How Moxie created 2 scalable growth channels with Divisional

“I’ve worked with both a Head of Content (Grace) and Head of Growth (Dante) from Divisional’s team, and have been thrilled with their professionalism. I get the intentionality of a full-time hire without needing to commit to the cost”.

_{- Dan Friedman, Co-Founder}

Moxie is a comprehensive platform to launch, grow, and manage a medical spa. They help customers to secure the appropriate licensing and roles (i.e. hiring a Medical Director), launch a physical location, and grow their med spa through sales & marketing channels. Since launching in 2022, they have helped start more than 100 med spas in 8 states, and closed $15.7M in funding.

Problem / Challenge

Dan Friedman was no stranger to building a successful company. His last startup, Thinkful, was acquired by Chegg in 2019 for $80M. But as a serial entrepreneur, he was hungry for his next opportunity and discovered a major opportunity with the med spa industry.

As his 2nd venture, Dan was better prepared for growth and knew exactly what he needed to do to scale efficiently and avoid the pitfalls he saw in the past. Here were his core challenges:

1. Find a versatile freelancer for SEO & Paid Media

Dan had lots of experience with both overseeing marketing channels and the various employees and agencies who powered them. At the earliest stage, however, he knew that he needed an individual who would take ownership of the respective channels and challenge his own ideas about how to run campaigns.

“I needed to move quickly with hiring but also trust that I had the right people owning these channels. The marketers needed to be strategic but also hands-on and proactive with their execution”.

_{- Dan Friedman, Co-Founder}

While Dan looked at agencies, he saw from experience that they were not agile enough at the early stage, and often cost a lot of money. He knew he would get more attention and seniority from individual marketers who had scaled these channels in the past.

2. Eliminate vanity metrics and focus on revenue

While Dan had seen a lot of success from SEO with his last startup, he knew that the guise of “it takes 6-12 months to show results” can also hide underperformance and focusing on the wrong areas. He wanted a partner who would set expectations around lead generation and down funnel performance, while knowing that it wouldn’t be an immediate impact.

Similarly, Dan was running Google Ads (Search Engine Marketing, SEM) himself and seeing good results but knew it could be optimized. As the primary lead engine for Moxie at the time, Dan knew that whoever owned this channel would need to be laser focused on the company’s KPIs and take ownership of the budget they were spending.

3. Show predictable growth across multiple channels

At the time, Dan had recently hired a sales rep but was looking to scale out that organization. In order to do so, and prep for their next fundraising round, Dan needed to show that Moxie had numerous lead engines that were predictably driving their growth.

This was a core concern as he looked for the right marketers. They would need to execute immediately (hands-on) but also have the know-how to iterate over time and scale their respective channels to 2x, 5x, and eventually 10x their current state.

Solution

By partnering with Divisional, this was a story of not just finding a great initial fit, but expanding the scope to involve multiple channels and multiple marketers.

In looking for his Head of Content (SEO), Divisional decided the following profile would be ideal for Moxie’s needs:

• Has built a content/SEO engine at 2+ companies, including keyword strategy, content calendar, managing writers, and tracking performance
• Experience building off of SEO (i.e. SEM, content distribution, etc.), and how it plays together with an SEO strategy
• Bonus if experience targeting new entrepreneurs (i.e. ‘start from scratch’) and if they have past exposure to the medical spa space

Divisional decided that Grace McClure was the perfect fit for the opportunity. She had spent the last 8 years in the Health Tech space, and built multiple companies (PeerWell, Flightfox) using SEO. As a marketer at early stage companies, she was very comfortable getting her hands dirty and working directly with the founders, but also had seen how content engines work (and scale) at companies with 150+ employees and tens of thousands of visits per month.

When evaluating the fit for SEM, Divisional needed to prioritize a different type of profile:

• Track record of growing an SEM account, including scaling spend without affecting CPL and launching new experiments themselves
• Experience launching adjacent channels such as Meta Ads and Paid Social as a whole, to complement what was working with SEM
• Comfortable with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) to improve both the ads themselves and the on-site experience for better performance

With this scope, Divisional evaluated multiple marketers to land on Dante Kichi as the best fit. As a senior individual contributor, Dante had led marketing at numerous startups including PostBeyond and StatFlo, which leaned heavily on paid media. He had healthcare experience via his work at MedStack, and and numerous reps at taking SEM budgets from scratch to $30k/mo, including taking the work in-house from an agency who was underperforming.

In both cases, Divisional was able to make the match and introduction within 1-2 weeks of Moxie’s request. Given the flexible model of individuals, both Grace and Dante were able to start work within a few days of getting Dan’s approval.

