Jonathan Snow, with the Snow Agency, takes us on his entrepreneurial journey. Drawing on his own experiences he built an affiliate marketing platform and launched a Shopify holding company, which later transformed into a cutting-edge performance marketing agency. This is a rare chance to glean practical insights from his experiences and learn how to strike the perfect balance between work and life.
What does a modern-day agency look like? Jon discusses how public relations and paid media can synergize to create compelling narratives and the importance of scaling out these narratives to ensure they reach the right audience at the right time.
We also discuss the exciting realm of AI, as we explore how it is revolutionizing the alcohol industry. We discuss the pioneering work of the team at Electriq and DRINKS and how they are elevating their online sales process.
Jonathan Snow, with the Snow Agency, takes us on his entrepreneurial journey. Drawing on his own experiences he built an affiliate marketing platform and launched a Shopify holding company, which later transformed into a cutting-edge performance marketing agency. This is a rare chance to glean practical insights from his experiences and learn how to strike the perfect balance between work and life.
What does a modern-day agency look like? Jon discusses how public relations and paid media can synergize to create compelling narratives and the importance of scaling out these narratives to ensure they reach the right audience at the right time.
We also discuss the exciting realm of AI, as we explore how it is revolutionizing the alcohol industry. We discuss the pioneering work of the team at Electriq and DRINKS and how they are elevating their online sales process.
I'm Brandon Amoroso and this is the D2Z podcast Building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of Retention as a Service Agency, electric, and today I'm joined by John Snow, founder of the Snow Agency and just a couple blocks away from us down here in Miami. Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 2:Of course, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Brandon. So before we dive into some of the topics we want to cover today, can you give everybody just a quick background on yourself and how you've gotten to this point?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, I have a pretty extensive background, but I'll try to keep it short and sweet. So I've been in the Ecom space for over 10 years now. It got started on the influencer and affiliate side, built an affiliate marketing platform with my brother, dan, who's been my partner for the past 10 plus years. We essentially got all the largest pages on organic social media, which was mostly influencers, celebrities, athletes or other publishers Got them on our platform and we ran affiliate offers through our platform and onto those organic pages and we drove nine figures in revenue through the platform and under two years of launching it From there we ended up launching a Shopify holding company where we launched, scaled and ultimately exited nine brands.
Speaker 2:We were doing everything in-house At first. We started with our leveraging our influencer network from there. That's where we got into paid media retention marketing. We were doing all the fulfillment in-house. Everything A to Z was kept internal for all of our brands. Each of those brands is seven or eight figures an annual run rate and that actually served as the foundation for us becoming a performance marketing agency, which is now known as the Snow Agency. So we've been a full service agency for over four years now. Really everything from paid social, paid search to retention, marketing, seo, creative influencer, web design and dev, and recently we've gotten into PR as well through the acquisition we've been a part of the past few months.
Speaker 1:Awesome, well, yeah, extensive would be one way to describe it.
Speaker 2:I didn't even get into my dental background. That's another story.
Speaker 1:I know I was hoping you touched on that. Let's quickly touch on that, because that's one thing that I'm super interested in. How the hell did you go from dentistry to e-commerce?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I was a general dentist in the Air Force about 10 years ago and that's how I essentially fell into the influencer marketing. So I was stationed in Louisiana in the middle of nowhere, not New Orleans, louisiana. I was Shreveport, louisiana, which is northwest Louisiana, on the border of Texas, arkansas and Oklahoma, so by nature there's absolutely nothing to do there. And so that's when my brother, dan, was actually building large social media pages. He was, ironically, studying to go to dental school. He was already accepted into dental school and then his Instagram page started growing a lot. It's at rap on Instagram, you might know them over 10 million followers. And so he had the idea he's like hey, I realize a lot of these other big pages on social are not monetizing their pages like they should be. Let's build this platform and essentially get all these large pages on the platform and we can help them monetize it. So I had a ton of free time that days would start at 7 am and end at 3 pm when I was doing dentistry for the Air Force, so I'll get home with nothing to do. And I was like sure I'll do. It really started as a hobby to pass the time and turned it into something really successful and then that was just. You know, once we started getting momentum, it was hard to ever come out of the econ side Finished up my three year commitment with the Air Force and my lifelong dream the reason why I went to dental school was actually to become an orthodontist, so I wasn't ready to give up my dental career just from seeing a flash in the pan. Success on social, didn't know if this could be sustained and so, yeah, I got accepted. It's my orthodontic residency. Move back up to the northeast, where I'm from, you know, had my residency in New York City and, yeah, I mean from there.
