Ep 396: Zero Revenue to $3K/Month: Inside a $3K Micro SaaS Acquisition with Steven Macdonald

My goal is to have one thousand paying customers by the time I reach I don't know where that number comes from. I didn't think about it before, but it just kinda popped into my head, and I thought, okay, it's a nice round number; it's a good enough timeline for me to kind of achieve that. And if this is really fun, then it's okay for it to take seven, eight years to get there.

I'm Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today we're speaking with Stephen McDonald. He is an SEO entrepreneur and SaaS founder, based in Estonia. And in the early 2025, he acquired a SaaS business. And it's OKR's tool, and it's a lightweight OKR platform for startups. And he grew it through SEO, product content, and AI search optimization instead of rebuilding the product. In this podcast episode, we talk about how he bought this business and his story.

And it's absolutely fascinating how he scaled it with content, getting AI traffic, getting Google traffic, and how he uses AI to create exceptional content. And that's the main vehicle for people finding out about his business and becoming customers. He previously founded other SaaS products, but he decided to acquire one. And I asked him why. Why acquire one when you could go away and build one? And his answer is absolutely awesome.

And what he's achieved is absolutely awesome. There's so much value in this podcast around buying a business, a sh a smaller business, a smaller deal under the ten-thousand-dollar price range, and how to scale it significantly without any out-of-pocket cost using AI and content creation.

So valuable. I'm sure you guys are gonna absolutely love it. Of course, we're talking about buying a business. If you haven't got my due diligence doing this framework, it takes the guesswork out of buying a business. It's saved people millions of dollars and made people millions of dollars. There's a link to that in the description. You can get it for free.

Steven, welcome to the pod. Yeah, I'm excited to chat. Congrats on your acquisition. I think it was a year and a half ago. How long ago was it?

Thank you, thank you. Excited to be here.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It was the end of twenty twenty four. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. End of twenty-four. Congrats. So you bought OKR. But first before we I wanna before we get into that acquisition, why and you've you've started a business before, right? Yeah. What's why what was your thinking, and why did you want to buy something versus, you know, buying an established business versus starting something from scratch? Well, why was that?

Yeah. Yeah. So to rewind a little bit, I've been a consultant now for about thirteen, fourteen years. And I work with B2B SaaS companies and help them with their marketing strategy. If you work in marketing and you help companies in B2B SaaS, you know that there is a very hard line when it comes to any influence on the product, right? Engineering teams, they'll sure they'll be like, Stay in your lane, guys. You know, you do marketing, we do product. So I had this itch. Probably around 2017, 2018, I thought I wanted to have something of my own. I want to own the full end-to-end lifecycle and customer journey, not just traffic and signups. So I started looking around online, looking at cost, and it was just ridiculous to get something up and running back then. I have no coding skills at all. So it was there, the itch was there, but I couldn't act on it. And then I think it was probably around 2023, I came across flipper.com. And that's when I thought, nice.

There's a place online where I can browse existing SaaS companies for sale. And in mid-2024, this is when I really started thinking, okay, I need to make the move now. Today it's different. Only 18 months later, with AI, you can ship something so much quicker. But even 18 months ago, it was still kind of like, okay, I'll try to buy something that exists.

And I started the journey looking at a WhatsApp marketing platform. And it was just that the cost was like three, four thousand dollars. It wasn't a lot of money. And I just thought that's just a nice kind of step into this world of product development and owning product pricing, things like that.

So I browsed a few tools, I looked at one particularly, and I set up a demo. But then I got cold feet. I was like, is this really what I want to be doing? I'm not sure. And then three months later, business model, you mean, or like just acquiring and just getting into that whole world, right? Like I in a way, you can say I was comfortable just running my consulting business, and it was like this was now it's serious, right? Like I'm setting up a demo to buy something.

Putting your money where your mouth is, yeah, for sure.

And but here's the challenge. I didn't know WhatsApp marketing at all. I've never used it. So maybe that's one of the reasons as well where I was like, it's just the right move. Anyway, fast forward three months. So then now it's December. I get an email, my weekly notifications from Flipper, OKRstool.com for sale.

At the time, it was priced at $8,000. Okay. And I was like, wait a sec. I know OKRs. I've been using OKRs with clients for several years. This feels like okay. This feels like it. So I signed up immediately.

