SPEAKER_00 0:00

You've built curve to an award-winning app growth agency. But before that, you've built and exited multiple other companies. Are you working towards an exit?

SPEAKER_02 0:09

If you're not building a business that could be sold, you're not building a business.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

How important do you think niche specialization is in agency now coming into the future as well?

SPEAKER_02 0:18

In the sort of early days of Shopify, we went from about 150 million websites to 2 billion. I think we're probably going to experience an exponential growth in the number of apps hitting the market.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

What happens when the ads just don't work and you're not able to drive the result that you want to drive?

SPEAKER_02 0:35

We identify, in our opinion, like the right persona. We deploy the ad and nothing works. It typically means that the product might not have the audience that it's about to build. Sometimes not taking the big risk is the biggest risk, I think.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

And they will be a friend of software because of the ability to replicate and duplicate.

SPEAKER_02 0:52

If your app is very easy to copy and duplicate and clone, I think the only thing that would be defensible in the future as a brand is your one thing that every agency owner should stop doing today.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

If you're an agency owner today, you really need to welcome to Agency Giants. Thank you. So you've built Curve to an award-winning app growth agency. Is that how you would define it?

SPEAKER_02 1:19

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

That's a good idea. But before that, you've built and exited multiple other companies in very different industries. I'm interested to start off with what drives you to keep building companies.

SPEAKER_02 1:33

Yeah. I'd love it. I would love to say that I'm like incredibly focused on something that is sort of building and generating money. But really the focus has always been curiosity and serendipity, I would say. Opened and also knowing maybe a little bit what trends are going. So stumbled across a location, early days, early barista kind of style thing, early 2000. I'd had a sort of a fallout with my local coffee guy because he just didn't do good coffee and he didn't try hard enough. And I said, Can't be that hard. And I just came back from having done a little um excursion in Italy for two years. Um so I knew what good coffee should taste like and uh found a venue and then was like can't be that hard. And then yeah, did it. And that convinced that curiosity, and then all of a sudden, oh, now I'm stuck with a successful sort of specialist barista styled coffee place. How do you build and how do you scale and how do you learn how to do management? I was in my early 20s and yeah, it incredibly informative. But at one point, I was like, okay, I think I've understood this business now, and then I got curious about other things. So yeah, I think it's the curiosity and obsession about getting to the source of something and understanding how it works. Um that's probably been my main driver. The the digital aspect of so today I run an agency that does technology or supports tech innovation for consumers, right? And cafe, wildly different. But in essence, it isn't. Because in essence, it's customers come to an experience, and if it's a good experience, it becomes a habit. If it becomes a habit, it's a successful business. So the obsession is always like how do people think, how do they behave, how can you inject like an experience that grows the product, the the restaurant, the cafe, or whatever it might be. So in the end, it's like obsession and curiosity about consumers and how we behave and how we interact and and in the end, um, buy things.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

It's really interesting because for lots on lots of entrepreneurs have that obsession with and interest in a variety of different things. But not everybody can then translate that into success before they move on to the next thing. Lots of entrepreneurs have that curse of starting something, getting shiny objects in drones, starting something else without truly maximizing on on that. Um what do you think it is within you that allows you to actually do well in the thing before you move on to the next thing, or or is that not the case and you you are constantly fighting that desire to do something new?

SPEAKER_02 4:28

No, no, it it I I do stick with it. Maybe less when I was younger, but um but no, I stick with it. And I'm really comfortable with the incredibly boring tasks and repetitive. Um grew up in a tiny little village with a thousand people, and I worked uh uh kind of messed up high school, uh and then call college or high school? I don't know what you call it here, like when you're 15, 16. So I I stopped it. And uh my parents were like, yeah, you're not gonna hang around, you've got to get a job. So I had to get a job, and living in a town with a thousand people in the countryside, that few jobs around, and one of them was farming. So one of my first most boring gigs and most boring jobs ever was doing a potato farming. You sit, and this is some time ago. That's probably not automated most of it, but it wasn't then. And we were sitting behind a tractor, putting potatoes that goes into a field, and the field was as big as you could see in any direction. And for I can't remember, three, four weeks, I was sitting behind that tractor from 5 a.m. in the morning till whenever the sun came down, come rain or shine, putting those potatoes in the ground. And in the end of it, when you got your paycheck, I was like, oh, hang on, this enables me now to do the next thing. And then the next thing became traveling and exploring other parts of the world. Um but I think just being sticking with it, being really comfortable with the extremely boring things. Most work is extremely boring. Most ideas that this instant sort of um eureka moment is is is amazing. But only if you're committed to the incredible long journey of carrying water and chopping wood for like months, years before you see the actual fruit of that eureka moment because that's what it is. And most often it will fail. Um so you have this amazing idea. You then go and you execute it, and after three years, it's completely failed. No one's interested, or the solution is like weed in the garden. It's just, you know, no one cares and no one likes it, and you've spent all this time, and all it is is like a garden full of weed, not the one you can consume. The other one. Um and then I think that's it. Like just sticking with it, taking the incredibly boring tasks.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

Have you had any ventures that have failed that you've put a lot of time into?

SPEAKER_02 6:51

So many. I would say most of them. Yeah. And uh yeah, most of most of I mean the ones that worked were also quite um sort of in the moment, it felt like failures because they weren't big enough or fast enough, and going back to the hospitality thing. I was I thought like opening a new unit was the way forward, growing with new, like doing more cafes or more, you know, espresso bars. And only like quite long after that I realized that, you know, the most like now I admire David Abramovich. I think he smashed it. He did a few grinds, but then he went into pods and he made into the brand and he built that. That's the real, I think that's the real sort of evolution of a brand. Whereas I at that point was thinking, you know, more cafes, more this. And I think that's a that was a failure. Even though I exited and it was fine, the real opportunity was, you know, I should have scaled the brand and the the product. And I have this uh in my team now I say we cannot miss the l Fucaccia and lasagna moments. Because at the cafe, I was making fucca and lasagna before it became sort of more common in Sweden. And that's what I should have done. Like I should have focused on opening a bakery or what do you call it, like selling it to wholesale or whatever. And I think that's like the what is failure? I think failure is the the inability to see the true scale of the idea. And I um I guess that's uh the going back to curiosity and obsession with finding the source, is like what's the source, what's the essence of this idea? Um truly then you can find the scale, I think.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Love that. Coming from the countryside? Potatoes and I love that sounds idyllic, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

Coming from a Sweden, it rains 95% of the time.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Oh well, 95%, I suppose that's tops us in the UK, but it it rains quite a lot in Norfolk where I'm from as well. But yeah. Um transitioning into digital though is a is a big jump into from from countryside to hospitality. How did that transition come about? What was the the birth point to that?

SPEAKER_02 8:52

Yeah, so you know, I've slightly been around slightly longer than most uh uh maybe attend your show um or attend a podcast. But uh I think the the main thing has been this hospitality experience, as I mentioned, was sort of a serendipitous moment. I had a fight, I found a venue, I was able to get it, and then I was able to figure out how to open a cafe or a barista style cafe. But in the sidelines, I'd been quite deep in tech, so the dot-com boom and all of that. I was all over it. And I did make some money in the early dot com boom of some investments, but also I learned about HTML and all of this stuff. I learned sort of roughly how you could build things and how you can get it out. So I was helping family and friends in the early days of that. And, you know, then came YouTube and then came all of these early platforms, and I kind of figured out quite early how to help friends and families and businesses get out there. So when I did exit the hospitality unit, there was only one thing, and that was move to London and just double down on the digital. There were many of the key failures. Uh early days I was building products and trying to ship photo sharing apps and social networks in the early, early days, kind of the Bebop, Bebop days, like that kind of phase. That's main, like if you like the textbook failures, they were probably back then. Um came here and instantly got to build a really good sort of network with great people, and um which really helped me propel into just doubling down on digital. So that was that was basically the reason why I sort of exited and sold hospitality units, and the reason I moved here to get to the essence and to the core of that curiosity.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

Was curve the first agency that you owned?

