We're super excited to announce that Tasket, a specialist VA service, has merged with Contentellect.
Tasket was started in early 2020 by Contentellect's founder and CEO, Mark Whitman.
I sat down with Mark to discuss the rationale behind the merger, and what we can expect from Contentellect now that we have a much bigger team, more clients and a broader service offering.
Kayla: Tell us a little bit about why you started Tasket?
Mark: The idea behind Tasket was simple. With the pandemic unfolding and lockdowns shutting businesses, I thought that virtual assistant services would be in high demand. The VA market has been growing really fast for the past decade. The pandemic has added rocket-fuel to this trend. Having personally worked with VAs for 10 years I already understood the space very well. I also had a great network of assistants to leverage and access to a buyer pool that I knew would be hungry for the service.
Kayla: It seems Tasket grew pretty fast. Can you share some details on your growth?
Mark: We launched in March 2020 and quite quickly scored some decent recurring clients. We went from zero to $5k monthly recurring revenue (MRR) within 12 weeks, but then stalled for a few months as we tried to figure out a better model for our service. The challenge we found was that every customer wanted something different and we were really struggling to productise the service. By August 2020 we hit on this idea to be more task-orientated, with a suite of digital services that were delivered by dedicated VAs. In addition to standardising our service around well-defined tasks like transcription and web publishing, we also launched complimentary productised services like social media marketing, content writing and link building for affiliate marketers. This was received really well by the market, and in December 2020 we breached $15k in monthly recurring revenue.
Kayla: That's some impressive growth. Why the merge with Contentellect then?
Mark: The intention was to run the two services separately. But as Tasket began to grow it became evident that the overlap between the two services, particularly the content writing service, was significant. Managing two teams of freelancers, account managers and systems was inefficient and it was obvious that there were huge synergies to be had in staffing and operations by merging the companies. It just so happened that there was also a management shake-up at Contentellect in July, with the departure of my co-founder and MD at Contentellect. The timing to bring the two companies together was perfect.
Kayla: Contentellect now has a much bigger team and service offering. Talk us through the merger process and Contentellect's new proposition?
Mark: The merger was pretty straightforward, but could never have been done so efficiently without the amazing support from the team. Particularly, yourself Kayla and our Head of Ops, Megan. Over a 6-week period we have managed to merge the teams, clients, operations and front-end sales. We have systemised our documentation using Slite, implemented a slick communication platform on Slack, and integrated our digital presence.
We have now more than doubled in headcount (we're at 79 people, which blows my mind), grown MRR by $15k (we're now at $35k MRR) and we had our largest revenue month to date in August, booking $60k in sales. Most importantly we've expanded the Contentellect offering from just content writing services, to link building, HARO outreach, social media marketing and of course VA services.
We've also introduced a broader writing offering, with bulk content campaigns, eBooks and eCommerce product descriptions now in the mix too.
I feel Contentellect is positioned well to become a leading content marketing agency. We're poised for significant growth as we go into Quarter 4 of 2021 and beyond. We have an aggressive expansion strategy in place, an awesome team and a reinvigorated culture. I'm excited to lead the team into the next chapter of Contentellect's story.