From a Freelancer to a $288K ARR Content Marketing Owner with Maeva Cifuentes Lardez @ Flying Cat Marketing

In just one year, Maeva Cifuentes Lardez went from freelancing for $1,000/month to owning a content marketing agency with a $288,000 ARR.

She joined us for an AMA session that sheds some light on her remarkable success.

Client Work & Pricing

Q: Where do most of your clients come from?

A: I have a mix—cold email outreach & inbound from my personal brand on LinkedIn, through word of mouth or events I presented at before COVID, and a few that I absorbed from when I was freelancing now that I could provide better value to them.

Q: Do you only provide SEO blog writing services or more?

A: We offer strategy & fully done-for-you content marketing services—SEO writing is a part of it.

Q: What financial increments in billing did you move up in? For example, did you go from charging $1,000 a month to $3,000 per client? Or have you kept pricing the same and simply increased volume?

A: So I wasn’t quite making $1,000 a month as a freelancer—that was the average, but I had some months with less and some months with more. My packages for clients have been growing as I’ve been becoming more financially literate and understanding how to price things in a way that can get them the best quality and not kill my team. So we are consistently raising prices in order to deliver the best and maintain profit volume.

We have different packages for different needs, but it’s harder to deliver results with the smallest ones.

Q: Why is it harder to deliver results? Is it because competitors are likely to be spending X amount and without spending 2X you won’t “catch up,” or is there something else that you would attribute it to?

A: No, since we do mostly organic, it’s not that much about the spend. But let’s say we have 1 weekly blog post—I still need:

• A good Writer (not cheap)
• Editor
• Strategist (the way I have it, these are all separate people)
• Graphic Designer
• Project Manager

Then I still need enough margin for my own take-home + opex for non-client-related expenses (paying the Operations Manager, my own marketing, coworking space, sales, etc.) + profit.

I try to maintain a healthy profit margin while providing livable wages to people who work for me and deliver high quality to clients. I just hadn’t calculated all this before and never thought of my own take-home as “owners comp,” so pricing was an experiment.

Business Strategy

Q: Did you have a particular strategy in place when you began scaling your agency?

A: My focus has always been a mix of 3 focuses:

1. Building systems: I tried to hire a VA without systems and failed, realized I couldn’t scale without them, so then I hired a VA agency to build the systems for me. Now I have a process-driven operations machine where everyone is involved in building systems
2. Focusing on quality for my clients and building strong relationships
3. Building my personal brand on LinkedIn

Q: What was your first hire and why?

A: First was a VA, which failed because I didn’t have any systems in place. Then, a Writer because I couldn’t write that much and do anything else for my business. Then, a Project Manager to manage the Writer & deadlines.

Q: What are the steps you took to grow from $1k/month to $20k+/month so quickly?

A: I had to:

1. Fix my money mindset
2. Get coaches to tell me what I’m doing wrong and where to improve
3. Have a very strict hiring protocol and thorough onboarding process
4. Be super active on LinkedIn on a daily basis
5. Niche down hard
6. Focus on quality and relationships over everything

Content Writing

Q: Why do you think content writing produces so many future Marketers?

A: Not sure if I’m approaching it in the way that you mean but: I hire people who are good at writing and I (or my systems) teach them marketing. So they learn that skill through being Writers.

SEO

Q: How do you use ClusterAi? Is it helpful to you? Did it change the way you do keyword research, and if so, how?

A: I’m still experimenting with it because we do more than just volume-based SEO, but I love it for helping me group keywords. A lot of my keywords are very long-tail and specific, for when I don’t need it as much, but I use it when I’m trying to figure out how to group them together and get inspiration for others.

LinkedIn

Q: What’s the best way to connect with people you can learn from?

A: LinkedIn!!! But instead of lurking and watching, have conversations with them.

Q: How do you initiate conversations?

A: Same way I did with you—start by engaging with their content first and have conversations on their content, then when you get used to each other, you can move to DMs.

Q: When you were starting with your LinkedIn crushing adventure, what was the most important thing you focused on that led to audience growth?

A: Niching down! I’m not just focused on SaaS, but hospitality (vacation rental) SaaS—and then I built a podcast interviewing people from the vacation rental sector.

Q: I can attribute every dollar our company has generated to organic Facebook and LinkedIn. How important have these platforms been for your sales funnel?

A: LinkedIn has been absolutely vital, and I would have nothing without it. Facebook brought me a couple of leads but nothing that closed, and I am not very active on there.

Niche

Q: You niched down super hard—how did you pick the niche, and how has that impacted systems, processes, delivery, hiring, ops, margins, sales, marketing, etc.?

A: I fell into the niche by accident when a big influencer “adopted” me as a hit Content Manager to manage his team. I don’t think the niche has impacted systems & processes, however, I found that I now have to look for Writers who have been Property Managers before. Otherwise, it’s a lot to teach them, which makes it harder to scale (so maybe it does affect systems)… I have had a lot of ideal leads come to me and close because I am the go-to person in that niche. In terms of marketing, I focus on a mix of talking about vacation rental tech and a mix of marketing/sales.

Podcast Strategy

Q: Your podcast seems like it came out of nowhere, and now it’s all over the place. What did the backend plan look like?

A: I thought it was an easy way to get content done easily. It turns out it’s a great way to do lots of networking as well. We talk about podcasting on this episode.

Cold Email Outreach Strategy

Q: What does your cold email outreach strategy look like? Share all you can share!

A: I stopped for the last 2 months ‘cause we were overloaded and had to get my team ready to scale/fulfill. But I build lists of tech from the industry and use Lemlist for mass personalized emails as well as follow the cold outreach copy principles presented by Josh Braun on LinkedIn. I kept it both automated and personalized.

Q: What’s your hook?

A: Focusing not only on hospitality tech but the fragment of hospitality tech that they’re in and mentioning what their specific competitors do.

Tools

Q: What does your tool stack look like?

A: It looks like this:

• Ahrefs
• Clearscope
• ClusterAi
• ClickUp
• Slack
• G-Suite
• Canva
• Coschedule

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