Not so long ago (2012), in a land not so far away (London, UK), there was a chap named Vincent Dignan who was living on welfare and working menial jobs. He was three months behind in his rent, and had only $20 in his pocket…

Then one day he decided to start a company—Magnific.com—and set up Planet Ivy, an online magazine for young people with his same interests. He called every single university in his country and offered a content platform through which they would get more traffic than their blog. Soon thereafter he was getting 300,000 visitors per month to his site.

He was invited to talk at the Google campus in London and received $250,000 from investors, which enabled him to call the welfare office and tell them that he would no longer need assistance.  Shortly, his website hit the one-million-visitors mark.  He later decided to start screenrobot.com, a site with written content for film and gaming. Within 100 days of launching, he began to hit one million visitors per month and, to date, Planet Ivy and Screen Robot have had more than 20 million page views.

Vincent applied to Techstars London, against 1500+ other companies, and Magnific.com was selected to be part of this prestigious 3-month-accelerator and  “global ecosystem that helps entrepreneurs build great businesses.” Through this program, he realized he could be more profitable following an agency model. Today, he has 500+ content writers and does growth hacking for numerous clients, racking up millions and millions of page views (over 150 million and counting).

Vincent continued to speak at events, developing a strategy to contact every Meetup in his geographic area and in his area of expertise. He became inundated with requests for consulting and coaching, eventually presenting at SXSW V2V in Las Vegas, where his presentation was voted as the “best talk”. 

He became so famous in his space, that Prince Andrew, Duke of York, asked for his help with social media for the Pitch@Palace event held at St. James Palace. Since then, Vincent has done several tours in the US to spread his knowledge about social media growth hacking,  and he just launched a Kickstarter campaign for the “Secret Sauce: The Ultimate Growth Hacking & Marketing Guide,” a step-by-step tutorial guide teaching methods for getting users, traffic, and revenue to a website, startup, or brand, FAST. He has also demonstrated the Midas touch in this effort: in less than two weeks his funding goal has tripled!

Vincent is a ball of fire, an inspiration, and I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. The best part? He is touring the U.S. right now, and he will be sharing his knowledge and expertise on how to "get rich and internet famous" at the Science, Industry and Business Library on Thursday, June 9 as part of our Social Media Afternoon @ the Library.

Reserve your spot here! You will learn specific strategies to grow your email and your social media base. And he will share some online resources that you can tap into immediately to get the best results from your digital campaign. Don’t miss this event!

Get in touch with Vincent via Twitter.

Read more about Vincent:

• Vincent was guest editor for the February 2016 issue of Disrupts magazine, “the magazine for the startup scene” in the United Kingdom. Thank you to our friends at Disrupts for allowing us to share Vincent’s articles with our audience: What is Growth Hacking?, The Five Rules of Growth Hacking, and How to Get Followers on Instagram.
   
• Inc.com: Bill Carmody’s excellent interview of Vincent from September 2015.