TMBA 678: Evolving An Agency, With SaaS Mistakes Along The Way

A scenic vie of apartments in Mljet Pomena in Croatia

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When Johnathan Solorzano, founder of Solo Media Group, joined us on the podcast just over two years ago his agency focused on broad ‘white label work’, which he aptly described as ‘doing all the work and then someone else passes it off as their own’. Today, through what he learnt from doing that, he’s niched Solo Media to focus entirely on Shopify clients.

Jonathan talks to Dan about how this evolution has provided him with a much more stable portfolio and revenue, and also why he feels ‘got distracted’ and wasted a year trying to develop some ‘Software as a Service’ products.

He also discusses how creating a social media presence has helped his personal and agency profile, and why you don’t need to have thousands of followers to achieve that:

“I’m not doing it for clicks. I’m not doing it for likes, and I’m not doing it for followers. I’m literally doing it to answer questions that I know people have. So some of my videos  are like, ‘Whoa, this was like a $20,000 question’. If the right person sees this and sees  they can save so much money .. To me, that’s enough.

Listen and Learn:

  • The importance of addressing the hard problems in an agency

  • Why Shopify merchants turned out to be Johnathan’s ideal clients

  • The lure of SaaS products

  • Going ‘all in’ on one thing

Mentioned in the episode:

Before the Exit – Our New Book
Partner With Us
The Dynamite Circle
Dynamite Jobs
Post a Remote Job
Dynamite Deals
Tropical MBA on YouTube
Dynamite Jobs – Remote Recruiting Sales Page
Johnathan Solorzano
Solo Media Group
My First Million Podcast
Ayman Al-Abdullah
Noah Kagan
Shopify

Enjoyed this podcast? Check out these:

TMBA620: The Upside of Running an Agency
TMBA566: Why Do SaaS Businesses Fail?
TMBA610: Building Deal Flow from Social Media and Content Marketing

This week’s sponsors:

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Have comments about the show?

Do you have ideas for things you’d like Dan and Ian to discuss on future episodes?

Our producer Jane would love to hear from you at jane@tropicalmba.com or leave us a voice message using the record button below.

 

Thanks for listening to our show! We’ll be back next Thursday morning 8AM EST.

Cheers,

Dan & Ian

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TMBA 679: News Updates + “The Number”

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TMBA 677: Digital Nomad Cities for 2023 and Choosing Between ‘Scaling Up’ And ‘Traction’