Reilly Chase started HostiFi (hosting SaaS) after facing his mortality in a car crash in 2017.
He has just hit $100k ARR and is growing his personal brand at a rapid rate.
How?
This posts explains…
In 2015, to leave my corporate job at Accenture I built an small outsourcing businesses.
We had a team of 8 people in the Philippines that would do work for startups in London. I charged approximately double their salary and included a little bit of my time to meet clients, manage the team etc.
When we hit 7 clients and I replaced my salary I left Accenture and went full time, whilst travelling the world. Now obviously, with 5 clients that all needed some of my time, it was hard to scale.
I therefore switched to the marketplace model and built Virtual Valley where people could access, hire and pay a Filipino virtual assistant.
Like a niche UpWork:
We were bootstrapped, and back then I didn’t really know how to do marketing.
So how did we grow?
I share everything we did on our blog and podcast…
Why?
Because people interested in that content could also potentially hire a virtual assistant. This content was our most effective growth channel and we eventually sold the business.
Reilly is doing something similar…
You can follow along with his journey on Indie Hackers:
And Twitter:
He set a goal to be interviewed on the SaaSClub podcast, and just achieved it:
So what is this doing for Reilly and his business?
1. Builds awareness of Reilly’s product
Though people that like to consume SaaS/business content may not be Reilly’s ideal customer persona for Hostifi, I still suspect that his content has generated a significant number of customers.
2. Helps Reilly learn
​As Austin Kleon says in his book Show Your Work, one of the best ways to learn is to teach. Reilly is getting better at each aspect of his craft with each piece of contents he creates.
3. Builds Reilly’s personal brand
As we discussed here, people get famous by creating content and hanging around with other famous people.
If you have growth/business skills, then why not create growth/business related content?
What did we learn?
Consider sharing your wisdom to speed up learning, find customers and build your personal brand.