Soso Sazesh is the founder of Growth Pilots, a performance marketing agency he sold to Wpromote in 2019. Soso tells us why most agencies aren't equipped to work with startups, why it's hard to scale an agency with startup clients, how firing one of his largest clients created a great culture, what he means by people, partnership, and adaptability, why performance marketers are convinced branding doesn't work and vice versa, and what it was like to sell his 20-person agency to a 600-person agency.
Soso Sazesh is the founder of Growth Pilots, a performance marketing agency he sold to Wpromote in 2019. Soso tells us why most agencies aren't equipped to work with startups, why it's hard to scale an agency with startup clients, how firing one of his largest clients created a great culture, what he means by people, partnership, and adaptability, why performance marketers are convinced branding doesn't work and vice versa, and what it was like to sell his 20-person agency to a 600-person agency.
David Rodnitzky (David) (00:02): In this episode of Agentic Shift, we talked to Soso Sazesh, founder of Growth Pilots, a performance marketing agency he sold to Wpromote in 2019. Soso tells us why most agencies aren't equipped to work with startups, why it's hard to scale an agency with startup clients, how firing one of his largest clients created a great culture, what he means by people, partnership, and adaptability, why performance marketers are convinced branding doesn't work and vice versa, and what it was like to sell his 20-person agency to a 600-person agency. Enjoy the show.
Soso, great to have you today on Agentic Shift.
Soso Sazesh(Soso) (00:41): Thank you for having me, David.
David (00:42): Yeah. I'm excited to talk to you. We've been friends for many years, and you're a little different than most of our guests because you have exited your agency completely. So got to go a little bit of a different path to normal, but I think it's going to be really instructive for people listening.
So maybe to start with, what I'd like to ask is back when you were running Growth Pilots, how would you describe your elevator pitch for the agency? What would you tell potential clients?
Soso (01:09): So our whole kind of thesis was rooted in my background and just being very close to all things startups and venture capital in the heart of Silicon valley. And so we worked primarily with venture back startups. And so our whole pitch was the performance marketing agency for high growth companies. That's really how we pitched ourselves. And that appealed to the kind of the whole spectrum of companies ranging from very early stage startups all the way up to like pre-IPO unicorns. And we had clients across that whole spectrum.
David (01:42): Got it. So you basically had the argument that you knew how their businesses operated and that startups operate differently than your traditional business. So you need an agency that operates or thinks the same way you do.
Soso (01:53): One hundred percent. And that was actually one of the core insights, which was startups and agencies just don't tend to mix very well because if you think about a startup, they raise some money and they have to get to the next milestone. And it's really do or die. If they don't do that, they may not exist. And everybody loses their jobs, company winds down, etc. So we took the approach that we would really go in and understand how these businesses worked, but partner much closer with these companies than you might find a traditional agency partners with them. And that was the opening in the market that I saw when I started Growth Pilots, which was I had all these friends who were founders and people working at startups who were just having horrible experiences with agencies and marketing consultants because they didn't really speak startup or understand how high the stakes were and just the level of intensity required to work with these companies.
So I guess for better or worse, if it's maybe a glutton for punishment, working with startups is extremely intense. No doubt, you know about this. 3Q has a lot of clients that overlapped with what we did at Growth Pilots. You’re kind of always on call, it's around the clock, and it's intense, but it's very gratifying work and we built a reputation for really being the founder's agency.
David (03:06): And so you mentioned that you had already been in the startup community before you started the agency. What's the founding story of Growth Pilots. How did you decide to launch an agency in the first place?
Soso (03:19): So I graduated college, and I jumped into a digital marketing agency, and I that's where I really cut my teeth and learned how to do performance marketing at scale. Then I caught the startup bug and I left and I did a venture back startup. We went through the AngelPad accelerator, and ultimately that company was not successful, but those two experiences shaped what would become Growth Pilots because I really understood not only the digital side and how to grow companies with performance marketing channels, but then I got the founders perspective and I saw both sides.
And so as we were winding down the company, the startup that failed, that's when things just started. Clicking people in my network were like, Hey, you blowing down your company, what's next for you? I'm working with an agency or I'm trying to get my marketing off the ground. It's not working. So I just started consulting and just advising friends and people in my network. And it just snowballed. That was where that opportunity that I mentioned, just seeing how dire it was for startups who needed help with growth marketing for performance marketing channels. There was really no great solutions. And so, yeah, that's how things started.
And I just started consulting in the outset, and like I mentioned, it really just snowballed. In the early days, it was almost just doing it to learn and just understand what the opportunity looked like. I think our very first contracts were like $15 to $100 to $3,000 a month. And honestly, the goal of that was really just to learn and just do customer development while getting paid a little bit.