Speaker 2:The e-commerce success continued. I was juggling both careers for another three years and then, ironically, I was actually under contract to buy an orthodontic practice at the end Of my residency, and that week is when COVID hit. So we all know what happened on COVID hit. So I pulled out of that deal because everything literally shut down in New York City and and yeah, I mean it was it was all shut down. That's when the agency started really taking off and growing and so by the time things ended up opening it back up in New York City, orthodontic practice I was under contract to buy, I didn't return to the level it was producing before COVID and so I decided to totally pull out of that deal and the agency.
Speaker 2:Honestly, at that point it already doubled in growth over the course of like those six months, while everything was pretty much shut down for COVID. There really wasn't enough time to go back to dentistry. So I had to choose. It was either, you know, be an entrepreneur on the dentistry side and run a practice or a network of practices, or, you know, continue building and operating my agency. So that was kind of how I stepped away from dentistry. It's funny how COVID totally changes lives, but that's the dental side of it. That's the dental side in the nutshell.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean the timing there worked out pretty well. If it was even two weeks later, then you would have had that orthodontic practice right before COVID hit, which would not have had a very expensive loan, zero revenue tied to it.
Speaker 2:It would just be, you know, totally lost asset, essentially. So it's funny how, you know, I guess, I, I guess I prayed well that week. Ironically, the deal should have closed right before COVID, but the lawyer on the seller side, he actually was on a Greek vacation, like a Greek island vacation on a boat, for like two weeks and he didn't even have service. So it got delayed and so that was to my advantage.
Speaker 1:Well blessing in disguise. Yeah Well, what's it been like? You've obviously taken the fast track through entrepreneurship and you just, you know, sort of capped it off with a, with a nice exit as well. What was that process like for you? Because it was really happened over the course of, I'd say, like three years right, I mean COVID to now is three years and you all grew super quickly. So, sort of, how did you manage and handle that growth and did you know exiting was something that you know was? Was that a goal? Like some founders I talked to, they're like yes, I started this business to like exit it, and others sort of just fall into it. Where do you sort of fall in that camp?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question. You know, whenever Dan and I started any business, the end goal really is to exit. You know, and it really comes down to at what point do we want to exit? But when it comes down to the agency side, we weren't thinking we were going to be exiting within three years. We were kind of setting it up long term. We were actually making a ton of investments into growth.
Speaker 2:Ironically, the year before selling which anyone would tell you not to do we ended up finding the right partnership where, even though we weren't totally ready to shift an ownership, the right partnership came along where it was an absolute no-brainer. It was a synergistic partnership. I'm still heavily involved in the business, obviously, as my full time, day-to-day is still being in the agency. We're really building out a big agency roll-up model of synergistic capabilities and trying to build a holistic strategy to marketing. There's no way that I would be able to do that alone. Having seasoned partners that can really offset a lot of the other administrative day-to-day the legal, the finance, the operations and then making sure the client work is excellent and the client services is a great experience. Handling all that while hiring and building out new service offerings it's not even a possible endeavor really, and we kind of realized that it's perfect timing. There was a no-brainer at that point.
