OppAlerts isn’t just another marketing tool.
It’s born from extensive marketing experience and advanced engineering
uncommon in a single person.
My Journey From HTML to OppAlerts
I’m Ben Wills, the creator of OppAlerts.
Back in 1994, while still in middle school, I taught myself HTML by printing out source code and rendered webpages side by side, comparing them to understand how they worked. I quickly filled up a 3″, 3-ring binder. I then created my own HTML guide around the same time the first HTML books were published.
This early fascination with how web pages were created laid the foundation for what would later become a unique career spanning both marketing and engineering. I always wanted to work in online business, and that opportunity finally came in 2001 when I entered the digital marketing world through SEO.
Building a Marketing Career
My marketing career took off quickly. I joined what would become (and likely still is) the world’s largest SEO company, helping grow it to over 1,400 clients. As Director of Search Marketing, I managed approximately half the company – between 70-80 people including writers, editors, and analysts who executed SEO strategies for our clients.
I became the company’s go-to SEO expert, conducting frequent training sessions for the entire company. When clients or prospects needed specialized expertise, I often stepped in. During this time, I also helped lead what was likely one of the first international SEO campaigns for Motorola, and managed a major long-term campaign for Lowe’s Home Improvement, leading weekly strategy meetings every Friday morning at 8:30.
After this experience, I helped launch another SEO agency where we grew from zero to $140,000 in monthly revenue. As VP of Operations, I managed a team of about 15 people – account managers, writers, editors, and analysts. I designed our service offerings and execution strategies, continuing to deepen my understanding of what marketers truly need to succeed online.
From there, I transitioned to consulting and contracting, working directly with clients to solve their marketing challenges. This hands-on experience gave me invaluable insights into the day-to-day struggles marketers face when trying to find and capitalize on opportunities.
The First Attempt: ontolo
In 2008, I was rock climbing a lot. I also founded a company called ontolo with a small team including Garrett French and a few others. ontolo was, in many ways, a precursor to what OppAlerts is today – an attempt to solve the problems I’d seen marketers struggle with throughout my career.
We worked hard on ontolo for a couple of years, but I eventually realized something important: to build the tool I truly envisioned, I needed to significantly level up my engineering skills. The marketing expertise was there, but the technical capability to execute my vision wasn’t quite where it needed to be.
This realization led to a period of transition as I spent a few years trying to figure out whether to continue with ontolo or pursue a different path. Ultimately, I made a decision that would shift my career entirely before leading to OppAlerts: I decided to become an engineer.
The Decade of Engineering
What followed was a decade fully dedicated to engineering. I immersed myself in learning everything from low-level C and C++ to web front-end development, database design, system architecture, search engine design and scaling, and very high performance web parsing. This wasn’t just academic learning – I took on paid professional roles that pushed my skills to their limits.
I worked as an embedded engineer programming microcontrollers like the ESP32, designing network protocols for communication between devices, and writing the test code to verify everything worked correctly. This experience taught me how to build reliable systems from the ground up.
At the other end of the spectrum, I developed large-scale web scraping applications, writing my own downloaders and parsers in C and C++ that could process an 400 million web pages per day on older commodity hardware. These systems had to be incredibly efficient and robust – skills that would later prove essential for building OppAlerts.
This decade of engineering wasn’t a detour – it was necessary to acquire the technical skills required to build what I had envisioned years earlier. The problem OppAlerts solves is one I’ve wanted to address since 2003, and I still have my original spreadsheet notes from over 20 years ago mapping out the foundations of this solution.
Where Marketing Meets Engineering
What makes OppAlerts different from other marketing tools is that it comes from someone who deeply understands both sides of the marketing and engineering equation. It’s uncommon to find someone with half their career in marketing and half in engineering – these are typically two completely different disciplines with different mindsets, approaches, priorities, and career trajectories.
This unique combination has allowed me to engineer OppAlerts in a way that truly addresses marketers’ needs. I understand the marketing challenges you face because I’ve been there – managing teams, running campaigns, and trying to find opportunities manually. I also understand how to build the technical solutions needed to solve those challenges.
I’ve experienced firsthand the tedious, time-consuming nature of monitoring, researching, and qualifying opportunities. I’ve felt the frustration of spending hours on tasks that should be automated. OppAlerts is the tool I’ve always wanted – and now it’s here to save you the time and headache I used to deal with daily.
The OppAlerts Competitive Advantage
OppAlerts isn’t just another marketing tool built by engineers who don’t understand marketing, or marketers who don’t understand engineering. It’s a solution crafted by someone who’s walked in both worlds and understands exactly what’s needed to bridge the gap between them.
The result is a tool that’s remarkably effective at gathering and analyzing information from across the web. Standard OppAlerts services can download tens of thousands of prospects daily for many industries, sorting and analyzing them automatically so they’re ready when you need them.
And it’s incredibly fast to get started – you can go from zero to seeing your first results in as little as 15 seconds by simply adding a few keywords. Of course, for the full power of OppAlerts, you’ll want to set up all your feeds, alerts, search queries, and opportunity searches – but even that process has been designed to be as streamlined as possible.
This balance of power and simplicity is only possible because of the unique path I’ve taken – from that middle school kid comparing HTML printouts to the marketing director managing dozens of people to the engineer building systems that process hundreds of millions of pages. Every step of that journey has informed how OppAlerts works today.
I built OppAlerts to solve problems I’ve experienced myself, and I’m confident it will transform how you discover and act on opportunities across the web.
