SEO business / life update

Hey, so today I just want to share a couple of thoughts about where I currently am in this business journey and being a founder of a software company and trying to figure all this stuff out. Okay. And I will tell you that yesterday was probably like let's call rock bottom of where I've been in this journey. I've been actually in business since uh I actually started my business in 2013. I started making money online in 2011 when I was still in college. So in 2011, I started doing paid surveys and doing all kinds of stuff to try to make money and it was and then eventually I discovered this thing called blogging where you could start a blog and you could make money from it. So that's what I did. I started a baseball pitching blog and this is in 2011 and I ended up working on this blog tirelessly and of course I didn't get any traffic. growth and then I didn't give up. I continued to look for solutions and I ended up stumbling upon this thing called SEO which is search engine optimization. And this was like the greatest discovery in my entire life. And I used this skill to grow this blog. And so I ended up getting traffic to the blog and I ended up making my first couple of dollars online. Then I made my first $100 online and then so on and so forth. And so that was what got me the beginning. And then from 2011 to 2013, I just kept building websites, learning SEO, becoming obsessed with SEO, and the money was great, but what I found out was that I just loved SEO, right? I just love doing SEO. And that was super exciting for me. So then I finally made the decision that like now that I've refined my skills and I feel confident I can get results, I was like, why don't I just start selling this to businesses? So then in 2013, I went on Craigslist and I'm like, "All right, I guess I'm going to start looking for SEO gigs. " So I started searching for gigs and started applying to every job I could find. Eventually, I landed my first client. And they paid me $100 per month, but that was super exciting. And so I ended up working probably 20 hours a week, give or take, on this campaign for a hundred bucks a month. And let's just say it wasn't the best situation, but it taught me a lot, right? And it was the discovery that people would actually businesses would pay me to help them get results. And that was exciting. So then from there I was like, "All right, I think I can do this. this. " So I packed up my stuff from California. Uh I had very little. Threw it all in my car. Came over here to St. Louis. Drove all the way to St. Louis in 2013. This is October 2013. And then I pursued this idea of trying to start my own SEO business. And there was a lot of stuff that happened in between there. I tried to apply for a bunch of jobs here in St. Louis. I didn't get a single. No one responded. So then I was like, "Okay, I need to move to St. Louis because I want to be with my uh at my at the time my girlfriend, but she's now my wife. " And so I did that. I moved to St. Louis. And of course, I wasn't making a lot of money. So I decided the best thing to do with this dream of building an agency was to just get a day job doing SEO so I could learn the internal workings of SEO and be able to obviously have some income to give some stability. And so I applied for every single SEO position in St. Louis, at every agency, every company that was hiring for SEO. I got one response and I got one interview at an agency here in St. Louis. And I did not get the job. So I was kind of left in a weird situation cuz I had just moved over here and fortunately I was super fortunate to have my mother-in-law allowed me to actually stay at their house when I first moved here. So I had my own little room while I tried to do this stuff. So, I just would wake up every day and try to figure out how I'm going to get clients because I didn't seem like I was going to be able to get a job. And so, I would go on Craigslist and I would respond to literally every single gig for SEO, every single one. And come to find out that actually ended up working weirdly. Now, I don't think that would work today, but it did work. And I started getting a lot of what you would call white label engagements. A business would go and close an SEO deal and then they would outsource that work to me, right? And so, the retainers were really small. I'd be doing SEO for $250 a month, $500 a month, really small, but the agency would send me a lot of work. And what ended up happening is I ended up getting to know $5,000 a month and then $10,000 a month. And then I started getting some direct clients because I started to rank for keywords like St. Louis SEO company and stuff like that. So, I started to get some inbound stuff as well. So, I was doing a little bit of outbound, Craigslist, Kora, just trying to make at least have a little bit of presence on those platforms and then also doing SEO to actually get clients. And so I ended up getting to 18 $20,000 a month somewhere in that range by 2014. And then in 2014 I made six figures in profit. And so that was like crazy because I had never made any significant amount of money in my entire life. And fast forward through all that from 2013 to 2016 all I did was client work. Literally I just did agency work. I just worked on clients. And then it's funny that was actually I started to feel a little bit of burnout at that point but

