Prashant Puri is co-founder of AdLift, a 120-person performance agency. Prashant tells us how he signed PayPal as a client in his first year of business, why he interviews 75 people before he makes a hire, why focus is key to agency success, and why he emphasizes empathy and humility as core values.
Prashant Puri is co-founder of AdLift, a 120-person performance agency. Prashant tells us how he signed PayPal as a client in his first year of business, why he interviews 75 people before he makes a hire, why focus is key to agency success, and why he emphasizes empathy and humility as core values.
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, a book by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't, a book by Simon Sinek
David Rodnitzky (David) (00:02): In this episode of Agentic Shift, we talked to Prashant Puri, Co-founder of AdLift, a 120-person performance agency. Prashant tells us how he signed PayPal as a client in his first year of business, why he interviews 75 people before he makes a hire, why focus is key to agency success, and why he emphasizes empathy and humility as core values. Enjoy the show.
Prashant, thank you for joining us today on Agentic Shift.
Prashant Puri(Prashant) (00:30): Thanks, David, for having me. Excited.
David (00:32): Yeah. It's great to talk to you. We have known each other for at least a decade. I think I know some of your founder story, but why don't you start out by telling us the founder story of AdLift, how it all came to be?
Prashant (00:43): So this was back in ‘09 is when AdLift started. But prior to that, I was running digital marketing for the likes of AT&T, Yahoo, eBay ran comparison shopping across three of the websites when comparison shopping was still okay with Google.
David (01:05): Until they did it themselves, you mean?
Prashant (01:06): And after spending a lot of time within SEO and search within the brand side, one of the missing elements that I noticed was a tighter focus on return on investment, on ROI. So this could also be because it was very, very early days with digital. So not a lot of experience out there, but it was more of comparing digital with radio or television or print. And hence the return on investment was being tracked, but not the way digital is being tracked today.
So the idea was to bring that to the table, working with brands. And I just always had that entrepreneurial streak in me. So although I did work with a number of F500 somewhere, in the back of mind, I was kind of when am I going to do my own thing? And the timing couldn't have been better because that time I started to consult also with a couple of startups. So I was like, Hey, this is what I love doing. And I want to keep doing this. And that's pretty much how AdLift came into being back in ’09.
David (02:13): So you said the timing was great, but 2009 actually was a time when the market was correcting. So explain why that was a good time to start your agency.
Prashant (02:23): Not with respect to the market, but more of having spent a number of years, close to eight years before starting AdLift with running SEO, search, for a lot of these companies. I started consulting, right. And consulting actually made me a little bit more confident of, Hey, I can scale this out. So the timing of getting consulting gigs at the same time of starting AdLift couldn’t have been at a better time. Had I not done the consulting back in that time, most likely I'd still be probably working with eBay or Yahoo in my comfort zone and not taking that plunge.
David (03:01): So you had some stable income basically that made you feel more confident to start something?
Prashant (03:08): That's right. Yeah, exactly.
David (03:10): It's still a pretty risky endeavor even to go from being a fulltime employee to a consultant. So how did you make that decision after working at all these big companies to take a leap at all, even into consulting?
Prashant (03:22): Like I said, I think it was more of doing my own thing. I think the pros and cons in any situation, and when it comes to working for big companies, some of pros are you are working with some of the smartest minds in the room. But the con is that you're pretty much limited to that specific role or vertical or category. So, for instance, if you're working on comparison shopping, you're basically working on SEO for the shopping vertical. If you're working for AT&T Interactive, it's more of like local search. This was pre-Yelp days. Then prior to that, I worked for Citysearch.
And so pretty much, it's very focused on that one thing whereas I think I was more inclined to getting experience across a wide range of verticals. I think that's where I was coming from. And then I won't shy away from this, basically being your boss. So writing your own pay check, however small or big it is, it comes with its own sense of satisfaction, and I wanted that sense of satisfaction. So I think that’s where I made the plunge.
