Joe Tompkinson co-founded MyMarketr in 2025, building a software platform to help small businesses, start-ups and sole traders take control of their digital marketing. It combines hands-on agency experience with automation, giving smaller businesses access to marketing tools without the cost of a traditional marketing agency.

Twelve months on, the business has grown considerably – faster than expected at times, with three new core features developed in the last year based on customer feedback.

“We actually missed our first birthday because we were so deep into building a new feature that we only realised a few days later,” said Joe. “But reaching a year feels like a real achievement. We’ve also just had our first accounts finalised and I’m delighted to say that we’re a profitable one-year-old business.

“I’ve always said we’re building a sustainable business. We’ve been able to do that while giving back to the community and supporting some fantastic causes and businesses too.”

At one point during the year, MyMarketr almost doubled in size in a month. The sudden growth meant the team had to rethink some of the processes they had relied on when the business was smaller and, at times, deliberately stop trying to attract more customers.

“In the early days our plan was basically to build what we could and do the rest manually, but there came a point where we realised that wasn’t going to work as we grew,” said Joe. “There have been times when we actually paused our outreach. Whilst it didn’t stop customers joining, it made demand a lot more predictable which was important to us at that time.

‘We’ll never prioritise growth or speed over the stability that’s important to our existing customers.”

The platform itself has changed significantly since launch, with much of its development coming directly from customer feedback and changes in the way people search for businesses online. Its latest feature, MyLocal + AI, went into early testing after just eight or nine days of development and has now been rolled out to the entire customer base.

“We’ve made very few assumptions throughout about what business owners actually need. We listen to our customers and respond to what they’re telling us,” said Joe. “There are a lot of whiteboards and Post-it notes involved and probably 90 per cent of the job is problem solving.

“We spotted quite early that the way people search was changing and knew we needed to respond quickly.”

With its first year complete, the next step for MyMarketr is to look at securing investment. The business has been approached by several potential investors, including one of its existing customers, with any investment expected to be used mainly to grow the development team.

“Investment has always been part of the plan. There is a lot more we want to do to help small business owners with their marketing and investment at this stage will help us to accelerate that. Small businesses have a habit of putting marketing further down the list when they’re busy, so we want to help our users focus on the things that will make the biggest difference.

“We promised we’d keep releasing new features and said from the start that we weren’t going to stand still. We meant it.”

MyMarketr.io helps solve some of the problems many entrepreneurs face when starting and growing a business, including a lack of time, budget and marketing knowledge. Backed by live performance data and using SEO, the platform creates content for small businesses needing to raise their visibility. Find out more at https://mymarketr.io/