SPEAKER_02 10:45

Um, yeah. And I and I don't think again, the serendipitous thing. It it wasn't, I didn't sort of wake up one day and say, I'm gonna make an agency. Um Curve already existed as a marketing kind of T-shaped consultancy. It was founded by my well now co-founder Orin and me. Uh and um the um the the thing that happened actually was I I'm quite good at building teams, building services, building solutions. And that became quite big. And at one point we were like, this is now a pure app growth agency, and that's sort of the crystallization of the of it now. Um but it wasn't that I woke up and was like, oh, I want to build an amazing app growth agency. I was like, I have some app clients, I need to build some solutions, I've outgrown the first iteration, I need to grow the team. Oh, now we've got a proper agency, a proper team. Okay, how do we now go to the next phase and all the operational bottlenecks and issues with that? And uh yeah, it's the first agency. But I would say like I didn't build an agency. I try to build a framework that can help clients, you know, run experiments and grow. And then it's an agency. So I think that's um yeah, I don't know if it's the answers, but I yeah, I think the agency is too limiting in one in many aspects, I I think. And core agency is like is more service-led where we try to be more solutions-led, and that's sort of I think there will be more transitioning towards that in the next couple of years. What do you mean by that? So where services is, it's like selling a service for uh paid media, you're running meta ads. As we know, that's sort of transitioning out. The need of having a specialist for that is less and less important. The need of having a creative solutions person, someone who understands creative systems and can scale them, is more important. And I think that's increasingly going to be a software or an agent or an agency solution. I think that's where we're putting a lot of our efforts and a lot of our focus into is how do we transition in this well, how would you call it service-led solution or service-led agency to solution-led agency, which is powered by people, but led by and sort of enabled by an increasing suite of a genetic tools. Some that we might build and some that we might acquire.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

I want to unpack that, but I want to somewhat park that for for shortly. But before we do, I'd like to just jump into early stage client acquisition a little bit. Like where did those first clients come from when you came over here?

SPEAKER_02 13:19

So initially, when I when I moved here, it was word of mouth. And a lot of it was sort of an individual freelance sort of solution. I um the first sort of thing I did here was uh work with a sort of family office and built um uh an app within that, but also helped pull together other products in that team. And it was word of mouth mostly, I would say. I built a good reputation. I've always been like back then, I was more the tech man and tech dude, I guess, and made him WhatsApp address books. And then progressively that became the app man, and now sort of that's still the case, and now it's increasingly app AI guy. So that's like personal network. And then Orin, my sort of co-founder, he's got his own kind of LinkedIn activation. He's very good with like a personal brand and also a very strong authority in marketing. That was probably the first bit. Um, the first sort of to get us off the ground, which is cost efficient and uh and uh and also helps because one referred client normally yields more. And then, you know, as being more of a traditional marketer, I've always invested a lot in SEO and um content. I think those two legs have always been a good contributor in the early days. Thankfully, SEO today is a big part of LLM discovery, so now we're riding on that wave. Um but I think that's like the foundational bit of it. Personal network, referrals, and then increasingly that sort of SEO and LLM um discoverability.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

But inbound is still the core today, there's not an outbound strategy.

SPEAKER_02 14:59

It's a good one. Inbound is still core, but it's also the thing that scares me because it's uh it's not scalable enough. I don't think that's gonna take us to the next level. So we are exploring outbound ways, and we have been doing that quite a bit. Um, have a team for that, building a team for more brand marketing. Um, and those two are sort of, I think, the next phase of it. Um, event is probably the one that I should do more of and happens. I think uh, but from a customer acquisition point of view, I I think my main client has a frustration. And my main sort of customer sits somewhere in the company worrying about how they compare to their competitor on the app store, uh, how their reviews need to be improved. And and I think they will increasingly be talking to Claude and talking to Google and trying to understand how to get to the root of the problem. And a lot of our content is telling them how to. And that's I think that's the most efficient way to do it. And then called outbound and all these other tactics and strategies help support that, but I do think inbound will continuously be a strong channel.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

That's um an interesting thing you said there. So you're doing educational content with the goal to get that nested within LLM search. Yeah. Can you talk a bit on that strategy?

SPEAKER_02 16:22

Yeah, so it's um I think a good LLM strategy leans into answering the questions that are most likely being asked by a frustrated CMO, founder, or app growth person who's trying to figure out either a technical app growth limitation, which there are many. And if you get into app growth, the first thing you discover is attribution analytics is broken and it has been broken for 14 years, and there's very little science that it will be resolved. So you have to live in a world where four plus one plus one is four. Um so that's one thing. So we know how to deal with that. Good app growth agencies will know and can do that. So producing content and sharing how to resolve it and answering the question that's most likely being answered on an LLM. Uh sorry, asked on an LLM is is is like the key objective. So that's one guy, uh one piece of content. Buying guides is another piece of content that does really well. And all of this, like with any kind of SEO work, only works really well if it also has links to it, citations to it, so that comes into that picture. So creating content that answers the question that's most likely going to be asked on an LM. Technically structured, so there's uh a growing sort of understanding of how to structure the content to be visible on an LM is also part of it. And um and then a team that, you know, of community members that can talk about it in the right forums, Reddit, Quora, whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

So it's not just like blog posts, it's your you're answering and and putting those questions out on blog plat uh on like forum platforms as well.

SPEAKER_02 18:09

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. It's um I think that's probably the fastest way.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

So if I had to Do you create the question yourself?

SPEAKER_02 18:17

Uh yeah, to some extent we have different community members, different people that we collaborate with, that helps sort of accelerate the exposure of a content. So if we have a guide for how to optimize your SCAD, uh your scan settings on iOS 14, whatever, then we'll see that content to people who we know talk about that. And then they they might refer to that guide in the sort of the context of, oh, that problem, we actually know that this agency has this a resource for that. Here's the link. And and and that's the that's the that's the kind of the no the nodes you need to create for these LLMs to see the connection in the context is content, the way people talk about that content, on the right platforms with the right UGC sort of indexation, and then yeah, that helps lift it. Nice.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

So you describe your solution as creative-led growth. What does that mean to you guys?

