How a meme account became a content agency doing $25k+ a month
A couple of weeks ago, I put out a thread about building a meme account into a content agency. It got a lot of traction, so I wanted to go into further detail about my business and how I built it.
Here’s a link to the original thread.
On April 12, 2020, I was doing what most others were doing: Sitting at home wondering when this Covid thing would be over.
In the meantime, I figured I’d create a Twitter account to pass the time. Over the previous 3 years or so before 2020, I was a regular Twitter user who would read business and sports commentary. But I had never contributed to the conversation.
I immediately knew I’d want to start a parody account so that I could joke around without having to use my real name. I’m not sure why, but my immediate thought was to start an account of an old executive who was clueless about technology, yet made millions from running a tech company into the ground.
The Side Project (April - November 2020)
The first seven months or so were an experiment. I ran the John W. B Rich (Wealthy) account in my free time, growing to about 42,000 followers by November. The account was purely a hobby, as there was no viable business plan for running a parody account with a few thousand followers.
The only tangible benefit I gained in those first few months was the couple dozen free hats, t-shirts, mugs and other merch that brands sent me.
I experimented with some business models in those early days, but nothing really gained traction. I set up a “news” website that just featured longer versions of my Twitter jokes, but quickly realized I’d need millions of monthly viewers to make any real money from display ads.
After having a couple of articles do really well, my 120,000 or so monthly viewers translated to about $20 in display ad revenue.
Not making money was totally fine; I would have run the account for fun indefinitely without being paid. However, I wanted to turn this into a full-time business somehow.
Consulting (December 2020 - December 2021)
Near the end of 2020, I finally figured out the business model: People who liked my account would pay me to help with their content. I quickly picked up two side gigs writing content for Hard Money and this guy Andrew with a new startup called “MicroAcquire”, which is now valued at $110 million+ (no thanks to me - I only helped Andrew for a month or so before he hired on his full-time marketing staff. It was invaluable to see first-hand how he scaled the business from basically an idea to a company worth 9 figures in basically a few months).
Over the new several months, I experimented with different pricing structures and service offerings. It became clear that the most valuable service I could offer was a combination of consulting and content creation.
I’d bring clients some ideas for the direction of the content, and then write tweets and articles on their behalf.
While I was mostly writing for Hard Money and my own account throughout 2021, I continued to test out client engagements on the side. I worked with a couple of entrepreneurs, stock newsletters, and trading software companies, creating content for them and finding out what worked and didn’t work in terms of managing clients.
Content Agency (January 2022 - Now)
This year, I got much more serious about the content agency model.
I standardized my service offering and pricing (though each deal is still somewhat custom).
I’m up to 12 clients paying an average of about $2,600/month for my content strategy + ghostwriting service.
While I have a hand in every client’s content, I’ve also been working on developing a pool of talent that I can get help from. The idea is that I find people who are talented at creating content in a specific space that I can get help with idea generation from: I have a real estate person, a startup person, a finance person, etc.
Where to next?
I am mainly working on streamlining my systems now so that we can keep bringing on new clients and delivering good content for them. I think that I have the set up I’d need to get to $100,000 in monthly revenue. After that, who knows if the model will break?
I appreciate you reading up to this point. If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to get in touch, feel free to reply to this email, or contact me at charlie@alphasocialgroup.com.