Speaker 1:Can you talk a little bit more about what that sort of joined entity looks like and know what you're most excited about? That was one thing that I always debated with Electric when we got to the 45 people mark is do we try and get bigger ourselves or do we just stay the same size Because we can't do everything, I think, at that size you mentioned. You added on PR and whatnot. How are you thinking about taking to market these synergies that you now have as a part of this larger entity?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question too. First, I'll start off with the model, the guy that actually started Avenue Z, which is now the holding company of what snow agencies are part of. He's a big agency guy. He's been in the space for over 20 years. He was a founder of iCrossing. His name is Jeff Herzog. Icrossing was one of the largest independent agencies at the time when he actually exited that business to Hearst Magazine. Then he started another agency years after that called Zog Digital, which then exited to Investus Digital. He had done it on the biggest scale. He had a global company with thousands of employees and had the vision for what a modern day agency should look like. He'd really been on the sidelines for a few years. Once he had the thesis and pitched it to us, we realized that that's exactly what we had already envisioned. We just didn't know how to get to that point, didn't really even have, honestly, the internal resources or finances. We were totally bootstrapped as an agency. He came in with a solution to everything and we had an aligned vision on what that agency does look like. What we have identified is that when you're an agency in a silo, if you're a Facebook ads agency, or maybe you also have Google and you have a few other execution service lines, but you don't have the overarching strategy to solve a business's true needs or even the ability to identify where those issues are and provide a holistic, one-stop solution for it. That was our vision here.
Speaker 2:The PR component that's where you create the narrative, which we didn't have any PR in house at the time. It's really the intersection of PR and then amplification through paid media. I've always said PR is only as effective as a number of people that see that, that earn media placement. If you have the best story in the world, but if 100 people see that placement on Forbes or Bloomberg or whatever the publisher is, then it's not going to drive impact. How do we have that convergence of creating those influential narratives, getting the placements but then scaling them out? The right people see them at the right time? That's where the paid media side, but we are truly great at kind of converged with PR. That's what we're bringing, kind of like a strategic consultancy approach with all the solutions to a business's problems that they might have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, because I've worked with countless brands in the past where I'm like you've got far bigger issues than email and SMS marketing. To improve your retention, you need far more. But how do you actually package that into a service offering so that you're charging fairly for the value that you're putting into it but then the brand is also able to get the value out of it? Because that's always been my hesitancy with full service agencies If you start to add up all these little pieces together, you start looking at a very hefty monthly bill and then you narrow yourself into a smaller target audience in terms of brands that you can service. Are you experiencing a shift in the types of brands that you want to work with or are working with? Because we had to go through that, where we had to shed a whole lot of business as we started to mature and scale up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. When we were first an agency we would take on pretty much any client that would pay our retainers, which is probably the reason why we were able to grow so fast. But when you realize over time you have so many different service models internally. If you have clients that are a tier one client where they might be using you for every service they're at nine figure one rate can't be giving them the same level of service as you do a brand that's using you for a small Facebook ad retainer and maybe they're doing like a million dollars a year in revenue. As you grow you realize those models aren't really. You have to develop several different service models internally and that's really hard to scale on. When it comes down to where we're at currently, we're definitely more upmarket than we are now. It makes no sense for us to work with a brand that's under seven figures a year in revenue Absolutely that's like a non-starter unless they're a well-funded brand that's pre-launch and they have the finances to invest and derive the value of our services. When it comes to the profile of the client, snow Agency has always been really entrenched in the DTC space. 95% of our clients were Shopify brands in a variety of verticals. Really the strategy is mostly the same, regardless of if it's a fashion brand, a VMS brand, a beauty brand, whatever it might be.
Speaker 2:Now, after the acquisition, the PR agency that we've acquired, most of their clients are actually larger, like Series A and up businesses, not in the direct consumer space.
