Arbor Mesh Internet
Direct mail, referrals
Photos, drone video, grant reports
Tower sites and landlords
Project manager, 2022 to 2025
Referral conversion went from 10% to 25%
$300,000 in state grants, the first closed out clean in 2025
I moved there in 2022 to do marketing for a company that had never done any. I knew nothing about internet. I liked that it was infrastructure. It could have been an electrical company for all I cared.
Half a network, a grant, and a guy knocking on doors.
The founder, Leo, is an aerospace engineer who taught himself wireless networking during COVID, paid for the first towers with his Bitcoin, and won a state grant to connect 195 addresses in the Lower Blue Valley. When I arrived, half of it was built and his plan for finding customers was driving house to house, three or four hours a day, between the installs and the grant paperwork.
The houses were mostly empty. The owners were retired, there for ski season, and burned by every provider before us. The grant paid for towers, not marketing. There had never been any marketing.
I started with the basics, for free.
There was no marketing budget, so at first I just did it. I rewrote the website, which read like a utility bill. I picked fonts and colors, made a deck, took photos, designed mailers. Later I took the project-manager job, so I had a say in how the grant money got spent.
I also waited. The network went down about once a week that first winter, and the companies we were competing with already had one-star reviews for exactly that. I didn't want to sell something I didn't believe in, so the rule was 60 days without an outage before anything went out. It took a few months of fixes to get there.
Letters in the mail.
I tried Google Ads, Yelp, Nextdoor and local search. They helped a little. Mail worked much better. The people I was trying to reach were in their 50s and 60s and had been reading letters their whole lives, so I wrote them long ones, five in a row, a couple of weeks apart, printed on heavy paper in good envelopes.
The letters said what mattered to them: we'd mount a dish without damaging the house, the connection could handle a full house of guests, and we lived in town. In the first neighborhood I tried, a third of the houses signed up. Every one of them mentioned the letters.
A letter also got us a tower site. Commercial tower rent was $800 to $900 a month plus a big install fee, and there were nine rooftops in town that could work instead. I sent each owner a handwritten letter from Leo with a photo of their building and a drawing of where the dish would go. We got a roof for $500 a month.
Referrals.
If a customer referred a neighbor, they both got a month free. The new customer had to say who sent them, so I could see where people came from. Referral conversion went from 10% to 25%, and referrals became the main way we got customers. It cost us two free months per customer and nothing else.
I also took a lot of photos and drone video of the towers and installs, mostly for the quarterly reports to the state. The board liked them. The next grant budget included money for customer outreach, which the first one hadn't.
Two grants, a stable network, and a handoff.
Arbor Mesh has won two grants from Colorado's Broadband Deployment Board. The first, Lower Blue Valley, was closed out in full compliance in October 2025. I wrote the quarterly reports for it. The second, Williams Fork, is being built now.
Leo took a job at Google. I moved to California and still do the marketing remotely while I hand it to someone local. The network has been stable, and the company is adding phone service because customers asked for it.
What I'd do differently.
Our first grant application promised dates we had no way of hitting. We were new, and we learned. The second time we promised what we could do and told the board early when something slipped.
