Currently over $2 million in annual revenue and how I got here.

lyannastark said:
yeah @Mayhem I know what you mean... I have the same issues in my local space. I guess in third world countries not that many people are willing to use their credit cards online like that, for fear they'll get taken advantage of... So I guess its just one of those things...
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First all our industrial raw materials are stolen with a cheap price from those countries you call them Third world, so I wouldn't go on politics here (we owe them a lot).

For non industrial hard labor countries people have a saving mentality not as like in first word countries a consumerist mentality.

So even if your offers are bellow low in USA or EU, they are seen as non reachable or money consuming offers.

This is my own theory and study so it may look non relevant to you but it still my own take and by experience on some marketing offers I did which proved to me that if we give them more money we can gain more consumer base in those third world or under development countries.
 
>What's your process for market research?

None. Waste of time for local (And largely a waste of time in general). For local, in the U.S at least. The question is:

1) Do people pay to get their homes cleaned?

The answer is yes, no matter where you are. That's it. Market research to me is a waste of time and just a way to punt things down the road. I don't even consider the competition. No matter where you are it's going to be horrendously bad for local services. The competition is laughable man. I had 3 people that I mentored start in NYC. NYC, a place crawling with competition. Their revenues for the month of November:

$120K -m**********s.com
$80K - c********s.com
$60K -s***********s.com
So I say all of this to say: That entire market research/competitive analysis thing is a waste of time in 99% of the cases, and is 100% a waste of time in local services. The competition almost universally, sucks!
 
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Wow, okay. So basically this just comes down to smart keyword targeting and effective landing page design + ease of booking?
 
If so, then as these markets get more competitive w/ this business model, market research will have to come into play. If everyone's got sleek landing pages + easy booking, you're gonna have to start targeting unaddressed pain points, adjust for competitive pricing, etc. to stay ahead (requires some modicum of market research).

Right now, optimized LPs and easy booking seem to be your only primary unique selling proposition (powerful, but I see this becoming less of a selling point in the future).
 
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Capital said:
Wow, okay. So basically this just comes down to smart keyword targeting and effective landing page design + ease of booking?
Click to expand...

Yup, effective landing page, ease of booking, and marketing (keywords, seo, review sites, social media)
 
Capital said:
If so, then as these markets get more competitive w/ this business model, market research will have to come into play. If everyone's got sleek landing pages + easy booking, you're gonna have to start targeting unaddressed pain points, adjust for competitive pricing, etc. to stay ahead (requires some modicum of market research).

Right now, optimized LPs and easy booking seem to be your only primary unique selling proposition (powerful, but I see this becoming less of a selling point in the future).
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Yeah if the future is the year 2060. Right now 99% of sites do not have online booking in a multi-billion dollar industry, where most providers do not even have a website, and the ones that do are mostly absolutely horribly. When market research becomes needed, I would have already earned $100 million.
 
Awesome, thanks for the response. You've certainly stumbled upon a game changer. The moral of the story: Take fucking action.

It makes you wonder how much opportunity is being missed because of useless fear based friction and untested assumptions about certain markets.
 
Capital said:
Awesome, thanks for the response. You've certainly stumbled upon a game changer. The moral of the story: Take fucking action.

It makes you wonder how much opportunity is being missed because of useless fear based friction and untested assumptions about certain markets.
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Yeah man, this is always the moral of the story: Take fucking action. Anything else is bullshit as far as I'm concerned. lol

Yeah, I think the biggest thing people do to talk themselves out of an opportunity is say "the market is oversaturated". LOL I'm glad that's the case, because people like me can just move from oversaturated market to oversaturated market and kill it over and over again. LOL
 
Hey Man,

Great Thread. So what is your primary marketing channel online? PPC/PPV/Social etc?? and also how do you reduce churn.

