Two years and 2 day ago, on January 7, 2022, I launched EditorNinja’s subscription editing offer. We had 2 customers on our launch day, and continued to run. After a fitful 2022, full of a lot of lessons and a lot of promise, I doubled down on EditorNinja in 2023.
Since launch, we’ve:
- collected over $275,000 in total revenue
- hired 15+ editors
- edited 5.5m+ words
This business is special to me for a few reasons.
First, I helped run a publishing company from 2008-2010 from Switzerland. I love the written word, and this business feels full circle.
Second, I have built my career and my companies off the back of content. Helping companies achieve results through content is my passion, and enabling them to do it is fulfilling for me.
Third, I get to work with amazing creative people. I am a data nerd and love making decisions from it, but I’ve also come to identify as an artist. My canvas might be business created through data and insight, but I was a writer before I became anything else (developer, marketer, entrepreneur) and getting to return to this craft with amazing people is a great feeling.
I never imagined I’d be an agency founder. In fact, for the first number of years working for myself I was adamant that my business was NOT an agency. We were something different, a tech-enabled productized service.
Unfortunately, I put too much emphasis on tech (and we did build some cool products), but didn’t focus enough on the service side.
That has now been fixed.
EditorNinja is only 2 years in the market, but I’m focused on building the Operations and Delivery side first so that we can deliver a consistent service reliably for our customers. This will enable us to market and sell to prospects confidently, which turns them into customers, which is what grows the business.
Numbers
2023 was a very good year for EditorNinja. We built upon 2022, and my increased focus on the business was good for it.
Here’s how our words edited and the number of documents uploaded per month has changed:
Revenue has closely mirrored that same trajectory. Traffic did well also, with some blog posts creating substantial traffic and new top-of-funnel leads:
What Went Well?
Many things went well this year:
- Obviously, revenue grew well as did words edited per month and documents per month. As a business, these numbers matter. But there are other things that are more important to me, that drive this success:
- We hired 7 new editors. One didn’t work out, and another left for a full-time gig. But many of our editors have been with us for over a year, and two have edited over a million words for EditorNinja customers! I am incredibly grateful for our amazing team.
- We started sending out new customer welcome packages to new customers, which have been well received.
At the start of the year, I attended an entrepreneur mastermind in Costa Rica called MMT. There, everyone asked me about AI content. By the end of the week, I had formulated a hypothesis that people would play with AI for the first half of the year, come July or August we’d start seeing AI content to edit, and by the end of the year a significant part of our work would be AI content. I was not wrong in this prediction; in fact, I was spot on with the timing. AI content accounted for a lot of our growth in Q4 2023.
Finally, our new Head of Operations, Sophia, joined us in early December full-time. Sophia was our first editor and lead editor way back in January 2022, and I am STOKED to have her back full-time and to build this business with her. We’re planning out our next hires, heavily influenced by Dan Martell’s framework.
What Didn’t Go Well?
Like any fairly young business, we experienced our fair share of challenges.
Our main one was a period of what felt like wandering in the wilderness as we identified our core best customer and then started to focus on it. We had a lot of false starts with customers, some high churn around the middle of the year, and a few points at which I didn’t think we were going to make it.
But after a great coaching call with Chris Ronzio, CEO of Trainual and who was very early working with Design Pickle, things started to turn around and grow. Thanks Chris.
What’s Next?
2024, we’re focusing and building. We’re focusing on editing content at scale for high-production agencies and platforms. We’re already bringing on some amazing agencies and service providers, who are producing hundreds of thousands of words per month for their clients, and we’re excited to partner with them.
We’re always hiring new editors also, and have a great extended network of them to pull from when we need their help. So, if you’re looking for an editing solution to handle the increased production volume you’ve seen from AI or from human writers for clients who want it, let’s chat. Schedule an Intro Call today.