Although the industry of content-based digital assets is not new, the growth and popularity of niche-based content publications skyrocketed during the Covid-19 pandemic. 
Bringing a Bangladeshi perspective into this digital asset market, the team of Rank Wizards LLC, a Bangladeshi start-up, talked to UNB about its journey and the enormous possibility in this investable global market.

Throughout its journey over the period, the company grew into a dynamic startup focusing on a number of clients all over the world, specializing in the development and management of affiliate niche blogs.

Now, the 5-years old bootstrapped startup is slowly making its way into the multi-billion dollar niche-blogging industry, aiming to turn into a media giant along with creating secure investment scopes for micro-investors.

Saleh Ahmed, while studying at Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology (CUET), founded Rank Wizards back in 2016 as a service-based startup agency with a bunch of engineers at its helm, primarily focusing on SEO, content, and growth consultancy services for bloggers and businesses.

“The plan was to keep ourselves floated by serving clients until we curate a bullet-proof strategy to develop our own assets”, Saleh Ahmed told UNB while describing the mission and vision of Rank Wizards LLC.

Just like other self-financed startups, Rank Wizards had gone through quite a rough patch. Against all odds, they have managed to serve over 400 clients with 92% recurrence within the first 4 years of operations.

They also developed their own portfolio of niche websites, and now own 27 websites which are projected to be worth $300,000 by Q3, 2022.

“We have a number of strategic advantages that yield better ROI and faster organic growth than  competitors”, says Sadman Rahi, Brand Development Executive of Rank Wizards LLC.  

As the Covid-19 pandemic forced the world to reimagine the world of digital media while increasing the focus on online businesses and digital assets, Rank Wizard LLC reached new highs in growth.

“In 5 years, we went from being a team of 2 to a whopping 62! Surprisingly enough, the peak of this growth was across the recent pandemic,” Saleh told UNB.

According to him, remote work being popular in 2020 has helped them to scale up the team without bothering the team spirit. They’re still sticking to this hybrid working mode of both remote and in-house employee operations.

The concept is to develop blogs with value-packed, informative content and use SEO as the primary growth channel, which is 100% organic. The revenue is generated from display ads, affiliate programs, etc while the cost lies in creating good content, optimizing them and maintaining the website.

“The fun part is, 95% of our readers are from the USA, UK, Australia, and Canada. And most of us weren’t even brought up in those countries!”, Sadman Rahi said while checking their analytics data.

Internationally, there are media giants like Dot Dash, Hearst Publications, etc who are funneling down their mass exposure to conscious purchases. And there are holding companies like Onfolio, Domain Magnate, etc who’ve turned this model into investment opportunities for non-institutional investors. However, no such approach has been seen from Bangladesh, as of yet.

“There are hundreds if not thousands from the country who build content-based digital assets and make a good fortune out of them. But it’s beyond ‘just another passive income scheme’ for Rank Wizards”, says Abu Yousuf Shihab, Creative Director of Rank Wizards LLC.

In the next couple of years, the startup plans to harvest its first network of assets, and then re-invest into scaling up its asset territory even further.

The next plan is to acquire and nurture other forms of digital assets as SaaS, Soft Products, Courses, Web Tools, etc.

In 5-7 years, they see themselves as a hub of three entities - the consumers of their contents, the business that will be promoted across the platforms, and the investors who would receive equities and dividends from their investments after these assets.

“Technically, there is no limit to how large the industry is, which is definitely a good thing for us,” Saleh told UNB.