What Converts

Michael Cooney's journey to entrepreneurship started unconventionally—as an electrical engineer building gold mines in South Africa. When the internet arrived, he saw an opportunity to create a directory connecting engineers with suppliers. To justify the expense, he needed to show suppliers the leads they were generating, but tracking them across phone calls, forms, and web activity proved nearly impossible. This pain point would resurface throughout his career as he pivoted into digital marketing and eventually ran a full-service agency. For years, he and his clients struggled with the same problem: proving the ROI of marketing campaigns when lead sources were fragmented across multiple channels.

The product didn't start as Michael's idea. Around 2014, his former employee Jeremy—who had left to work a corporate job—came back unhappy and wanting to start something together. Jeremy, a developer, had originally pitched building a Wix competitor, which Michael rejected as too crowded. When Michael suggested they focus on tracking forms across any website with just a tracking code, Jeremy returned a week later with a working prototype. "I've got it working," he said. Michael's original vision was form tracking only, with integration into existing call tracking providers, but Jeremy suggested they build call tracking themselves too. "I'm so thankful he did that because call tracking is a huge part of why we're successful today," Michael reflects.

They handshake-committed on a golf course in September 2014 with a 50-50 split: Michael would handle sales and marketing while Jeremy developed, both keeping outside income while they built. By March 2015, they launched commercially.

Validation came naturally—Michael's first five customers were existing agency clients he showed the product to. They immediately saw the value. From there, he and Jeremy added What Converts to Google's Analytics Partner Directory, which generated an initial trickle of leads. They also ran modest Google Ads campaigns with great early results. For roughly a year, Google Ads worked brilliantly, delivering high-quality customers at reasonable acquisition costs. Some of those early customers remain today. But the honeymoon ended when well-funded competitors entered the space and began bidding $100+ per click on the "call tracking" keyword. "How do you compete with that? Our plans are $30 a month. How do I pay $100 a click?" Michael recalls thinking.

When paid search dried up, What Converts had already cultivated a powerful alternative: word-of-mouth. One marketing agency using the platform would recommend it to peers, who'd switch from competitors and recommend it further. "We'd work with one marketing agency, and they had 500 customers under their plan with us, and then they would spread the word to other agencies." Google Organic and review sites (like Captera) also contributed, though Michael developed a love-hate relationship with review platforms—initially cheap, they eventually became competitors as they consolidated traffic and raised their own CPCs.

The biggest lesson was learning to filter out noise. Michael discovered that much advice online—A/B testing button colors, quick pricing experiments, cold email tactics—didn't apply to his scale or philosophy. "There's a lot of pseudo experts out there," he notes. He and Jeremy deliberately avoided cold email campaigns despite knowing they work for some, because neither felt good sending unsolicited outreach. They've stayed true to their principles: authentic value-driven outreach only.

After 18 months of both founders working nights and weekends while maintaining other income, Jeremy went full-time. Michael continued running the agency at a reduced level while building What Converts evenings and weekends, juggling college bills for his kids. The bootstrapped path was slow but steady. Today, What Converts serves nearly 20,000 websites through just over 1,000 direct customers, with $2.2M in annual recurring revenue and 40% growth over the last two years.

Michael's biggest mental shift came recently: moving from doing everything himself to building a team. He hired a sales consultant, started recruiting a sales team (their first ever), and shifted from trying $300 blog posts to five-figure-per-month agency partnerships. "It's a huge mental shift," he admits. His 10-year goal is $10M ARR within three years, convinced the market is massive enough and their product superior enough to justify aggressive growth. The key to competing against $30-100M funded rivals? Building a genuinely better product from the ground up with absolute clarity on the problem being solved, while maintaining small-team focus and avoiding the communication overhead that derails larger organizations. "One person doing a great job doesn't equal double the output with two people," he explains, citing Apple II's success under a small team versus Apple III's failure with 4,000 employees.