Cheers
 
@localcasestudy Great to have you here! I read through the reddit posts and my one burning question is How are you landing local service guys to do work under your company? I have about 4 lead gen sites right now that I have developed out, and continually getting leads for daily/weekly. When I first launched, I had the issue where I had so many calls, the guy who was taking all of them stopped answering and those leads went to waste. This was back in the summer, so I decided to hop on home advisor and dig through some contractors who were in the same field and I called about 10 of them and all of them told me they were not interested in additional work/leads. It boggled my mind, i offered them 2 weeks free and then flat rate per month for leads from my site and NONE of them wanted them. Am i doing something wrong here? hahah!

anyways, great post. I'm in the local lead gen, but I would like to RUN the company w/ my own employee's rather than fuss around with selling Leads etc. I'm new in the SEO/web game and still learning all the ropes, but so far Im pleased with the outcomes. I can see this really take off.

Thanks for your info and knowledge, its a total gold mine thus far and WELCOME :wink:
 
aussiefly said:
Hey Man,

Great Thread. So what is your primary marketing channel online? PPC/PPV/Social etc?? and also how do you reduce churn.

Cheers
Click to expand...
He does adwords, FB PPC, and local SEO. Check his Reddit thread, no need for him to repeat easily accessible information.

Lazy bastard :wink:
 
red_devil010 said:
@localcasestudy Great to have you here! I read through the reddit posts and my one burning question is How are you landing local service guys to do work under your company? I have about 4 lead gen sites right now that I have developed out, and continually getting leads for daily/weekly. When I first launched, I had the issue where I had so many calls, the guy who was taking all of them stopped answering and those leads went to waste. This was back in the summer, so I decided to hop on home advisor and dig through some contractors who were in the same field and I called about 10 of them and all of them told me they were not interested in additional work/leads. It boggled my mind, i offered them 2 weeks free and then flat rate per month for leads from my site and NONE of them wanted them. Am i doing something wrong here? hahah!
Click to expand...

Wow, yeah. That was a potential problem I was thinking about earlier. You'd have to find dedicated service providers, otherwise their lack of ambition/work ethic reflects on your lead-gen brand.
 
red_devil010 said:
@localcasestudy Great to have you here! I read through the reddit posts and my one burning question is How are you landing local service guys to do work under your company? I have about 4 lead gen sites right now that I have developed out, and continually getting leads for daily/weekly. When I first launched, I had the issue where I had so many calls, the guy who was taking all of them stopped answering and those leads went to waste. This was back in the summer, so I decided to hop on home advisor and dig through some contractors who were in the same field and I called about 10 of them and all of them told me they were not interested in additional work/leads. It boggled my mind, i offered them 2 weeks free and then flat rate per month for leads from my site and NONE of them wanted them. Am i doing something wrong here? hahah!

anyways, great post. I'm in the local lead gen, but I would like to RUN the company w/ my own employee's rather than fuss around with selling Leads etc. I'm new in the SEO/web game and still learning all the ropes, but so far Im pleased with the outcomes. I can see this really take off.

Thanks for your info and knowledge, its a total gold mine thus far and WELCOME :wink:
Click to expand...

Hi, so far you're doing some things very right. You've figured out how to get leads. So your landing page is working, your marketing is working, your conversion process is working. Good stuff all around.

Now all you need to do is STOP trying to sell those leads. This is what I would do:

1) Post a nice looking looking page on your website to take applications for people to do the work. Here's mine from my lawn site: http://lawntribe.com/joinus/

2) Post a nice ad on craigslist (Gigs section) looking to find folks. Here's what handy uses for homecleaners: https://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/lab/4821103256.html

3) Person clicks and applies to the job. Contact, them interview them and get things moving on that end.

4) Change your conversion process to turn those leads into jobs and start sending them off to your folks.

5) Profit : -)
 
Hey
Great thread mate, thanks a lot for sharing experience!
Question, what is your cut on cleaning services for example? Or what would be a reasonable one?
 
localcasestudy said:
>What's your process for market research?

None. Waste of time for local (And largely a waste of time in general). For local, in the U.S at least. The question is:

1) Do people pay to get their homes cleaned?