David (04:30): I will say, actually, I gave you a weighted question about why 2009. And I actually think that starting an agency or running an agency during a down economic time is actually a great time to be an agency because companies cut back on fulltime employees and they want to save money and they find an agency or consultancy. So I started essentially the same time you did, and that's what I found. I found a lot of companies that were suddenly hunkering down for winter who are like, I can't afford to pay someone $120,000 a year, but I can pay someone $3,000 a month to do my management.
Prashant (05:04): Absolutely. And I think the proof of concepts are, we were very grateful to have PayPal sign up with us early on. So back in December, if my memory serves me correct, of 2009, or I think it was one year into AdLift. So it was probably 2010, we signed PayPal on as a proof of concept, and before that, we actually worked with a number of YCombinator startups, 500 startups and grew those relationships where PayPal was a turning key where an F500 actually trusted us, and we did a proof of concept. And then that became a 12-, 24-, 36- and 40-month agreement across not only North America, but LatAm and APAC. So I think that itself was within that 2009, 2010 time period when we were like, okay, we're onto something great.
David (05:55): Was that contract with PayPal the result of connections that you had made while at eBay? Or was there another way of getting in there?
Prashant (06:03): It was definitely connections from eBay because eBay had like an in-house SEO community. So we brainstorm, share stuff. Although I was more on the eBay side with comparison shopping, like shopping.com opinions, didn't work very closely with the folks at PayPal, but more of like eBay, Half.com, all of those, but it was eBay’s connect that got us a foot in the door to at least have the folks at PayPal listen to us and see what we can bring to the table.
David (06:36): I find the same thing happened to me, and probably our biggest client that we've ever had was the result of a friend of mine, actually from the SEO community going and getting a job at a big company and texting me saying, Hey, I think we could use some help. And I feel like a lot of times people think, oh, you must have been a genius salesperson or you must have had this compelling proprietary algorithm. And in a lot of cases, it's like, no, I had the trust of someone because I worked with them for years and they knew I was going to do a good job for them.
And a big company, normally, a company like eBay or PayPal wouldn't work with an agency with less than 500 people at it. But because of that trust, you were able to build something that was the catalyst for growing a much bigger agency.
Prashant (07:18): And I would say there were number of startups that we were referred to and we pitched and we won their business and that grew, but also I think connects really early become extremely critical because another example is we started to into 2011. So two years in, we started to work with Barnes & Noble, which again was a big feather in our cap where I worked with the person at shopping.com, and he went on to head SEO and digital at Barnes & Noble.
So he’s like, hey, Prashant, we’d love for you to help us here. It's a smaller team. So I think connects definitely early on help out, and we've always been bootstrapped from the get-go. So it’s pretty much been two founders without any external funding. So especially early on, it was imperative for us to go all guns blazing from our results and ROI perspective so that the referral and word-of-mouth spreads, but then client retention was pretty much top of mind. So once we were in, there's no way we were going to lose that client because we were like bootstrapped. And we wanted to let that be the way it is and grow organically with margins. So we made that call really early on, and I think kept us in good state.
David (08:35): Absolutely. It's a lot easier to grow an existing than to acquire a new client, basically.
Prashant (08:41): Absolutely.
David (08:42): Let's take a step back. And why don't you just tell everyone what AdLift does? We know that SEO is a part of it, but I think if I remember correctly, you're part people, part tech, if I'm not mistaken.
Prashant (08:53): Yeah. So with a performance marketing agency specializing in SEO and search marketing in North America, we also work extensively with the APAC region where we work on all things digital. So that's SEO, search, social, paid social, creative, but in North America, it's specific to SEO and search. And then we're basically 20, 25 people team here that's working with and has had the opportunity of working with right from players like I mentioned, PayPal, Airbnb, Shopify, Rakuten to startups like ThoughtSpot, Credit Sesame, [Ilstreet? 09:26], CoverHound, BlueJeans. So pretty wide range of experience is what we bring to the table.
And then early on, back in 2015, we found the need of content. And just with the impact of COVID that the need of content has catapulted because people are just spending a lot more time on their mobile devices. So content creation is the need of the app, not that it wasn't two years ago, but that surged. About 2015, we saw that coming, and pretty much it started as an initiative for helping grow SEO because SEO has a direct dependence on quality of content, the algorithm, which is now coming to being, but pretty much Google was emphasizing on quality versus article directory sites and just creating free stuff.
