What my teams have been busy at work with + priority channels
The past 30 days have been absolutely bulletproof – a great product of a strong Q3 strategy (following the prepwork started back in November).
Key achievements in the past month
- The pipeline is up 160% compared to Q2 so far – amidst the summer season and the Olympics (thanks to new strategic partnerships and strong weekly sprints in Hristina’s team)
- Closed 2 new agency contracts
- Several new landing page templates as Todor’s team scaled up the production and integration into Gutenberg patterns without frameworks
- Multiple case studies approved, published, and pitched to media (success stories with clients) – another team OKR initiative from leadership triaging with clients based on recent launches
- “MBA Disrupted” negotiations with airport libraries (this is taking a while)
- Several proposals undergoing final reviews (top 3 shortlist)
- My community has been growing
- New website revamp (major props to Vlad and Plamen for the move)
- Hired a new marketer in-house
- This newsletter is finally powered by beehiiv!
And last but not least, my YouTube channel grew by 350+ new subscribers in the meantime and I’m publishing content again. While most topics revolve around business, marketing, M&A, the future of tech is also in the books – here’s the latest upload:
(If you’re on YouTube, hit Subscribe 🔔)
The turbulent business ecosystem is not for the faint-hearted, but we push methodically one step at a time.
I’ll break the process down for you.
What is the Holdco?
The holdco (holding company) model has been gaining popularity over the past couple of years with solopreneurs or agency owners elevating and grouping different entities under a set of LLCs (or just brand portfolios).
I ran a couple of businesses in parallel as early as 2010, and branched out in 2018 to keep independent initiatives under a different P&L – and sometimes leadership. Large organizations incur additional management layers and overhead which isn’t necessarily the proper structure for certain business models.
Where a team of 5 can achieve more than a department of 8 in a company of 60.
Right now, the org includes 5 companies:
- DevriX (B2B martech agency),
- Growth Shuttle (my advisory firm)
- a WordPress product business (multiple paid/SaaS WordPress solutions)
- a reseller company (hosting, ads, social),
- my digital portfolio division (content/SaaS sites).
They are all ran independently with me on top and different teams within or helping as contractors.
Additionally, my investing portfolio (stocks and angel investments) goes through me as an individual. This prevents some conflicts in the event of a business sale, merger, or investment for an LLC that owns equity elsewhere.
How does the Q3 model work?
The structural breakdown across all companies goes through 3 teams + external parties (advisors, contractors) + myself.
DevriX has been running successfully for 14 years and represents retention work (existing retainers) + new work (existing channels + new channels). The team takes care of almost everything while I tap into new channels (partnerships, strategic alignments, public speaking/events) for additional leadflow.
The advisory work is mostly word of mouth, social, happy book readers, former clients, VCs referring ops work to me.
The portfolio of products/apps/sites is slightly more complicated, but essentially boils down to:
- Publishing sites – a couple of people handling SEO audits and reviews internally, with new content publishing + internal links and updates
- SaaS – we have a few small products that we grow together, mostly on autopilot, with some social + organic content work and cross-linking
- Reseller contracts – this branch acts as an intermediary between contractors and small agencies offering low-cost work for SMB/startups where DevriX can’t match the price. It’s an accelerator of sorts for small projects that graduate to DevriX later + a sandbox for test projects
- Communities – we have 3 different communities we run and grow together slowly, but steadily – think of it as first-party data
These businesses run their own P&L and we aim to reach profitability or sustain a certain profit margin. Pretty low effort + aligned with my Flippa acquisition efforts.
My individual goals
Other than keeping all businesses in the green and coming up with new offer ideas or packages based on sales meetings or strategic partnerships, I spend a good chunk of my time on R&D and data analysis:
- Testing new channels and campaign types continuously (reddit and Quora marketing, LinkedIn thought leadership ads, beehiiv boosts or Sparkloop, AI email outreach, automated auditing through Airtable/Frontly integrations with OpenAI) – with Niko cross-testing in parallel during the in-house automation initiatives
- Keeping an eye on recurring ICP pain points and building new relationships across communities on Slack, Skool, Circle
- Newsletters – keeping this up and running as an ongoing business journal (and getting invaluable input by dozens of readers, thank you all)
- Social content – continuously running a content backlog across all social networks to gain firsthand insights and double down on what works
- Videos – I’ve been refining my video content and publishing more on YouTube – and it’s been delivering great results in late Q2 and early Q3. Some of that goes to Instagram reels, TikTok and X.
- Product and platform experiments – running MVPs on automated tools both internally and for clients
This entire mechanism works like a well-oiled machine – and the goal is to keep growing profitable channels and expanding the networks over time. While the past 12 months have slowed down some initiatives while we pivot, develop new services and value propositions, or tackle algorithm changes, the diverse portfolio helps immensely in staying on top of growth hacks that work, apply them for our agency and advisory clients, and onboard new business in the process.
If you have any tricks up your sleeve that you deem valuable, hit Reply and let me know.
And if you want to work with me or learn more from me:
- Our DevriX contracts start at $3K/mo (WordPress, SEO, HubSpot, Go-to-market, Experimentation as a Service, and specific B2B offers)
- My community plans for Growth Shuttle are available here
- Haven’t read “MBA Disrupted” yet? Grab a copy.
Yours,
Mario
My Take
✍️ How Billionaires Made Me Switch From Enterprise to Low-Ticket – My formal career started in enterprise-grade engineering – building telecom software, high-end consultancy for banks, working with airline and automotive corporations. But as DevriX continuously grows its B2B growth department deploying GTM strategies and experimentation retainers, we keep cracking the code on high-volume, low-ticket, high-profit solutions.
