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Andrew Warner: Hey there Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses for an audience of entrepreneurs who are just listening in and picking up some good ideas for their own companies. John Doherty is someone who I interviewed a while back and he and I have stayed in touch because I’ve been impressed with what he did with Google.
Credo, he created what to me was a marketplace of agencies. If you need to hire an agency to do your SEO work, you can either ask all your friends or you can go to Credo and they’ll help you find the right one. Or if you need to find, um, I don’t know, someone to do your digital ad buying, you can look around, ask your friends, or you can go to them and you know, they’re going to have a vetted agency for you and they’re going to do a little bit of a, of a matchmaking service.
That’s what Credo was. I watched the thing grow. I did an interview about how it launched. And, uh, today’s here to talk about how he sold it. And how he has now been running this new business, editor Ninja, which is a service that will basically give you editors on demand. If you’re writing content, you turn your content over to them and make them part of your workflow and they make sure that thing looks good.
I’ve I’ve used them. I’ve been a customer. All right. And we can talk about this interview. Thanks to my sponsor, Gusto. If you are like me, if you are like John, if you need somebody to, um, if you need a service that will handle your payroll and benefits, right. Go check out gusto. com slash mixergy. But first, John, congratulations on the sale.
John,
John Doherty: Thank you. Yes. Yes. It was, uh, it’s quite the ride. I’m, I’m happy to be back. Thanks for having me back. Um, I always, always appreciate it.
Andrew Warner: I saw you here in Austin. I didn’t realize that you had sold the business at the time. You were kind of like on an almost sold, almost not. Was there ever a moment where you looked and you said, Alright, I did it. I crossed the finish line. Or was it always a slow exit from this thing that you had created?
John Doherty: Yeah. So I think when I saw you in Austin, we hadn’t inked the deal yet. So I was like, not. I may have mentioned it to you, I’m not, I don’t remember. But, um, we were like super close to it. I think it closed a few weeks later. Um, that moment of like got it across the line happened, uh, I mean like the, so the day after we closed the deal in like into September, 2022, um, which like ironically enough was seven years to the day of me getting laid off from Zillow.
Um, so like. Uh, in the Bible, it’s a, it’s a number of completion. And so it was just like ironic and hilarious to me that it was seven years to the day. Um, but we closed it at like 3 PM on a Wednesday and I had an 8 AM flight to Mexico city the next day with my wife. Um, and that was going to a conference in Cabo and like we landed in, we inked the deal, uh, next day, my wife and I landed in Mexico city and I looked at my bank account, the money had hit and like, dude, that whole next like four or five days.
I was just like, Out of my body, like just did not feel like me, just a huge, like just boulder lifted off my shoulders, you know? Um, and so, yeah, I just kind of like, I kind of floated through life for the next couple of months to be honest with you. Um, but like felt just out of my body and my wife looked at me at one point, I think it was like that Saturday.
And was like, this is the most relaxed I’ve ever seen you since we’ve been together. And it had been almost 10 years at that point. So I was like, okay, I made the right choice. So that definitely happened.
Oh, I lost audio.
Andrew Warner: How much did you see in your bank account?
John Doherty: Uh, I can’t talk about that. Unfortunately. I can’t
Andrew Warner: More than a million dollars?
John Doherty: Not more than a million dollars. No, no, but it was, it was enough for us to feel comfortable for a while with me getting a new thing off the ground.
Andrew Warner: And so the thing that I wondered was why a new thing, why not just stay in this business? This business was growing. It was produced. Was it growing actually? I assumed it was.
John Doherty: It wasn’t actually, it, it, it had tapped out. Um, you know, I started the business. I first started it credo in 2013, uh, as a side project, uh, when I was working for an agency in New York city is before I went in house and, um, yeah. And so. Basically just short answer is over the 10 years that I ran it, nine and a half years, I ran it, the economics changed.
Um, so many people came up, Alex Hormozy wrote his book about, you know, offers and all these people came up offering, you know, an insane number of leads and X number of days, like sort of thing. Uh, the pandemic happens, marketing got a lot more expensive. Like it just, the economics of the business really changed.
And I spent a ton of time, ton of money. I mean, it’s crazy. Multiple six figures, Facebook ads and Google ads and all of that, just trying to get it to grow. And it just wouldn’t, it just wouldn’t grow. Um, or at least wouldn’t grow. Like there were wiggles here and there. Um, but to be honest with you, like I know how I could have made it grow, but I was just so burnt out on it.
I had been working on it for so long and I was so burnt out on it. And I’m a growth and marketing guy. And when you’re doing all the things and it’s not working, it just kind of kills your soul a little bit. Um, and so I was like, I got to, I got to move on, I got to do the next thing. Um, and so that’s, that’s why, and I had an interested buyer, um, and so I went for it.
Andrew Warner: Funny that it started and ended with a vacation. What happened from what I remember from our first interview was you had just come back from a vacation in Europe and you went to work. Your wife goes, how was your first day? And you said,
John Doherty: I got laid off. Yes, that happened. I had just gone on a two and a half week European vacation, was unplugged. And I got back and I, um, I was reporting to a vice president and they were like, Hey, let’s catch up this afternoon about how things have been since you, you know, since you were gone and I was like, okay, cool.
And so they sent me the calendar invite. And when I went to look at it, we were on like the third floor, I think, and it was on the seventh floor, which is where all the admin stuff was. And I went up, uh, I was like, yeah, it’s. Weird, but whatever. Um, and so I went up and I sat down on the couch outside the room and this, uh, this blonde woman sits down next to me and I introduced myself and she goes, yeah, I’m the new head of HR and I knew there was a new head of HR coming on.
And I was like, Oh, great. Great to meet you. Look forward to working with you. And then, you know, my, my boss came up and walked into the room and I walked in and the HR person walked in with us
Andrew Warner: you had credo,
John Doherty: on here. Yeah, that happened. Uh, so that was a Monday and the next day I woke up and went to work for myself.
Andrew Warner: or as it was called at the time, I think hired gun,
John Doherty: Hire a gun. Yep.
Andrew Warner: you had it, uh, before, was it a side hustle? What was it?