Speaker 2:It's actually mostly in the tech space FinTech, healthtech, frontiertech. Those are most of their client profiles. What they realize is a lot of their clients need the amplification and they needed the social media components which the PR agency couldn't deliver on. Maybe they would refer out to an external agency to handle the execution of that, but not having the integrated strategy to actually come up with a great PR brief that included the PR or the performance side of it. Upfront, maybe they got an intermediate placement that won't actually lead to a new business for their clients Having that in-house now having their client profile. That's in addition to D2C. Then the SEO agency that we acquired is actually more enterprise, so AAA or Lando, magic, universal Studios, businesses like that, also not really in the direct to consumer e-commerce space. So now we have this amalgamation of many different client profiles and they all have the same needs and really it's 90% of the same strategies, whether it's Legion, purchasing a product or signing up for a service, really comes down to the same core principles.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and how are you thinking about sort of meshing those two different entities all together? Because I'm like a firm believer in buying versus building. Can you imagine if you had to go out and build your own PR arm or build your own SEO department? I don't think it works as well, because I really think you need founder involvement in those entities that are coming in, because that's where you get into issues with quality control. In my opinion is if you just sort of start throwing people into the mix in new channels, that it's not their business, so it's not the same. They're not paying the level of attention or detail to it that you really need in order to have a thriving organization. But how are you dealing with merging all these various processes? And I'm sure everybody had a different way they put together client decks and have a different way for project management solutions. How are you tackling that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you brought up a great point in the beginning like buying or building, and that's something we were totally bootstrapped as the snow agency pre-acquisition. We were obviously just building everything internally and that takes a long time, a lot of trial and error. It's finding the leader of that discipline you're trying to build internally and that's a very difficult endeavor is to find talent that is fully bought in as normal, sees themselves as a CEO of their service line, and that's where buying really comes in. So acquiring PR, acquiring SEO where the SEO company we acquired has been business for 15 plus years, so I mean these are true experts at their craft.
Speaker 2:For us starting SEO internally, it might be already difficult to find someone, but someone with 15 plus years of experience and has been through it all over two decades almost impossible to find. And founder involvement totally like each of the businesses we've acquired since the acquisition, founder involvement is critical. That would be like a non-starter, essentially, if it was just an exit, just dump a business into us, not how it works. So we're pretty much fully integrated, I would say, with both of those businesses faster than I imagined. Obviously, with any integration of different cultures, different services, different operations, different communication styles, different meeting cadences and syncing all that obviously will have its challenges, but it's been much smoother than I expected, really, because our new CEO, jeff Herzog, and his leadership team he brought along with him as COO, cto, cfo. They've been through many acquisitions and integrations in the past, so they've already brought those learnings internally and it's been a much smoother process than I realized.
Speaker 1:I'm sure having everybody be in their own sort of swim lanes helps as well too. So it's not like you're merging together to email and SMS agencies.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And there's some inefficiencies and maybe there's some people that don't need to be there anymore because there's overlap and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:So you get to avoid that, yeah, we want to avoid redundancy in any acquisition, and the same holds true moving forward. I think the most important core principle and value that's really been emphasized across the board has been flexibility and open-mindedness. So everyone's gonna have been used to selling from the same deck or using a certain task management software, whether it be ClickUp, teamwork, asana, whatever it is. It might be using Salesforce or HubSpot, it might be using a DocuSign or Proposify or Panda Doc. So everyone has to just have an open mind. You know that you're gonna have to kind of not everything's gonna be your way and really embrace that openly rather than complain Like be part of the solution, not the problem. That's huge and I've been really happy to see that the team internally it's been really honestly easy because every team has been open minded and flexible and it's been a pleasure to see that.
Speaker 1:So how do you stay focused on one thing? Because you obviously, just based off your background, you've got a lot of different interests and you got your hands in different sort of buckets, and I can relate to that and I feel like I have like three different businesses always running at once. How do you not only choose which one you're really gonna go all in on, but then be able to keep the focus sort of so intensely on that when there might be other shiny objects that are flying around that could be worth your attention?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I've been much better recently than I was five plus years ago. So back when I was a dentist, orthodontist, owned numerous e-commerce brands. Then we were starting the agency. So we were really operating like I was operating like four or five different entities. One point, I think I had close to 10 LLCs active at the same time.