Played around with a platform. It was bare bones, like bare bones, but enough that I thought, I can see the vision here. I can see where this could go. And I sent an email to the owner to set up a demo, but it was like mid to late December now. So he was slow to respond, you know, getting ready for Christmas. And I was just like, screw it, I'm just gonna put a bid in. I haven't even, like, spoken with the founder. I'm just gonna go for it. So I bid $3,000. Okay. It was accepted the next day.

And there you there we go. I was an owner of a class.

Yeah. He wanted some Christmas money, didn't he? So, so congrats. Explain the explain what OKR is, OKR's tool, just so just so the audience knows, and what what you how you used it before. Sure.

So OKR is a goal-setting framework, and it was created by a guy called John Doerr, who is famous for a goal-setting framework. Yeah. And it was created by a guy called John Doe. And it was famous because he rolled it out at Google in the early years of Google's growth. And it's very simple. You set a goal, very ambitious, and then you set three measurable key results, the KR in OK, and you are looking at setting outcomes when it comes to key results, going from X to Y.

What framework, sorry?

Yeah, got it.

As opposed to just task-based. So it's very hot in Silicon Valley, and it's been spreading around the world over the last 20-plus years, and it's a really common goal-setting framework. And we used it with clients because clients love it when we help them set goals, concrete goals.

So we would introduce OKRs, they'd get on board, we'd set some, and they'd really see things move because it wasn't just launching Facebook ads. It was to grow the click-through rate from X to Y, or go from position eight to two in Google, things like this, right? Really having a measurable difference. So that's the OKR part.

OKR's tool is the platform then to manage that. So I speak to tons of companies. Most companies I speak with track goals in spreadsheets. And that's okay to a certain point, but it's very clear when you get to twenty, twenty-five people, it starts to crack. People then forget to update, and so on.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It becomes very, very tricky as you go to like fifty, sixty plus; it gets very fragile. So the platform basically is just one tool where everything is automated, and it's one place where leaders can get quick visibility into how their team is performing.

Yeah. So when you say it's automated, does that mean the tool is linking to other apps that automatically update the KPIs and the data and everything?

Exactly. There's that aspect, part one. The second part is when you set goals, people forget to update them unless their boss and team lead say, " Update your goals. So the other part of your automation is the reminders, the notifications, like you're slipping on this goal, you're ahead here, what's working, you're, you know, you're at risk, and so on. So that kind of thing.

Yeah, cool.

When you bought this money was it making per year or per month, or it was it making anything? Zero.

Zero. Yeah. So during the call, I placed the bid; it was accepted, and then we set up a core. And going through the call, it was like, okay, here's the platform. It was built on Bubble at the time. And that's a low code, no-code platform. And it had a simple one-page website. And it was zero revenue. There was no payment gateway. And page views- this is what was recorded in Flipper.

Page users: one thousand four hundred visits or sessions, right?

Yeah, over what period of time?

This was I don't know if it was even; maybe it was all time. It was on the listing.

Wow, okay, that's very low. Yeah. Yeah. It probably would have been twelve months. Normally, that's a default on Flipper. I'm pretty familiar with Flipper. Okay. Yeah.

But it was alone, you're right. And yeah, so when we went in, he was talking; he was like, Yeah, you know, one thousand four hundred, okay, okay. I was thinking, okay, and then interesting.

And then and then so yeah, but then as we went through the call, we were looking at, okay, what are they visiting, what page are they engaging with, or which parts of the website? And he was selling me on, like, you know, people are clicking on the higher-priced plans to sign up and so on. But it was only like a month later.

Yeah, it's still like when I look back and actually dig into the numbers, that most of those sessions were just test views from his own account.

Wow. Okay.

Really was when I say fourteen hundred page views and being low, it was basically zero. No, zero, yeah. So where did people discover it anyway? Did that were there some people still discovering it through Google, but just very little, like through Google search, or I would probably say that it was maybe two or three months where we were getting just like a couple of hundred visits a month very early on in the beginning and with mostly bot traffic. There was no real meaningful action until five months into it.

Five months after acquisition, I want to get into what you've done, which seems exceptional so far.

Coming just coming back, when you go, all right, cool, this is listed for what was it, nine thousand dollars? Sorry, eight thousand dollars. And you just went, I'll just put three down. How did you value it, the business, like the business?

And a separate question is, was it based on what you thought you could build out of it? Like, was it based on what the value was to you and your plan? Like did you what sort of plan did you have if you had a growth plan?

