How to Make $60k in 6 Weeks with LTDs – Diran George

In this interview “How to Make $60k in 6 Weeks with LTDs” we speak with Diran George, Founder of quickblog.co, who launched his own private LTD and also self-listed on AppSumo. He shares how he was able to make $60k in 6 weeks for his side hustle SaaS. Diran spotted a gap in the market to create something and he got his product built using Fiverr and Upwork. What’s more, he did all of this whilst also working full time in his sales job! Quickblog gives agencies an embedded, SEO-ready blog for their websites and clients’ websites. They rank on Search Engines and earn passive income, without spending any time or money on theme coding, editing, or design.

[00:00:03] – Peter

Okay, so today we are live with Diran George a SaaS founder in our SaaS, founder Facebook group. Welcome to the live chat, Diran. Great to meet you.

[00:00:16] – Diran

Nice to meet you too. Thanks for having me on.

[00:00:18] – Peter

You’re welcome. So you are the founder of quickblog.co. Could you just tell us a little bit about what your product is, what it does, who it’s for?

[00:00:29] – Diran

Yeah, sure. So quickblog is a lightweight blog tool that will allow you to get your blog up and running within minutes. So most people, when you ask them about a blog, they probably think instinctively, WordPress, WordPress is a very powerful CMS, very powerful tool for building websites. But if you just want to get your blog stood up in minutes, WordPress is quite daunting. Takes hosting, security updates, all these things that nontechnical people really don’t like to deal with. And so what I decided to do was, especially after I signed up for a tool that helps me build web pages very quickly, I then quickly decided, well, I discovered it didn’t have a blog tool and I wanted to build one.

So I took the initiative after speaking to the founder of this lander page builder, making sure that they weren’t going to be doing anything competitive. And that basically gave me the impetus, they gave me the drive to actually go ahead and build this tool. And really it came about from frustrations, from using a tool which did a very similar thing. I thought, I can definitely do a much better job than they can.

[00:01:39] – Diran

So I went ahead and built a tool that can allow you to add a blog to your existing website within minutes. Not like hours, like it would be, let’s say, on Ghost or WordPress.

[00:01:53] – Peter

Awesome. Because like you mentioned, WordPress does require a bit of set up working with themes if you self hosted. People who are not very tech savvy have to understand the hosting and the WordPress installation often. So there’s some complexity there and you’ve taken that away, solved it by giving people a really quick and easy way to embed a blog on their website that ranks that’s SEO friendly. And yeah, we were just talking earlier about how other options to do this are things like medium, where you’re not actually hosting your own content. So it gives you a solution to have something as easy to use as that, but on your own site.

[00:02:38] – Diran

Right.

[00:02:39] – Peter

Who are the people that benefit most from this tool? Like, who’s your ideal customer?

[00:02:45 – Diran

Yeah, my ideal customer, I probably bucket them into I’ll put them in two buckets. So the first one is arguably right now, my most widely used or user base, which is more of the smaller digital agencies, maybe like between one and five people who are managing a service for their own clients. Maybe they’re doing web design, maybe they’re doing social media, and then they’re able to tackle this as an additional service to add value to those customers. So whether they are either doing the blog, writing for them, so maybe they have arrival and they’re actually hosting their blogs and writing their blogs for them as they appear on the website, or they’re creating this sort of white label service, which is also possible with quickblog. We have a white label service that allows these agencies to brand the quickblog app with their own branding, their own login URL, creating users sub accounts and then give access to those clients to then go and create their own blog, add that to their website and then manage all of their posts. So that’s arguably my biggest user base right now. The second user base, which is probably the biggest target, the one that has probably the biggest addressable market, which is around those who are either hobbyists or people who are starting up in business and creating some sort of passive income.