John Doherty: Yeah. It was a side hustle. People were asking me like, Hey, what’s going on with this? I was like, I’m busy. I’m newly married. I’ve got a busy job. You know, all of that. Um, and yeah, so like the month before, if I remember correctly, this was eight years ago, nine, almost nine years ago, uh, the month I got laid off, it did like 85 in revenue, like nothing basically.
And the next month, October 2015, it did like 2, 500, I think something like that and went up to like 5, 000 by a month by December. So,
Andrew Warner: What was it back then before you got laid off?
John Doherty: It was, uh, I mean, it was high touch, like also like matchmaking. So it’s kind of, we kind of went back to that, that same model, just cause I saw at that time, especially the challenge was, uh, people just, there were so many SEO agencies and PPC agencies and that sort of thing.
There were no real leaders. Um, and basically people needed help vetting out and like hiring the right agency for them. So I always had this idea of like. You know, hire the best B2B SaaS agency, the best like, uh, e commerce, Facebook ads agency, like that sort of thing. Um, and we did it in just like a high touch way.
Eventually our technology got, you know, we, we had a whole like matching algorithm and matching score for projects. Once you, once we put into the system, um, but early days, it was just like, I would take calls when I could, um, and would, and would vet people out and would match them up and basically got a commission on the backend once the agency closed.
Andrew Warner: So agencies would say, we need people, we need new clients. You’d vet them, make sure that they knew their thing. Ask us, ask the kinds of questions that an experienced client might ask. Then clients come to the site because they’ve seen your search engine optimization work. You were big on SEO or they just know you because they know you.
A lot of us know you from social media. Got it. And this is what the thing was. And then you go online after you get laid off and you say. You don’t, I don’t think you admitted that you’d been fired, but you said, I’m, I’m looking to help people find agencies or something like that. Right?
John Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. I said, I think what I said was I’m no longer with Zillow. Um, I didn’t say I got laid off. I started talking about that later, but like, I’m no longer with Zillow, uh, figuring out what’s next, but picking up some SEO consulting work and, uh, building hire gun. Let me know if you’re interested in working together.
And Andrew, it was, it was insane. Like I tweeted that out like 10 AM on Tuesday. I had like, I don’t know, 15, 16, 000 followers on Twitter at that point. And. Uh, and it was still called Twitter at that point, I guess. Um, but I, by Thursday I had to stop taking phone calls. Because I was just like, my DMS were inundated.
Like I signed my first client, like SEO consulting client, like two weeks later, it was a five figure SEO audit for the largest used car website in India. Um, and just started like doing a bunch of SEO consulting. I did that for the next few years just to kind of like fun stuff. Um, and then would basically build up a, like a bank, literally a bank of money.
Stop consulting for a few months, just work on hire gun, which became Credo in January of the next year. And then I’d pick up some more consulting work, crank on that again. Build up a bank of cash and kind of just like self funded it that way. Um,
Andrew Warner: But what I’m wondering is this was roughly 2016, right? When you were doing this,
John Doherty: 16. Yep.
Andrew Warner: why did you get so many people who were looking to hire agencies at the time?
John Doherty: Um, I mean, there are a lot of businesses growing and I think we had a unique offering in the space as well. Um, where we’d actually like match them up with the right people and take kind of a high touch approach.
Andrew Warner: Did they even know that at the time? Like when you first tweeted
John Doherty: talked about it.
Andrew Warner: No, when you tweeted out, it was more like, um, explore it here. I think I’ve got it in, uh, in front of me announcement. I’m no longer with Zillow and exploring SEO consulting opportunities. Let me know if you want to chat. My, my sense is that you had been talking about SEO.
You done SEO. I, is that what you did it, uh, at, uh, Zillow? I know you’ve done it at other companies. And so. I get that people said, all right, I want to work with this guy who I’d seen talk about SEO and some of them might get to work with you and you take on that consulting work, which would pay more. Some you couldn’t help.
And you’d refer to people who are in your directory. That’s the model, right?
John Doherty: at the very start. Absolutely. Yep. Yep. That’s what would happen. People would contact me and if I couldn’t take ’em on, if it wasn’t a good fit for me or they couldn’t afford me or something like that, then I’d be like, can I refer you to other people? I have this service. And they’d be like, yeah, sounds good.
And I’d do that. And dude, I was just slinging it via email, like cold email. I was manually like writing these introductory emails. I mean, I wrote hundreds of them. And that eventually became like what we put into our like process and our templates in order to like scale intros as we grew. But, um. Yeah, that’s kind of how it worked at the start.
Andrew Warner: I guess one of the things that I’m realizing is that I think this was a period when SEO was still hot. It’s not so hot now, but there’s always a thing that is hot. And if someone is known for doing it, instead of just offering consulting, the takeaway from your story is say I’m available. And then if you can’t service them, move them into this network that you’ve pre vetted in and make referrals and get commissions,
John Doherty: Exactly.
Andrew Warner: the thing that sucks about that, as I think about it.
Just talk about it is it’s like a one time sale. You don’t get ongoing revenue unless you make a deal with them where you keep ongoing revenue from the client. Right.
John Doherty: Yeah. Well, there, there are a bunch of different ways to do it. We explored them all. Um, we, our initial business model was, we got 10 percent of a closed client for the first three months, which was dumb because I built in like a hundred percent churn every three months of revenue. Really dumb. Uh, then we went to a, like, it was kind of a more automated Legion, uh, System, um, where people could subscribe.
It was like a hundred to 400 bucks a month, something like that. Um, and that really like grew the, the supply side, the network side. It wasn’t great for the, the person looking to buy. We ran an escrow service for a while, which actually, like, we launched that in fall of 2019. Um, and we went from nothing to about $125,000 a month held in escrow for agencies in about five months.
Um, and I mean, just like mistakes made, right Andrew? If the pandemic hadn’t happened, actually, even with the pandemic happening, when the pandemic happened, we changed our model to just a straight, like, uh, vetted agencies pay us X dollars per month. It ended up being like 1700 to 5, 000 a month. Plus we got a commission on the backend, like a one time commission.
Half of the first month was what the model was. Um, but if we had kept, if we had just like written it out for like two, three months, like through the start of the pandemic, Andrew, I would have had a multimillion dollar a year business on my hands.
