Tara Hunt on Creating a DIY Marketing Platform for SMBs

Show notes

Marketing can be painful for small businesses; spending money is a hard pill to swallow.

As a result, they adopt a DIY approach that often goes badly.

Tara Hunt experienced the small business marketing challenge while running a digital marketing agency.

Work easily done as a freelancer no longer made economic sense.

But rather than walking away from marketing-hungry entrepreneurs, Tara did something different.

She and her team at Truly created a program called Phlywheel, a marketing platform that combines DIY lessons, templates, coaching, and community.

It allows entrepreneurs to do marketing without spending a lot of money.

Key takeaways

Before hiring your first employee, talk to someone who has scaled and ask what they wish they had set up. Time sheets, processes, quality checks and margin tracking are easy to skip as a freelancer.

Hiring staff adds fixed costs like salaries, benefits, software and office space. These cut into margins that look great when you work alone, so track them closely.

An agency with staff can't profitably take small mandates, which forced Truly to turn away promising startups. That gap led to Flywheel, a lower-cost mix of lessons, templates, coaching and community.

Many people handed the marketing job come from finance, legal or business development. They learn fast, use the tools quickly, and value a community because they are often the only marketer in their company.

About one third of Flywheel's members are marketing professionals. Sharing processes with competitors helps everyone, because marketing is not a zero sum game and better practices grow the whole field.

Tara Hunt on Creating a DIY Marketing Platform for SMBs

Show notes

Tell me what's going on with your marketing.