Starting a New "MicroStartup" From Scratch (In Public)

I will be building a new micro startup from scratch and I will do it in public.

I strongly believe in the saying: practice what you preach. While most people have enjoyed my digital marketing training courses, I am not happy and satisfied just selling courses.

The Micro Internship Program covers the topics in the “horizontal” of the T-shaped digital marketer. The MasteryClub program covers Mastery courses in each subject - and forms the vertical of the T. However, these two programs focus on helping people get jobs or freelance opportunities. I have enough authority to teach digital marketing because it is documented that I have worked in many companies as a digital marketing manager and I have the expertise in digital marketing.

The next level of education is for those who want to start their own agency or startup. This is a much more sophisticated crowd and they are more skeptical of “business coaches”. From my market research and observation of the current landscape, most business coaches have only one business and that’s their business coaching. They call themselves successful business coaches but they do not do anything else apart from business coaching.

The business coaches will ask their students/clients to start a new business in a micro-niche, however, they won’t encourage them to start doing business coaching themselves to other clients. If everyone becomes a business coach and no one is doing any real business, then we will have a world full of business coaching and “business coaching businesses”. There won’t be anyone left to create products and services for the world.

A Yoga teacher cannot teach Yoga without practicing Yoga himself. A guitar player cannot teach guitar without playing guitar himself. A cricket coach doesn’t teach cricket without having been a cricketer himself. But we have so many business coaches to teach business without doing any business. We don’t even have a lot of people who had a successful business earlier and are now teaching. Even in that case, many of their teachings will be outdated because the business world is changing all the time.

Yes, it is of course documented that I have built my own company/startup in the name of PixelTrack, but it is not authoritative enough. Do you know how much we made in revenues and how much we spent? Do you know our balance sheet? Do you know about the challenges that we have gone through on a daily and weekly basis? What if I can show this while I am doing it? But before we talk about my new company, let’s see what will happen to the current company PixelTrack.

What will happen to PixelTrack?

You know that I already have an agency called PixelTrack. We have run this company for more than 6 years now. We have learned a lot in this process. The biggest learning was that you cannot offer all the digital marketing services to all types of clients. You need to niche down.

PixelTrack has now niched down to sales training under the brand “RemoteClosers.com”. And who is a better person to run PixelTrack than

Jayant Kumar Padhi

.

Jayant is training people on the skill of closing using his Remote Closing Mastery program and he is offering B2B services to businesses helping them build a robust sales team. I will continue to have my stake (equity) at PixelTrack but I will not be running the day-to-day operations of it anymore. I will continue to seek Jayant’s help in building a sales team for myself and continue to refer clients to him through my brand and distribution.

The New Agency (Deep Marketing)

My new digital marketing agency (Deep Marketing) will focus more on the top of the funnel. I will help clients build the CATT funnel for their brand. It will be focused on email marketing and community to nurture the leads to a level where they are ready to buy. If the product’s complexity and price demands 1-to-1 sales calls for closing, I will pass the baton to Jayant (RemoteClosers).

The full Deep Marketing funnel has CATT + OST = R. But if I am providing services, it will be focused on CATT because I can’t do much about onboarding, servicing, and transformation for my clients. They have to do it in-house.

The services stack of the Deep Marketing agency will include:

• Content

  • Building Lead Magnets

  • Publishing blog posts

  • Creating landing pages

  • Helping them with social media posts

• Attention

  • Driving paid ads traffic via Facebook Ads and Google Ads (May be LinkedIn ads and Twitter ads too)

  • SEO (on-page and off-page optimization)

  • Partner traffic and media buying

  • Solo Ads (ads on other’s email newsletters)

• Trust

  • Engaging the leads via email newsletters

  • Creating Drip marketing sequences (like 10-day email courses)

  • Community engagement (online and offline events)

• Transaction

  • Converting warm nurtured leads into sales via copywriting

  • Sales calls

  • Sales meetings

I will also partner with other agencies and freelancers to deliver stellar results to our clients. For example, if we need closers for our clients, they will be delivered by RemoteClosers.

And as I am building this agency, I will also be teaching people how to build and run the agency. In the long term, I will roll over the profits from the agency to build a software company but that’s probably 3-5 years away from now.

I might build software that my agency needs for its clients. An agency will have a limited scale and beyond a certain point adding more manpower and headcount to the agency will become inefficient.

The Holding Company (MicroStartup.com)

Obviously, I won’t be making revenues just with the agency. I will also be selling my coaching programs under the brand DigitalDeepak. When I have enough money to invest, I will invest it in software and platform building.

All these activities will come under my “MicroStartup”. And I will be showing you how I am building it from scratch, from Day 1 of this entire plan.

MicroStartup will be my holding company for all these activities and each activity will have its own brand name. I will reveal the brand names for the software and platform later.

You might ask, why don’t I start with software directly if building a high-value software company like HubSpot is my ultimate goal? Most of the people who start out building software do not have the distribution or the product-market fit. They also have to invest heavily in development and to raise capital they end up liquidating a huge portion of their company to VCs. I have seen so many software companies fail like that and I am not ready to make that mistake.

My approach to start with services and education might take more time, but I am ready to be patient. Build it once, build it right.

Building MicroStartup and Deep Marketing in Public

What I do with the agency and the education, I will be publishing updates weekly and monthly. It will have two levels of transparency, one for the world for everyone to see and one for the Inner Circle.

The Inner Circle will have more details about my decision-making process, and the challenges I face and I will also seek advice from the inner circle on micro decisions.

I will write another blog post shortly charting out my plans for the software and platform. The plan I have laid out is 90% and it might have some changes going forward. And if there are any changes, I will write about that too.

Are you excited to follow me on this journey?

What do you think about this plan?

Please comment below.