it wasn't all the way up until about 2018 because I this is a good problem to have but I had so many clients that and I didn't know how to actually like run a business. So I just was working non-stop and so at that time I got super burned out from agency work and I had started this course called Gotcha SEO Academy. And once again, you just have this expectation that every time you start something new, of course, you want to be optimistic about it. like, "Oh, this is going to be so awesome and people are going to love this. " You should do that because at least gives you the motivation to want to build something, to want to try something. That's really good. But the reality is you also need to you need to lower your expectations slightly because most new things that you start are not going to be a home run. Okay? So, when I started Gotcha SEO Academy, I launched it for the first time and I got five sales. I got five sales and I got three refunds. Not exactly. You see everyone these big six-figure launches. I started with agency and that was a grind getting there and then I started a course and that was tough in the beginning too, right? But I stuck with it, right? I stuck with it. And so then I redid the course and I changed what I did in 2017. I launched again and I did much better that time. And then I ended up doing multiple launches leading up to 2021. And I actually ended up doing one launch was a six figure launch in one week. So I booked six figures of revenue in one week period from that training program. In 2022, I decided with my partner that we were going to start a software company. And obviously I had waited a really long time to think about doing this. I had done agency work. I had been relatively successful doing agency work. I built a pretty decent business but got pretty burned out by it. And then I transitioned more into training. That has done very well for me. So I've done well in both of those different mediums. Pretty confident business models. But I was always really fearful to go into software because for a few reasons. Number one, in the SEO industry, there's just the software companies in the SEO industry have some of the smartest people I truly believe in the on the planet. Some of these guys are so incredibly smart, so talented. And I felt like a lot of these software companies had already solved a lot of the big SEO problems. And so I told myself that the only way I would ever think about building a tool was if I felt there was a serious need, right? If I felt like there was a serious problem that needed to be solved. And I did find a problem. And that was because I had been teaching this particular SEO system that many agencies for many years. There was a distinct problem which was this idea of content optimization. Okay. And so what we decided to do was build our own content optimization tool. So that's what we did. We started Rankability and it was just a content optimization tool we started in 2022. So basically what we would do is we would my partner and I would make money with the academy and we would both just basically reinvest into rankability. And so we did that for the first two years just pure investment in the product hoping this agency can get the work done. And honestly they did a really good job. They built us a solid content optimization tool. It was pretty much in line with what I wanted within reason. And then we soft launched it in 2024 and just let see what would happen, right? And we ended up doing okay. We started getting customers. We did all right. And that was 2024 and then obviously in 2025. And we just it just got really difficult with churn. And that wasn't something I fully understood when we started. But obviously as someone who never dealt with a lot of churn in a business like agency has very low churn and even in our course model we had really low churn as well because we do these coaching calls and we put a lot of support around the product. So our churn was in like insanely low like we did had no one basically cancel for our academy. But then when we started this product we felt like we were doing a good job. solving real problems with this product. But then we had this like insane amount of churn. People just cancelling and that was it. That was a new thing for me. I wasn't quite ready for that which is wow people like either a are not using the product b are maybe not getting value. I don't know. It's just really hard to figure out what the reason is why people cancel. And so that was a new development was from 2024 2025 even into today dealing with this concept of churn. Okay. And so I uh made a big decision and that big decision was that we were going to stop working with the agency that we were working with and we're going to take over development inhouse. I'm going to bring that development inhouse because the only way that we could fix this problem was that we need to be able to do the work. see and truly test and try to figure out what is the thing that's making people leave or stay. Right? And if we can't control our own destiny, then we're always going to be constrained and restricted by this agency that we're working with. But we spent a small fortune working with this agency. Okay, a small fortune. And when I even when we looked at the work that

they were doing, there was something that really stood out to me. And this made me really realize that we had to bring this inhouse. And as a founder or someone who's building your own business, no one is going to care about this as much as you. There's no one that is going to care about this more than you. Just realize that. And that's okay. You shouldn't expect anyone to care that much. But especially when you're working with an agency, agencies are our target market. But we have a different angle here. But I'll just tell you some agencies, any type of agency that you're looking at, a lot of them focus on billable hours, right? So, they're not necessarily focused on results, they're focused on billable hours. And so, what ends up happening is when you start to review the billable hours, you start to look at what they're doing and you start to realize that a lot of the time they're just looking for ways to add more hours. They're not help you get better results. fix churn. They're just clocking in. They want to try to clock as many hours as they can because that's how they make money. Nothing wrong with that. But the thing is, this is a serious thing when you're running a business. And you need people that care about it when you're in these early stages. You need people that see these numbers and say, "That hurts. We need to fix that. " an agency, they don't really care. Let's be honest. They're looking at our business and they say, "Yeah, we'll build you that product or yeah, we'll build you this, we'll build you that. " They say yes to everything without any context of what we're trying to do in the business, right? And if it doesn't work, if the agency builds something and it doesn't help us improve churn or help us increase retention, doesn't do anything to them, right? So I made a big what most people would define as a risky decision and we went ahead and we brought it in house and we started building the