61: Nathan Hirsch, From $5k to $12 Million

Nathan Hirsch started a business called Free Up with $5k, then built it up over 4 years to earn 12 million dollars/year in revenue before selling it. Now he owns and manages several new businesses that we cover in this episode.

He discusses the strategies he used to acquire his first customers and the lessons he learned along the way. Nathan emphasizes the importance of minimal viable product, building trust with customers, and the value of feedback in improving the product. He also shares insights on hiring, delegation, and the key factors to consider before starting a business.

Nathan Hirsch’s Advice to Entrepreneurs

• Starting with a minimal viable product and selling it early builds trust and allows for customer feedback.
• Hiring and delegation are crucial skills for entrepreneurs, and mastering them accelerates business growth.
• Feedback from initial customers is valuable for improving the product and building a loyal customer base.

Takeaways

• Nathan built FreeUp with a $5,000 investment and scaled it to $12 million.
• Early selling experiences shaped Nathan’s approach to entrepreneurship.
• Offering free services helped Nathan acquire initial customers.
• Building trust with customers is crucial for long-term success.
• Cold outreach and social media were key in gaining initial clients.
• Feedback from customers is essential for product improvement.
• Hiring the right people is a critical skill for entrepreneurs.
• Nathan emphasizes the importance of market research before launching a business.
• Scaling operations requires finding effective operators.
• Entrepreneurs should focus on their strengths and delegate weaknesses.

Key Moments

00:00 The Entrepreneurial Journey Begins

03:20 Acquiring the First Customers: Strategies and Lessons

08:19 Marketing and Outreach: Cold Email and Social Media

11:57 Delegation and Business Expansion

Nathan Hirsch Book Recommendations

• The EXITPreneur’s Playbook: How to Sell Your Online Business for Top Dollar by Reverse Engineering Your Pathway to Success
  • Nathan’s thoughts on this book: “…because at the end of the day, the things that buyers care about are the same things that you should care about in your business…”
  • Buy it here: https://amzn.to/3AdSmx2

Nathan Hirsch Experience & Exptertise

Nathan has extensive experience in sales in many types of businesses. He brought those skills into the digital world, started several businesses, and successfully exited one of them so far:

• FreeUp (sold in 2019)
• Outsource School
• EcomBalance
• AccountsBalance
• TrioSEO
• The Savvy SEO

Find out more about Nathan Hirsch’s experience and what he’s working on now at his website: https://nathanhirsch.com/

Show Transcript for First Customers e61 with Nathan Hirsch

Paris Vega (00:00.218)
Welcome to the first customers podcast today we have Nathan Hirsch with us. He started a business called free up with $5 ,000 then built it up over four years to earn $12 million a year in revenue. He then sold that business and now he owns and manages several new businesses that we’re going to talk about today. Nathan welcome to the show.

Nathan Hirsch (00:21.202)
Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here. Sorry for rescheduling in you a bunch, but I appreciate you being accommodating.

Paris Vega (00:24.762)
No problem. Yes, sir. All right. Take us back to when you first got started and how you got your very first customers.

Nathan Hirsch (00:35.794)
Yeah, so I kind of three parts of this. I mean, first of all, I learned how to sell just at a young age. I had a lot of jobs and internships. I never had a real job after college, but I had a lot of high school and summer jobs. And one of the funny ones was an internship at Firestone, which they sell tires and car services. I know nothing about cars. I’m not a cars guy. And they threw me into the fire and had me sell car services. So I’d go out to the back, talk to the technician, try to go out to the front, put in layman’s terms and sell cars.

sell to the customer and I crashed at Burns at first and by the end I was one of the top salespeople being a high school and then eventually like a freshman in college before I left that. So that was my first selling experience and then my first company which was an Amazon business and I got into Amazon super early 2008 -2009. No one really knew what Amazon was.

We just threw products online. It was all trial and error. Amazon brought the customers. There was no PPC. There was no SEO. It was all trial and error trying to figure out what would people buy. And we landed on baby products. And ironically, I’m buying a lot of that same stuff now because I had my first kid nine months ago. But that was my thank you. My first like real my own business sales. And then fast forward one more time to my first B2B business, my own brand away from kind of the Amazon world.

