Jake Roper

Three years ago, I was eating $1 salmon packets from corner stores. Couldn’t afford real meals. Drowning in debt. One missed payment away from losing everything. Today, I reside in my favorite city in the world. They asked me what this moment means. I couldn’t speak for a minute. Because it’s not about the award. It’s about every night I fell asleep wondering if I was delusional for believing Adstra could work. Every morning I woke up choosing to keep going when quitting would have been easier. Every time someone said “maybe you should get a real job” while I was building something from nothing. This award isn’t just mine. It belongs to every entrepreneur who’s been one step away from giving up. Who’s chosen ramen over restaurants to fund their dream. Who’s been called crazy for seeing something others couldn’t. To my team who believed when I could barely believe in myself. To my clients who trusted us when we were just a guy with a laptop, wifi and a vision. And to everyone still fighting in the corner store, eating $1 meals, wondering if the pain will be worth it. It is. Keep going. Your breakthrough might be closer than you think. This one’s for everyone still grinding in the darkness. 🏆

How we book 12 calls a day without cold outreach: 1. Run ads to a free report 2. Report solves one specific problem 3. Email sequence builds trust over 14 days 4. Retargeting catches everyone who didn't book 5. Calendar link goes to a pre-qualified booking page No SDRs. No cold email. No LinkedIn DMs. Just a system that runs.

@jordan_ross_8F AY

Building a second brain for your advertising agency has never been easier. But most agency owners don't have the time to learn Obsidian + claude code or validate it's even worth their time. So I put my team to work for you. 196 pages built to help you install, set up, and start using Obsidian to run your agency with claude code powering it behind the scenes. Inside you'll find: → The 5-folder vault structure that scales (plus the CLAUDE.md file that turns Claude into a collaborator who's been reading your notes for months) → 29 ready-to-paste plays for daily ops, content, sales calls, client delivery, and strategic thinking → The 30-day rollout plan Comment AY and I'll send it.

The follow-up sequence is where most B2B funnels die. They generate the lead. Send one email. Maybe two. Then move on. The data says most B2B buyers need 7–12 touchpoints before they're ready. If you're stopping at two, you're handing the deal to whoever follows up next.

Why our landing pages convert at 17%: White background. Black text. One headline. One sub-headline. One button. No video. No animations. No testimonial carousel. Direct response doesn't care about your design. It cares about your message.

The buying journey is not linear. They see your ad. Close the tab. See a post three weeks later. Read it. Get an email. Click the link. Get a retargeting ad. Book the call. If you're only running one channel, you're invisible for most of that journey.

Three numbers. That's all you need to know if your business is healthy: 1. Cost to acquire a customer 2. Lifetime value of that customer 3. The ratio between them If LTV:CAC is 3:1, you have a business. If it's 5:1+, you should be spending more than you are right now.

The only funnel you need: Ad → Free report → Email nurture → Booked call That's it. Not a webinar. Not a VSL. Not a 12-step sequence. A free thing that solves one small problem and leaves an open loop. Then a system that follows up until they're ready.

I got into business because I love marketing. Sales training makes me miserable. It's repetitive, grueling, energy-draining work. But it's the problem sitting on my desk. And nobody else is going to solve it for me. The happiness in building something doesn't come from doing what you love. It comes from solving what you hate.

The most important thing I learned building Adstra: The problem you hate solving is usually the one your business needs you to solve.

@levelsio How many plants you got your crib?

I still haven't solved the CO2 bedroom challenge You open the window and you wake up from a 6am garbage truck or barking dogs and sunlight You close it, you suffocate in 1200 ppl at 5am I guess you really need some mini tube in your wall with a vent that opens and closed based on internal CO2 but how do I build that?

There was a year where I was on every sales call, every client call, every strategy session. I was everywhere. And the business barely moved. Not because I wasn't working. Because I was the bottleneck and I couldn't see it.

I used to think the best founders were the ones who worked the hardest. Now I think the best founders are the ones who figured out what to stop doing.

The first time I ran paid ads for Adstra I lost $14,000 in 30 days. I almost quit. Instead I looked at every number in the funnel and found the one thing that was broken. Fixed it. The next month we were profitable. Most people quit one test before the answer.

I hired 15 salespeople in 2025. Every single one underperformed. I blamed the market. The scripts. The leads. Then I ran out of things to blame and landed on the truth: The training was broken. And I was the one who built it.

I fired my entire sales team in December. Not because they were bad. Because the process only worked when I was running it. My instincts don't scale. So I rebuilt every step until someone who wasn't me could execute it. That's the only way a business actually grows.

I've taken over 2,000 sales calls in the last decade. The ones I lost weren't lost on the call. They were lost three weeks before it, when the prospect wasn't nurtured enough to show up ready.

I spent two years blaming my sales team for a pipeline problem I created. I hired better people. Ran more training. Rewrote the scripts. Nothing changed. Then I fixed the marketing. Everything changed.

Six years ago I had $947 in my account and was eating dollar salmon packets in Fort Collins. Last month we ran $500K in ad spend for clients. I'm not telling you this to flex. I'm telling you because the gap between those two moments was not talent. It was systems. And time. And not quitting on the wrong Tuesday.

Nobody buys from the loudest person in the room anymore. They buy from the one who understood their problem before they even described it.

Cold outreach puts you in the same inbox as every other vendor. Content puts you in a completely different category. One is a commodity. The other builds a moat.