We had the good fortune of connecting with Julian Espinosa and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Julian, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
I had been working at agencies for 9 years and always felt like the businesses focused on their profits over their client’s success. I fundamentally believed we were in the business of growing our client’s businesses while the agencies believed in delivering products. When it came time to look for the next agency I was on a bike ride and realized no one is going to believe what I believe. Why waste months looking for the next company and just start one. Thus the birth of Papi Digital. Our goal is to find fast and cost-effective ways to revenue for our customers. Through the years we’ve mainly served the eCommerce space. We’ve recently decided to make the pivot into growing our customer’s podcast. We have implemented the same tactics we learned in eCommerce and now applied our growth hacking tools to podcasting.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I’m most proud of our creative division. Paid social media at this point is very well documented and what sets apart one agency from another is it’s creative that it uses in it’s paid ads. We’ve done very well with animation. We’ve pioneered a unique way to market podcasts. We take a popular episode of your podcast and identify a thought-provoking clip. We take that clip and create a visual representation of that clip. We use that clip and run paid social ads to it and bring in cost-effective listeners.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I’d start with Santa Barbara and stay oceanside. Rotate back to LA and use the Santa Monica mountains for hiking (Sycamore Canyon & Temescal Canyon). Head down to Laguna Beach. Restaurants I would recommend are Mouthful (Thousand Oaks), Badass Tacos (Thousand Oaks), So Sushi (Tarzana), and Hamamori (Costa Mesa). If you want to try mountain biking I would go to Worldwide Cyclery (Newbury Park), book in advance!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I have a ton of mentors, it would be a long list. Greg Monterrosa from Milk Room and Rahul Alim of Custom Creatives have had some of the biggest impacts in my life. I love podcasts, I mean I work in the industry, here are my top listens, Master of Scale with Reid Hoffman, Build for Tomorrow by Jason Feifer, Social Media Marketing with Michael Stelzner, and The Tim Ferriss Show.

Website: www.papidigital.com

Instagram: thebosspapi

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-espinosa-growth-hacker/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxzr0lY3n-skr_m0NRgVoMw

Nominate Someone: ShoutoutLA is built on recommendations and shoutouts from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.