Rob Hoffman set out to be a writer, became a million-dollar closer instead, and built an agency that needs him to be both

The career-change story usually gets told backwards, with the ending smoothed over the beginning. Rob Hoffman's actually happened in the ugly order. He was a journalist in Toronto, then an employee at a startup he has described as slowly draining his soul, and in 2019 he did the thing people mostly only talk about: left, moved to Medellin because his savings would stretch further there, and took a $50-a-month apartment in a rough neighbourhood with no hot water.

The plan was to write. What happened was sales.

The accidental closer

He landed a remote writing gig with a Toronto media company he had worked for before, then talked the CEO into letting him go after revenue as well. He built a 30-page deck mapping the whole plan, and on day two he sold a $13,000 ad spot. First year: $500,000 in advertising revenue. Second year: a million. He ended up as COO of the place he had joined to write for.

This is the duality, and it is a more useful one than it looks. The writer half never went anywhere, it is what made him good at the sales half, because the pitch is a piece of writing and most people selling have never thought about it that way. Contact Studios, the agency he co-founded and now runs as CEO, sits exactly on that seam: it sells organic search and content to fast-growing tech companies like Kajabi and Beehiiv, which is to say it sells writing, as a growth channel, to people who buy growth channels. Roughly 25 people, profitable, still growing.

The same instinct runs through the side projects. Kleo and Mentions are both tools for people trying to be visible and legible online, which is the problem he solved for himself first, in public, on LinkedIn, where he has become one of the most-read voices on SEO and content strategy.

The controversial part, stated plainly

You cannot write about Contact Studios without the SEO Heist, so here it is straight. His co-founder Jake Ward exported a competitor's sitemap, used AI to generate roughly 1,800 pages from it, and publicly claimed 3.6 million visits captured over eighteen months. The target site's owner found factual errors in the copies. Sundar Pichai ended up discussing it in an interview. A large part of the industry was appalled, and the copied site's traffic later fell in a way that looked a lot like a Google penalty.

That was Ward's stunt, not Hoffman's, and the distinction matters. But it is why the press calls this the most controversial agency in the business, and pretending otherwise would be a worse profile. Take it as part of the picture: this is a shop operating at the aggressive edge of a discipline where the rules are being rewritten faster than anyone can agree on them.

The part worth taking away is the first act, not the third. A man in a cold-water apartment in Medellin wrote a 30-page deck for a job nobody had asked him to do, and it compounded from there. Go read the Hampton interview for the long version. The receipts are unusually specific for this genre.

Suffocating, stuck in a startup job that was slowly draining my soul.

Rob, on the life he left behind before Colombia