A New Voyage Begins
Friday, August 16th, 2019, was officially the last day on the books for Apex Current, which was my first-ever entrepreneurial endeavor. I've raised capital and am pivoting right into a new startup concept that I couldn't be more excited about. Apex Current didn't have to close, maintaining solid revenue and healthy margins, but I struggled with the same factor most entrepreneurs will understand - scaling our model.
Performance-driven digital advertising presents many challenges in its own right, but wh-en combined with custom-built campaigns, achieving scale became all the more challenging. I'm an all or nothing type of person so I just couldn't justify straddling the fence. It'd not only shortchange Apex Current's clients, but this next startup concept, which I believe presents the type of opportunity that's rarely seen by businesses.
After 15 years in Corporate America, I began consulting while at Iron Tribe Fitness and then bootstrapped Apex Current from my basement. In 2018 (our first full fiscal year), we produced the type of revenue that only 3% of the approximately 600,000 new businesses started each year in the U.S. are able to achieve. We received a number of recognitions and honors the most recent of which was being ranked by DesignRush as one of 2019's Top Advertising Agencies in the World. It's all been extremely humbling and very much unexpected.
I also had the opportunity to bring on some incredibly talented individuals who believed in what we were trying to create.
Even with our lack of scale, nothing the business accomplished would have been remotely possible without their valiant efforts.
None more bought in, harder working or talented than my good friend, Ethan Voce, who is now successfully growing his own consulting business.
Most importantly, Apex Current afforded me the opportunity to do something crucial to this next venture, what I call "tinkering" or my "play time." While not working on client or Apex campaigns, I spent every second I could building and testing new business concepts and digital strategies.
The fact that this type of environment provided the means to not only build these different concepts, but then implement them with live campaigns provided an education that's truly invaluable. After one of my employees had been here for a bit, she compared me to a "mad scientist" and she's not wrong. That's what I am... for better or worse. This tinkering of mine also birthed my next business concept.
The man, the myth, the legend and now founder of Miniwar Marketing, Ethan Voce!
In June, I was doing research for a campaign when I stumbled upon something I've since dubbed a "glitch in the matrix." A massive B2C segment of the marketplace that is completely unserved. As soon as I sniffed this out, I began bootstrapping a concept for testing. The response from the marketplace was nothing short of the best digital ad campaign results I've ever seen in my life. Actually, the results were too good making fulfillment a BIG issue. I very quickly realized that I wouldn't be able to bootstrap this one.
I began having a few investor conversations without any type of presentation slides or anything you'd expect in these types of discussions. I would simply turn on this machine I had built and let the interested parties watch the results in real time. Shortly thereafter, early seed capital was committed and I began transitioning clients to agencies who could serve their needs.
It's all very much been a whirlwind and happened insanely fast. At some point, I'll share more about this next thing I'm onto, but for now it's time to work. We've got a certain timeline with the current capital raised and if things go as planned our Series A will follow shortly behind.
I couldn't be more grateful to our clients and the people who chose to spend their time here. It was a very brave move because even with our fast growth, we remained not only a bootstrapped business, but one that was run by a first-time entrepreneur in myself. I also couldn't be more thankful to the business itself. While the business demanded more of my time and attention than most will ever know, it also allowed me to discover so much about myself. I'm a mad scientist. I'm an inventor.
My guess is that I'm not the first founder of a new concept to believe they've discovered the biggest thing since sliced bread, but I do with this next startup and it wouldn't have been possible without my first-ever business venture, Apex Current. Thank you.
Keep crushing it!
Corbitt
P.S. For now, if you want to keep up with me you can do so via my personal website here. That's also a great way to reach along with my social media channels (mainly Instagram). I've left the door open to consult with brands given the right opportunity comes up, but it's nothing I'm actively pursuing at this time.
