MicroStartup's ₹20 Crore a Year Revenue Plan

Setting goals so that we can be motivated to work to achieve them.

The incorporation of my new company MicroStartup Venture Studio Pvt. Ltd. is going on. That’s the final name we got approved. The brand name will be just MicroStartup (.com). We are doing the necessary paperwork. We hope our bank accounts will be ready by the end of this month in another 3 weeks.

I have started thinking about revenue goals and which products should bring how much revenue for the startup. From my previous posts, the approach always includes education, services, software, and platforms.

My thesis for MicroStartup is:

• Education helps build distribution

• Services help bring in cash flow

• The software brings in more cash flow

• Platforms can become billion-dollar companies (but require huge investments)

Education will be under my personal brand Digital Deepak. Services will be under the brand name Deep Marketing.

I have a lot of ideas on how the software and platform should look, but right now it’s too early to discuss that.

We need to generate good cash flow with the agency to become profitable enough to start investing in software and platforms. One of these days I will make a detailed post about my software and platform dreams.

For now, I will be focused on Education and Services only. Within Education also I will focus only on one funnel first (the startup founders funnel).

The table below gives a projection of how we intend to build the funnels and the major products in each category.

I have not included the assets that we might use for marketing. For example, I might launch a book and make sales but the revenue will not be significant to be included in revenue projects. The revenue from book sales will make up for the marketing costs of the book.

Education (Digital Deepak)

Education is a great category and I have a lot of experience in creating courses, memberships, and programs. But one of the biggest challenges in education is that unless you keep fuelling your profits back into distribution, you will not be able to scale.

Education is built around a personal brand and the topic is based on the mentor’s experience in life.

My experience revolves around digital marketing and startups. So it is obvious that I should be selling digital marketing courses and startup courses. But it just won’t be courses, it will include mastermind programs as well.

Digital Marketing Niche

Until now, our success has been in the digital marketing training niche. I started my training career with a Google Ads Mastery course back in 2016.

In the digital marketing niche, I will be following the T-shaped digital marketer model. Anyone in the digital marketing niche should first become a generalist. This includes all the topics in digital marketing so that they know how all the parts interact with each other.

Micro Internship Program (Horizontal of the T)

The Micro Internship program will cover the horizontal of the T. It’s like general medicine. No one can become a specialist doctor without becoming a generalist first. Similarly, no one can become a specialist in a specific digital marketing category (like email marketing) without having an idea about the other parts of digital marketing such as content and paid advertising.

The Micro Internship program will be cohort-based. We have already trained more than 12,000 students in the first avatar of the Micro Internship program. We know that there is a demand for people to learn digital marketing and they want to get jobs, internships, and freelance projects.

Mastery Club ® (Vertical of the T)

Once people learn the basics, then they want to go into specializations. There are more than 10 topics in digital marketing that people can master. But we can’t launch 10 cohort-based programs because that would be chaotic, for our customers and for us.

So I’ve decided to bundle everything under MasteryClub® (we’ve even got a trademark registered for MasteryClub).

The Mastery courses in digital marketing that will be part of MasteryClub®

• Google Ads Mastery

• Facebook Ads Mastery (Check out the sales page)

• Sales Mastery

• SEO Mastery

• Content Creation Mastery

• Email Marketing Mastery

• WhatsApp Automation Mastery

• ChatGPT and AI Mastery

• Community Management Mastery

• Copywriting Mastery

All the above courses will be self-serve courses and they will not have individual cohorts. However, they will have Weekly Q&A sessions where people can get their doubts cleared. MasteryClub will also have an exclusive community.

Each of these Mastery Courses is priced at Rs.25,000. The course bundle is sold at a discount so that the avg. price of each course comes down to 10,000. MasteryClub® will be a yearly membership but most of the sales will be presented as a lifetime membership where new courses will be added in the future and members will have access to the content.

Digital Marketing Club

I am not too sure about this right now because I will be having a community for startups called Inner Circle. I don’t want entry-level membership products to overlap with each other.

Or maybe Digital Marketing Club will only be an online membership while Micro Startup Inner Circle will also have offline activities across many cities. I will take a call on this later. This kind of ambiguity is common when building a startup.

The 3 Major Customer Segments

The Digital Marketing Niche is focused on beginners who want jobs or freelance opportunities. The Startup niche is focused on new business owners. And the agency will be for established business owners who are already making 10 lakhs a month in revenue.

Startup Founders Niche

To grow the education business and get more sophisticated customers, I had to pivot into a more lucrative niche. Based on my experience, the digital marketing niche serves more of beginners and working professionals and there is a limit to the ticket size of the products that we can sell to them.

The goal is not just to make more revenue. The first goal is to help people. And if I want to help people get financially free, it’s not going to happen with jobs or freelancing.

For most people who are here, the only way to get wealthy is to start a business. My funnel aligns with Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant. (I will ignore investors for now).

When people graduate from college and just starting out, their best bet to start making money is to get a job. Then people want to become self-employed (freelancers). This is where the Micro Internship and Mastery Club will be focused. Beyond that, people want to become business owners (Startup Founders).

I also feel this is the right time for me to get into the startup coaching niche because now I have more than 7 years of experience in building my own startup(s).

A significant portion of customers from Micro Internship and Mastery Club will upgrade to my Startup Launchpad Program. But a lot of people also might want to build startups right away (the ones who have 5-10 years of work experience in corporate and are not looking for technical or beginner courses). That’s why the Startup Launchpad program needs its own top-of-the-funnel and trip-wire to get aspiring startup founders directly into my funnel.

Ideally, in terms of the timeline of building this, I will just focus on 1-thing for now: The Startup Funnel. Once this funnel is built and optimized, I will re-build Micro Internship and Mastery Club for the other customer categories.

