Agency Startups

Anna Wickham started Charm House, a marketing agency, after traveling the world for nearly ten years. Despite building the business, she ultimately decided that entrepreneurship wasn't the right fit for her and chose to leave to pursue a traditional 9-to-5 job instead.

Eat My Words is a naming and branding agency founded by Alexandra Watkins that specializes in helping businesses and products choose effective names. Watkins is also an author of "Hello, My Name is Awesome," a book on the subject of business naming. The company works with founders and entrepreneurs to solve the critical challenge of branding and naming new ventures.

Growth Ninja is a performance-based Facebook ads agency founded by Vincent Nguyen in 2015. Vincent built the company after apprenticing with Empire Flippers, leveraging his experience in performance marketing. The episode focuses on Vincent's journey navigating social pressures while building his business, including hiding his college dropout status from his family.

Content Refined is a content marketing agency founded by Madeleine Lambert. She began the business last year and has grown it to $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Her growth was facilitated through serendipitous networking within The Dynamite Circle community, where she won an all-expenses paid trip to DC BKK conference offered by entrepreneur Greg Gerber.

Greg Gerber runs a marketing agency that pioneered cryptocurrency payment acceptance, having accepted Bitcoin as payment since 2013. The agency operates in the cryptocurrency space and serves as a case study for early adoption of digital currencies in business payments.

Booster Stage is a web app development agency founded by Ryan Heneise that specializes in building products for startups. The founder participated in his first official mastermind at a Tropical MBA event in Austin, Texas, where he experienced firsthand the value of peer learning and collaboration networks for business growth.

Monetize More is a 100-person monetization agency founded by Kean Graham that helps online brands optimize their ad revenue. The company emphasizes location independence as a key value and has grown through strategies focused on solving publisher monetization problems. The source provides limited detail on specific traction metrics or growth channels.

China Ecom Boost is an agency founded by Matt Kowalak that helps manufacturers, product companies, and celebrities navigate and market themselves in the Chinese market. The company leverages deep expertise in Chinese supply chains and evolving commerce dynamics to facilitate business expansion. Matt has undergone a major re-evaluation of his business model to focus on the vast opportunities he sees in China.

Coran Woodmass left his corporate job and initially pursued location independence by buying and selling small web properties while based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. After realizing this path wasn't fulfilling, he pivoted to found TheFBABroker, an agency advising and brokering quality deals for Amazon FBA business owners. The business reflects his shift from chasing entrepreneurial freedom to finding work that provides genuine fulfillment.

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.