[EO San Francisco] Building a Scalable Marketing Agency in a Noisy Digital World With Ryder Meehan

Ryder Meehan is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Upgrow, a performance-driven digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, paid media, and conversion optimization for B2B tech companies. With over 20 years of experience, he led digital marketing teams at Samsung, Microsoft, Razorfish, Fossil, and Tatcha. Ryder has managed more than $1 billion in Google Ads spend and has been featured in Forbes and Business News Daily. He has also contributed to university-level digital marketing curricula and frequently speaks at industry events.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:17] Ryder Meehan shares his first entrepreneurial hustle selling Halloween masks at school
• [4:17] Why Ryder was drawn to the Bay Area during the early tech boom
• [7:36] Ryder explains what drove him to leave corporate roles for startup freedom
• [9:07] Building a scalable agency model by merging consulting clients with a co-founder
• [12:33] Strategies for improving landing page performance and doubling conversion rates
• [15:30] Using audience research and SERP analysis to sharpen digital marketing campaigns

In this episode…

What does it take to scale a digital marketing agency in an era where attention is scarce and competition is fierce? In a landscape flooded with AI-generated content and ever-rising client expectations, standing out requires more than just performance metrics or clever ads. How do the most effective agencies build not only campaigns but enduring client relationships?

According to Ryder Meehan, a seasoned digital marketing strategist with over 15 years of experience, the key is combining performance-driven execution with a deep understanding of the audience. He highlights how agencies must evolve beyond simply running Google Ads or optimizing SEO. They need to immerse themselves in client pain points, audience behavior, and competitive messaging. By building robust brand research documents and conducting SERP-level competitor analysis, agencies can craft campaigns that speak directly to what matters. Ryder also emphasizes how thoughtful use of AI can elevate, rather than dilute, marketing effectiveness when it’s guided by strong inputs and human editing.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, host John Corcoran sits down with Ryder Meehan, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Upgrow, to talk about building a scalable marketing agency in a noisy digital world. They discuss how to turn early consulting gigs into a full-fledged agency, why message clarity is the new performance lever, and how to weather market volatility through smart positioning. Ryder also offers advice on using AI tools responsibly without losing creative edge.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• EO San Francisco
• EO Accelerator
• Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
• John Corcoran on LinkedIn
• Rise25
• Ryder Meehan on LinkedIn
• Upgrow
• Danny Ng on LinkedIn
• EO San Diego
• OpenSky
• OpenAI
• Anthropic

Quotable Moments

• “To stand out and differentiate and get your CPC down, you really have to think about messaging, think about your audience.”
• “Any crazy marketing idea you have is sort of like on the table and probably going to get done.”
• “Without spending any more on media or putting a whole lot of effort, we doubled their conversion rate.”
• “If AI has all the context, it will actually beat a human writer nine times out of 10.”
• “It’s a huge advantage for people that use it responsibly and people that are using it effectively and consistently.”

Action Steps

1. Build detailed audience research documents before launching campaigns: Understanding customer pain points and differentiators ensures stronger messaging and better campaign performance.
2. Analyze competitor messaging on search results pages: Knowing what others are saying helps you craft a more compelling, differentiated pitch that captures attention.
3. Use trust signals on landing pages: Highlighting ratings, client counts, and credibility markers increases conversions by reducing uncertainty and building confidence.
4. Leverage AI with tailored brand inputs: Feeding AI with brand-specific data results in higher-quality content and avoids generic, ineffective output.
5. Test and refine messaging based on customer mindset: Speaking directly to your audience’s emotional state improves engagement, especially when offering solutions to sensitive problems.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran: 00:12

All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m one of the co-hosts of this show. And you know, every week we have interesting CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.

