Nathan Barry’s Growth Hacks

Nathan Barry founded ConvertKit, which does $2.4 million in monthly revenue as of this writing.

Nathan recently broke down how he scaled the business from $1500/month to $100K/month in only a year 🚀

I especially like the email template he shows there for reaching out to customers of competing software (he had previously connected with on social media so he wasn’t emailing them cold)…

Rather than asking for them to buy or demo my product, I’d ask what was frustrating them about MailChimp, Aweber, or whatever they were using…

That lead naturally to a conversation about how I’d solved those same issues. I’d offer a call to a) give them some suggestions to improve things in their current tool & b) show them what I’d built with ConvertKit.

Nathan did 100’s of those calls, following Paul Graham’s famous advice for startups: do things that don’t scale.

Nathan also did a bunch of other tedious tasks to secure early customers, and estimates that his hourly rate was less than $5/hr, “far from the $150/hr I’d been charging for design services.” 😩

Takeaway: sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better.