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Yeah, I think in the um three years or four years ago, targeting sort of dropped off a cliff. It was it was sort of gone. And everyone tried to figure out how do we do targeting in a privacy-first uh world. And obviously the ad engines as well try to figure it out because they still need to get the exposure and so on. So quite quickly it became clear that creative is the new targeting. Um and at that point I think algorithms were getting better. Uh, TikTok probably the fastest to understand what makes us engaged and what makes us find content valuable. So, you know, in instead of creating an asset and then trying to get that to the right audience with targeting, you needed to create an asset that actually truly and sort of authentically engaged with a customer. Uh talk to them in their tone, in their way, and directly could emulate a real sort of conversation. Um and that was the one thing that we could see take off like significantly. And the o the way that we got there was experimentation. So we had a big experimentation framework and worked with apps that tried to get, you know, significant scale and running a number of creative strategies um against a number of uh sort of audiences became the way forward. And um, you know, when it when it's um in in action, you're sort of at any given time deploying 35, 40 different creatives towards uh two or three different uh personas that you think would engage with the product, measuring then you know the install rate, the registration rate, whatever the customer needs the app to do for them. Um card activation. Worked with a US client, and you know, card activation became a key metric. So you need to create a content that engages and then goes all the way through the customer journey and activates a card, but you only have three, four seconds to get that creative to sing and tick. And I think that's that's how we define it. And it still is the most pieces of sort of uh work we do is figure out what creative will work the best from uh sort of stop scrolling to the the one sort of key metrics downstream that the client needs to see. Booking uh a tattoo at a local parlor. Like how do you do that in a three second video and get and optimize it for that metric? There are ways, and that's that's sort of where we specialized.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

What's your process for coming up with creative angles?

SPEAKER_02 21:46

Research. Um lots and lots of research. And I think this is LLMs allows you to crunch data like never before. It allows you to disc sort of discover some patterns, but human led research is still by far the best way of arriving at a unique concept and a truly creative idea. And I think it's the ability to think in different frames and then colliding them and then coming up with a new iteration. So it's research. So it's you know if if I would say what does the creative team do at curve, they research and they try to find new innovative ways of telling a story that is not indifferent. That is sort of unique and a point of differentiation. And I think that's the that's the process. So a lot of research arrive at something the output today is a brief. So the output is still a brief with a influencer or a creator or a director who needs to film it. But it's still a brief with a description or a recipe for this is the way we think this product can be communicated in an authentic and engaging way. With these three, four different personas and we think one of those will be the end customer that will do this downstream event that will yield value for the cust for the client. So that's that's like the process. Most of it you don't see it it's boring on the desk or in a document out comes a UDC script or a brief and then you have a 15 second video. You produce 30-40 of those one will work and um and that's then go back to the beginning repeat. So going back to the farmer analogy is like a lot of potatoes and needs to go into the ground.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

What are the differences between creative performance marketing with apps versus let's say a conventional D to C brand?

SPEAKER_02 23:40

Technical I would say um and I think this is this is the landscape of app marketing is you're you're living in a world of a duopoly. So you have Apple and you have Google and they set the rules for their inventory effectively. So their platforms have limitations. Apple the most so Apple will hardly ever give you any data and if they do it's in such a way that you need to really work hard to get the right amount of data. So the first thing is technical. So the ability to track an attribute on mobile is completely different than on web. And then it's the customer behavior. Web again I'm simplifying it but web is transaction you're optimizing for a transaction app is you're optimizing for a behavior. So it's fundamentally different. It's the funnel on most DTC brands will be you know visitor, basket, checkout, abandoned basket or completed basket, upsell journey and so forth. On mobile it's every app has its own customer journey. Very few are standardized unless you're a game and you need to optimize for the behavior that yields this conversion that might not happen in the first session. That might happen day seven and most tools only optimize for a first session. So you need to figure out what behavior in that first session has the highest propensity of yielding that event seven days later or even with some apps 35 days later that indicate value. And so it's it's it's different. So D2C, web marketing a lot of about conversion optimization. App marketing a lot about I think behavior so app behavioral optimization which is I think more complex.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

Do you have to drive traffic straight through to the install page or is it like a landing page you're taking people through like a traditional funnel?

SPEAKER_02 25:38

There are a few different tactics and this might be super boring unless you're uh um thinking about doing it yourselves but you have two landing pages effectively you have Android you have Apple. So they're the app stores. Whenever any link hits the app store all the analytics, all the attribution that is attached to that is gone. So with web you have a pixel and that pixel can travel for dates in your browser and it will track things and it will report it back and it's pretty accurate. Some have ad blockers but very small percentage and there are ways around that. The app marketing the moment you hit the app source everything is lost. So those two funnels are only possible to do when you have something called a mobile metering partner. There's a few of them around they do a very simple thing they basically have a technology in the app that allows you to stitch it together with a source. It's not perfect and both Apple and Google will make the world quite tricky for you so you'll have to work around that. The other funnel is web funnels. So that's when you're driving most of the traffic a lot of gym apps do this very successfully and GLP1 apps and other kind of apps where you know that the intent is so high and you can reach the audience very effectively on meta or whatnot. You do an app funnel so most of the activities happen on the web or on the web view. You can generate the conversion there and then you drive them to the app. That's another tactic. But those are effectively the three funnels that you can have for an app for direct response. You can then also obviously you have all of the other brand activations and whatnot but they are effectively the ones that will convert an app install. The web funnel still needs to see the app used to download the app. So they still need to go through an email or through an e uh SMS, go to the app store and download it. So you have more points of friction than on web with a web funnel but you reach a broader audience and hopefully at a lower CPM. So typically you would try to run all three all of them. So you run direct to web uh direct to app store or web funnel but they're effectively the the the uh the funnels that you have at at your disposal. And are the majority of applications you're working on free revenue like launching from new or or majority already existing and bringing in I would say I don't know if it's a personal trait that I I tend to attract a lot of early stage startups. I think a lot of content I've written also helps early stage startups get to that point of validation because the more apps in the world the more leads we will have. So we have a lot of content that talks to early stage founders. It's also a personal sort of curiosity what is out there, what are people thinking what are they building so I love to talk to people on an idea stage. But if I had to quantify it I'd say 80% of our customer or client base are revenue generation generating apps. The rest are early stage trying to figure it out or apps that might be part of a business that doesn't necessarily need to generate revenue the app in itself it might be part of a you know a digital brand utility for a another brand like the typical such thing would be Nike's Runkeeper or whatever for Nike products. Like it doesn't need to generate revenue.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

It could but it doesn't need to so those but most of the apps are profitable revenue generating apps across mostly lifestyle health and fintech what happens when the ads just don't work and you're not able to drive the result that you want to drive how deep do you get involved in the problem solving of the app itself?

SPEAKER_02 29:14

Yeah so going back to the the customer journey it is because it's not a pure conversion optimization thing it's still it's not the price button that should be bigger. It's not the above the fold checkout it is it's typically it could be a couple of different variation variants, but if it's a product led issue, we can identify that what it might be, but then you need to redevelop it and you need to redeploy it on the App Store. So the time from identifying a problem on a on an app to the time having it fixed and live to validate that that was the issue of the ad can take weeks. So that's one of the issues app marketing if there's an issue you typically have to stop running ads or really dial it down until you can quickly validate what the issue was. But that's if it's a product led issue product led issues are typically quite rare because clients typically have good processes to make sure that they've tested and done all this but it still happens. It still happens that they push an app live and the registration is broken because an API token has stopped working and all of a sudden Google login doesn't work and then conversion rates from install to registration drops to 10% from 70%. That's rare. The other side of it is what if the ads don't work so I think there's two aspects of that one of them is what if the ads don't work period like what if it we do everything we can we research all of the angles of this product we identify in our opinion like the right personas we deploy the ads and nothing works. At that point it's quite uncomfortable conversation I think because it typically means that the product might not have the audience that it set out to build. And we see this quite often even in later stages either that you do a pivot or you have a very rough proof of concept you manage to raise a significant round to absolutely scale it and realize that there wasn't a much bigger pool of customers than that initial pool. And we've just invested you know time and material for you on behalf of you, the client in developing assets, maybe even deploying some ads and it doesn't work because there is just not a pain big enough to convert it to create the behavior that you needed to happen in the app. And that that happens it's not common but it happens. So that's one aspect the other aspect is you're running the ads and everything's working really well and then all of a sudden it stops. The performance tanks or something else and that can be messaging all of a sudden like we're off brand we've we've been iterating on the same concept for too long we haven't really been looking for disruptive sort of creative innovation. We've been just consistently doing the same because that's been working so just keep on doing that. And I think that and that comes down to complacency. I wouldn't want to say that we are that but you know we we operate in zones of comfort I think oftentimes with clients like they they want to take risks but not too big. So sometimes not taking the big risks is the biggest risk I think so that's the other aspect and then because of the landscape today competition can be quite fierce. It's easier to deploy an app than ever so if you've got a phenomenal app we saw this with GLP1 apps that was like a from no GLP1 app so the OSMP apps.