Andrew Warner: Right. So before the pandemic agencies were paying you a monthly fee to be listed in the network, and they were paying you a commission every time you match them up.
John Doherty: that’s, that’s what it moved to at the end. We had like some version of that as well, like before the pandemic. Um, but like once the pandemic hit, that’s what we moved to just cause it stabilized revenue. Right. We went from like, kind of not knowing what we’d make every month to, um, Knowing exactly like it was an MRR sort of thing.
So like, basically we moved from being like a escrow service, um, that would also like match them up with agencies. Agencies would close work through our, our portal through our, our platform, um, to an agency model.
Andrew Warner: Where, well, an agency model where you’re referring out, right? You’re not. Mm
John Doherty: Yeah. Well, so agencies were the ones paying us. They were paying us for leads. Certain number of leads are like qualified pipelines. What we called it. Cause we’d caught, we’d basically had a calculation that we’d make off of what the lead told us their budget was, their expectation was, and all of that.
And then we’d match up agency. We’d match up agencies and we were basically going against a cap for agencies.
Andrew Warner: I guess the thing that I. Is that even that model doesn’t get really big unless you get the monthly fee from the agencies and then you have to keep sending them a lot of business. Do you think it would have made sense if you instead said, I’m just going to be an SEO agency. I’ll create my agency instead of referring business out and making money.
Quickly, I’ll just slowly build my team out.
John Doherty: Yeah, you know, I’m a stubborn man, to be honest. And I just, I just didn’t want to build an SEO agency. I was honestly really tired of SEO at that time. I wanted to build my own thing. And I, I mean, it was my first business, right? Like after going out on my own and I, uh, I didn’t know how to build an organization.
I didn’t know how to like hire people that were better than me or could do these things. And like, I’ve just found that. Um, like it’s hard for any business to scale when the person starting it is a subject matter expert in that specific area. Like editor Ninja now is as big in monthly revenue as credo ever was.
Um, and, but I’m not an editor. I’m a writer, I’m a marketer, but I’m not an editor. So I’ve been forced to build out our delivery side with like with editors, with like professional editors, like running the whole system, the delivery, all of that. So I can focus on business marketing and sales cause that’s my jam.
But like. I could have built an SEO agency. I probably could have done it pretty easily, but I would have become quickly overwhelmed because I didn’t know how to hire good people and how to hire good SEO is to take stuff over. And it would have been really hard for me at that time to give over any control.
So that’s why I didn’t do it. Um, now with editor ninja, we do some SEO stuff, some like SEO formatting and that sort of stuff. We update content for SEO. We’ll like review it for like keyword optimization, you know, on stuff that agencies are writing for their clients. But, um, but we’re like, But I’m very firm on like, we are not an SEO agency.
We’re not going to do SEO strategy. We’re not going to do technical audits like that sort of stuff.
Andrew Warner: You know, what I’m seeing is on the task side or hiring side, there are lots of examples of businesses that work. So you’ve got a growth assistant, Jesse Poojie’s thing, where he was, he had an online marketing agency and he realized there are a bunch of tasks that go along with that, pulling data, putting things into a convert kit or whatever it is that you’re doing.
And so he created a, a. A service essentially where you get to hire their people and they’ll do the growth assistant work for you. There is,
John Doherty: We’re like a PEO, right? Like partial employee, partial employment organization, I
Andrew Warner: what those are
John Doherty: called. Obviously it’s overseas. It’s called a PEO. Yep.
Andrew Warner: Yeah. So there are a bunch of those for different topics, right? There’s the person who will do just your email. I interviewed, uh, Yaro Staric, who’s got that. So in that sense, that does work. What I guess I haven’t seen is. The model that to me would be more interesting, which is a marketplace, come to the website, find the person you’re looking for, get ratings on them and then move on.
Kind of like Yelp is for restaurants, but for all this other work. And do you think that maybe that just doesn’t work?
John Doherty: Uh, it does work. The thing is you’re up against Upwork and, um, you know, Fiverr and like all these big ones that have.
Andrew Warner: Oh, because they also have agencies. I think of them as individuals. Got it. And so you’re still up against those. So is growth assistant, right? If you’re thinking about, I need to hire somebody to do some Some help to just help out my growth people. Upwork has all that, but they don’t have the vetted people.
The, I guess what they have
John Doherty: Vetted the matchmaking, the high touch. I think, I think they had that on like the higher end, but yeah, I mean, Upwork is just like, find anyone and any type of entity to do anything versus like growth assistance, like we help you hire assistance from the Phillip. We hire assistants for you from the Philippines who are vetted out and have the experience to do this thing for you.
And they’re like, you’re, you’re hiring an employee as opposed to like getting a task done. So that would be the challenge. Like you just have to go so niche. To get like something like this off the ground. Um, and then there’s just marketplaces are, it’s fricking hard, man. They’re so hard. Um, like. So, yeah.
And like, I don’t consider growth assistant, uh, a marketplace at all. Like they’re, they’re definitely a placement service, you know, just like a support bird or someone like a shepherd, I guess they’re called, but, um, something like that. And we’re, we’re somewhat similar. We’re more of like the design pickle super side, uh, video, video, Husky model at editor Ninja where that
Andrew Warner: That part. I see, I don’t see a lot of marketplaces for services that do, that do well, or even for agencies that do well, which is kind of disappointing because I don’t I like that model better. When I look at hip camp, for example, it’s Airbnb for campgrounds. I love the model. Every time she improves it, she improves it for all of us.
The more people she gets on the platform for either people who have land where you can throw up your tent or people like me who just want to throw up a tent somewhere. It becomes more valuable for everybody. Um, and I, I kind of thought of credo that way. All right. So that was. Not what I imagined it.
Then you found the model that worked charging monthly. Then the pandemic hit. I know in the beginning of the pandemic, everything was chaos, but eventually we all settled on everything online all the time. And wouldn’t that have helped credo
John Doherty: It did for a while, for a couple of years. Um, like we went, I mean, we were probably doing, I don’t know, 60, 80, like vetted projects a month coming through our systems, getting introduced to agencies, so we were making a few hundred and we introduced each of them to three to four, so we were making a few hundred like qualified intros a month.