At the time. Yeah. And I was that the main reason for acquisition? So I guess there are a couple of questions in there, and we can come back to them if we miss the answers here.

So the first thing was it was listed at eight, and I bid three. Three was what I felt comfortable with, knowing that for a very brief five-minute play around with a product that I thought I could spend this where it's at right now, I could see three K value. The WhatsApp marketing platform- I forget the number of that, but that was more for sure. It's probably closer to five.

And when I've been keeping up to date with the listings on flipper dot com during that time, I could see the range was around four or five K for what I was looking at. So I'd probably subconsciously allocated that spend earlier on. So when I saw that, I thought, I'm not going to pay eight for it.

I'll just start low, and then maybe we'll meet in the middle. Fortunately, we didn't need to. That was, yeah. The second was I was 41 when I made the bid. Okay. And I thought for the three months before that, I was thinking more about, like, what do I want to do for the next eight to 10 years of my life until I hit 50. And consulting worked, but I thought my growth learning curve had kind of plateaued a bit.

I've been doing the same thing, the same frameworks and strategies, for several years now. I needed something that would put me back on kind of a beginner level. Not that I was expert level, but I needed to start coming at it from a new challenge. Exactly, right? Like, how can I take this from plateauing to just a learning curve, growing exponentially and quickly?

Yeah.

There are so many people listening to this who are thinking like they're in a job, a full time job. Maybe a little bit different to your situation, but they're like, they've been in that job for so long, and they're just like, I would love to learn something new and do something new and have a bit more control of the financial future.

So it's so relevant to everybody listening, really. And especially starting with where you started, it's so cool. And I'm excited to hear more of the journey as it unpacks. So did you have an ideology of what you wanted to do to grow it before you acquired it and what did that like what did that look like? Not now you that you know, what you know now since making some of the changes, but what did it look like before you even bought it? Yeah. What was your thought process?

So one thing, I mean, I remember communicating to a company that I was taking a step back in mid-January. So this is now probably four weeks from when I placed the bid and accepted, to then communicating and saying, I'm gonna take a step back, guys. I need to focus on this.

So in those four weeks, I somehow, and I don't know how now, looking back, I thought this was an eight- to ten-year project for me. My goal is to have one thousand paying customers by the time I reach fifty. And I don't know where that number comes from.

Never thought about it before, but it just kinda popped into my head, and I thought, okay, it's a nice round number. It's a good enough timeline for me to kind of achieve that. And if this is really fun, then it's okay for it to take seven, eight years to get there. So I think a goal like some people come to this space, and they want to buy a business, and they want to do it within a one- to three-year timeframe.

And I'm like, if you're gonna buy a business and the reason you want to buy a business is so it can dramatically change your lifestyle, what's wrong with it, you know, buying something in year three or four or five and then spending another five years on it and taking ten years to dramatically change your lifestyle?

Like it's not that big of a deal. Right. Like most people aren't buying businesses at sixty-seven years old anyway. So you're probably in your thirties to fifties. Yeah. Maybe even a little bit younger. But like what's there's no real rush; you can buy something that's going to set you up forever.

Because the less, and the thing that I love about what you've done, Steven, is you most people put time against yourselves by putting time pressure on yourselves. And when you do that, time works against you 'cause you rush. And when you rush, you are more stressed, and you don't make the decisions as well as you could when you're less stressed, right? Yeah.

Versus if you put time on your side, you're just allowing time to compound and everything else in your business to compound. And that's when you'll start to see the effects in, like, you know, when you get to year seven, eight, and nine, you're gonna be like, Wow, like maybe this is more than a thousand, you know? It's pretty cool.

Yeah. And that's as well, like I didn't want to get caught up in that trap of checking things daily and just clicking refresh on the reports, new customer, new visitor, realtor, you know, things like that.

What I wanted to do was just say, I have a clear vision for the next three to four months. I mean, okay, we have the long-term vision, but for the next three to four months, here's the plan. And I'll execute on it, and then I set milestones every six or twelve months to make sure I'm on track.

And if I am, great. If I'm not, I can make those changes because I know it's not going to be linear. Maybe over the course of eight years it'll look linear. But in the quarterly cycles it'll be up, down, up, down, and that's okay with me. Yeah.

It can only look linear when you have a long time frame from point A to point B and you get to, with the graph, it gets to smooth out and iron out those crazy periods. Cause there might be, like, I know in my life, there's a period of like one to two years; it's just catastrophic. Right. But if you look at it from point A to point B, people are like, Whoa, dude, what the hell is that? That's ridiculous. You know?

