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How ClickMinded Grew
Digital marketing SOP library and courses for marketers
How did ClickMinded grow?
Summary of the sourced claims below
ClickMinded grew substantially through its first AppSumo deal in 2012, which the founder called the biggest break for the business and which brought in $21,243 in gross revenue over 8 days. Roughly 35% of users have come from AppSumo, and the founder reports that each subsequent AppSumo deal has been larger than the previous one. The company also grew through its email list, supported by joint ventures with companies such as Hubspot, AppSumo, and ConvertKit, and through a weekly newsletter that keeps readers after they find content through search. The founder reports growing 15x and reaching 50,000+ customers, and says the business has also used SEO content, paid search and social, and a Facebook ad leading to a landing page with a low-cost product.
Channels
26 channels · grouped by how ClickMinded grows
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Email List Growth
· 9 mentions · 9 sources“We created an enormously complicated automated email marketing funnel with a complex scoring system that changed what the user received based on how they interacted with the site. 85 unique, custom emails, delivered to users over the course of YEARS, with different content, offers and variables f...”
highShow 8 more quotes
“Win those searches with useful content, then keep readers with a weekly newsletter. Channel Mix SEO contentLead Email newsletterLead LinkedInSupport PartnershipsTest 90-Day Roadmap Days 31-60 Launch the weekly newsletter for new readers”
medium“The vast majority of our business has really shifted towards building our email list and doing a lot of our nurturing through our automations. We're on Drip and we have a really comprehensive automation going there.”
high“the vast majority of our business has really shifted towards building our email list and doing a lot of our nurturing through our automations. We're on Drip and we have a really comprehensive automation going there.”
high“give away a little bit more money upfront in order to gain access to like lower risk platforms, like access to people's email lists, things like that.”
high“Joint ventures – Hubspot, AppSumo, RightMessage, MeetEdgar, Alexa, ConvertKit, and a couple of other awesome companies coming up in the future have all been extremely valuable in growing our email list.”
high“Sent a “last chance” email with a few hours left Emailed everyone that signed up a few days later and asked for reviews”
high“Joint ventures – Hubspot, AppSumo, RightMessage, MeetEdgar, Alexa, ConvertKit, and a couple of other awesome companies coming up in the future have all been extremely valuable in growing our email list.”
high“Win those searches with useful content, then keep readers with a weekly newsletter. Channel Mix SEO contentLead Email newsletterLead LinkedInSupport PartnershipsTest 90-Day Roadmap ... Days 31-60 Launch the weekly newsletter for new readers”
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Organic social media
· 8 mentions · 8 sources“We have lead magnets and downloadables and cheat sheets to move everyone into the middle funnel. So we usually have a, hey, here's how to do X thing, but here, if you want the resource to do it and put your own logo on it, whatever, click here to grab it, right? And we grab everyone's email that ...”
highShow 7 more quotes
“Of course, my first tactic for user acquisition was SEO. SEO takes time, as a lot of people know.”
high“nDash is a SaaS platform and elite freelancer network for marketing teams. Founded in 2013 by Michael Brown, the company evolved from a content agency into a full-service platform. nDash now serves over 7,000 brands and has a network of 15,000 vetted writers.”
medium“We now have: A ton of content and YouTube videos driving traffic to the site”
high“We now have: A ton of content and YouTube videos driving traffic to the site”
high“For intelligence, combine Firecrawl with the LinkedIn Ad Library. Write a short script that scrapes your top three competitors’ landing pages and their active LinkedIn ads, then ask Claude to extract messaging themes, offers, and CTAs.”
medium“A few years ago, I quit my job to go full-time on a side project called @ClickMinded. Since then, we've grown 15x, and now have 50,000+ customers.”
medium“Promote one post as an X thread, LinkedIn or Facebook post, newsletter, image slideshow or short video”
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SEO
· 7 mentions · 7 sources“Initially, my plan for customer acquisition was, obviously, SEO. But as any practitioner of SEO knows, results can take time.”
highShow 6 more quotes
“Win those searches with useful content, then keep readers with a weekly newsletter. Channel Mix SEO contentLead Email newsletterLead LinkedInSupport PartnershipsTest 90-Day Roadmap Days 1-30 Brief and publish posts for the top keyword gaps SOP 038”
medium“However, as you'll hear, Tommy started teaching an SEO course on the side, and that has now become a full-time business for him.”
medium“However, as you'll hear, Tommy started teaching an SEO course on his site and that has now become a fulltime business for him.”
medium“The majority of our business is SEO. Should be. Right.”
high“Content/SEO: what’s winning and why Kieran Flanagan’s content reverse-engineering approach is the clearest example of this done right. Pull your Google Search Console data via MCP, identify the pages sitting at positions 5-15 (close, not winning), feed the top three ranking competitors’ pages int...”
medium“Agencies and freelancers already search for the problems this business solves. Win those searches with useful content, then keep readers with a weekly newsletter. Channel Mix SEO contentLead Email newsletterLead LinkedInSupport PartnershipsTest 90-Day Roadmap Days 1-30 Brief and publish posts for...”
