How Victor LaRunger Built Social Gravity into a $25K/Month Side Hustle

Introduction

Discovering how to start a side hustle that can scale into a thriving business is a journey filled with pivotal moments and strategic decisions. In this Q&A, we sit down with Victor LaRunger, the founder of Social Gravity, a Canadian digital agency. Victor shares his incredible story of transitioning from a full-time music producer to running a successful agency, hitting revenue milestones of $25,000 a month. He breaks down the key strategies, from niching down to high-ticket clients to cleverly navigating the challenges of the pandemic, providing a roadmap for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Founder Success Story QnA

Why not start and introduce yourself?

Hey, thanks Molly. Appreciate you guys having me. My name is Vic, I’m the founder of Social Gravity. We are a Canadian digital agency and right now we’re making the shift and focusing on helping high-ticket sales providers—someone who has a program or a course or a service at a higher ticket—helping those businesses optimize their funnel, optimize their sales process, and just take things to the next level.

Before this, you used to be a music producer, is that correct?

Yeah. Um, I actually still am a music producer, but it’s more so just because I love it and it’s always gonna be a part of what I do. But uh, absolutely, I’ve put out three solo albums on my own under two different projects. I’ve had so many clients, client projects; I’ve probably produced over 10 different albums. I still have clients here and there, but in the music space, it’s kind of distanced from myself a little bit, but I still love doing it.

How long was the transition from kind of getting out of, not getting out of because you’re still in it, but moving from music production and just trying to really make Social Gravity your main, I guess, goal?

You know, it was like I said, it was really organic, but it was really exhilarating in a sense. I’ve actually recently boiled down my, I want to say purpose, I don’t think purpose is the right word for it, more like my overall goal as an entrepreneur, and it’s always just been to create almost passive or um, systematic streams of income. So when I got really heavy into music production, my vision of it was yeah, I’ll put out these albums, I’ll work with other artists and take royalties on their projects, and those albums will forever pay me. Those royalties will forever pay me; they still do even to this day. Um, so getting into Social Gravity, you know, a lot of digital marketing tasks that you do, especially when you’re on a monthly retainer with some clients, that becomes somewhat passive. You don’t really have to make those sales over and over and over again, and I really like that about the business model.

You mentioned how you started off helping your original clients with their marketing. Are they still some of the clients that you’re, you’re working with today?

So would you mean on the music side or on the marketing side? Um, music and marketing, I suppose. So was it someone that you used to have in the music world that you helped with marketing? Yeah, um, it was actually just a random uh, video project that I picked up because I was just kind of freelancing a lot of different things at the time. I have a background in 3D animation as well, I went to school for animation, and I was doing somewhat of an intro logo for a YouTube channel just on the side from someone that connected with me, and he asked me, you know, “What other skills you have?” So I was focusing on growing my Instagram at the time, so I started helping him grow his Instagram, and that’s kind of how that started. But in regards to clients and who I still have around, I would say that clients definitely come and go. Social Gravity‘s about three years old, and I don’t think we have any of the same clients that we’ve started with on a retainer still, but I definitely have clients that we’ve worked with in the past that weren’t on a retainer that come back on an individual project basis all the time.

In terms of stumbling across Foundr, how did you, I guess, locate us to begin with?

I think I originally found about Foundr on Instagram, and you guys had a really big page. I think that uh, it may have been on YouTube as well. You guys were focusing on producing content that had a lot to do with growing on Instagram. And yeah, I’m pretty sure you guys still are pushing that type of content, which is awesome. And yeah, I I learned a lot from a lot of those early pieces of content that had a lot to do with Instagram, like writing different descriptions, um, for for content, how to build out the content, how to write your bio and all that stuff. And those fundamentals that I learned from you guys, even on a free basis just from YouTube, I did carry on over into the earlier stages of Social Gravity when we were doing a lot of Instagram stuff.

In terms of Daniel’s lessons and his course, what really drew you to this Start Your Side Hustle course first?

So I’ve actually followed Daniel for a while too, even when I didn’t have Social Gravity, even just as a music producer. I remember finding Daniel on YouTube, and um, one of his videos really helped me through a really tough part in my professional career where I was really stuck on a project. And he had this one video, and I, if you if you ask him or if he sees this because he’s still my mentor, he had this one video where he kind of outlined Tupac and how how prolific Tupac was and how he just, in two years, he put out all these albums, he put up these poetry books, he was like unstoppable. And at the time, I was really stuck on this album that I already, like I already had announced that I was gonna make it, and it was like two years in the making. It was like weighing on me. And I found that video that Daniel put out, and it was about Tupac, and it was so inspiring. And I remember for a stretch of like two months, I would watch that video almost every day because it was so inspiring to me.

