Today we’d like to introduce you to Jordan Banafsheha.
Hi Jordan, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
During my time at USC, I began working at Tinder, which is headquartered right in the heart of West Hollywood. At Tinder, I was on the growth product management team where I spent time working on new features and products to help Tinder grow around the world.
After graduating and working at Tinder for a couple of years, I was approached by Imran Khan, the ex-CSO of Snap, to join his new venture, Verishop, as a founding team member leading the Product Management organization. After we spent six months building the website, app, internal tools, building the team, and getting the inventory we needed to launch, we needed someone to lead our growth efforts. I offered to lead the effort until we could hire someone to run the growth team. We built out our performance marketing, email, affiliate, and SMS efforts and I ended up loving the work and taking over as full-time head of growth, in addition to running product.
When covid-19 shutdowns began, many small businesses saw their wholesale businesses drop to 0 overnight. Many people in my community in L.A. reached out to me to see if I could help them grow their eCommerce/DTC business. A few months into the pandemic, I left Verishop to pursue building my own performance marketing agency, icepop. We helped numerous businesses not only survive but thrive during the pandemic by growing their eCommerce channel.
Now, over 18 months later, we’re very fortunate to be working with top eCommerce companies, consumer tech companies, and SaaS tech companies like Open, RedCircle, Madhappy, Euka, Lucky Day, Impira, and many others. We’ve quickly become a well-known agency in Los Angeles and are rapidly expanding and growing our team.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Starting a business during the pandemic was definitely an interesting experience. All of the contractors and folks we’ve brought on to support our clients are fully remote and are based around the country. Coming from Tinder & Verishop where we had very few remote colleagues, this was a big shift for me, but it has worked out very well and has helped find great folks without location being an issue.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Icepop?
Icepop is a performance marketing firm. We specialize in paid social advertising (Instagram, TikTok, and Snap), paid search advertising (Google ads), and Search Engine Optimization. We also produce ad content for our clients.
We’ve been very fortunate to cement ourselves as a top-tier boutique agency in L.A. very quickly and we are working alongside some amazing agencies to support our clients.
We’re super proud of the work we did during the height of pandemic shut-downs. We were able to 20+x the sales of multiple businesses and not only keep their businesses alive but also scale their businesses to hire folks that were laid off during the pandemic.
We’re also very proud of the clients we get to work with like the V Foundation, Lucky Day, Madhappy, Open, and many other phenomenal organizations that are changing the world.
Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
For folks interested in starting agencies or service-based businesses, my advice is to always take time out of your day to answer people’s calls and emails asking for advice or help. You will quickly see that each of those calls will eventually lead to a referral, a new deal, and new opportunities. Providing value and advice to others will, for the most part, always end up helping your business.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://icepop.co/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/icepophq/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/IcePopHQ