And this episode, before we get into it, is brought to you by EO San Francisco. EO San Francisco is the Bay area chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which is a global peer to peer network of more than about 20,000 influential business owners across 200 chapters, 61 countries. And if you are the founder, co-founder or controlling shareholder of a company that generates over $1 million a year in revenues, you want to connect with other like minded, successful entrepreneurs. EO is for you and the EO San Francisco chapter, which I’ve been a member of for about five years now, enables leading entrepreneurs in the Bay area to learn, grow, and achieve more, greater success. If you want to learn more about what we do, you can go check us out at eonetwork.org/sanfrancisco. 

 And I am the Co-founder of Rise25. My our company helps B2B businesses to get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with done for you podcast and content marketing. And you can learn more about us and what we do in our platform. podcastcopilot@rise25.com. 

 All right. My guest here today is Ryder Meehan. He is the Co-founder of Upgrow, which is a performance driven digital marketing agency focused on helping B2B companies to accelerate growth through data backed SEO, SEM, and LinkedIn ads strategies. Over 15 years of experience in digital marketing and held leadership roles at Samsung Mobile, fossil and Tatcha. I’m not sure if I’m saying that correctly and other major brands. 

 Before I launch up, grow and we’re going to get into his background. So Ryder, pleasure to have you here today. And I’d love to get to know people and what they were like as a kid. and any particular entrepreneurial ventures that they engaged in. And you had this idea to buy and sell masks around Halloween time and sell them at school. 

 I’ve heard lots of stories of like, people selling gum at school, getting busted by the teacher. I’ve heard selling weed at school, getting busted by the principal, but not masks.

Ryder Meehan: 02:17

Well, John, thanks for having me. Yeah, I was always, like, scheming. And I really tried to pay a lot of attention to, you know, what is an opportunity? Where is there demand that nobody’s sort of like meeting that need. And so I knew, you know, on Halloween, if I forget my costume or I’m not dressed up for whatever, and I see everybody else wearing it like I really am sort of like desperate.

And the need is there. So if somebody’s offering me a $2 mask that they pay $0.25 for, then I could make a pretty good margin on that. So I always filled my school bag full of, like, cheap Halloween masks and then sold those throughout the day.

John Corcoran: 03:00

And never got busted for it.

Ryder Meehan: 03:02

No, I mean, I guess the teachers didn’t seem to mind.

John Corcoran: 03:05

And what drove that? And the reason I asked that is because sometimes people grow up with an entrepreneurial parent that taught them that. Other times it’s more self motivated. Sometimes it’s they didn’t grow up a lot of money and they just wanted to make money. So they had money in their pocket.

What what drove what motivated it?

Ryder Meehan: 03:25

Yeah, I would I would say, you know, my parents weren’t particularly entrepreneurial. What motivated me was I never seemed to have money. I didn’t get an allowance or anything. So I was just sort of like, you know, if I want if I want to buy baseball cards, if I want to get a, you know, go get junk food after school, I wanted just a little bit of extra money. So I was just sort of like trying to come up with ways to get a little bit of money for, you know, kid activities.

John Corcoran: 03:54

Videos. Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. And so you study marketing in school. And this was around the time period of the early 2000 growth.

And you were I guess you’re watching the Bay area, watching San Francisco and kind of seeing all these different tech companies that are growing. And it excited you enough to try and make your way to the Bay area.

Ryder Meehan: 04:17

Yeah. I remember seeing like a people magazine, and it had Sergey and Larry, the founders of Google, on it, and I like read that. And I was like, oh, these like nerds are are just like so cool. Now it was finally like our time to shine. Yeah.

I mean, I joined an agency there in Dallas and they were sort of launching their digital arm of their traditional agency. And so I became a part of that little department and just, like, totally fell in love with the immediate gratification of how you can drive leads immediately. You can generate traffic. And at that time it was like comparatively easy to how it is now, just like not that much competition and you could just get insane Rois. So just like immediately intoxicated by the industry. 

 And I just wanted to be at the hub of where it was happening at that time and even even now around Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

John Corcoran: 05:15

And what made the leap for you to the Bay area? How did you get yourself here?

Ryder Meehan: 05:21

Yeah, so I was trying to get a job at Google. I never was able to pull that off. I got into some late interviews but could never, like, get over the edge. I did.

