Freelancing is often the first step for many an entrepreneurial journey. It’s usually the case when someone realizes they’re the type who enjoys starting businesses more than anything else.
Laura Roeder is one of those types of people. She leapt out of the world of employment without a net, managing to land on her feet as a freelance designer. But it wasn’t long before she felt that she wanted a more expansive business model.
She quickly advanced from freelance design, to social media consulting, and then to online training. But Laura was just getting warmed up … her next project was the big one — the social media management software-as-a-service Edgar.
The Show Notes
Transcript
From Freelance Designer to SaaS Superstar
Laura Roeder: Hey there, I’m Laura Roeder. I’m the founder of MeetEdgar.com, and I am absolutely unemployable.
Voiceover: Welcome to Unemployable, the show for people who can get a job, they’re just not inclined to take one — and that’s putting it gently. If you’re a freelancer or solopreneur, Unemployable is the place to get actionable advice for growing your business, improving your processes, and enjoying greater freedom day to day. To get the full experience, register at no charge at Unemployable.com. You’ll get access to upcoming webinars and more. That’s Unemployable.com.
Brian Clark: Hey, Everyone, welcome to Unemployable. I am your host Brian Clark, and today, as you might have guessed, we are speaking with Laura Roeder.
Laura, how are you and how has the big move back to Texas gone?
Laura Roeder: I’m happy to be back in my home state. Moves never go as easy as you want them to, but we’re working it out.
Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s generally pretty horrible. I think you’re being nice. Well, good, I’m glad you’re getting settled.
It’s an amazing story, I think, as long as I’ve known you over the years. And here’s something that’s interesting, and I don’t know if you’ll remember where we were for this, but it was interesting to me. I think the last time I saw you was, of course, at a conference somewhere. I don’t remember which conference.
But there was a party or something, and I don’t know if it was our party or someone else’s, but it was off to the side in this hotel and you were there. And I don’t remember who it was, but what I do remember is that the founder of Hootsuite was there. Do you remember this event?
Laura Roeder: Yeah, it was in San Francisco where Ryan lives. It was for a real estate conference in San Francisco.
Brian Clark: That’s right. Okay, you’ve got a much better memory than me. But I thought that was odd, because at that time, who would have guessed that you would be taking on the big guys like Hootsuite and Buffer with Edgar?
Laura Roeder: Yeah, I did not know that’s where my path would take me.
Brian Clark: Isn’t it great though? See, that’s what I love though. I mean, you just keep pushing forward and next thing you know, you’re doing things, and I know this is in my case as well, that you just thought maybe you couldn’t do or was out of your reach and then you realized, “No, it’s not. It’s actually attainable.
Laura Roeder: Absolutely.
What Is Your Background?
Brian Clark: So, let’s go back, because you went out on your own early on, like a lot of people do as a freelancer, and you did design work, correct?
Laura Roeder: I did. I’m a really great example of someone who’s unemployable, because I’ve only ever had one real job. I started working for myself very young when I was about 22. And yeah, I started out doing freelance print and web design.
I love any kind of freelance service business as a first business, because they’re really easy to get started. As soon as you can find one person to pay you, then you have some money coming in. I just think they’re a great way to get your feet wet and kind of learn all the basics of running a business.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I agree. And I think that’s been a common theme that we’ve talked about on this show quite a bit. Because sometimes you have people who want to go right into the SaaS startup. And of course, some people do that, but I certainly didn’t and you didn’t as well. I think that’s correct, that getting your feet wet and finding a way to be self-sustaining without a job is step number one.
How Did Your Start Go?
Brian Clark: How was it for you when you first started? Scary? Did you have any idea what you were doing? Did you make these classic mistakes we all make?
Laura Roeder: I had a lot of naive excitement, I think, when I started. How I started was a little unusual for a designer, in that I didn’t freelance on the side until I built up a client base and then quit. I just quit my job and I didn’t have any clients when I quit, which is probably the worst way to do it.
I was incredibly naïve. I hadn’t even learned anything about the business from doing it on the side. So, I just knew absolutely nothing. I remember sitting down with someone and being like, “Okay, I know that you’re supposed to do something called a proposal when someone is interested in working with you, but I don’t know what a proposal is or what’s in it or what you’re supposed to write. So, I was absolutely clueless.
Brian Clark: So, how many years did you do freelance design?
Laura Roeder: I did over about two years.
Brian Clark: And were you kind of itching to evolve to the next stage pretty much the entire time or…?
Laura Roeder: Yeah, obviously, pretty early, because of course, I didn’t do it that long. I’m not a great designer, I’m an all right designer and I never loved design. I was never happy doing design all day, which is part of the reason I quit my job and wanted to freelance. I think a lot of freelancers have the problem that they just want to do design and then when they go freelance, they face this harsh reality that actually you have to spend a lot of time doing the business.
