Episode 1 with Ross Fruin, Co-Founder of SearchLogic ADD Hero

To kick off The ADD Entrepreneur Podcast, I interview Ross Fruin, Co-Founder of Portland, OR based direct-response marketing agency, SearchLogic.

My favorite quote from this episode is:

We live in a world where our education system has not evolved much from 100 years ago.

If you’re unable to listen, the full podcast transcript can be read below:

Nick: Hey. Welcome to the ADD Entrepreneur.

This is our flagship podcast and I’m really excited to kick this off with an entrepreneur with ADD, who happens to be a good friend of mine.

So today we are joined by Ross Fruin, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Portland, Oregon-based paid media marketing firm SearchLogic.

How you doing, Ross?

Ross: Good, how are you doing? Thanks for having me.

Nick: My pleasure, man.

Ross: Glad to be the first.

Nick: Yeah, me, too.

Do me a favor.

Before we jump into my list of questions, tell me a little bit about SearchLogic.

Ross: Yeah, so SearchLogic is a direct response marketing agency, like you said, located in Portland, Oregon.

And we started about five years ago, this is our sixth year as of January. And we are primarily with mid-market brands, companies that, you know are kind of in the, I guess, $100,000 to a half million dollar a month in digital advertising spend range.

And one of our more primary focuses recently is really B2C and B2B allegiant companies that have to integrate sales cycles and sales teams into the process of just helping brands understand how to connect all those pieces of the puzzle together and how to optimize them individually based off of data they have on each part of that process.

And so we’re a small team. About 20 of us here. And, yes.

Nick: It’s not small at all.

Ross: Yeah, well, I guess it depends on what you’re comparing it to, right.

But, it’s certainly not been an easy experience but it’s definitely been fun and excited to talk about some of the hurdles, I guess you could say that I’ve had to overcome personally with my ADD and all those types of things.

Nick: No, totally.

It’s funny because it’s more and more socially acceptable, I think, not only to have it but to talk about it.

But it’s still never…at least for me it’s not become something that is, like, easy to talk about just yet, because it’s still…it’s still, you know, it’s that second D.

Like, it’s still called a disorder.

Ross: A disorder, yeah, well and I think that’s a good point, you know, I can’t imagine in 20 years…I think that compared to 20 years ago, so if you look at a gap of 40 years, I mean, the amount of people that are gonna struggle with some type of this is just gonna be outrageous because people are growing up with everything instantly, you know, at the tips of their fingers.

And I think it’s partially a…it’s obviously, I believe at least personally that it’s partially genetic, right?

Some people have it worse than others but I think as a byproduct of how we engage now with media, I think that everybody is gonna have it to some extent compared to what people have now.

Nick: I could not agree more.

With that said, let’s dive right in here.

A couple things. Some of these are gonna be more like transactional, just so, you know, me and everybody listening can get a sense of sort of what your life cycle of dealing with this has been like and then some of these are gonna be, you know, give you the chance to expound a little bit more and have some personality come out.

Ross: Absolutely.

The first one is how old were you when you started displaying signs of ADD?

Ross: Yeah, so I think, unfortunately, I really wanted to potentially sit down with one of my p...