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Real-revenue cases

How We Put Together An Action Plan To Grow Our Business - Starter

Real demand

An Irish SEO agency serving local small businesses with local SEO, site audits, link building and content marketing; the founder self-reports $25k/month in revenue.

Founder interview, self-reported LinkedIn 人脉冷邮件Facebook 广告Medium 内容
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01

Real-demand verdict

Real-demand verdict

Real demand

Small businesses need search visibility to compete with larger rivals and can't do it in-house, so they keep paying for it. The founder self-reports $25k/month, but losing half his clients and a 70% revenue drop during COVID shows the demand is real yet the client base is fragile.

How it makes money

Local small-business clients pay a monthly retainer for SEO and content marketing work; invoices go out the day a project starts, with payment due within the same month.

What old behavior it replaces

Small businesses doing SEO themselves or hiring a full-time marketer

02

Where the first customers came from

Not mentioned in the source

Acquisition channels LinkedIn 人脉冷邮件Facebook 广告Medium 内容

03

Tactics you can copy

  1. 01Narrow the service to one vertical (e.g. accounting) so ads, content and outreach all speak to the same buyer instead of targeting everyone.
  2. 02Change payment terms: invoice the day a project starts with payment due within the month, replacing month-end invoicing plus 15-day terms, to ease cash flow.
  3. 03Keep building links and content inside one niche rather than across many; it's less work and turns into repeatable process.
Moving it to an AI business

For AI founders: the 'pick one vertical first, then aim both marketing and product at it' approach transfers directly, especially for an AI tool or service choosing a single industry to enter at cold start; the collect-first payment terms apply too.

04

Evidence and limits

Self-reported numbers are unaudited — treat them as leads, not facts
Founder interview, self-reported

Revenue basis · Founder self-reported, unaudited (see source page)

What evidence is missing

The $25k/month figure is founder self-reported and unaudited; the same text mentions a 70% revenue drop and being 'nearly back up to $20,000', so the two numbers don't line up.
No client count, average deal size, retention or churn data, so revenue stability can't be judged.
Affiliate site revenue is only given as a target ('around 50% of turnover'), with no actual figures.

Primary source

https://www.starterstory.com/stories/how-we-put-together-an-action-plan-to-grow-our-business ↗