Um, and these were all projects like minimum, I think value that we had in there was like 18, 000 a year, like average contract value. Um, so like, and some much bigger than that. Um, and so like, so say we were doing 80 a month and then like March. Like, I mean, it just fell off a cliff right of 2020 and then the next month was about the same and then we saw a little bit of an uptick and it just blew up like it over doubled basically early volume over doubled in about six months time.
Andrew Warner: But I guess I thought you said earlier that. The pandemic knocked your legs out from under you that if not for the pandemic, you would have been doing millions. What happened
John Doherty: Well, so, so. Remember, so we were, we were, we had basically moved to an escrow to being an escrow service. So agencies would, or clients would hire agencies through our system, including contracts, um, proposals, all sorts of stuff. We had a whole like proposal builder in there. Um, and Andrew, the metrics were amazing.
Like the average agency closes about 15 percent of, so this is actually a business someone should build just to be honest with you. Um, like they, they, someone should do it now. Uh, yeah. The average agency would close about 15 percent of the leads that went to them. Um, and, and it should be higher, but digital agencies are notoriously bad at sales.
Uh, through our system, they’re closing 35 to 40 percent of the projects that we sent, that we sent their way. Um, and then the client then, so they would close it. The client would then fund it. So say it was a 5, 000 a month SEO and content project. The client would then fund it in Credo. The agency would deliver the work.
So they were guaranteed to get paid as long as they delivered. Right. And we required them to, um, uh, We required them to, uh, to, to report to the clients by the fifth day of the next month was just kind of the line in the sand that we set. Um, and then they’d get paid and we would take our cut from that.
So we weren’t charging the clients anything more. And the agencies were basically saying, yeah, we’ll pay you, you know, whatever percent, I think it was like 15 percent of the total contract value for this. Cause they were basically guaranteed to get paid. So it was solving that like agencies do have new accounts receivable and all that sort of stuff.
Um, And it was working really well. Like I said, we went from nothing to about 125, 000 a month in February of 2020, uh, held an escrow through our system. So we were getting 15 percent of that. It was very quickly catching up to like our old model. And then the pandemic hit, we lost 30 percent of our revenue.
Um, and cause, cause, uh, clients fired their agencies or paused with their agencies. And to be frank with you, Andrew, I got scared. And I was like, this isn’t going to work. I’m not going to go back and get a job. I don’t know what the F is going on with the world right now, but I know I can sell like basically retainers, like as an agency model.
Um, and so we just lopped our product in half, doubled our prices and went and went from there, had agencies who were currently billing through our system, had them take over the billing, got them to buy out the project from us, um, which I still can’t believe we pulled that off, but we did, you know, added 40, 50, 60 grand to our like bank account in like a month’s time, which is awesome.
Um, and it had a super fair deal for them as well. Um, And then, yeah, we just went to the straight agency model, uh, did that. That was probably April ish of 2020. And by may, June, everything was ticking back up. So if we had held on for about two more months, the escrow service just would have taken off for the next few years.
Like we would have been, you know, holding millions, multiple millions a month in escrow for agencies and getting 15, you know, probably would have bumped it up to like 20, 22, 25%, but
Andrew Warner: And the way
John Doherty: let’s
Andrew Warner: the way the escrow service worked is client would pay you, you hold the money. As soon as the service is done, the money goes to this to the agency, and you
John Doherty: that’s right. The. The client would fund it in our systems. Exactly. Yeah. They weren’t, they weren’t paying us. And we had to be very clear about that to them. Like, you’re not paying us this money. Like this is going into an escrow, like held for this project to this agency. As long as they do the work and report to you, then they’re going to get paid.
Right. And we had some like arbitration and like that sort of stuff. Honestly, that part of the business sucked because, you know, a lot of these agencies and like, That we’re matching up with these clients. They were friends of mine and it sucks to tell your friends that they’re not doing a good job or to have people complaining about your friends, not doing as good of a job as they expected.
So I didn’t love that. Um, but it just came with the territory.
Andrew Warner: And the part that you think somebody else should do is just create that part of the business,
John Doherty: escrow payment service for between clients and, you know, freelancers or agencies.
Andrew Warner: because clients. Don’t want to pay unless the service is done and agencies don’t want to wait. And, and maybe they get paid, maybe they don’t do this work. And then maybe they end up getting stiffed for whatever reason. So having that third party in between helps a lot. I totally get that. I could see that working for sure.
Just escrow service for. For agencies. All right.
John Doherty: service for digital service providers, you know, freelancers, it could be designers, it could be marketers, it could be developers, whatever, you know, it’s just like, do you know, codable codable to IO? It’s just WordPress developers. So I use them fairly often actually for development needs for editor ninja.
Cause we have our own tech built on top of WordPress. Um, they hold the money in escrow. So it’s like, you say, this is what I need. People like scope it and bid it. And then you say, yes, I’m hiring this developer. I mean, I just finalized a project today. Just like pay the developer. They say, all right, cool.
It’s going to be 725. You fund it. So it’s in escrow. The developer does the work. You say, yes, it is done. I’m happy, et cetera. And then the payment gets released to them and Codable takes their cut.
Andrew Warner: Ooh, I like that.
John Doherty: so basically we, we built that for hiring marketing agencies.
Andrew Warner: I see. All right. And I could see that then being useful for other, for other work, by the way, you said you got scared. I do remember the beginning of the pandemic that I was trying to figure out what was going on. What does it mean for me? Is everything gone? Uh, do we just bunker down here in the middle of San Francisco, which is where we were at the time.
John Doherty: Yeah.
Andrew Warner: And I remember watching people who were not just. Bold but a little too brazen and those are the people who are right and that’s the big thing that I take away that it’s really hard to say things suck but we are going to still double down and we’re still going to take we’re going to grow our business here it almost feels like you’re being opportunistic when people are suffering you’re trying to sell more but somewhere in my phone I also remember taking photos of things like Apple that somehow had an ad out saying you can’t touch anything, then you might as well use Apple pay.
