rudy rupak

As the first CTO of American Apparel (from 1999-2003) I was responsible for the entire technical direction of the company and this included setting the course for their strong internet dominance on search engines. We were one of the first companies to embrace and constantly experiment with SEO. You could say I was growth hacking before that ever became a thing. We were one of Google’s first customers for PPC back in 2002 and one of the first companies to put out a video on YouTube before it was bought out by Google, and we also used to do SMS blasts to our vendors before Twitter was invented.

In 2003, I started the world’s first medical tourism company, PlanetHospital, and used excellent internet marketing to secure strong positions in search engines for health related terms (today when you enter affordable surgeries two of my legacy sites still appear). PlanetHospital grew rapidly, I sold it in 2011, and my ego forced me to buy it back only to watch it go up in smoke because of terrible business decisions I had made (more on that later).

After selling my company initially, I started to delve into search engine optimisation and marketing very aggressively. I joined a new start up called 29Prime and created automated processes to help with search engine placement for small businesses .

I have been exploring the search world for over a year now and have taken several courses on the subject matter, watched and memorised practically every Matt Cutts video. I have even created my own search engine and built rudimentary algorithms to run on it to understand how it affects search. I feel that machine learning, visual, vocal search, and image recognition are the new frontiers of search but no one has figured out really how to optimise for that world yet.

Google and Apple are doing a remarkable job with voice and image search on mobile devices and has surpassed desktop search; but one would not know it given the focus on desktop search.

In 2012 mobile users purchased $21 Billion. By 2014, it'll be $118 Billion, and it has been the larger companies that are using mobile search intelligently that is attributed to this successful phenomenon rather than small to mid sized companies or non-digital companies that are rushing to stay relevant.

I want to utilising the knowledge I've gained in the search and mobile space as a Mobile Growth Hacker.