A Ethereum Defi Researcher and a Bay Area Solo Dev Walk Into A Zoom Meeting...

Written by pageshidara | Published 2023/05/16
Tech Story Tags: digital-marketing | marketing-strategies | startup | startup-lessons | ai-trends | aritificial-intelligence | business-strategy | growth-hacking

TLDRAndy and I started a digital marketing agency to build marketing, sales, and lead-generation skills. We were both making anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand a month from cryptocurrency and defi. We’re trying to hit our goal of 500k ARR within a year of a launch.via the TL;DR App

…And Start a Digital Marketing Agency

Andy and I’ve been meeting every Saturday night for the last year for 2 hours to hack on every idea under the sun.

We’ve worked on:

  • Decentralized Finance Newsletter
  • Job Board
  • Metrics calculator for DTC e-commerce brands
  • Cohort-based Course
  • lead generation tools
  • Index fund investing tools
  • Blogs. A lot of blogs.
  • AI. A lot of AI.

With this consistency and a good personality fit, we were just enjoying each other’s time and learning from one another. Andy is a low-code, sales, and lead-generation expert. I’m a seasoned software engineer and content marketer. We’re both honest nerds, athletes, and love technology. It’s a deadly combination of feedback and growth.

I’m not gonna lie. We both make a pretty good living at our full-time jobs. By the laws of compounding interest, Andy and I can easily be next-door millionaires in < 10 years at our current trajectory. In some way, I think we’d both made our peace with that.

So what changed?

Artificial intelligence and the economy changed the way we look at our financial futures. We were both making anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand a month from cryptocurrency and defi over a year ago. Then interest rates rose and with it, the inflated value of all assets shrank significantly. Then the layoffs started happening. Senior-level engineers (the market with the best job security in tech) were struggling to find jobs months after layoffs. I tested the market for a few months and struggled to get past the first recruiter screen, and my resume has companies like Indeed and Instacart on it.

We realized that we needed a different plan. We needed to develop more skills to be able to increase our cash flow outside of our 9-5 jobs. We also wanted tax breaks for having a business.

more skills == more business opportunities

We’re great at building, but even the best developer in the world doesn’t get as many business opportunities as the guy that’s pretty good at building and pretty good at marketing.

So we started a digital marketing agency to build marketing, sales skills and generate more cash flow for ourselves.

New Marketing Campaigns With ChatGPT

ChatGPT has changed the game. If you’re not using it effectively in your marketing workflows, you’re at a competitive disadvantage.

Our areas of expertise are content marketing, software lead magnets, and ads. But we didn’t expect that we could deliver expert-level outcomes in areas that we had little experience in via chatGPT. We don’t know that much about say, SEO.

Here’s a fun example. We asked chatGPT to generate an SEO-friendly domain name, then used a low-code website builder and within 2 days, we were ranked first for “Strategic Dental Ads“ on Google search, getting a decent amount of organic traffic a few days after launch.

Andy was also able to generate 7 blog posts in a day using AI. Welcome to the new world of digital marketing.

What’s Next For Us?

💰 Growing the business. We’re trying to hit our goal of 500k ARR within a year of launch.

💡 Building in public and posting marketing strategies and insights on our blog.

💻 Hosting a weekly Hack Night. Come hang out with us!


The featured image for this piece was generated with Kadinsky 2

Prompt: A researcher and a software dev walk into a bar.


Written by pageshidara | Digital marketing nerds
Published by HackerNoon on 2023/05/16