But you've got one thing in the middle that people can't really see and they don't want a part of and they would prefer prefer to not even be a part of the whole big journey and get that to to not have to witness or experience that crazy time. Yeah. Not to say that happens to everybody, but that's what it's looked like for me, and I know a lot of people, anyway. Now, what's just before we move into the growth, because you've done some cool things.

What did your journey look like in terms of looking? Like, you looked at one WhatsApp business. How many businesses do you think you kind of did due diligence on? Because it seemed like a short time frame that you went, all right, the middle of twenty twenty four to the end of twenty four, you sort of bought something.

How many businesses did you get serious about and do due diligence on, do you think? Yeah.

Say serious, just those two. But in terms of being not sort of reactively looking at and browsing and thinking, I would probably say 10 to 20. Like, it was basically each week I was waiting for that email to come through. I mean, I could have just gone to the website and browsed them, of course, but it was just like a nice little thing like, okay, it comes through on a Tuesday or Wednesday, whichever day it was.

Scrolling through, okay, this takes my fancy. Let me just learn a little bit more about this. And again, it was back to what can I afford to spend and risk? And if it goes down the drain very quickly, I'm okay with that.

So that's also why even even when I bought the boot, okayos tool.com, I mean, it could have closed three days after I bought it because I just thought there was nothing here. It just doesn't work. Fortunately, that's not the case. But I think, had I missed that, let's say I went on Christmas vacation early.

I missed it; someone else bought it. Then I could still be looking now. I think it was it was some it was something that just because it was that alignment of I knew the space, okay, and I knew marketing assets and what was required there. And I had that curiosity: how do you build a really good product that people love? Like finding value.

Yeah, it's yeah, it's it's it's it's cool and unique. Some people don't find their deal for a year or more, like three years, maybe. So it is unique to find it that fast. Now let's talk about growth, which is super exciting. What did you implement in the first ninety days after taking over OKR's tool?

So I would probably say my first love when it comes to marketing is SEO. It was my first marketing task. This was in two thousand and seven. It was under the IT department, and I was tasked with updating title tags and meta descriptions, right? Very boring. Still is boring today.

But it's twenty twenty-six when we record this, start of twenty twenty seven. And its SEO is still a thing. If you look at it from two thousand and seven to twenty twenty seven, it's twenty years, even with AI and different things coming and going and the changes through Google search and everything like that, SEO is still super important, like it's not going anywhere. Yeah. I'm glad that you mentioned when you started it, and it's still meta titles and descriptions, and yeah.

For sure.

No, no. And because that's my first love, that was my first point of attack. It's also the cheapest, right? Like I can create one set. Okay, it's my time. And yes, it's not that like my time is worthless, but at the same time, there's no cost, right? Like I'm not saying no to paid projects to do this. It was like I'm gonna create something. I didn't want to run ads; I have nothing to scale. So it was like organic or paid. So SEO, I think it was probably January.

Still gone anyway.

No money out of the bank.

Yeah. Exactly.

Week two, my first piece of content went out. So like, this is, you know, straight away like, get on it. Start creating content. By February, I was publishing 30 posts a month. And because I'd done this in the past with clients, I knew how valuable original research can be in publishing that.

So by May was when I made that leap to put something out that's unique to the market. So they would that would probably say, okay, a bit more than 90 days, but really it was create content, publish it on the blog.

And start working on the original research.

And the research was just a beefy piece of content that is like a very link-worthy and clickable asset. Is that what you mean? Yeah.

Correct, yeah. So we surveyed two hundred plus startups and asked them about their experience with OKRs. And one of the questions, it was very leading, but it was good data. We asked, Do you think you hit your million ARR milestone because of OKRs? Yes and no. And sixty-seven percent said yes. So we were startuping startups. The research was on startups and their OKR experience.

That's so cool.

So we went into the market with that message. Sixty-seven percent of startups hit their milestones faster with a core. And put that out. One of the really cool things about that was it was picked up by a strategist; her name's Maya Voye. And she works with dozens of startups. She has a newsletter list of forty thousand subscribers. And because it was a right alignment, she loves OKRs, shoots startups, included it in her list, free distribution.

And we had this huge influx of traffic and sign-ups immediately from it. So it was a very, very good piece of content. Yeah.

