• 🎉 We got our first ‘real’ MRR - $20/month!
• 🎉 We did a new product launch (writing job descriptions -> first revenue in under 48 hours!
• 🎉 We grew the team!
• 🐌 We failed to sign any new long term clients

Our first (?) MRR!

Most of our clients are on month-to-month contracts. This means that we can fairly confidently predict our monthly recurring revenue, but it’s still manual. We do the work, send them an invoice, and hope that they don’t cancel.

Last year, I launched editing.ritza.co as an experiment. Many people I had spoken to wrote regularly, weren’t blown away by Grammarly, and wished they had a human editor, but didn’t really know how to get one. As we have several editors on retainers or similar agreements, it’s easy for us to generate spare editing capacity. I pushed the idea to a few people, and they were kind of interested, but not enough to put in their credit card details.

I reached out to someone I had done technical editing for before and who had ended the agreement as I was too expensive. He just needed more basic editing, but worked in markdown and GitHub and wrote about technical topics so the editor had to be at least somewhat technical. He trialed the service for free for a while last year and signed up in January.

Like our other clients, it’s still month-to-month and he can cancel any time he wants. That said, it’s set up as a Stripe recurring subscription so it feels more like ‘real’ MRR to me, even if it’s only $20/month.

Writing job descriptions

If you’ve ever hung out with developers, you know how much they like to laugh at bad job descriptions. “We’re looking for a ninja rockstar” is the easiest way to get laughed at as an employer in 2021. Getting Java and Javascript mixed up is a close second. Asking for 10 years experience with some tech that’s only been around for 5 years also features. Writing job descriptions is actually hard: you’re trying to tell people about your requirements, but if you want good applicants, you also have to do this in a way that meets their requirements.

I saw someone post on a Slack I’m part of, asking if anyone knew of a service that created job descriptions. I’ve written dozens of job descriptions for my ex-employer, several for Ritza, and I’ve read literally thousands of job descriptions (and seen how developers react to these) on ZATech slack. I put up https://ritza.co/write-job-ads.html and sent it to him, and we reached an agreement the same day. We produced the first job ad the next day and got paid. We went on to do two more.

I don’t think that ‘writing job ads’ will ever be a startup on its own, or necessarily something that we would like to double down on, but it was a great feeling to go from idea to cash in bank in 48 hours.

Growing the team

One of the earliest pieces of advice I got when starting Ritza was ‘Make sure your first hire is an editor’. And I’ve definitely found myself backlogged by editing and finalising articles, as well as just keeping track of our commitments and the stages various things are at. I think one of our highest return long-term investments is also developmental editing - editing that focuses on helping the writer improve rather than on getting a piece finalised.

We were lucky to find an experienced editor with a background in publishing who had experience with machine learning content too. She joined us for the last week of January and is continuing part time in February.

We also agreed to retainers with several more freelancers, notably a front-end expert (which is where my own knowledge is most clearly in the ‘enough to be dangerous’ territory), and we have several more in the pipeline.

No new clients

We’re still growing slowly and organically and with as little outreach as possible. There were two seemingly very keen potential customers ‘in the pipe’ for December and January, so I focussed even less on outreach than usual, expecting either or both of these to confirm long term. Unfortunately, they are both quiet and slow (both are startups that recently did fairly large funding rounds, and I expect are battling with some of the growing pains and newly required process that I have seen other companies go through, where suddenly everything that was quick and easy becomes a lot slower and more difficult).

We also had costs in January that were significantly higher than previous months. We are still profitable and remaining profitable will always be a core focus (otherwise I can’t eat), but we’ve now taken the nerve-wracking plunge of expecting some revenue growth in the next two months. Balancing finding more work with growing our team was always going to be a chicken-and-egg problem, and I’ve always been very risk-adverse. That said, I’m fairly confident that we’ve found some form of product market fit - we’ve seen that people need our services and I’m confident that we can find more with some effort, so I’m happy to build up the ‘supply’ side in anticipation, while shifting my personal focus more to the ‘demand’ side.

January content highlights

• We did the groundwork for “Go Hack Yourself a Portfolio” - an event we are running next week where devs can get together and work on their portfolios with some guidance and help from us and our tutorial on the same topic.
• We published a tutorial on Steganography that made the front page of news.ycombinator.com for a few hours.