I was kind of the opposite of a lot of people where I really liked the business side actually, but I was pretty bored by doing the design. And I saw that I didn’t want to build an agency, which seemed like if I wanted to grow the business would be a natural model. So, I started looking around for other businesses I could run.
I had been doing social media consulting for free for my web design clients thinking, “I’ll just chat to them about how to drive traffic to their website and the different ways to use these new tools. And that’s really how I got into the social media world and moved to social media consulting, which very quickly for me turned into social media online training.
Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s interesting. I totally get what you’re saying about there are some people who just like to do the work, the design work. They like to write, whatever the case may be. I think I was more like you, in that I figured out I just really was into starting businesses. So, therefore, you always had to think of the next thing, which isn’t a bad thing in my mind, obviously.
I think it’s frustrating sometimes, because you’ll try to get someone who’s kind of stuck in that technician role, whatever their case may be, and they just get stuck there and they can’t evolve out of it.
So, you turned to social media obviously. That was, let me see — what year was it that you started to make that move?
Laura Roeder: That was late 2008 or early 2009.
Brian Clark: Okay. So, that’s probably when we became aware of each other, I guess, around that timeframe.
Laura Roeder: Yeah, I actually, I know that I published a guest post on Copyblogger in 2009 and I think I was on your list of hot new bloggers to watch or whatever in 2009, because that was a big, big break for me to have my link on Copyblogger. That was huge.
Brian Clark: Yeah, there are a lot of people who have launched their careers off Copyblogger and we love that. But it’s also cool to watch the people who started out at one place and now they’re about three steps past that. And I certainly can’t take any credit for that. That’s all on you guys.
How Did You Transition to Online Training?
Brian Clark: Okay, tell me about the transition into online training. Did you have any trepidation or were you like, “No, I’m advising people on this. What I need to do is make it scalable?
Laura Roeder: I didn’t have much trepidation, because I saw that it was such a great business model and it was a really exciting time for it, especially then. A lot of people were discovering this model and getting started in it. I was definitely worried about the kind of scummy side of it.
I remember I had someone who was kind of a mentor to me and when I wanted to get into it, she was like, “Don’t do it. It’s all scams and just people trying to steal money from each other, which was really horrible advice, because I’ve had a great career out of doing online training. But there always has been this dark underbelly to the online training, info product, Internet marketing, whatever, industry. I mean, Copyblogger has always really been a leader in consciously saying, “Okay, there’s another way to do online marketing without promising people one thing and stealing their credit card.
That was really my only concern about getting into this industry. But as soon as… I remember, I launched my first info product, which was an info product about Twitter in 2009 and I made about $3,000 with that launch. For me, that was just this huge light bulb moment where I was like, “Wow, I used to spend months chasing down a contract for $3,000, and that was a good size contract for me at the time doing web design or doing consulting — I wasn’t even getting anywhere near that.
So, I thought, “If I can just sell this product, which to me seemed a lot easier, “and make $3,000, wow, I am definitely going in this direction.
Brian Clark: Yeah, you were hooked. It’s funny what you’re saying about the dark side. When I started Copyblogger, we just made it a point to differentiate and say, “No. There were tactics and strategies related to direct response copywriting and all this stuff that’s in common with the darker side of the business. But that doesn’t mean it’s unethical.
I felt like we had to preach that for a good seven, eight years and then things changed. I mean, don’t you get that feel where digital entrepreneurism just is the way it is now? Everyone wants to create an app or a course or an ebook or a Saas. You know what I’m saying? And that’s why we’re excited about our new project.
Oh, thank you, by the way, because Laura will be speaking at our first Digital Commerce Summit — still a while away, but I’m looking forward to it.
It’s become not just a legitimate industry, it’s like it is the industry as we go forward. You know what I’m saying? As far as what does digital business continue to evolve into when we get into things like virtual reality environments and all this kind of stuff?
I like to geek out on the more science fictiony stuff, but it’s right around the corner.
Laura Roeder: Yeah. And I agree that the industry has changed so much, where you no longer have to say, “Oh, I run an online business, but it’s not a scam. Don’t worry. It’s a real business. I think a lot of people now understand that, yes, online businesses are real legitimate businesses.
What Is Edgar?
Brian Clark: Speaking about legitimate, it comes to mind when we think about social scheduling software. You do have Hootsuite, you do have my friends over at Buffer who have done a great job, I think, with their content marketing strategy that was really fascinating to see. And then here comes Laura and she’s like, “I don’t care that we’ve got these two big dogs here. These platforms are not doing something that I think is important.
It’s very rare to find these days a true USP, but you have one. As far as I can tell, the other guys are not interested in adding it. Do you know anything about that?