Speaker 2:But since I had like, and then I realized that, rather than spreading yourself thin and just having okay, successful businesses across the board, it's impossible to ever build one of those until what you truly think should be like your hallmark and what you're known for, and so realizing that and that was honestly a moment of introspection that we had when we started the agency is, at one point we got to as many clients as we did brands that we owned, and then we're like these are really competing interests. We truly can't be giving the brands all the attention they deserve and we're gonna minimize the value there. And then same thing on the client side. If Dan and I are building an agency very early on, we have to train new people and build new processes and have numerous clients with different verticals. We need to be fully on board there and that's like a full time job in itself. So we had that realization, so we exited our brand. That's when I stepped away from dentistry back in June 2020 to really focus. That was like our core focus.
Speaker 2:Since then I do some advising on the side and everything it never penetrates like really my work time. I have a consultant call during the day and everything, but I mean, when it comes down to being an entrepreneur a successful one there is no like four hour work week or any like get rich quick schemes that you see on Twitter and propagate on LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok doesn't exist. I'm like a relentless worker and I think you know business is part of my life. It's like business is my hobby. I actually enjoy doing business and that's probably why I'm successful doing it, because I don't see it like work and it really is like part of my lifestyle.
Speaker 2:It's like I'm always thinking about business. I mean I do other things as well, but it's not like I'm a workaholic and I'm miserable and my life is falling apart. You know I still go to the gym seven days a week. I still go on the beach. You know, saturday and Sunday, miami Beach in my backyard I'm chilling on the beach with a beer. I go to my football. Sundays I'm in a sports bar. So it's like I found that work life balance and really honestly, part of my life is work and I enjoy it. So it's really just like I think that's the cheat code is really just have to enjoy what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like, I like that perspective, the you know it's a hobby, Because it really is, I think. And that's a good way to explain it to others who maybe don't understand the fact, like why the hell are you doing this like, or why are you working so much? It's like, well, it's not, it's not the same as maybe necessarily like clocking into a nine to five.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I know you're. You have the same mindset because I see all the great thought leadership you put out there. Clearly you're consuming content as much as you're putting it out, if not more consumption. So you might be doing that instead of watching Netflix on the couch for five hours afterwards. So you get enjoyment out of that, keeping up to the industry trends and you know being at the forefront of that, and clearly it's part of your lifestyle too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my Wednesday evening of staying up to like one am reading the additions report and then putting together my analysis, I was like, as I was going through it, I was like this is some of the stuff is like I feel like I'm kind of a nerd Like I'm reading through it, I'm like wow, like that's really cool, and I'm like having to Google some of the, some of the, even some of the words that they put into the additions report. I was like what the hell is this Like? What is web assembly code? And then I went down this whole rabbit's hole of like you know it's faster than JavaScript and you know they have this distributed network as well, all these edge nodes, and I'm like this is like far more technical and nerdy than I was expecting to get on a Wednesday night at like one am, but it was fun.
Speaker 2:Yep, and, by the way, your analysis is on my reading list. I still got to get to it, but I did read additions. But I'd love to see what you, what you had in mind about it.
Speaker 1:Well, I think like the thing for me that is makes it easier to like digest that much information is actually like less. You know, like bells and whistles, and so when I go in that additions landing page I'm like holy shit, like where do I even start? There's so much going on. There's like so I like to distill it into that PDF and then once I just sort of go through each one and bring it over, that forces me to read through each item, and then I'll go back and like analyze each section, but like just the text.
Speaker 1:I don't need these like three minute, like flashy videos or whatever like just give me the, give you the meat and potatoes, or whatever the expression is, and then and then go from there. And I always like to think about it as what does this mean for the next six months or the next year? Like what is missing from this report? That, like obviously should be coming based off of where they're putting investment at the moment, and there's some.
