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It's bitter pill time. My recommendation for someone looking to start or scale an agency in 2025 is: Don't. Running an agency is not for the faint of heart. At scale, the cashflow is great. Getting there is an absolutely miserable slog. I started with $300/mo clients, and unless you have a reputation or a couple of plum clients due to your connections, you're going to start at the bottom too. You're going to work with clients with bad businesses that don't work. You're going to eat endless amounts of shit. The plum clients, the ones that already have product market fit figured out and great operations? They won't work with you. Not until you prove yourself. There's very little loyalty to agencies. It's a what have you done for me lately business. You can crush it for a client for years, but all of a sudden you have a month where things don't go well, you're done. Loyalty exists, but it is the exception and not the rule. You scale them up and they bring in a new person to manage you? You're probably getting replaced by that new person's preferred agency even if you're still killing it. If performance is bad whether it is your fault or not, you're fired. If performance is great and they're scaling, they start balking at your invoices and want to renegotiate or fire you. Everybody is posting on twitter about how great they do work, how much better their clients performance is, and other agencies are always sniffing around your clients saying they can do a better job than you're doing. Hiring talent is brutal and costly. Half my team makes over $100,000 a year. You're always in danger of losing 20% or more of your revenue in any given month. Doesn't matter how good you are. Doesn't matter if every client is killing it. I'm happy that I've made escape velocity with my agency, and I make great money with a great team. We will scale a lot this year. But if you told me what it would take to get here 7 years ago, I would have done something else. There are much less stressful paths to making lots of money. Oh, and the multiples on agencies suck too, so when you want to sell you're not even going to get that much for it.

We all assume that hidden search terms waste money, but I wanted proof. So I analyzed $20 million in spend, 14 million clicks, across 933 campaigns to see for myself. Turns out they do and to a staggering degree! For every $1 in ads you buy, Google siphons $0.85 in forced inefficiency through hidden search terms. I'm firmly in the "this is not for privacy but for Google to sell low quality inventory" camp, and the rest of the data bears that out. Beyond the lower efficiency, we also saw CPCs that were 52% higher and CTRs that were 44% lower. It was a pretty herculean task getting all this research compiled, and I've written up all my findings in a blog post, which you can find in the first comment!

Biggest mistake as a business owner this year: bringing clients into slack. Time on comms with clients has increased 4x on average with no actual benefit. Just more talking and less time on accounts.

I hate the amount of competence that GA4 robbed from me. It's not even that I think it's a terrible platform, it's that it took thousands of hours of expertise and knowledge where I could do literally anything I wanted and replaced it with me having to Google answers for 90% of the capabilities that I had.

I voted for Zohran last week. I grew up in NYC. I went to one of the specialized high schools as he did. He wasn’t my first choice in the primary, but a few things can be true. 1. He seems like a good person who is willing to listen and change his positions. We’ve seen this on some YIMBY stuff. 2. He’s young. We need new blood in politics. We can’t keep electing people who don’t know how the internet works. 3. He genuinely loves New York and wants to solve problems. I think he’s wrong on things. He will be wrong on things and make mistakes. But he approaches politics from a position of loving the city. 4. So much of governance at the city level is caring about “small” things. Like improving the permitting for food carts so halal carts don’t have to rent them on the black market. That matters! Go vote tomorrow if you haven’t already and make sure you vote yes on props 2-4 to support more housing development.

I am going to be publishing some absolute bombshell data on Google Ads here soon. We've analyzed tens of millions of Google Ads spend, and we have hard data on performance that'll make your jaw hit the floor. I am absolutely astounded.

We are having hard conversations with clients around tariffs right now. We have a client who we helped to double last year. He was set to double again this year to a mid 8 figure business. He employs over 10 hardworking American citizens. He has some margin left over for himself to do very well, and he earns it. We talked today about trying to cut his revenue by 50% to increase his inventory runway because his business is not viable with COGS doubling. He’s heartbroken because he was growing rapidly, he is giving people good jobs, and he might not have a business in 6 months because nobody is going to pay 2x for the product. He can’t manufacture here. The price will be 10x. One component sourced here in the US is more than he sells the product for today. This is what tariffs do. They make everyone poorer. And they destroy businesses that support American jobs.

Oh look, more agency hate. If I were to say “DTC businesses almost always make shit products at insane markups to make up for being terrible operators” I would get a lot of shit. You call all agencies scammers though and you get attaboys. 🙄

Honestly, I feel like reporting is so stupid. Most people never even look at it, and it's just kind of a waste of time, but it is still expected that it is done.

Life has a way of working out if you give it a chance. 15 years ago I attempted suicide. I was living in a $425/mo room without direct access to a bathroom. I was 150 pounds because eating was a luxury. My second bout of homelessness started after I left the hospital. There were

Brand is live. Ads are live. We are officially cooking.

I fired an agency today. I made an analysis when I hired them on a projected ROI, it didn't work out the way I was hoping it would, and so we will no longer be working together. It happens. I don't think they're a scam. They weren't trying to rip me off. It just didn't work. There are no guarantees in this game. The entire reason we have outsized rewards as business owners is we're willing to take risks. Sometimes that means you lose money. I lost $18,000 in cash and probably another $20k in inefficient labor on this project. It happens. I learned some lessons that I can apply in the future. Some of y'all act like there's no risk and stomp around and throw a tantrum any time you lose money on a mistake YOU made. The vast majority of stuff isn't a scam. A lot of y'all are just too childish to own your mistakes.

