🚀 The $500k content marketing business that costs its founder $500 a month

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📚 Posts

🚀 The $500k content marketing business that costs its founder $500 a month

Jimmy Daly is Superpath's solo founder.

Since 2019, he's done an arguably incredible job of growing the business, which is a community that helps content marketers connect with each other, work opportunities, and more.

Jimmy spoke to us about how he's grown Superpath to over $500,000 a year revenue, (nearly) all with no-code tools that cost him ∼$500 a month.

"Superpath is a Slack community for content marketers.

We have four lines of business:

1. A job board: companies pay to get their job listings in front of our community and newsletter.
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2. Paid membership: companies can sign their team up to get courses, office hours, networking calls and a few other goodies.
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3. Sponsorships: companies pay for ad space in our newsletter and Slack community.
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4. A marketplace: we match companies with vetted content creators and take a cut of the payments."

The $500/month stack powering Superpath

"It's built almost exclusively using no-code tools: Zapier, Airtable, Squarespace and a few more.

Here are some ways we manage things internally.

Slack Community:

Members can ask anonymous questions about employers, work, and more using an Airtable form. A zap posts the question anonymously on our career advice channel in Slack.

We use Zapier to automatically open roles from our job board to the relevant channel.

We use a tool called Campfire to send an automated onboarding message series on Slack that comes from "me".

I also use a great tool called Calndr.link to create calendar invites for AMAs, workshops, etc. seamlessly.

Job Board:

We used Notion for an MVP of our job board. Now we run it using Niceboard.

Other:

Our membership runs on Podia. It includes courses, office hours, networking events, and 1:1 calls.

We use Notion for our meeting agendas, I have a CRM that runs in there that connects to a SavvyCal form.

Our website runs on Squarespace."

Running a marketplace through Airtable

"This is the most interesting part of our stack. The Superpath marketplace runs entirely on Airtable.

There's a giant kanban board where we keep track of all our customers. Then we have many different views set up specifically for different zaps, e.g. when articles are assigned to writers or a view to let writers track their work and earnings.

We pay $24/month for two pro accounts. This business alone generated $40k MRR, so it’s totally worth it!"

The recipe for success? Build an audience yesterday

"I built Superpath as a way for content marketers to connect privately. Before that, it wasn't easy to connect unless you did it on Twitter.

Everything else (the job board, membership, marketplace, etc.) began when I decided to go full-time and started thinking through potential ways to monetize.

Something that made Superpath successful was me having an audience (4k newsletter subscribers and 5-6k Twitter followers) before I started building.

So my advice to anyone looking to start a similar business is this: Build an audience NOW, build one yesterday! Whether you're thinking about starting it, or already doing it, this is so important."

​Read the full post.

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✍ Making good design more accessible using integrated no-code tools

Good design impacts everything about our perception of a company, and for small businesses, it can be hard to afford. Learn how a designer is helping small businesses make an impact with more accessible, high-quality design.

​Read the full post.

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📺 Tutorials

How to build a crazy efficient consulting business with Outseta & Carrd View →​

How to build a no-code job board with Airtable, Webflow, and Whalesync View →​

Creating a marketplace app on Bubble View →​

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💼 Jobs

​Customer Support Specialist – Attio

​Coding instructor NoCode LowCode - REMOTE WORKING – WeSchool

​Product Manager – Unfabled

​Growth Strategist – Primer

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🐦 Tweet of the Week)

Andrew Gazdecki @agazdecki How I'd build a no-code startup: 1. Build niche job board connecting businesses with developers to build say mobile apps 2. Look for common postings 3. Build software that allows you to create most common job requests faster and cheaper 4. Evolve into a DIY no-code platform May 25th 2022 14 Retweets 114 Likes

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Cheers!
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Ben & the Makerpad team ✌️