My community pivots in 2024 – a GTM case study
I’m bullish on experimentation: what worked in 2021-2022 hasn’t been working in 2024.
- Google’s Helpful Content Update tanked hundreds of thousands of sites – many over 90%. Everyone affected relying on organic was left high and dry.
- LinkedIn reach – along with other social networks – has been going down for most.
- ROAS on paid ads (Google and Meta) is no longer sustainable this year. The volume of pipeline generated simply isn’t there.
- AI has been blasting emails, texts, and robocalls continuously at scale.
We’ve seen dozens of clients firsthand struggling, going through layoffs, reducing contracts, stopping service lines over the past year.
And I met agencies charging $150 – $200 per hour now selling at $60 – $80 to sustain until Q4 (virtually breakeven or running in the red while managing burn rates).
2024 hasn’t been kind to B2B.
What worked on the agency front?
In terms of agency value proposition, our internal experimentation engine helped us productize and operationalize:
- Experimentation as a Service
- Digital GTM solutions
- 1-off HubSpot implementations
- 7-day outreach launcher
Our portfolio of publishers was affected by SEO and B2B SaaS by VC rounds and unsustainable outbound journeys. What our newer cohort of customers looks like is different:
- Businesses in the military space
- Payment gateway providers
- Non-profits
- Businesses in tourism/entertainment
- Local businesses
- Fintech/trading businesses
- Specialized consulting/coaching businesses
The R&D workload has decreased (cheaper solutions with more existing plugins and tools vs. more innovative R&D with big data, custom partnership platforms, and other solutions).
Marketing is exploding – SEO contracts, funnel management, A/B testing and CRO strategies through experimentation, refining ICPs and offers, targeting new channels and markets.
My personal portfolio of side businesses is growing organically – this represents hosting resell, AI image generation, business directories, publishing network management (links, PR, interviews). Demand for proven and expensive channels is lower, which is why lower-cost solutions are on the rise.
Growth Shuttle plan elasticity
I’ve been experimenting heavily on the advisory plans over the past 9 months as well. Having spent 600+ hours of team effort and $40,000+ on campaigns/ads to test new offers, I’ve been shuffling several advisory options this year.
Quick context: Growth Shuttle is my advisory business – I’ve been consulting since 2008 and have several advisory retainers + regular ad-hoc strategy calls.
It generated about $400K in 2022 and some ongoing clients churned while cutting costs, but it’s still going strong in the six figures. In the meantime, I’ve been stretching the elasticity by testing out different pricing models aiming to achieve 6 figures each.
In other words, each community/advisory offer has to bring $10K/mo as a baseline.
It’s not fully scaled yet, but I’ve closed contracts for each vertical while testing the offers.
Here are the winning advisory plans I’m still testing with (that haven’t been ruled out or merged yet):
1. Low-ticket, High volume
My starter Slack access plans at $99/mo and $349/mo growing my community.
Intent: provide cheaper solutions than my standard rates + no calls whatsoever (my async model in action). And bringing a diversified cohort of founders and entrepreneurs who aren’t high-scale yet, but definitely need professional help.
There are 114 members in Slack – most are free through my MBA book, and some are subscribed to my plans and have access to playbooks or goal-setting.
2. Monthly async advisory
Dedicated 1:1 time on Slack or email threads with founders and executives (in a couple of cases, along with their co-founders or executive assistants).
$1,800/mo helping as an external advisor.
This is my default plan over the past year – and it’s often picked by DevriX clients who need additional strategic support from me or prospects who aren’t ready yet, but need an advisor to help them get there.
3. Fractional CXO
This is the most time-intensive one (and I have one contract in a fractional capacity), currently selling at $7,500.
I can realistically juggle up to 4 at a time while providing enough support, hop on calls (my nemesis), work with executive teams, manage additional resources (which often resort to DevriX), organize PR campaigns through my other businesses and whatnot.
The trick here is that this used to be in high demand in 2020-2021 by Series A startups and fast-growing businesses who need strategic support, but it’s more cost-prohibitive in this environment unless I have a previous relationship with the founders.
4. A productized advisory package
One of the recent pilots I’ve been testing includes:
- My async advisory plan (currently at $1,800)
- A collection of 40+ playbooks I’ve developed over the years (business strategy, managing teams, hiring and VAs, operations, marketing, business plan development, and many more)
- A couple of in-house tools for developing ICPs and personas and offers
- Campaign development
- Competitive research (custom dashboards tracking a number of KPIs across competitors and unlocking GTM strategies)
- P&L review
This sells annually in the range of $30,000 to $72,000 – the lowest plan being comparatively similar to the advisory while the highest plan also includes my brand ambassador participation – public recommendations and support, making referrals, strategic plugs across my businesses, PR and case studies, and other goodies.