I’d love to hear how the first steps of Social Gravity really happened. Did you want to walk me through the process of even picking out the name for your company, what where you wanted to begin?

It was so organic, like it just, the opportunity was there. I was, I was using certain practices to streamline Instagram content, streamline and Instagram growth, and I I just was able to find people that needed those services and sell them at a really, really low ticket. So my first clients were like $80 a month, which is hilarious when I I think back on that because you know, now we have clients uh, that are between three and five thousand dollars a month. And it was just a an iterative process of putting out a new product or service and then listening to the market and seeing how they responded, and then iterating again, and then listening and then iterating again, and just trying things. And literally, we are still doing that process; it’s just you know, gather your market feedback, try it out, take action, and then iterate. That’s that’s really how we’ve progressively gotten to where we are right now.

Walk me through how you actually proceeded to get more clients. Was it on a word of mouth basis, testimonials, social proof?

So at the beginning, definitely more word of mouth because we were really local with everything that we were doing. Not until COVID hit did we really tap into the power of ads because we couldn’t have local clients anymore; we had to kind of get creative and pick up, you know, e-commerce clients or lead generation clients for businesses that were able to remain open. So that was when we we gave ads a shot, and that worked really well for us. And that was a great time to try ads because ad costs were really low at that period of time, so we ended up seeing a really good result running ads for ourselves, and then we leaned into running ads for other people.

Is ads something that you were kind of always learning in the background to kind of educate yourself on, or was it something completely new that you had to dive head first in?

So we had definitely dabbled in ads for the year following up, but not at the level necessarily that it would require to run successful, like e-commerce or Shopify ads, for example. Like that is definitely at a different level than what we were doing in the past. We were kind of throwing ads into a package with, you know, different social media content, some email marketing, um, some video here and there, kind of just a jumbled up package. So it wasn’t really our main core focus. But getting getting into COVID and seeing, you know, it’s very clear that ad costs are low right now, it’s a great opportunity, and also seeing that we were not going to get into the the businesses that we were working in, you know, taking photo, taking video, working hand on hand to hand with the business owner, which we were used to, that wasn’t going to happen for the foreseeable future.

What’s the difference between those $80 clients now to those three to 5k clients?

It’s definitely experience. You know, back then we were just starting, and we just really didn’t know exactly what we were doing. We had a good general idea, but as in working with the client, getting the results, and actually knowing what the results means, that’s that’s really what matters. Like now, I’ll still have people, in regards to Facebook ads for example, say, you know, “Yeah, we got uh, you know, 10,000 impressions on this ad,” and I’m like, that doesn’t matter. The what matters is how many conversions you have and your return on your ad spend. What’s your return on your ROAS? Like that’s what matters. Right? The impressions or the clicks, they don’t matter. So just that, for example, is that, so that’s a an a difference in experience where someone’s going to see a big number and be like, “Yes,” but you got to focus on the right number instead.

Do you want to talk me through how you went through the process of obviously going, you mentioned experience, but improving those prices?

So a really smart thing to do is just to keep track of all of your sales numbers. So it it’d be good for you to have a spreadsheet where you have every sales call kind of mapped out, and then you can you know, take a look at, “All right, I have to have, over the course of this two or three month spreadsheet, I’ve done let’s just say 10 sales calls, and I’ve closed two of them.” So that means you’re closing about 20% of your calls at your current price point. So why don’t you now try doubling your price and do that same test and see if you’re and see if your ratio holds up. Like you can do the math on, you know, you might close ten $100 packages or you can close one $10,000 package, right? And you could have done double the amount of calls to get there, but the math is still 10 times more revenue. So you want to kind of try and figure out the math.

How long did it take you to get from the lower ticket to the higher ticket? Was it a year, was it two years, three years?

It was kind of like a step and then a step and then a big jump. Um, in Daniel‘s course, he taught me to resell higher packages to clients I already had, and it was that step that took me from my biggest retainer being $1600 to my biggest retainer being five, five thousand. And it was it was the same client I had going here to here.

