🚪A real painkiller with 6-figure revenue
The No-Code Success Story of Ryan Sager and WhoSponsorsStuff
Hi, Katt here.
Welcome to the 159 new subscribers this week. 👯
I’m going to rebrand No-Code Exits. So that it is clear that it is not only about exits anymore. As usual I’m in analysis paralysis when I have to pick a name. Help me out and share your opinion here.
On to this week’s interview, Ryan Sager breaks down in 4 minutes and 9 seconds:
🩹 Building a system for his own problem
🔥 The ideal stack for non-technical entrepreneurs
💰 The business model to get to a 6-figure revenue
🏎️ Virtual assistants to go faster
🔥 Newsletter to build authority and find customers
Before we begin, a moment to shine for:
🍬 Gummy Search
For months I have been posting my newsletter interviews on Reddit.
95% of the time my posts were banned.
No links, no self-promotion, yada yada.
Gummy Search helped me change my strategy:
There are 3 million subreddits. Gummy Search helped me to find where my target users live on Reddit (besides the obvious /nocode)
I get notifications when keywords I’m interested in are used so I can be the first one to comment (learn more)
It helps me to find new people to interview for my newsletter
It helps me to have a close eye on problems my audience struggles with as inspiration for new product ideas (see demo)
🎈 5 Cool Finds
Instant Domain Search helps you to find product names with available domain names.
PluginsCarrd is a library of plugins, widgets and components that powers up your Carrd landing pages.
ncScale monitors your no-code stack, simplifies troubleshooting, improves security and helps you consolidate documentation and best practices.
BlogHandy brings you a hassle-free solution for a SEO optimized blog on your existing website.
Data Gif Maker from Google Lab helps you turn your data into cool GIF’s.
*This section is a mix of paid sponsorships (in bold) and cool things I use, discovered or made.
🔥 Maker Story
Hey Ryan, what is your background
For most of my career, I have been on the editorial side of journalism and media. I started the Wall Street Journal's weekend Review section and built TIME's Ideas vertical.
After TIME, I moved into a more product-oriented role at a company called Ladders. Here I built out an editorial operation. We had a large email list, so we distributed that content through a daily newsletter which was monetized through native ads.
My now-co-founder Jesse Watkins joined Ladders to do ad sales, and we quickly stood up a multi-million-dollar ad business with just on newsletter.
After Ladders, Jesse and I set up a company doing third-party sales for newsletters that needed help filling ad inventory. We had big clients in numerous content verticals, so we needed a way to track what companies were sponsoring which newsletters. We'd done this casually at Ladders, but this time around we systematized it more and more.
Before long, it was clear that what we were building wasn't just of use to us—it was something we should package and sell to publishers.
What is the product you have been working on?
The product that emerged was Who Sponsors Stuff. Who Sponsors Stuff tracks 350+ newsletters. We record who is sponsoring each newsletter and package that data up for use by publishers' sales teams or for solopreneurs.
The data includes:
A screenshot of each ad
The sponsor landing page
The newsletter web view (if available)
A company summary
The website
LinkedIn profile
The best two contacts to reach out to
Like that you have everything you need if you want to try to sell that company an ad in your newsletter.
Which No-Code tools did you use?
Our tech stack is relatively simple:
As I like to say, I'm the CTO... and my background is editorial. Airtable is highly intuitive and provides all the flexibility we need to record and organize all of the relevant data about the newsletters and sponsors we track.
Softr is a relatively straightforward tool to put an Airtable backend into a user-friendly frontend. Like any no-code powered team, we also use Zapier to patch various systems together.
What went into building the first version?
We started in late 2021. From building the database to selling the first subscriptions was a relatively short jump... We found that there was a lot of demand to access this kind of sponsorship data. Luckily, we'd built up some capital from our third-party sales work that allowed us to hire virtual assistants to collect data and get up a head of steam before our first paying customers. Now there is me and my co-founder and 2 employees.
What's your business model ?
The model is pretty simple. We sell annual licenses to access our database. Our revenue is in the six-figures range.
More than 50 publishers use our paid product (Sales Pro), to help power their newsletter (and podcast) ad sales. Customers include:
Morning Brew
The Daily Upside
Flipboard
The Future Party
6AM City
etc
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
Most of our interest has come inbound and through referrals from other customers. We also market our weekly newsletter about the newsletter industry Email Intelligence, which generates a lot of our inbound inquiries.
What are the biggest challenges you've faced and how did you overcome them?
The biggest challenge is simply building out systems that function smoothly day-to-day with minimal intervention, while my co-founder and I focus on bigger strategic initiatives.
The key to that has been documenting standard operation procedures, creating extensive Looms to guide employees, and just... documenting, documenting, documenting.
What's your advice for people just getting started?
Make sure you're solving a problem. If you're solving a pain point that can unlock revenue for others, you're off to a better start than 99% of projects.
That’s it for this week.
I hope you enjoyed this story. I loved how it’s proof that ‘simple’ products can be very successful.
If you did enjoy, please reply ( it helps with deliverability 🕊️ and motivation🎢 ).
PS: the last main sponsor got 5.7K views and 193 clicks. Book your ad here