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Webinars
· 6 mentions · 6 sources“we're having a ton of success with many courses and webinars. So we, you know, all of our courses are four to six hours long. And we found this one particular tactic ... we give them access to a mini course ... Users end up completing it and then it's absolutely no surprise at all that when we se...”
highShow 5 more quotes
“I started teaching search engine optimization to startups on weekends at San Francisco. I rented a coworking space and physically, in person, one-on-one, teaching a class.”
high“We made a hard switch to heavier on media and heavier on webinars. And I'd never attended webinars. I hated webinars. I thought they were all scam and super stupid and used car salesman style stuff. But we ended up putting our own spin on webinars and ended up working really well.”
high“The offer was simple: to help me re-launch the ClickMinded SEO course to users via a webinar.”
high“The offer was simple: to help me re-launch the ClickMinded SEO course to users via a webinar.”
high“The “Let’s Have a Webinar For Everything” phase - We did both live and automated webinars, with unique content, instructors, value propositions, price points and promo codes - presented during different days and time zones each week.”
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Partnerships
· 5 mentions · 5 sources“Armed with a few good yelp reviews and a minimally viable class, I walked into Parisoma, another coworking space in San Francisco, and asked them if they ever hosted tech class meetups. They said it sounded interesting. We agreed on a rev share, and I had a date set for my first class. A large po...”
highShow 4 more quotes
“Win those searches with useful content, then keep readers with a weekly newsletter. Channel Mix SEO contentLead Email newsletterLead LinkedInSupport PartnershipsTest”
medium“We're actually doing both. We've actually basically became a webinar company. ... We actually switched more recently to do a lot of partner webinars, so it depends. The partnership webinars have been hit or miss.”
high“So I ended up doing a lot of partnerships in the first year of the business where I basically took a lot of quote unquote bad deals. Every coworking space, I couldn't afford them and I was too risky to book one in advance...”
medium“Channel Mix SEO contentLead Email newsletterLead LinkedInSupport PartnershipsTest”
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AppSumo Launch
· 4 mentions · 4 sources“The biggest break for me was landing my first deal with AppSumo back in 2012. I wrote a blog post on this called $21,243 in 8 days: Why AppSumo is crushing it. This summarizes the AppSumo story. I’ve done many more deals with AppSumo, and each one has been larger than the previous. Roughly 35% of...”
highShow 3 more quotes
“So the big one, I'm not sure if you're familiar with AppSumo? ... I would latch on in the early days to other people with big email lists and basically find reasonable ways to get in there, even offline.”
high“The biggest break for me was landing my first deal with AppSumo back in 2012. I wrote a blog post on this called $21,243 in 8 days: Why AppSumo is crushing it. This summarizes the AppSumo story. I’ve done many more deals with AppSumo, and each one has been larger than the previous. Roughly 35% of...”
high“the AppSumo promotion brought in a total of $21,243 in gross revenue, in 8 days ... That being said, the AppSumo experience has been incredible for me as a marketing channel ... They were able to let me tap into a user base of 730,000+ people, many of whom are exactly my target market, and have n...”
high -
Side project marketing
· 4 mentions · 4 sources“One of the other results of the Meetup group was that a student from HULT, an international graduate school in San Francisco, came to a happy hour. He was part of a digital marketing club on campus and asked if I wanted to come to one of his classes and give a talk on SEO. I said sure. Crucially,...”
highShow 3 more quotes
“It started as a side project at PayPal. I started teaching SEO on the weekends. I was actually trying to get out of debt from my first business idea. I borrowed a bunch of money from family and friends and was trying to hustle up enough cash to pay down my debt. I started teaching search engine o...”
high“It started as a side project at PayPal. I started teaching SEO on the weekends. ... I'd rent out a co-working space and just physically, in person, one-on-one teaching a class. It was sort of the right place, right time with this online learning renaissance that we're in right now.”
high“One of the other results of the Meetup group was that a student from HULT, an international graduate school in San Francisco, came to a happy hour. He was part of a digital marketing club on campus and asked if I wanted to come to one of his classes and give a talk on SEO. I said sure. Crucially,...”
high -
Meetup groups
· 3 mentions · 3 sources“I started my business with meetup.com. And I was doing an SEO training course. Of course, my first tactic for user acquisition was SEO. SEO takes time, as a lot of people know. And so one of the first things I did to try and get going was with Meetup ... meetup.com is one of the single best user ...”
highShow 2 more quotes
“Next, I set up a meetup group, The San Francisco SEO Meetup. I didn’t exactly have a plan in starting this group, but it felt like something would happen if I gave it a shot. This ended up being absolutely crucial in getting the initial traction I needed for my class.”
high“Next, I set up a meetup group, The San Francisco SEO Meetup. ... This ended up being absolutely crucial in getting the initial traction I needed for my class.”
high -
Leveraging existing platforms
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“Are you familiar with Udemy? I am. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I started on Udemy and it was just kind of like right place, right time with them. I created my first SEO course and continued to work on it while doing this enterprise SEO thing.”
highShow 1 more quote
“It started with Udemy, Udemy Online Course Marketplace. And pivoted the offline version onto Udemy. Was on Udemy for a little while.”
