How He Built the World's Most Controversial SEO Agency

Meet the Hampton member who built a multi-million dollar SEO agency while living next door to Colombian gangsters.

Rob Hoffman traded Canadian winters and soul-crushing startup jobs for unfinished concrete walls and questionable neighbors, all to build Contact Studios into an SEO powerhouse that serves the likes of Kajabi and Beehiiv.

In our exclusive Hampton interview, Rob reveals:

• How living in a Colombian "slum" gave him the runway to build his dream business.
• The controversial SEO strategy that caught the attention of Google's CEO Sundar Pichai.
• How he convinced a CBD startup to bet their entire $50k funding on SEO - and turned it into a 8-figure business.
• Why he invests heavily in R&D while most agencies are busy copying competitors.

If you're curious how he turned a $50 apartment into a multi-million dollar agency, Rob breaks it all down:

Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

I'm Rob Hoffman, Co-founder & CEO of Contact Studios, an SEO and organic marketing agency that helps fast-growing tech companies acquire customers through organic search and content marketing. 

Many people know us from our innovative and often controversial approach to SEO. Every day our team is geeking out in Slack over new technologies, and how we can use them to give our clients an edge.

Last year, my Co-Founder Jake Ward wrote about an “SEO Heist” that “stole” 3.6M total traffic from a competitor. It went viral and was discussed everywhere from the New York Times, to an interview with Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google himself. 

Our flagship service is end-to-end SEO content production. We work with companies like Kajabi, Beehiiv, and other high-growth SaaS, Ecomm, and B2B businesses to create content that both ranks and converts.

We have a small but mighty team of ~25 fierce nerds, and we only take on projects that excite us. 

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

We started our business in 2019. I had just moved to Medellín, Colombia with nothing but my savings and a vague plan to start a business. My theory was simple - with Medellín's low cost of living, I could stretch that money for 12 months while focusing full-time on getting my marketing agency off the ground. 

But, in order to make my money last, I decided to move in with some local friends I met in Medellín in what American newspapers described as a “very dangerous neighbourhood.” In fact, I saw one Reuters article about my neighborhood that characterized it as a “slum.”

Back in Toronto, I had been suffocating, stuck in a startup job that was slowly draining my soul. I was living on ramen noodles, watching a long Canadian winter drag by from my apartment window.

From the outside, my life in Medellín was hardly an improvement. My rent in my neighborhood was $50 a month. We had no hot water. And my next door neighbours were Colombian gangsters known in the neighbourhood for stealing motorcycles, selling drugs, and kidnapping.

But I didn’t care because I was having an adventure, and could spend every day focused on building my business. I felt like the luckiest guy on earth.

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But eventually, I lifted my head up and 12 months had gone by and I wasn’t making any money. And my savings were almost gone. 

But then I got a phone call. It was the VP of Product at a startup I used to work at in Toronto. They were a media company, and I used to be a journalist, so I would write articles for them back in the day. And they offered me a job as a full time writer. Best of all, they said I could work remotely from Colombia.

But at this point I didn’t see myself as a writer anymore. I saw all these opportunities for this startup to generate revenue and grow, and I would beg the CEO to let me help.

One day I created a 30-page slide deck mapping out my entire revenue plan for the company. The CEO relented and let me try to execute my plan. 

I started cold-emailing companies and trying to set up appointments. On my second day of operation generate revenue, I sold a $13,000 ad spot. From then on, the CEO took me seriously. 

But the problem was, I was still living in that same apartment with unfinished concrete walls and mold creeping up the corners. During sales calls, I couldn't find a single camera angle that didn't scream "this guy lives in a slum." 

So I took the only halfway decent decoration in the entire apartment — a dumb super man poster from the early 2000s — and I put it up behind me on the wall so at least I had some sort of decoration in my zoom background.

That superman poster became my good luck charm. I went on to sell $500k of advertising that year. And the next year, I sold $1 million. 

Eventually, I became the company's COO, learning invaluable lessons about scaling a business that would later become the foundation of Contact Studios. 

While running both companies simultaneously, Contact hit $1 million in annual revenue - that's when I knew it was time to go all-in on my own venture. The risk I took moving to Medellín, the years spent building relationships in the barrios, and even the struggles of closing deals from a "slum" apartment - it all came together to create something unique.

Today, Contact Studios has grown far beyond those humble beginnings, but we've maintained the scrappy, resourceful spirit that was forged in those early days. The lessons learned from building a business in an environment where most people only see danger have proved invaluable. Sometimes the best opportunities are found in the last places you'd think to look.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product…

Building a service business is different from creating a physical product. Your "product" is really your process, your team, and your ability to consistently deliver results. Our biggest initial challenge was standardizing our content production process enough to scale it, while keeping the quality high enough that tech companies with a chip on their shoulder would trust us with their brand voice.

