In all of my 6+ years as an entrepreneur I’ve always enjoyed helping people solve specific problems.
For me maybe this was talking to an expert on a podcast to help my audience, creating a video course to share my own knowledge or even writing a Kindle book. Of all the ways I have helped others over the years I had never created a software solution.
I remember in 2013 I interviewed Shane Melaugh about his email marketing tool Hybrid Connect. During our conversation I remember he told me that he simply creates software to solve problems he has faced in his own business.
Hybrid Connect was a WordPress plugin that was one of the best opt-in forms available at the time. Shane added a lot of capabilities to customize your opt-in forms with templates and integrations that most tools available at the time didn’t have.
He then went on to form the company Thrive Themes which now provides various solutions for lead generation, landing pages, opt-in forms, sales funnels, quizzes, count down timers and tons more awesome functionality for marketing your online business.
I liked that Shane was always on the lookout for creating awesome solutions that solved major pain points in the online marketing space.
Despite being in a very competitive space, he really made a mark creating these tools that compete with some of the big players today such as Leadpages or Deadline Funnel to name a couple.
Working With Local Businesses
Throughout 2014 and 2015 I started dabbling in the local business space by building some websites for local businesses. I made some decent money doing this, but certainly not enough to quit my day job over.
I then went on to start bringing on a couple clients doing SEO to help businesses rank in the Google ‘Map Pack’. As this started to pick up I had hit or miss luck with clients all the while trying to figure out how to really scale this business model.
I ended up getting laid off from my full time job and spent 2 months trying to bring on some clients which more or less backfired on me.
I came across an opportunity to come work for a digital marketing agency as an account manager. I figured this would be a good opportunity to learn how an actual agency was running things and working with a lot of clients all at once.
I was in charge of all the communication with about 20 clients, I also very quickly became the ‘go to’ guy for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work at the company.
This means I had to not only communicate with the clients over phone and email on a regular basis but I had to take on a huge portion of the work that involved getting them results on Google.
Tackling Project Management
We used a platform called Teamwork which was a general project management solution designed for anyone and everyone.
- I had no real way to track where a specific client’s progress was at during any given moment, either stuff was done or not and I had to manually look into each client’s dashboard to determine what was worked on
- The reporting features were not quick and designed for the type of work we did
- The task system allowed for templates and sub-tasks but I quickly discovered when working with this many clients I really didn’t like seeing completed work fall off my radar and disappear.
- The solution was very expensive, for 50+ projects (clients in our world) the cost came in to over $200+ per month
With all this being said I decided to explore other solutions and found myself trying out Trello. I really liked how the Trello system worked.
After building out an in-depth ‘plan’ for tackling SEO for our clients using Trello I had the owner almost convinced to make the switch.
- The major problem was Trello really lacked a good reporting system (no PDF exports)
- From an overhead view of all the client ‘boards’ you had no way of knowing the progress being made with each client. This was really important for me as I had no idea how far certain clients were in terms of the tasks that had been completed without really digging into their boards.
- I also realized that for what Trello was, the way it was being used was not really specifically designed for the needs of an agency like ours
Because of this I couldn’t convince the owner to switch to Trello but I decided to continue using it for my own tracking of clients tasks.
The problem was being called into meetings and being asked about what work was going on for ‘such and such client’ I found myself in arguments over using Teamwork vs. Trello.
Struggling To Build a Step By Step Plan
Another huge problem in the digital marketing industry is there is no real ‘specific way’ to do some of these tasks.
You could ask 10 different ‘Adwords Experts’ how they setup campaigns and It’s likely you will get different answers from all of them about all the different strategies they are utilizing.
This was an ongoing battle for us over our approach to Local SEO, which is exactly why I created a ‘plan’ within Trello for us to follow with all of our clients.
I found another big pain point in digital marketing to be that we were constantly trying to create ‘templates’ or ‘plans’ for how we were going to approach something and often times we were simply taking our absolute best guess at what we should be doing to get our clients results.
Training New & Existing Employees
When working on these tasks I also realized maybe 1 other person at the company knew how to actually do them without being taught 1 on 1. This was another big issue I found myself in with SEO, instead of spending more time working on clients tasks I’d be training other employees how to do things that they didn’t know anything about.
I later went on to create a 1 hour+ training course designed for new and existing employees which we ended up hosting over on a Thinkific school. The course turned out pretty good but didn’t really dive into some of the specifics that we had in our ‘SEO plan’.
This was an area I knew could be improved upon. One of the girls who had been hired after me had prior agency experience and also had a college degree with a marketing background. Despite this she really didn’t know all that much about SEO or Adwords beyond some of the very basics.
This is where I saw a need for a better way to incorporate task management and training at the same time.
Onboarding & Finding Client Passwords
Another big issue I remember we had was the onboarding process for new clients. We used a word document with a ton of questions on it. Typically the account manager would go through a ‘kickoff call’ that involved manually filling in all the questions by asking the client over a phone call.