Speaker 1:It's crazy to think how much the platform has come since, like, I started the agency or since you started the agency. Even just yesterday, I was able to do something for, like a drinks app client. It's not even agency client. They like needed help with their theme, so I didn't want to bother the developers. Like maybe I could do this because of Metafields and, like the new online store editor, I was able to do it in like five minutes that maybe a year ago would have taken at least a couple hours of a dev team time to do, and I just thought that was really cool, just to see how much the pro platform has progressed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, at this point, shopify is like the no brainer platform. I don't understand like how, any bit. I know there's a ton of still, like you know, billion dollar plus revenue brands that are, like you know, on the magentos and on the. You know, salesforce, commerce cloud and WooCommerce. It's actually mind blowing how many are still in those like grandfathered platforms. You know Shopify it's so easy to just build on now Shopify app ecosystem see the Shopify executive team constantly shipping new updates. They're thinking you're very forward thinking where these other platforms are stuck in the Stone Ages and you need a whole dev team just to like maintain a website, one little website change or one little integration that you want to build, you literally have to build it from scratch. It's still mind blowing to me.
Speaker 1:And I think part of it has to go back to your comment about, you know, when you were looking at teams to potentially acquire, like having the mindset of being open to change. I think a lot of these legacy businesses are not, or they're almost disincentivized to push for change, because I hear it all the time. As we've started a little work with more enterprise businesses, like I almost wonder, like do the CEOs of these businesses actually know what their team members are saying on the calls that they have with third party vendors? Because they're basically just like you know, we'd love to do this but it'll probably take six months because like that's just the way it is here and like I'm going to go sign off at four o'clock now and just do nothing because there's no, not incentivize to make any forward thinking change Right and that to me is like that would be painful and I think that's the biggest holdup.
Speaker 1:But with them offering commerce components, specifically a shop pay, like I think that could be a foot in the door for Shopify to like a little lemon or two and Nike, where like I still don't get, I shop on some of these massive retailer websites and just awful, awful checkout experience. Just throw shop pay on there and then that makes all the shop sort of products and the network effects and the whole ecosystem more powerful in the door, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And even if big commerce created those products, it doesn't matter, because they don't have, they don't have the network, they don't have the merchants and they don't have the customers, exactly. So let's, let's foot the foot, the table here, I guess for a second, and then have you be the interviewer for a moment. Are there any burning questions that you have on your end?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I would say the first question is like how do you split your time right now with the agency and drinks? You know, obviously the two. I guess they are integrated right, like you're helping drinks clients, but I think there's a lot of your clients are not drinks clients and vice versa. So I'd love to hear about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we brought on a Lisa who was formerly at flowium another clave elite agency and so she's taken over the day to day of the agency operations, which has actually been a sort of a blessing in disguise, because I can now focus on doing the newsletter, doing more of the thought leadership. I have the time to spend digging into additions like that day versus you know, maybe I'll get to it eventually because I'm so like bogged down and client work. So that transition has been really, really successful and helpful. And we're also in the process of unless it's a really like sort of, you know, unless it's a Soylent style, you know Shopify plus brand.
Speaker 1:We're solely focused on alcohol and enabling the alcohol category on Shopify and we're the most uniquely sort of adapted, doing so because of what drinks brought to the table with their 30 plus years of beverage alcohol experience I mean I joke with most of our C levels were in the workforce before I was even born and that's sort of how the alcohol industry works. It's very much so an old school network. There are rules and regulations that are I mean, it's the only product that's in the Constitution, so it just opens up this whole can of worms in a way that we at Electric never really had to deal with. Like you sell coffee on the internet, it's a lot different than selling liquor on the internet. So in coffee, you know you make a mistake with sales tax, like maybe you get a little fine. You make a mistake with where you send hard liquor in the US, you go to jail. So it's just a different. It's a different level and Drinks had been working with Fortune 500 businesses whereas electric was working with, you know, mid-market Shopify plus brand. So we've really been able to up level.
