Tyler Hanson, the founder of PPC Foundry, went on a Dittofi boot camp in July 2023. In November 2023, Tyler released a SaaS product for his clients which you can test out at https://ppcfoundry.com/.
In this interview, Tyler talks about his experience building his app with Dittofi, his experience on the boot camp, some of the things that he learnt & a demo of the application that he developed.
What is PPC Foundry and why did you decide to build an app with Dittofi?
James Virgo: Okay. So, thank you very much, Tyler, for doing this interview with us. Maybe you’d be able to kick off by telling us a little bit about PPC Foundry. How did PPC Foundry start?
Tyler Hanson: Yeah, absolutely man. And thank you again for just having me on to do this kind of showcase. You know what we’ve done and we’re very excited with everything that Dittofi has done for us.
So my name is Tyler Hanson. I own PPC foundry. We’re a marketing agency. Specifically, we work with other marketing agencies to provide white label services for Google ads, meta ads and a bunch of different stuff. Basically through that I’ve always personally wanted to build a web app, a kind of client management system, but since starting, it’s really evolved into so much more. Into a much bigger and complicated thing.
Dittofi has helped us to not only to build our app super fast, within months and with just me personally working on the app and with some help of your team, but, you know, I would never have dreamed like within, you know, a few months I would have a fully functioning web app that people can or my current customers and new customers can be signing up on doing stuff in purchasing and I’m literally like hands off.
James Virgo: How many customers do you currently have using your application?
Tyler Hanson: At the moment here, I’ll tell you right now.
So since we launched fully at the beginning of the year, in January 2024, so currently, our current clientele at that time was probably about like 40 partners is what we call them.
So other agencies we work with. Since then, within the platform, we have signed up this month alone, 93 people have signed up and the month prior 30. So yeah, it’s been growing. So total right now we’re at 153 agency partners.
James Virgo: Oh, wow. And, are they actively using the system?
Tyler Hanson: Yeah. Parts of them are, not all of them are paying customers.
Since part of our system is like a free type thing. But that’s kind of our marketing plan is getting people in and using the platform. And then we’ll be promoting our other paid services with that.
What was your previous app development experience?
James Virgo: So what was your app development experience prior to trying to build with Dittofi?
Tyler Hanson: Absolutely nothing. I mean, I have somewhat of a background in, you know, website design, but that doesn’t touch anything like this.
You know, I understand automations and different stuff being in marketing. So we use those types of things a lot with Zapier, but really coming into this project, I didn’t understand APIs. I didn’t understand backend logic. I knew of the different languages and stuff, but I really dive deep personally into understanding a lot. And the platform that Dittofi provides really helps make it super simple where I can just kind of get the surface layer of it all and then just build it visually from there.
James Virgo: What would you say was the hardest bit to learn?
Tylor Hanson: At first it was hard to understand the API stuff. Um. Just, you know, the different types of requests and like just the methodologies and, and how it’s handled traditionally, you know, for some reason that was really hard for me to grasp but I just kind of pushed my nose down into it and just kept trying and breaking stuff with the team.
Sam will know that I’ve made many requests to him, but yeah, I think the API stuff that was hard, but once I really got that, the ability to connect so many different things seamlessly and so fast, like, the web service, you know, the portion that Dittofi provides is, spectacular.
What advice do you have for others seeking success with Dittofi?
James Virgo: What would be, kind of, let’s say you were to give advice for one of our customers in the future, or someone thinking about using Dittofi? What would you say is the best way to find success with the system in building an application?
Tylor Hanson: Yeah, I would just say for me it was I I would push myself to like small goals, you know The boot camp was super helpful. Personally I didn’t want to waste the team’s time, you know having Sam spend time with me on silly things where it’s like hey “there’s already a bunch of documentation on this stuff”.
Like I should take the time to understand the basics and things I didn’t understand, I would come prepared to our meetups of like, okay, can you quickly explain these kind of things to me and then I’d go back and learn that but some of the more complicated stuff, you know, especially with the API is in different ways that you know, like the logic behind things or why I should do something this way.
You know, security concerns, different stuff like that. Those were the types of questions that I wanted, you know, more in depth that there’s not really. Documentation on because it’s an inexperienced type question. Right?
So having small minute goals of okay, like I’m going to push myself to learn what you know, I need to do on the front end to pull stuff to the back end.
Like that was a big thing for me to wrap my head around or like, okay, if someone input something on here, how do I really send it back to the backend to do something with it? And that, that took me like a few days to really grasp, but like, I kept just trying different things until I got a good rhythm and like, okay, I get it now.
I didn’t want to have to have Sam explain that simple concept with me because it’s already documented.
Would you mind giving us a demo of what you have built?
James Virgo: So would you mind showing everybody what you built and explain a little bit about the functionality within the application?
Tylor Hanson: Absolutely. Let me move this over here.
All right. You can see everything. It’s just coming up now. All right, here. I’m gonna log out here.
So we have a full you know, sign up page register. So this is the login screen. Our users can come and register over here. Links to all the different stuff. I’ll kind of walk through our registration process too, so when someone comes, we, we promote a free account, you know, no credit card required, and then let’s see,
So you can register, uh, oh, email already in use, let’s see if this one is in… lots of testing.
Let’s try, uh, let me go real far.
Okay. Yeah. I’ll use yours.
So then it’ll come here, where they can confirm, you know, if they’re going to want to use our free platform, or we are providing, you know, some paid tools that cost a monthly fee.
So, what happened, though, on that side is when I clicked on. Um, register. I sent an API request to Stripe. So this person’s already been created as a customer in Stripe.
So when I click upgrade, it’ll take them to a Stripe page to finish a payment and then here, it’ll just send us to the dashboard where we can finish setting up our agency profile. So, let’s see.
That doesn’t matter. So then it’ll spin up and kind of, um, get everything situated with all the different parts of And then all of our notifications so someone, you know, we have slack stuff connected stuff on our backend we use zoho for all of our client management. So it’s sending a bunch of different calls to everything Um generating their profile basically and then yeah, so it lands here.
James Virgo: So when someone signs up, you literally get like a notification on your phone saying james virgo just signed up.
Tyler Hanson: Yeah in our slack channel. I have this thing, it’s called the hype bot. So yeah, it says, new user just registered, the agency name, which in this case was test agency, and that person’s name. You’ll also probably get an email right now too, with like a welcome email, with all that too.
James Virgo: So, yeah, I just got that on my side here. Nice. So, very nicely designed.
Tyler Hanson: Design’s important to me. So yeah, coming in here, like again, the, the point of our web app is, you know, we, we tailored a marketing agencies that want to use our service to, you know, what we call whitelabel fulfilment. So say a marketing agency, sell someone Google ads management.
They may not know how to do it the best, or they. you know, they just don’t have the infrastructure to do that. So they would hire us basically to come in and manage it all. But we’re what we call white label. So the end client doesn’t see our name or who we are. Um, the partner, the other marketing agency manages the relationship while we do the work.
