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Marcus Taylor

👋 I'm Marcus Taylor, Founder of Venture Harbour, AMA about bootstrapping & automation.

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I run Venture Harbour, a digital product company that builds a new, highly-automated, online business every year. We've built nine ventures to date, ranging from SaaS tools to macOS productivity software. I bootstrapped the company at 21 years old with £500 in my bank & a broken laptop, and have grown our portfolio to 7-figures with zero outside investment in 7 years. Our two latest ventures are SereneApp.com and Leadformly.com. Here to answer any and all questions about bootstrapping, automation, building products, SEO, landing pages/forms, productivity, being a young entrepreneur, Scandinavian metal, and systemising innovation.
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Elliot Byfield
Hi Marcus, Tons of questions but the number one is: What is the best lesson you've had to learn the hard way?
Marcus Taylor
@ebyfield5 The same activity/business/product, in a different niche, is often the quickest way to 10-100X results. Example: My first website was a blog for musicians where I would often promote affiliate deals for products like guitar strings. On a $5 sale, I would typically earn $0.25. Even if I absolutely crushed it and made 10,000 sales/month that's just $2,500/month. My second website was in the luxury space where we promoted items like $1000 luxury pens and diamonds where I would typically earn $100 per sale. For the same amount of work I could achieve 400X the results - just by changing the niche I was operating in. We've seen the same with SaaS where just changing the niche/audience we're targeting has reduced churn rates & increased LTV by a significant factor.
Jake Dewar
Hi Marcus, the story behind Venture Harbour sounds awesome! Congrats on growing into such success! Currently, I'm trying to figure out the best practices for building a user-base. For any of the tools VH created, was building a user-base a problem to be solved, and if so, how did you go about solving it? Thanks!
Marcus Taylor
@jake_dewar Thanks Jake, appreciate the kind words! Every venture has its own unique challenges around building a user base. Two things that have been useful for us are: 1) Picking a very niche audience and/or problem to begin with and broaden over time With Leadformly, we reached product-market fit almost instantly, as the problem/audience was so specific (we built high-converting lead gen forms for digital marketers). If I could go back in time, I'd refine this further to only target digital marketers working at PPC & CRO agencies. Starting with a very niche problem & audience means your conversion rates should be be exceptionally high, as your solution becomes ultra-relevant to the right audience. It's then just a case of finding the right (small communities) where those people hang out. 2) Lego block marketing I have a rule that we only invest in marketing where the work we do today will still generate results in 3 years time. This passive approach means that everything you do is cumulative and 'builds' upon what you did yesterday. That way, I don't need to constantly create marketing campaigns to maintain a certain level of acquisition or engagement, instead I can slowly but surely build things up. This has meant we've said no to a lot of traditional marketing - including most forms of social media marketing, speaking at conferences, and sponsoring events. In general, these marketing channels create spikes - which I'm not interested in. I much prefer predictable and passive marketing that snowballs over time. Hope that helps! 👍
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