And they were taking advantage of it. And maybe the language that I’m even using is the wrong language for me to have in my head for the next crisis, which is maybe it’s not taking advantage of it. Maybe it’s just making the best of a tough situation and not, not being a little bitch about it, which is what I think I was in the beginning until I got my legs, um, strongly under
John Doherty: and I think we all were in like this kind of thing happens, you know, people did it, people got super scared in the financial crisis of 2008 and all that. Right. Like we see this stuff, history repeats itself. Um, I, I learned a big lesson from this for sure. Like, um, when, so I doubled, uh, exited credo in September into September of 2022 to double down on editor Ninja, which was going and was working.
Um, And then in November chat, GPT launches. And we’re like, I’m like, what does this mean? Right. I was even, I was at a conference, you know, mastermind talks, MMT, Jason Gaynard. So I’m in MMT. I joined MMT right after I, I exited. And, uh, I was in Costa Rica January of last year, uh, for an MMT retreat. And everyone I told, so this is like two months after chat, TPT launched.
And everyone I told what we do, they were literally the first question from like 80 plus people was what does AI mean for that? And I was like, I don’t know. Like Monday, I was like, I don’t know. And by the end of the week, I talked with Nathan Barry and talk to some other smart people who were there as well.
They have them from convert kit. And by the end of the week, I was like, all right, I had a hypothesis of like, we’re going to see a ton of like data. Bad content for six months, people are going to start figuring it out. Then people are going to operationalize it and we’re going to start seeing services launched around AI content.
And then eventually Google is going to come in and whack it and whack the low quality stuff, which happened last week. Um, and, but we’re, but. Basically I put a line in the sand of like AI content is going to need human editing and a human touch before it’s ready to publish. And it’s going to rank longterm.
It’s going to convert and do all of that. So I launched, like I’ve always been a, like, like a late early adopter. So if you know, crossing the chasm, it’s the book crossing the chasm. It’s like right before something crossed the chasm to the mainstream. I’ve always been right there, right before it crosses the chasm before I’ll adopt something with this.
I was like. We’re doubling down on it. We’re going to figure out what it means to edit it. And we did. And so like, I was bold. It was like two months later, we’re the first or second editing service on the internet to say, we work with AI content. Like I launched that in mid January of 2023. So, you know, I was like, I see an opportunity.
Yes. There are constant markers who are terrified for their jobs. Freelance writers are terrified for their jobs, but I think this is the future. And I think we can do it in a way that is also sensitive to those people and their like potential plight.
Andrew Warner: Yeah, I remember seeing it. I think you might have tweeted out, you said something like, we lost business to ai and then we became the agency for AI writers to make their writing more human. Alright, tell you what, let’s, let’s do an ad for Gusto here, and then we’re gonna go into where the idea for Editor Ninja came from.
How you grew it, where it is today. Gusto, I mentioned it. You said you use it. Tell, tell me
John Doherty: I do, we use it to pay all of our editors who are contractors. So we pay them every two weeks and I run payroll through there. Also use them for payroll for credo. Um, yeah, I mean, they’re, they’re a great tool. I love that. They’ve added on, uh, you know, international contractors as well, you know, kind of like a deal competitor.
So used to not be able to do that. I don’t think, and now I can pay my, you know, I, we have one editor in Canada. I had one in Romania for a while. I can pay them all through there in one platform. Super easy to use. Support is awesome.
Andrew Warner: You know what? That’s interesting. I’ve got editors in, uh, in the Philippines. I wonder if I could use them for that.
John Doherty: I don’t know.
Andrew Warner: I’m
John Doherty: I know they have a list of list of countries they use, but possibly.
Andrew Warner: The thing that I love about them is it’s just so clean. It’s so easy. It’s like, if you had created it yourself, someone within the startup community who was really into user experience had created it, they would have created Gusto. And I don’t know how they resist. I know that they do other things. They do employee benefits.
They do time and attendance, hiring, onboarding. They do all that stuff. I’m like this one competitor of theirs that I used to use, which just crowded everything and you couldn’t find what you needed. I don’t know how they keep it clean. And so it is easy to use, easy to move on from. And the same thing from, for, for the team, they just use it.
They get what they need and they move on. I’m going to see if we can, if we can switch the Philippines people into them. Anyway, if you’re out there using, using anyone else, Please go check it out. Even if you hate me and you don’t want me to get credit by using my URL. And I think you should, cause you’re going to get free time with it.
Go find a way to try it. You’re going to love Gusto. I, and many of the people who I I’ve interviewed have used them. Here’s a URL. If you want to try them for free, it’s gusto. com slash Mixergy. Gusto. com slash Mixergy. All right. Where did the idea for Editor Ninja come from?
John Doherty: So the idea for editor Ninja came from, I actually launched it in May or June of 2020. So I saw all these content marketers, content writers, editors getting laid off. And I was like, I’m pretty good at matching up service providers and people looking to hire a service provider. So, um, I just, I started investigating it.
You know, I’ve, I’ve known Russ from design pickle for a long time and kind of was interested in that like unlimited model. Um, but was like, I’m just going to put a site up. And see if people will hire editors. Um, and so it was, but then I needed to, you know, was working to stabilize Credo and working on that and was hiring a team cause we were growing and all that.
And so it was kind of a side project for a while. And then I got to the end of 2021, right? So fast forward, 18 months ish, got to the end of 2021 and you still had the idea for, for, uh, the design pickle of content editing, the like unlimited subscription model, and, uh, I was burning out. You know, we’ve talked about that already.
I was burning out on Credo and I was like, I need, I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a builder. I was like, I need something. I need something to revitalize this. And I was like, I wonder what it was like November of 21. And I was like, I wonder what Eder Ninja has done this year. Cause we had had some projects come through and such, and it had done like a thousand dollars in revenue.
And I worked on it like seven hours all year. And I’m like, that’s interesting. I just finished 75 hard, um, which is like a mental toughness, you know, physical, uh, challenge. And so I was like, um, kind of geared up and like ready to go and ready to work on some things. And so basically long story short, over the next six weeks, I kind of rebuilt the, the original credo product, uh, using WordPress paid memberships, pro gravity forms, gravity view.
It was like, I know how to build this system. Uh, so I started like messing around with it already had the domain. And, uh, formed the business mid December of that year. Um, I remember sitting in the living room of our cabin in the mountains and formed the business and got the EIN. And we launched January 7th of 2022 and had two customers lined up.
So I had a thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue. By the end of that first day.
