The failed exam that started everything
Jacky Chou was an electrical engineering student, Taiwanese by roots and based in Canada, when the future found him at the worst possible moment. "It was the night before failing an engineering final exam, I knew it wasn't for me, and I googled 'how to make money online' and found SEO." He taught himself the craft "through trial and error and a lot of Googling," then did something most students never do: he took a year off school, moved to Berlin for a marketing internship paying €450 a month, and started Indexsy in 2014 alongside co-founders Evan McMullin and Albert Liu.
The early work was unglamorous — local SEO, citation building, creative uses of private blog networks for small businesses. For years Indexsy was a side hustle: Chou earned $3–5k a month from it while working as a Director of Growth in Berlin. But he was watching the industry closely and spotted something the incumbents missed: agencies sold rankings and traffic, but clients wanted revenue. Indexsy's positioning as an ROI-focused SEO agency — "we practice what we preach" — became the wedge that let a three-person shop charge retainers starting at $2,000–5,000 a month.
The lesson is one Chou has repeated ever since: he learned the business by doing it for himself first. His earliest SEO experiments were on his own sites, so every pitch came with receipts. Clients weren't buying theory; they were buying what he'd already done.
Side hustle to $55k months — then a Facebook ban
Chou went full-time on his own businesses in 2018, and the timing was perfect for one thing: dropshipping. A home-decor dropshipping store did roughly $250k a month in revenue while Indexsy retainers pushed his combined income to around $55k a month. Then Facebook banned his ad accounts — the classic single-channel catastrophe — and he sold the store for about $150,000.
Most founders would have called it a setback. Chou called it an education. The store sale funded the next phase: in 2020 he co-founded Far & Away, an artisan homeware DTC brand launched on Kickstarter with Albert Liu. Suppliers flaked, the model wobbled, and it pivoted to a hybrid of DTC and content sites. But by then Chou had discovered his real engine: a portfolio of 35 to 50+ content and niche sites run like a private equity fund. "We run on a private equity model," he told an interviewer, "the winners are supposed to 'cover' for the losers." Winners in SEO paid for losers in dropshipping, and the losers taught lessons the winners couldn't.
The portfolio peaked around 2021–2022 at roughly $258–293k a month across all streams. Then Google did what Google does. "If you were to look back three years ago, the sites that are still remaining today would be like 5% max. They're all dead," he said on a podcast. So in 2022 he did what seemed unthinkable: derisked, exited equities, and stopped taking agency clients entirely.
The daily-YouTube comeback
The client pause lasted about a year. In 2023 Chou realized something counterintuitive: after years of building in public — his net-worth-split newsletter marketingletter.com, X threads breaking down every year since 2014 — he still needed the agency as a foundation. So he came back, and this time the growth engine was daily YouTube uploads. Every day, a new video about SEO, acquisitions, or the portfolio. For an industry where most agencies hide behind case-study PDFs, a founder publishing daily in public became the ultimate trust signal.
It worked because the business behind the content was real. Indexsy's link-building operation was doing around 3,000 white-hat backlinks a month with a 20+ person PR team. The agency had named enterprise clients including Shopify, Oberlo, and The Motley Fool. Chou could talk about "parasite SEO" — publishing on high-authority domains via revenue-share partnerships — because he'd built the playbook, not read it. By 2024, the partnerships model, which he calls "0F," took off alongside Advise.so, his marketing newsletter product hitting critical mass.
The public-numbers discipline matters here. Chou's 2014-to-2025 revenue thread — every year, every stream, good and bad — is the reason strangers trust him with retainers and acquisitions. "Diversification saved me," he wrote. "Algorithms, ad bans, crypto cycles, everything changes."
From agency to acquirer
The most interesting plot twist: Jacky Chou never sold Indexsy. When people hear "agency founder," they assume the exit is the point. Chou went the other direction. Indexsy is now a holding company — its own about page says "We don't advise from the sidelines. We buy, operate, and grow businesses ourselves." His X bio reads "@indexsy (buying online businesses up to $1m)." He flips the script: he's the buyer, not the seller. The only exits on his record are other assets — the dropshipping store, several six-figure sites, a lead-gen towing directory bought for $10k and flipped for $195k.
And in 2025 he made his biggest pivot yet: all-in on SaaS. LocalRank.so (local SEO software with 500+ paying agencies), Trackings.ai, Version.so, Revive.so — built from a decade of running Indexsy's own retainers, including AuditStack, which productized the agency's internal audit process. SaaS now drives 60%+ of revenue. It's the classic services-to-software arc, except the services business never died — it became the R&D lab and the distribution channel.
Eleven years after a failed exam, the arc is clear: learn a skill on yourself, sell it as a service, productize the service into software, and use the cash flow to buy other people's businesses. The $41k MRR agency is just the visible tip of a portfolio that once peaked near $300k a month.
The playbook
- Learn on your own assets first — Chou's first SEO wins were on his own sites. Every client pitch came with receipts, not theory.
- Sell outcomes, not deliverables — While agencies sold rankings, Indexsy sold ROI. That positioning let a small team charge enterprise retainers.
- Run a portfolio, not a single bet — The private-equity model: SEO winners cover dropshipping losers. "Diversification saved me. Algorithms, ad bans, crypto cycles, everything changes."
- Build in public as a growth channel — Net-worth threads, daily YouTube, revenue timelines. Transparency became the agency's best salesperson.
- Turn services into software — A decade of agency retainers became LocalRank.so and AuditStack. The service business is the R&D lab for the SaaS.