SPEAKER_00 32:36

What's the purpose of a GLP one app to just track the timing?

SPEAKER_02 32:40

Yes. And yeah absolutely exploded and from two aspects exploded in user growth and revenue growth. And because you can track this revenue growth through tools a lot of app studios out there are looking at the trends and looking what what are the apps that are easy to replicate and sort of launch and monetize and with AI development tools today and with AI insight engines today you can get that insight very quick. And we saw that like apps that had become really good at what they did they did got copied very quickly and if this initial product did a very good job but they didn't come from a product background let's say so the UX wasn't optimal the branding wasn't perfect or the storytelling wasn't as good as the others the other brands were just taking over because in the end it's loyalty is kind of a thermal in that space right so I think that's one thing. It's um like competition can be really bad. If you're not protective and keeping your eyes open and investing in like being category leader and I think that's like the other aspect of what we're trying to do is we'll help you grow but we'll also get you to a place where hopefully you're a category leader forever and can keep that.

SPEAKER_00 33:57

Same in the D2C space it's people are vultures one one thing takes off and everybody's on it. Have you ever had to tell a founder, I'm sure you have and how does this go, if you have, that you don't think that their idea is going to work in the market or isn't going to be suitable as a product for you to work with.

SPEAKER_02 34:18

Yeah it's this is maybe the the most challenging thing I I guess also from my personal point of view I don't think it's a founder potential issue. It's just like we all want to create something. I think we are founders are probably just have a higher found the definition of founders is probably just a human who has a very low sort of fear level of trying something new and then have an idea and spend quite a long time figuring out that it should work and then they come to me and maybe I have an instant sort of thought that I'm not sure about this. But I would not want my bias because I have been wrong so many times about what would work or what would not work that I don't think I would want to be the person at the first instance to tell the founder that maybe just that business, just that ping that you're trying to solve maybe it's not big enough. You know, 20 something years ago I had this idea and I told my sister about it and she's like no one is ever going to share photos online with people they do not know. And you know today she's out there showing photos to people she don't know to sell her products. So I think you know and she's very clever she she went to school like different to me she went to university she's got like things degrees so when she said that I was like oh it's a bit tough. And so similar today I talked to someone and they're like oh I've built this you know super complex thing and I have no idea what it is and I try to imagine the customer journey I try to imagine the pain and can't really smell it or taste it or size it but no I I don't think I would tell someone in the first instance what I typically would do is go back to them and say what's the least amount of effort that you need to deploy to validate that someone would find this valuable and that's what typically how I would tell to myself as well it's like oh I've got this idea okay what's the least amount of effort you can do Sam to get this validated before you spend a weekend where you could have spent with your family or work late evenings. And and so I would give the same to a founder who comes to me. Then the other aspect is you you might say that at after they've done that and they come back with the data and they say well I tried to do it no one wanted it but I think they are wrong. At that point I might be a little bit more sort of informed and might you know list some products in their space that haven't made it and then sort of say why would you be different? Vertical video entertainment is one that you know was made a few years ago did not work out cubic I think it was called massive investment and now that format is absolutely exploding. So it's also timing. So that's the other aspect I don't want to tell someone that you're ahead or before you know or too late. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

You've kept curve very niche down into into app growth and how important do you think niche specialization is in agency now but coming into the future as well I think it's even more important.

SPEAKER_02 37:18

And I would say if if I was if I had to like what am I investing in now it is even more app related things um even more specific app solutions. And um as an example I have some sister engagement sister company engagements that are doing kind of even more deep technology in mobile app space um trying to solve problems that have been around for 14 years and not been solved. And then in the creative solutions framework similar because we're so exposed to it I can build an insight engine for app growth better than an insight engine for web going into app because there are just so many specificness things that me and the team are exposed to so I'm I'm going even I'm doubling down on it and you know and taking a bet that this market will see a similar explosion that websites saw in the sort of early days of Shopify we went from about 150 million websites to two billion in a in a period of five to ten years I think it was the the change in the market was the ability to deploy a website became so easy. And today the ability to deploy an app is so easy. So I think we're probably gonna experience a exponential growth in the number of apps hitting the market and I want to make sure I have the tools and the solutions to cater for this audience.

SPEAKER_00 38:44

The growth curve yeah yeah there you go you're also the co-founder of a couple of different app solutions aren't you like tap? Yeah and so you're creating an ecosystem of of different things around around apps. Can you talk a bit on tap?

SPEAKER_02 38:58

Yeah so how how would I talk about the curiosity is massive in my head um and it's it's like becomes a storyteller in inside of me which is like okay you've got this now this thing and then why is no one fixing this and let's get to the source why is no one fixing this like no no but why really is no one fixing this and then it comes down to maybe no one spotted it then going back to what's the least amount of effort I can go into to validate that that's the case. And uh so I tried to do that. And we tap that was pretty much it. For years a good friend of mine um incredible entrepreneur he's um sold several companies and sold the same company several times for one of the engagements he came to me and it's a parenting app and he's like I want to run affiliate marketing for mobile I don't I don't want to do more meta ads. I want more of our growth to come from the users. And we started looking at it and you can use web affiliate solutions for it but they break because they don't integrate properly with again it gets very technical the MMPs so the mobile measuring partners which is effectively the the pixel that stitches together the traffic so the journey is broken so you can run it but it's very technical you need to have put a lot of engineering effort into it. And in the end it most likely won't work perfectly. You can use a code but whatever it just doesn't work. This is about two years ago so about two years ago I talked to a developer friend of mine who is very technical and very um yeah he's patented so he he understands uh software and technology in in its core and he came about and said well let's try to find out the least amount of tech to to validate that we could do it what do we want to do? Well build a system that could enable any app to become an affiliate or referral partner. So just like you run an in Shopify app, you plug into impact.com or Tapfluent or whatever, putting your credit card details and then every month it pays out to the influencers uh the yeah to the partners or whatever so we we went we went around and tried it and we managed to do it um on a sort of proof of concept very early stage and then you know how do you how do you build something you create more curiosity in more people and um we'd managed to do that and now it's uh imminently a standalone tool to enable apps to build and launch an affiliate solution plug in a card your users can become your own sort of affiliate engine or you plug it into an affiliate marketplace and you have publishers across the world that can start monetizing their content. And yeah it's working and it's uh it's uh it's a very sort of incredibly niche technology solution um but because it is from day one he got qualified leads from the landing pages I built for him and the team the sales team are getting qualified leads every day for exactly that specific search term so what's an affiliate solution for mobile that works and then so far tap is the one and it's sort of a blue ocean and maybe now less so but um yeah it's uh it's exciting and that's again goes back to curiosity why is no one doing that go to the origin go to the source of it's like maybe it's just complacency maybe it's just impact.com is so have hap happy with the web and the infrastructure they have and the revenue generation and looking at mobile it's not going to be that big so double down on web so I think that's the the opportunity is the the gap from existing brands not investing in disruptive innovation and then being able to disrupt it before hopefully they get into the ocean.

