#1 Boostability

   Four years ago, Boostability needed a, well, boost. The ability was certainly there, as were the entrepreneurial emblems of passion and sacrifice. But the do-it-yourself SEO company was struggling to pull rank — until now. “That first year, we made a whopping total of $7,600,” says Rick Horsley, president of the American Fork-based business. “This coming year, we’ll top $23 million.” So what changed? DIY became DOA, and the now full-service SEO firm got flexible with the product, partnerships and power plays. But the one area where it won’t budge? Bootstrapping. “I still have a bad habit of wanting to be the janitor,” Horsley says. “There’s a bit of do-it-yourself I just can’t let go of.”

Travis Thorpe and I are neighbors in Highland. He had been the CTO of an Internet marketing company, and I had a background in small business. The idea was simple: Deliver do-it-yourself SEO software to small businesses. Meeting up with Jared Turner, Kodie Francom and Matt Beatty over Pier 49 pizza in April 2009 was the beginning of a wild journey we could not have anticipated. 

We had a competition to come up with our company name — some were good, some not-so good. Our original name was SEOTownCenter, but Jared came up with Boostability. We paid $7.98 for the domain, created our logo and developed a website. We now had an idea of who we were as a company.  

By November 2009, we completely ran out of money. Up until then, we funded the company through home equity loans, selling cars and toys, and asking relatives to fund our idea. We want to thank them for gas money. We discussed with the team the fact that we were out of money. Kodie and Matt took other jobs, as Travis, Jared and I went without pay for the next year. Welcome to the life of a startup.

We’d put in a thousand dollars here and a thousand dollars there. It seemed extremely meager — and it was — but at that point we’d take anything we could find. We leveraged credit cards and decided we needed someone to count our debt, so we added Russ Larson as our part-time, non-paid CFO to advise us of our drop-dead date.

We soon got the indication that instead of the DIY software, we would pivot in April 2010 to start offering full-service SEO. Software that was meant for the consumer was now used internally by our employees to manage customer campaigns. Boostability received an injection of funding indirectly via Nu Skin International. I was able to sell property to them for their Downtown Provo building project, and we had new life to fund sales people, hire key operators and move into a bigger location. 

The turnaround came when we started marketing to the right people and finding our niche. Our breaks came in late 2010 when we partnered with SEO.com, late 2011 with YPG of Canada, and 2012 with DexOne. We were able to generate enough revenue to break even in November 2010 when Travis, Russ and myself took our first paycheck we knew we could cash and not bounce. 

We are on fire. There’s an enthusiasm among the Boost employees that we are building something great and improving our customers’ visibility online. We’ve built SEO campaign software that equips employees with productive tools, optimizes their time and organizes the tens of thousands of customers we manage. 

Growing this fast is chaotic. We’ve added 45 employees in one month, and training is our No. 1 issue. Because of how great Utah Valley is, we don’t have trouble finding the right people. The only exception to that is top-notch .NET software developers. I can’t get enough of them. Come one, come all! 

For other startups, my advice is to work with people who will put in sweat equity. If you have people on your startup team not willing to go without pay, you have the wrong people. 

We did this all by ourselves. We went out to raise money in 2009-2010 to the angel groups in Utah, and their message was, “We’ll track you for six months and let you know if we’re interested. And if you really kill it, call us back.” We spent too much time and effort trying to engage these people. My advice to entrepreneurs? Spend less time caring about what other people think about your business, and actually focus on your business. If we had done that, we’d be even further ahead.