And then after a few reps of doing that, things just clicked and it was very clear. There was something here and you could argue we had- I don’t know if you could quite call it product market fit because it was a service company, say service market fit. And we’re off to the races and just started growing very quickly by word of mouth because of the quality of service and really understanding how these companies work. And that really resonated with founders.
David (05:14): I feel like our stories are very similar, are almost identical, same concept of not having a job, people pulling you into consulting, and then deciding, Hey, maybe there's something here. You mentioned that the speed of startups and the rollercoaster ride of a startup is one thing that you understood that was an advantage. Do you think that's the main reason that when you started your agency, there weren't a lot of entrenched competitors. Is it your theory that most agencies just don't have the stomach or the speed of delivery to deal with startups? Or was there another reason that you felt there was a lot of white space in that area?
Soso (05:52): I think it's twofold. I do genuinely believe agencies tend to lack really just the rigor and understanding needed to work with startups because they just operate at such a different pace. And again, when these companies are living and dying by maybe the next 12 months, if you don't come in and perform, the stakes are really high. I think it's really hard to wrap your head around that if you haven't been a founder or you haven't been in the trenches and really seen that.
I think that's challenge one why there was white space, but challenge two, I could talk about this, and this is maybe a little bit controversial, but agencies that focus on startups, it's really tough to scale these businesses for those reasons? It requires so much just mental bandwidth to work with startups that like we didn't scale to become this massive agency. We built a really nice boutique agency that had a great brand and reputation with the founders, but it was cause the attention and frankly the very low ratio that we had of key members to clients.
And that was kind of the magic sauce that we had, but it's very tough to scale that. I think that's why you also have a lot of white space, and frankly, there's still a big opportunity here and there's a few agencies where I'd say doing quite well, trying to operationalize this model. You've had several of them already on your podcast, but yeah, I think it's the understanding of these companies and just, frankly, the ability to service them to the level that they need that prevents this from being just a bargaining agency market.
David (07:23): I think that's a great point. And as I think back on my own trajectory, when I first started my agency, we were doing a lot of Series A startups. And as you said, in many cases charging $1,500 or $3,000 a month, but we realized over time that to scale, we had to eventually start working with series B, C, D and public companies. And in some respects, we still call those startups. These days in Silicon Valley, you could be a Series C company and be nine months old.
I think your point is absolutely right. I think, unfortunately, it just happens to be the case that if you want to scale your agency, doing it on the backs of startups in the true startup sense, pre-seed, seed Series A is probably not possible.
Soso (08:06): Totally. We had this existential crisis, I would say, like three years into running Growth Pilots where we were working with all these amazing companies primarily on the earlier stage side. But it just wasn't sustainable because some of these companies would fail and the amount of hours that the team was putting in relative to the small contract size, we had to change the game for ourselves internally. And so we did exactly as you described. We started going more upmarket, still working with startups, but startups with bigger budgets and where we can generate more revenue.
And so that was an interesting shift for us internally to make that leap. It ultimately led to the success of the agency and allowed us to achieve the outcome that we did, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say that, like I truly loved working with those very early stage companies. This is where that glutton for punishment perspective comes in where those were my favorite clients to work with. And no doubt plays into a lot of what I'm doing now, working with super early stage companies.
David (09:06): I think every agency in Silicon Valley has their two or three favorite stories of when they started working with a company that no one had heard of and no one thought was going to go anywhere. And then you are along for the ride/helping that company achieve amazing returns. The story I'll give, maybe you can share one, too. And my story is we started working with a little company in Half Moon Bay that was trying to convince people that they should put cameras on their bicycles and surfboards. And no one could understand what the heck they were selling. And you can probably see where this is going. It was GoPro. My team was responsible for 0.0001% of GoPro success, but it's still fun and fulfilling to see an entrepreneur’s dream become reality.
Soso (09:52): Totally. We have so many of those stories. A few of my favorites, I'll give two examples. So coincidentally, I think they were the second or third client I took on when I was even consulting pre Growth Pilots. The small real estate agent basically matching our lead generation service that was pairing up home buyers and sellers with real estate agents. And they were like a very small startup. I think maybe they had, I don't even know if they had raised a seed round. Maybe it was like a small seed round and got involved, worked very closely with the founder. And we ended up working with this company for like five or six years and just really scaling the business significantly with a very big percentage of the growth coming from all things paid advertising, which my team was working closely with them on. The company is called HomeLight, and now they're one of the most well-known companies in the proptech space and they've expanded their offering, just very amazing success story. It was really cool to be there in the early days.
