ALPHAPREP.NET

Overview

AlphaPrep.net is a bootstrapped company out of Portland, Oregon. They were in the beta stage, providing machine learning, exam preparation for networking certifications, such as CompTIA, Cisco and TIA. I had previously consulted on social media tactics to boost beta user growth, and within two years, we had generated the first $100,000 in profit for the company with nearly zero investment.

My responsibilities included educating the team of technical founders, who eventually determined that I should be brought on as a co-founder and given equity for my contributions. They were open to seemingly high volatile growth in the early stages of the company, and with no marketing budget, we acquired our first 10,000 users primarily through Quora. Quora is a Q&A or a forum-based website, and using questions generated through AlphaPrep.net, we could both ask and answer questions through Quora, and hired many of our students to come on as trainers to educate the general population on highly technical questions, providing answers and referencing back to the assets and resources available on AlphaPrep.net. Again, with no funding, we were able to generate substantive revenue in the first two and a half months, which gave us the capability to hire interns from all over the world, including Egypt, and those interns were trained by myself to serve as community managers, reducing our costs, and allowing us to focus on the technical aspect and the B2B portion of the business. additionally, I was responsible for making points of contact with educational institutions.

The founders, the original founders were hesitant to take this approach as they had previously lost a $300 million contract with ITT Tech when the company went bankrupt. My outreach started with several introductions to local Cisco educators, and along with the support of 6,000 Minion Tic Tacs, I landed a contract to fully replace the Oregon Institute of Technology's introduction to computer networking class, replacing their existing curriculum with AlphaPrep-based learning strategies. This led to conversations with Cisco Corporation, and AlphaPrep.net is now in discussions to use the machine learning aspect of the product to replace how the Cisco certifications exam is administered globally. IMMUNIO is a Canada-based startup that had gone through Techstars, and upon receiving funding, hired a colleague of mine at Staffing Robot, who had hired me. When he left Staffing Robot to go to GitHub, he offered me a marketing contract to replace him at IMMUNIO, which included managing ad spend, content creation, and overall website design.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zvNrqiE0e6e_sPQ2_wu6hDihcKuK4hjEZn78j-cv1Ew/edit?usp=sharing