Andrew Warner: How did you
John Doherty: and it was just a side project, uh, SEO content connections in the industry. I mean, basically the way I built credo is how I got the initial traction.
Andrew Warner: Credo was you writing a bunch of content. It was you reaching out to people on Twitter and other social media. And what was it? What else was
John Doherty: Uh, it was also people reaching out, uh, people reaching with credo is people reaching out to me, wanting me to edit, wanting me to not edit. I’m not an editor wanting me to do SEO for them. Um, so editor ninja didn’t have that one. Um, but I know a lot of content agency owners and content marketers and that kind of thing.
And, um, yeah. And so. People just, and I had been talking about it a little bit. You know, I probably put an announcement on Twitter or Facebook or something. I don’t even remember. Um, and just started taking sales calls. and kind of carved out. I think I carved out a day a week to work on it. I was like, I’m going to give it time.
I’m going to give it more time than it merits right now, just to kickstart it. And then as I see more traction, if I see more traction, I’ll put more time to it. And so by the time, basically by summer of 22, when I was like, all right, I’m ready to like, let Credo go. Um, Eder Ninja was doing, I don’t know, high four figures a month, probably mid to high four figures a month.
And it was just fun. And I could feel the energy. And I was like, I need, I want to work on this. Like, and Andrew, like, and this was, this was kind of the burnout talking, I think, but like anytime I was working on credo, I was just like, I was short, I was frustrated. I was angry. Like it was to the point where my team one day, uh, we get on our like weekly call and one of them goes, John.
Are you okay? Cause I was so angry and frustrated and mad. It was like, I hate this freaking business, you know, that kind of thing. And every time I’d go back to work on editor and Ninja, it was just fun and it felt light and I was like, so I just started paying attention to that energy. Um, and it’s, it’s still fun and I still feel light and I love running it and I love building it.
So like it’s very much the right, the right move.
Andrew Warner: do remember the very first versions of editor Ninja. They weren’t what they are now. And now I’m looking at the pricing page and it’s a clear subscription service. You pick the service that you want and you pay per month. I thought it was you send, I thought it was a service where clients pay per per edit project based on how long it was.
No.
John Doherty: We still have that capability. Um, and we’ll often start people on that. If they’re like, not sure they want to see the work, that kind of thing, they can pay for a single document to be edited. Um, and we do have the ability for people to create a free account and just like get documents edited one off. We have a number of like customers that do that couple of documents a month, you know, makes us, you know, Thousand ish, $1,500 a month.
But you know, we’re, we’re like, we’re probably gonna do 40, 42,000 this month in revenue, something like that. Um, so like, it’s a, that’s a small part, like the main one is main services subscription business. But we’ve also, like, over the last year we’ve gone up upstream. So we’ve gotten agencies with more people that are producing more content.
Basically anyone producing under about 50 thou, uh, about, under about 25,000 words a month of content. So 15 ish blog posts. It just doesn’t really make sense for them. Not necessarily from a money perspective, but from a, like, it’s not a huge pain for them, but like agencies that are growing fast, that are creating a lot of AI content, that kind of thing.
They just don’t have the people to edit. And so they can plug us in and we can literally get content back to them. Two business days later, their first like pieces edited. Um,
Andrew Warner: But that was a realization is what I mean. I feel like you at some point realized, you know, why are we doing this one off? It really is challenging to build a business with one off. You can’t predict, you can’t build relationships. And every time someone touches you, they have to think, do I want to pay for this or not?
Right?
John Doherty: Yeah. And pay for it again. Totally.
Andrew Warner: Right. Versus when it’s a subscription, they stop thinking about money and start thinking, I have this service. I now need, and I paid for it. I now need to use it. And I paid for it. I now need to work to get the most out of it. And without that, you don’t have them fully there. And instead you have them constantly evaluating whether they want to interact with you, how
John Doherty: a hundred percent. And the goal was never to build like a one off put in a single request sort of thing. Even our competitors that are not like an unabashed, like subscription, like retainer service, they like, they do one off documents basically as a, A way to get people in and then they have like a high ticket sales, like opt like high ticket retainer on the backend is the way a lot of our competitors work.
We’re just clear about like, we edit marketing content at scale and we’re like focusing on marketing content. Like that is our niche at this point. We do some other stuff as well, but like 95 percent our blog posts, 1200 to 1500 words long, um, is the content that we edit, but it’s very much like it, it just became about 2023 was figuring out who needs this, who has the big pain.
Um, and what will they pay and what makes sense for them? And what do they need from like multiple users? We have our own portal built out, like multiple users and like account controls and that sort of stuff. And we’ve, we just figured that out over the course of 2023 and then like doubled, really doubled down on it a couple months ago.
And like we 4X our average customer size, like average customer monthly payment in about six months time.
Andrew Warner: much
John Doherty: then part of that too, Andrew was like. I was doing high ticket sales or I was doing like phone sales for people for like 500 bucks a month. And I still get those. I still like talk to everyone, but like it only takes marginally more effort and time to close a 5, 000 a month retainer than a 500 a month retainer.
And they stay a lot longer and it’s higher profit for us. So like, and I love selling high ticket stuff. It’s what I did with SEO. And like, I just didn’t enjoy slinging the 400, 500, 700 a month. Like retainers. It just, it’s just so much work. It was gonna take so many customers and so much like operations and people on our end to deliver that.
I was like, we can make a lot more money with the same number of customers with better customers because they’re bigger and they’re more established. And they have the real felt like, Holy crap. We need this need not to like, eh, sounds interesting. I’ll give it a shot for a month
Andrew Warner: one thing though, that you do, that you, that you have going against you when you charge a subscription is it’s a really hard commitment for somebody to make. They’re not looking at you and saying, I’m going to pay this much. It’s I’m going to pay this much forever, even if I don’t use it. And it makes them really second guess it.
How have you found that? That’s sales process.
John Doherty: to wait to a couple of things. One is we’re month to month. Um, so we don’t say like, we, we give people the option to pay up front for a, you know, for a small percentage discount, which some people do. We just had one big, uh, very big company just renew for a full year, just paid up front, which is awesome.
