Tyler Hakes | Apr 11, 2018 | Agency Journal, B2B, Case Study
One year ago, we launched Optimist. The vision was pretty straight-forward: A full-service content marketing agency that works with clients on a monthly retainer. Our goal is to grow it to $1.5 million annual run rate in 2018. In our first year, we made a pretty big...
Tyler Hakes | Jan 2, 2018 | Agency Journal
Wow. It’s been an entire year since we first launched Optimist and set out to build a million-dollar agency. We aren’t quite there yet, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t have a great run in 2017. Back in December 2016, this thing was mostly a pipe...
Tyler Hakes | Oct 11, 2017 | Agency Journal
I almost didn’t write this. Looking at our numbers, I wanted to wait until we hit our goals–or at least had a clear trajectory–before I published another article revealing what was happening behind the scenes. On top of that, I never felt like I had...
Tyler Hakes | Sep 7, 2017 | Agency Journal
Have you ever had one of those days where everything is going wrong? I’m sure you’ve been there. It’s one of those days where the work you completed weeks ago seems to have magically vanished from your computer. Your website crashes. You realize that the incredibly...
Tyler Hakes | May 3, 2017 | Agency Journal, Culture
Have you ever noticed how job listings often ask for candidates that are “entrepreneurial,” “driven,” and “self motivated”? What they’re really saying is that they want to hire someone who will think of the company like...
Tyler Hakes | Apr 18, 2017 | Agency Journal
I spend a lot of time on SaaS websites. Between looking at various tools for our own use and checking out sites from companies that we’d like to work with or would like to work with us, it’s safe to say that I’ve seen hundreds, or even thousands, of them. There’s one...