The answer is yes, no matter where you are. That's it. Market research to me is a waste of time and just a way to punt things down the road. I don't even consider the competition. No matter where you are it's going to be horrendously bad for local services. The competition is laughable man. I had 3 people that I mentored start in NYC. NYC, a place crawling with competition. Their revenues for the month of November:

$120K -maidmarines.com
$80K - checkmaids.com
$60K -synergymaids.com
So I say all of this to say: That entire market research/competitive analysis thing is a waste of time in 99% of the cases, and is 100% a waste of time in local services. The competition almost universally, sucks!
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^^ You have to be careful here, just because 3 companies can do $60K to $120K in NYC, doesn't mean those numbers will transfer over to some random city like one in Mississippi. NYC has 8+ million people, the most any city in Mississippi has 175K, with most averaging about 5K people. I purposely chose Mississippi since it's the poorest state in the US.

Basic market research is needed to know whether there IS a market. If there is competition, that's a great sign, but depending where you are attacking locally disregarding market research can be disastrous for someone starting out and not able to properly gauge whether there is even an audience for the service or if they'll even be willing to pay.
 
@CCarter That was an example to show this:
What you think is an environment that is saturated competitively is usually not the case. It's the biggest cognitive failure people make in assessing a situation. So here you had 3 companies start at the same time, competing against each other in probably one of the craziest cities in the country and they still all won. That was the point. It was a point on how people routinely mis-guage competition (not that the new york market is going to be comparable to the Mississippi market.)

To your other point, If you guys are still in the "basic market research is needed" stage, there's not much more I can say. It's just not how I work, and I stand by saying:
1) It's a waste of time at local
2) It's a pre-cursor to inaction and an excuse to kick the can down the road, and
3) It provides information that is overly relied on that often has zero impact on actual outcomes.

That's my take. This stuff ends up being a project that should be titled "How to justify my inaction!"

So while the 'basic market research" guys are wrapping up their 3 month 75 page economic analysis, complete with demographic data, per capita income, employment rates, market saturation, competitive landscape, and blah blah blah, and coming up with all the ways why it probably won't work, I would have already launched and made my first $50K.

I've seen this over and and over man. : -)
 
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Example here @CCarter .

I found WetShaveClub for sale on reddit.

This guy also saw it, completely mis-guaged the competition and passed on it. I bought it the same day I saw it and got to work. 7 months later we're well over $200K in revenue, with $60K in December. Here's the convo:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ouhibmbyd6xdifi/Screenshot 2014-12-28 10.46.07.png?dl=0

This isn't a perfect example, but I can't say it enough man. There is no rewards for research. Only the doers are rewarded.
 
localcasestudy said:
To your other point, If you guys are still in the "basic market research is needed" stage, there's not much more I can say. It's just not how I work, and I stand by saying:
1) It's a waste of time at local
2) It's a pre-cursor to inaction and an excuse to kick the can down the road, and
3) It provides information that is overly relied on that has zero impact on actual outcomes.

That's my take.

So while the 'basic market research" guys are wrapping up their 3 month 75 page economic analysis, complete with demographic data, per capita income, employment rates, market saturation, competitive landscape, and blah blah blah, I would have already launched and made my first $50K.

Thanks man.
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I agree if someone is doing 3 months of market research will a full SWOT analysis - that's operation isn't going to take off no matter what. When I talk about market research is me spending 4-6 hours of intense research to see if a business is viable. You should be able to see within 2-3 hours if a business will work or not.

Fact is the old days of SWOT analysis are over if not at least coming to an end since the internet provides almost all the data you need to figure out if there is competition, meaning it's a viable business, within a few keystrokes.

You have to be careful with "don't do any market research" cause someone might take that literally - and not even take 10 mins to figure out if their business is viable then find themselves selling vibrators in Utah (example). I've seen it happen dozens of times, they start a business not realizing there is a reason that type of services will not work in a location. If there is competition - that means there is a market and you can "jump" in since they've already done the leg work of making people aware of a new concept.
 
localcasestudy said:
Example here @CCarter .