So we saw that on and we built out our own platform, which basically works closely with a number of publishers across different countries and us creating content, disseminating it across high-authority sites, thereby talking about the brands that we work with, which helps with domain rating, domain authority, all of that. So now we've taken that to non-editorial content, too. This could be infographics, GIFs, videos, all of that.
David (10:44): I think Google's algorithm makes sense from the perspective of quality is better than just a bunch of words on the page that seem to be about something but aren't.
Prashant (10:54): And David, I think we've seen that shift been in the industry for close to 17 years now where creditcard.com or cheapcreditcards.com where it pretty much that's all you needed to do was to get a domain and bunch of low quality links and you are one and two for pretty much all keywords. Fast forward now, 15, 16 years, the game's completely changed. So it's a good thing that waited. And I think today, 75%, 80% of the clients that we work with use the platform.
David (11:21): I will say, and this is a bit of a rant on my part, but I find that Google does a very poor job, especially with commercial intent phrases of filtering what is clearly paid for content or affiliate content from unique quality, independent content. And an example I'll give is you type in best, insert any commerce product, best ovens, best paint, best SaaS software. Of the 10 organic results that you see on Google, at least 8 of them are either affiliate links, almost always affiliate links or they're even a site that is owned by someone who's promoting their own content and pretends to talk about the best content of their other competitors, but ultimately try to steer you to buy from them.
Prashant (12:05): Yeah. I tend to agree here. So it could be promoting the affiliate network that has a direct correlation to their ad network. But I would also think about when you're searching for best oven or best refrigerator or TV, I think you're somewhere in the top two middle funnel, not exactly transactional from a user. So you want to actually consume content. Now we can absolutely argue is that content even worth consuming, but it's more content led. So yeah, there are article links and a bunch of ads all over the place, but was this showing them Panasonic’s landing page or LG’s landing page? I think the user wants to see content at that time in his or her consumer journey.
David (12:51): Yeah. I think it's gotten better. Fifteen years ago, if I typed in best refrigerator, I would get a page that said, “Are you looking for the best refrigerator? We have information about the best refrigerator. You can find information about the best refrigerator on our site refrigerator. That’s refrigerator.com.” It's gotten better, but I guess I'm too much inside baseball. As soon as I see a disclaimer that says we may be paid for some of these links, and I'm like, you are being paid for all these links and you rank them based on who gave you the most affiliate commission.
Prashant (13:20): Yeah, absolutely.
David (13:22): Rants over. Let me ask you going back to the early days of founding the company, if you could anything differently, what would you have done?
Prashant (13:31): To be honest, I think I wouldn’t have done anything differently. Have I made mistakes along the way? Might have, but those kind of helped us understand and build new products, themes, introspection, all of which wouldn’t have happened without stumbling, falling, and then getting back up and sprinting. I think I would have made pretty much the same mistakes again had I had to do it all over again because I strongly that when a person is in a specific situation, they don’t desperately make those mistakes. It’s part of the learning curve if you’re truly yourself. I think these were all, I would call them, helping me catapult and grow faster mistakes versus shit hitting the roof and whatever done. So if I was to go back to ’09, it’s going to be a similar journey.
David (14:22): Can you share like one mistake that even if you feel like you learned from it, but one mistake that did happen that you did correct?
Prashant (14:29): I think we were primarily focused on SEO for the most part and a little bit of search marketing, not a whole lot, but I think we could have entered the Facebook marketing in APAC or even search more aggressively than we did. If I was to call out one key learning was to be a little bit more aggressive in other digital marketing verticals. Having said that, it set us on a very strong foothold when it comes to SEO. We are an agency to reckon with across multiple geos. I always believe the ace of spades is better than being the several jacks of clubs, right?
When I look at agencies and when I’m also mentoring startups, you’ve got to figure out what your key pool is, whether it’s product or a service. And you have to be one or two, preferably one or two. But being four or five across six, seven verticals and having your fingers in multiple jars is not going to help you because you need to be one or two, because that helps open avenues for the services or products that you are maybe five or six in. So yeah, we could have gotten into the spin management side of services maybe earlier, but yeah.