The first iteration was pretty scrappy. Back in the day my Co-Founder, Mike Terry, would lead the SEO strategy, while I'd write articles myself while building relationships with writers and editors from my network. 

One of our first real breakthroughs came from an insight about most agencies' blind spot: they would talk a big game on sales calls only to close the deal and immediately pair clients up with some clueless account manager. Then, they would give their client an endless mountain of homework. Finally, when the results didn’t come, the agency would blame the client for “not doing their part.”

We decided to build the agency we would want to work with: 

• Each client gets paired with a senior-level SEO expert who oversees their entire operation. 
• If our clients are going to pay us a boatload of money, our service should be totally hands-off for them. 
• We would cap the number of clients we take on, focusing on expanding current relationships rather than building new ones.

Another huge advantage came from building a company that was 100% remote from the beginning.

Our operating costs were so low that we could afford to experiment and invest back into our service. While our competitors were paying $20,000/month in San Francisco or Toronto rent, I was working out of an apartment in Medellín, reinvesting every spare peso into building a better service.

Describe the process of launching the business.

Our launch story started in the midst of the pandemic, with me holed up in a finca (countryside house) in the mountains outside Medellín, Colombia, desperately scrolling through my contact list looking for our first customer.

That first breakthrough came from an unexpected place: my tattoo artist's best friend had just launched a CBD company with $50,000 in funding.

I convinced him to take a massive bet on us - essentially risking this entire $50k on our unproven SEO services. It was a big ask, but I knew we could deliver results. That bet paid off for both of us: they became our first client, and we helped grow their business to 8-figures over the next few years.

The early days of client acquisition were about as scrappy as it gets. Phoning friends of friends, and relying on referrals. We somehow eked out our first 7-figures of ARR like this before discovering a reliable, repeatable way of acquiring new customers.

It’s amazing what you can achieve with a lot of hustle and a bit of dumb luck.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

A big breakthrough for client acquisition came when we discovered the power of personal branding and building in public. 

We started to build an audience on platforms like Linkedin and X. We would share everything from cutting-edge SEO strategies to banger case studies.

For my Co-Founder, Jake Ward, building an audience on LinkedIn became a full-time job. One time we took a trip together to a small town in Colombia. I’d wake up at 5am and he’d already be sitting at the kitchen table, nose in his laptop, halfway through his newest LinkedIn posts to go live at 9am. 

This obsession paid off, and today Jake is one of the most influential voices in the SEO world. His insights and controversial takes on the future of Search have been discussed everywhere from the New York Times to an interview with Google's CEO. This level of visibility and thought leadership has been transformative for our business - clients now come to us because they've been following our content for months or even year.

Once we get customers in the door, our retention strategy is simple: make them more money than they’re spending with us.

Besides this, we've never done anything fancy for client retention. I didn't even know what QBRs were for the first several years of running the business. Our strategy is embarrassingly simple: execute an SEO strategy that establishes a reliable sales channel for our clients, then document and report on the results each month. 

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Today, Contact Studios is solidly profitable and growing, but we're at an interesting inflection point. We've proven that our model works - we can consistently deliver results for high-growth tech companies, and we've built systems that allow us to do it at scale. 

But while we've built a successful agency, we see something bigger on the horizon. The rise of AI isn't just changing how content is created - it's transforming the entire digital landscape. Most agencies are scrambling to adapt, but we see this disruption as an opportunity to build something revolutionary.

We’re currently working on building out a vertical suite of products and services that all support each other. Each piece of our ecosystem strengthens the others, creating a flywheel effect that benefits both our clients and our business.

We're obsessed with staying ahead of the curve. We're constantly experimenting with new tools and technologies.

Here's why: marketing channels follow a predictable pattern. First, a small group of innovators discovers a strategy that gives them an unfair advantage. For a while, these pioneers print money.

Then the secret gets out, copycats flood in, and what was once revolutionary becomes routine. Just look at what happened with keyword stuffing and link farms in the early days of SEO, or the first companies that figured out Facebook ads - early movers made fortunes until everyone else caught up.

This cycle is why we invest heavily in research and development. We're not interested in selling yesterday's strategies at today's prices. When everyone zigs, we're already working on the next zag.

Did you ever have an “oh shit” moment where you thought it wouldn’t work?

The early days of running an agency were like walking a tightrope without a safety net. Before we cracked the code on consistent customer acquisition, I lived with this constant, gnawing fear that everything could fall apart at any moment. Every month brought the same agonizing decision: do we reinvest our profits into improving our service, or do we stockpile cash in case all our clients suddenly disappear?

