Rob Hoffman shares storytelling tips behind agency growth to millions in revenue

Rob Hoffman’s pitch was simple: storytelling is not fluff, it is one of the cleanest ways to win clients, earn attention and build a business that compounds. In a post on X and LinkedIn, the co-founder and CEO of Contact Studios framed that lesson as a growth tool, tying it to the agency’s rise into the millions in annual recurring revenue and to the two bootstrapped SaaS products he now runs alongside it.

That message fits Hoffman’s own path. Before he was selling SEO and content strategy, he had tried writing and journalism, then moved into startup sales, where he later said he closed $500,000 in deals in his first year and doubled that the next year. A 2023 podcast description said he shared tips on storytelling and getting the first 100 customers, a clue to how he thinks about distribution: the narrative comes first, then the pipeline follows.

Contact Studios itself was founded in 2019 by Hoffman, Tyler Fyfe and Connor Fyfe, three Newmarket natives who started the company in the Toronto area. The agency grew while Hoffman was living in Medellín, Colombia, where he has described working from a low-cost apartment and stretching his runway through geo-arbitrage. That setup became part of the brand story as much as the finances, because it showed how a lean operating base can support a much larger revenue target.

The agency now serves fast-growing tech companies and brands including Kajabi and Beehiiv, and its headcount has been described at about 25 to 27 employees. One reason Contact Studios became a talking point was its controversial SEO strategy, the “SEO Heist,” which was said to have generated 3.6 million in traffic and drew attention that even reached coverage mentioning Google CEO Sundar Pichai. For Hoffman, the point was never just traffic. It was proof that a strong narrative, backed by real execution, can pull in both customers and press.

That same storytelling lens now follows Hoffman across his public profiles. He is regularly framed as a voice on SEO, content strategy and AI-driven search, with Contact Studios, Mentions.so and Kleo.so all tied to his name. The pattern is clear: Hoffman has used his own non-linear founder story, from Newmarket to Toronto to Medellín, as a selling tool, and turned that story into one of the most effective growth assets in his business.