Let’s back up. Tell everyone about Edgar for a second.
Laura Roeder: Yes, yes. The USP that Brian is referring to is: in Edgar you store a library of all your social content and then it repeats over and over again. So, what I was doing, and I found what a lot of people who were pretty serious about their content, social marketing were doing was storing this database of content and then cycling through it over and over, especially for things like your backlog of blog posts. Anyone who’s been creating content on the web for any amount of time has developed this enormous library of really valuable content and they want to keep sending it out.
So, that’s what Edgar does automatically. And right now, we are the only tool that does it in a way that we do.
Brian Clark: Yeah, and that just seems like it makes so much sense. I haven’t tried Edgar yet, but I’m going to because of that very reason. I find scheduling stuff in itself tedious, but having to do it over and over again, or really just not, you know what I’m saying?
We have 10 years of content and we’re constantly trying to go back in the archives and either bring it forward or something. But this idea that you don’t have to be obnoxious, but yet over time, there are certain key pieces of content that you should probably be sharing not just once a year, but once a month or whatever the case may be.
How Did You Decide to Develop This?
Brian Clark: So, when did you look at the space and say, “I’m building this?
Laura Roeder: I definitely had a lot of frustrations with the existing tools. One of the big ones was not having a library. I’m still shocked by that one, that the other tools haven’t just added that immediately. I think in Hootsuite, maybe on some of their bigger, more enterprisey plans, you have some sort of library. But that was just always so weird to me like, “Why am I keeping this in a spreadsheet, which obviously doesn’t work? People just have random Google docs of all their updates. So, that was really frustrating to me. And then obviously, the repeating bit as well.
I had sort of assumed that it literally wasn’t possible. I’m not a software developer. I thought, “Well, these are such obvious ideas that if you could do them, they would exist already.
Then I met my husband Chris, who is a Ruby on Rails developer, which if you’re listening and you don’t know, that’s what Edgar’s built in, what a lot of web software is built in. And so, I’m talking to him about how we have this course teaching people to do this, but you still have to do all this really tedious work, and why don’t the tools do it. And I remember he said, “Well, I can build that in a week. And I was like, “What?! What are you talking about? He was really exaggerating by the way. He did not build it in a week.
Brian Clark: I thought so. We do software development, not that fast.
Laura Roeder: No, not at all. But he did go on to build it in six months and it was really meeting Chris how this all came together. I had to meet someone who was a software developer to tell me, “This is absolutely possible.
And it’s really interesting being in the software game now, because now I know that anything you can think of, anything that a computer can do, anything you can do on the Internet, you can build software to do. Anything is possible. It’s a question of time and money, how long it’s going to take to build it. But anything is possible.
So, that’s how it came together. I just thought, “Wow! I mean, if this is possible, why not? And I thought, “Worst case scenario, we’ll have an awesome tool to use at our own company. If we build this thing and no one wants it and no one buys it, that will suck. But at least, we’ll have a huge leg up over the competition using our own tool.
Brian Clark: Yeah, and that’s what we do as well. Build stuff for ourselves first. If we use it, that’s kind of our use case and then we sell it.
This is fascinating, because that was my next question, which was how did a relatively non-technical person, like me… I know my story of how we got into development. But I was wondering what you did. Did you put an ad out for a developer, did you know someone, whatever? But you actually got in a relationship.
Laura Roeder: A married one.
Brian Clark: You’re in it for life, Laura. I mean, this is serious.
But when you first met him, were you dating then? This is interesting to me, because on the one hand, it’s like how do you find someone you trust to do software development? That’s a big issue. On the other hand, now you’re working with your husband, which could be another issue.
Laura Roeder: We met in 2012 and we actually got married the same year we met. We got married in November, we met in February. So, it was very fast. And then we built Edgar in 2014. That’s when he first built it, so it all happened pretty quickly.
Brian Clark: So, you literally just came home and said, “I don’t understand why Buffer doesn’t do this. And he said, “I could build that in a week, which was six months. I like his optimism at least. That’s amazing.
How Has Your Team Grown?
Brian Clark:So, as things stand now, is it really just you and Chris or have you brought in other developers?
Laura Roeder: No, we have a pretty good size team now. I was running the info product business LKR Social Media and we really transitioned that team over to Edgar. So, it wasn’t like launching a whole new thing. Well, it was launching a whole new software from scratch, but not a whole new company from scratch, because a lot of the people at the company could just move over. Obviously, what we didn’t have was developers.
So, now Chris who built the initial version, he serves as CTO and we have a team of three developers. We’re working on hiring a fourth right now. So, now he’s more overseeing and other people are more hands-on building the software.
