#UNCONVENTIONAL: Josh Fechter

Alright, article four of the #UNCONVENTIONAL series. Today’s profile is on someone who has been providing incredible value on LinkedIn: Josh Fechter, the man behind the popular Facebook community “Badass Marketers and Founders”.

Josh had trained years for the moment he could walk onto the grass field to line up as a college football safety.

Then one day, everything came crashing down.

In one of the last practices of his high school career, he broke his ankle. He played through the pain in his league’s championship game turning one fracture into three.

He went from being a promising collegiate athlete to a confused young adult.

Despite that setback, Josh persisted and went to San Diego State University (SDSU) where he applied his competitive spirit in academics (aiming to complete a triple major in political science, economics, and finance in five years).

Early in college, he had his first experience with marketing and personal branding. He ran the Young Americans for Liberty (primarily US-based libertarian organization) SDSU chapter.

Frustrated by the difficulty of attracting new members, he began to blog about politics and started to think of other ways to engage his audience. He thought of creating a platform for the organization that allowed people to contribute content in the form of a publication.

But he needed a way to reach writers.

At the time, Facebook enabled you to message anyone you had one friend in contact with. Josh used this opportunity to message thousands of people at his school interested in libertarianism.

Within a week, Josh’s chapter began to experience substantial member growth. As a result, the Regional Director for Western YAL reached out to Josh to find out more about what he was doing. Over coffee, Josh explained to the director that he was sending messages at scale using Facebook. A simple idea that gave the Director an aha moment. The next week, she sent a newsletter to every chapter president explaining how to send messages at scale using Facebook.

A few months later, Josh started a blog about politics (opinion pieces), life advice from a college student, etc.. Impressed by the number of views he received from sharing his content on Facebook, Josh immediately thought, “How do I make money off this?”

He used the same strategy for growing his YAL chapter to get more traffic to his blog. He got three other contributors (at the time he didn’t know this was called guest posting) and he saw his traffic go from around 30 views to 80. Though this is still not that many views, for Josh it was a big aha moment because it showed him the tip of the iceberg and the potential this had if he put his head down and continued to put out good content.

On the first day of a new semester in college, Josh dropped out right before finishing his third degree. He believed he didn’t need a degree to allow to him to create value for someone else. This is not to say that Josh is opposed to education, but he consumed knowledge in other ways - podcasts, books, and attending conferences. He wanted to accomplish something more challenging to help him grow.

After leaving college, Josh grew the blog by turning it into a publication and recruiting more writers. He used Facebook which at the time allowed people to pay a dollar to get into the inbox of mutual friends. Within three months, Josh had 150 writers, and yet he still had no idea what he was doing.

“I taught myself web development, worked twenty hours a day editing and writing content. I was going crazy but continued to see results and that encouraged me to keep going.”

As he added more writers, he added more categories to his platform from music and fashion to health and business. He worked with affiliate programs like Google AdSense but found many of these programs not to be as effective as they were spammy.

A few months later, Josh vividly remembers talking to his co-founder and telling him, “we have so much content and traffic, but we’re broke.” The team had no idea about product and market fit, and they didn’t even know their target market.

Josh decided to shut down the company but still learned a great deal from the experience not only about marketing but leadership. He then went on to work as the VP of Marketing for a mobile app company that matched employers with employees using Tinder-like features. He tried to help market the app, but struggled because it had no product/market fit. Six months in, Josh left, and the company failed a month afterward.

Josh applied to many companies in San Francisco that would enabled him to use his marketing acumen. He spent most of his money traveling to interviews in California, and he got rejected by many places (some of those companies have offered to hire him now).

He didn’t receive any offers.

He ran out of money.

Dejected, Josh went back home.

“I was done with entrepreneurial lifestyle and had a breakdown.”

Josh stayed with his Dad (his parents are divorced) in a small apartment (Josh has to be careful of where he stays because of his severe allergy to mold).

With almost no money, Josh sought an outlet for his creative marketing skills that would balance well with his budget.

He found work as a low-paid copywriter and focused once again on writing. He worked for a video editing software company, became a contributor to Elite Daily, saved up money and began getting featured in more prominent publications, including Entrepreneur and Social Media Today.