Would you say there was one key strategy or idea that really stuck with you from doing the Start Your Side Hustle course that you’re still implementing or was like a turning point for you?

So Daniel‘s, uh, I’ve taken his course, but he actually is like my one-on-one coach as well. We have coaching calls. Um, I don’t know if it was in the course, but the one thing that he taught me that always stuck with me was around making standard operating procedures because I was hiring at one point, and I just had someone leave, and I had to fill their role pretty quickly, and I was like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Like I have to do all of his work, and then I have to hire, I have to hire someone in that to train them.” Like how am I going to handle this? And Daniel told me, “Do the work for the that the person would have to do, but then film yourself doing all that work, and then explain what you’re doing, and then when you hire, give the new person those videos and tell them to watch the videos and ask them to write out standard operating procedures based on those videos.” That was really helpful. I actually did that, and it worked out super well.

How many people do you have in Social Gravity at the moment, if you’re talking about new hires and things like that?

So our team has definitely gone smaller since COVID. When COVID hit, there was five of us in total, and then you know, we had to work remote, people started doing kind of their own thing when when COVID was was in. Um, some of my, some of my employees started their own, like one of them started a spring roll making business from his kitchen and just different stuff like that. So at this point in time, it’s myself, one other full-time employee, and then I have a handful of contractors that basically fill individual tasks if the project needs it. That to me is just the best formula for our current business model right now.

What would you say is your biggest client at the moment? Are they within that bracket or is there a particular retainer that they’ve put you on?

So with our whole rebuild, we had clients of all different shapes and sizes. We were, we were clients with e-commerce, we were clients in security, uh, a lot of different clients. Over the past month, I made a really bold decision where I wanted to make sure that we were focusing 100% on our goal. So what I did was I actually asked maybe three or four of our clients to stop working with us because they didn’t fit where we were trying to go. Specifically, in e-commerce, I don’t really want to be in the e-commerce space anymore at this point. So what we’re focusing on right now is building our high-ticket accelerator program, which we’ve already sold a couple of them, but we’re in the process of building it. So we’ve definitely retracted, and we don’t have massive clients at the moment because we’re trying to focus on building a big package.

Where are you sitting at now, how is your company performing or what are you turning over after you know, going through COVID and bringing yourself back up?

Yeah, so basically again, we’re rebuilding right now. So our revenue numbers, in the grand scheme of things, aren’t as impressive as they used to be, and it’s because, like I said, we just retracted a lot, and I kind of left a lot of the clients that I felt like we weren’t providing our full attention and value. I just, I just needed to trim the fat and focus on what we were best at. And I think that, you know, it was a really hard decision to make because you have the decision of right now, and then you have the decision of later, and a lot of agencies I feel like pick up clients when they know that they might not be the best option, and I really didn’t want to go down that path.

What is your projected revenue target? You mentioned that you want to grow in the next couple of months. What’s that big goal for you?

So our our next revenue goal is going to hit $50,000 a month. That to me is going to be a big milestone for us. It took us a while to cross $25,000, and once we crossed $25,000 a month, I knew that I knew that things had definitely developed. And you know, there’s a lot of fluctuation in an agency because you you gain clients, you lose clients, you gain clients, you lose clients. And this month and last month have been one of our more suffering months, to be completely transparent, but again, it comes down to the rebuild, right? And I just know that we are going to blast past $50,000 once our high-ticket program is where where it needs to be.

If anyone listening to this was in a situation where they wanted to start their side hustle and really focus on something they’re passionate about, what would you tell them?

Follow the skill that you have right now and just keep doing things. Because I started editing video when I was a kid, and that led me to producing music, and that led me to starting social media marketing, and then building it into a much bigger business. And it was only because I just kept taking action and taking action that I would figure out what skill worked well and which skill people would pay for. So if you just take action and then iterate, that’s that’s really all you have to focus on. Don’t really focus on if this is the right thing. The moment that you ask yourself, “if the is this the right thing,” I mean, you are asking a question that doesn’t really need to be even asked. The only right thing is taking action. And um, there’s a quote in “The Richest Man in Babylon,” which is a fantastic book, and it is that “Lady Luck favors men of action.” And what they mean by that is, if you wonder why people are lucky, it’s because they just did things and then they didn’t stop doing them.

Is there anything else that you would like to quickly share with anyone listening?

