Today we’d like to introduce you to John Horn.
Hi John, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I started as a blue collar warehouse worker, moved into the white collar world in customer service, then vendor relations, then marketing, and eventually found myself at StubGroup, a digital marketing agency.
When StubGroup started over a decade ago, the founders brought me on as employee #1. and together we bootstrapped the business, learning how to run advertising for clients and using advertising to find our own clients.
I took on the role of CEO around 6 years ago, and we’re now a Google Premier Partner with team members and clients around the globe. We help businesses find customers online through a variety of marketing channels including paid media like Google Ads, organic methods like SEO and email marketing, and we’re diving headfirst into understanding how to optimize for LLM tools like ChatGPT to make sure that people using AI are finding our clients. We also have developed unique skills helping companies comply with Google’s advertising policies and have become the number one resource in the world for fixing Google Ads suspensions and helping businesses run compliant campaigns.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
As I think any entrepreneur will tell you, there have been many struggles along the way.
One that comes to mind is early 2020 when the world shut down due to the pandemic and in the span of a few days, a significant percentage of our clients paused their marketing because of their inability to operate their businesses.
We had to take quick action to cut our own costs and streamline operations so that we could stay cash flow positive. Thankfully, our business was diversified across a wide variety of industries, allowing us to double down on clients who were able to keep advertising and seeing massive growth for our ecommerce clients who were able to capitalize on the temporary shift of retail online.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
We are a digital marketing agency and Google Premier Partner. We’re the number one resource in the world for fixing Google Ads suspensions and helping businesses comply with Google’s policies. We help businesses find customer online through paid advertising, SEO, email marketing, and more recently, GEO (optimizing for tools like ChatGPT to meet customers where they are spending their time).
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
There is a massive shift right now in how people find information and products online. People are using LLMs like ChatGPT to find information they previously would have searched for on Google, as well as to have new conversations that they would have never had online before. This shift in consumer behavior is going to have massive effects on the whole online ecosystem.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://stubgroup.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjhorn1/
- Twitter: https://x.com/JohnHornSG
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@stubgroup
