Meet the Maker Laura Roeder
from Paperbell

14/03/22 | Interview by Stuart Goulden

Photo of
                    Laura Roeder

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I’m a happy, long-term paid user of MeetEdgar so I was delighted to share Laura’s story back in 2020.

Her initial business, MeetEdgar is a powerful control centre for automating and curating your social media accounts. Its clever features can automatically write status updates, self-schedule posts and even repost evergreen content across all the big platforms. We returned to the story in March 2022, shortly after Laura sold the MeetEdgar to concentrate on her latest venture, Paperbell.

In this interview, we explored how the tool grew out of a need to fix her own juggling act as solopreneur and why she decided to open it up to other indie businesses. The tactics and tools Laura used to get her first 10,000 users and scale both businesses. Plus, why she chooses to lead with kindness in everything it does.

  1. Hi Laura. Firstly, congratulations on selling MeetEdgar!

    Thank you! I’m pleased to report that MeetEdgar is now being run by SureSwift, a company that specializes in B2B SaaS. When I was deciding who to pass the baton to I wanted a partner that would not just buy MeetEdgar but really devote resources to making it even better, and that’s what SureSwift has done.

  2. How would you describe MeetEdgar to anyone yet to hear about it?

    MeetEdgar takes your social media stress and turns it into social media success with features designed to remove the time-intensive parts of managing the content on all of your networks.

    MeetEdgar automates content for your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts and provides all of the automation, social media content management, reporting, and human support you need to maximize the reach of your organic content on social media.

"MeetEdgar takes your social media stress and turns it into social media success with features designed to remove the time-intensive parts of managing the content on all of your networks."

- Laura Roeder
  1. Social media scheduling is a very competitive space. What does MeetEdgar do better or differently?

    MeetEdgar automates much of the social media scheduling process for you. We have features like continuous posting on Facebook and LinkedIn so Edgar continues to share content, even if you haven’t added any in a while. We use category based recurring schedule so all you need to do is add in the content and set your schedule and Edgar handles the rest. Edgar can even write your updates for you!

    Our automation tools make it so that we’re much more than a typical social media scheduler. MeetEdgar keeps working for you, long after you’ve added your content!

  1. Tell me about MeetEdgar's humble beginnings. What inspired you to create it? And what was your background?

    I created MeetEdgar because it was what I needed! I was running a social media marketing training business and I was a busy solopreneur who needed a smarter way to schedule all of my social media content. We were using this massive spreadsheet of all our social media updates divided into categories. We’d copy and paste them into our scheduling tool, repeating the content as necessary, and I really wanted a tool that could actually do all of this for me.

  1. MeetEdgar's tone of voice is refreshingly conversational. Why is the human side of tech so important to you?

    People buy from brands they feel they feel connected to and brand voice is one of the most powerful ways people connect with your brand. We wanted our brand voice to project the values we have as a company — kindness, sincerity and fun.

MeetEdgar snippets screenshot - social media automation

MeetEdgar can even write posts for you. It trawls articles for the punchiest snippets and suggests them for sharing.

  1. MeetEdgar is not a freemium product, so how did you grow it?

    Our acquisition channels focused on SEO, content marketing and social media marketing. We focused on growing our email list by providing as much value as possible. We wrote blog posts, hosted webinars, offered free downloads and then once, they were on our list, we sent valuable emails. We educated our customers and taught them about how MeetEdgar can improve their marketing and grow their business.

  1. You started a new business during the pandemic, Paperbell coaching software, how’s it going?

    Right at the start of the pandemic seemed like a crazy time to launch something new, but Paperbell is actually 100% geared towards online businesses and specifically online coaching, an industry that’s experienced huge growth since 2020. We now have over 10,000 coaches signed up on the platform which is a pretty major accomplishment!

    Paperbell coaching software   Surges.co interview
  2. How’s the switch from working with a team on an established product to starting afresh?

    It’s actually very fun being in do-it-yourself mode again. I love the ability to just rewrite the whole homepage one day if I feel like it without having to check in what other initiatives are being impacted. Of course the downside is everything depends on me!

"It's actually very fun being in do-it-yourself mode again. I love the ability to just rewrite the whole homepage one day if I feel like it."

- Laura Roeder, Paperbell
  1. Where do you hope to take Paperbell in 2022?

    2022 is shaping up to be a big growth year for Paperbell. I feel like we now have our core product working really well and it’s all about spreading the word so that every coach out there knows that they no longer have to spend time typing up invoices and chasing down clients.

  1. Do you have any advice for people wanting to build their own sales or marketing tool?

    There’s no one right way to build a business and there’s no exact formula to success. Everyone does it differently. You have to be willing to test, experiment, listen to your customers and trust your instincts.

"You have to be willing to test, experiment, listen to your customers and trust your instincts."

Laura Roeder
  1. Apart from MeetEdgar and Paperbell, do you have a favourite tool you’d like to give a shoutout to?

    There are so many! At MeetEdgar we loved using Demio for our webinars, Podia is a great tool for courses and ConvertKit is fantastic for email marketing.

    Now, I’m also using ActiveCampaign as our central source of truth which I’ve never done before. On the surface it’s an email automation tool but it also works really well as a core database of all activity from customers and leads. We pipe in UTM data in order to track ad campaigns so that we can tie ad spend to actual customers.

Visit Paperbell.com if you’re in the market for coaching software or catch Laura (@lkr) on Twitter.

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