Agency Startups

Revision Legal is a law firm specializing in serving businesses that make money online. The firm was featured on The Tropical MBA Podcast discussing intellectual property law and cease-and-desist matters.

ContentPros was a productized content generation service founded by Tommy Joiner. After roughly a year of operation, Tommy decided to exit the business and part ways with his business partner, sharing insights about the exit process on a podcast follow-up appearance.

Neil Patel built a 700-person bootstrapped digital marketing agency that generates nine-figure revenue. The agency started with minimum $10k/month contracts for custom SEO, PPC, email marketing, and CRO work. While the Neil Patel blog initially brought in around $30-40M in client bookings, word-of-mouth referrals, employee-sourced deals, and industry awards drove most subsequent growth.

Audie Attar founded Paradigm Sports Management in 2009 to revolutionize MMA fighter representation by creating IP, media, and business ventures rather than just securing sponsorship deals. He signed early fighters like Michael Bisping and discovered Conor McGregor in the regional Cage Warriors promotion, building one of the most successful sports management platforms. The company expanded beyond representation to creating ventures like Proper 12 Irish whiskey, which sold for approximately $600 million in 2024, demonstrating Attar's execution on his vision of building multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses around athlete clients.

Late Checkout is a creative studio and holding company founded by Greg Eisenberg that builds businesses with audiences and communities. Operating as a combination studio and agency, it focuses on profitable, cash-flowing businesses rather than pursuing venture capital. Eisenberg has shifted from the traditional Silicon Valley VC path to building lifestyle businesses that prioritize sustainable profitability and quality of life for founders and teams.

John Morgan built Morgan and Morgan into one of the largest personal injury law firms in the country by pioneering advertising in the legal industry when it was taboo. Starting from a personal mission to help injured people, he scaled the firm to ~$2B in revenue through innovative marketing, brand building ("for the people"), and creating a network of referral partners. Beyond law, he's built a portfolio of entertainment attractions including Wonderworks, Alcatraz East, and now Flavor Town, generating significant cash flow.

Scalable is an operational consulting and advisory firm founded by Ryan Dice that helps entrepreneurs build systemized, scalable businesses. The company does approximately $10M in annual revenue with healthy margins, but generates significant additional value through deal flow access—including a $300M company investment that could provide outsized returns if it goes public. Rather than licensing their operational framework model like competitors (EOS), Scalable maintains an internal-only service model to preserve access to high-quality deal flow opportunities.

Forget the Funnel is a growth consulting agency founded by Georgiana Laudi and Claire Selentrop in mid-2017 that helps B2B SaaS companies accelerate growth by replacing traditional funnel metrics with a customer-centric journey mapping approach. Working with companies like SparkToro and others, they've consistently driven significant conversion improvements—including an 89% increase in website conversion rate for a social media tool and doubling trial-to-pay conversion rates—by identifying ideal customers, mapping their experience, and optimizing each milestone for value delivery.

Irrational Labs is a behavioral science consulting firm founded by Kristen Berman and Dan Ariely in 2013 that helps companies like Google, TikTok, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and PayPal improve product engagement and user behavior through applied behavioral economics. The company works with hundreds of clients using their proprietary "Three B's" framework—identifying specific behaviors to change, reducing barriers (logistical and cognitive), and highlighting immediate benefits—achieving measurable results like 24% reduction in misinformation sharing on TikTok and 20% increase in appointment bookings for One Medical.

Thrive Digital is a performance marketing agency founded by Jonathan Becker that has grown from a 10-person Vancouver-based consultancy to 130 employees managing approximately $500 million in annual ad spend. The company got its breakthrough when Becker transparently disclosed an arbitrage exploit he had discovered in Uber's referral program at a TED conference afterparty, which led to Uber hiring them to fix the vulnerability and then employing them for 10 years. Today, Thrive works with major brands like Asana, Square, Masterclass, and Tempurpedic, focusing on sophisticated creative testing, attribution modeling, and channel diversification as core growth levers.

