🚪How Paul went from idea to 5-figure exit in 4 months
The No-Code Exit Story of Paul Metcalfe and Lettergrowth
Hello, Katt here.
I need your help. Lately, I have been feeling that the No-Code Exits name has been limiting me (not the first time 😅) in achieving my mission to inspire what is possible with No-Code. Feel free to share your opinion in this poll below or in this tweet.
But nonetheless… I have another great Exit interview this week.
Learn how Paul Metcalfe (with 11 exits on his name!):
🚩 Validated the first idea with a landing page and a form
🧲 Used DM’s and his own community to find his first users
⚒️ Built the web app with no-code in less then a week
🏄♀️ Surfed on a viral growth loop thanks to newsletter writers sharing results
🚪 Sold to a company that wanted a head start with a new business
Enjoy it and happy building!
🎈 5 Cool Finds
Baserow has a cool job opening for no-coders with some amazing interesting perks.
Million Labs no-code hours packs give you the expert help you need to kickstart your app with no-code. Buy a few hours and let's turn your vision into reality.
Lifeat is something I have been looking for a while. It’s a beautiful and calm virtual ‘co-working’ space to power up your productivity.
RankIQ got me hooked as a SEO noob. It offers a library with low competition and high traffic keywords. So the only thing you need to do is: pick a keyword from your niche, write about it and wait for the traffic to trickle in.
Audiopen converts audio, video and voice memos to blog posts in just minutes. It’s made with Bubble so let’s support our No-Code friends.
*This section is a mix of paid sponsorships (in bold) and cool things I use, discovered or made.
🔥 Maker Interview
Hello Paul , tell me about yourself?
I’ve been messing about on the internet for a few years building content sites and monetizing via ads and affiliate deals, email marketing, info products. More recently I started writing newsletters. And together with that, I started to create resources, tools and a community for other people building newsletter businesses.
Tell us about your product that you made?
The product I made is Lettergrowth. It’s a tool for helping newsletter operators find other newsletters to do cross promotions.
I was working on a new newsletter and had grown it to the point where I wanted to do some cross promoting with other similar sized newsletters. The problem was finding others with a similar audience and similar size who were also willing to work on a cross promotion. It seemed like a lot of hard work to cold outreach loads of other newsletters. There were a couple of other products out there but they were lacking in functionality or they seemed to be inactive.
So I figured there was a gap for a good quality directory of like-minded newsletters that speed up the process of finding partners for us all.
Which No-Code tools did you use?
I didn’t really get started in No-Code. I can’t code so I have used the tools available to me:
Glide: the main tool and database behind an opt in
Make: to send emails to ConvertKit for the newsletter
Airtable: to capture some data for easily preparing the weekly newsletter
Carrd: the landing page for the tool
What went into building the initial version?
I validated the idea with a Carrd page and a Google Form. I already had a small list of subscribers and Twitter followers of people building newsletters. By sharing this on in my newsletter, on my Twitter and doing cold outreach via DM I was able to collect 100 newsletters who wanted to participate. So I figured out it was worth building the product.
I’d played with Glide in the past but never launched anything in public. The tool is fairly intuitive and it took about a week to create the first web app. Once it was live I kept adding features and tweaking things.
What's your business model and how have you grown your revenue?
This was a big gap in the project - there was no real business model at the beginning. The idea was to build it and then figure out some premium type features. I never really got there.
But in the back of my mind I knew I could rely on sponsorships of the weekly newsletter I sent out to users. It’s a niche audience and I had some contacts. So it was easy to sell the ad space without doing any outbound. I increased prices as the number of users grew.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
Users initially came from:
Reading my existing newsletter
Social posts on Twitter and LinkedIn
My newsletter community that I started at the same time. It was (at that time) free so it quickly grew to an active newsletter focused space. It was kind of luck that I started them at the same time. But it’s a lesson for others. By having the distribution across platforms (email, social, community) it removed a big obstacle when trying to get users.
After that word of mouth soon took over as the main driver as people started to get results. In less then 6 months there were 700+ newsletters listed with a combined subscriber count of approx 6.5 million.
How did the acquisition happen?
I was approached by someone who was interested in acquiring LetterGrowth and after a few discussions over a period of a few weeks, I decided it would be best to sell.
In its current form, there was no great monetization plan. To start with premium features I would’ve needed to rebuild the web app on another platform or custom coded. I wasn’t sure about taking that risk to invest in someone to do that for me.
The sale happened via Telegram Chat. We agreed a price, signed a contract and transitioned ownership. Very simple. I can only say it was acquired for 5 figures. It was worthwhile for the time invested in building and running it.
Why did the buyer decide to buy it?
The buyer, The Wisdom Group, has a portfolio of businesses supporting newsletter entrepreneurs. They are building a new business to help with cross promotions for newsletters, podcasts and other media forms. By buying Lettergrowth it gives them a head start on building out that part of their new product.
What's your advice for No-Code Makers who are just starting out?
Consider the business model before building. Admittedly this didn’t take a lot of time to build and was low maintenance to run. But falling back on sponsorships shouldn’t be the only way your project can generate revenue.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your project?
I run a community for people running newsletter businesses at Newsletter Lab. Recently I have been helping people buy and sell newsletters. Feel free to follow me on Twitter.
PS: I’m also in the Newsletter Lab community. And I can say that it is one of the more active communities that I’m part of where I always find answers to my questions.
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