How This Entrepreneur Turned His Blog Into an 8-Figure Software Business with 46,000 Customers
Clay Collins, Co-Founder and CEO of Leadpages, shares the powerful insight that led to the creation of his company.

Clay Collins is Co-Founder and CEO of Leadpages, a powerful and easy-to-use software tool that allows marketers to build customized landing pages and opt-in forms to capture email addresses.

In a recent conversation on my podcast, Clay shared the story of how he took a lifestyle blog and turned it into Leadpages, which in just over three years has grown into an 8-figure SaaS business with 46,000 customers and $38 million in venture financing. In July 2016, Leadpages dipped into its venture funds to acquire Drip, a marketing automation firm.


Clay Collins, Co-Founder and CEO of Leadpages
Clay's advice for entrepreneurs? Focus first on building a "Minimum Viable Audience"--before you start to build a "Minimum Viable Product." Here are some excerpts from our conversation in which he shared some of the practical strategies you can use to start building your "Minimum Viable Audience":

From blogging to vlogging.
"I had built a pretty successful lifestyle design blog. It went from zero to 4,000 RSS subscribers in about four months. A lot of people were more interested in how I had grown an audience for my blog than they were in my actual writing, so I started teaching about marketing.

I used to write these 4,000-5,000 word blog posts on how to do different things when it comes to marketing and maybe I'd get 20 or 30 comments. Writing isn't one of these strong suits for me. I think the end product comes out pretty good, but it's an agonizing process.

At around the time I was doing this, I discovered Gary Vaynerchuck, who had a wine blog called Wine Library TV. Where it took me 3-4 days to write a 4,000-word blog post, he would take wine bottles off the shelf, taste them in front of a camera--and completely unedited and uncut--he would get millions of views.

I said 'screw it': I needed to find a way to create content that efficiently. So instead of writing these long blog posts, I would take landing pages, and I would film a video talking about how they worked, share any split test data I had on them, and show how we would deploy them in some of my clients' businesses. It would take me half an hour to produce an episode and they were so much more popular than my blog posts."

The quote that inspired Leadpages.
"Then I came across this quote by Buckminster Fuller, the designer, author, and inventor. He said something to the effect that if you want to teach someone a new skill, don't bother. Instead, create a tool that will teach them the skill through the use of it. It's one of my favorite quotes. It got me thinking about how I could create a tool that has embedded within it best practices for marketing................

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