Speaker 1:Just I mean I mean I probably gonna get shit for wearing this hat on this podcast but like the up leveling of the professionalism and the way that we work and interact with clients to the point where you know it's been a great synergy and part of the reason I was asking you about how are you merging agency processes? Because we didn't actually have to do that because drinks didn't have an agency. So we just sort of, you know, morph together and it was additive. There was no overlap in any way whatsoever when it comes to processes. But I'd say my time is say, maybe 20% agency, a lot more on just the overarching side of the business, and then scaleless. I basically do in my air quotes free time and and that's where the hobby aspect comes into play I would say like this is why I'm doing it on a Saturday or Sunday, versus, you know, trying to force everything into like an eight-hour window during the day.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. I'd love to hear your story too. So how did you start the agency? I know you're a young guy.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's an anomaly in itself so I was going to the small school in Indiana to play basketball and and then I Basically I tore some ligaments in my ankle. You know I was gonna take forever to recover and I looked around and like I don't want to be in a cornfield in Indiana so I immediately withdrew, like I was probably like a month in to freshman year With drew, moved to LA, took a gap year working while I, you know, got the surgery and recovered and whatnot, and then went into business school at USC. Best part about business school at USC was that it was so, you know, uninspiring that I was able to spend most of the time in class and also structure my schedule. So I was only in class Tuesday and Thursday, so I could work Monday, wednesday, friday and I actually Was working at drinks during that time. Oh yeah, I left about a year into school. So just start freelancing for really small businesses in the Shopify ecosystem. I'm talking like one person out of their garage style businesses Working for free or working for a couple hundred bucks a month, did that for about a year in between classes to get some reviews and case studies and just fortunately was able to get revenue up to a point where, about a month before graduation I just had to, you know, turn down the actual job offers, was able to hire, like a full-time team member who also was graduating with me, for like 45 grand a year or something, and like it was just the two of us for a year in this dingy little office in Chinatown, just learning a bunch like that was. That was the most exciting time for me, because everything's on YouTube, everything's on Google, the guy had no true experience. It was just, you know, fake it till you make it, so to speak. And it was a grind those first 18 months because we didn't have any connections. We had no agency experience like we. I was writing handwritten letters like sending wine to the CEO of TRX and bomb us and like all these other companies, businesses we had no like actual business doing work with, but fortunately, you know, a lot of them received it well and would chat with me and that was an invaluable experience and. But eventually it just all that work over the first 18 months and it was just like almost overnight we went from like 10 people to 45 it feels like because of the Foundation that was being laid as a part of that like first 18 months and and we like screwed up a bunch along the way to, and I actually and finishing up and we'll be publishing in probably a couple weeks here have been writing like a Sort of a reflection on that process in journey, like what would I have wanted to know, going into it like back, if I put myself back in my shoes in 2018, 2019?
Speaker 1:These are all the things I want to know now, given all the mistakes that I made, whether it was, like you know, not giving up control of the bookkeeping quickly enough, like as detailed in my new shows that to more, like you know, putting the wrong person into the right role for your business and in this whole, like you know, you might be a great individual contributor, but you might not be a great manager. And like, if I would have just asked that team member, hey, do you even want to be a manager? They would have told me no, and they would still be a really strong individual contributor right now at a lecture. But I like essentially thought, hey, everybody wants to, you know, be a manager, everybody wants to start their own business, but that's just not the reality.
Speaker 1:So there's so much stuff that that I learned and is gonna be invaluable, I think, for Whatever else I decide to do next, because it's not like I had this undying love for, for marketing or wanted to, you know, be an e-commerce agency guy. It was more about I knew I wanted to have my own business and Agencies can be bootstrapped, that you don't have to go out and raise money. So now I'm embarking on that next challenge, which is the Venture-funded business side of the world, which will be interesting.
