6x Start-Up Founder, Growth-Hacker, Keynote Speaker, Corporate Innovator, Start-up Junkie, Mentor, Creator
1. Hi, Taylor, please tell me a little bit about your background and your interests.
I’m an American entrepreneur, currently living in Denmark. On my better days, I consider myself a growth-hacker, founder, keynote speaker, corporate innovator, start-up junkie, mentor, and creator.
Having co-founded 6 startups and helping to monetize dozens more. My professional experience is rooted in building marketing departments, setting up marketing tech stacks, updating business models, building online
online courses, event series, and growing my digital marketing agency.
I’ve been in the startup ecosystem for 12 years and just within the past 4 years I’ve focused heavily on growing and scaling marketing departments for multiple successful Danish startups.
More recently, my marketing efforts were acknowledged as the core driver behind my last company winning “Best New Start-Up in Denmark” of 2018 by the Nordic Startup Awards.
I’m the course designer and lead instructor of the Growth-Secrets’ 2 Day Growth-Hacking Masterclass.
Taylor currently runs a saas startup aimed at disrupting the sales processes of the architecture industry. Additionally, Taylor can often be found in webinars, Linkedin live feeds, keynote speeches, and occasionally jumping in as guest lecturer for numerous universities around Copenhagen (CBS, KU, ITU, etc).
2. What motivates you to keep running a business?
Plain and simple, I love learning. I’m motivated by getting to work on a variety of projects that very few people get to touch. I often look at growth-hacking as a never-ending journey of tools and connections that allows anyone to squeeze creativity into.
3. Can you tell me more about the founding of the company and what the problem is that you were addressing?
I moved to Denmark 4 years ago from Washington, DC.
The first people I just happen to get along with and form friendships just happen to be architects.
I’d never met an architect prior to moving to Denmark and I found it to be a fascinating industry.
I’m in the start-up scene and have helped some of the fastest growing startups in Denmark grow quickly. One day I got curious and asked my friends working in architecture firms, “How do architects get new leads?”
The answer they consistently gave was “word of mouth.” No other industries operate solely on word of mouth in 2020. Much less beyond into the future.
I had spent nearly a year and a half working to disrupt the construction industry did project management with an online tool named Geniebelt.
So I set out to disrupt a very “old school” industry using marketing automation and growth-hacking (digital growth marketing) techniques and processes in a platform.
As for funding, we’re completely bootstrapped. We’ve done numerous start-up competitions, pitch battles, and meetings with investors. We haven’t encountered the right investor and circumstances just yet, but always open for a chat.
4. What are the company’s main objectives in 2020?
We’re aiming at 30 paying customers on ArchitectureQuote.com
The product features we are pushing hard to build are the Internal communication functionality, update permission logic for adding new users on projects, and adding our win-prediction feature.
We love creative content and want to continue to increase our overall traffic to hit 50.000 unique visitors per month.
5. What is the Biggest Risk to the Company?
Our lack of resources might keep the speed of our growth from ultimately reaching our goals fast enough. If we only focus on the small country of Denmark as our primary market, we may not be able to capture enough users.
6. What Does Success Look Like for the Company?
We’re interested in evolving and expanding our service offerings and extending our capabilities beyond just the architecture industry. We would like to partner with a larger company, then evolve in other markets, then hopefully find some good terms for an acquisition.
7. What do you read to keep up with news and innovation? Are there any podcasts, blogs, or publications, covering digital startups, that you particularly like and that you want to suggest to our readers?
There’s no end in content these days. I’m following a number of thought leaders across numerous platforms. Some of my favorite stuff hits my news feed randomly on linkedin and facebook. I think facebook groups are probably the best source of material these days for those that want an edge. I’ve also gotten into seeking out full length keynotes from conferences on youtube.
8. To close the interview, I have one final question: What would be your overall advice for people that would like to start a start-up?
What should they look for? What should they avoid? And how can they start?
Life in general is a bit of whirlwind right now. Despite all the uncertainty everywhere, I think there’s a lot of room for personal development. People are going to realize that the covid19 timeline was a perfect period in which they could have spent their time learning or doubling down on getting more optimized in their work. Consider updating your marketing tech stack or trying out a new machine learning tool to automate processes.
There will likely be a blowback reaction to people trying to improve themselves with online courses, process optimization, and automation tools.
For start-ups, now is the best time to overcome your competitors. There are tons of well know industry leaders that scaled during recessions when others scaled back. My last webinar was about this very idea:
I think it’s important to focus on your priorities. For most- that should be driving revenue. Figure out which channels tend to produce the most leads and double down on that. Additionally, innovate, create a “stop doing list,” and trim the fat where you can. Stay healthy and stay focused.