SPEAKER_00 42:29

Are there any other kind of ecosystem based projects you're working on?

SPEAKER_02 42:32

Yeah so I mean I think that's been going back to the Foucacia and Lasagna analogy is like what are we what are what am I and what is the team exposed to every day that no one is trying to solve and that is you know that's the essence of entrepreneurship is it's like what's the problem out there? What's the pain out there that no one is trying to provide a remedy for and so in my space in the mobile app space we're doing a lot of that so doing a lot of agentic solutions for app growth. I can't name them yet because they're coming out more a Q3 anything that's related to an app that can help an app grow or monetize or scale in any shape or form we we want to make sure that we provide the solution for it or can offer it through um you know expert insights.

SPEAKER_00 43:27

How did you steer away from the opportunity of developing apps yourself internally?

SPEAKER_02 43:35

Yeah I'm I'm thinking a lot about this a lot of people say if you have all this insight why don't you build your own apps? And I and I think it's not where my curiosity is my curiosity is helping app founders grow, helping new ideas come to market and like the biggest obsession is seeing that little idea go from a founder to 10 people to 100 people. And then the users of that app like one of my favorite Clients, on and off clients, they do mortgage for first-time buyers. It's it's such an incredible feeling. I don't know, you know, to become a house owner and get the key, probably one of the most fulfilling feelings in your life as a couple or an individual. And these guys are solving that. The company is doing really well. It's growing, growing, growing, but it's also growing its customer base. And the customer base is growing, growing, growing. They get a house, they can build a family. And I think that's really what drives me. And I think, you know, if I was to build apps and launch them, I wouldn't have time to spend it on figuring out what's the best way to clients to grow and scale. Um and I think and I admire companies that do it really well, like uh Bending Spoons. I don't know if you know this guy, a couple of Italian guys, absolutely geniuses. You know, they've they've bought and improved monetization of apps that you thought, you know, had um had uh gone. And they specialize in that. But it's not it's not where my my passions are at. Um you know, my our ideal future is working with more enterprise-sized apps that are looking to, you know, maintain their category leader position or launch new products that can take up new categories. That's our that's our sort of holy grail. Success is the ultimate charity, that's how I feel. So if I can help more success in the world, then that's like the most charitable effort I can do.

SPEAKER_00 45:25

You must also get because your content is, as you say, more focused to people who are in those early stages. You must get a lot of people asking you to develop their apps as an agency. And have you never been tempted to introduce development onto the service debt, and how did you stay focused if not?

SPEAKER_02 45:43

No. And um and having built apps um in the early days, and sort of the thing that we did with our early family office was we built we were building apps. I think it's um it's such a complex skill set. And even today with you know AI vibe coding tools and whatnot, you still need to, you know, understand the platforms really, really well. And again, it's not directly direct uh correlated to growth. Um the app building of like the the building of an app doesn't necessarily, is not the necessarily the tool that grows it. You can have product-led growth, fantastic viral loops and all of this stuff, but the app, the thing that grows it is creative strategy, is the team is activating it. And again, that's where I'm sort of passionate about and and uh curious. Um and in the app development space, I think we've helped a few clients introduce them to developers and we worked with a few development agencies instead. I think that's the better way.

SPEAKER_00 46:44

Do you think it's um a handicap for agencies taking over too much control of the entire solution because the responsibility of its success then leans even more entirely on the agency?

SPEAKER_02 46:56

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think so far I haven't seen I mean or do it to that point. I think a game developer is effectively that. A good game developer builds and growths apps. But they're quite low complexity, sort of if it's a hyper-casual game, quite low complexity app behavior you need to generate, quite high first session conversion. Digitally, you can have the same platform providing several different app versions, so different app titles, but pretty much the same technology. I think maybe that's what happens. Like if you become an agency that builds app and grows them, then you probably end up becoming an app studio. I don't know. I'm just talking like uh hypothetically. The few times I've been tempted to help build apps, it's always become this bottleneck of, oh, now we need a project manager to do to do tech project management, which is totally different. You know, sprints and all of that stuff. So I I I I do think it's it's dilution of focus will make you less effective on on both. So I think if you're really into building apps and rather work with a growth agency that really understands what could improve the behavior in the app, and then have that kind of a fine line. But I think with with me and and and the different entities I'm in uh sort of supporting when it comes to more development led, I always tell I'm growth, your platform, your, you know, your your the technology. They are they are different. They there's a some of them are below ground, they're roots and they're sort of infrastructure, and they need to have all these different ecosystems to work with them. The other part is above ground, and it's air and it's raining and it's wind, and whatnot, it's seasons, and and that's where I think marketing is at. It's like it's two different elements, and I'm above. I'm in I'm in the air. I'm exposed to all these elements. I think development and software is in another part. And I think they should live together and they should work together, but I don't necessarily think they need to be the same.

SPEAKER_00 49:00

You also sacrifice the benefit of fruitful strategic partnerships with other agencies and referral network.

SPEAKER_02 49:07

Aaron Powell 100%. And I think that's the much more effective way of building those, forging those relationships.

SPEAKER_00 49:13

I'm curious to know how you're thinking about AI and the impact of AI on the industry in general. You clearly are an advocate because you're building a genetic solutions to your mission. So how are you thinking about AI's impact on the industry over the next five years?

SPEAKER_02 49:30

I mean I think long and hard about this. I think there's a few aspects to it. There's a philosophical question: what are we? Like what is human intellect and human ideas and what is what is truly defensible human? That question I think will be increasingly uh relevant. I think ontology as a subject in university is probably gonna skyrocket. Like going back to Spinoza and these guys, like people are really gonna figure out what the hell makes us different. Like what is ideas and what is inherently human. I think that's going to happen. So a lot of that conversation is gonna be there. I think business wise, I think every big innovation has this kind of doom and gloom. Um, I go back to uh another story I tell quite a lot of the team members as well, which is uh my um my partners, um, her granddad was an architect, and he used to tell me that, you know, the biggest f scare to the architect uh business was the Cerox machine because an architect practice used to be, you know, a few architects and then a massive building with other architects drawing copies of the plans because you didn't have a copying machine. In Came with a Cerox machine, and nine floors of the building were empty and replaced by a Cerox machine. That didn't create, that didn't eliminate architects. That just allowed more architects to specialize in more things. Um and I thought we I think we got less generalists and we got more specialists. And I think this is what happens in any and every technical innovation, we get more specialists. And I don't think we can comprehend the number of specialists that are about to come to market. So going to my industry in the app marketing space, we need to be even more specialized in it. We need to make sure that we are the specialist in every aspect of it, or at least define which ones we want to be specialist in and which we don't want to be specialists in. So I think that's the only change, is we have to become even more specialized. Economical growth engine, you know, Keynes and all these guys, have always been productivity is always improved with our ability to specialize. And I think now that will probably exponentially increase. I think in the short term it will create a lot of confusion. And, you know, a lot of companies will just go like, oh, chat GPT can do that. Until they figure out it can't, because it's old data trying to reproduce something for the future. It can't. Um, we still need human intellect and humans' ability to specialize and really understand something just before it happens. And um so as a company, I'm all over it and was super into it and went deep into it when it started coming out and vibe coding on the weekends with my son, you know, new games so that he can have fun building like he he loves flags, um completely consumed by flags. So we built a lovable app for him where he can practice his flag skills, and that can be released on the App Store tomorrow so he can share it with his friends, and then you know, there's a flag app community there. Like that is what I mean. I think I think everything will be built. That doesn't necessarily mean a lot of good things will be built, just like music. There's a hundred thousand tracks uploaded to Spotify every day. Less than 8% of those will ever have more than a thousand streams. That doesn't mean that it's useless to the 92,000 tracks that don't get any streams, that they are useless. That's not the case. Some of them are probably pretty amazing. It's just we need volume. And I think, you know, in order to have a good idea, you need many. In order for humanity to have success in the future, what's the best idea? Many. And I think now we will be able to deploy more ideas than ever. Which ones will work? You know, who knows? Um, but I think there will be more of them. There will be more specialized versions of them. And what we thought was niche 10 years ago, today is very different. And I think in 10 years, a niche will be, you know, we can't even comprehend what the niche is today, what are it going to be in 10 years.