Speaker 2:Awesome, yeah, and you bring up the individual contributor versus manager debate. That's like the, the classic debate that I think is honestly misunderstood. On both sides of the coin, it's really at the, the business level and the employee level. You know so I always I was equated to. You don't want to take off your best player off the court. Like you know LeBron James, you know, obviously, the best player in the NBA and his prime. You want to take him off the court and make him the coach of the team Because he's the best contributor.
Speaker 2:No, it's like those are two parallel pads. I think sometimes you have to identify that and call that out and let your employees know hey, you could be paid better actually as being one of the best individual contributors out there rather than just, like you know, being an administrator or a manager. It's not to say that you're not sufficient enough as a contributor if you're not right for the manager role. So then on the flip side, you could be an amazing manager and you could be a B minus or C plus individual contributor. So it's really different qualities, different skill sets and you know it's very rare to find someone that's great at both.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't. I think I'd be a terrible individual contributor. I get distracted too easily. I'd be like and that's what, like what the agency was to begin with, like I was doing everything at like a seven out of 10, but like, I can't do web design and development, I can't do email, I can't do SMS, I can't do all these things under one roof. But one last question I have for you. Everybody you know talks about AI. I feel like a lot of it's pretty gimmicky at this point. Are there any ways within your business right now that you're actually leveraging AI to be more efficient, whether it's in, like you know, creative or copy development process, or what does that look like right now for you and how you're thinking about it moving forward?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So AI, like you said, is almost getting to the point of being very gimmicky and every business now is calling themselves an AI company, when they shouldn't be much. Like you know crypto and NFT, every e-commerce brand or business is trying to figure out how they could be a crypto company and publicize that they're a crypto based DTC brand, just to increase the valuation or whatever. But AI is very exciting. Obviously it has amazing use cases. So right now, internally, we're really using it as a tool, mostly for market research, copywriting. You know, getting something from zero to 80. And then the human takes it from 80 to 100. I think if you ever try to replace humans with AI totally, or put something in chat, gpt or some other generative AI and copy and paste that into your actual work without you know giving it the extra TLC it needs, that's where the big mistakes happen. So we're really just using it as a research tool and a copywriting tool, as a foundational piece, just so we can make things a little more efficient, looking forward to seeing it kind of get introduced into creative. A lot of the creative AI tools. Generative AI are really not up to the standards that we have, so but I think that's something that will get there in the next year, so hopefully that can be leveraged soon.
Speaker 2:Where I think I'm really excited for AI to take over is the actual media buying. You know, budget optimization in the ad platforms, forecasting, you know, saturation, cross-platform budget planning A lot of that is actually all of it, I should say should be objective based. It's really just statistics and machine learning based on data. And when should I increase my budget by 20% or drop it by 20%? You know the machines are better at running that equation than humans are. So I think that's where I'm actually most excited to see the industry go is really with the objective parts of media buying, which is budget optimization, not just within a campaign or ad set, but within the whole platform prospecting versus retargeting budget. You know, facebook versus TikTok, versus Snapchat versus Pinterest when should my budgets actually be?
Speaker 1:So yeah, I still think there's still so many decisions made by us that should not be made by us, even with, like, email marketing, like segmentation I don't know. This segment sounds good like we're personalizing it, but is this actually what we should be doing? Like Clavio, you have I don't know basically all of Shopify using your platform. Why are you not telling us send this email to this person at this time? That's where I think it should go, and we will be far more efficient and able to focus on other things. Like, I don't think it's going to necessarily wipe out a ton of jobs. It'll just make us a lot more like impactful with the time that we do that Exactly Well, thank you so much for coming on. Before we hop off here, can you just let everybody know who's listening, where they can get in contact with you or Avenuesy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. I'm pretty active on Twitter and LinkedIn. You'll find me there and my email is john at thesnowagencycom. If you want to chat more about any difficulties you might be having or potentially work with Avenuesy as a client or come work for Avenuesy, those are the best places to find me Twitter, linkedin and email.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, as always, everybody listening. This is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at brandamorosocom or electricmarketingcom, and we'll see you next time.