Hi, and thanks for coming to my site! I’m Patrick Ambron, co-founder and CEO of HelloPrivacy and BrandYourself.com. I mostly talk/write about online reputation management and online privacy, but I also try to weigh in where I can on what it takes to build a company. I certainly don’t consider myself a success–we’re still in the process of trying to make our first company successful–but as a first-time founder, learning from others has been integral in getting where we are today. I hope that by sharing some of my experiences I can pass the lessons we’ve learned onto others.
Here are a few important areas of my life:
HelloPrivacy & BrandYourself.com: I’m the co-founder/CEO of HelloPrivacy and BrandYourself.com, where our goal is to help people clean up, protect and improve their online reputation and online privacy. Some of our more popular features include social media clean up tools, identification and deletion of old accounts, dark web scans and data broker removal services. In an age of cyber-bullying, revenge porn, hate sites, rampant digital identity theft and spam and inadequate online privacy laws, everyone needs the power to understand and protect their reputation and privacy on the web. In fact, we started BrandYourself because my cofounder Pete had his own issue: he was being mistaken for a criminal online and couldn’t get a quote from anyone in the industry for under $25K. We realized Online Reputation Management (ORM) is an important need and shouldn’t just be for the wealthy. Since then, we’ve expanded our offerings to protect consumers from a variety of different online threats, ranging from negative Google results to online identity scams. We’ve grown to over 70 employees across two offices and hope to keep building tools to help people. Our Enterprise Brand, HelloPrivacy– allows enterprises across industries like identity protection, fintech, banking, antivirus and cybersecurity to add privacy features to their own offerings through our Privacy APIs and white label partner solutions. You can learn more about that story here or read our comprehensive Online Reputation Management, Personal Branding, and Thought Leadership guides, as well as our thoughts on social media screening.
Writing: I also occasionally write about these topics so I can dive deeper, particularly when it comes to the future of Online Reputation and Privacy. I’m a regular contributor to Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, and Adweek (and occasionally other places like the Washington post). You can check out some of my favorite pieces here.
- Search Engine Optimization/Organic Marketing: This is where I got my start. There are so many ways to get your product in front of the right people without spending an arm and a leg. In fact, BrandYourself has spent less than $100K in marketing dollars ever, and done nearly $30M in sales (here’s a growth hacking presentation I gave a few years ago). However, the space is crowded with players and not all agencies are created the same. I’m happy to speak with you about your SEO and marketing strategies and help you find the right partner.
- Fundraising/Pitching: I advocate against raising money for the sake of raising money. In fact, I’ve written about how excess venture capital can lead to capital inefficiency in the past. However, for some companies raising seed or venture money is necessary to hit their next set of milestones. As a first time founder, navigating through investors, investor pitches, term sheets, and legalese can be tough. When we started the company, I didn’t even know what VC stood for. If you’re thinking about raising money or need help positioning the pitch, I’m happy to be a sounding board and help where I can.
- General Startup Advising: Building a company is hard. Between building product, raising money, hiring talent, managing teams, setting goals, and hitting projections–the job never stops. As I said above, I’ve been lucky enough to have mentors and advisors along the way and try to pay that forward. I’m a mentor through a few different startup programs, but always happy to help where I can.
