Ashley Richardson started her marketing agency out of college, but it wasn’t long before promoting her own company became her biggest problem.
“I’m trying to not only create content for other companies but my own company, too,” the 25-year-old founder said. “I’m trying to solve this problem for entrepreneurs, but I have this problem myself.”
That realization led her to pivot her initial idea of Totem Agency into MyTotem, a marketing agency that aims to be more streamlined and customizable than the original company plan.
Clients of MyTotem answer a brand quiz to set expectations for things like aesthetic preferences, industry and company missions. Then, those clients can subscribe to MyTotem for $15 a month and get 16 pieces of marketing content, which they can then edit or tweak to fit their vision.
More than 150 clients use MyTotem. Richardson stopped taking new customers until the end of the year because she’s rolling out MyTotem’s newest feature, which uses artificial intelligence to automate new marketing content.
Instead of Richardson and her team of four contractors turning around the content in about a week, she said the AI would allow people to take the quiz then get the marketing materials much sooner. She hopes that feature can get off the ground within the first quarter of 2021.
"It can get more personalized as well with the automation,” Richardson said. “It’ll be a more improved product.”
She said she’s seen a 50-60% month-to-month growth rate since April, which she attributes to businesses needing more virtual marketing strategies because of the pandemic.
Richardson said MyTotem gives startups and small businesses a starting point for marketing, which may be less intimidating than a blank Photoshop page. She wants the product to be affordable while still giving clients control over the content.
Allowing her clients to still be in control of their own marketing is a quality Richardson values as an entrepreneur. Coming out of Georgia State University, she didn’t expect to jump into the startup world. But she was drawn to having her hands in every aspect of a company rather than being siloed to specific projects.
“Making the idea real is what got me super excited about entrepreneurship,” Richardson said. “It’s not super defined. It’s about if it’s working and if you’re solving a problem.”
Since the beginning of 2019, she and co-founder and CTO K.M. Shaub have run the MyTotem platform, which was a pivot from the marketing agency she initially started in 2017.
In those early days, Richardson said she ran her company with $6,000 and a credit card.
"I would be lying if I said that not having any capital didn’t make us stronger,” Richardson said. “It made me more resilient and more focused on the problem we were solving. We had to be scrappy."
In June 2019, Richardson was accepted into the Main Street Entrepreneurs Seed Fund at GSU and won the demo day at the end of the program, bringing in $17,500. Richardson said courting Atlanta investors has been one of the most difficult parts of the startup.
“We have access to talent, but nobody wants to take risks, both on the investor side and the entrepreneur side,” she said.
Richardson is currently raising an angel round after stalls because of the pandemic and hopes to expand her client base when the MyTotem AI feature launches.
