There are entrepreneurs everywhere

This might sound terrible, but I loved the quarantine.

It suited my personality. All of us holed up in our homes, hopefully with a loved one or a fling. Amid chaos, we somehow built these calm sanctuaries. Violence was down, baking was up, pollution dropped, and sweatpants became en vogue—heck, I even had a second kid during it all.

But most importantly, we built businesses—and we haven’t stopped since.

I’ve written about this before, but my favorite statistic of all statistics is the new business formation number that is published monthly by the Census Bureau.

Prior to the pandemic, in 2019, Americans were starting 300,000 new businesses each month. This number was slowly increasing, having grown from 200,000/mo 15 years earlier. It took 15 years to increase 50%.

And then, in 2020, BOOM!

Over 550,000 new businesses formed each month at peak and rarely dipped below 400,000 ever since the pandemic and mid-2020. That’s practically a 50% overnight increase, which has been sustained ever since.

Sidenote 1: It’s cool to see that new business formation is seasonal with consistent peaks in January—the entrepreneurial resolutions.

Sidenote 2: It’s strange to see that this wasn’t a global phenomenon. In the UK, for example, there was no notable increase in businesses formed during this period; in fact, it’s been decreasing steadily. The Middle East and Africa have also seen declines.

To me, this influx of entrepreneurship is an undeniable data point that people (Americans?) realized that life doesn’t have to be about climbing up someone else’s ladder.

Now, there are entrepreneurs all around us. Everyday entrepreneurs.

Moving forward, I’ll be changing the name of this newsletter to Everyday Entrepreneurs and broadening the scope of what I share a little bit more.

Let’s start, apologetically, by obnoxiously discussing my own contribution to the new business formation statistic last year. I formed 2 out of the 5.2M new businesses formed in the US in 2024.

I’m proud, already tired, and acutely aware that I’m just at the beginning of what will hopefully be a long journey but statistically never is.

Popform will have a busy February, and I’ll be sharing a first peek at what we’ve been up to in the next week or two.

But today, I’d like to focus on lowercase b2b.

After months of working on other businesses websites, we finally launched our own site: lowercaseb2b.com.

Lowercase b2b is the agency I formed after my role as Chief Growth Officer of a startup came to an end.

At our core, lowercase is focused on creating beautiful websites that have a strong SEO backbone and are built for lead-generating conversions.

I’ve been building websites for companies of all sizes for 20 years now—I love it. To this day, nothing excites me more than launching a site and helping it grow over time. Websites are like bonsai trees to me.

That said, because our team is so insanely experienced and talented, we now do paid acquisition, lifecycle marketing, content production, and even branding.

I’ve been so lucky to be able to bring on some of the most talented colleagues that I’ve had the chance to work with over the years to take on projects as part of lowercase. Reflecting on its first year of existence, I’m most proud of the fact that lowercase paid out nearly six figures of income to these insanely talented people.

Here are just a few of the sites we built from the ground up over the last year:

Check out more of the team’s work at lowercaseb2b.com.

After building websites comes growing websites with SEO and paid search.

We published our first articles for this large education website in September and beat their highest month of organic traffic ever by 30% in December - their seasonally down period!

I’ve always been obsessed with startups & small businesses, and I built lowercase to specifically serve these businesses. We’ve helped everything from venture-backed tech companies to bootstrapped therapy practices.

I have no desire to help a massive company make more money.

I’m here for the companies that contributed to the new business formation statistic over the past few years.

I’d be lying if I said that the goal of this email was anything other than hoping you’d go check it out and share it with someone who might be interested in our services.

I’m sorry this email was so self-promotional, but I’m proud of my little agency. I’d love to share more about it, and quite frankly, I’d love your support making it grow in any way you can.

New businesses are exciting but fragile—if you’re an everyday entrepreneur on a similar journey, I’d love to hear about it. Please message me at any time on LinkedIn.

linkedin.com/in/rikin

Cheers.

Rikin

Goodies for Marketers

Brandfetch.com - Whether building a pitch deck or a website, it’s always such a pain in the ass to get clean logos for companies. A good friend intro’d me to Brandfetch, and it has made our lives at lowercase so much easier.

Google Goes After Forbes & Hubspot - If you’ve been in SEO for a while, you probably share my anger towards sites that have abused their high DA and just slammed the internet with shit content. Well, it looks like Google has finally decided to stop sites like Forbes & HubSpot from playing this game.

Since the December updates, Forbes’ organic traffic is down 50% and HubSpot’s down 75%!

Now’s the time to start trying to rank for your key terms—and don’t forget that even AI chats are primarily linking to the highest-ranking organic search sites in their responses too.