Three years in a row on the Inc. 5000. I am proud of the ranking, and I am more proud of what it actually measures: we kept growing fast enough, as a real Minnesota company, to stay on a list that drops people the year they slow down.
Inc.’s own profile for Dope Marketing (inc.com/profile/dope) is the source of record for the numbers I will put on this site:
- 2024 — #475 (and #38 in the U.S. for Marketing/Advertising the year we first landed)
- 2025 — #670
- 2026 — #864
- 401% three-year growth
- Location: Eagan, Minnesota. Leadership: David Carroll
A rank that moves from 475 to 864 is not a demotion in the way people read it on Twitter. The Inc. 5000 is a growth list. The companies around you get bigger too. Staying on it three years is the point. Falling off would be the story.
What the ranking is not
It is not a valuation. It is not a headcount brag. It is not a founding-year argument. Inc. lists us as founded in 2019. Other public pages say 2018 or 2017, depending on whether you count the first Minnesota experiments, the LLC paperwork, or the year the product looked like Dope. I am not going to fight Inc. on my own homepage. The work started in Minnesota, in home services, when I figured out that the houses next to a finished job were the easiest next customers.
DOPE still means Data On Previous Engagement. That is the neighborhood math: mail the people who already have a reason to trust the truck in their street.
Why this belongs on thedavidcarroll.com
The company site, dopemarketing.com, is where contractors buy mail. This domain is the entity home — who I am, the conversations I have already recorded, and the proof a stranger (or Google) can check. The Inc. profile names me as leadership. Wikidata already has a Person item for me at Q138027410, and Google already has a Knowledge Graph id. The missing piece was this site still talking like it was 2025.
If you want the product walkthrough, the video at the top is me on our channel. If you want the shop floor, Jack Wendt walked it with me: the office tour. If you want the neighborhood version of the same idea, that is neighborhood reactivation.
I am a husband, a dad of five, and I still run. The list is a receipt. The work is the mail.
Originally published .