13 Building in Public: Community...?

GM. Thank you for bearing with me those last two weeks.

Those posts were off topic, yes. But damn were they fun to write.

Onward.

What’s goin’ on with HeyCPA?

We’re still truckin’ along. We’ve been extremely active on social media (mainly LinkedIn). We’ve been able to land our first few clients and we’ve also been able to get some quality applications through the door. Overall, it’s been…

But, we’re running into one major issue: Traffic.

Back to this damn chicken and the egg problem…

We have just enough traffic to support our job postings. But frankly, it ain’t good enough. Some potential ways to increase traffic quickly:

1. Paid ads - FB, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google, etc.
2. Paid promotion (influencer).
3. Hire a social media manager/expert to release content consistently (and probably more effectively).

But we’re a tad cheap. And we’re not in it for the quick win, we want HeyCPA to be thriving decades from now.

And that’s the problem with paid ads… Sure, they bring traffic, hopefully some revenue, and overall can be super useful. But I don’t think we’re far enough along yet. We haven't built a strong enough community, and don’t have enough organic content to justify the cost (i.e., our ROI wouldn’t be great).

Plus, many businesses become ‘addicted’ to paid ads.

It’s like a salary. Or heroin. You can’t stop, and once you do, you need it to just sustain yourself.

Better approach (we think) is to go slow(er) and steadi(er).

Yes, revenue will take longer to increase substantially, but it will occur through organic reach. Basically, our customers will be stickier. And our CAC (customer acquisition cost) will be close to nil. Which is what we want.

We’re playing long-term games. We’re thinking: What will HeyCPA look like in a decade? Not: What will it look like on Monday?? This, as Shannon can attest to, is something I am f***** terrible at. (I’m working on it).

So, how do we grow our organic reach? Leverage.

As the savant, Naval, once said: there are three types of leverage:

1) Capital; 2) Code; 3) People.

First, we don’t need much capital, nor would it help us. We’re trying to remain capital light during these inflationary times. Second, we got some code, but that’s not our differentiator. So that leaves us with people.

Usually, ‘people’ in this sense would refer to labour. For example, I can increase my leverage by having more people sell X products to the YZ community. But this is not what we mean by people in this case. What we mean by people here are our ‘true fans’. People who love our product. And use it!

Moral of the story? We need to build Community.

Okay, so Community is likely the most overused jargon, bullsh*t word out there. But we actually mean it. We want to help CPAs exit the Big 4 and find their dream career.

This where 95% of the focus now shifts and we need to continually answer the question: How can we add value to the CPA community?

Our content has become much more consistent daily, and we’ll continually pump out organic content to slowly increase our reach.

A couple tactics we’ve deployed (unscalable):

• Messaging 10+ CPAs on LinkedIn per day. It’s simple: I say “what’s up, check out heycpa.io and let me know what ya think!” - No selling, no ask (kinda). I usually add in a piece of flattery there too…
• Email companies - “Hey, saw you posted this job [here]. Wanna post it on HeyCPA? PS would love your feedback”.
• Posting 2-3 blogs or videos per week on quitting the Big 4, interviewing, job search, or just general career advice.
• Posting on LinkedIn daily.

So far, so good.

We just need to let these actions compound. And become a trusted source within the accounting and CPA community.

This strategy may be slower, yes. But sometimes being slow is okay.

Only sometimes...

Until next time ✌️