[00:04:06] – Diran

That could be travel blogging, food blogging, it could be technology blogging, whatever it is, whatever their passion or their hobby is actually creating that into a blog, which is going to be very profitable for them, especially as their audience grows. What I’ve actually done is to make quickblog very easy for them to set up on their website. And even if they don’t, for example, if they don’t have an existing website, that they can actually create one with us so we can provide them with a free website and then again, free blog, so you don’t actually need to set up or pay anything. It’s effectively done for you and you’ll be able to then write about whatever your passion is in that respect.

[00:04:49] – Peter

Neat. So you’re using a freemium model for getting used. How are you finding that for a blog? Because I like that because it’s easy to get set up, easy for people to start using and see how simple it is to use Quick blog. How are you finding the premium model working for your SaaS?

[00:05:08] – Diran

Yeah, so it’s actually been really successful right now, the number of people who have had sign up for free who have been converted to a pay model and this is actually something I can talk about, but actually ran on AppSumo and those people, we’ve just been testing the platform, making sure actually it does what it says on the tin and then converting to Paid. It’s been a much higher conversion rate than I thought it would be. I think the 300 people who signed up for free versions of the system, actually 50 of those have converted into paying customers. So I was really surprised, as I said it’s much higher conversion rate than I thought it would be. Even just to get like 5% conversion would be quite neat, but to get that many was very surprising.

[00:05:59] – Peter

Yeah, that’s great. Really nice validation as well, because so many times people have a different experience. You put a lot of time and effort into building a product, and you always kind of hope that it does get the adoption that you’re aiming for. So that’s a good experience. I wondered if you had additional features for bloggers because you were mentioning the kind of hobbyist or the travel blogger or this kind of independent business people signing up their own blogs. Did you have any features for them or do you have any things in your roadmap that help you shape the direction of where you’re taking your blog?

[00:06:42] – Diran

Definitely, yeah. So on the roadmap, I have obviously like two different audiences to service, but I think I can definitely make it work. But the main focus for quickblog is search engine optimization. So how do I make sure that platform is what it says is on the team for everyone? Who that means is that they’ll be able to rank on Google whenever they’re creating posts. Right? That’s the number one priority for me. But also I want to make it as easy as possible for people to blog and publish anywhere. So any sorts of multi publishing platform tools.

I’m not sure if you’re familiar with things like Story, Chief and even some other platforms that publish to WordPress, Facebook, et cetera. This is something that I’ve got very squarely and firmly on my mind. How do I make it so that the big sort of addressable market, the ones who are bloggers, like independent business people, can actually get their content delivered to multiple places from one place, one central location. One of the things I always talk about with Quick Blog, especially in a user group, is questions coming. How is it different from WordPress?

[00:07:51] – Diran

And I say to them, CMS is like, WordPress is really powerful. What quickblog does is it allows you to build and centrally manage multiple blogs from one place, because you could have, let’s say, 20 WordPress sites, right? But you’d have to log into each of them to manage their blog posts. With quickblog, you can add a bit of code to all of those web progress sites, and then you’d be able to centrally manage just by literally clicking the account you want to go into, centrally manage all those blog posts, schedule them, even import your blogs from Google Sheets as well. So if you’re wanting to do like mass sort of loading of blog posts, you can do that all in one place and do that very efficiently inside of quickblog. Cool. Good.

[00:08:37] – Peter

So you’re already differentiating from your main kind of what you consider your main competitors, and you’re also planning features that are going to target your biggest audience. You touched on the Alpsuma launch that you did. So I wanted to ask you about that. How did you find that process? How did it go for you?

[00:08:59] – Diran

It was phenomenally successful. I was actually blown away considering it was a self-list product. So I didn’t have the select campaign. And so it really started off from my sort of Alpha Beta privately and I did my own private Ltd. So I had about maybe 150 people. I decided now, I think now’s the time to go on AppSumo. Spoke to the team, they said, yeah, look happy for you to sell list, and it just blew up. So in just over a month and a half, it grossed around $61,000. I was absolutely blown away.

[00:09:42] – Peter

Wha were you expecting?You were not expecting anything like that?

