SupplyDrop Email Marketing: $8,000 Monthly
The founder is an experienced professional in email marketing for e-commerce — both hands-on and as a marketing consultant.
He initially tried building his own e-commerce brand, invested $14,000, and ran it for 18 months before it fell apart. So he went back to his roots and got into marketing services.
Early-stage goals:
1. Get businesses willing to pay for the service — any price point would work.
2. Based on customer feedback, realize clients thought the pricing was high and wanted clarity on where their money was going. So he refined the product — dropped the price from ¥5,000 to ¥3,500 and productized the marketing service so clients could clearly see how their money was being spent.
It took several rounds of iteration over a few months before the business model finally clicked.
The first batch of clients came from his YouTube–grown newsletter subscribers. Even though there was just one, that person referred other clients later on.
After locking in the business model, most customer acquisition happened through Twitter and Facebook. Having previously done course training, he had an expert-like presence, so he focused on long-form, valuable, altruistic content on these platforms. His marketing copy often drew a contrast: if a client hired their own specialist to handle this kind of work, it would cost around ¥150,000 a month — but with his service, it was only ¥3,500 a month.
Current profit margin sits at 20%.
Key takeaways:
1. Clients buy based on trust. A 20% discount alone won't close the deal. So with service-based products, you need to consistently deliver high-quality content that gets embedded in their minds. When they need this type of service and your name is the first to come to them, that's effective marketing.
Highly recommended read:
The secret to running a lean, efficient agency is treating your entire service offering like a product. In other words, focus on selling one repeatable service as a step-by-step process, and get paid upfront.