Joe Griffin and the business of being found

Joe Griffin has a list of 99 lessons for internet entrepreneurs. Number 17 advises against taking money from one profitable venture to fund another. ClearVoice, the company he co-founded with Jay Swansson, began with profits from their search marketing agency. Experience has a habit of sending the invoice before it supplies the instructions.

The contradiction is a useful place to meet Griffin. His career runs through small search businesses, agency management, a freelance marketplace and an acquisition by Fiverr. Along the way, he has written down what worked, what hurt and what he would tell someone approaching the same corner. The resulting advice has more grease on it than gloss.

A father, a son, and a business worth buying

Long before ClearVoice, Griffin and his father, Joe Griffin Sr., were trying to find an internet business they could build together. Joe brought the technical curiosity; his father brought experience running businesses. Their early experiments included a website intended to help them trade painting work for travel. Italy was an appealing prospect. A repeatable business would take longer to find.

Submitawebsite gave them a more durable proposition: help businesses submit their sites to search engines. Griffin later recalled early sites hosted on Geocities, the do-it-yourself web service. The ingredients were modest. So were the barriers to trying something. A family partnership, a computer and customers who needed help being found were enough to begin.

In 2001, Griffin joined iCrossing. He subsequently returned to the family company, bringing experience from a larger search business. The company eventually attracted a buyer: Website Pros, which later became Web.com. Its March 2007 acquisition announcement covered an 18-person team in Scottsdale and a roster of 500 clients. The business had become something another company wanted to own.

For the buyer, search expertise could extend an existing collection of small-business services. For Griffin, the transaction was an early education in how a specialist business fits inside a larger operation. Years later, ClearVoice would encounter a related question: what could a focused marketplace offer a much broader one?

The partnership before the platform

Griffin met Swansson in 2004. They became friends and found that they shared an appetite for building businesses. In April 2009, they formed iAcquire. Their initial opportunity was in link building; their ambitions expanded into digital strategy, content marketing, social media and digital public relations. Technology was already part of the proposition, through their proprietary iRank system.

Griffin described a working day spent connecting with team leaders and individual contributors, meeting clients and revisiting the company's direction. This is the part of entrepreneurship that resists a clean photograph. It involves many conversations about what someone else needs to do their job. An idea may arrive alone. Its execution tends to require a meeting.

iAcquire grew without venture capital. Griffin described the strain of matching sales with delivery while keeping people, technology, finance and legal work moving. A signed client created an obligation before it created a success story. Growth demanded the capacity to perform the work already promised.

By 2013, the agency was adapting to changes in search, including Google's Panda and Penguin updates. Its content operation became more sophisticated. Griffin was also talking about a new platform intended to connect journalism, brands and publishers. ClearVoice's eventual shape was beginning to appear inside the agency's daily problems.

Managing across locations supplied another education. At iAcquire, closely connected departments and leaders could become harder to coordinate when separated. The company adjusted where leadership sat and established clearer working guidelines. Griffin discussed using tools including Trello, Google services and an internal wiki. The office problem and the software problem were already acquainted.

There was a human version of the same work. The company circulated updates covering hires, promotions, clients and milestones. Staff travelled between offices, and the annual gathering in Phoenix brought people together. Communication required a system, then someone willing to keep using it.

The writer needs a desk, too

ClearVoice launched in 2014. Griffin and Swansson were responding to a change they had watched from inside marketing: brands needed to publish useful material, and producing that material required people with the right knowledge. A business might have a publishing ambition without an editorial team capable of carrying it out.

The company's model connected freelance creators with brands and supplied tools for managing their collaboration. Its talent network and VoiceGraph technology were central to that approach. Finding someone who could write was one task. Organizing assignments, deadlines and revisions was another. ClearVoice put those activities in the same working environment.

In a product demonstration with Jay Baer, Griffin showed how the platform brought editorial activity into a shared interface. Calendars, contributor discovery, payments and content submissions belonged to the same process. The appeal was easy to recognize for anyone who had ever looked for the latest draft in an email chain and discovered three candidates, each apparently final.