David (15:52): Yeah. I always say, if you can't be number one in a category, create a category you can be number one in. So in that respect, it's better to focus and get really good at something than to try to be an expert at everything, which is impossible.
Prashant (16:04): Yeah, absolutely.
David (16:05): What are your challenges today? What are the things that keep you up at night?
Prashant (16:09): So I think a big challenge is we're pretty much in the service industry. So what we sell is expertise in specific verticals that we work with brands on, and that's pretty much people. So hiring is a challenge. And I think especially in our line of business, the last two years, finding good folks earlier, I would say, for every 50 or 75 resumes, we'd make one hire or maybe two. Now that's gone up to about 100, 110. I think hiring is definitely a challenge, which we've got processes in place obviously to help with retention of employees, recently launched like ESOPs plan for employees.
So just like with clients, it's better to retain a client and grow that out versus constantly looking for new. But every agency will have clients dropping out. You can't have like a 100% retention rate, the same way you can't have 100% retention rate with employees, but we're doing things in place to maximize retention rate, but at the same time, hiring is a pain point. So yeah, I wish there was a way to make that easier.
David (17:23): If I heard you right, you said it was a 75:1 ratio, like for every 75 applicants, you get one hire. So what are the main things that you're screening for? Maybe another way to say it is, what is it that that one person you hire has that makes them the 1 in 75?
Prashant (17:41): So we look for a couple of things, and it's not only related to the vertical that you're interviewing for. So let's say paid media manager or SEO manager or data analyst. We're basically looking for hunger to learn. So personality traits and how amiable they are to learning new things. Like do they want to continuously learn and improve or do they think they pretty much know it all. And are they open to being trained on specific tools, job functions, how AdLift thinks about SEO or paid search, etc. Right. So being more amiable is always continuously learning and the hunger to learn. So these other personality traits that we look for, apart from obviously you have to hit a certain mark from if you're interviewing for an SEO manager or a senior SEO manager or Head of SEO, you got to be in that knowledge range.
David (18:38): So if you're hiring a junior person, maybe someone who it’s their first job, if it's an entry level job, I'm curious, how do you determine that they have that hunger? How does the candidate prove that they've got that hunger to learn?
Prashant (18:52): We work with Meta, which is like a Mercer company, which helps with recruiting questionnaires. They'll look at our data, and they'll look at our top performers within the company and what makes them top performers. And then they'll work with you on creating questions for the junior-level folks or even mid-management based on the data that we give them. So that's when they create those. I it's like a 45-minute questionnaire that's sent out. It's not good, bad, or ugly. It just gives us a sense of whether they’re a right fit for round two and round three, which gets more technical.
David (19:30): I always tell entry level people that they should write a blog. If they want to get into the field, if you want to get into SEO as an example, even if you know nothing, just start writing a blog about what you think about SEO, and then you go into the interview and someone says, why do you want this job? And you're like, oh, I've been researching SEO for the last six months here. You can read all my articles. I may not be right, but I've got a passion for this industry.
Prashant (19:53): That's passion.
David (19:54): A lot of people just show up, and why do you want this job? Well, I was in the marketing club in college and we had a bake sale and I showed up on Page 20 of the local events near me results. So I think I know SEO. Just be proactive and prove that you want it.
Prashant (20:09): I think that's where the whole hunger comes into play. That for some reason is a difficult trait to find. We might be digressing here, but maybe social media today has something to do with it, time spent online, amount of content. I’m still learning. When I spent a lot of time teaching, I’m sure you did this, too, David, but we spent a ton of time on Search Engine Journal and land and pretty much reading, testing out stuff. There’s a new tool mentioned, sign up for free. A lot of that happened because there was no digital marketing course like you have hundreds today. None of that was there. There was no structured data. What’s technical SEO? It’s URLs, it’s underscores, it’s dashes, all of that.
Oh, why is that bad? Because the way Google parses it. What does parsing mean? That’s what it means. And with so much content now and with so much training, I don’t see a lot of that happening, but I think for folks that want to get into the digital industry listening to us, I think what David said was passion is important. So pretty much prove that you are passionate about it. You might be wrong or content is not there, but I think that goes a long way where hiring within an agency is concerned.
