Hey Rebekah's Business Plan Part 1

As we near the half way mark of warming up our email sender domain, we're getting a lot of questions from readers. A recurring theme: What the heck is Hey Rebekah and what are you doing?

To be honest, we're still trying to figure it out ourselves. But don't worry, we've got some pretty solid assumptions and a dependable data-pipeline to work from. So, how did we end up here? Let's just say it involved some unique experiences, a taste of the possibilities, and a pinch of pure madness. We'll be telling you all about in painstaking detail over the coming weeks, so don't lose any sleep. 😜

It all started mid 2020, just after taking on a new client. We were faced with the hard reality that highly personalized professional services weren't scalable and our business model was approaching it's peak. Something would have to change.

Some ODIous research

We've played in the digital marketing space for as long as we can remember. Rebekah's been one of the most sought after experts since forever, Ambreen the creative force, and Sam powering the tech. We've been helping companies gain digital marketing superpowers together, since 2014.

So it was logical and convenient that our focus remain in the field moving forward. We examined the landscape to identify problems companies were facing, did some competitive benchmarking, and identified a lot of possibilities.

However, something occurred to us as we continued to conduct a unique combination of qualitative and quantitative research in our market segmentation.

First things first

When examining our value proposition and what we've achieved together we honed in on stuff like:

• 65 years of combined experience
• Acquired 315M users
• Converted 100M users to customers
• Earned over $10M

But we overlooked the fact that we were self-employed professionals. When we focused on that basic premise, everything changed. It was at that point that our unique value proposition became clearer.

Oh, and remember that client we talked about from 2020? We were introduced to them by our favorite person who'd taken on a senior role there. It was a non-profit organization working to make higher education more accessible.

Our time there had a huge impact on our path forward. It redefined meaningful work for us. So we reframed our thinking and began to look at things in a new way.

What has made us successful self-employed professionals and how could we leverage that to help others?

A discovery

Approaching the question from a new paradigm landed us on something unexpected. What made us successful as digital marketing professionals was deeply seeded in what made us successful as self-employed professionals:

• Significant exposure to enterprise/best-practices
• A lot of insider knowledge gained from experience
• A deep understanding of business processes
• A superior command of business technologies
• An established network of contacts
• A ton of hard work
• A $#!t load of mistakes
• Probably a little luck too

It was about this time that we were contacted by a former colleague who was with us on one of our client adventures. They had written to check-in, say hello, and to let us know that they'd been promoted to the role of Engineering Manager at Meta.

What stood out about this story was their gratitude for things they said we helped them with or showed them during our time together. For some reason, they over estimated those simple things in lieu of their own potential and capabilities. We reminded them of that and were grateful for the check-in nevertheless.

That quick thread made us reflect upon some of the other people we worked with, many that had similar trajectories. Most of whom continue to remain self-employed. Where were they now?

There's the story of our former social media manager from Cebu who went on the productize her service offerings and establish a thriving agency.

There's also our ASP.net friend from Kharkiv who built one of the first Facebook payment apps with us. They now run a team of .net professionals working with big US companies on Azure. We're thinking about you K, stay safe!

There are a lot more of these stories and we'll share them with you in detail in future editions. However, what's curious about each of them is the profound effect of exposing high-potential, self-employed professionals to the factors that have contributed to our own career success, such as best practices, industry expertise, and business processes.

Ultimately, the path forward became clear. We were going to help self-employed professionals become better at what they do so that they can make more money and find their joy. How? We'll get to that in the next part of this story.

This is the first part of a multi-part series that we'll be continuing on Tuesdays and Thursdays until we're done boring you to death.