From Saving a Life to Scaling Businesses
- May 6
- 3 min read
By Dillon Hill
I was born blind in both eyes. After multiple surgeries as a kid, I regained partial vision in one. Growing up, my family lived in a trailer while my dad worked to build his small business from nothing. I watched what it really meant to earn every dollar, to deal with uncertainty, and to keep going even when things did not work the first time.
That early environment shaped how I think about building. Nothing was handed to us. Everything had to be figured out.
In college, my best friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Doctors told him he did not have much time.
I made the decision to drop out and help him find a bone marrow donor. At that point, I had no background in marketing, no network, and no real plan. I just knew we needed people to care.
I taught myself how to tell his story online. I learned how to edit videos, write copy, and distribute content in a way that would actually reach people. That campaign ended up reaching over 200 million people. It broke three world records and, more importantly, helped us find a donor who gave him more time.
That experience changed how I see marketing. It is not about noise. It is about connection and clarity.
After that chapter, I went back and earned my MBA from UC Davis. While I was there, I entered the Big Bang Business Competition, one of the largest startup competitions on the West Coast. Founders present real ventures and are evaluated on execution, scalability, and viability. I pitched a concept rooted in systems and storytelling and ended up winning. That was a turning point. It gave me the confidence to take what I had learned and apply it to real businesses.
That is how Cosmoforge started.
At Cosmoforge, we help service based businesses grow through marketing systems that actually tie to revenue. Early on, I noticed a pattern. A lot of teams were chasing surface level metrics. Clicks, impressions, traffic spikes. It all looked good on paper, but it did not always translate into real engagement or growth.
That is where we started thinking differently.
We built and started tracking something we call engaged scroll. Instead of just looking at how many people land on a page, we measure how far they scroll and how much time they spend, adjusted for the length of the content. It gives us a clearer picture of whether someone is actually consuming what we put in front of them.
One example stands out. We published a blog that did not perform well at first glance. Traffic was modest and it would have been easy to move on. But when we looked deeper, the engaged scroll was unusually high. The people who did land on the page were reading it, staying on it, and moving through it.
That told us something important. The demand was real, it just had not been fully discovered yet.
So instead of abandoning it, we leaned in. We improved the structure, made the content easier to read, strengthened internal linking, and built authority around it through backlinks. Over the next six months, clicks more than doubled, impressions increased more than five times, and engaged scroll continued to rise.
The biggest lesson for me has been simple. Early signals can be misleading if you only look at the surface. Real growth comes from understanding behavior, not just volume.
Everything I learned from trying to save my friend’s life still applies today. Pay attention to what matters. Focus on what actually moves people. And when you see a real signal, even if it is small, do not ignore it.
Connect With Dillon
Comments