It's 20, you know, this is after like the I just I'm so glad that you're saying this because so many people are against like, content marketing and SEO for Google traffic and whatever it is, but it just goes to show, and I've had a couple of SEOs on this year, and I will every single year to just showcase that it's so critical and it's the best type of traffic you can get. And when you create quality.

Over quantity and you invest into one big asset that you like you have, like you released in that in in that May edition, that it's just so quality that it can't get ignored, like so quality for that space that people like it it gets found and then it gets recycled everywhere, and then you get f like you said, free distribution. And it's I'm sure that's your pillar, pillar piece of content now and an absolutely critical part of your business. So I'm glad that you shared that.

Yeah. What's funny is that she was presenting on stage the results of the study as well to a group of cohort, and one of the guys after it came over and said, That's the same story we have when it comes to the report. So things like that, right? But just on that note, you said it's the key pillar. Well, it works so well that now we're trying to run research reports every six to eight weeks. So it's part of the content strategy. It's not an addition to the content strategy.

Well, that's so cool.

I love that. I love that. That's cool. You see, guys, listening, you if you follow Steven's footsteps in how he's growing through SEO content, it's like you don't just learn what's working and do more of it, and then do less of what's not working. That's how you grow a business. That's how you grow anything in life, right?

Like you just learn from the run from the data and tune into your business, learn to listen to it. So what else have you done to get traffic and grow the business, scale the business, other than just SEO? And well, I guess a lot of it's probably SEO, but yeah, what else have you done? Other than just a con like, blog posts.

Yeah. So part of it, as you mentioned earlier, is the learning curve of this, right? And learning not just the product, but also having the flexibility and freedom to just test new things. For example, ChatGPT ads rolled out in Europe two days ago. So in the morning, I woke up, I added a budget, and I launched a campaign. I ran it for two days, and I can see, you know, clicks, data, cost, CPM, things like this. So it's just enough to say, okay, is this something I explore later on?

So the last one and a half years have been a lot of that. Reddit ads, LinkedIn for leadership, all this kind of stuff. I think in terms of marketing, I have three areas right now where I spend most of my time. So the first is mostly content and SEO. It's working so well. We rank number one for OKR software, the best keyword in our market. We get thousands of visits every month.

Tons of backlinks from our research. It's growing really well. And there's still so much room to grow with SEO. So while that's there and the opportunity still lives, I'll continue to invest in that. We pay the Google tax for AdWords, or Google Ads. Controversially, I don't believe it does anything.

I just think it's a waste of money. It's an absolute waste of money. I can track everything because I can see signups, and I track the whole end-to-end. I can see clicks, who signs up, and what they do in the product. It's largely Gmail addresses that do nothing in the product at all. Could be a coincidence.

But I've played this game so long now, I really believe it's just me; for me it's just a visibility play, not an acquisition.

It's a branding it's a branding move, sure.

Exactly. I mean, I don't spend a ton of money; I spend seven Euros a day. So that's like eight, ten dollars a day. But it's just there. So when someone searches for these keywords, I'm visible there. And when they scroll, I'm visible below as well. So there's that. And then on the other side, one thing I really love doing: email marketing. Love it.

What does your email marketing strategy look like? So we send so, such a big topic. Okay, so we have the onboarding sequence, we have retention, but when it comes to pure communication with the audience, just newsletters.

Yeah, just like new like audience and then moving audience into new sign-ups or generating an audience. What's your, like, how do you generate leads onto your email list? Yeah.

So the only way we get an email address on the website today is through a product sign-up. I don't want to deal with a newsletter list, MailChimp account. I just have if you wanna sign up to my product, you leave your email, and then we'll communicate with you until you unsubscribe. So really kinda low maintenance.

Is it a free is it a free sign up? Like, is there a free version? Or you okay. Right. So it's not, yeah. Cool. That's cool. That makes sense. So we have, yeah.

Four thousand people on the list, and all of the research, the tools we have on the website, are free. So it's part of the strategy. The overall kind of vision here for the website and the content is we want to be the number one resource for OKRs. And part of living up to that is making sure everything is accessible.

You don't have to leave your email address for it. So if you want to sign up to the product, fine. We'll take your email address, and then we'll send you emails. So we have a cadence of two emails per month. I want to increase that to four, but for now it's two.

And the it split between product updates and research. And cool. One thing we did in April was we moved from Bubble to Lovable.