product literally from scratch. So that means all that work that we did from 2022 to 2025 we completely erased it. Now we erased it on the front end but we didn't lose everything that we learned during that time. So we learned a lot from that product like that first version of that product and we were able to carry that over into the second version of this product. So we started it in right in J beginning of January we started building the product from scratch again and this time to finally get to what I'm going to talk about today which is we wanted to focus 100% on helping agencies specifically digital marketing and search agencies that sell SEO and now AI search services or AEO services and the re there's a very specific reason is because that's what I know best, right? I've been in their shoes. I know what it's like to be an agency. I know their struggles. I know their problems. And it's truly the type of person, type of business that I can help the best, right? And so, we literally have a training program that we focused on agencies. And then, yeah, I actually ran an agency. So, it's like it's in our wheelhouse. So, we made a couple decisions. Number one, let's bring it inhouse. Let's build this product in-house. We can move faster. We can do what we want. We can test. We can truly focus on building a great product for agencies. Number two is focus 100% on agencies. Simple as that, right? We're going to focus 100% on agencies. And specifically though, there's a lot of, let's call it a lot of gurus out there that think growing an agency is about just getting more leads and closing more deals. But the reality is growing an let's call it an agency that you can respect, an agency that gets word of mouth, gets referral, one that people really look up to. They're not these lead generation machines. They're agencies that develop a reputation for getting results, right? And that's in my opinion, when it comes to building a successful agency, it building one that's stable and has high retention and is able to grow, it's all from that basic pillar, which is client results. If you can get client results predictably and confidently, then that's what helps you grow because it's much harder to go and acquire new clients than it is to keep your existing ones. And how do you retain clients? You get them good results, right? And that's the same thing with our software. If we want to have high retention, we have to help agencies get good results. And that's it's as simple as that. So, bringing me to where I am today, okay? I'm going to going forward, I'm going to do my best to try to be as transparent about this process of building this business, okay? I'm going to try to give you as much information as I can. Maybe this is for any founders out there that

are going through the same thing or trying to build like I am. I'm just going to share it all. And of course, my content on YouTube and X and LinkedIn. It's not all going to be about just, you know, me being a founder of Rankability here. It'll still continue. Large majority of it will be about SEO and AI search optimization. All the stuff that I really love. That's my true passion. Uh I know that might be weird, but it actually I just love search. I and that's why I've been doing it for 15 years. I really do love it. But I also want to share just I know there's other founders out there who are likely going through this same kind of grind and I want to be there to kind of tell you where I'm at and hopefully you can learn some things that are working for me, things that are not working for me and hopefully that helps some people out there. So this is my goal here, right? And there's a specific reason for this goal. If you're going to set a goal, doesn't matter whether it's a business goal or a personal goal, you got to get really specific about it and because you want to plant that seed in your mind. So for me, 10,000 agencies, that's what we're going for. 10,000 agencies that we want to help and them achieve a 95% client success rate, right? So most agencies would be happy with 90%, but we want to go for 95%. And we think we can do that. help agencies do this with our software which already exists by supporting these agencies more with training, giving consistent coaching every week to make sure that they can deliver results and then of course just building community around this objective which is ultimately to deliver incredible client results. And for me, I think that's the most important thing cuz that's when I was running my agency, that's what kept me up at night was I need to get results to these clients because if you don't get results, you're in trouble. That is the number one thing that will determine your agency's reputation is results. So that is the number one thing that needs to be fixed in agency. And if you don't fix that, none of it else in my opinion really matters. But for those that want to build a sustainable agency that can help feed your family, help you build wealth, help you achieve the financial goals that you want to get to. It begins and ends with that core pillar which is getting results. So this is my goal, right? So make it very clear how many the specific numbers around this. Quantify that uh and then how you're going to do that. Okay? How are you going to get to that goal? Now you may have a goal and that's fine. And I'll explain here in a second why just having a goal alone is not enough. But you need to say how you're going to get there. Okay? And then have a deadline. Okay? Now, this deadline for me is very specific because in business there's this rule of seven. If you're going to start a business, you got to commit to it for seven years. So 7 years, that's how long you should commit to it. Now, we start in 2022. So by 2028 is only about two years away. So we got some work to do. That would be our seven-year mark running this business. So at that point, we have put in our time at least by this kind of madeup deadline and that for us maybe that'll be enough, right? So but having that deadline helps, right? And you got to have you got to put a timeline on it, okay? And that will help you work towards that deadline. And I guess the best question is what happens if you don't hit the goal? Nothing, right? If we only hit 80% of our goal, did we grow? Yes, but we want to try to hit this goal. That is our goal. Okay, so set a goal. It helps. You need to have if you're traveling to a location, you need to know where you're going. Okay? And so establish that. Now, a couple things I just want to finish off this video here. Number one is I will be trying to keep up with the progress here. So, we have 125 agencies right now in Rankability. 