Eli Basch // Founder & Creative Director, day3

I was born in Boro Park and went to Torah Temimah through high school and to Camp Agudah in the summers. I then learned by Rav Rosenblatt for beis midrash and then in the Mir in Eretz Yisrael for several years while spending second seder at other chaburahs, including a Breslov one.
“My father was a diamond manufacturer on 47th Street; he’s now semi-retired. He has been giving a Daf Yomi shiur for 30 years and is the famous voice behind those secular chag voicenotes that go viral on WhatsApp. A lot of my personality and creativity comes from him.
“My mother always took care of the kids; I am the youngest of five children. She gave us a lot of spirituality, and she instills emunah and bitachon in us.
“I live in Monsey with my wife and three boys, bli ayin hara. My eight-year-old son already has plans to take over my company one day.
“Growing up Litvish in Boro Park, my yeshivah friends were Litvish, but my friends in the neighborhood were more heimish and chasidish. I grew up around chasidim and loved it. I enjoyed going to different tishen. I used to daven for the amud in the minyan of the Nikolsberger Rebbe, Rav Yungreis, and I would get the chevrah into the davening. When I learned in Eretz Yisrael, I got very into chasidus, especially Breslov and Chabad, so my environment definitely had an influence on me in a positive way.
“My grandparents were heimish, though not in the way they dressed. On my mother’s side, Rav Shmilu Roth of Munkacs was a Galanter talmid who helped write the Ohr Pnei Yehoshua, the shalosh seudos Torah of the Galanter Rav.
“My father’s father was Reb Levi Basch, an einikel of the Megaleh Amukos, whose last name was Shapiro. Our great-great-grandfather changed his name to Basch, which stands for Bnei Avraham Shapiro (beis, alef, shin). We are also Berditchever einiklach. When I started learning chasidus, I felt at home, as though I had reconnected with my roots.
“When I was in Eretz Yisrael, I opened a herring business out of my apartment. I called it ‘D’Liver D’Herring,’ as I sold herring and liver that I would make according to my own American-style recipes; I did deliveries on Fridays. After a few weeks of this business, my roommates were not too happy with the aroma of my success. I went to Meah Shearim and found a takeout store that would manufacture the herring if I sourced the ingredients. I sold about 150-200 containers a week for around six months until I realized it was taking away from my learning and closed it down.
“As a child, I was always fascinated by the way advertisements work and the psychology behind them. I would rip my favorite ads out of the magazines and keep them.
“I got married while I was in Eretz Yisrael and learned in kollel there. I’m still not sure how I did it, but I helped the kollel raise $35,000 to $40,000. This impressed the alumnus who was running the campaign, Lazer Rubin, and he told me to give him a call whenever I wanted to start working.
“We moved back to America, and after I had my first child, I interviewed with Lazer to begin selling emergency lights for his company Viviox. However, I was more interested in another company he had, QST, which brokered ad space online. QST would approach a company that had a website with lots of traffic and ad space, purchase a bulk of that ad space and resell it. Within a few months I was focusing solely on the ad space business.
“I identified new technologies the company could use and was creating partnerships with some of the world’s largest websites and media companies, including ABC, CBS, the Boston Herald, and other popular individually owned websites. When I started, it was just Lazer and me as the lead salesperson; within four years the company grew to $40 million in revenue and 60 employees.
“At one point I helped us rebrand from QST to Next Millennium. Soon after, things really took off. That was my first powerful lesson about the power of branding.
“Then COVID hit. We were still doing very well, but we had plateaued. We were making good money, but we weren’t increasing sales by ten million dollars a year anymore. I’m the type of person who needs something fresh and new, so I decided to exit. I sold most of my shares in the company but kept a small percentage, in case it ever goes public. Lazer and I are still good friends. Working with him had a major impact on me and my professional growth, as you’ll see later.
“Like many people who come into money very quickly, I decided to invest in real estate. I did some marketing consulting on the side. I made some money, but some deals went bad, too. Around a year after I exited, I had to decide whether to continue in real estate or pursue something else.
“I went to consult with my rav, Rav Yisrael Dovid Schlesinger, who told me to follow my kochos hanefesh and do what comes naturally to me. I told him how I was fascinated with marketing from a very young age and that everything I did at Next Millennium only enforced that interest. So Rav Schlesinger urged me to open my own company in the marketing space. He and his brother, Rav Sheya Elazar Schlesinger (in whose shul I daven in Forshay), are my guiding lights.
“I started by telling my friends that I was opening a business. I got a few clients even before I made a website of my own.
“My first website was actually for my brother Menachem, UniversalElevator.com. I wrote the copy myself. The fifth one came in an interesting way. The CMO of VRG Management, a very successful company with over 1.5 billion in units under management, reached out to me on LinkedIn about building a website for him. It turned out that his boss was someone I knew from shul, but he had no clue about my new business. We did their site and it turned out nicely, but it taught me a lesson—to tell people what I do and never assume they know.
“Through my experience with QST/Next Millennium, I was always dealing with different websites and how they functioned. When we were dealing with placing ads on specific websites, I collaborated with developers to figure out how to make it work, often looking into the code of a website. For example, we created online ads that stayed on the screen regardless of where you scrolled or clicked. Some ads automatically enlarged when you hovered near them. I learned about UX and UI and what works for a site and what doesn’t.
“When I first began, I said yes to everything that came my way. You want Google Ads? I can do that. Social Media Management? Sure!
“But after doing a few websites, I finally noticed why so many websites have bugs, don’t load fast and aren’t engaging. There are so many elements and it takes so much attention to detail for a website to come out perfectly. There’s the writing and strategy, there’s the design, the coding, then the motion design, which creates all those cool animations. All those parts have to be cohesive. I thought to myself, I love writing, I’ve always had a fascination with design and understood development. If I can do this well, I’ll have a desirable product.
“That’s when I decided I had to focus on my strong point, and that was building premium websites. As that developed, I realized that there is so much more than simply building a site. You need to make sure the site fits the brand, and if the brand needs work, that has to happen before the website gets built. So we started helping clients with their branding before building them a site. Sometimes we just helped them with the branding.