It’s a healthy mix of advisory, tooling, playbooks, upcoming courses, and scales predictably with limited time on my side.
Experimentations = Revenue
We made a radical shift in both DevriX and Growth Shuttle with plan pivots and revamping value prop from R&D and tech strategy to go-to-market and growth strategy.
Some of my clients also reach out for LinkedIn strategy, content outlines, setting up hold cos or US LLCs effectively for new ventures, testing offers and different markets effectively (going down or pivoting offers).
Without the experimentation mindset, we would have been hit dramatically, unable to sustain the 2023-2024 storm.
Yet, finding what works now and positioning ourselves through a dozen different experiments led to profitable solutions – for us and our clients.
If you want to learn more about our current setup and solutions, hit “Reply” and I’ll let you in on the internals.
Yours,
Mario
My Take
✍️Peak Times for Business Advisors – I’ve been ranking for dozens of terms around business advisory for years. And incoming applications come at predictable times. This process applies to agency services, tourism companies, launching LLCs or tax consultants, and other seasonal activities.
✍️7 Common Marketing Fallacies – Humans are bound to memorize mental models faster than fundamentals. Marketing paradigms aren’t universally applicable. If this was the case, we would all count on a single channel, one specific content format, one strategy, one schedule, one email template…
✍️3 Ways B2B Tech Companies Grow – As PPC becomes oversaturated, it’s time to return to foundational marketing principles. Learn how to build a strong brand, create valuable content, and establish thought leadership to stay ahead in a competitive market.
Newsletter Recommendations
📧A Media Operator – @amediaoperator for long-form analysis of top media firms, trends, SPACs, etc. Sign up here for topics on how to build digital media companies.
📧 Neil Patel – Special mention of @neilpatel here (though he doubled down on video in 2022). His blog is a goldmine. I religiously follow all of his content. You can sign up for his newsletter from here.
Business Strategy
📃Fortune 500’s fear of AI – 56% of Fortune 500 companies see AI as a risk to business, rather than an opportunity, which is a marked increase from just 9% who thought that in 2022, incidentally the year ChatGPT arrived
📃Google Ads removes audience recommendations – Google Ads officially eliminated the audience recommendations feature from the Insights tab, a move that removes automated suggestions for targeting specific audiences.
📃Google confirms ranking bug- Google unleashed the much-anticipated August 2024 core update Thursday morning. Less than 24 hours later, Google Search confirmed a ranking bug, which is still ongoing.
📃Longest time to close rounds since 2012- The time lapse between funding rounds for early-stage startups has reached the highest point in more than a decade. That was the finding from a Crunchbase survey of U.S. companies that raised Series A funding and went on to close a Series B. The median time lapse between rounds in 2024 was 28 months — by far the longest span since 2012.
📃Stocks notch longest win streaks of 2024- US stocks closed at session highs on Monday after posting their best week in a year as the markets continued to rally in a sharp turnaround from their early August sell-off.
Global News
📈Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign rolled out a policy proposal on Monday, a plan to lift the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%.
You can tell how seriously the market took it: after a proposal that would decrease domestic earnings by 9%, the S&P 500 SPX climbed 1%, to its fifth-highest finish on record. Even given that the likelihood of Harris winning is roughly 50-50 and that betting markets give Republicans a 72% chance of taking back the Senate, it still was a remarkable snore.
- S&P 500: $5,608(+4.94%)
📈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: 6.58%
- 15-year mortgage rate: 6.01%
📈Federal Reserve officials gathering at the annual central banking conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, this week can take some satisfaction that the U.S. unemployment rate, at 4.3%, remains low by historical standards.
But it usually is: The U.S. experience of unemployment since the late 1940s has involved jobless rates that far more often than not are below the 5.7% long-run average until they rise fast and far above it, a phenomenon Fed officials are worried about repeating.
📰Here are some of the most prominent headlines this week:
- Disgraced former Rep. George Santos has pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft. He faces at least 2 years in prison.
- Columbia University President Minouche Shafik resigns months after protests over the Israel-Hamas war roiled the campus.
- The US has concluded Iran is behind the hack and leak operation targeting the Trump and Biden-Harris campaigns, intelligence agencies have said.
Investment News
- InstaSun– raising €200,000 to scale its innovative 360° Sun Protection Dispenser, offering advanced UV protection and premium skincare.
- 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
Well-Aged Antivirus Blog – This antivirus comparison content site drives $885K annually through affiliate sales and has achieved double digit profit growth, year-on-year, since 2021.
- Annual profit: $282,000
- Active subscribers: 400
- Business age: 2 years
Need My Help?
I’m involved with a number of initiatives – here’s what I can do to help you:
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🚀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.
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💼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!