After analyzing a lot of other successful funnels like Siddharth Rajsekar’s Funnel. I have come to the conclusion that the best funnel is simple and has the following 5 parts.

The 5 Stages of a Coaching Funnel:

• Free content for branding and reach (blogs, podcasts, YouTube, Social Media, guest appearances).

• Opt-in Content for Email List Building. Usually lead magnets like free email courses, tools, and calculators.

• Trip Wire to get people to transact with you. Printed books, community memberships, and weekly exclusive webinars for members. (Usually between Rs.500 to Rs.5000)

• Front-end Product that helps you fund your time, ad cost, and losses that you make selling the trip wire. (Priced at at least 1 lakh)

• Back-end product that is usually a high-level mastermind membership for your true fans (Priced at 3 lakhs to 10 lakhs). Most of the sales of the back-end product will be profits. One can choose to reinvest back into the funnel for list-building.

Let’s deep dive one by one:

1. Free Content (Branding and Reach)

The funnel starts with free content for this niche (Startups). This article is also a part of it. Free content will include:

• YouTube Channels (English and Tamil) where I publish the journey of building my startup

• Digital Deepak Blog and Newsletter

• Guest appearances in events, podcasts, and posts on other blogs

• Social media posts (X, LinkedIn, Instagram)

The problem with perpetually posting just the free content is that you cannot get people into your funnel to upsell them to other products that make revenue.

Many YouTubers with millions of followers do not have a funnel. They try to make revenue from their distribution through simple sponsors on their videos.

All the free content will lead to the opt-in page where we convert visitors into subscribers.

2. Opt-in Content (Lead Magnets)

Lead magnets help me get people into my email distribution. An email list is much more valuable than followers, fans, and subscribers because the platform cannot restrict my reach. Email subscribers are my users.

When you have subscribers on YouTube, the subscribers are just YouTube’s users. That’s why with a new video or post, you cannot reach all the subscribers. The algorithm will make a decision.

Lead Magnets to bring people into my email list will include:

• 30-Day Email Course on MicroStartups (main lead magnet for this niche)

• In-depth Guides and ebooks

• Calculators (like revenue and profitability calculators)

• Hiring tools (like job description maker, and offer letter builder)

• Free software tools (Like a landing page or form builder)

• Taxes calculator for startups

All the tools cost money to build. Free lead magnets cost time to build. We offer value first and then lead people into the trip wire.

3. Trip Wire: MicroStartup Inner Circle (Inspiration)

The Inner Circle membership is a low entry fee community product that brings people (aspiring startup founders in this case) into my world.

What people get in the Inner Circle for Rs.999

• Membership in the Inner Circle community

• Local meetups

• Printed Book: MicroStartup Playbook

• Community Membership

• Weekly exclusive calls for the community

What I get by enrolling people in Inner Circle

• An opportunity to build trust among the audience that I am the right startup mentor for them

• An opportunity to intensify their desire to join Startup Launchpad.

• A Qualifier before they join the Startup Launchpad program. We will book sales calls only with the most active members. This helps in efficient sales because we can identify the leads with high lead scores.

• A pipeline of potential clients for Startup Launchpad that is engaged until they convert.

The content in the trip wire will not be structured and it is more for inspiration than for achieving goals.

4. Front-end: Startup Launchpad Program (Start)

The Startup Launchpad program will be the main revenue maker in my education funnel. It will be a 3-6 month program with services included in it.

The goal of this program will be to help people launch their MicroStartup and start making revenue within 3 months. This helps them get a proof of concept that they can build their own startup. This will be a perpetual cohort eventually, but to start with we will have timed-cohorts (batches starting and ending at certain dates).

5. Back-end: Mastermind Program (Grow)

The mastermind program will be for people who are consistently making revenue and want to reach 10 Lakhs a month in revenue. They have started and now they want to grow.

The mastermind program will have:

• Dedicated account manager

• Weekly mastermind meetings (not webinars) with me

• 1-on-1 consulting calls with me and the core team

• Offline events (2-3 times a year)

Once they reach a level where they are consistently making 10+ lakhs a month in revenue, they will go to the next level.

6. Partner Program: MicroStartup Mafia (Scale)

We will invest in 10% of the startups that go through the mastermind program. They don’t need to pay us. We might help them with services from Deep Marketing. We will get investors for them and make them a portfolio company of MicroStartup Venture Studio. This will be around 5-10 startups in the first 5 years and not more than that.

Here, we will only make money when they raise multiple rounds of funding or have an exit. That’s why becoming part of the MicroStartup Mafia is a guaranteed road to success and wealth for the founders of these startups. This is inspired by Alex Hormozi’s Acquisition.com where he takes equity in companies and helps them grow.

Services: Deep Marketing (for Mature Businesses)

Businesses that are already making 10+ lakhs a month in revenue do not need to go through the Startup Launchpad program. They might become part of my mastermind.

But for larger businesses, the best option is for them to become our retainer clients where we help them build, manage, and grow their revenues.

Deep Marketing will have 2 major offerings:

• A 30-day sprint which gives them a 12-month road map and consulting

• A monthly retainer service where we help them with digital marketing (the pricing of this will vary depending on the work commitment).

Once we hit our first 5 clients in Deep Marketing, I will make a separate post about agency growth strategies.

Now the revenue projections look much more realistic, doesn’t it?

I will keep updating you as I try to reach the goal. We will put honest efforts into this as a team and tell you about the challenges that we face along the way.

And maybe, just maybe, if you’re reading this right now, you can also become a part of our team or invest in MicroStartup as an investor.

There is no doubt that there is an element of luck that will be involved in reaching the goal. But we won’t depend on the luck alone. We will increase the probability of us getting lucky with hard work, focus, and consistency.

Wish my team and me… good luck.

Thanks for reading.