Hi Julian! Who are you, and what are you currently working on?
I'm currently the founder and CEO of Embarque, a productized agency for premium content that converts, at affordable prices.
At the moment, most of our clients hire us to create SEO content, including blog posts and landing pages. We've worked with many hyper-growth startups such as VEED, MentorCruise, and Levels FYI. So far, it's been great.
What's your backstory?
I've been getting paid for my writing since I was 16 (I'm now 27). I earned a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing on a scholarship from UEA, one of the UK's most competitive universities for the program. Founding a content marketing agency might seem like a natural progression, but I didn't have a desire to grow my own revenue-generating business until I stumbled upon the indie making community in October 2018 when I was in London, UK. In fact, before that, money was an afterthought, and my living conditions were scrappy, to say the least.
For instance, throughout my time in London, I slept on friends' couches for a few months, lived in a house under renovation for free in exchange for (very bad) carpentry work, and rented a pantry as a bedroom. During the last one, the house was located on a street in Tottenham that was quarantined twice due to gunshot noises. That said, the room was only £380 with utilities included, so I'd say it was a fair deal for London standards!
While being part of the indie making community, it dawned on me how lucrative my skills were in writing and community engagement. I expanded my network in the scene by taking part in fun online blogging initiatives, such as being an editor at Maker Mag and actively engaging in relevant communities.
The indie making community has changed my life on a financial level. Three months after being part of it, I was earning 2.5x more than my full-time salary in a French email tech company by working with founders and bootstrappers. It helped me develop a healthier relationship with money, understand the value of my work, and see how launching and growing companies can be darn fun. The community has helped me understand that I can build an ethical business and provide a reasonable stream of income for content writers and other creatives.
So that brings me to Embarque. I owe much of my creative growth to extremely talented — yet overlooked — underground writers, artists, performers, poets, and journalists who are either brown, queer, women or a mixture of these identities. At Embarque, we want to link talented English-speaking content writers to founders and companies that need their services. As a nod to my creative roots, we aim to make our hiring practices as inclusive as possible. As the saying goes, 'talent is everywhere, opportunity is not.'
On the client-facing side, we want to help bootstrappers and early-stage startups grow fast through quality content marketing. A year into the business, I’d like to say that the results speak for themselves.
How did you come up with the idea?
I'm a first-time founder, and the idea behind Embarque came about in a chat that I had with Dominic Monn in May 2020. As the founder of MentorCruise, Dominic was looking to scale his SEO content production efforts but hated the process of looking for writers. So he pitched the idea of me launching a content writing marketplace.
I found it interesting but quickly realized that it would take a long time to see profitability with that business model. It also still wouldn't eliminate the vetting process completely. Platforms like Fiverr and Upwork can be interesting, but people's skills in writing, editing, and content strategy can vary widely. Content mills tend to produce spun content of subpar quality, underpay their writers and are often involved in shady practices that I don't want to be part of.
Eventually, I stumbled upon the productized service business model employed by some of the competitors in the content marketing niche. It was perfect for Embarque. Productizing our content marketing services allows us to show our pricing transparently, focus on being good at selected key offerings, and scale our growth through these services. On the operations side, we can look for and vet talented writers to make sure that our clients get quality content, on time.
How did you go from idea to product?
As far as businesses go, productized services are relatively easy to launch. You don't even need a website to begin a business. Embarque went from idea to launch in roughly four weeks, partly because I still had a full-time job and ongoing freelancing gigs. That said, the website took less than an afternoon to create. The layout was pretty unexciting, but I wanted to build something quick to deploy and functional.
When I launched, I received a total of 0 orders. The first two months of growing Embarque were some of the hardest on an emotional level. I was having a serious bout of impostor syndrome and didn't fully understand the length of a sales cycle for productized content marketing services. I recently learned that the summer months are usually a grueling time for agencies and online businesses for acquiring new clients.
Nevertheless, I decided to plow through, remained active in some online communities, published helpful content, and included some samples on the homepage from previous work.
Closing clients as a freelancer is different than as an agency founder. As a freelancer, people already trusted my abilities in writing content. As an agency founder, clients also need to trust my skills in hiring the right people.
After around two and a half months, my efforts began to pay off. A founder who wanted to jumpstart his SEO content production found me on Twitter and decided to buy a package. Then VEED, a video editing platform, followed. MentorCruise also became a client. By September, I had reached $4,000 MRR. In December 2020, I reached six figures annually.
Since then, I've realized that Embarque is not really in the business of one-off orders. 80% of our clients are returning ones that pay for the Steer package valued at $1,250 per month. I only learned how lucrative scaling content marketing production can be after some months in, but it wasn't at all how I envisaged the business model would be.
A year into the business, the homepage still roughly looks the same, just with more social proof baked in. It has been a bit neglected, and I do need to spend time making it more conversion-driven.