So if you have a sales funnel, whether it’s like a webinar or it’s like an audit or it’s any way to generate leads, and you have a high-ticket product, the the problem is that you never know where people are falling out of your funnel. It’s a huge problem, and I experience, I’ve experienced it with my own funnels, my own webinars, free training, and everything like that. And I would always try to find people to go through my funnel and then give me feedback. I would always try to find it, and I would actually have some people go through my funnel and then provide me a little bit of feedback, but it was never calculated; it never really did anything; I could never find where the leaks were in my funnels. And that’s why what we’re doing moving forward is we’re actually offering a pretty low-ticket service. It’s a hundred bucks Canadian, and we go through your funnel like in detail and then provide you a report card on your high-ticket funnel in order to help you identify where people are falling off. So if that’s of any interest, jump over to socialgravity.ca and you can check it out. It’s basically called “Audit My Funnel.”

Victor LaRunger Business Stats

Victor’s journey with Social Gravity showcases a classic side hustle evolution, starting from tiny retainers and scaling to a significant monthly revenue. His agency, based in Canada, hit a major milestone of $25,000 per month before strategically pivoting to focus on a high-ticket niche. Below are some key stats from his business journey.

• Company: Social Gravity
• Location: Canada
• Started: 2018
• Peak Monthly Revenue: $25,000
• Next Revenue Goal: $50,000/month
• Team Size: 2 Full-Time Employees + Contractors

Metric	Value
Initial Client Retainer	$80 / month
Current High-Ticket Retainer	$3,000 – $5,000 / month
Years in Business	3+ Years
Business Model	Digital Agency (High-Ticket Niche)

Victor LaRunger Method

Victor’s success wasn’t from a single breakthrough but from a consistent method of iteration and value-first thinking. He focused on taking action, listening to the market, and refining his offerings based on real-world feedback, especially when learning how to start a side hustle.

• Organically started by leveraging existing skills for a client in need.
• Listened to market feedback to iterate on services and pricing.
• Used a “first month free” strategy to acquire clients during COVID.
• Niched down from a general agency to high-ticket sales funnel optimization.
• Prioritized delivering absolute value, even if it meant letting go of misfit clients.

Victor LaRunger Tools

Victor utilizes a range of tools to manage his agency and deliver results for clients. His background in music and video production gave him a head start with creative tools, while his business growth required adopting platforms for marketing, sales, and operations.

• Facebook & Instagram Ads: Primary channels for client acquisition and lead generation.
• Audio/Video Production Software: Skills from his music career used for creating marketing assets.
• CRM & Sales Tracking: A spreadsheet system to track sales calls and conversion rates for price testing.
• Funnel Analysis Software: Used for his new “Audit My Funnel” service to diagnose client funnel leaks.
• Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs):strong> Created via screen recordings to streamline training and delegation.

Key Notes

Victor’s story is filled with actionable insights for any entrepreneur. His emphasis on action, value, and strategic focus provides a clear blueprint for scaling a side hustle into a serious business.

• Lower-ticket clients often require more management and can be less profitable than high-ticket clients who trust your expertise.
• Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic can present unique opportunities if you are willing to adapt and get creative.
• Tracking your sales metrics is crucial for confidently increasing your prices and maximizing revenue.

Get Started in Just 5 Steps

Inspired by Victor? You can start your own journey to building a profitable side hustle. Here are five key steps to get you started on the right path, focusing on action and iteration.

• Leverage Existing Skills: Start by offering services based on skills you already possess, just as Victor did with his video and social media knowledge.
• Find Your First Client: Look within your existing network or offer a low-cost introductory service to get your first few clients and testimonials.
• Take Action and Iterate: Don’t wait for the perfect plan. Start, get feedback, and refine your offerings based on what the market tells you.
• Systematize and Document: As you grow, create SOPs for your processes. This will make it easier to hire, delegate, and scale efficiently.
• Niche Down for Higher Value: Once you have experience, consider niching down to solve a specific, high-value problem for a particular type of client to increase your prices.

Conclusion

Victor LaRunger’s story is a powerful testament to the fact that how to start a side hustle is less about a perfect idea and more about consistent action, learning, and a relentless focus on delivering value. By starting small, listening to the market, and bravely pivoting when necessary, he transformed a passion project into a $25,000 a month agency. His journey provides a clear and inspiring roadmap for anyone looking to build their own successful business from the ground up.