Paris Vega (01:45.626)
Okay, congratulations.

Nathan Hirsch (01:58.194)
I pretty much started offering free hours of virtual assistance. I had all these VA’s for my Amazon business that were great. Amazon was getting harder. I didn’t sell my own product. Manufacturers realized they could do it themselves, but I had this great team and I started offering it to other e -commerce sellers. And so I would go on Facebook. I would go on a Craigslist. I would just go anywhere that I could see with job posting and just say, Hey, I have these pre -vetted e -commerce VA’s. Can I give you 10, 15?

20, whatever it took to get that potential customer free hours. And I still had to pay the VA. So this was money out of my pocket. but that’s how I got the initial clients for free up and launched it with that $5 ,000. And the rest is history.

Paris Vega (02:41.946)
Wow. What do you think some lessons you learned about getting those first customers? Would you do it any different if you had to do it over today?

Nathan Hirsch (02:52.53)
So I’m a big fan of minimal viable product and selling it as early as possible with free up. We had nothing. We had this crummy software we built that could you could see the freelancer’s hours. That was it. Didn’t do anything else. And, and we just sold it and I built trust with people. I kind of assured people that I’d have their back if anything went wrong. And, and I did that with those initial clients that they didn’t the issues. I would refund them, give them credit, cover replacement costs, whatever it was.

Luckily that didn’t happen very often, but that kind of built a sense of trust. And at the same time, I was open and honest with these customers. I said, Hey, this is a new company. We’re gonna, we are planning to grow this thing. I have your back if anything goes wrong, but like there are going to be speed bumps that like any new company and we want feedback. We want to know how we can make this better over time. And we kind of shared our journey as we went. So those initial clients became raving fans as we kept going. Now.

We did the same thing with our other companies when we launched Outdoor School, which is my company that teaches people how to hire. And we launched this post free up. We had no idea if people wanted a course on how to hire great VAs. We sold the course before we even made the course. We just did a pre -sale and said, Hey, we’ll give it to you at a cheaper price than what we’re going to launch. If you’ve been following me and you enjoyed the free app journey, it’s yours if you want it. And if people didn’t buy it, we would have just never built it. If.

People got the course when we finally built it and wanted a refund. We would have just refunded everyone and moved on to something else. And fast forward again to bookkeeping business. I own accounts balance, an online bookkeeping or booking business for online businesses and econ balance, a bookkeeping business for e -commerce sellers. We went out and we tried to give away two free months of bookkeeping. And if we couldn’t give away two free months of bookkeeping or those people didn’t stay on again, we didn’t have a business. And we did the same thing with True SEO. We offered.

free articles, we do a lot of SEO content that we now offer as a service through Trio and that was how we got our initial client. So I’m a big proponent of that if you can’t sell it at a discount, if you can’t sell it free, if you can’t give it away and keep those initial clients you don’t really have a business.

Paris Vega (05:00.026)
So I’ve heard some entrepreneurs complain, like if they give things away for free, sometimes you can get the quote unquote wrong target customer that may not be with you long term or be willing to pay higher prices later and that kind of thing. How do you account for that?

Nathan Hirsch (05:16.178)
So we look at it two ways. For one, we definitely like vet the buyers in some way. Like with our bookkeeping business, we have certain specifications and in certain situations that there might be cleanup work or additional stuff there. But we’re not just trying to take anyone. They have to be some kind of legit business. But then the second way is we don’t really care if some of the initial people drop off, we kind of expect it, but we use them to improve the process. So.

Bookkeeping, for example, when you sign up, we have to get you a quote quickly. We got to integrate you. We got to have a kickoff call, and then we got to catch up your book. So just by putting like five clients through that, even if two of them drop off, we’re going to learn a lot and improve the process for down the line. Now, if all five of them drop off, that’s different, but I think we had like 20, 25 initial customers, a few of them dropped off. We also learned a bit about what an ideal client looks like for our business. And that helped us going forward.

Paris Vega (06:11.642)
All right, let’s back up a little bit and break down kind of step by step some of the tactics you use to get those very first customers. You went over it briefly, but could you get a little more in depth on the different ways you found them?