David (21:26): I'm not sure social media is the answer. My theory is more macroeconomic, which is that the economy has been in such a boom for the last, I guess, I don’t know, 15 years. So people who are coming out of college right now, there's plenty of jobs available. Right now, especially, you can have half a heartbeat and you're going to get an entry level job at a lot of companies. And so that doesn't really feel like there's that much fear or anxiety about where your next paycheck comes from. And for me, actually, I started in Silicon Valley around 2000, and in 2001, the bubble burst. And so I always have had that emotional scar about knowing that things could not be good next year.
I remember the whole story about how you couldn't get a U-Haul in Silicon Valley because everyone was moving out of town. There was like a hundred thousand tech jobs lost in six months. So some of it, I think, is a lot of people just don't have the hunger because they don't have the fear. But then you do meet people and maybe this is your 1 person out of 75. It doesn't matter what the economic environment is or what's going on in the world. You can see that they're driven to learn and they just are going to eventually probably start their own agency or their own company. And those are the people you want on your team.
Prashant (22:34): Exactly. And you can sense that out with the questions, the face-to-face Zoom calls whether there is that hunger or not or this is just one more role, one more checkbox, spend another year, and then look for something different. Yeah, absolutely.
David (22:49): I will tell one tangent side story. I interviewed a guy 15 years, 16 years ago before I started my agency, and I loved him. I wanted to hire him. My boss said, don't hire this guy. And I said, why not? And he said, because this guy is so smart and so driven that he's just going to take whatever we teach him and quit and start his own company. And so I didn't hire him, but I then became friends with him. He was actually one of the first people to hire me as a consultant. Anyways, he did go and start his own company. And I'm not going to say the name of the company, but the last I checked, it's worth $28 billion.
Prashant (23:17): Wow.
David (23:18): So he did well for himself. I give him much congratulations for that if he's listening.
Prashant (23:23): That's awesome.
David (23:24): So do you have core values or promises that you share with your team? Are there things that make AdLift?
Prashant (23:31): Yeah. So pretty much goes back to what we've been talking about from a priority of hiring perspective. So continuous learning and being passionate stands up front. But with that, integrity and honesty is paramount, empathy and humility. So our groundwork at AdLift is across these five pillars of empathy, continuous learning, humility to learn, so not a know-it-all, culture, love what you do. So be very passionate about work and having integrity and honesty right off.
David (24:05): I love those. I actually don't know that I've ever heard anyone say humility as a core value. And it's an amazing core value. There are so many companies that are the absolute opposite where it's the Wolf of Wall Street sort of whoever's the most aggressive and arrogant wins. I think that's a really cool core value.
Prashant (24:23): I'll give you one example. We're running display ads for ourselves like eating our own dog food. And this is the APAC team that's working on it, and we've won numerous awards in the last 12 to 15 months, I think 15 or 16 awards. So doing really well there. And you know, the marketing team was like, Hey, we want to really blow our trumpet, but where does humility fit in this? I said, there's the way of doing it. Obviously, you got to like call it out but don't brag because that's where you lose your core value.
So even marketing, they’d be some brands that we work with that want us to brag and call it out and number one and all of that, which is fine. But when it comes to us, we have to eat our own dog food both ways. So have that in place because that resonates well across the board. It's not only about client acquisition, but it's again, the second similar, most important thing at AdLift is getting the right people board. Otherwise, you'd have a bunch of unhappy clients because you can't service them. So that balance has to be made even when you're marketing yourself. I personally am a very strong believer of humility being top of the core value chain.
David (25:34): Related to that, if I ask someone on your team what's Prashant’s leadership style, humility, I guess, is going to be part of it. But what else would you say about the way you think about leadership?
Prashant (25:43): I've got this a lot from numerous folks. They're like whether things are good or whether they go wrong, you're always very calm. So I think most of the folks that I work closely with at AdLift would say, I have a very calming effect. I don't get angry. And in fact, I don't get angry at all, which is definitely a good quality to have. I would try to understand where the other person is coming from. This could be a person I'm working with or a brand that's not very happy and see their point of view, what’s his anger displacement.
