Hustle & Hardware: An Entrepreneur’s Story of Tech and Cars

Masters in Marketing Agency

Dive into an entrepreneur's journey from the early grind of networking events to the thrill of accelerating a business. Uncover the unique story behind Roosterly, the hustle of raising capital, and the passion for tech, teaching, and fast cars.

Here are a few o topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Selling t-shirts to managing socials.
• Affiliate program with a car giveaway.
• The struggle of scaling a business.
• Websites from 2004 vs. the modern web.
• AI and digital currency arbitrage.

Resources:

• Roosterly
• DevNoodle
• BiggerPockets Podcast
• Buy Back Your Time

Connect with Irfan Jafrey:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 30:25 - There's gotta be obviously arbitrage related to AI. There's arbitrage related to digital currencies. That's how Sam Bankman Fried initially was making a lot of money until he wasn't. But I mean, I think in digital currency, I think in things related to AI, we're gonna see a lot of arbitrage I think in PR, which is a very antiquated industry. No disrespect. We work with over 30 PR firms in North America to help them get their clients in the press quickly. And they all agree that it's an inefficient industry and I think we're going to see a lot of arbitrage there as technology makes things more efficient.
• 24:10 - Josh: Because it's not very often that you hear actually marketing agencies. Actually, two things I'll say about that. One, marketing agencies don't always raise money. And the other thing I forget. So my other question would be, what was the goal for raising capital.
  Irfan: Yeah, so I think the important distinction to make is we do not consider ourselves a marketing agency. We do some marketing agency type things, but we raised money. Our capital raise was predicated on the fact that we built a platform to aggregate, curate, schedule, and post content based on combing through a person's LinkedIn profile or Facebook or Instagram profile without them needing to do the heavy lifting.
• 28:35 - The average person on LinkedIn, let's say at that law firm has five hundred to a thousand connections. If you're sharing one piece of really good content on different times throughout that firm, not at the same time, not at the same day, 'cause it's gonna look robotic and spammy, but you can get, extract 10 X, 20 X, a hundred X of value for that piece of content that you put together. 'cause it's syndicated throughout multiple people. So that's also part of our goal is to create the automation around that strategy so that piece of content, whether it's a press release, original content, curated content, has the largest lifecycle with the most impact.
• 32:21 - And so if you can imagine the giant waste of time to, well, not really a waste of time, but if you look at the amount of effort and energy that goes into dressing up and going to a networking event in Chicago in the winter time with the snow and sleet and rai,n parking your car with the risk of it getting a parking ticket and meeting people when you're not a social guy to get a business card so you can sign 'em up for something that's $49, it's quite painful. But as silly as it sounds that being able to do that 40 times was a factor in us able to effectively raise money. We had people that signed up and they're like, yeah, I like the service. Okay, so we're a real business, not a concept at that point knowing, sure, we're only making a, a whopping $800 at that point or whatever it was, but it was enough where the caliber of clients that we had was sufficient to showcase to investors that, ah, okay, this is something that a lot of other people could use. Okay. So, that's sort of how we started.
• 37:01 - Actually no, I would say that about 80% of our business comes through the meta ads that we run. That sort of, you know, Facebook, Instagram, take the rooster really two week free trial if you'd like it. Stay on, there's no contracts. That's sort of the entry point low-risk product to help clients understand if we're a good fit for them and vice versa. They can come back and say, you're fine. Your product sunk sucks. It stinks, I hate it. We don't wanna work with you. And that's fine. Well well you didn't risk, you risked $0. So you took that free trial and it didn't make sense. Or you come back and say, Hey, I really like the welcome book that you guys produced. I like the first couple of weeks of content, here's the changes that I would make. And we're like, yeah, absolutely, we'll make those changes. And then we go from there and then there's a step up to other different products and then they're, they might just come back and say, dude, this is way better than I could do on my own, or our team could do on our own. Keep doing what you're doing. So that's typically how clients get started. Now, 20% of our business comes from a mix of referral, referrals and affiliates. Other agencies, either white labeling us or not white labeling us.