And making that move meant that now we can ship better features faster. So our product is being updated daily. Improvements are based purely on customer feedback. We don't just have a wish list of what we want to do. It's all based on what they tell us needs to improve.

So every four weeks, they'll get a product update email with what's new based on your feedback. And then every four weeks, it alternates with new research based on what we've asked the market or some of the data we found in our own platform usage about what's working and what it.

Cool, cool. And so does the business make money yet? And if so, how? What's your product? Like how does it how does it generate revenue? Is there a premium version, or is there, like, you know, ad revenue? Like what's the what's the business model?

Yeah. So we have a free version, one to five users, and then we have the paid plans. So the plans are split by number of users, so different segments. So it's from six users to fifty. A company will pay one fixed rate, fifty dollars a month. And then if they go past fifty, so fifty-one or more, it's a hundred and twenty-nine dollars a month. Yeah. It's very different from the rest of the market, who all charge per user. Some of them, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. So this is just easy to remember.

Right. And you open sharing where you're at in.

Yeah. So we're at about three thousand dollars a month in revenue, and it costs us, right, six hundred dollars to run the business.

So you bought a business for three thousand dollars, and you're making that same amount every single month?

Yeah.

Cool. Roughly twenty four hundred a month net profit per month. So what do we have? Twenty-four hundred. So yeah, close to twenty-six grand a year. Yeah.

Yeah. And and I still I still speak with some clients, and I work with them. So it's not my only source of revenue. I do some investing as well. Yeah. But this is by far the most rewarding.

Yeah, I love that. And it's only gonna scale so much, right? Like you've how many so how many users are you at now?

So we have users, but I don't track users.

Right. So your goal was a thousand paid users, is that right? Or a thousand teams. Okay. So how many teams?

So we track five teams. We have three hundred and fifty teams total using the product. So it's, yeah, it's based on forecast; it won't be eighty years until we reach a thousand.

Not at all. Maybe in the next one or two years, to be honest.

So yeah, be nice. Yeah.

I'm sure you're gonna double the business in the next year, like the compounding, the compounding that's what I can see: you've gone from zero revenue to three grand in revenue in a very short period of time. It's been a year and a half, right?

Yeah. And also just a note on two. We didn't worry about monetization for the first eight to ten months. It wasn't about that. I mean, yes, we had a payment gateway, pricing was there, but the only thing I cared about for the first I would even say for the first year was getting people into the product, speaking with them and learning what sucked, right?

And what worked well. And again, when you have that timeline of eight years, you bake that in, right? You can say, for the first year, I just want to know the market; I want to understand how our product competes, what does well, where do we need to improve, and just keep iterating on that. If you just have a year-long timeline and want to go from zero to a billion, that's very difficult. So I have that time and patience on our side to say, let's figure out how we can win here over the long term.

Yeah, cool. I love that. Is just for somebody listening, 'cause it's very inspiring to buy something for three grand and a year and a half later it's making three grand a month when it wasn't making any money when you first bought it.

A lot of people here listening are looking at buying something that's, you know, maybe ten grand, twenty grand, maybe five grand, even close to that three-grand range. Is it what advice would you have for them if you were looking at doing this again, and are there things that you would do differently or all the same?

So I think one of the things that made me or triggered that instant purchase was that I knew the space well. And if you were to contrast that with the WhatsApp marketing platform that I looked at, that one I wasn't sure, right? I had those doubts, internal doubts. And I think that's what I would recommend. If anybody is looking at buying a platform, software, or business, make sure you know it. You don't have to know the ins and outs of it, but at least you know it well.

And the key thing for me, really key thing for me, was when I speak with clients and their OKRs, I know the pain point so well because I say, Hey guys, it's time to create your OKR and now, because you've, yeah, you've done like a year of data, and you've learned so much about it, which is like so important for people.

Not normally what I do and say when people buy businesses: just wait a month before doing anything, learn and listen to the business, and see what people are saying in the space, see what they like about the business, see what they don't like about the business. And you did it on a longer time frame, and you just get so much data. And I agree, if you know you, if you're in a position where you have knowledge about, you know, software already and you already consult around it before acquiring this.

A lot of people listening, they might not have that experience, but they can get that experience once they buy something or even during due diligence; they can learn so much about it. And then they can learn that experience on the go as well, which is instead of just thinking that you know how to grow it, like asking the business, asking the clients.