John Corcoran: 05:31

Get. What was the experience like of interviewing at Google?

Ryder Meehan: 05:35

Oh my god, it was. I probably had this was like in 2002.

John Corcoran: 05:41

Oh, so super early.

Ryder Meehan: 05:42

It was pretty early. I mean, they were still like huge back then, but I had like 4 or 5 interviews. Use. They were sort of waffling and I said, hey, I’m going to fly out there on my own dime. I really want it.

Like, I, I wasn’t even interviewing anywhere else. I was like, totally like, I gotta work at Google. That’s the place. So I fly myself out there. They put me through like it’s probably 4 or 5 more in-person interviews. 

 They gave me assessments and quizzes and stuff. I think I did okay in interviews, but I like bombed the the tests and stuff and like writing. It just wasn’t my strength.

John Corcoran: 06:24

It’s a bummer. It’s a bummer. But, you know, life takes you in a different direction, right?

Ryder Meehan: 06:28

Yeah. So I, I ended up getting a gig at Razorfish, which is like a, I think the biggest digital agency at that time. So we had Apple clients like Apple and Microsoft later and, and other Walmart.com etc..

John Corcoran: 06:46

And what was that like working at an agency that had such high profile clients.

Ryder Meehan: 06:52

It was really awesome. I think the advantage of that is like you have one, maybe two clients. So you really know them well. You know their industry, you know their ideal client. You’re not trying to juggle calls with, you know, 10 or 12 different clients of smaller companies.

But at the same time, I think the drawback is that it can get stagnant. So 3 or 4 years working on, you know, one Google Ads account, one SEO account, it can kind of feel repetitive.

John Corcoran: 07:21

Yeah, yeah. So you end up kind of getting burnt out from the corporate world. What was that like? Did you was there a catalyst or some incident that happened that that led you to say, I’m done with this?

Ryder Meehan: 07:36

Yeah. So I had maybe 12 year or 12 or 13 years in corporate. I had a series of gigs. The last role I really again, like, really liked that I kind of start up company. So at that time, I was maybe the 10th employee at a skincare startup called Tatcha.

Now they’re huge. They got acquired by Unilever for like $500 million a few years ago. Unfortunately equity everything. But I just like loved that ride of you know, you’re at a ten people just like super scrappy. Any crazy marketing idea you have is sort of like on the table and probably going to get done versus like you’re just in corporate you’re just like, you know, pitching and trying to convince and, you know, one out of ten things actually get done at the startup level. 

 It’s just, hey, let’s just like get crazy and creative. So I really love that, you know, that company did grow up, you know, became obviously a little more structured than the early days. I when I left, I was thinking like, hey, I got to do my own startup. Maybe I’ll join a startup because I just like, love that energy and freedom of this. The startup phase.

John Corcoran: 08:55

Yeah. And so but you didn’t have doing that. You ended up having people coming to you after you left the corporate world and started asking you for a few hours a week, basically consulting on marketing.

Ryder Meehan: 09:07

Yeah, that’s that’s right. And in a way, it sort of scratched the itch of, you know, here’s a new client, a new challenge. A lot of the clients I took on when I first started consulting were those early stage type of startups where, you know, you don’t have a lot of time, you don’t have a lot of resources. You have to start getting growth like relatively quickly. So I really thrive and enjoy that type of environment.

John Corcoran: 09:34

Yeah. And then you meet your co-founder and you you it kind of decide that it’s going to become a full fledged agency or or rather, I don’t know if anyone decides that they’re going to become a full fledged agency, it just kind of one thing leads to another, right?

Ryder Meehan: 09:49

Yeah. So I had, you know, 4 or 5 clients. Danny, my my co-founder, he’s also an EO in, in San Diego. But he, he had 4 or 5 clients. And so we were like, let’s join up.

Let’s hire a couple of junior people together and really think about how can we make this bigger than ourselves. Like, how can we build a brand, build, build out a company under the umbrella of the brand that we that we have? And we came up with as a, as a name. And that was seven plus years ago.