125. So, that puts us at about 1. 2% of our goal. So yeah, got a lot of work to do, right? And along those lines, there's three things I kind of want to share with you if you're on this journey of trying to achieve a big goal in your life, in your business, whatever it is. Just three simple thoughts that I've been thinking through. This is the most important one in my opinion, which is you achieve your goals by helping others achieve theirs. And I've had these moments where I realized that's actually not the part that matters. The way that you earn money is by helping others achieve their goals or solve their problems. That's it. So if you can solve someone's problem, you can help them achieve their goal, then that is how you get rewarded. It's not, hey, I want to make money. I need to focus on making money. That's just a bad way to think about things. you focus on how do I give value to another person so that then their life gets altered in a positive way. And a small example is just yesterday on my call in the academy, one of the members just was asking questions and was like, "Hey, I just want to let you know I took your advice on increasing pricing and I just closed my biggest deal ever in my agency. " That's an example where someone

they executed and they got a result that put them in a place that they've never been in before, right? And that helped them achieve a goal. And that's what creates trust. That's what we should be doing in our businesses, right? Even as an agency, your goal is not to make a ton of money. That shouldn't be your goal. If your goals in your agency is like, I want to make as much money as possible, like you see it all over the internet. Build a $10,000 per month agency. build a $100,000 per month agency. Like, everyone's so focused on that, but that's not what actually matters. The money is just the lagging outcome, right? But what really matters is giving value. And when you're helping a business, they're paying you because you're helping them grow. And if you help them grow, what do they get out of that? They get more revenue. They get more profit. They can hire more people. They can take their family to Disney World. whatever it is, right? It's always more than just the money. And you keep going deeper and deeper into those levels, but it's not to be all woo about this, but even as an agency, like if you just view it as, oh, I'm just helping this business to help them get better results and they're going to pay me for that. If you view it a little bit differently from the perspective, no, if I help this business grow, that's going to impact so many different things on so many different levels. That's going to help them have more stability. grow. That's going to help them free up funds and have more cash flow so they can hire more people and that's going to positively affect the economy. Like you can go to a much higher level with this. And if you view it like no, I'm not just helping this business. Like I'm helping so many other people. It doesn't just influence one thing. When you help a business grow, you're helping many people grow, right? So much good comes from that. And so when you reposition as okay, I'm not just here to make money. I'm here to actually serve. help these businesses. So that's the first thing is like when you're stuck, really think about how can I help other people achieve their goals in whatever I'm doing? How can I help them achieve their goals faster and easier and more predictably? Those three things, if you can do that, you it it's impossible basically to not make more money. Okay, that's the number one thing. Okay. Number two is don't focus on the money as I already mentioned. Okay. Like when you focus on the money, what you're doing is you're focusing on the lagging outcome. The money is just it just comes out the end from all the stuff that you're doing, right? Instead, what you do is focus on service, focus on giving value, focus on helping, right? Focus on what can I do to help them achieve their goals. That reframe will make you more successful. It's almost a guarantee. And I don't guarantee a lot of things, but that one thing absolutely will because I've done it time and time again. And I've made this mistake more times than I can count where I get so focused on the money and the lagging outcome that I forget that's just a byproduct. That's just a byproduct of all the other stuff that comes before it. Okay. But what other option do we really have? Right? I'm just going to take one step and keep going up this mountain until I get there. And what happens when I get there? I don't know. I'll cross that bridge when I get to that point. But I think it's important along this journey that you do celebrate the milestones, right? And this is something I've been horrible, absolutely horrible at. I'll hit certain milestones in business or I signed a book deal for AI SEO for Dummies or I got 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, but I just that's something I've really struggled with in the 15 years I've been in business is just sitting back and be like, "Hey, I did something cool. " Right? My wife is really much better at this. Like when I got 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, she got me a cake and she wrote some stuff on it and the kids all celebrated. That felt really nice, right? And that was super cool. So I think it's be very deliberate about celebrating milestones because it's a long journey, right? And if you just wait until you get to the top of the mountain, then what? You didn't celebrate anything along that journey. That's just a mistake. So, you have your huge goal that you want to go for and try to celebrate it every little milestone that you hit because that can give you a little bit of motivation to keep going. I hope that helps you and once again I'll try to, you know, share more stuff about what I'm working on and good luck out there. Thanks.