BrandYourself is a renowned online reputation management firm established in the United States. It offers tools and services to assist organizations and people in outranking bad search results by creating new content and websites. It follows a freemium model, in which certain tools and services are supplied for free, but premium memberships and professional services are also available.
The startup was formed in 2010 by three Syracuse University students. The firm had an appearance on the television show Shark Tank in 2015, where it turned down an investment offer from Robert Herjavec. The CEO and COO of the firm participated on the BBC show Dragons’ Den in 2018, when they accepted an offer from entrepreneur Peter Jones.
Over the years, this company has continually increased in its reputation and the impact it is creating in helping organizations and individuals as well. To know more about Brand Yourself today, keep reading this article as we summarize everything you need to know about this company as well as their net worth today.
Inception
Patrick Ambron, together with two other former Syracuse University students, Pete Kistler and Evan McGowan, founded Brand Yourself.
They founded the company immediately after graduating from university. Pete majored in information technology and management. Evan, on the other hand, majored on entrepreneurship and new venture development.
Pete double-majored in advertising and psychology. Patrick now serves as the company’s Chief Executive Officer, with Evan serving as the Chief Operating Officer and Peter Kistler serving as the Head of Product Strategy and Design.
Kistler’s business was created out of his post-college predicament. Because he shared his name with a well-known drug trafficker, he was unable to obtain work in computer programming in 2008. The issue drew the attention of both the traditional and social media. The story remained a legend, however, because there was no evidence of a drug dealer with the same name.
He was still receiving no employment offers. So, in 2010, he formed the firm with a group of his college pals. They were able to obtain $300,000 in startup money shortly after that. They also raised $1.2 million in venture capital investment in 2012, and by 2014, they had raised $3.3 million for their series A fundraising.
Patrick Ambron appeared on Shark Tank in 2015, asking for $2 million in return for a 13% share in his company, Brand Yourself. Robert Herjavec proposed investing in the reputation management firm, promising to put up the minimum $2 million in exchange for a 25% interest in the company.
Herjavec’s offer was one of the most significant made on the show at the time. Ambron eventually declined the offer. Ambron was interviewed by Heavy after his appearance on Shark Tank, and he explained why the proposal was rejected. “While [Herjavec] was the right Shark, his agreement just wasn’t the right deal,” Ambron said.
Robert offered $2 million in exchange for a quarter of the firm. The issue was that they had recently obtained funds that valued the firm at twice that amount hence they couldn’t accept due to investor fairness.
Evolution
Brand Yourself began as an online self-service tool for online reputation management, with features that assisted in the creation of webpages designed to outrank those with bad content in certain searches. It runs on a freemium basis, with certain services available for free but further capabilities costing $10 per month.
It launched a service in May 2012 that seeks to track who is conducting Google searches for a company or individual utilizing the service. Later that year, it released a tool that analyzes Facebook, LinkedIn, and corporate sites and makes recommendations on how to enhance their SEO.
In 2013, the company began to compete more directly with its bigger competitors by providing professional services, after primarily focusing on students and small enterprises with limited finances. It also updated its software with a new user interface and other enhancements.
In an interview, Patrick Ambron indicated that the publicity from Shark Tank contributed to a $1 million increase in sales for the professional services portion of the firm just a few months after the episode aired.
BrandYourself’s product has 500,000 users and 30,000 paid members as of May 2017. It is used by students at Syracuse University and Johns Hopkins University. The firm began providing this service to secondary school kids and their parents in 2017 as they prepared to apply to colleges and universities.
BrandYourself released artificial intelligence software in March 2018 that searches a user’s social media profiles and recognizes any comments, photographs, or postings that might be construed negatively. According to the firm, it employs the same algorithms that potential employers do to warn users about potentially harmful content.
By April 2018, the total number of users served by BrandYourself had surpassed one million. The number of users has kept on increasing day by day with the increasing popularity of the company all over the world.
Awards and Achievements
Though the company has had good reputation from many people, it has not yet received any nominations or awards. Nevertheless, the company has had a lot of achievement through becoming an essential tool in cleaning up one’s reputation.
Net Worth of Brand Yourself in 2024
As of April 2024, Brand Yourself has an estimated net worth of $25 Million. This is from the fortunes the company is making through the subscriptions it makes through the services it offers. It has attracted many users and organization in building up their reputations which might be misrepresented in online platforms.
In conclusion, Brand Yourself Company has proven to be one of the most useful companies in peoples and organization privacy together with ensuring that one builds up their brand and gets good reputation from the public.