John Corcoran: 10:23

And was he always in San Diego? Were you guys ever in the same city?

Ryder Meehan: 10:27

Oh, he was here in San Francisco at that time. He he was he moved to San Diego a couple years ago after Covid, kind of during near the tail end.

John Corcoran: 10:36

Yeah, yeah. And and talk about Covid because a lot of agencies had a weird kind of roller coaster experience with that.

Ryder Meehan: 10:47

Yeah, we definitely did. We kind of call it our Nike swoosh in terms of we have.

John Corcoran: 10:54

Go down first and then up.

Ryder Meehan: 10:56

We went down like March of 2020 and then like two months later it’s like we couldn’t hire fast enough. We could barely like cash the checks that were coming in. So we went from 7 or 8 people to like almost 30 people. And yeah, we we really rode that, rode that wave. And I’m glad we were kind of just in position to, to catch all of the Covid money and, and all the marketing that used to be offline was just like shoved online in a matter of months, and we were just in the right place at the right time and doing good work for our clients.

John Corcoran: 11:35

And for for you. Did you experience the backlash backside of that, because there were a lot of agencies that it then around 2024 time frame where the Covid money cut off? Or, you know, it was kind of an economic slowdown as presidential election year and a lot of agencies and companies struggled that that period of time.

Ryder Meehan: 11:54

Yeah, I mean, we definitely felt it. I think there was kind of a hangover period of, you know, interest rates were going up. We’re very focused on the tech industry. Tech industry is very focused on, you know, debt and lending. So, yeah, our clients and the companies that we target were sort of struggling.

And that impacted us too.

John Corcoran: 12:16

Yeah. Yeah. That’s kind of the good and the bad of the especially the Bay area economy is that there’s definitely boom and bust cycles. That always happens. Talk a little bit about open sky credit card.

This is a credit card. A client that you worked with that was for people that have bad credit.

Ryder Meehan: 12:33

Yeah I like this I like this story or this case study because it’s a little bit different. Just for some background, open Sky makes credit cards that are called secure cards that are basically for people that can’t qualify because they have bad credit to get normal credit cards. And so the way they work is more like a debit card where you prepay a balance, and then that’s your limit for the month, so you can build your credit that way. All right. So basically they had a landing page that was funneled funneled from traffic like Creditcards.com or WalletHub etc. of people that were declined from normal credit cards would come to this landing page.

And so they were getting 100, you know, 100,000 plus visitors to this page. But it was converting really poorly, like around 1%. But it was a super basic page. So we totally rebuilt it. And it was more about the the language and the message than it was about the design.

John Corcoran: 13:40

And how did you figure out that what the language and the messaging should be?

Ryder Meehan: 13:46

Yeah, we just tried to think through, you know, what is the mental state of someone that’s just said, like, hey, you’re not good enough for this credit card. You’re feeling a little bit dejected and frustrated. So we really tried to use softer language. We wanted to highlight like, hey, here’s the opportunity, and then use that classic messaging framework of like problem, solution, outcome where like, hey, you know, you have this problem, you have bad credit. The solution is this card.

This is how it works and this is how your life is awesome. After you solve these problems. Like, you know, you can get the home loan, you can get the auto loan, you can get the credit you need every month. And then also integrating a lot of what we call like trust signals, where it’s like, you know, we have this high rating score on this site. We have over 100,000 clients. 

 We have, you know, just sort of like looking legit. It really goes a long way when somebody doesn’t know your brand.

John Corcoran: 14:47

And what kind of results did that result in after after implementing those changes?

Ryder Meehan: 14:54

Yeah. So within a month we more than doubled their conversion rate. And that is a huge impact when you have the amount of traffic that that page was getting. Yeah. Without spending any, any more on media or putting a whole lot of effort other than rebuilding the landing page into it, that’s crazy.

John Corcoran: 15:14

And you mentioned that it’s gotten a lot harder today than it was 15 years ago to get attention online. What are some different strategies that you employ or that you recommend for your clients today?

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