Duarte Incorporated, founded by Nancy Duarte, has become the world's leading presentation design and storytelling agency, having crafted over 250,000 presentations for iconic brands including Apple, Google, TED, the World Bank, and Al Gore's groundbreaking 'An Inconvenient Truth.' The company pioneered modern presentation design in the early Macintosh era and continues to help Fortune 500 companies and world leaders master the art of persuasive communication through story structure, empathy-driven design, and visual clarity.

SixEastern is a PR agency founded by Emily Gerber that has worked with over 100 tech companies from stealth startups to publicly traded companies. The agency specializes in helping startups get press coverage, build awareness, and develop PR and communications strategy by taking a tactical, direct approach to media outreach that focuses on clear messaging, understanding publication preferences, and leveraging second-order effects of press coverage like credibility signals and content reuse.

Working Backwards, LLC is a consulting firm founded by Bill Carr and Colin Breyer, co-authors of the book 'Working Backwards.' The firm helps growth-stage and public companies implement Amazon's proven management practices and innovation processes, including single-threaded leadership, the PRFAQ process for product development, disagree-and-commit culture, and input/output metrics. The company synthesizes 15+ years of experience from Amazon (1999-2014), where Carr was VP of Digital Media overseeing Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios.

Enjoy the Work is a founder advisory and mentoring firm run by Jonathan Lowenhard that helps founders transition from being great entrepreneurs to becoming effective CEOs. The firm teaches frameworks and skills around CEO failure modes, M&A strategy (the Magic Box Paradigm), hiring, planning, and leadership development to help founders scale their companies successfully.

Bob Mesta, co-creator of the Jobs to be Done framework, launched The Rewired Group and wrote 'Job Moves,' a tactical guide for finding jobs aligned with personal energy drivers and career goals. Over 15 years, he interviewed over 1,000 people and coached nearly 1,000 more, identifying four distinct job-search quests (get out, take the next step, regain control, realign) and distinguishing between job features (salary, title) and job experiences (energy drivers/drains). The book aims to help the ~1 billion people annually who switch jobs make better decisions by understanding their motivations and prototyping potential roles before committing.

Reboot is an executive and leadership development firm founded by Jerry Colonna, a former VC partner at Flatiron Partners. The company helps leaders develop radical self-inquiry, practical skills, and shared experiences to build resilience and authentic leadership without sacrificing their wellbeing. Through CEO boot camps and coaching, Reboot has become a trusted resource for entrepreneurs and executives seeking to grow without burning out.

Lexicon Branding is a naming agency founded by David Placic that has pioneered the field of brand naming over four decades, having completed approximately 4,000 projects. The firm combines creative teams with proprietary linguistic research involving 253+ employed linguists and a network of 108 linguists across 76 countries to create distinctive, memorable brand names like Sonos, Pentium, Blackberry, Vercel, and Azure. Their three-step process (Identify, Invent, Implement) blends creativity with linguistic science, using sound symbolism research and small creative teams to generate names that provide asymmetric advantage in competitive markets.

AJ Prasad founded GMR Web Team, a digital marketing agency doing $150,000/month ($1.8M ARR projected for 2015) with a 90%+ retention rate. He built the agency on a foundation of selective customer acquisition and full-service execution, with 11 staff in Orange County and 90 in India. The business operates on a recurring $4,000 average monthly retainer model, achieving high profitability through offshore operations.

The Sales Whisperer, founded by Wes Schaefer in 2006, is a sales and marketing agency that generates approximately $500k annually by helping entrepreneurs implement CRM systems and sales strategies. Wes has built a recurring revenue business through Infusionsoft affiliate partnerships, earning $30k-$40k monthly in passive commissions from 300+ active customers, while diversifying into HubSpot, Active Campaign, and done-for-you support services.

Basic Bananas is a marketing consulting and education agency founded by Christo Haugh that sells a year-long program called "The Clever Bunch" to small business owners in Australia (expanding to New Zealand and Los Angeles). The program costs $8,000-$12,000 annually and includes monthly workshops, weekly webinars, and online support. Over the past 12 months, Basic Bananas generated between $2-3 million in revenue with a 14-person team, using a paid advertising funnel that costs $20-50 per workshop attendee and converts 10% to the full program.