Will Mitchell is an American businessman and online marketing consultant best known for co-founding StartupBros.com, a company that advises new entrepreneurs.
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Early ventures
Mitchell founded his first company at the age of 16. After a few failed ventures, he left college at 19 to work on Affluence, a private social networking site for the wealthy. He later worked as a business consultant, a venture which became the marketing agency Clear Presence Media after its IPO.
During the Financial crisis of 2007–08, Mitchell invested heavily in gold and silver. In 2013, he reported to the Christian Science Monitor that his precious metals holdings had increased in value by 100% since his original purchase.
Startup Bros
At the age of 22, Mitchell co-founded Startup Bros, a company to advise new entrepreneurs, with his best friend Kyle Eschenroeder. Mitchell originally wanted to name the company either “Startup Jedis” or “Online Income Labs”, but accepted the name “Startup Bros” after discovering that it tested better through his new experimentation method for business names. When Startup Bros hired its first employee, Mitchell saw the moment as a turning point, realizing that with someone on the payroll, they needed to create a steadier cashflow.
Mitchell believes that new businesses often focus too much on indiscriminate social media and advertising rather than on creating a quality product that the target audience will love. He has sometimes advised clients to buy fake social media traffic such as Facebook “likes”, though he believes this practice generally becomes counterproductive after the first 100 or so.
StartupBus and BumperCrop
Mitchell also acts as an organizer for StartupBus, a competition in which fledgling entrepreneurs from around the US join in teams on a 72-hour bus trip to develop and pitch an idea for a new company. The ideas are then presented at a pitch competition at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, the buses’ destination. In 2012, Mitchell was part of a team that developed and pitched “BumperCrop,” an app to sell and exchange home-grown produce with gardeners in a five to ten-mile radius of the user. The new company was the runner-up in that year’s pitch contest. In March 2014, Mitchell was one of those robbed in a burglary at a rental home used by StartupBus en route to Austin.