SPEAKER_00 53:35

Do you think AOI facilitates whilst specialism is the answer for coming out on top, it facilitates generalism though.

SPEAKER_02 53:43

And and I think that's what this immediate thing is. It's like, again, going back to the dot-com boom. You know, what's the first thing people what the first thing men did when they came to a laptop and like you can Google anything, you can find anything online. What are you gonna search for? Pamela Anderson. That was the one thing. Like the the number of search for Pamela Anderson compared to like uh, you know, law of physics or whatever. It's like they were there in front of it that didn't have the problem, they didn't have the pain, they didn't know what they were gonna do. Uh Pamela Anderson. Because she was, you know, on TV, Baywatch, and whatnot. She was just top of mind. And I think this is us. Like, we are exposed to something, we have no idea what to do with it. We are typing in Pamela Anderson to ChatGPT. That's what I think. We have availability heuristics. We only know what we know, that's what we're putting into it, that's what we're getting out. So, in similar ways, it's like we are still to see the YouTube evolution of the dot-com boom. Like that took what, 10 years before you had YouTube and 15? And similar here, it's like we're we're miles away from our ability to understand what we can do with it. So, what we're doing, we're replicating. We're replicating what was there, we're getting general information, we present it to people. It's like you put two bullet points in, write an email, out comes the 16, you know, paragraph long email. Someone puts that into fixer and gets two bullet points back out. I think we're in that phase. We're like, it's amazing, it can do these things because we think that's what it should do. Because we don't know yet what it could do, because we're only operating with what we know. And I think that's we're the innovation is still to come, I think. So that's why I think like, yeah, it's general, because it's old knowledge. It won't be old knowledge. We will consume from it in a year or two. We will try to figure out like the web two. What's the web two of of AI? I I don't know yet. But um, it will be fundamentally different to what we think it is today.

SPEAKER_00 55:40

Aaron Powell Do you think it's a dramatic threat to your client base who maybe not the guys that have already got a significant business who uh who have an app which is uh you know it's an amplifier rather than uh than a sole business vertical in the sense that AI will be a threat to software because of the ability to replicate and duplicate.

SPEAKER_02 56:01

Aaron Powell I think is AI a threat to software. I think it's it's it's a threat to the way we build software today, yeah. But that's only because we that's the way we think we have to do things, because that's how we've always done it. And you know, back in the days we used to do software in a different way, and then Swift came, and a lot of C developers was like, oh, my days is terrible, and this is going to cause unemployment. Whatnot? I think we we are just uncomfortable with the new way of we have to do something. The new way we have to do it now is massively different than the incumbent way of doing it. So I think that's the first thing. Soft, it won't kill software. We'll still need more software, and it'll probably just accelerate the number of iterations of software that we build by thousands. And the software developers I know that have become really deep in this, they just do more and build more towards where they want the technical solution to go. And I think that's the thing, right? Like you can iterate, you can copy, and that's a big threat to clients. The opportunity. I think this is what I would say. If if you're a client that your app is very easy to copy and duplicate and clone, and you haven't built a community, build a community. I think the only thing that would be defensible in the future as a brand is your ability to have a community of humans. And I think you know, that's that's the defensibility for someone can clone your product, yeah, but they can't clone your human interaction, your brand, the defensibility you're built up by, you know, your consumers and your community. So if you haven't done it already, put all your effort in the next six to twelve months in figuring out how you can translate your engagement into community. Because that's the one thing that is very, well, practically impossible to duplicate. People are very unlikely to leave one type of community, one kind of you know, tribe for another, unless there's like a significant reason to do it.

SPEAKER_00 57:50

What are you doing in that regard?

SPEAKER_02 57:51

This is a good question. Um not enough, if if you if I have to be honest. And I think that's my i what what if someone kept me up at night is like how do I ensure that I build a community around the services, products, and things that we want to do in the future? And the answer is not enough. Um so that's also something I'm looking at. Like that's a main key investment area in the future is making sure that we have that. And um, that's not like a Discord channel. I I don't know what it is yet, but it's definitely something else.

SPEAKER_00 58:27

Nice. What is next for curve and for tap?

SPEAKER_02 58:30

Yeah, so for curve, curve is my my my uh my full-time uh engagement. Uh and I think the the thing that we're working very long and hard on, and the thing that we're scaling the team in is in engineering. And um I don't want to call it like that. We we call it platform, but it is like engineering a platform using AI, agentic workflows to improve the delivery of things, but also hopefully in the future, the experience for our customers and the community of that. So I think we're building platform uh and investing a lot in platform with a view of hopefully building an operating system for app growth. That's we're already doing it as humans. We're already offering our clients an operating system for how they grow their apps. The next iteration of that like would probably be technical.

SPEAKER_00 59:23

It's a really interesting topic. It feels like every intelligent agency owner I speak to at the moment, or at least the majority of such, are building some form of an operating system, some kind of a platform as such. And uh it's like the the age order we always hear like as an agency, don't get tempted to pivot into SaaS because of SAS, but it's like you know, in a in a round and about way, we're almost creating a new model. It's like software with a service. Yeah. And uh I think that's quite interesting that most if not all great modern agencies at least are moving in that direction at the moment. And that is that super niche specialization surrounding a specific like platform-based solution. So that's going to be quite interesting to see where that goes.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:08

100%. Uh I'm keeping my ears on the ground and looking like at the horizon and seeing um I'm seeing it in legal and Legora, I think. I mean they've never they were never a service agency, but I think what they've done to the legal profession is profound and very useful, but also very scalable and financially very effective.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:29

Do you do you think though that it naturally is going to drive price down across market?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:33

