Today’s guest, Jake Hare, has tons to share about overcoming struggles in the first year of agency ownership. He got his start developing apps while serving as Lead Intelligence Analyst in the military. Today he is co-founder of Launchpeer, a digital agency serving startups and entrepreneurs in the South.

Why Start an Agency?

After spending 3 ½ years in 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Jake went on to do government contract work in software development. Once he realized he wasn’t passionate about his work, he started taking on side jobs developing apps. In late 2014 he and his two partners decided it was time to go all in, so they founded Launchpeer. As a husband, father and part-time grad school student this was a giant leap of faith! 

Struggles in Early Agency Days

For Jake and his partners the hardest part of maintaining the agency this first year has been generating leads outside of their personal contacts. After working with friends (who naturally expected special pricing) The 3 co-founders brainstormed ways to drum up new business outside their circle. They tried to white label their services for larger agencies which didn’t work out because other agencies weren’t receptive to the idea. (They had not read my take on white labeling!) They tried networking events, which did bring in some business but takes tons of time and yields little results. They also got some referral business but word of mouth is not a scalable way to grow business.

Finding Ways to Capture and Convert Leads

When they got to a point where they had no new jobs and no new leads, Jake did some online searching and discovered my Generate Leads Everyday program. They bought the program and made the decision to niche and focus on marketing to just one type of business — startups and entrepreneurs in the South.  Jake admits it was super scary but the guys were forced to either take action or look at shutting down.

How a 0.3% Opt-In Rate Grew to 32% in 6 Weeks

With a 0.3% opt-in rate, Launchpeer had nowhere to go but up. Jake and his partners got themselves out of the mindset that their website was a showpiece. They scrapped their entire site and changed the content to focus on the prospect and not themselves. They created landing pages focused on the lead and how Launchpeer can solve their problems. They created a Foot In the Door offer to drive traffic to their landing pages and marketed on Facebook.

Jake says there was a lot of testing and tweaking involved in getting everything just right. In fact he laughs about one of the biggest tweaks happened when he was investigating why their Facebook ad click through rate was lower than expected. He realized he had chosen to advertise to “southern based entrepreneurs who speak English-UK”. One silly slip-up and he was aiming his ads at Brits in the the U.S. South!