I found WetShaveClub for sale on reddit.

This guy also saw it, completely mis-guaged the competition and passed on it. I bought it the same day I saw it and got to work. 7 months later we're well over $200K in revenue, with $60K in December. Here's the convo:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ouhibmbyd6xdifi/Screenshot 2014-12-28 10.46.07.png?dl=0

This isn't a perfect example, but I can't say it enough man. There is no rewards for research. Only the doers are rewarded.
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^^ But that's not locally - and I definitely agree, I wouldn't be scare cause of competition at any level, they just validates there is an idea.
 
@localcasestudy I saw you on reddit a few months back, nice to see you here. My question about your local lead gen sites is related to your employee structure. I'm guessing you're not doing all this yourself, so I wanted to ask how big of a team you found you needed, and their roles, for running a 120K/mo lead gen site?
 
Yeah I feel the same way local or no. Research of this type is a waste of time. I really think school has fucked people over in many regards, and this is one of them.

As for figuring out viability I speak about this in that post as well. It's not about not thinking about viability for a few minutes it's about the extended bullshit research that people go through and end up talking themselves out of opportunities.

Bottomline: I think the risk of skipping the bullshit research and getting to work is LESS than the risk of conducting the bullshit research and talking yourself out of the opportunity.
 
RiverStyx said:
@localcasestudy I saw you on reddit a few months back, nice to see you here. My question about your local lead gen sites is related to your employee structure. I'm guessing you're not doing all this yourself, so I wanted to ask how big of a team you found you needed, and their roles, for running a 120K/mo lead gen site?
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Hey @RiverStyx thanks man. So I have a team of 4 people that work on this with me so it frees up my time. I only work on my main local site now for about 1 hour per week. I'm on to other projects: wetshaveclub, launch27, lawntribe, and launching these two in the new years:

http://www.branddesignz.com/hellocarpets/hellocarpets/
http://verycreative.info/marian_h/backpacks/wp/

Zero market research @CCarter . I predict $50K each in the first 6 months. Let's see what happens! : -)
 
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@localcasestudy thanks for the great info. i've pondered on hiring people to do the work for me and take a cut of the profits, but for the type of businesses I generate leads for, they are not reoccurring items (house cleaning, lawn care, etc) but rather 1 off's that will require a detailed bid/estimate while calculating costs of materials etc.
For example, I have 1 site that got leads within 1 day of launching. I haven't advertised/marketed this site through any of the given channels that I have done in the past for others (CL, Yelp, backpage, facebook, yellowpages, etc), because i wanted to test how quickly a site would rank locally with a couple links, etc. Well bing put it in the #2 position after 1 wikipedia link, so I started generating leads through bing and I have no clue how to Bid a new Hardwood flooring installs in old homes or let alone any homes.
My question: How do you approach specialized Trades (construction trades in particular. ) This is the area where I've done the most work in for lead gen and have relative success thus far.

I 100% agree with you by bringing the work in house and subbing it out, but most skilled workers will make more money going out on their own, which makes it hard to snatch the quality guys over the not-so-good guys.

Any input would be great. I have about 4 sites right now generating leads as mentioned above, so I'd like to take this to the next step.
 
My question: How do you approach specialized Trades (construction trades in particular. ) This is the area where I've done the most work in for lead gen and have relative success thus far.
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@red_devil010 this will be a tough answer man, but I stay away from those specialized trades because of everything you listed.

So Hardwood floor installs? NO. Requires a slow onboarding process, specialized knowledge, going out to give quotes, etc.

I stick to non-specialized services where the client can book quickly online and onboard themselves in a minute or two. No going out to give quotes, no special knowledge required. So these fit the bill for what I do:

Housecleaning, lawncare, carpet cleaning, moving services, local delivery, etc.
 
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