Ep.30: How this Entrepreneur Started His Own Digital Marketing Business at 17 Years Old

Who is Venchito Tampon?

Venchito is the co-founder and marketing director of Sharprocket—an SEO company that only offers link building services and content marketing. 

When he’s not running the business, Venchito goes out to speak in schools, non-profit organizations, and different companies. He also conducts trainings that revolve around our own advocacies. 

The trainings that we provide are for B2B and B2C companies. One of his more popular ones involves Jayson Lo’s Younique workshop—in which he is a certified facilitator for.

How did you start a business?

Venchito thinks that there’s no such thing as an accident. There is always a purpose and a reason behind an idea. He started by simply reaching out to experts in the SEO industry. There, he met Joseph Cruz, the current head of operations of Sharprocket. At only 17 years old, Venchito was already working as a content writer.

2 years later, he was hired by Jason Cooper, one of the best SEO professionals in the world. Jason was the one who mentored and taught Venchito about all the ropes when it comes to link building. He even got the courage to start up his own blog, which later on in his career, he redirected to Sharprocket’s website.

That old website/blog built up a great audience and garnered Venchito with several inquiries and business opportunities. He saw the potential in it and thus, he went for it.

Venchito and Joseph started with just three to seven clients. Eventually, more clients came, and they needed even more team members. 

What were the challenges and difficulties that you had to face during the start of your business?

The first challenge that Venchito had to face was the whole experience itself. He didn’t have any extensive corporate experience before. He had to learn the systems and processes as they go. 

He had to go to more seminars and seek mentoring just to keep up.

A particularly difficult part was trying to build connections with the very few that you have. There’s a big barrier when Venchito tried to sell his products and services to high-end managers and executives just because he was young at the time.

Often his first clients would usually ask how young Venchito was and from there have a hard time believing in his services.

What he lacked in experience, he made up with technical knowledge. Venchito knew his services inside out and used that to his advantage when getting people to accept his services. 

Proving that what he had was effective was hard at the start. But over time, Venchito was able to accumulate testimonials and create case studies from his previous clients. With these resources backing up his pitches, he was able to close more and more deals.

When did you hire your first team member?

Further down the line, Venchito had to hire his first-ever team members apart from Joseph. They started out in a semi-old residential apartment as their office. He was the first and last person to come, as well as the person who cleans everything up.

His hiring wasn’t that simple, however. The two new hires that he had were trained very well in order to keep up and ensure the quality of work.

For Venchito, this is something that many startups lack. They hire as many as they can without considering the overhead cost as well as thinking that more manpower will automatically result in better productivity and output.

At the start, they didn’t have any kind of onboarding process. Venchito just hired people and immediately trained them. 2 years later, they hired an HR consultant to streamline their hiring processes and company regulations. They started with the onboarding and have continued to do so ever since.

This also led to the creat

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