high -
Speaking at conferences
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“I started physically teaching in-person SEO classes. So I would rent out a co-working space in San Francisco and North Beach in 2012, rent out a co-working space and teach people SEO.”
highShow 1 more quote
“He was part of a digital marketing club on campus and asked if I wanted to come to one of his classes and give a talk on SEO. I said sure... Grad school ... the class was rolling, and the dean of HULT San Francisco gave me a call and asked if I wanted to teach an elective. Since I had offered to ...”
medium -
Online Community
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“I created the San Francisco SEO meetup in 2011, paid $15, set up all the categories. And then within 3 days, I had an email list of 100 people interested in SEO and digital marketing in San Francisco. I held one happy hour. ... And so my first idea for the course, I emailed all the users, 150 peo...”
highShow 1 more quote
“In order to do this, I used the Meetup group as leverage again. Here’s how I did it: Launched the course on Udemy. Gave everyone in the meetup group a promo code to get the class for free Encouraged them to share with friends ...”
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Offline advertising
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“To get started, I went old-school, the same way you’d start mowing lawns or babysitting. I started printing out flyers with pull tabs on them that had my website URL. I burned a vacation day at work and walked around the city all day, papering most of the FiDi, North Beach, the Marina, SOMA and t...”
highShow 1 more quote
“I started printing out flyers with pull tabs on them that had my website URL. I burned a vacation day at work and walked around the city all day, papering most of the FiDi, North Beach, the Marina, SOMA and the Mission with flyers. Not a huge surprise, but this didn’t work at all.”
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Advertising on social media
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“Our elaborate, 85-email sales funnel, with webinars, mini-course, flash sales and an enterprise sales team, was completely blown away by André’s plan: A Facebook ad A landing page A low cost product that everybody buys A higher cost product that some people buy That’s it.”
highShow 1 more quote
“Paid search. Paid social.”
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LinkedIn
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“Win those searches with useful content, then keep readers with a weekly newsletter. Channel Mix SEO contentLead Email newsletterLead LinkedInSupport PartnershipsTest”
mediumShow 1 more quote
“Promote one post as an X thread, LinkedIn or Facebook post, newsletter, image slideshow or short video”
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Word of mouth
· 1 mention“And word of mouth started to go, and even though the initial revenue on these wasn't that great, it ended up being like, the first set of users that was really helpful.”
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Building in public
· 1 mention“It was like a dorky Saturday morning sort of thing. All-you-can-SEO. We would nerd out on people's websites from 9 in the morning to 5 at night and try and figure out how to get the more traffic.”
high -
Kickstarter
· 1 mention“And we did a Kickstarter style presale to this pivot we made.”
high -
Product Hunt
· 1 mention“We just launched a digital marketing strategy guide with a retro, 8-bit design. 🕹️ Grab a copy and leave a comment on ProductHunt, I'd love to hear what you think! 📖”
high -
Content marketing
· 1 mention“I ended up turning it into an online course, and it eventually started generating more revenue than my salary. In 2015, I wrote a blog post about the whole experience here: A Six-Figure Side Project. That post, basically the early story of ClickMinded, became the basis for a few conference talks ...”
high -
Email marketing
· 1 mention“Email: sequences that know what segment they’re talking to...The basic version: give Claude your subscriber CSV with UTM source, signup date, and any behavioral tags, then ask it to write a five-email welcome sequence with branching logic by segment.”
medium -
Events
· 1 mention“Specifically, I was told multiple times I made a previously uninteresting topic, interesting. The good reviews were a catalyst for me to ask my boss if it was cool if I started teaching SEO classes on the weekends to startups in San Francisco.”
medium -
Referrals
· 1 mention“But I was in person, drinking the beers and having these conversations with the users and figuring out what they actually wanted. So it was my own dumbness that had me there initially, but it ended up being accidentally correct.”
medium -
Brand partnerships
· 1 mention“We've actually switched more recently to do a lot of partner webinars. So it kind of depends. But the partnership webinars have been hit or miss and it's really, we've actually had a lot of success with partners who do webinars all the time.”
high -
Google Ads
· 1 mention“The more interesting version connects live via MCP. Point the Google Ads MCP at your account, and instead of CSVs you’re pulling real-time keyword performance.”
medium -
Search engine marketing
· 1 mention“Austin Lau ran Anthropic’s entire growth marketing function solo for roughly 10 months. [8] Paid search. Paid social. Email. SEO.”
medium -
Lead magnets
· 1 mention“Gave everyone in the meetup group a promo code to get the class for free Encouraged them to share with friends Emphasized that the offer was ending in 48 hours Sent a “last chance” email with a few hours left”
high
How 3,091 businesses grow
Of businesses with mapped growth channels, the share using each —
ClickMinded’s highlighted.
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Referral/Word-of-mouth66% ◀
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Social media64% ◀
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Search/SEO58% ◀
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Email48% ◀
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Community37% ◀
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Content/Inbound35% ◀
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Partnerships33% ◀
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Events25% ◀
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Paid ads24% ◀
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Outbound/Sales19%
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Press/PR18%
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Marketplaces/App stores12% ◀
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Podcasting4%
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Building in public3% ◀