That demonstration also explains the distance between a writer directory and a working publishing operation. A directory answers who is available. A calendar answers when something should arrive. Feedback and payment determine whether the relationship can continue. ClearVoice assembled those practical details around the act of writing.

It was a familiar Griffin move: start with work a customer already needs done, then build a structure that makes doing it less cumbersome. The agency years had exposed the coordination cost. The platform attempted to contain it.

Money arrived after the work had started

ClearVoice's January 2016 funding announcement reported a $1.1 million round, with investors including Peak Ventures, Desert Angels and PC Ventures. It also described a company that had operated without outside funding before December 2015, using a lean team with an engineering emphasis. The stated next investments included sales, marketing and product development.

The sequence mattered. The founders had reached product, revenue and delivery milestones before seeking capital to accelerate. The financing followed a working business. It did not have to stand in for one. That approach gave Griffin's later warnings about fundraising a history behind them.

Fiverr acquired ClearVoice in 2019. The fit involved two different scales of freelance work. Fiverr had a broad marketplace; ClearVoice brought a focused content business, collaboration technology and experience serving larger customers, including Intuit and Carfax. The acquisition announcement said ClearVoice would operate as an independent subsidiary.

Writers had a reasonable question about the arrangement. Would joining Fiverr alter the economics of ClearVoice? Griffin defended the acquisition as a way to expand the premium business. He said the company had no plans to add bidding software, and described an ambition for freelancers to build ongoing relationships with brands.

The distinction had consequences for the people doing the work. A continuing relationship lets a writer learn a company's subject, expectations and voice. Griffin's argument for the deal rested partly on that continuity. The technology mattered, but so did the accumulated knowledge of the people using it.

When he later discussed the business with Greg Head, Griffin described a difficult transition out of the agency and toward a combination of marketplace, software and services. Those components needed to work together. A service could help a customer use the software; the software could make the service repeatable. Getting the mixture right was part of the business itself.

“I would just avoid raising capital unless you need to.”

Joe Griffin, Practical Founders, 2022

Ninety-nine lessons, with room for revisions

Griffin published his 99 lessons in October 2019. The list moves cheerfully between money, grammar, mentorship, selling and leadership. It gives Excel a place in a founder's education and treats proofreading as a business skill. Anyone hoping entrepreneurship would excuse a misplaced apostrophe receives disappointing news.

Some entries favour restraint: preserve cash, avoid unnecessary fundraising and be careful about partnerships. Others call for involvement: understand the product, listen, speak to employees and stay close to the work. One brief instruction reads, “Let Others Shine.” Taken together, the list suggests a leader trying to balance personal drive with the need to give other people room.

Its warnings also make the earlier career more interesting. The founder who used agency profits to launch a platform later advised against moving money between ventures. Advice becomes more useful when it can admit a cost. A completed deal does not make every decision on the way there worth repeating.

In October 2022, Griffin announced that he was leaving full-time leadership at ClearVoice and becoming a part-time advisory board member. He thanked the creators and leadership team, described the transition to existing management and said he planned time with friends and family before deciding what came next.

The departure added a quieter scene to a career usually described through launches and acquisitions. He had ideas, but was allowing time to reflect. Building another company could wait for a moment. His own lessons had made a place for perspective after a financial win.

Back at the question of being found

Today, Griffin is CEO of Dean Garland. The company builds and operates Pulse and Casa, combining software with services. Its offering covers search visibility, content, local search, advertising and outbound prospecting. AI answers now sit alongside familiar search results in the places businesses want to appear.

The company's team includes Michael Bernardez as head of product and engineering. Its advisory roster includes Swansson, former Web.com leader David Brown and Fiverr's Micha Kaufman. The names connect different periods of Griffin's working life: the early search business, the agency partnership and the marketplace acquisition.

Dean Garland's stated values include transparency, curiosity, expectations and expertise. Its operating proposition pairs a platform built in-house with a team that runs the work on it. After the various company names and changing search interfaces, that combination feels familiar. Griffin keeps returning to the relationship between a useful tool and the people responsible for the result.

The internet has changed the places where a customer can discover a business. Griffin has spent his career working on the difficulty underneath: getting the right business, person or piece of work in front of someone who needs it. There are now more ways to ask the question. He is building another answer.