Um, but it’s month to month. You can cancel anytime. You can also scale up and down. So we have like, so our pricing scales based off of the amount of volume that they have. So like, say they have 25, 000 words in one month. Right. Let’s say a thousand dollars a month because they have some AI content mixed in there, but then the next month they’re going to have 75, 000.
So we can scale them up for that month. We always have the editors to handle it. They’re not having to worry about finding editors and training them and all that stuff. We have them, we plug them in and then they’re like, well, that was just like a 50, 000 word, like one shot for one customer and moving forward.
We only need 25, 000. So we scale them back down. Um, so that helps. They like the flexibility. Um, And then the other one is Android. And I learned this trick with Credo where people would be like, we’d get people coming in agencies, wanting leads. Right. And they’re like, I want your 5, 000 a month, like top tier package.
I’m like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, buddy. Like, we don’t know you. You don’t know us. Let’s start you on this. On the bottom, we start everyone on the bottom one is what I told them. Like, let’s start you on the bottom level three, four, however many leads a month. It was, we’ll start getting your leads. We’ll start learning what you want.
You start, you tell us what you want. You learn what you actually want. And then as we have the like capacity to scale you up, then we can send you more leads. Right. Um, so I do the same thing with editor Ninja, where I say like, Hey, you don’t need to commit to a hundred thousand words a month right now.
Okay. Let’s start on the bottom level, send us 10 documents, give us feedback and then integrate us more into your, you know, into your system. So we’ve had a number of customers go from like a thousand a month to like 4, 000, 5, 000, 6, 000, 8, 000 a month just for editing because we proved it. They worked us into their workflow.
And from there, it’s like, they’re like, why would we stop using you? Because like, we don’t have to staff up all these people internally or pay them or whatever. It’s like, we just pay you and you, and we get it done. And that’s what they’re looking for.
Andrew Warner: You know, I’m not nearly as good as you at figuring out where traffic comes from to a site, but I don’t see that there’s a lot of SEO traffic coming to editor ninja. Is that really where you’re getting your customers?
John Doherty: Uh, there, there is a fair bit coming. I mean, couple, couple, five figures a month, uh, of organic traffic, a lot of like top of funnel stuff, but like you search, like we rank really well for some of our main keywords. So we get a fair bit coming from their, um, traffic. Those leads aren’t nearly as good. Um, we get, honestly, we get a lot from LinkedIn.
Um, I publish a lot of content on LinkedIn. Um, and then honestly, it’s a lot of referrals, um, and like relationships and that sort of stuff. Like I know a lot of people in the space and you know, I’ll like, I also very much believe in the, uh, like, I’m still trying to learn, right. And we’re still like adjusting our service and figuring out what exactly do these bigger agencies need and that kind of thing.
So like, I’ll reach out to my friends and be like, Hey, you run an agency of this size. I’m thinking about this. I’m thinking about this positioning. What do you think? Right. And they’ll be like, Oh, well, I would adjust it this way. By the way, we’ve been, we’ve been needing some editing help. We just lost an editor.
Can we hop on a sales call? It’s the old, like ask for advice and get a customer, ask for a customer and get advice or get ghosted. Um, so like, but I’m not even doing it in like a ha ha, I’m going to ask for advice and like get a customer. It’s like genuinely, like I want to build the best service on the internet for marketing agencies that are producing content at scale.
Andrew Warner: Are you big on texting
John Doherty: them, you’re going to. A
Andrew Warner: I’ve texted you in the past. I’ve asked questions like, all right, if we have somebody who’s paying us to edit their podcast, If my team is editing their podcast, what should I use to charge them? And you told me what you were using and I was experimenting with different options and it helped to see what you were doing.
You were quick with that. Is that the kind of thing that you do? Just staying in touch with people and staying on top of responding?
John Doherty: hundred percent. A hundred percent, man. I love, I love people. I love, like, I love good, big, good and smart people. Um, and I’ve like, I’ve always been the friend or the person that like I’m super loyal. And I’ve always been the person that I’ll like, that’ll be like, Oh, I haven’t talked to Andrew in two months.
I’m just going to text him and say hi and see how things are with his new son, you know, with his new child, his son. Right. Um, Yeah. Like, Hey, I’m just going to check in and just be like, Hey man, was just thinking about you. How’s it going? Like, it’s nothing more than that. There’s no, like, you know, nothing behind it and not looking for anything.
I’m just like, I just want to keep up with good people.
Andrew Warner: I suck at that. Like if there’s something that’s going on, I will reach out. But if not, I really suck at that. And I’ve seen some people who I’ve interviewed who are amazing at it. They’ll just randomly ping me. I’m in Austin. Here’s what I’m up to. I got married. We’re in whatever, like little life moments are really, or big life moments, I should say, are really good times for them to contact.
And I’m just not
John Doherty: it’s a superpower. It really is. It’s a superpower to building a business, especially getting a business off the ground. It’s just like, just keeping up with good people because good, because good people also know good people. Right. And so, um, you know, the connections that have come from just like being good to people and keeping up with them and genuinely being interested in their lives and how they’re doing good things
Andrew Warner: then you’re working on something and anyone else’s message can interrupt your flow and you’re okay with that.
John Doherty: Well, I keep my phone on do not disturb almost all the time. Um, and yeah, so like, I, I don’t allow, I have like set times where like, I’ll check my phone and see what’s going on. Um, but I don’t know, it, it works, it works well enough. And like my main thing right now, Andrew, my main role within Eder Ninja is, uh, running the business, branding, marketing, sales.
That is hiring good people when we need them. Uh, but I have a head of operations that handles most of that. So like, I see it as. Building my network and building friendships and relationships is also building the business. And so like I, I put time to it. It
Andrew Warner: So you were at South by Southwest recently. Here in Austin. Is that intentional? Is that you just kind of building relationships with people who might refer you out? Or what’s the thought process there?
John Doherty: yeah, well, so I came in for one conference in specifically. So it was run by the continent scale. ai team. Um, they’re an AI content writer, like focused on SEO. Um, great, great product. Um, I’m not. Paid to say this. They’re a great product. The team is awesome. And they were putting on a conference called content hacker live all around AI future of AI and content marketing bang on perfect audience for us.