Nathan Hirsch (06:25.028)
Yeah, I created a can template that just said, hey, my name’s Nathan. I was an e -commerce seller. I hired a lot of EVAs for my e -commerce business. And I know hiring is a struggle. It took me years to figure out how to hire really good people. But when it did, it changed my life. And I gave people a story that it related to, a true story. And I said, hey, I launched this new company, FreeUp. I know it’s new. I know it’s tough to trust new people. But if you’re ever looking for VAs and…

You want to give it a shot? Your first five hours are on me or something along those lines. And then I tried everything. I tried going to other marketplaces and, and, and put like posting profiles there. I tried going on Craigslist and remote job boards and posting there. I did it on social media and just made posts about, Hey, if you know any business owner looking for VA’s, we’re giving away five free hours. So it was pretty much, how do I get this message and get it out there? And then I would tweak it.

over time and let’s say I would come across someone online that would say hey I’m looking to hire a customer service rep, I’m looking to hire a bookkeeper, whatever it was, I would get their email and try a variation of the email to see what would work and we actually landed some really big clients that were with us for all four years in that initial first month or two of free app just by doing that.

Paris Vega (07:43.002)
So was email marketing a big part of that initial outreach? Was it just pure cold email outreach? Or you said there was social media and stuff. Which channel did you see perform the best?

Nathan Hirsch (07:53.714)
Yeah, cold outreach landed our initial clients. And I also just said, Hey, I’m going to post on social media every day. And I didn’t really have any followers or anyone back then, but I just said, Hey, I’m just going to focus on being consistent every single day. I, Facebook was my go -to at the time. And I just made a post on Facebook. I would either teach someone about hiring or make an offer. And, the, the cold email definitely was the first way that we got clients, but social media soon turned into another way. And.

to keep going like I started going on podcasts after that. Now there’s a lot of podcasts back then there were not many. Now I’ve been on 900 plus podcasts, but it was a great way to get in front of ideal audience and network with podcast hosts and get my brand out into the e -commerce space. So those are kind of the free easy ways that we got our message out there and landed our initial.

Paris Vega (08:43.994)
Did you transition into paid advertisement at some point?

Nathan Hirsch (08:48.498)
We didn’t, we probably spent maybe a few thousand dollars on ads. We tried out some Google retargeting. We got really good at just organic marketing. If you go to OutsourceSchool .com organic marketing, it’s our exact organic marketing blueprint that we use for all of our companies. We drive traffic through SEO. We go on podcasts. We have partner programs for different people in the space that have the same ideal customer, but a different service that we’re constantly doing cross promotions with. We put out a lot of content and social media.

We have really good reoccurring affiliate programs in all of our companies that we mentioned to everyone and our clients are for other clients that get kickbacks from it. And there are a few other things as well, but that’s kind of our organic marketing blueprint that we do on all of our companies now. And a lot of people use Outsource School to hire VAs to do it for them.

Paris Vega (09:36.218)
You mentioned something that came up during the last episode with Richard White, the CEO of Fathom, about using those initial customers to improve your product and iterate. Could you talk a little bit about that? What was your process for handling that kind of customer feedback and that initial burst of customers?

Nathan Hirsch (09:54.866)
Nice. We use Fathom. They’re great. So, I mean, we always want feedback. The first thing is just being open and honest that we want feedback and telling people like, Hey, we’re not going to be perfect and kind of setting those expectations. And Hey, if you’re looking for an established business that is, has all their systems dialed in, like that’s not us go find someone else and, and all that. But if you want someone where you’re going to get a really good rate, you’re going to get hooked up. You’re going to have me there. If anything goes wrong, a much more personal experience.

Paris Vega (09:56.538)
Okay, yeah.

Nathan Hirsch (10:23.698)
and someone that’s actually going to listen to your feedback and improve as we go. I’m your guy and I’d love to work with you. And with that, we would check in with clients. and with free up, you got to remember that there’s two sides of the marketplace. There’s the clients and then there’s a freelancers that we’re getting on. So we created this marketplace and all these freelancers, they can go on Upwork, they can go on Fiverr. So we wanted to make free up the best place for them. We also wanted them to stay on the platform and keep building through the platform and same thing on the client. So.

