How Dry Duck went from a $500 brief to a $200k/month waterproofing company
A waterproofing company that didn't exist hit roughly $200k months in six months, on a ~$500 brief, with SEO before ads. The full launch sequence, including the month-two cliff.
Dry Duck went from not existing to roughly $200k months and five full-time staff in about six months, starting from a brief worth around $500. It did it on local SEO and a structure-first website before paid ads did any real work — including roughly $80k of revenue in a three-week stretch while the ad account was still cold.
It’s our clearest proof that the foundation is the growth lever, not the budget. It’s also the account that taught us the most uncomfortable lesson we pass on to every new brand: month two is going to hurt.
The brief was $500 and one sentence
An owner I already worked with on another business came to me with, essentially: here’s about $500, spin up a quick one-pager for a new waterproofing company. That was the entire mandate. Nobody involved thought they were commissioning a company.
Two months later we weren’t looking at a brochure site. We were looking at a ranked local brand booking estimates faster than it could staff them. The full numbers are on the case study; this is how it was actually built, in order.
Brand first: show the promise, don’t describe it
We started with the name and the mark. “Dry Duck” stuck immediately. Borrowing from Branded Not Blended and StoryBrand, the rule was show, don’t tell. Dry Duck stops water. So the mark is a duck holding a shield against a tidal wave — the entire value proposition in one image, before a homeowner reads a single word.
Brands that arrive quickly and obviously tend to beat workshopped ones. This one felt inevitable the moment it clicked, and it carried the whole site. If you’re staring at a moodboard in week three, the idea probably isn’t there yet.
What does a homepage need to do for a trade?
Google is grading experience, expertise, authority and trust. The homeowner is deciding whether you can help them in the next thirty seconds. A good homepage serves both with the same structure, in the order the questions arrive in someone’s head:
- Hero: trust and authority immediately, because most people never scroll.
- Services with real descriptions: answers “do you even do my job?”
- Service areas: answers “do you come to me?”
- A 1-2-3 process: answers “what actually happens if I call?”
- Risk framing: what happens if this gets worse — far stronger than a “why us” section listing values nobody reads.
- FAQs, then a final CTA: expertise signals that double as schema.
Keywords came from Google Keyword Planner before any of that — “basement waterproofing” was the head term, with thousands of monthly searches in market. Relevance goes in the title tags and headers. It does not go in every paragraph.
Win one city before you chase the state
Dry Duck serves a wide Iowa footprint, but the Google Business Profile lives in Des Moines. Trying to rank “all of Iowa” on day one just tells Google you’re not confidently anything. So:
- Reinforce the true home city — Des Moines — on both the site and the profile.
- Use honest “we serve” language for surrounding towns, never fake offices.
- Add service-area pages outward only once the core city is genuinely strong.
- Don’t publish hundreds of thin pages in week one. Earn trust, then spend it.
Within roughly two months, heatmap rank tracking showed strong visibility across a wide radius on the head term, with average positions in the top few results in the key zones — and an obvious next push into West Des Moines, Ankeny and Urbandale.
Review velocity beats a big review total
Dry Duck collected dozens of reviews unusually fast, mostly because the owner already knew how to ask at the right moment. That part isn’t typical. The lesson is: recent pace matters more than a dusty pile of old five-stars. Look at what the top competitors in your city earn per week, then beat that cadence. A company with 40 reviews and four this month outranks a company with 300 reviews and none since 2023.
Then month two happened
This is the part most agencies leave out of the case study.
Dry Duck launched hot, staffed and equipped into that momentum — then watched leads fall off a cliff in month two. Organic came back in month three, weaker than the launch spike but real, and climbed from there toward $200k months and a five-person team.
New profiles and domains often get an early visibility surge and then a brutal average-out. We’ve now seen it enough times to warn people in advance, because month two is precisely when a panicking owner fires the agency that was actually doing it right — or worse, staffs permanently against a temporary spike.
Don’t treat a hot first month as permanent capacity.
The reason foundation quality matters is that it’s the only thing holding you up when the honeymoon ends. Dry Duck survived month two because the site structure, categories and reviews were right — not because anyone spent more money.
Why we build with AI-assisted development
Same SEO standards, completely different speed. Spinning up a new service-area page or changing a layout across dozens of pages is genuinely painful in page-builder land: waiting on loads, fighting templates, meta tags drifting out of sync. On a code-based site with AI-assisted workflows, those changes take minutes and we can enforce the same SEO checklist every single time.
That speed is why a $500 brief could keep compounding instead of hardening into a brochure. If you want the longer argument, we wrote it up in AI websites aren’t automatically slop.
What to take from this if you're starting out
- Start with Keyword Planner reality, not agency poetry.
- Make the hero earn trust in the first screen, because that’s all most people see.
- Rank your real home city before you chase the whole state.
- Review velocity is both a ranking factor and a conversion weapon.
- Budget for month two emotionally before it arrives.
- Pick a stack where iteration is cheap, because SEO is never set-and-forget.
None of this required a big budget. It required someone doing the unglamorous things in the right order, and then not flinching in month two.
Questions owners ask us about this
Dry Duck started with roughly $500 for the initial build and grew from there as revenue arrived. Our published starting point is $500 a month for SEO and profile work, plus around $2k if a website is needed. The expensive part of most launches is a big upfront setup fee, and we do not charge one.
Dry Duck was booking estimates within weeks and ranking well across Des Moines inside about two months. That is faster than typical because the foundation was right on day one and the owner was excellent at getting reviews. Expect real, durable local visibility somewhere in the three to six month range.
New Google Business Profiles and domains often get an early visibility surge, then average out hard. Dry Duck launched strong, went quiet in month two, and recovered in month three at a lower but real level that kept climbing. It is normal, it is temporary, and it is the point where most owners wrongly fire their agency.
No. Rank your actual home city first. Publishing hundreds of thin location pages on a brand-new domain spreads your trust thin and can look manipulative to Google. Dry Duck won Des Moines, then expanded outward into West Des Moines, Ankeny and Urbandale once the core was solid.
Google does not detect or penalise how a site was built. It evaluates structure, relevance, speed and usefulness. An AI-assisted build held to a real SEO standard outperforms a slow page-builder site, because iteration is cheap and the checklist gets applied every time.
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