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Growth Talks: Interview with Rishabh Bhandari about his journey from near-bankruptcy to $75K MRR business.

If you’re just starting out, the best way to learn is by doing, but getting advice from more seasoned pros can give you a leg up.

We’ve been talking to founders of successful startups about how they launched their products in order to inspire people who want to start their own businesses.

 

In this interview, we have Rishabh Bhandari, the founder and CEO of Content Beta. His company provides a creative team as a service subscription to software companies. They work with over 110 software companies to help their product marketing, customer enablement, and GTM launch teams make more content. 

Read the interview to find out all about his achievements, key turning points, and strategies he used to climb the ladder of success.

 

What is the backstory of Content Beta? How did you get from an idea to a product?

Content Beta is a COVID baby. Before the pandemic, I had a training business where we worked with large organizations to train their teams on analytics software tools (PowerBI, Tableau, Alteryx, etc.) and had a small online school with a YouTube channel as a funnel. We grew our YouTube channel (video tutorials for these analytics tools) to 300,000 subscribers and figured out how to make software videos that people want to watch.

During COVID, when our training business had gone down, we explored the idea of creating the same video tutorials for other SMB software companies and did some outreach, and that’s how Content Beta was formed. Slowly, we worked with the product marketing, demand generation, and GTM teams and scaled our solution to the creative team as an a-subscription.

 

How did you validate your idea?

I used two approaches: personalized cold emails and community forums (Facebook, Reddit, Slack, etc.) to pitch to people and see how they respond. During video production, I found that prices were hard to understand and the turnaround time was very long. We fixed that. We made our prices easy to understand and cut the turnaround time down to less than 10 days. 

Later, the same customer asked for design creatives like UI animated GIFs, infographics, video ads, or TikTok videos. 

 

Tell us more about launching a company in 2020, undoubtedly the most challenging year to start a business. What were the major hurdles at the beginning? 

Doing something during the COVID year was not optional for us. Our training business went down for a couple of years. We were in survival mode. The biggest hurdle was finding customers who would give us a try. We were new to the software industry and to US markets and had never done any cold outreach before.

I think communities (like Growth Marketing Pros) helped us figure out our messaging, how to shape our value proposition, and even get a few early customers. 

 

What marketing strategies have been successful for Content Beta so far?

Content marketing – writing interesting blogs that answer questions people normally ask.

Cold outreach – personalized outreach to people and trying to solve their problems.

 

How did you get your first 100 users?

Since we’re B2B, our ACV is much higher than SaaS, so getting the first 25 customers was more important. We focused on just one industry. With that, we learned what problems they have, and when we added more logos from the same industry, it gave us enough social proof. 

We work with 110 software companies today. I would attribute 60% of initial customers to cold outreach and 40% to marketing efforts.

 

You mentioned on Indie Hackers that you went from a nearly bankrupt business to a $75K MRR business. What were the key factors in your success?

I think doing good work (which got us more referrals) and focusing on a small niche helped us scale faster in terms of sales, marketing, and operations. 

 

What do you consider your biggest win so far with Content Beta?

I think acquiring 110 logos from the B2B SaaS world is the biggest win, especially since we started during COVID. 

 

What is your advice to founders who are just starting?

Start with a small niche. Your market doesn’t have to be $100 billion to start with. 

Become the best in your niche. Have faith in cold outreach. It always works. 

Begin with a small niche and work your way up to becoming the best in it.

 

Join the conversation

If you’re a startup founder with a unique story to tell, we’d love to hear from you!
Contact us to be featured in the upcoming interviews.

Stefan Despotovski

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