Arrigo is the brains behind the company Koala Rank. Koala Rank helps small business-to-business firms scale their growth efforts with content that drives ongoing business. They create content with the ultimate goal of impacting revenue rather than just traffic as most content agencies do.
This is his first entrepreneurial voyage other than a few small blogs. He got the idea for the company after working as a content creator on Fiverr for a year and a half. The articles the clients were requesting were useless from a content perspective. They wouldn’t rank and it ultimately wasn’t scaling their business. Arrigo decided to change that with Koala Rank.
Koala Rank is the only content marketing service in the market right now that allows you incredible flexibility in choosing how you’d like to go about producing your content.
Most agencies will “force” you to outsource content production to them whereas, with Koala Rank, we provide a lot of consulting in the form of our “Self-managed” plan, helping small firms better understand this world without spending too much.
Arrigo believes that he has become a better entrepreneur because he spent time working for himself in foreign countries as he travelled. He discovered what he wanted to do in University when he took computer engineering and realized that scientific things were not his strong suit. Arrigo went all-in with marketing.
He grew up in Tuscany, Italy and taught himself to speak English through YouTube videos and online gaming. He considers himself bilingual now and does most of his work in English.
Arrigo’s favorite thing to do is create things which makes him a passionate entrepreneur. He loves things like the #NoCode movement that brings together people who just like the process of creating. He loved using Lego as a child and creating things with it from his imagination.
Arrigo has not identified as an entrepreneur for long. Koala Rank started in 2019 but he didn’t officially switch from a freelance model to an entrepreneurial model until July 2020. He said it was a scary choice but one that he found empowering.
He does not have any funding for Koala Rank although he did try to get someone on board to help with funding. Arrigo ultimately just kept working at it and did it himself. He works by himself but does outsource some of the more mundane tasks. Koala Rank is completely bootstrapped by him and his own investments. He did try looking for bank investments and applied for a few grants but to no avail.
His clients invest in him pretty heavily to get things done and rely on him and as a small business, it is that reputation and connection that helps him to keep moving forward when times are challenging. It’s humbling and it keeps him going every month. He is grateful for the trust.
Arrigo says the best decision he made was to invest heavily in technology from the get-go. Not even a year after launch, he feels like he has most of the tools necessary to be successful against competitors in the digital landscape. Of course, this didn’t come out of nowhere. he has to spend many months studying and learning best practices.
Arrigo also says that he always attributes his worst decisions to how he spends money. He says it is always better to invest in his business based on analytics and cold, hard truth but that sometimes he makes emotional choices. He is working to get a better visual of his ROI when he is making investments into his company. Arrigo also says that having a few people teach him proper accounting for his business was a sound investment and one that although initially difficult, has proven to be very valuable.
Going forward, Arrigo is committed to spending 100% of his time building Koala Rank.
He is also running an Italian blog but that is not his priority business wise. He wants to build Koala Rank to a point where it’s a profitable million-dollar ARR business.
Arrigo’s final words of advice to new entrepreneurs is to get out and sell your product without coming across as too much of a salesperson.
He says, “Be helpful first and foremost, share content that is genuinely useful. One thing that I see is that people get anxious to go about pitching themselves and that’s because you DON’T want to do that. You want to be genuine in your approach.” Arrigo is a unique and creative visionary in the world of B2B Marketing. He has done some amazing work and has scaled his own company in a very short time. Therefore, businesses are trusting Arrigo more and more to help them scale their own businesses. He puts his money where his mouth is.