Josh leveraged his new credibility to get a better job at a Facebook software marketing company, 22Social, where he excelled.

The software company was the first to live stream on Facebook.

Josh helped get the company featured in many publications, created their sales funnel, and began to build a community for them. To this date, Josh is indebted to how willing the founders were to help him grow and flourish.

By this point, Josh started to get well known in the San Diego marketing scene. Imagine that - in four months, he went from being broke to well known. He used his recognition to begin hosting marketing Meetups in San Diego. These Meetups did not make that much money but helped him expand his network.

As he continued to work for 22Social, he realized the company had a major early adopter problem. The technology was cool, but the majority of people weren’t ready for it yet. So, he decided to take a look at San Francisco’s tech scene.

He had zero network in San Francisco. To outcompete the other job applicants, he needed to set himself apart. To do this, he wrote a book about Facebook marketing focusing on community building and paid acquisition. The book made few sales but landed him a job as the Head of Growth for the event subscription company, UpOut.

The CEO, Sam Ho, appreciated his knowledge of Facebook advertising and in exchange not only employed him but taught him about attribution and in-depth web analytics. Josh viewed every interaction and moment to this point as currency (not in the form of money but experience) which only made him more valuable.

To expand his network in San Francisco, Josh began hosting meetups again. Through these events and his earliest experiences speaking, he connected with a venture capital firm, GrowthX. They were hiring a marketing head, and Josh was brought on to promote the firm and their training academy. The fund was not the biggest (around 50MM) but still invested very actively (over 160 ventures by the time Josh arrived).

As Josh’s brand and community grew, he decided to start a Facebook Group, “Badass Marketers & Founders”. The group which still exists and is very active, started getting tons of members organically which prompted Josh to take some time off to decide what he wanted to do.

Josh went back to a skill he had continuously worked on since college: writing.

He grew his Facebook group while writing consistently on Quora, have one of the fastest growing follower bases on the platform. Becoming an influencer on the platform helped get Josh’s name out there, and it directly contributed to the success of his Facebook group.

During this time, he also pinpointed the specific role he wanted: being an evangelist. He wanted to use his personal brand and experience of reverse engineering social platforms to drive revenue. Looking for the perfect evangelist fit, he found the marketing automation company, Autopilot.

Today, Josh’s Facebook group has over 12,000 members (including me - yay), and he has hosted over fifty events in San Francisco. As of today, he recently left Autopilot to launch an agency and membership community for helping founders become evangelists.

His message to youth is simple: Provide value. If you’re a writer, start a blog and write and share something every day. If you’re a photographer, go out and take photos and edit/post them every day. Josh loves the feeling of when you finally realize that people enjoy your content and seek it out daily. There’s nothing comparable.

To anyone out there that feels like they have not found their passion, Josh wants you to see this story as a testament to the fact that you don’t have to rush to find you “passion”. Instead of focusing on building a lifestyle around work, build your work around a lifestyle you desire. Josh has had friends who have made tons of money but still feel lost when it comes to defining their purpose. For them, they have built a lifestyle around their work as opposed to flipping it and peering at every opportunity through the lens of their lifestyle.

In the future, Josh is looking to expand his presence to other cities like Toronto (yay), Vancouver (yay), Los Angeles, Austin, and Sydney. If you’re a marketer or founder (of any age and level), Josh wants you to reach out because so he can help develop real marketing skills and be part of a community that actually values your intellect.

His group “Badass Marketers and Founders” is truly supportive (I’ve seen it first hand), and it’s free to get in. The best part of his group is that it’s not just made up of the talking heads of companies, but also the people behind the scenes who are equally if not more instrumental to their company’s success.

You can connect with Josh by joining his Facebook group (Badass Marketers & Founders), following him on LinkedIn (https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/joshuafechter/), and staying up to date with his content on Quora (https://www.quora.com/profile/Josh-Fechter).

If Josh's thoughts resonated with you, share it on Twitter and Instagram with the #UNCONVENTIONAL and follow along with this series!