Adam Young's Best Marketing Advice for New Entrepreneurs

Picture this. A guy in his early twenties, three laptops open, phone glued to his ear, trying to figure out why 40 calls came in overnight but only 12 show up in the client's spreadsheet. That was me more times than I want to admit, building Ringba. Nobody teaches you that in school. You learn it at 2 a.m., staring at a call log, wondering if the discrepancy is a tracking bug or a client about to fire you.

So when people ask me for marketing advice, I don't start with funnels or ad spend. I start with the boring stuff. The stuff that actually keeps you in business long enough to get good at the exciting stuff.

Start with attribution, not creative

New entrepreneurs want to talk hooks, headlines, creative angles. Fair enough, that matters. But if you can't prove where a sale or a call came from, none of it matters, because you'll be optimizing based on guesses.

In the pay-per-call world, this gets expensive fast. Affiliates in verticals like insurance, legal and home services can earn anywhere from $10 to over $100 per qualified call. Real money changing hands based on one data point: who gets credit for that call. If your attribution is off by even 10%, you're either underpaying partners who'll leave for a competitor, or overpaying for calls that never should've counted.

I've watched companies lose six-figure relationships over attribution disputes that had nothing to do with traffic quality and everything to do with sloppy tracking. Dynamic number insertion, real-time bidding, call analytics dashboards. These aren't nice-to-haves anymore. They're the plumbing. You don't get to skip it because you'd rather focus on paint color.

In practice, this means before you spend a dollar on customer acquisition, you need a system that tells you the truth about where results come from. Not an approximate truth. The actual truth.

Does your business know, with certainty, where your last ten customers came from?

Compliance isn't optional, it's a business model decision

If your marketing involves phone calls, texts, or automated outreach to consumers in the U.S., TCPA compliance has to be part of your business model from day one. Not a legal afterthought you handle once you scale. Violations carry statutory damages per call or text, and class actions in this space have bankrupted companies that thought they were too small to get noticed.

I've sat across from entrepreneurs who built entire campaigns around a clever angle, only to realize six months in that their consent language wouldn't hold up if challenged. That's not a marketing problem. That's a business-ending problem. It usually happens to people moving fast, and look, I get it. Speed's an advantage in this industry. But speed without a compliance foundation is just a countdown clock.

So here's my actual advice: talk to a lawyer who specializes in telemarketing and lead generation law before you launch, not after your first cease-and-desist letter. It costs a few thousand dollars up front. Compare that to a class action. Not close.

The advice nobody wants to hear about ownership

New entrepreneurs love the idea of platforms doing the heavy lifting. Run your campaigns through someone else's system, plug into someone else's network, let someone else own the infrastructure. Faster to start that way. I get the appeal.

But here's what I learned the hard way. When you don't own your data, you don't own your business. You're renting it.

I built Ringba because I got tired of watching performance marketers get squeezed by platforms that controlled the attribution layer and, by extension, the truth. When you own your call data, your analytics, your dashboards, you can walk into a negotiation with a buyer or a network and say "here's exactly what happened," instead of hoping their numbers match your gut feeling.

Same principle separates people who run platforms from people who just use them. If you're only ever a user of someone else's system, you're at the mercy of their reporting, their definition of a "qualified" call, their timeline for paying out. The moment you have your own source of truth, the whole relationship changes. You negotiate from data, not hope.

Pick a lane and go deep, not wide

I've watched a lot of new entrepreneurs try to be everything at once, running traffic in six verticals, testing five networks, building a personal brand, all in month one. Doesn't work. Home services calls behave differently than legal calls. Insurance has its own seasonality, its own compliance quirks, its own buyer expectations. You cannot become an expert in six verticals simultaneously. You barely become competent in one.

My advice, and I wish someone had shoved this in my face early on: pick one vertical, learn its economics cold, understand its call quality benchmarks, know what a "good" call looks like versus a wasted one. Only then expand. Depth builds intuition. And intuition is what lets you spot a problem in your numbers before your dashboard even flags it.

Show up where the industry actually talks

A lot of new entrepreneurs try to learn this business entirely online, blog posts, YouTube videos. That's a start, but not enough. Conferences like Affiliate Summit and Leadscon are where the real conversations happen, the stuff too specific, too tactical, or honestly too cutthroat to ever show up in a public writeup.

I've closed relationships in hallway conversations at these events that took months to develop over email. Nothing beats standing next to someone at a coffee station and asking a blunt question about their call quality problems. People are more honest in person, especially by day two, when everyone's tired of pretending.

If you're building something in performance marketing and haven't been to one of these yet, put it on the calendar. Worth more than another course, trust me.

I also wrote about a lot of this in more detail in The Pay Per Call Revolution, if you want the longer version of how this industry actually works behind the scenes.

You can also find me on Instagram, on X, and yes, even on Spotify if you're curious what I do when I'm not staring at call logs.

FAQ

What's the single biggest mistake new entrepreneurs make in pay-per-call marketing? Treating attribution as an afterthought. They focus on creative and traffic first, then wonder why payouts and reports don't match reality.

Do I need a lawyer before I start running call-based campaigns? Yes. TCPA and telemarketing law violations carry serious financial risk, and a few thousand dollars in legal review up front is far cheaper than a lawsuit later.

Should I use a call tracking platform or build my own? Start with an established platform like Ringba to get moving fast, but prioritize owning your own data and reporting rather than relying entirely on someone else's numbers.

Is it better to specialize in one vertical or spread across several? Specialize first. Learn one vertical's call quality standards and economics before expanding into others.

Are industry conferences really worth attending as a new entrepreneur? Yes. Events like Affiliate Summit and Leadscon offer conversations and relationships you won't find in blog posts or online courses.