I think it depends where value is. And uh I think agencies have always had a issue, not an issue, the challenge with aligning themselves with the value they're generating. And unfortunately, that is never fair. Either it's, you know, you're trying and you're trying to capture a bigger part of the value, or you're getting pushed into having a smaller part of the value of what you're generating. So I think that's the main issue with with an agency model is you're never truly aligned with the value you're generating. And if you are, you know, you smashed it, and I would love to meet you. Um but um I think yeah, so that that's that's like the main opportunity, I think. So I think the prices of a service will probably change, if I had to answer it. I don't know if it will go down, it will change. And hopefully it will be moved in the direction of, but we're unlocking the value in a different way or unlocking the value in a different capacity. And uh in comparison, like meta-ads won't go down. Like people will still spend a lot on meta-ads to get the exposure in front of the right customer to hopefully drive the conversion of behavior they want to see in their product. So, how does an agency compete with that? And I think that's going to be the thing. How can we drive more sort of successful outcomes for clients and make sure that the value is aligned with those conversions? I think that's where we're experimenting or where we where we're thinking maybe the future model is. That doesn't necessarily mean that cost will go down or revenue per client will go down. If you can unlock more value, I think it could be the opposite.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:10

The client if you're directly tied to client growth or incentivized by a performance deal. But I think the way I see it is if if meta is I mean, meta has now just become very algorithmic. It's it's it's very easy to within reason once you've been working on an account for a decent amount of time, run it by the numbers per se, and you've got the benchmarks across all of your other clients in similar verticals and you can an automated media buying piece I think is really, really close. You could do it now. If someone really intelligent, really focused on it, we're we're we're we're months away from that, really. At that point, the services within themselves become less valuable. Yeah. So I suppose then it's the agencies that are directly tied to revenue growth or the goal outcome from an incentive perspective, probably won't see that decrease. But I I can't I struggle to see a world where services themselves won't see a a decrease in price value.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:06

It might be. Um especially the services tied to what will be automated. I think services that can stand out is the ones that creates a point of difference. And I think that's like going back to what we I think you talked about earlier was like creative and creative solutions and creative strategy. What happens in the architect firm when everyone was made, you know, made redundant on those four floors by just doing copies, well, they all have time to start thinking about how could we actually innovate in public housing, in whatever. So I think a lot of the creative solutions didn't have enough time and uh investment because the ad buying took such a big scope of the retainer or the fee. If you put the same amount of resources into creative ideation, creative strategy, creative thinking about how to create a story on Instagram that is 15 seconds long that captures a bigger part of the attention than a competitor, I think that's going to have a disproportionate value then. So I think that's where you need to, where I think the value will move. So yeah, we will. You won't be able to have the same kind of retainer for managing meta-ads when most of it is done by an algorithm. But what else could be done on meta, well, you'd still need to improve your creatives. And the more advertisers that come onto the platform, today it's easier to do creative iterations because you can generate outputs using AI in ways that you could never have done before. So you can run more campaigns faster with a lower cost per creative iteration, but you still need to measure it. You still need to understand does it generate the downstream event, the behavior that you we wanted it to do? And going back to human defensibility, so far I've not seen agentic tools that can understand value for customers in the same way as a good creative strategist can do.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:03

Is that not a problem of just more data?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:05

Yeah, I don't know if it so I've had this conversation a few times, which is uh data-led, data driven. And I and I I see that like I see the I see the value of it to understand if something is performing. But the only way I see something performing is if it wasn't informed by data, but if it was informed by someone taking a wild idea, translating it into some asset, a video or whatever. Like that generates attraction, that generates performance. We can then use data to tell where does that come from. It's like a fire, and then you have like the fire engines coming there, like they can tell you where the fire is, but they cannot start it. I think that's the the the main thing is there will be more, there will be a sort of dilution of ideas, but someone's gonna stand out, someone's gonna create something that is groundbreaking compared to someone else. That's what I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:56

Pure creative genius, like a genuine creative genius of. one of the most valuable skills in the marketing. And we're seeing a lot of we I think we'd spoke off camera about creative strategy and that creative strategist role just it used to be that the media bar is one of the the most well paid team members in the delivery team and now that is completely flipped and creative strategists are a scarce resource that us agency owners fight for and trade like AI engineers in the AI world. Yeah yeah and and quickly becoming that. I think we'll probably see a rise of of people that go freelance on creative strategy and just work on brands dedicated. It's quite a it's going to be interesting to watch that.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:34

And it's the it's the I see like the um the ability to transcend what's obvious and kind of take a bet and go like this is a completely new thing that I've seen and experimented with. Let's put that into the 30, 40 creatives running and testing. And because you can run more experiments, produce them at lower cost, you can put more effort into that creative strategy. So I think that's you'll see more creatives in the platform, pulling the data. Like head of creative like creative director at Curve, you know, she's increasingly wanting to be in the tools to understand the data. And maybe two years ago he was outside of that getting you know presentations and talking to the team. Now she wants to be in there. So I think the transition is if you don't need a media buyer but you need a creative strategy is to be connected to the media that you're buying then there needs to be a technical skill transformation as well to understand this. I think that's probably what we're seeing. And that's where we're I I would say investing most of our time and energy is to make sure that that loop is shortened. Like the the learning loop is yeah it's more instant than it used to be. Learning loop in terms of what we can communicate back to the human side of the team because that still has been a big competitive advantage.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:46

Have you observed that bringing new people into the team it's people are increasingly relying on AI for their source of truth rather than trusting their own intuition.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:56

For the wrong reason sometimes I think if you use AI as the creative strategies and you're the creative strategist then you're probably not right for us. If you use AI as a way of translating your 16 ideas into something visible then you're in the right place. In the end you still need to to get the version that you're presenting to the world to test to go through a lot of you know you need to there needs to be an element of editing an element of review an element of like a smell test. Like you need to make sure like yeah you know it doesn't have three arms let's go with it. If if you're leaning all on AI then that's what everyone will do then you'll be much the same and um and you'll you won't stand out and your performance won't uh your ads won't convert so your ad dollars will tank and so I think in the end it's like yeah they they definitely lean it need to lean into AI and if you're not using AI tools and solutions today to get you to a place of sort of um delivery then you you probably need to upskill yourself a lot um but don't deliver AI because that's not part of the the job I think I think um you deliver something that you're proud of something you would put on the wall um and typically that needs some kind of editing some kind of iteration um post AI.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:22

For the majority of people that watch this are established agencies but there are a subsection of the audience that are new starters maybe you're working in jobs in agencies that actually want to get into the space like now we're kind of in the future somewhat it can feel overwhelming for people that are wanting to get in. If you were to start again today and to speak to that person who was looking to get started in the industry what would you do differently today to what you did when you originally launched curve?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:52

For someone to start their own thing. I think I I I was quite set that this was going to be the way that we were going to go we were going to stay in the app space we were going to go down this route. I think if you're if you're not conf confident in where you're gonna go if you're not sure where you're gonna specialize then I would probably play around with that first to figure out what what excites you about this industry. An agency's role is typically to help another company grow. So what companies are you you know excited about growing is it finance or whatever because you need to really understand that and I think increasingly you need to be an expert at it um like we don't do games we don't do I don't know we do a lot of categories of apps we don't touch. And I think you know that that that's I think that's important. So if if I was to go in today I would probably take a little bit step back and play around a little bit more before I jumped into it and um sort of said okay crypto apps I'm not gonna work with because they're too complex or this these industries are not I'm not aligned with them. So it's not going to work. Because in the end you're gonna be working well hopefully eight hours a day but sometimes unfortunately more with clients and their products and you need to be able to grow them. So if you don't understand them maybe even feel for like have an affinity with their industry then I don't think you're gonna do very well um or at least you're gonna be burnt out doing you know fulfilling someone's ideas that you don't necessarily align with value wise. I think that's maybe one thing like make sure that you have some kind of value alignment with what where you think you're going. And then um yeah who are you going to do it with um I think we're you know in a the agency world of tomorrow would look very different because of the tools that will be available to you. So like pick the tools that can help you you know scale to the first I don't know five, six clients without maybe having to have too many other people involved. And um I think that's the opportunity today like compared to maybe a few years ago that you can probably get to a quite reasonable scale without having to add too many complex layers of you know financing or whatever it might be. Yeah and and don't jump into tools just because someone is raving about it on LinkedIn or whatever. Like test them test a lot of them and go through them and and see if they actually serve the purpose that is the library where your clients need to see the value. That's that's probably something I would yeah if I had to do it today.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:25