What makes agency life particularly nerve-wracking is that you can lose clients even when you're crushing it for them. I remember one of our early e-commerce clients had to pause their campaign due to a global supply chain crisis that made it impossible for them to keep their products in stock.

Another time, a client decided to take our strategy in-house because they loved our results so much. They figured they could replicate what we were doing at a lower cost (spoiler alert: they came back six months later after realizing it wasn't that simple).

Still, when faced with the decision to play it safe and hoard cash, or bet on ourselves and double down on what we were doing, we chose the latter. 

Without a reliable customer acquisition channel, this felt like the business equivalent of pushing all your chips to the center of the table. Then something happened: one of our clients asked to double their monthly spend to scale up their content output. Then, another client did the same. Then another.

That period taught me something crucial about entrepreneurship: sometimes your biggest "oh shit" moments aren't when things are going wrong, but when you have to decide whether to play it safe or bet on yourself. The scary part isn't failing - it's having the courage to double down on what's working, even when every instinct is screaming at you to build a bigger safety net.

What platform/tools are absolutely crucial for your business?

Here’s a breakdown of our core SEO tool stack:

Strategy:

1. SEMRush and Ahrefs: All-in-one (competitors, keywords, etc)
2. Keyword Insights: Keyword clustering
3. SparkToro: Audience research

Content:

4. Byword: Programmatic AI content
5. Grammarly: Writing assistant
6. Frase: Content optimisation

Technical:

7. Screaming Frog: Website crawling and auditing
8. Google Search Console: SEO analytics and data
9. Detailed SEO Extension: Quick on-page analysis

Backlinks:

10. Connectively: Journalist requests
11. Hunter: Email address finder
12. Pitchbox: Link outreach

Underrated:

13. AlsoAsked: 'People Also Ask' keywords
14. Seed Keywords: 'Seed' keyword surveys
15. HTTP Status Checker: URL status checker

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I’m a huge podcast nerd, and regularly listen to: 

• My First Million
• Moneywise
• Startup Ideas Podcast 
• Acquired 
• Diary of a CEO 
• etc.

I also love reading. My all-time favorite business book is The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. It’s a must-read for any Founder, CEO, or leader.

Here are some book recommendations I’ve found useful for different parts of the entrepreneurial journey:

• To become a better operator, read Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman. It’s like a COO in a book. 
• To create a world-class company culture, read The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. 
• To get inspired by the single best entrepreneurial memoir out there, read Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. 
• To learn how to work “on your business” not “in your business,” read The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber
• To learn how to gain leverage through hiring, read Who Not How by Dan Sullivan. 

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Shaan Puri, the co-host of a popular business podcast called My First Million, talks about how when you’re starting out as an entrepreneur you want to spend that first year “strategically broke.” And your goal is just to get to your Freedom Number (the minimum number you need to just cover living costs).

That’s exactly what I did that first year in Medellin, and it was a game-changer for me.

The difference was, my freedom number was way lower than what it might be in the United States. 

To put this into perspective, minimum wage in Colombia is about $250 USD per month. That means if you can figure out how to make $1,000 per month, you’re making 4x minimum wage. If you can make $2,000 per month, you’re now making 8x minimum wage in Colombia.

By way of comparison, 8x minimum wage in the US would be $230,000 (if you’re living in California or New York or a state where the minimum wage is $15 an hour).

This isn't just about saving money - it's about buying yourself time. When your burn rate is low, you can:

• Experiment and take risks
• Focus on quality over quick revenue
• Be more selective about which clients you work with
• Reinvest profits into growing the business instead of just surviving

But here's the key: you have to be willing to make unconventional choices. Living in a foreign country isn't always easy. But when I did the mental math, I decided it would be easier and quicker to learn Spanish and assimilate into this new country while building my business, than it would be to save up a years worth of rent and living expenses in Canada or the US to give myself the same amount of time and breathing room.

Can you share a specific example of how being part of the Hampton community has helped you achieve a goal or tackle a challenge?

I’ve joined a lot of Founder communities over the years and Hampton is by far the most elite. The quality of the people and information is unmatched.

I’ve found game changing software tools, learned strategies that have been instrumental to our business, and even made some new best friends.  

Everything in life is people. As a result of meeting some of the great people in Hampton, I’ve had some of the greatest adventures and learning experiences of my life. 

For example: one of my Hampton friends and I, Josh, and a group of other founders, decided to do our own little “mastermind” trip in Costa Rica a couple years ago. The memories and learnings from that trip are some of the best I’ve ever had — so much so that two years later, we still use the whatsapp group we created for the trip as an active group chat. 

Where can we go to learn more?

Our Website: https://www.contactstudios.com/

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-hoffman-ceo/