Brian Clark: Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve heard a number floating around as to what you’ve achieved recently with Edgar, sounds like you’re doing pretty well. If you can share with us how things are going, that would be, I guess, an affirmation of what I’ve heard.
Laura Roeder: Yeah, we’ve grown really quickly. We got to our first million in annual recurring revenue 11 months after launch, which was pretty amazing. And we thought it was going to take a lot longer. And now, we’re about a year and a half after launch and we’re at about 160k monthly recurring revenue.
Brian Clark: Wow, that’s a higher number than the last number I heard. So, you’re doing well.
Laura Roeder: We’re growing all the time.
Brian Clark: Excellent. That’s really amazing. I heard your podcast with Jon Nastor. It’s basically so true though, people who think, “I need to find some area where there’s no competition is exactly backwards. What you have to do is find demand, existing demand and then differentiate yourself. And, again, you did that perfectly.
What Role Did Your Marketing Expertise Play in Your Success?
Brian Clark: Do you think being not necessarily a technical person, but you having a great marketing mind…? That’s why I think Edgar was so obvious to you that you couldn’t understand why someone hadn’t done it already.
Laura Roeder: Yes, absolutely. And that’s been such a huge advantage for us. So many software companies are created by developers who do not have much sense of marketing, or even worse, are those people who are like, “Oh, if your product’s any good, people will just find it. We don’t do marketing. We’re too good for marketing.
Which is something I see even now with a lot of Silicon Valley companies. They don’t do any paid acquisition, because they think it’s uncool. This is just now starting to change. We spend as much as we can on Facebook Ads. It’s a great way to get customers. I don’t think I’m too cool for Facebook Ads at all. But people think, “Oh, we don’t want to have to pay to get our customer. It’s really weird.
Brian Clark: We’re just now getting into advertising. We’ve been obviously beating the content marketing drum. But you’re right, especially Facebook Ads. I’m not a huge fan of Facebook, in general, but the advertising there is really cost-effective and really powerful if done correctly.
Has that been your primary growth engine once you launched to your audience and you obviously had some uptake right away which is nice. Has it really been a Facebook Ad strategy for you?
Laura Roeder: It’s been a mix of Facebook Ads and content marketing. Obviously, a lot of listeners to this podcast are very into content. And content can take a while. It’s a long-term strategy that you are building up over time.
So, I think it can be great to start with some paid acquisition right from day one. You’re not going to get massive traffic to your blog as soon as you launch, or massive of SEO. The way I view it is you kind of build up your search traffic, build up your content strategy over time. And then you can use paid advertising to really supplement some faster growth in the beginning if you have the cash of course.
What Is Your Marketing Strategy?
Brian Clark: Yeah, obviously. Now, are you using ads to advertise and distribute content that then leads maybe to an opt-in or something? Or are you advertising the Edgar trial right off the bat?
Laura Roeder: Weirdly, we’re sending people straight to Edgar and we’ll definitely evolve that strategy over time. But what’s worked for us really well are just ads saying, “Here’s a new social media tool, check it out. Obviously, targeted to people who are interested in social media tools, because sometimes the product is compelling enough that that’s kind of all you have to do.
I find with tools in particular, people (I mean, I’m like this) tell me about a new project management tool, I will absolutely waste an hour checking it out, because they’re just interesting to me. And all you have to do is show me an ad and be like, “Here’s a new tool you haven’t spent an hour on yet.
So, we’re actually pretty unsophisticated with our marketing in that way so far. We don’t even have custom landing pages. We’re not doing opt-in content. We will add that stuff over time. But right now, there’s still a lot of people who are just interested in learning about a new social tool.
Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s an excellent match. You’re right there in a social environment. So, even remembering back in the day when we would publish about Twitter or Facebook or whatever and it would go viral, it’s just like this meta thing. But selling a social media scheduling tool on Facebook seems like, “Yeah, why wouldn’t you check that out?
Anyway, it sounds like you guys are doing really well, so I wouldn’t call yourself unsophisticated. If the product’s good enough, just advertise it directly. Hey, more power to you.
Laura Roeder: I mean, I don’t think that’ll last forever.
Brian Clark: No, at some point, you reach your point.
Cool. Well, Laura, I really appreciate your time. I love the story. You’re like one of our perfect unemployable case studies. Just like me, you quit your job without a plan. I like the pressure, I don’t know. Are you like that?
Laura Roeder: Yeah, I love it. I’m a huge “Burn the ships. Get rid of everything else.
Brian Clark: I’m just like you though. I tell people not to do that, even though I didn’t. Yeah, you go out on your own, you go for a couple of years, you realize you’re really into business and you just evolve from there, and it’s really cool.
Thank you for your time and I will see you for sure next October, but maybe before then at some point.
Laura Roeder: At some point. Thanks, Brian.
Brian Clark: All right, take care.