Like you said, you take a very small percentage of credit for helping companies. It was just awesome to be there and have a front row seat, and just being able to help these companies and these founders succeed and watch them grow is amazing.
The second example, this is maybe a little bit of a more counterintuitive one. A buddy of mine took over as heading up growth for Instacart's marketing team, and when we got involved- so he pulled us in to take a look at and pitch what we would do from a Growth Pilot's perspective. They were running zero, like absolutely nothing in paid marketing. And maybe they had some branded keyword just protect the name, but they were already a massive company.
So it was one of these very strange situations, but we got involved and very, very quickly ramped up and put a strategy around it and probably shouldn't disclose budget spend, but went from zero to spending, let's just say, millions of dollars in a very, very short ramp. And that was a fun one because you instantly see the impact of your work on a company that's already big and well known.
That was like anomalous. I think it's rare that you find those type of opportunities, but of course, an agency, when you see that, you talk about white space, a company with that brand and just such an amazing product and offering doing very little from a digital marketing perspective. It was a lot of fun to work with them.
David (12:14): That's awesome. Those are both great stories. It actually reminded me, we could probably spend all day telling war stories of our successes. We had a company many years ago, probably 12 years ago that came to us, and they said, well, we've been trying to make this paid search thing work. It just doesn't work. We're about to give up on it entirely, but we'll give you a chance to scale it. And so they brought us in, and we scaled it, and we scaled it to the point that they actually were able to bring in a full-time marketing team. So we scaled ourselves out of a job.
But the company that we did that for was Shopify, which is obviously they were an 80-pound Chimp at the time. It is very fulfilling to be a small, small part of success of these companies. And I think, as you said, you can't really scale a company on startups, but it's a lot of fun to work with startups.
Soso (12:57): Totally. And you bring up a really good point, which I think I would say is probably a third variable in why you don't see a lot of agencies scaling going after startups. A lot of times exactly what you described happens. You work with a company, you help grow them significantly, and you win yourself out of a job because the needs and resources change very quickly as companies move from stage to stage.
I can't tell you the number of times we work with a company and we take a small part of credit for helping them grow significantly. And then before you know it, they hire a CMO who has their own preferred marketing team or agency. And you're like, well, it's a very bittersweet feeling. You're very happy for the company and the work that you've done, but you realize like, okay, well you just lost the big client that you have been spending several months to years on building up. So that makes it very difficult for agencies to scale too when you have client churn happening due to your own success. It's a perverse thing.
David (13:56): We used to have a number, and I think the number changed over time, that if the client started having bills in excess of this number, we felt it was likely they were going to bring things in house. The mass started to make sense. And as you said, it is bittersweet. And I will admit that there have definitely been times in the past where I have been, I guess you could say resentful. I've been angry that we had such a great partnership with a company. We've scaled them, and then our reward is to be fired. But I think you're accurate that it's bittersweet, but at the end of the day, it's like it is actually probably the best example of success. The fact that you got this company so big that they are able to handle a massive internal team is in a way a sign of accomplishment.
Soso (14:44): One hundred percent.
David (14:44): Let me ask you just one more question about the early days of the business. I'm just curious, knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently?
Soso (14:51): Yeah, so I think, and when I go back in time and look at like what was happening in the ecosystem and where we positioned ourselves, which channels, of course it was great. I think we struck a lot of things, hit the nail on the head.
The one area that I think we missed the opportunity on was really getting ahead of creative. If you look at where things are now and just like how important creative is to the mix, we started as a paid search shop. We were like 90% paid search and 10% social. And we slowly built up the social expertise. I think at the peak, we were like 60% paid search, 40% paid social from a revenue perspective, but we always approached paid social, for better or worse, with the rigor that you would apply to old school paid search.
So you're thinking about segmentation. You're thinking about bid optimization and account structures and budget optimization, things that frankly were like when Facebook came on the scene and pre-pixel and pre look-alike audiences, that worked quite well. That was actually quite successful. If you were a performance marketer who had that rigor, you could do very well on Facebook.
Then as the platform started maturing, things started to get more automated, I think the value of that rigor, the value was diminishing. I think where a lot of the value is now being captured and it was pretty clear that was where it was going was the ability to really produce high quality creative in a very iterative fashion. And we always consulted with our clients and advised them on here's the testing cadence. Here's what we'd like to test, but there's always that disconnect between the marketing team and what we were doing as the strategist, the executors and the data analysts, but truly kind of distilling all of that and generating new creative. We always struggled with that. And I think if I went back in time, I would have found somebody who really knew, understood creative, and built that out as a core practice early on.