And thus ends my shittiest week in probably 18 months. The good times are good. But then you have weeks where you have to fire an employee who is low performing despite many attempts to help them, and you lose a client because of that person's mistakes, which are your mistakes as well because the buck stops with you. We had a deal that felt like a lock fall through. I ate shit this entire week, and I am rewarded with more work trying to fix things and make a better hire next time. This is the price, and I choose to pay it every day when I get up and run this business the best I can. Mistakes were made but lessons were learned. And the company will be stronger and our work better because of it, but it doesn't make this week suck any less. It's not all glamor.

I voted for Zohran last week. I grew up in NYC. I went to one of the specialized high schools as he did. He wasn’t my first choice in the primary, but a few things can be true. 1. He seems like a good person who is willing to listen and change his positions. We’ve seen this on some YIMBY stuff. 2. He’s young. We need new blood in politics. We can’t keep electing people who don’t know how the internet works. 3. He genuinely loves New York and wants to solve problems. I think he’s wrong on things. He will be wrong on things and make mistakes. But he approaches politics from a position of loving the city. 4. So much of governance at the city level is caring about “small” things. Like improving the permitting for food carts so halal carts don’t have to rent them on the black market. That matters! Go vote tomorrow if you haven’t already and make sure you vote yes on props 2-4 to support more housing development.

Fashion Twitter, how we feeling about these loafers? These gonna be a summer staple or are they a little too old man?

It's bitter pill time. My recommendation for someone looking to start or scale an agency in 2025 is: Don't. Running an agency is not for the faint of heart. At scale, the cashflow is great. Getting there is an absolutely miserable slog. I started with $300/mo clients, and unless you have a reputation or a couple of plum clients due to your connections, you're going to start at the bottom too. You're going to work with clients with bad businesses that don't work. You're going to eat endless amounts of shit. The plum clients, the ones that already have product market fit figured out and great operations? They won't work with you. Not until you prove yourself. There's very little loyalty to agencies. It's a what have you done for me lately business. You can crush it for a client for years, but all of a sudden you have a month where things don't go well, you're done. Loyalty exists, but it is the exception and not the rule. You scale them up and they bring in a new person to manage you? You're probably getting replaced by that new person's preferred agency even if you're still killing it. If performance is bad whether it is your fault or not, you're fired. If performance is great and they're scaling, they start balking at your invoices and want to renegotiate or fire you. Everybody is posting on twitter about how great they do work, how much better their clients performance is, and other agencies are always sniffing around your clients saying they can do a better job than you're doing. Hiring talent is brutal and costly. Half my team makes over $100,000 a year. You're always in danger of losing 20% or more of your revenue in any given month. Doesn't matter how good you are. Doesn't matter if every client is killing it. I'm happy that I've made escape velocity with my agency, and I make great money with a great team. We will scale a lot this year. But if you told me what it would take to get here 7 years ago, I would have done something else. There are much less stressful paths to making lots of money. Oh, and the multiples on agencies suck too, so when you want to sell you're not even going to get that much for it.

I was going to make a cheeky 3.6 lessons post for my 36th birthday. But life sometimes has other plans. On Thursday I suffered a freak accident and shattered the bones in my upper arm requiring surgery. I also have a genetic condition that makes severe trauma like this life threatening. I am, frankly, lucky to be alive thanks to my girlfriend, assistant, and director of ops working tirelessly to make sure I made it to the right hospital and that the language barrier did not prevent proper care. I have a newfound appreciation for the insignificance of small inconveniences. I think the most important lesson is that your health can be taken away in an instant, and you never know when that will be. Value it above all else. And it’s going to force me to be better at delegation, since I only have 1 hand and will need to shoot lots of looms. 😂

Biggest mistake as a business owner this year: bringing clients into slack. Time on comms with clients has increased 4x on average with no actual benefit. Just more talking and less time on accounts.

Honestly, I feel like reporting is so stupid. Most people never even look at it, and it's just kind of a waste of time, but it is still expected that it is done.

We all assume that hidden search terms waste money, but I wanted proof. So I analyzed $20 million in spend, 14 million clicks, across 933 campaigns to see for myself. Turns out they do and to a staggering degree! For every $1 in ads you buy, Google siphons $0.85 in forced inefficiency through hidden search terms. I'm firmly in the "this is not for privacy but for Google to sell low quality inventory" camp, and the rest of the data bears that out. Beyond the lower efficiency, we also saw CPCs that were 52% higher and CTRs that were 44% lower. It was a pretty herculean task getting all this research compiled, and I've written up all my findings in a blog post, which you can find in the first comment!

I am going to be publishing some absolute bombshell data on Google Ads here soon. We've analyzed tens of millions of Google Ads spend, and we have hard data on performance that'll make your jaw hit the floor. I am absolutely astounded.

Life has a way of working out if you give it a chance. 15 years ago I attempted suicide. I was living in a $425/mo room without direct access to a bathroom. I was 150 pounds because eating was a luxury. My second bout of homelessness started after I left the hospital. There were

I hate the amount of competence that GA4 robbed from me. It's not even that I think it's a terrible platform, it's that it took thousands of hours of expertise and knowledge where I could do literally anything I wanted and replaced it with me having to Google answers for 90% of the capabilities that I had.

Got my first random hate mail for the brand. 😂

I haven't seen manual CPC outperform smart bidding for a nonbrand campaign in probably 5 years. Anyone here have any recent examples where it has/does?