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Nick Jordan is an entrepreneur and founder of Workello, a new startup that helps ambitious startups hire remote roles. With a background in SEO, Nick drove 4 projects from 0 to 100k organic visitors/month, with the biggest one generating 1.5m. Now he helps others get the same results
City where you’re from: Seattle
Favorite quote: Careers are measured in decades, not months or years
Social accounts LinkedIn Facebook
Tell us about Workello. How did you come up with this idea?
Nick Jordan: I started an SEO agency with only one editor. We started building a content team to service our clients and soon realized that there is no tool built specifically for hiring writers. Fast forward two years later, one night in Barcelona while I was sitting with my, now, two cofounders, it just came to me — if the solution doesn’t exist, I will make it. And so Workello was born.
We spent 1,000 hours building and iterating a better way to hire writers, because our content agency growth was capacity constrained, meaning we could only grow as fast as we could hire new good writers.
How did you promote your company in the early days?
Nick Jordan: We started building a community 3 years ago knowing that we will one day launch a SaaS product. We didn’t know what the product would be, but we knew that we wanted to focus on community-led growth. We wanted the people in our community to be our first users, so we shared a lot of advice for free, we were building in public and included our community in our growth journey.
We use LinkedIn to share our journey of building in public, and our Facebook group to keep close to our community and help each other learn.
Teach us something we don’t know about building successful content teams,
Nick Jordan: The biggest secret to building a successful content team is to hire people who care. In content writing, every single word is a liability and an opportunity to mess up. If you hire people who truly care about the content they are putting out, if you work with editors who want to be proud of their work, and with content managers who thrive when things are organized and streamlined, 90% of the work is done. All you have to do is set them up for success with documentation and good values and company culture.
How can SaaS founders and growth managers get out of editing?
Nick Jordan: Many SaaS and agency founders and growth marketers suffer from one plight: editing content instead of focusing on growth and business development. During their growth phase, it’s very difficult for founders (and growth managers) to give up editing content and delegate it to someone else. The best thing they can do is work with a lot of writers, figure out who the best of the best are, figure out who cares the most, and then promote them to an editor.
Then, once the editor is comfortable in their role, they should let their editors have autonomy over the writers they work with. Our editors have the complete freedom to hire whomever they want and continue to work with them if they feel that the writers are a good fit. We also promote from within, so every writer has an opportunity to advance their career with us, learn new skills, and grow at their own pace. Document everything you do and delegate to your team. It’s the only way to keep people happy and give them autonomy to be masters of their careers, instead of just being employees in a company.
What do you think you do better than most people? How are you able to do it?
Nick Jordan: Empathy. Spotting the next big product category. I truly believe that Workello is going to be the next big thing in the content and SEO niche.
What are some of the best books you’ve ever read?
Nick Jordan: Atomic Habits by James Clear
Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin
Where do you see yourself and your product in a couple years? What’s your dream?
Nick Jordan: I see us helping companies hire writers using Workello, but our goal is to be the go-to infrastructure for remote teams. We want to help ambitious brands hire any role and spend less time on people ops so they can spend more time building their business.
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