As with a lot of Divisional engagements, Dante saw this as an opportunity to repeat what he was already good at, just in a different environment:

“I had worked with early stage startups & SEM on numerous occasions and knew exactly what I needed to get to work. As a repeat founder, I was also excited at the prospect of working with Dan, as he already knew what to expect."

_{- Dante Kichi, Fractional SEM Marketer}

Implementation

Despite being two different channels, both Grace and Dante got to work in a similar fashion. They focused on understanding Moxie as a business and getting to know the team’s working style. The latter was especially important; Dan is very data-driven and expected his marketers to come prepared for any question or idea that might arise.

For Dante, this meant taking stock of the SEM account and analyzing each of the campaigns to see how they were driving down-funnel performance. He looked beyond Cost Per Lead and into Cost per Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), and how this information was tracked in their CRM (HubSpot).

Over the several months that Dante has worked with Moxie, he brought the following methodology to SEM:

• Conduct detailed keyword research on competitors and Moxie to identify any gaps
• Bring a systemized approach for growth experimentation, including A/B testing for landing pages, ad copy, etc.
• Create reports in HubSpot that would look at down-funnel performance, shifting from Cost Per Lead to Cost Per SQL

For Grace, this meant reviewing the existing SEO results, tracking setup, and setting expectations on their output cadence (articles per month) and the ancillary work that would need to be completed (i.e. backlink outreach). Like Dante, she wanted to focus on down funnel results, which involved moving away from impressions as a metric and focusing on MQLs and Closed Won deals that could be attributed to SEO.

Over the 6+ months that she has been working with Moxie, Grace brought the following approach to Content & SEO:

• Start an in-depth analysis to see how SEO leads were converting down-funnel
• Work with Dante (SEM) to tie search trends and results into their organic content plan
• Implement a content brief system that would be used to hold freelancer writers accountable to the goals of the article, reducing the number of iterations / edits needed
• Create an SEO report that would look at the actual impact of content, i.e. remove ‘Moxie’ from the query to avoid convoluting ‘organic success’ with ‘brand success’
• Move from pure SEO into case studies and other areas (i.e. AI article generation) that would enable Moxie to scale

When looking at the impact that she was able to drive, Grace took a lot of pride in being very adaptable to Moxie’s needs and going from ‘the SEO person’ to a true member of the team:

“Dan comes to me with growth ideas that leverage content and trusts my expertise to take it and run. Through collaboration, we’ve been able to make a much bigger impact and run innovative experiments. I’ve never seen a startup put this much trust in an external resource”

_{-Grace McClure, Head of Content}

Results

A major benefit of being data-driven is that it’s easy to show the impact that you’re making! Both Grace and Dante had a significant impact on Moxie’s growth trajectory, both from a quantitative perspective, but also from the way that Moxie has developed internally as a team.

Grace helped Moxie create a mature SEO engine and move into new areas, including:

• 40% Month-Over-Month (MoM) growth to organic impressions
• 24% growth in MoM organic clicks
• 10.3% better lead-to-close rate for Moxie leads
• Using ChatGPT and Byword to produce content drafts that are 70% completed

Dante had a similar impact with Moxie, including:

• Grow spend from $2k/mo to $25k/mo while keeping Cost Per Qualified Lead consistent
• Help Moxie expand their customer footprint from 3-4 states to now 8 states
• Immediately cut waste by highlighting the 2 campaigns (of 4) that weren’t contributing to SQLs and doubling down on the ones that were moving the needle

Most notably for both Grace & Dante, their work with Moxie enabled them to raise their $15.7M funding round in mid 2023 and hire an in-house Head of Marketing. This is common trend for Divisional customers; lean on fractional support to go from early stage to predictable growth, then gradually take the work in-house as you have more funds & internal capacity.

Dan continues to rely on Divisional for new channels and is a champion of fractional marketers:

I love that I can spar with both Grace and Dante about their respective channels and that they always come prepared. Divisional’s model is a game changer to how I think about building & scaling companies”.

_{- Dan Friedman, President}

Conclusion

Since starting with Divisional in late 2022, Moxie has expanded to leveraging (3) marketers from the network to power numerous channels. Both Grace and Dante have thrived in Moxie’s team, and they could not be prouder of the impact they’ve made.

In 1 year of working with Moxie, Dante and Grace were able to:

• Drive a 3.5x increase in organic impressions and 24% increase in qualified clicks
• Improve the lead-to-close conversion rate for organic leads by 10.3%
• Scale the SEM budget from $2k/mo to $25k/mo while keeping CPL the same
• Help Moxie expand from 3-4 states into 8 states
• Enable Moxie to close $15.7M in funding