So we, so we sponsored it. We sponsored the conference. Um, we actually ended up being like. The headliner sponsor. Um, I got time on stage and met a ton of awesome people. And it was just a, like, I flew in our head of ops, Sophia. And so Sophia and I got to hang out. Sophia was my executive assistant at Credo.
So like worked with her for a number of years now. Um, and yeah, it was, it was a building of relationships thing. So like I met some incredible people, um, we’ll probably get some business out of it. Um, but it was like a, this is where people who are doing the things that we want, people who are doing the things that like, we’re a good fit for, but also like just want to know and just want to like know them and them know us.
And it was a great opportunity just to get there in person. So that’s why we went, like, I find, I mean, it’s relationships and I find that just like meeting up for people for meeting up with people for drinks when they’re in town or something like that, like we’ve gotten so much business off of that, that, you know, just the in person building relationships, people coming to trust you is just the way it.
It’s honestly the best, it’s the most effective and most fun way to grow the business
Andrew Warner: And these posts that I’m looking at your LinkedIn to see what kind of posts you’re doing. Most of them are just social stuff or an interesting observation. And then there’s one like this one. Let’s talk for a minute about quote edit free writers. They don’t exist. And then you go on that and that’s got what, 70, 80 different people who liked it.
50 comments. Does that then lead to customers?
John Doherty: It does. It does because it spreads, right? And that’s the thing about LinkedIn, like for B2B businesses, like one person that you’re connected with will like it. And then their connections will see that they liked it. And you know, if they’re a content marketer that I’m connected with. Um, and then I have a whole process for like seeing who did it, seeing who liked it, seeing who commented.
If I’m not connected to them, I’ll connect to them. I’ll send them a message just saying like, Hey, thanks for, you know, thanks for, you know, commenting on my post, like really appreciate it. You know? Um, and sometimes I’ll ask, like, you know, if they’re like, yeah, sure. No problem. You know, great to be connected to you.
Sometimes they’ll ask about editor and injure, or I’ll be like, I see you’re at an agency, how’s that going? You know, and just like, start that conversation. So gotten, I don’t know, dozen plus like sales calls off of that. Um, but once again, it starts with value first, like I’m not, I’m not like, yes, I am investing time there to, you know, to, to, for people to learn about editor Ninja and to, you know, to, to kind of see that we’re doing what we’re doing.
Just cause at this point, it’s still like an education problem. Um, cause people still think about like, they’re still struggling to find writers. I don’t even think about editors and now with AI, they’re scaling, they don’t need writers and they’re scaling it up. And now they’re like, Oh shoot, I need editors.
But Well, I want to be, I want to be the first one they think about when they, when they think about that, what was that company I heard about? I saw their founder on LinkedIn, right? And then they find us and they reach out.
Andrew Warner: I did think I would
John Doherty: kind of a short term, but it works
Andrew Warner: thought I’d see more AI on your site, but it doesn’t look like you’re playing that part up,
John Doherty: not a ton. We’re like doing a bit more of it. We do, I did. Ship an adjusted homepage a few weeks ago where like AI content editing is like near the top of our homepage is like one of the main things that we do. Um, but yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, man, we’re talking about content and about marketing content.
And so whether it’s with humans or with AI, like, I don’t know, I’ve, I’ve not, I haven’t seen the need yet to just say, to say like just AI content. Um, cause there are a lot of great agencies out there that are working with great freelancers. That need editing as well. And I don’t want them to be like, Oh no, it’s only AI.
Um, or what a lot of people think is that, uh, and I’ve, I’ve never been able, well, they think we’re editing with AI, not humans, editing content created with AI. So I get a lot of questions about like, what was the AI doing or humans doing? I’m like all humans. So that phrasing is, is kind of weird still. So I tried to talk about like content editing for AI generated content or something like that.
I should lean into like real human editing for AI generated content or something like that.
Andrew Warner: Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s something in that. All right. And you’re doing over 40, 000 a month. It seems like.
John Doherty: That’s what we’ll do this month. Yep.
Andrew Warner: Net profits or net is what 50 percent
John Doherty: After, after call after cogs, after paying editors and people, the whole delivery sides, about 70%.
Andrew Warner: Wow. And like I said, I’ve used you guys several times. I love that you just use the tools I already use, which is a Google doc. Everything’s commented, easy to see good feedback. Um, and there was a time when you were doing SEO feedback too. You don’t do that anymore, right?
John Doherty: We still do that.
Andrew Warner: You still, so it’s like, as an add on, I like that you would say, here’s what you need to do in order to make this SEO friendly.
And I like that because I can’t stand SEO. I know that it works. It’s just not my thing. But if you just say, Andrew, write this stuff and it’ll make it more friendly to search engines and you’ll get more traffic. And I liked the stuff that you suggested. Anyway, I might as well add it in it’s, and so
John Doherty: And we even do stuff like, I think I suggested, like, here’s the URL that I would use. Here’s the title tag that I would use, like that kind of thing. Just to like, like, like you could copy paste it. I mean, definitely like take a look at it and see if like you want to add anything in or whatever, but like, here’s a good optimized, like SEO, like URL.
You know, um, like, uh, or title or whatever. Um, so yeah, we find that adds value to people. I still do those honestly. Um, just cause I like it and we don’t have a huge volume of it, but like, I’ll probably build out an organization around it at some point to do it. But, um, yeah, that’s, that’s kind of how it
Andrew Warner: That was my favorite surprise of it. I didn’t sign up for that, but that was my favorite part to discover because I can’t stand SEO. And it was like having a friend go, Hey, Andrew, it’s not that hard. Here’s a couple of things you need to do. Just do those things. And yeah, sure. Why not? All right. For anyone who wants to go check it out, the website is editor, ninja.
com. And uh, of course, John, John, you’re Don Doherty on all the different services, right? Then it’s not like there, there is, there’s another actor with your name.
John Doherty: JF on most of them.
Andrew Warner: Okay. All right. And you are pretty active. A lot of it is social fun stuff, like what you’re doing in Colorado, skiing and things like that. And then occasionally you’ll hit us with some work stuff.
And I want to thank gusto for sponsoring this, everyone out there, go check out gusto. com slash mixergy. Bye everyone. Thanks Sean.
John Doherty: Thanks, Andrew.