Throughout that, we’re always listening to feedback. We want people to feel heard. We’re always trying to improve and we’re trying to put steps in place. If something does go wrong, if someone hired a freelancer, it didn’t work out or whatever it was. How do we put steps in place so that that doesn’t happen again? And then you got the software that holds it all together. We were building like an Airbnb type portal that people could log in, put in a request, get matched up. So then it becomes all these feature requests that we’re getting from clients. We’re getting from freelancers.

How do we prioritize these? What moves the needle? How do we balance long -term projects for short -term projects and trying to get that feedback out there as quick as possible. And we’ll tell people like we listen to feedback, we write it all down, but we can’t implement every piece of feedback instantly. So you have to prioritize at the end of the day.

Paris Vega (11:36.634)
So when you were building free up over that four year period, you started off you yourself spreading the message, however you could tell them your story to get those first customers. Did you transition to like a sales team or how did you expand or kind of delegate and move out of that position? Or did you stay on that position the whole time?

Nathan Hirsch (11:57.491)
Yeah, we teach VAs to do everything. So we had a VA from the Philippines doing sales calls for us and they would go through free up and take requests for clients that they wanted and put it into the portal for them. It was very white glove. We had a whole marketing team that’s putting out content. People are doing SEO strategy and writing articles for our blog. A partnership manager that’s managing all these different e -commerce software companies and different partners where we’re doing cross promotions and keeping that organized. We want to be more organized at our end. So that.

Paris Vega (12:00.186)
Okay.

Nathan Hirsch (12:27.442)
like other people’s partner managers might not be that organized. So we want to be so organized that it makes it easy for them to do business with us and do cross promotions with us. Run people running our social media. Yeah, over time, I mean, by the time we sold it, we had no office, no U .S. employees, but we had a 30 person team in the Philippines doing everything from operation fulfillment to sales, to marketing, to billing, you name it.

Paris Vega (12:54.106)
That’s beautiful. So you’re fully kind of fleshed out a full digital marketing funnel. It sounds like you leveraging every modern aspect of technology you can get a hold of.

Nathan Hirsch (13:05.234)
Yeah, and don’t get me wrong, not every business works. We created this SOP building software called Simply SOP and we did the same process. We minimal viable product, which is like the bare minimum that we can build. We took it to market and we tried to sell it and there was not enough interest. People liked their Google Docs, they liked their Loom. We pivoted, we moved on to something else and luckily we didn’t spend four years working on this project. It was a few months and it didn’t really cost as much time or effort. So…

It goes both ways. Not every business that you hit is going to be a success, but if you prove that you can sell it first, that’s going to tell you a lot about the market.

Paris Vega (13:41.818)
That’s a really interesting insight. Trust in your process and then also that specific niche of anything that starts to compete with Google Docs, Google Sheets, Loom, that kind of, you know, those really fast, easy ways to document things. A lot of tools out there, I feel like end up becoming more work just using the tool than just, hey, go back to the good old office suite of products, basically.

Nathan Hirsch (14:05.714)
Yeah. And there’s the market research part ahead of that. Like before we launched a bookkeeping business, I’m not a bookkeeper. So I didn’t know anything about bookkeeping business. And we did, we interviewed people. We published those interviews to the econ balance blog. If anyone wants to check it out, but we want to know, can you name five competitors? Like, what do you like about your bookkeeper? What do you not like? What do they charge you? And, and see if there’s an actual market before spending any time on it. And you’re, you’re brainstorming ideas all the time. I’m sure you do this like with our business, my business partner work.

Paris Vega (14:08.506)
Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Hirsch (14:34.674)
constantly throwing around bad ideas, but when you have something that you think is a good idea, now it becomes do market research, find an operator, because now we don’t want your business without an operator and then prove you can sell it before you do anything else.

Paris Vega (14:51.546)
What do you mean by find an operator? I’m assuming that’s the person who runs kind of the day to day of each of your businesses. Talk a little bit about how that works.

