Justin Kelsey has had a strong entrepreneurial spirit since childhood — from selling custom clothes for stuffed animals in elementary school, to delving into indoor hydroponics and car-audio installations in high school.
That spirit is stronger than ever.
Two years ago, Kelsey was working in digital strategy at Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC), having worked at Accenture prior to that. He decided to go in a different direction, funneling his creativity into e-commerce digital advertising by founding Vaxa Digital. Vaxa was a side hustle, in addition to the BofA job, for about a year. Kelsey took the full leap once his startup grew to six-figure revenue.
The bootstrapped venture, founded mere months before the pandemic hit, has since tripled its monthly revenue and doubled its active recurring client base. It has mostly U.S. clients but also some internationally. The company landed big-name client Pier 1 Imports in the last year and has worked with about 60 total firms. There are a few local clients, such as 2U Laundry and 22Below.
Covid further affirmed the importance of e-commerce and the need for creative agencies to help drive those sales, Kelsey said. Vaxa has produced almost 1,500 video ads in the last year, he said.
"E-commerce is the future of how people will be buying things because of Covid," Kelsey said. "There are more e-commerce stores popping up than any other previous period in history."
The startup operates out of a 2,500-square-foot studio on Elliot Street in uptown, with Enventys Partners CEO Louis Foreman and President Roy Morejon nearby as Kelsey's mentors. Vaxa's projects run on four-week cycles — two weeks of production, one week of planning and one week of testing. The company has three employees, not including Kelsey, and a big network of contractors. Kelsey plans to grow to eight to 10 employees by the end of the year.
Kelsey said Vaxa has also shifted its business model, moving from one-time projects to minimum three-month contracts.
"It was very unpredictable," Kelsey said of the old model. "One month we could have six or seven or eight clients we're doing work for. The next month might be three, so as you can imagine, having full-time employees on salary when you had such an unpredictable amount of revenue, going up and down, was a little stressful."
The plan is to keep growing Vaxa, but Kelsey isn't stopping there.
He is about to launch another technology platform for video editing at scale in advertising. The current process is largely manual and time-consuming, he said. The new platform, which has yet to release its name, would allow for making changes to thousands of videos at the same time, he said.
This newest venture is in the pre-seed fundraising stage, hoping to raise $500,000 to $750,000, Kelsey said. It is working with Charlotte investors.
The platform will cut into Vaxa's video-editing services, Kelsey said, but it is also an easy opportunity to cross-sell. The two will remain separate businesses, although he hopes to grow them parallel to one another. He is confident in the new venture's potential for long-term scalability. It is slated to launch later this year.