Someone’s not happy here makes you unhappy and you make the third person unhappy. So you're basically passing on that unhappy chain versus actually stopping and thinking, Hey, why is that guy unhappy? What do I do to change that, and to change that, I need to work with teams. So team player is another thing that you probably hear folks in my team saying.
I’m absolutely a nonbeliever of micromanagement. In the past, obviously I’m not going to name the company, but I've had my share of amazing bosses that I just loved working with. And then obviously, I had my share of micromanagers. And when I was in that situation, I said, whenever I start a company, the one thing I'm not going to do is be a micromanager. So you delegate and you let them run with it. They might not be able to swim at first. So you teach them how to swim and you pretty much be a mentor versus do this. So I think these are probably the three things top of their mind.
David (27:12): I feel like a lot of leaders, the best practices that they have are often from doing the opposite of what didn't work when they were being managed by someone else, basically.
Prashant (27:23): Yeah.
David (27:24): What's your aspirations for the future of AdLift?
Prashant (27:28): I think we've grown really well in the last couple of years. In fact, the last two years have been 75%, 80% growth rates year over year, and we want to keep that momentum. So the aspiration is to continue working with brands that we can help grow into well-funded companies or go public and be part of their growth charter across North America and APAC. And then we are also looking at expanding within the Middle East. We feel there are certain verticals that are doing very well there. That’s something we’re kind of looking at doing. But I think it’s pretty much working on targets that we’ve set and hitting those, working with brands and helping them grow legit-ly within this space and Middle East as a growth opportunity.
David (28:18): Two more questions. First question is, do you have any marketing or leadership books that you would recommend that have been particularly influential for you?
Prashant (28:26): So couple come to mind, but top of list would be Zero to One, Peter Thiel. I love that book. The other one was Leaders Eat Last. That's one that I found really powerful, and I think empathy was pretty much called out there, which is part of our core values. So that resonated. I think these two would be my favorite.
David (28:52): Last question, what advice would you give to someone who's starting an agency today?
Prashant (28:56): This goes back to what we're chatting about, David, be really good, number one, at the service, at any one service. And today in 2022, it’s not like PPC and SEO. It's SEO, it's content writing, it's video, it's content marketing, it's paid media across affiliate, search. It's like a plethora. So digital marketing, influencer marketing, it's about close to different categories, but pick one that is your foot in the door, where if there are five other agencies that are competing with you, you know very well that there's a high degree of probability of you getting it just because you bring something to the table that the other four or five didn’t. So you have to be one, two in one, and then figure out the other two, three services, but don't overcrowd it with sevens or eights.
And segueing from there, I have the opportunity of seeing a lot of agencies do well, but at the same time, seeing a lot of agencies go under. And the reason behind that, there are a number of different reasons, but one of the big pitfalls are someone reaches out and says, Hey, you do this and you don't do it. And you're like, yeah, we can do it. And what that happens is you might get six months of revenue in, but seventh month when things are not working out, that guy's going to tell 10 other people, don't work this guy. And that's pretty much game over.
And if that happens again and again, even if you're good at that number one thing, they're not going to work with you on it. So A) be really good at what you do, but at the same time, don't pick up work that you're not staffed for, you don't have experts for, you don't understand it yourself. So I think as a founder early on, it's very important to understand yourself you should be a subject matter expert within that vertical versus relying on hiring folks that might be good at those verticals.
David (30:49): That's great. I think every agency has had an opportunity to take on business that they're really not qualified to take on. And you're obviously right that as the adage goes, a happy customer tells three people and unhappy customer tells the world.
Prashant (31:02): Good. Exactly.
David (31:05): Well, this is great. I really appreciate the time. This is a new format of the 30-minute Agentic Shift instead of one hour. So I could have asked you about 10 more questions, but we'll have to have you on in the future date to continue the conversation. So thank you again for joining us.
Prashant (31:19): Thanks so much, David. Thanks so much for having me. I loved our conversation.
David (31:23): Great. Thank you.
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