Candybox Marketing

01The full story

Darryl Keyser has run Candybox Marketing for fourteen years, but only the last six have been fast growth. Asked what he would do differently, he does not name a strategy — he names a habit. He would hire faster. His reasoning is unusually honest. He only ever hired when it was absolutely necessary, and every hire came directly out of his own pocket, which he describes as giving yourself a major demotion. But when you are personally overloaded at eighty hours a week, your conscious mind says you want more sales and your subconscious quietly refuses to go get them. Hiring ahead of need creates the urgency that makes the next deal happen. Every time he has done it, he has thought he should have done it years earlier. The second structural decision was to have no partners. He meets three or four business owners a day and says most conversations start the same way: I began this as a partnership, then this happened, then I bought them out — a sequence that can stall a company for twelve months. His alternative is the most quotable idea in the interview: instead of looking for startup partners or startup capital, go find startup customers. Customers who are willing to pay you at the beginning do two things at once — they fund the hiring, and they validate the model. "Unless one person says I'm willing to pay for that, you don't have a business, you have an idea." He also works thirty-five hours a week and is a full-time father the rest of the time, and turned down a real-estate career early on specifically because it meant evenings and weekends. He frames that as a filter, not a sacrifice: if you succeed at the dream you are chasing, will you like your life?