Like I say, I didn't grow my business. You guys did. The people that are listening, the people that are my clients, they told me what they liked, they told me what they didn't like, and I just did more of what they liked and less of what they didn't like. And it's not me thinking, Okay, I know how to do this and I know what you want. I don't. Like, you tell me. And you've done that with your business. So yeah. Congrats, Steven. It's really cool.

Thank you. Thank And one of the things we did really on, so just sort of like today, especially going back, because a year and a half ago wasn't so much the case with AI. So you talk about learning the business, right?

And absolutely, that's so important. Understanding where people are in the market, what they like, what they are looking for. One of the things I did with AI in January was I used ChatGPT to find out which market or segment it's underserved in. And it did this really nice analysis and came back and said, basically, startups aren't getting much love when it comes to OKR software.

Everything is priced per user and priced at tens of thousands of dollars a year, even reaching the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So that's why I thought, okay, well, my pricing can be flat rate per team. That way it appeals to startups. So that was our first kind of go-to market when it comes to pricing. And today you could do that probably even better, just to get an understanding of, you know, where the markets are.

Yeah, I love that. You can, yeah, you can use both your audience and then also understand where the market's at through AI. Like AI and how big of a how big of a help is AI with your content creation? Tell me about that. Is it do you use it much, or do you not use it much, or I barely do anything yourself anymore?

So it's purely driven by AI. But I think there are a few things I want to highlight here because it's not just I prompt Claude or ChatGPT and say Create an article on X and hope for the best and publish it. So one is we have original research, which means that as a foundation, everything we build going forward is based on that research.

So it's surely every piece we create is gonna have something unique to add that will outrank other sites because they don't have anything unique to add. Like, two out of three keywords we target rank in the top three. We're getting picked up in AIL, L L because of so I think when you have that foundation in place, you have your original search, you have a clear ICP. Then when you create content, and I'll say at scale, but it's not tens of thousands of pieces; it's thirty, forty, fifty pieces.

It's always going to be unique; you put it into the market. And when that compounds over time, because again you've said it many times so far, but it is about that. Giving it time, letting it compound. And then I look at it took two or three months before we started getting organic search traffic. Now we're at four thousand four to five thousand visits a month. Our blog gets twenty thousand visits a month. It, you know, I could have cut it off and quit many times along the way.

It's so cool to see that the research is a part of the strategy, right? That's the main thing because you're not just getting AI to just gin generate a piece of content for you based on everybody else's stuff or what is out there in the market. You have something that nobody else has, and they can't get access to. And you're using that as the framework for the content creation, and you can keep on building upon that research, like you said, every six to eight weeks.

So it's a it's really good for people listening to understand that you can use AI and rank straight away or very fast in your space as long as you're being unique and building something unique that nobody else can get, which is really cool.

And just to add to that too, I think I'm seeing a lot of content writers now pretending that they're adding unique insight. You know, as you can clearly see it they're saying things like I've been working in this space for twenty years; here are my thoughts on X, Y, and Z and it's clearly AI-written.

That's not the way to go. It does take time and effort to create original research and publish it, but once you have it, then it just snowballs. Yeah. And yeah, like now, as I said, six to eight weeks, we put out something new. Funny enough, prior to my first research report going live last May, the most recent research in the OKR space was twenty twenty two, right? So everyone was re referencing that as according to recent research.

But now I pick up that place where they go to cite data. So I think there's so much opportunity 'cause so few companies are doing this work.

Guys, that's your opportunity. Get out there, do your research, create content around it, and get great content. I mean great users and views, and it's organic. It's cool, and it's only gonna compound. Steven, I just wanna say thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experience.

I'm super excited to see where you guys are at in one to two years and yeah, where you go, whether you're gonna buy more businesses and do the same or just, you know, stay in the lane and yeah, it might change over time, it might not.

Yeah, but one thing about that: when you buy one, you definitely get the feeling to buy more.

Yeah, yes, I agree. I've been there. That's why I bought three businesses in three years. Yeah. Awesome, Steven. Thanks so much. Where can we send people to like learn more? Is it just OKRstool.com, and then also reach out to you if they have any questions around, you know, scaling their business, D to B SaaS business. Absolutely. Yeah, cool. All right. OK R school. Sorry, O K R S T O O L dot com. I'll put a link to that in the description and also on your LinkedIn.

Steven. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Everybody who's listening. Thank you for listening. I'll see you on the next one.