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5 Mistakes that have Crushed Content Army's Growth
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This year, I boldly claimed that I would scale my B2B thought-leader agency, Content Army, to $500k in less than 2 years. As of today, I’m a million miles away from this target. Here are the top 5 mistakes I’ve made along the way and how I will fix them to hit that target. CONTEXT We launched Content Army as a 3-person company back in late 2023 (myself, Blake, Andy). We immediately gained traction based on our network and grew the company to over $30k per month within 2 months of launch. Then the wheels started to come off.
Additionally, the initial startup costs were subsidized by Magnet Monster - a loan that needed to be paid back (the companies act as separate entities). In the background, Magnet Monster has been quietly going about having its best-ever year in terms of revenue and profit. Content Army, by contrast, has been a struggling startup without a clear “service-market fit”. What seemed like it initially could be a rocket ship quickly turned into a potential distraction. I’ve had to spend a lot of time justifying this business to my partners at Magnet Monster, who wanted my time back to help grow the company. All of this combined with a major lifestyle change for me and lack of focus has led to the business having an underwhelming year in terms of performance. So why continue? Two major reasons:
That’s why when the pressure truly came on, I decided it was the right decision to absorb Content Army into Magnet Monster so it has complete buy-in from our team and alignment. With that out the way, there are some crucial specific lessons I’ve learned along the way that have held us back that I’m already rectifying now. Here are the top 5 reasons the business has struggled to date along with what I’m doing to fix them. 1: Getting the Value Proposition Wrong My GTM message with Content Army has been for B2B founders to “save time” on content marketing. This has been the wrong approach. After working with over 20 individuals in the past year, the best clients we have believe in creating content and want to spend time on parallel activities that yield the best returns. That includes meticulous preparation for our interviews; investing in and testing their setup with the right recording equipment; proactively connecting with their ICP each day; leaving thoughtful comments on the responses to their posts and others in their networks to expedite audience growth. ALL of this activity will stretch you far beyond the initial value proposition of “create a month’s worth of content in less than 4 hours per month.” Even though this is true, you’ll still get better results if you take the time to prepare and execute all of the above in tandem with us. So while time is definitely a core consideration and reasonable value proposition (posting content is better than doing nothing at all and still justifies the investment into our services), we want our clients to get exceptional results. This means they truly need to collaborate with us on making the whole strategy a success by executing the 3 “Cs”:
If you’re only doing number 2 on this list, you won’t get the maximum results. So, our value proposition will change from “time” to simply creating the best quality content to become a dominant thought leader in your category - something that is likely to attract the highest LTV clients within our ICP, from the data we have to date. 2: Being sucked into the “MQL” conversation to justify our services For many B2B founders (especially in the SaaS) space, the idea of founder-led content is still nascent and they’re struggling to justify the time investment it takes to truly make this a success. This leads to a lot of pushback in the sales process and conversations such as “How many leads will this generate compared to cold outbound?” This has always stumped us because frankly, nobody knows how many leads your content will generate in 3, 6 or even 12 months. It’s like asking whether you should invest in direct-response advertising or brand building activities for DTC – you need to do both. And content sits quite squarely in the “brand building” playbook. That leads to misdirected scrutiny as people try to compress the timeframes on content to box it into an “ROI” KPI (a thoroughly debunked measurement strategy) and an obsession with short-term attribution. Instead, I now believe that anybody who wants to generate leads from content within 3 months and has the expectation of doing so just has the wrong mindset to succeed with this type of activity. I’ve written endlessly about more effective ways to measure the impact of your content (see here) before, but it really boils down to this: content is a BUSINESS ACTIVITY, not a siloed MQL generator. Until you reprogram your mind to understand and believe this, your results will always be subpar and you won’t get access to the same opportunities that the top creators in the space do (who have fallen in love with content creation). 3: Switching the website to Adamkitchen.co away from Content Army Around 5 months ago, I made a really dumb decision to divert all traffic from Content Army to my new personal website (Adamkitchen.co) as I believed that the business was going to be run primarily through a cohort-based business model with the agency a secondary offering. In hindsight, this was probably my worst mistake to date. It diluted our offering, was a distraction in development time + costs and led to cashflow issues as I experimented with a new business model, positioning and entirely new service. In reality, I should have focused on improving our core offering (done-for-you service with fully managed clients) and doubled down on outbound to bring these individuals in. The Content Army website will be relaunched in the next few days with a crystal clear value proposition, and Adamkitchen.co will be rebuilt to essentially be a landing page for my newsletter (subscribe here if you haven’t already!) and storage space for historical podcast episodes. This brings me onto… 4: Running a Cohort-Based Business Model This coincided with my rebrand of the website a few months ago. I’ve just released a new YT video that goes deep into this (more here) but the short version is: cohorts require a LOT of leads and traffic to generate traction, and at the time of launching, I didn’t have either. While the cohort project was a bad decision in terms of financial results, it wasn’t entirely a waste of time as I learnt a huge amount about how to run these programs successfully (a long-term interest) and I also generated our client's excellent results (the ones who listened to me, anyway). In turn, this further validated my mission, value proposition and long-term belief that we’re on the right path by seeing how many founders struggle to systemise and stay consistent with this activity, despite understanding its impact. Going forward, we’re going to deprioritise the cohorts for Content Army until further notice. We may relaunch them in the second half of next year depending on where the business is at, but for now, we’re focusing on fully managed clients. 5: Taking my eye off the ball with Magnet Monster It’s arguable this one should be on the list. After all, I’ve successfully “freed” myself from MMs operations – a dream for many agency owners. AND we’re having our best ever year! So why is it a mistake I haven’t been involved? Because Content Army gained traction initially because of my involvement with Magnet Monster being the face of the company! When I abandoned all the leverage I had previously built up and went in a completely different direction, fewer people were interested in my new message and what I had to say. In the last 3 weeks, you’ll have noticed that I’m now posting again about email marketing and the DTC space. This has been an intentional strategy to reengage my existing audience and allow Content Army to flourish as a byproduct of its success. That’s my hunch, at least, while I steadily build up more audience in the background with a “new” ICP. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS All of these are contributing factors as to why I’m behind on my goal for this year with this company. But the biggest one of all? A major lifestyle change and struggling to find the balance between my new responsibilities as a father at home as well as a business owner. I’m getting to grips with that balance now, but here’s my final message: never start a new company when you have a newborn child, lol. See you all next week. |
Adam Kitchen
Join my weekly Newsletter where I teach you the strategies the world's leading creators are using to build and monetize their audiences through content marketing, digital products & newsletters.
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