Nathan Hirsch (15:00.786)
Yeah, I mean, I have four businesses now. My goal is to get up to 10 plus a media company that promotes Connor, my personal brand and all the marketing for our companies. And so we couldn’t run all those businesses together if we wanted to without a lot of help. So, and on top of that, like I’m at a different point in my life now for free up, I was hustling all the time, going to every conference. Now I don’t do any work travel. I refuse to go to any conferences. It’s just personally, I want to run a business that doesn’t require me to go places. I.

don’t work after 3 p on the weekdays, I don’t work weekends, I only go on podcasts that I want to go on. So I’m very particular about our time. In order to do that, I have to put really good people into these positions. And I mean, bookkeeping, for example, I’m not a bookkeeper. I couldn’t do fulfillment or run a bookkeeping business even if I wanted to. So we had to find a controller with 30 years of experience that’s been there, done that, that has our values, that’s going to be with us a long time, that we can support. And with those operators,

They have that entrepreneurial spirit, but they don’t love all parts of it. They don’t like sales. They don’t like marketing. They don’t love all the things around it, but they’re super organized. They’ve been there. They have systems. They can build systems that they don’t have it. And we can just every week check in with them and say, how can we support you? Can we help you with a problem with the software, with hiring someone with more clients, whatever it is. And, and that’s kind of how we run our companies now where we’re checking with the operators. We’re out of operations and we’re also running our media company to push clients.

to these different businesses.

Paris Vega (16:27.866)
Wow. Do you have this visualized anywhere?

Nathan Hirsch (16:31.986)
yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we’ve got internal docs and stuff. I don’t have like a template or anything. I do have, if you go to nathanhirsch .com slash exit, we have this exit playbook that teaches you how we build our businesses to be scalable and sellable. Even if you don’t want to sell your company like free up, we didn’t have to sell it, but it had really good teams, really good processes, diverse marketing clients coming from different directions.

Paris Vega (16:33.53)
I guess internally probably, huh?

Yeah, that’s really cool.

Nathan Hirsch (16:56.018)
good leadership, recurring revenue. There’s just certain things that we look for in a business and the way that we build a business that we’re happy to share with others.

Paris Vega (17:07.226)
Would you recommend any books? I mean, I’ve seen that you’ve got a color coordinated stacks of books behind you on your shelves. And it seems like you’ve got really dialed in systems and everything. So be curious to see what you’d recommend for others who are trying to build businesses out there.

Nathan Hirsch (17:11.41)
Yeah.

Nathan Hirsch (17:24.466)
Yeah, so when I went through the sale of FreeUp, I knew very little and I relied on a lot of mentors just teaching me about the process. I didn’t know about earn outs and non -competes or what to expect after the sale or what buyers look for due diligence or any of that stuff. So there’s a great book on the shelf behind me called Exit Per Newer Playbook by Joe Valley. He’s been a business broker in the space. He’s a friend of mine. He knows just a lot about just deals and the ins and outs and every deal is different. And just having that background.

helps you build a business because at the end of the day, the things that buyers care about is the same things that you should care about in your business and doing things right. Even stuff like he talks in the book about hiring a good bookkeeper from day one. That’s what we do for all of our companies. Like it’s why we started a bookkeeping business, hiring a great bookkeeper for free up was one of the best decisions we ever made on the first day we started the company, even before we were profitable because we had clean immaculate books every single month. We made decisions, good decisions on the numbers.

we passed due diligence when we got to that point. So stuff like that that the average entrepreneur might not think about I recommend checking out Exitpreneur.

Paris Vega (18:31.354)
Okay. Man, you’ve offered a lot of great insights in a short amount of time here. I think that’s about it for today. Any parting advice for people who want to get into entrepreneurship? I mean, you’ve started so many companies. Most people never get one successful company off the ground. And it sounds like you’ve got, I guess, five at least that you’ve got on your record. So what do you think those…

kind of biggest, most important takeaways that somebody should consider before starting a business or in the process.

Nathan Hirsch (19:06.802)
Yeah, so you can’t master everything as an entrepreneur. The sooner you learn what you’re good at, what you’re not good at, and how to delegate, the better. Hiring is a skill that you can learn. Hiring makes entrepreneurship way easier. If you’re bad at hiring, it’s always gonna hold you back, and it’s just a very underrated skill. So learn how to master hiring first. Follow me on social media. I post a lot of content about it, but that’s something that’s gonna really accelerate your growth as an entrepreneur.

Paris Vega (19:33.274)
Awesome. Well, Nathan, thank you so much and we’ll see everybody on the next episode of the first customers podcast.

Nathan Hirsch (19:39.698)
Thanks for having me.