Are you working towards an exit?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:27

Yeah I think um always I think if you're not building a business that could be sold you're not building a business. My auntie once said uh you know she she's like we should build a business that we would want to buy that's like that's the essence right like you should build a business that you want to buy then you will sell it very easily and I think that's that's like that's what we're doing. We're building a really nice smooth engine for nominal people in the in in the company like anyone and every one of them could come and stay on my sofa whenever. And I think like that's the the other aspect like these are people you'll spend more time when fortunately than you do with your family and kids. So make sure that they're really the people that you want to support and and stay with. And uh yeah and I think that's going back to build the company that you would want to buy it's like I'd love to own this business. And hopefully one day someone else will see the value of that and will buy it. I think that's that's the essence of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:25

I've got some rapid fire questions for you. Go for it. One thing that every agency owner should stop doing today.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:30

Ooh what a great question yeah I think if you're an agency owner today you really need to s to not schmooth your clients like you need to break it to them hard if they're being I I think my biggest regret is I haven't told enough founders and and clients your ideas will not stick creatively you need to take these bets and you need to and I think as an age you need to fight for your for your right like you're the you're you're uh you're the band they came to you make sure that you play the music and not them because otherwise I think you're you end up being bland. Agree one brand or company that you'd love to work with that you haven't ooh amazing I think that the I think this kind of Airbnb is like one of these guys which like I just want to see how they do it internally they've built this incredible platform that has some kind of emotional connection to people for a short term rental. No one else managed to do it. Several people have tried and I think that's like I'd love to just understand the essence of the culture because I think their culture is coming out onto the product and onto the experience. I think the team and me were really aligned with like purpose built companies um you know doing things um I've never worked with um virgin companies but I've always been quite close to it. I'd love to um see how how they do that. It's like a culture of ideas that translates into products that used by millions of people and benefits them a lot. Love to see that. I think these kind of businesses are driven by culture that comes through the product. I think that's like how I'd love to be able to do that. Go back to the community like they've built communities around their product that will not leave. They're there to stay and uh yeah I'd love to understand that.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:22

One book that every agency owner should read.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:24

Ooh there's a new one by Niryal as a fantastic writer. Oh I can't remember the name now belief something belief Niryal belief. Google it um it taps into um it's more about personal development he's a um um behavioral psychologist but like anything he does it's very commercial and you can apply it to your strategies and to your customer acquisition strategies. It talks about limiting beliefs um about how belief drives human interaction and as a marketer our job is to create belief in an increasingly short amount of time and that belief should hopefully convert to something quite meaningful for our clients so understanding what can help reduce the time for someone to believe in your product I think that's a believing what you're trying to sell them. So that book Nirial belief I'll I'll send you the link nice it's it's very good it's like an end-to-end lots of notes in the book. One app that everyone should download Sweatcoin it's my longest serving client I've had the app since the day I talked to the CEO and it was quite an interesting call. It's the most simple app pays you to walk generate some coins get some vouchers in there it's addictive and I'm not saying this because it's my client I'm truly saying because it's like it's an it's such a good product in so many ways and it will improve your health because you will walk a little bit more and the more we walk the better it is. How do they monetize that?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:56

Well in very many clever ways it's a free app though yeah free app free app yeah interesting and finally one thing that you wish you learned earlier as a founder.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:10

This is this clear day I remember the smell of the weather is under some trees outside of my restaurant I just opened a second one or cafe just opened my second one and this guy came up to me and he's and I was 20 combo 25 26 came up to me and he looked at me and he came from a wealthy family of a steel family Sweden has a lot of steel so like a steel family well off you know from wealth really lovely guy and he took took me on my shoulder and said Sam such an exciting time for you now it's all going to be about transitioning into management. And I was so proud that didn't I didn't I didn't understand what he meant. It is my first business that I sort of built to some some scale that I needed to figure out management. And I think he was offering mentorship I think if I asked him what does he mean he would have told me and it would have saved me five years of my life banging my head against the wall trying to figure out management. So the biggest regret being too proud to ask him what does that mean? And maybe in life the limiting belief of not being able to ask questions when we don't know the answer even though it might make us look a bit silly or the fear of being stupid that's like the biggest regret and like I should have asked him at that point what do you mean exactly by that question? What is it that you see that I don't know help me. And I look back at that moment many times and I'd be like I'm never doing that again. And I have never done that again.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:37

That would be a really lovely place for us to end but I but I now want to know what your biggest lesson is that you've taken from bringing in management and managing managers.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:46

Oh I it's this is um I I tend to read quite a lot about this and I'm never never very good at implementing it completely. But I I listen and I feel and then I worked with some incredible leaders and what I've learned is from incredible leaders is they are not very good managers. And they're not very good at hiring the best managers. I think they're just very good I have in my life so far been very good at hiring people who just won't give up and make sure and won't give up and they only want the best so they are relentless perfectionists who only want the best and then they realize that they have time capacity that don't have enough time. So then you say well get someone into your team and at that point that person who's such a perfectionist and don't you know don't want to mess up has to bring someone in and manage them and they don't necessarily want to manage and that is a fantastic manager. And like one of the best team members in in our company I I would say they are they don't know that they are an incredible manager. And I don't think I need to tell them I just think they should keep on doing what they're doing. And I haven't really given them much advice then whatever you're doing and whenever you get to a point of block it, hire someone I will support you. And if they need more people tell them how they should hire and just keep on doing what you're doing. Deliver excellent results work hard and don't give up so I think a good manager is someone who doesn't want to manage but also doesn't want to fail. But they have to deliver and they're kind of driven by delivering more. So by virtue they have to hire more people and they have to manage them and they work them hard and they work hard and and I think that's like the that's what I've understood. Then I think at one point at one scale and I've seen this happening especially if you get acquired by private equity or whatever then there is a different kind of management. Then you get a Bing consultancy comes in and they they'll apply some of their kind of management style. And and so far I've never seen that be significantly better. Maybe in the short term bottom line it's been like slight improvement in efficiency. But long term the vision has died or the quality of the output has died. So it's like a short short term sort of cost cutting or efficiency improvement but a long term vibe killer. And that vibe killer will kill the business like I've seen it many many times and and you know when you go back to it and you play it back it's like rather have a management structure that is built on like this gonna sound wrong because it's not it's not dysfunctional but like managers who doesn't really want to manage.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:30

Managers who are exceptional operators.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:32

And then just have culture built into them. And uh and that transpire through in this chain there's a vibe from the this side to the that side and it works. And as as long as it works, just leave it. Like I think that's um I think control is the biggest limiting factor as a manager. Like you don't need control if you hire the right people. You just need to make sure the vibe is there.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:04

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:05

Thank you.