Travis Thorpe had helped build a tool for small-business owners who wanted to be found online. There was a plausible market, working software, and a pitch about making search engine optimization affordable. Then came the first year’s revenue: $7,000, as he later described it. The customers had delivered their verdict with the discretion of people simply keeping their wallets shut.
For a founder, that is an awkward form of correspondence. A complaint at least gives you something to argue with. A purchase that never happens leaves your convictions sitting in the room with you. Thorpe’s team had to decide how much of its original idea deserved to survive.
The useful question became whether customers wanted to do SEO themselves at all. Boostability changed course, putting people to work on campaigns and using its software to organize delivery. Thorpe’s founding story turns on that willingness to reconsider the job he was selling.
A reluctant convert to Google
Years before explaining search marketing to business owners, Thorpe had been a skeptical search customer himself. He recalled preferring Yahoo until a database-server problem left him stuck. Other searches had failed him. He tried Google, and its first three results supplied the answer he needed.
His reaction was that he would have paid for that help. The recollection is a useful introduction to his commercial instincts: a technical service earns its place when it gets somebody past a specific obstacle. His own enthusiasm arrived after the problem was solved. Small-business customers would ask for a similar courtesy from him.
The customers declined the homework
Boostability began in 2009. Thorpe’s colleagues included Rick Horsley and Jared Turner. Horsley’s recollection places an early gathering over Pier 49 pizza, with Kodie Francom and Matt Beatty also involved. Turner supplied the name Boostability; the team had previously used SEOTownCenter, a name with the unmistakable sound of a place where you might struggle to park.
By November, the money had run out. Horsley described founders going without pay and funding the business through personal resources. In his account, the switch to full-service SEO came in April 2010. The software moved behind the scenes, where employees could use it to manage customers’ campaigns.
There is a revealing economy to that change. The team could preserve the work that was useful while abandoning an assumption attached to it. A piece of software does not become worthless because the person willing to operate it turns out to be your employee.
A business built through other businesses
Thorpe also faced the expensive problem of finding buyers. Building a sales organization takes time, training, and management. Boostability pursued companies that already had relationships with small businesses, including directory and advertising businesses whose own market was changing.
A Yellow Pages company could offer an online marketing service to an existing customer. Boostability could carry out the campaign. Each side brought something the other needed, which gave the relationship a practical reason to last beyond a friendly introduction.
By November 2013, roughly 80 percent of sales came through outside channels. The business was serving about 12,000 SEO clients, with 370 employees and a network of 4,000 contract writers. Those figures describe the scale at that moment, and they also suggest the less photogenic side of growth: coordinating an enormous amount of work performed by other people.
A partner’s sale becomes your delivery obligation. Every new account adds a promise. From Thorpe’s seat, distribution and operations had to grow together, because a reseller with dissatisfied customers would hardly be eager to send more.
The company’s 2013 UV50 listing captured another version of the same difficulty: recruiting quickly, training well, and helping employees understand the culture. It put Boostability first among the fastest-growing companies, with 2012 revenue of about $9.75 million. Recognition could arrive in a single evening. Teaching a growing workforce how to do the job required turning up again the next morning.
The commute becomes the strategy
Thorpe’s own management writing gets interesting when it reaches the map. In 2014, he described an additional office beside a university, convenient for more than 100 student employees. Two offices were near mass transit stations. A business needing people had considered how those people would actually get there.
He also wrote about the strange distance that develops when a small team becomes a larger organization. A founder can no longer speak with everyone each day. Middle managers become the connection between leadership and the rest of the company, making their communication skills particularly consequential.
His recommendations included town halls, shared lunches, parties, and tournaments. These are familiar office rituals, but his concern was specific: keeping people connected across locations while the business changed around them. Another office solves a space problem and creates a communication problem. The chairs are easier to order.
In June 2014, as Boostability opened a third Utah County location, Thorpe linked the expansion to creating local jobs and building a sustainable company. The geographic concentration mattered. Growth could be international in ambition while remaining thoroughly local for the people who came to work.
“We are responsible for a lot of families.”
Travis Thorpe, reflecting on Boostability’s workforce in 2015
That observation followed his account of a summer party attended by almost 2,000 people. Employees become headcount on a spreadsheet. Bring their families together and the abstraction has rather less room to hide. His remark adds weight to all those apparently mundane decisions about hiring, travel, and communication.
When the growth lists arrived
In May 2014, Thorpe, Horsley, and Turner were named Utah regional finalists for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award. The recognition was shared across the leadership team, an appropriate detail in a story whose early survival had required several people to keep working through uncertainty.
That August, Boostability placed No. 254 on the Inc. 500/5000. Its announcement described more than 500 employees and three offices across the Wasatch Front. Thorpe was also beginning a regular Inc. column, giving him somewhere to explain the decisions behind the company’s expansion.
He wrote about local marketing with the same practical emphasis: make it easy for a prospective customer to find and contact the business. The advice belonged to the small operators Boostability aimed to serve. A visible phone number and a usable website may lack theatrical appeal, but a customer trying to book a service has limited patience for theatre.
In October 2014, H.I.G. Growth Partners announced a strategic investment. Boostability was serving more than 17,000 end customers. Thorpe said the partnership would support a broader service offering and international expansion, bringing another set of resources into a company that had once struggled to fund the next month.
In December 2014, Boostability announced a Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award for the following year’s Best Places to Work list. The award drew on employees’ anonymous reviews. For Thorpe, who had written about maintaining a sense of connection during expansion, that recognition addressed a different question from the revenue rankings: what did people make of the place from the inside? A rapidly growing employer needs willing recruits, but it also needs reasons for the people already there to stay.
The following March, he and sales and partnerships executive Matt Tennison went to Dublin for the SIINDA Spring Conference. They met potential partners and presented on SEO sales and building digital products. The trip placed the same reseller proposition in an international room: other businesses could sell the service, while Boostability supplied the delivery.
Boostability begins
No. 254 on the Inc. list
Red Canyon Media announcement
The dinner bill is the detail
Thorpe’s later recollections retain a founder’s attention to the moment cash might fail. In one account, he pursued a large directory reseller that initially chose a competitor. The prospect eventually called him back. At dinner, with a bill exceeding $500 and a company card he knew would not work, he paid personally.
He recalled learning that the contract was theirs, and valued it at $12 million a year. The financial figure is his retrospective account. The smaller number is what gives the scene its force: even a potentially consequential partnership can depend on someone being able to settle tonight’s bill.
His advice to aspiring entrepreneurs includes getting experience and learning from employers, including the examples they would prefer not to repeat. He also acknowledges having been arrogant himself. That admission belongs beside the early pivot: listening is an operating habit that has to survive the founder’s confidence.
A second act in familiar territory
By March 2020, Thorpe was building Red Canyon Media with partners including Jordan Farrer, Cassandra Bevan, and Tech9 founder Nick Stice. The announced offer combined software, customizable workflows, and white-label SEO fulfillment for marketing service providers.
“This is a culmination of my experience to date,” he said.
The offer addressed agencies trying to serve clients without adding costly internal staff for every function. His public author biography identifies him as a partner and co-founder. His earlier position at Boostability remains a founding chapter; Gavan Thorpe, a different person, was appointed Boostability CEO effective January 2017.
The continuity is in the work. Thorpe has repeatedly returned to the space between a business wanting online marketing and someone having the time and systems to carry it out. It is a crowded space, full of promises that need people behind them.
His first customers supplied a blunt correction to his plans. He helped build a company capable of acting on it. For all the subsequent numbers, offices, and partnerships, that remains an unusually useful place to meet a founder: at the point where he agrees to change his mind.