I’d later go on to look for these documents for older clients and they were nowhere to be found, I also constantly found myself searching for passwords and information from clients that I simply couldn’t find in Teamwork or in a mess of random Google Drive documents.
Going Down My Own Path
In August 2016 I parted ways with the agency and decided to start working with my own clients, but I also realized there was still a major issue if I was going to tackle this the right way and stay organized.
Remember Shane?
Well I thought a lot about what he said way back in 2013 in that interview. I realized there was a big pain point when it came to task management and onboarding for SEO agencies.
I had been successfully launching SEO courses and doing webinars with my partner Paul James since October so I decided why not run the idea of building a solution by him.
The Idea Behind Building Evolutly
Paul had previously launched software tools and had an audience that was very much interested in the local marketing space so I immediately started mocking up a plan to implement this software with his development team.
This is how Evolutly got started. I simply took my own experiences of dealing with pains I faced working with big project management solutions and created my own solution from the ground up.
Ultimately we targeted two specific areas that we knew were a problem – Task management and onboarding.
Here is how I solved the issues I faced:
- Onboarding: Implementing forms allowed us to create embedded forms we could use for asking clients any questions we wanted. Once a client filled out the form the information would be safely stored in their client area.
- Reporting: I added the ability to export entire campaigns into a PDF document using a company branded logo
- Status of client campaigns: I added the ability to quickly get a solid idea of how far a long a campaign is for the client based on what tasks were completed usage a percentage meter
- Video implementation for training: I added the ability to link training videos within each task being worked on after realizing training was a big part of this industry.
I additionally focused on lots of other features such as:
- A unique point and priority system for tasks
- Allowing unlimited usage for clients and employees
- Getting exclusive vendor discounts with various SEO outsource providers
- A comprehensive video course showing brand new consultants how to get started with their SEO business
Programming & Development For Evolutly
Paul had a known programmer he had used for some of his past projects and this made it fairly easy to find someone with tangible results we could work with. When starting out on your own, it isn’t all that difficult to head over to a platform such as UpWork and simply post a job seeking a developer
Our total development costs came in at around $2k and we ended up spending maybe another $300-400 on some bug fixes with a couple other developers after our initial launch.
Selling Evolutly
For our initial launch plan we decided to run a webinar to our existing audiences. This works well because you can very quickly bring a prospect through an A-Z journey on an hour webinar by introducing the pain and then offering a solution all within a single hour.
We decided to launch with a price point of $197/year, this would allow us to bring in some residual income each and every year from people who continued to use the software.
Our final sales numbers on the initial launch were over 60 sales which resulted in $12,000+ in total sales. We did this in June/July of 2017, we were then able to get feedback from our users and continue fixing small bugs we discovered over the past year.
We decided to put a new angle on the software for a 2nd launch in 2018, this time putting a much bigger focus on selling a training up front and using Evolutly as more of a ‘backend’ tool to go alongside with what we were teaching.
Our new plan allowed us to price the offer even higher at $297 initially and then $30/year to continue using Evolutly, overall a much better long term offer.
The sales presentation we did had a much higher focus on scaling your digital marketing business. The idea was to take yourself out of the picture so you could hire help and spend less time on small simple tasks and instead hire other people to do them for you so scaling your business was easier.
This angle converted much better because we catered to people who were also starting from scratch and also to people who had existing clients and agencies where they may have felt ‘stuck’ trying to do everything on their own.
Our new offer converted with 73 total sales, bringing us in over $21,000!
How To Execute On This
Now you might be wondering, well.. “How do I go out and execute on all of this myself?!”
I’m not going to sit here and tell you it was a simple overnight task, because it wasn’t. It took me about 6 months to work with the developer to get everything working the way I wanted, then coming up with a launch plan, working out bugs and fixing issues.
There are a lot of moving pieces in this big puzzle!
Maybe you’ve thought about having your own software built but you simply never went out and took action on it.
Given the success I’ve had selling our software and the huge return on our investment I decided to put together a program where I cover in-depth everything I did to develop Evolutly from A-Z, a real step by step system if you will.
It’s actually a 6 week training program I call SaaS Evolution.
Now since you’ve read this far (thank you) I wanted to give you the opportunity to pickup my program teaching you EVERYTHING I did to get Evolutly off the ground and turn my $2k investment into $20k+.
Normally I’ve sold this program for as much as $997, but I’ve decided to include a discount code where you can pickup the program for just $197 with this coupon code here.
Curious About Trying Evolutly?
I’d be happy to jump on a 1 on 1 call with you to do a live demo. Schedule with me here.
If your interested in the software itself, you can checkout the sales page here and if you’d like to learn how to get access at a discounted price, simply contact me and I’ll help you out.
You can also leave a comment with any thoughts or suggestions you have on the challenges you currently face with project management.
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