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Building a Marketing Technology Business (4)

06-26-2018 02:59 PM #1 waterhouse (Member)
Building a Marketing Technology Business

Hello STM,

The next months I am going to create a full-service Lead Generation & eCommerce Business. I decided to create this follow along to keep you updated through my experiences and hopefully get your valuable feedback about everything.

I am a digital marketer with a computer engineering background and 8 years of experience. I started my career as a software engineer for a digital marketing agency. There I was introduced to digital marketing (media buying part) and decided to completely switch my career. We were doing cross channel performance marketing campaigns for various clients (I helped this company to expand from 4 people to 40 people in 3 years). Then I moved to client side where I worked as head of performance marketing for one of the biggest, if not the biggest, AdWords spenders for Google Europe. In the evenings I was doing affiliate marketing. I quitted 18 months ago and worked from home doing affiliate marketing full time, mostly nutra on adwords, facebook and natives.
BH is not for me but wanted to save money in order to be able to build an 100% self-funded company around marketing tech for eCommerce and lead generation.

Here I am today. After one and a half year working from home and having a 6-digit balance in company’s bank account I finally decided to get an office and if needed reinvest all the money. It is a space (around 60 m2) in a coworking building that can fit 6-7 desks, a sofa and a whiteboard

My areas of interest are


Any other areas to explore by STM members suggestions

Incorporation
I am incorporating in Estonia because I find it really easy using their online services and they have one of the best e-government systems for nonresidents (It is called e-residency).
I am physically based in another European country where I have a company as well in order to be able to rent the office and hire local people.

Company structure

Topline the departments that I will need in order to start are:
Finance (It will be complete outsourced to the Estonian agency)
Business Development (I have one senior partner, with deep knowledge of the industry, that will help me with the Operations – not full time at the moment)
Content writing (I am currently doing it myself or using Upwork but planning to get it inhouse. Translation services will continue to be outsourced)
Creative (I am currently using Upwork but planning to get it inhouse)
Web development (I am currently doing it myself or using Upwork but planning to get it inhouse)
Media Buying (I am doing it myself, but planning to hire two media buyers as soon as possible)

Main company products are not yet decided. I strongly believe that a good team will be able to finalize the products and drive company forward.

2019 H1 - Ideally what I would like to achieve is within the first year to have a team that can do what I was doing alone for the last two years (except the bh part, which is not an option moving forward).

I would like to provide advertising technology solutions for ecommerce and lead generation brands.
With the help of the BD dept. I will try to find clients that want leads for various verticals and allow us to design the whole funnel (content writing, creative, web app development) and then drive traffic to these funnels (media buying dept.). Continuously give us feedback on lead quality and build strong partnerships for fair and continuous collaborations.

2019 H2 - Next, I believe that the company needs, and the market trends will show us what proprietary technology we need to build in order to improve our services.

My accounting agency does not support for my company to sell physical goods at the moment but only digital services. This mean that I cannot create a Shopify store, add my company PayPal account and get paid by users for selling physical products. Hence, drop shipping is not an option at the moment. Any feedback on this will be much appreciated.

I decided to start with the Media Buying Department. I am currently looking to hire two junior media buyers with engineering background. This is what I am looking:

Responsibilities



Essential requirements



Desirable attributes



I decided to hire people that have no idea in media buying but can understand scripts and are familiar with computers in general. After some interviews I am very close to finalize this. I have already prepared the space in order to train them for the next three months in Analytics, Tracking, Google AdWords Certifications, Facebook Ads, Native and how to work with the already established Upwork teams and translation agencies.

Here are some tools that have already purchased in order to help collaboration between different company members.




I will attend AWE Barcelona this year. Hopefully I will come back with more feedback and knowledge on what I try to achieve.

Please, any kind of suggestions, comments or mistakes that I can avoid in advance will be appreciated.

06-26-2018 08:11 PM #2 pekadis (Moderator)

Interesting plans - looking forward to hearing how this develops.

I do find it very odd that your accounting agency doesn't allow you to sell physical goods. You decide what your company is going to be, not your accountant. They need to support your business, not tell you where you should be heading.

Only reason I can think of is that they are not capable to deal with VAT reporting and registration once you hit the thresholds for the different countries.

I would recommend focusing on one area and be the best in that. Otherwise, you'll be spread thin.
So ecommerce for bicycle accessories for example, or lead gen for lawyers (and you can get more specific than that even).

Ecommerce and lead gen are such broad subjects that you'd be one of the many, but would not stand out through expertise and results. When focused, you would be.

Just some thoughts...

06-27-2018 01:41 AM #3 cawovt ()

exciting! it's great to see someone starting a company here. keep us updated.

here are a few thoughts/questions, they can be totally wrong since i don't know too much about your experience,

* from your post, looks like you are building up the 'supply' side of things. How's your demand side? Asking because your burn rate will be up once you have an office & employees that puts you on a clock, and if your demand side doesn't catch up, the 6-figure bank balance won't last very long.
* there seems to be a slightly larger jump from single person AM to e-commerece & lead gen agency - if you haven't done e-com yourself, why not try it yourself first, and get to know the space? a lot of agencies i know started from first doing e-com marketing themselves, did a great job on personal branding and eventually transited into an agency. why not follow that path? the accountant agency reason seems strange, i dont get why your accounting firm get in the way of what your biz model can or cannot be.
* 100% agree with pekadis you need to niche down.
* why do you need a business develpment partner? are you going after large corp? i can see the use of one if you are in growth mode, someone need to follow up and keep track of deals. but at the early stage, all of your customers should come from your personal brand or sphere, they are already pre-sold by you. if you don't have that but hoping bus dev person can solve the demand side of things for you, they most likely can't.

i kind feel it might make sense for you to take the slow route and build a personal brand on e-com space first. again, these are just my 2 cents. i could be totally wrong since i don't know exactly how much experience you have starting a startup.

06-28-2018 08:04 AM #4 waterhouse (Member)

Thank you both for your feedback. Will follow your direction to niche down and come back to you with the progress in a few days.

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