Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Did you follow the same strategy in the second year?

Britt Baker: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. It doesn’t sound like you need to make any change. You just keep executing and put more money into Facebook. Is that correct?

Britt Baker: That works well until your Facebook ad account gets shut down. Sometimes they’ll just do this to businesses. They did this in January of 2021.

Sramana Mitra: Why?

Britt Baker: We never found out.

Laurie-Anne King: They just scan accounts. Ours got shut down for no issue. We had to contact their support team. It took two weeks. All your campaigns get reset. Anyone who has worked in Facebook ads knows that it can be finicky. When it got reinstated, we couldn’t get the same performance just by turning stuff back on.

Sramana Mitra: They changed the algorithm.

Laurie-Anne King: Right.

Sramana Mitra: We’re not a credit company, but they insist on putting us on the special ads category. We’re an education company.

Laurie-Anne King: We’ve played all the games. Just to back to your question around strategy, we were very diligent in staying focused on that one customer acquisition channel for about 18 months. It was July of 2021 when we got to the point where we had enough stability in that customer acquisition channel and enough profit that we started to expand and began to do content marketing as well.

We launched a YouTube channel. We also started investing in our social media presence. We have attempted to get YouTube ads to work for us, but we haven’t been able to crack it. We recently decided to focus our efforts back on Facebook. There are risks to that. We’ve decided to take that risk for a little while.

Sramana Mitra: I love your story. I have to say. Facebook is a very powerful advertising channel despite being finicky.

Laurie-Anne King: What we have done would not be possible without it. The kinds of people that we are able to reach and help, we would never be able to do it without Facebook. Our customers are not people who are looking for a solution. I’m thankful that Facebook exists because we’ve been able to do a lot of good.

Sramana Mitra: This is a story that we talk about within our organization. When we first launched One Million by One Million, I used to do speaking trips. We had a lot of adoption in India early on. How many people can you fit in a room? For almost no money, we are able to get our message out to 200,000 people. It’s a very different order of reach. Is it just the two of you?

Britt Baker: We have a small team because the intention has been to keep it lean. We want to keep the price accessible. We just found great people. We work with a ton of independent contractors and freelancers. We outsourced our Instagram and someone else to run our YouTube scripts. The core team, there are probably five or six of us. The broader team, there’s about 30.

Sramana Mitra: Congratulations and all the best!

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker
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