This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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What's up, what's up? Welcome to Santa's Soul School. This is Chris Guillebeau. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday. Throwback Thursday, our weekly segment.
We take a look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. And we have had all kinds of stories throughout the year. Last week, in fact, we heard from a Florida enthusiast, a Florida man, let's say, but that's not a knock. It's okay to be a Florida man. He becomes America's leading ambassador of kick bikes, a European mode of transport and adventure.
That was Jordan Crowder. Today in our latest feature, we're gonna hear from the founder and CEO of a lead generation slash digital marketing company called Credo. Credo, C-R-E-D-O. It's been through a few different iterations over the years, but continues to grow and evolve. CEO's name is John Doherty.
So let's hear a bit from John, and I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
- My name is John Doherty. I'm located in Denver, Colorado in the United States. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Credo. And I was featured in episode 450.
I got started with Credo under a different brand name seven years ago at the beginning of 2013, where I had stopped doing any of my own consulting and had clients that were asking me who they should work with. And then had other people coming to me wanting to work with me. And when I told them I wasn't taking on work, they asked who they should work with. So I built out a Google sheet of people that I knew and trusted and just started sending them leads, basically an introductions. And then I realized that lead generation is actually a big business.
And I got in a lead in a city in Utah, and my friends own an agency there. And I, so I pinged one of them and I said, Hey man, I just got this introduction here, got this lead. Would you be willing to pay me 50 bucks for the intro? And he goes, what's your PayPal? So three minutes later, I had 50 bucks in my account, sent him the lead, he closed it, made thousands of dollars.
I went and bought a domain name and threw it up on some hosting. And then I went full time on it on the business in September, 2015, when I got laid off from my last job. So since I was last on the show, which I believe was a couple of years ago, we've made actually some pretty big changes. So I brought on a business partner as a CTO, and I now have a team of five, which includes some contractors. And so basically we cover marketing, product, dev, ops, and finance.
And then during the year of 2019, we actually made a huge business and product pivot. So we went from basically being a lead generation service to a full fledged marketplace. So we actually help companies hire, and then we hold the payments in escrow, pro delivers the work, and then we pay out to the pro from the money that the client paid in. And we take a commission on that from that total that they paid in. So during that time we dipped and we actually went down to about 23, 24K a month in revenue.
And since then we've come back up. And so now we have six figures a month flowing through our systems and money being paid to pros. Of course, we're taking up a percentage of that. So we've had months revenue as high as 50K. And then we've had during the dip, we had months, as I said, around 23, 24K.
So we've been through a lot of strategic changes. I really bet the company on it and seems to be paying off. Our biggest challenge right now is really like, which side do we put more of our time into? And so, and there's no clear cut answer for us. So we have to keep doing the marketing on the client side, on the demand side.
And then also working with the supply side, the agency side, the network side to help them close that work and retain that work. So our biggest challenge is just that, we're in that weird size time and also a weird time in business and always just trying to put our efforts where they're gonna make the biggest impact. So advice that I would give to someone who wants to follow in my footsteps would be first become an expert in a specific field. So before I even started my company, I had worked in, before I went full time on it in 2015, I had worked in search engine optimization and digital marketing, in-house and agency side, leading teams, building teams, helping clients grow for six, seven years. So I went deep in a specific area, so I really could identify what the issues were that people had kind of on both sides and then was able to bring it together.
So my first piece of advice is get really, really good at one thing. And honestly, if you can get known for that as well, so speaking at conferences or blogging or something like that, it's much easier to launch your own company, if you wanna launch your own company. And I always say that if you feel like you wanna launch your own company, you owe it to yourself to do that at some point. But it is much easier to launch your own company and to get initial customers and really get those thousand true fans, as Paul Graham calls it, if you already have an audience. So those would be really my two biggest pieces of advice, is become an expert and then also build an audience because then if you're an expert in one area, you know the specific problems to solve and your audience is going to follow.
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Thanks so much to John for sharing those updates with us. Check out his business website, gitkredo.com or his personal site, johnfdority.com. John F, like Foxtrot, dority, D-O-H-E-R-T-Y.com. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives and more than a thousand stories. If you've got a question or an update for us, come say hi on sidehustleschool.com.
Today's notes, sidehustleschool.com/2168. That's all for today. Coming up tomorrow, failure Friday. Then we got some more listener questions, a first $1,000 story and of course, so much more. My name's Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
