and you will start to earn money. If you don't take action and just sit and wait for something good to happen, I'm sorry—it won't.

It's important to think about this law when it comes to the planning and execution of the various tasks involved with your business, but also the relationships you have with your customers, readers, colleagues & friends online. It's simple—if you're nice, honest and respond to every customer or reader, you will gain people's trust in return, which is worth everything. If you're an a-hole, dishonest and unresponsive, good luck trying to gain people's trust and get people to pay you for anything.

Lastly, I'd just like to step back for a moment and talk about something that I feel is more important than anything when it comes to entrepreneurship and how it relates to this law. It's fear.

Fear is a disease. If you fear, you will be met with hurdles and obstacles that will stop you from reaching your goals. If you put away the fear, whatever it may really be, you will open up possibilities for success and fulfillment in your career and in your life. Remember, this is your life—the only one you'll ever have. In my opinion, it's better to say “hey, at least I gave it a shot” instead of just wondering what really could have been.

Thanks everyone for your support! If you've enjoyed my “Physics of Business” series and would like to stay updated with the new content I update on my blog, please click here to get the RSS feed!

The post Pat’s Three Laws of Business and Success: Law #3 appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

I thought this might be a fun way to get you to think about your entrepreneurial journey in another light. I hope you enjoy.

If you ever get stuck and want to give up, or don't know why what you're doing isn't working out like you thought it would, think back to these laws and how they apply to you. Please note that when I say ‘business', I mean your website, your online or offline store, your blog, your email list, your twitter or subscriber follower count, your love life—ANYTHING. Here is the first Law.

Law #1: Every business in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Law #1 can be applied to your business in many ways:

First, if you don't already have a business, you can hope and dream all you want, but you will not see any results unless some kind of action is taken. This should be obvious. In order to find business success, some kind of productive action must be taken, some external force by YOU to get your dreams of success out of rest and into motion.

If you have a business, but it's not going anywhere, you're not alone. I've talked about this before, but how many blogs have you come across where the last post was from over 6 months prior? Many of these people setup their businesses (blogs) but after a while are met with less than satisfactory results. Maybe no one is visiting their blog or they are not selling any products, and they are just flat-lining on the results axis. If you're business is in a state that you don't like, apply an external force. A marketing campaign, a redesign, a new product, a joint venture—something that will get you the results you want. Don't give up just because you're not seeing results right away. Have you tried applying an external force? If not, you didn't fail—you're just not done yet. See unnecessary graph below:

If you have a business and it's doing really well—awesome. Now, you have two choices:

1. Keep it that way. This is done by making sure no external forces are negatively changing your results and getting in your way. For example, making sure your product(s) are meeting the needs of changing markets, making sure you're satisfying your customers, making sure you're staying on top of your keyword research and SEO, making sure you're on top of your company's financials, making sure you're getting enough sleep and have enough energy to see things through, etc. Or, you can…
2. Make it even better and take it to the next level. Use external forces to make your results even better. For example, I was selling an Ebook Study Guide for $29.95. I was happy making $7-8k a month. Insert audio guide…Booyah! Up to $30k in one month. Again, see graph below:

Lastly, If you have a business and it's going downhill, figure out what external forces are causing this to happen, and then counter accordingly. You've heard the phrase “everything happens for a reason”, right? Well, this applies to the online business and marketing world too. Do what you can to find out what is causing you to lose visitors, decrease sales, have unhappy customers, whatever. An easy way to do this is just to stay involved with your business and the trends in the industry. No, this doesn't mean reading about it 24 hours a day, but reading emails, listening to customers, and staying focused on what's happening every once and a while can help you figure out what the deal is. Here's a personal example:

Between June and July of 2009, my monthly income fell from about $26k to $9k. That's huge. Luckily, because I knew the exam I wrote a study guide for was expiring, I expected this drastic change. In fact, I was still able to generate $9k by creating a product for the new exam just in time for the change. If i didn't know the exam was going to expire, it would have been $26k to absolute zero. This is an example of an external force that cannot be changed, but one that I addressed to keep my business running as strong as possible.

Unfortunately, there may be external forces that we just cannot control and may not have an answer for. For example, you may have read that I was recently forced to change my domain name from intheleed.com to GreenExamAcademy.com. Because of this, most of the SEO work done for intheleed.com will have to be redone for the new domain, which will take some time and will definitely have an impact on my income from this source.

What I've learned is that you should do everything in your power to create the results you want, but make sure you do the proper research first so you don't have external forces acting upon you later which may eventually put all of that motion you've been working on back to rest. Using a trademark in a domain name, although may not be met by an external force all the time, certainly opens up the possibility.

So, how does Law #1 apply to you? You don't have to comment (you can if you wish), but at least give it 2 minutes of thought.

Law #2 is next. Can you guess what it is?

The post Pat’s Three Laws of Business and Success: Law #1 appeared first on Smart Passive Income.