[00:09:44] – Diran

No, I was not expecting that. I mean, that just goes to show the validation is definitely there for this product. But but I was thinking if it can gross, let’s say $15 to $20,000 in three months, I would be a happy person. But yeah, for it to do that much in just over like it was six weeks, I think I was absolutely blown away. And the last sales day, the sales is absolutely skyrocket. Speaking to the team as well, speaking to the group members in my Facebook group because everyone’s in well, a lot of people in there have got about 540 odd members in there.

I talk about what I’m going to be doing, how I’m going to be improving the platform, the types of people and the team I work with. So it’s really important that they get all that transparency and I think that’s really helped, as well as some giveaways that I did, and speaking to other like, lifetime group founders, all of that, as we help compound sort of sales on that side.

[00:10:40] – Peter

Great. I love it that you had a really good experience and a lot of success. Was there anything that you did right or any advice you could give to anyone thinking of going down that LTD route with their launch?

[00:10:54] – Diran

Yeah, so definitely some good advice is obviously to test the waters first. Do your alpha and beta internally. Create a Facebook group or some sort of community that people can feedback whatever they feel is important to improve your product, but also doing things like your reach out call. So I did a few sort of one to one with my early users. I find out what they want and that’s how how I built up the key features. So it’s like white label, multiple languages and a few other bits and bobs and then taking that to AppSumo.

What I did was I created the ability to have multiple codes, which then if you upgrade to one level, which is like an agency level, having different things, like different sort of not just his ears, but different value adds. So white label was a value add and I knew that people would like that as well. Having a lot of these sorts of things in mind in terms of how you’re going to take your product into a bigger market for apps, even if it was selfless, it’s still like an 800K user base. So having that and hitting things like the customer favourites and what’s new and all that.

[00:12:07] – Diran

Hitting those lists really helped accelerate its growth in sales, especially.

[00:12:13] – Peter

That’s great.

[00:12:14] – Diran

Awesome.

[00:12:14] – Peter

I also wanted to ask you how you built the product, because obviously you incur costs and this launch would have done really well to maybe pay off some of the costs that you already invested into it and then also hopefully give you some future, like, hopefully give you some cash and also give you some money using the future on new features. How did you build the product?

[00:12:40] – Diran

Yeah, so completely candidly, I’m not technical, I can’t code for love or money, but I guess I’m in a fortunate position. The sales role, where it’s very flexible, I earn enough money to put away so I can invest in terms of this type of development. And I’ve worked with a company and developer I found on Upwork. They’re absolutely brilliant. They’re so fast, they did the alpha and beta so quickly. So having all of these things and building the roadmap and putting that to them to then create and add the features, that’s all been done by this development company. I create this sort of roadmap and the vision and then they effectively implement it for me. Wow, that’s awesome.

[00:13:23] – Peter

Did they do the design as well?

[00:13:26] – Diran

Yeah, I went to Fiverr to get an independent sort of a gig to actually create the design, and I wanted to make it very simple just so people can focus on the content. And I think that’s what people like as well.

[00:13:39] – Peter

Great. And then the other thing I ask is, are you working full time? Have you done this while you’re in a job?

[00:13:48] – Diran

Yeah, so the sort of hour I get every year and there like five to ten minutes just to answer sport queries, Facebook questions, that sort of stuff, they’re all like golden moments, so I can literally just take that time and put that back into the business. And so. Like I said as well. With the revenue that has been generated from AppSumo. I’m pretty sure 99% of it will go back and start from I’ve got a very ambitious roadmap that I want to be delivering for doing things like improving the SEO features. Improving just the Usability. And like I said. This sort of publishing effect that I think will make Quick Blog an absolute number one contender in this blogging space.

[00:14:28] – Peter

Oh, that’s great. Joanne. It’s awesome to hear your story of what you’ve done so far. I’m amazed that you’ve done that just as a side, so I wish you all the best with it to continue it. And thanks for joining us to share.

[00:14:41] – Diran

Thanks for having us on, I really appreciate it.

[00:14:44] – Peter

You’re welcome.

[00:14:47] – Diran

Have a nice day. Bye.

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