✍️ Marketing roadmap you need to scale Q4 and grow effectively in 2025 – My team has gathered 80+ proposals for our Experimentation as a Service and Go-to-market solutions we’ve sent from DevriX this year and compiled them into one complete infographic. This incorporates our $20K/mo retainer plan in a nutshell including the 8 core categories:
Newsletter Recommendations
📧 Stacked Marketer – @stackedmarketer is packed with the latest marketing news, stats, recommendations, and tools. Sign up here.
📧 Digiday – @Digiday for all things publishing – media and ad agencies. Sign up here.
Business Strategy
📃Publishers are redoubling their presence on Reddit – Last September, in an initiative called the Helpful Content Update, Google made a number of changes to the algorithm that powers its search results. The update gave heightened search visibility to user forums like Quora and Reddit – Google even added a Forums tab to its search results
📃EU warns Elon Musk ahead of Trump Interview – European Commissioner Thierry Breton on Monday warned X owner Elon Musk that the company may face penalties if it doesn’t address the spread of illegal content. Breton referred to riots that have taken place in the U.K., triggered by disinformation related to a fatal stabbing attack, as well as a conversation Musk is due to hold with Donald Trump.
📃Apple warns Patreon to switch billing system – Apple has threatened to remove creator platform Patreon from the App Store if creators use unsupported third-party billing options or disable transactions on iOS, instead of using Apple’s own in-app purchasing system for Patreon’s subscriptions.
📃Musk accused of data theft – Following last week’s court order from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), over Musk stealing X user’s data to train his AI model, Grok, without their consent, privacy campaign group NOYB (None Of Your Business) has raised nine complaints with the data authorities across nine European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain), for the same thing.
📃Shop Amazon products in TikTok without leaving the app – The app says Amazon product recommendations will soon show up on the “For You” feed. Those who link their TikTok and Amazon accounts will be able to complete checkout on TikTok, which will display real-time pricing, Prime eligibility, delivery estimates, and product details.
Global News
📈Two big Chinese companies, Alibaba (BABA) and JD.com (JD), are set to report results on Thursday, in what’s been a pretty snoozy year for Chinese stocks, with the iShares MSCI China ETF MCHI up just 3%.
- S&P 500: $5,434(+1.68%)
📈Looking at the past four decades, the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage peaked in 1981, rising to roughly 16 percent.
- The average 30-year fixed rate bottomed in 2021 at just under 3 percent.
- For much of 2024, the cost of a typical 30-year fixed mortgage had been in the high-6 and 7 percent range. In August, 30-year rates plummeted to 6.5 percent.
- 30-year mortgage rate: 6.59%
- 15-year mortgage rate: 5.99%
📈In the market’s eyes, the Fed finds itself either poised to head off recession or doomed to repeat the mistakes of its recent past.
The market-implied odds of a single 25 basis-point cut to the target federal funds rate at the Fed’s Sept. 17-18 meeting rose to 52.5% by mid-morning Monday, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch Tool, pricing in a move from the 5.25% to 5.5% range rates have sat for the last 13 months down to 5% to 5.25%.
📰 Here are some of the most prominent headlines this week:
- Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan is stepping down immediately after just a year in the role. He will be replaced by Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol.
- Elon Musk says a denial-of-service attack overwhelming X’s servers has prevented his scheduled interview with Donald Trump from beginning as planned.
- Israel’s credit was downgraded by Fitch Ratings after the agency cited concerns about the ongoing war with Hamas and geopolitical risks.
Investment News
- Questo– a travel startup used by 500,000 people worldwide, is raising €630,000 funding round to scale its gamified event solution.
- CO2Later – raising €600,000 to empower businesses to make impactful sustainability decisions. It has an experienced founding team coming from the UiPath mafia and successfully exited Kubeark, the largest pre-seed round in Romania.
- Maskots – raising €200,000 to expand its pet care app, helping pet owners keep their animals happy and healthy.
Note: Got a round going that you want to feature – your own business or a portfolio company? Get in touch.
Now let’s have a look at the latest top Flippa offers
Best-Selling Weight Management FBA – This Amazon FBA business features a best-selling weight management supplement in the UK and the US.
- Monthly profit: $30,996
- TTM Revenue: $2,167,980
- Business age: 2 years
Quickly Growing Math Tutoring SaaS – This AI-powered math tutoring app generates $8.6M annually from a global user base.
- Monthly profit: $86,506
- MRR: $500,000
- Business age: 3 years
4-Site Blog Portfolio – This blog portfolio contains two websites in humour, one in men’s lifestyle, and one in photography.
- Monthly profit: $7,822
- Monthly page views: 163,319
- Business age: 6 years
Need My Help?
I’m involved with a number of initiatives – here’s what I can do to help you:
🌐Scalable and secure WordPress? DevriX provides WordPress retainers to SMEs, publishers, eCommerce, SaaS, and more. Our plans start from $1,200/mo to $40K/mo for anything from support through engineering, CRO, performance, security, to fractional CXO services and managing the data stacks of large corps.
🚀Want to scale and optimize your business? Growth Shuttle offers personalized advisory plans starting at $600/hr. Tap into my personal pool of business know-how and my data warehouse of industry data.
👥Want access to my blueprints/books and a weekly Slack planning session? Join my Community and grab my Entrepreneurship book.
📈Looking to start a US company? Check out doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Suitable for both foreigners and US citizens and both for residents and non-residents.
📊Have you tried buying and selling digital property? Have a look at Flippa’s marketplace. They offer a vast variety of online businesses for any buyer’s interest. Or if you’re ready for an exit, Flippa provides you with the necessary tools to list your business and close the deal.
💼Looking for investment opportunities? Check out SeedBlink and use Nimity to manage it.
💡Eager to incorporate my recommended solutions? Track my angel investments. Sharing, applying for open roles, or writing reviews helps a ton. And anything else I try to publish on my blog and my courses here!
