My Story
Hello, my name is Jacob Kearney. I am a 25-year-old entrepreneur living in South Korea, originally from Melbourne, Australia and I have been intrigued and interested in entrepreneurship since age 15.
During my youth, I grew up living with my Grandmother in a small home. Being intrigued by business from a young age, my first step in my journey was starting my first business at 15 - a World of Warcraft Cataclysm private server with a WordPress website. The private server, built mostly on MySQL and C++, was initially hosted on a VPS, and we soon migrated to a dedicated server hosted by OVH for better performance.
E-Commerce
Directly after graduating from high school at age 18, I stumbled upon e-commerce through a marketing Facebook Group, and from that point on became more and more fascinated and obsessed with anything and everything related to e-commerce. I soon became well-known within popular e-commerce communities due to my extreme activity and ended up running a remote team for my stores, predominantly in the Philippines, reaching a milestone of $400,000 in revenue within a 30 day period.
Performance Marketing Agency
Soon after, I co-founded a Performance Marketing Agency named Niftsocial for E-Commerce brands with a direct-response focused approach towards marketing. For Niftsocial, I had a co-founder who had previously sold e-commerce brands in the seven-figure range. Within 8-12 months of founding Niftsocial, we had a range of e-commerce clients; however, both my co-founder and I came to the conclusion that running a marketing agency was not really fulfilling and not what we wanted to do.
Fast forward to early 2021, I launched a few more e-commerce stores, which ended up reaching $30,000 in revenue within the second month of launch, but I didn't envision this as my future. I had a drive for something that could be built into something beyond what I had previously achieved.
CRO and Consulting
To me, this was one of the most important areas of my life. While CRO might not sound "important" or "grand", to be a true top performer in CRO, it requires continuous learning and a broad skillset with expert-level knowledge across branding, copywriting, marketing, psychology and UI/UX design.
If you don't have all of these different verticals at an expert level (in conjunction with a deep understanding of how to use CRO tools), then you lack the foundation to be a top performer and lack the foundation to consult CRO firms and oversee Conversion Rate Optimization practices at a high level.
Having expert knowledge in CRO across all of the different verticals mentioned above is what truly allows you to pull all of the pieces together and bring massive value to companies. I have been obsessed with building and learning these listed skills, along with multiple others, for most of my life since starting in e-commerce at 18. This is why a top CRO firm reached out and asked me to work with them, ultimately leading to me to providing significant value and driving substantial growth for many different companies, ranging from a wide variety of clients that included publicly listed companies, AI companies and smaller-sized companies which only generated $200,000-$300,000 in revenue per month.
Whilst I was running e-commerce stores, I was always captivated by CRO, The ability to optimize your company's front-end by solving user journey friction in the purchase funnel, thereby increasing profit margin and maximizing revenue generated from every single channel at once, is fascinating. From the second I started generating revenue in e-commerce my hobby of constantly learning and upskilling my knowledge CRO started.
During my time in CRO, I both worked with a leading CRO firm as a consultant, did freelance CRO consulting outside of just firm clients and also did freelance e-commerce consulting which was more focused towards LTV optimization. Consulting the CRO firm involved assistance with general project management, optimization of internal business processes, project management of A/B test development, assisting CRO specialists, managing more complicated A/B tests, leading more complex A/B test ideation sessions, UI/UX project management, sometimes UI/UX design and more.
UI/UX
Having a deep understanding of UI/UX is a required skill for any business that operates on the internet. As such, I have accumulated high-level knowledge of UI/UX design and implementation. This has often led to me liaising with designers to ensure that designs were feasible and aligned with CRO best practices, quality checking Figma designs, and also creating countless amounts of designs from scratch myself.
I have had my designs implemented on countless amount of brands. During my time working as a CRO consultant, I also learned fundamentals of both HTML and CSS and I have also served as a Marketing Consultant for both clients I was assisting with in the CRO agency and clients outside of the agency.
Artificial Intelligence
In late 2021, while consulting clients on CRO, similar to when I was 18 and first started learning about e-commerce, I became captivated and consumed about the capabilities of AI and began learning everything I could which you can see by my blog. I could see the likely impact AI would have over the next five years. The more I delved into and learned about AI, the more use cases I envisioned coming to fruition in the near future.
In 2023, it is significantly clearer that AI is the future; however, near the end of 2021, it wasn't nearly as apparent as it is now. As of now, my primary focus is on solving problems using AI with my accrued knowledge up to this point with other people who are smarter much than myself and are equally passionate about the future of AI, and then building a business around it.
I have had a strong belief since 2021 that AI will be the next big thing and I have been captivated with everything AI— which you can see from the topics I have delved into on my blog.
With startups focused on creating AGI already underway and being valuated above 1 billion USD and I truly believe there's for better or for worse likely going to be a world where we co-exist with AI within the near future.
