The NO-BS Team

With over 20 years of collective digital marketing experience, Aaron and Tristan Gray founded their own agency, Studio 56. This then-startup in Melbourne delivered digital marketing solutions to small and medium-sized businesses—just your typical agency.

But over time, they realized the dire state of the industry was hampering their efforts to deliver quality results.

For the next two years, the brothers investigated the reasons for their limitations and found no reliable way to ensure a link’s quality. While they frequently relied on third-party service providers, they couldn’t verify the quality of their work by themselves. In light of this, they took matters into their own hands, forming an internal team and training its members.

Our team secured some wins for a time, including a sale worth $50,000 to clients on Black Hat World, an online forum for SEO enthusiasts. But then, another problem arose, this time involving turnaround times. Demand for our services grew, but our ability to keep pace didn’t, even as our team expanded. The average turnaround time for each order was around three months, which won’t do in a fast-paced environment.

We found our solution in technology, resulting in the birth of the NO-BS Marketplace Platform. This all-in-one system gives our clients more control and oversight over their marketing decisions. It was received extremely well, netting $500,000 in sales in its first year of going live and posting a month-on-month growth rate of 10%.

Despite the platform making things easy for us, turnaround was still a major pain in the neck. It worked a bit too well, and demand skyrocketed beyond what the platform and another round of team expansion could handle. In light of this, the platform was rebuilt to make it easier to use and manage multiple projects. At the same time, the company opened its first brick-and-mortar office in Geelong, an hour’s drive from Melbourne.

The initial year of the COVID-19 crisis turned out to be one of the best years for NO-BS Marketplace, marked by an accelerated shift to digital. Demand for our solutions grew, prompting us to expand our team threefold and establish a second physical office in downtown Melbourne. It also coincided with our then-plans to introduce new services.

We knew that our flagship link building service alone wouldn’t be enough to sustain our operations. For this, we embarked on another round of team expansion—this time to fill our need for content writers and SEO specialists. As content is still king, and that fact won’t change anytime soon, we handpicked our writers to write like journalists. At the same time, the company decided to go fully remote, shuttering its two offices.

A new round of upgrades made our already impressive platform even more impressive. These include the ability to view our list of high-quality publishers and manage PR links, further improving the transparency we’re known for. Also, to make our services more affordable, we’ve updated our pricing structure to provide bulk discounts.

To further extend its reach, NO-BS Marketplace set up “digital hubs” in several locations worldwide. These would allow more potential clients to know about our ethical approach to Filipino SEO. The Philippines is home to one of these, owing to a bustling business sector, but we’re planning more hubs in the future, so stay tuned.