David (16:43): Obviously creative is incredibly important today. I think one of the things that I struggle with creative is, like you, I started as a performance marketer, mostly focused on search, and search is so literal. It's demand fulfillment. So your ad says, “Looking for email marketing? We have a $10.99 subscription plan. Start today.” And it's just tell someone exactly what they want. But creative is some combination of direct response. It's something about buy now, but it's also something emotional and even gets into the world of brand where you have insurance companies that have a mascot as a ostrich or something. That's somehow supposed to convince you to buy insurance.
I feel like creative is an area and anything that's mid-funnel that performance marketers still struggle with, every performance marketing agency has a large creative team now, but at the end of the day, there's still something about creative that if you're wired to do SEM, you're probably not entirely wired to do creative.
Soso (17:43): This is so funny. I have this theory that like performance marketers are convinced that brand marketing does not work and the reverse is also true. It's just such a different discipline. And you see, because you have this measurement disconnect. It's like you said, just a completely different way of thinking. You're just wired differently. It's very difficult for performance marketers, in my experience, like both myself and just knowing so many people in the industry, when you talk to performance marketers about brand and like top of funnel, it's just so funny because they try to apply their framework to it.
And you've seen so many companies try, oh, we call like performance branding. And I think it's just two completely different tracks that, and I'll admit it, like the branding and the top of the funnel stuff is something that we had clients who asked us to do it just because we were there, but we never claim to be experts at branding and really trying to nail awareness and driving things through the funnel. It's such an interesting debate, but that has not changed from like when I started doing performance marketing to today. Those same debates and conversations are happening. So big opportunity for somebody who can bridge the gap between those two. I feel like that's been the case for the past decade or so.
David (18:47): The way I describe that is brand marketers need to embrace data and analytics and performance marketers need to embrace storytelling.
Soso (18:56): Totally.
David (18:57): They’re both deficient in different ways. Let me just ask you a few questions about how you ran the team. Did you have core values or promises that you made to the team?
Soso (19:07): We did. I had this really interesting breaking moment where it actually coincided with what I mentioned when we had all these small clients we were working with, and we realized it just wasn't sustainable. The team was getting burnt out. My team, no joke, was working 60- to 80-hour weeks. The intensity of that with demanding clients, who frankly like startup clients, it's not all roses. And, yeah, I'm sure people are maybe cordial and nice, but at the end of the day, results matter. I care a lot about my reputation and the reputation of the company that I'm leading. I imposed that on the team and that led to a certain culture that was very intense and it was very rewarding.
If you looked at the team, where they are today, I think everyone would look back and say, that experience helped shape them and get them to where they are today. But no doubt, we burnt people out. I had this breaking moment where I said, okay, this is not sustainable for the team. It's not sustainable for the business. We're treading water. To keep our heads above water, we’re just grinding it out and revenue, we’re growing clients, but something felt off.
So we made a huge strategic shift at that moment. We fired half of our small startup clients as amicably as we could because it just wasn't making sense. I think that was when I really internalized what it meant to be a leader. It changed my whole trajectory of how I ran the company going forward. I went from being in the trenches, grinding with the team to, okay, now I'm a leader. I need to think about building a sustainable company.
I put some core principles in place. And that really stayed with us for the rest of the company up until we got acquired and after that, the way that we kind of ran the team post-acquisition and those three principles. So there was three principles of Growth Pilots and it was people, partnership, and adaptability, in that order.
So we reframed everything where everything became about people. We wanted to hire the best people, train the best people, make sure that they felt very supported and they were going to be pushed. And we set that expectation, but people came first above everything, even clients.
The second thing was partnership and that was, we are partners to our clients. This is not a transactional relationship. Like we get invested. We spend the time. Frankly, we were working so closely with these companies. Our culture at Growth Pilots was actually a function of the cultures of all the startups we worked with. That's how closely we worked with them. We took partnership very seriously, and we really signed in ink that we are going to be the best partners possible. I really imposed that on the team.
This comes from my paranoia or obsession over having an amazing reputation. I'm a big believer that reputation drives everything in all aspects of life, I think, especially in a services business where the quality of the work gets talked about and the small ecosystem like the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem, words gets around quickly. So good reputation compounds and poor reputation decays. That was our second principle.
And then adaptability, that was the big one where that got pulled from this idea of strategy of we had to fire a bunch of our clients. We had to change our strategy. We needed to stay nimble, and this applied to whole stack of the agency, meaning us as a business and the agency, we might need to make dramatic changes and that shouldn’t scare people. We’re going to do what we need to provide in service of those two principles of hiring the best people and developing the best partnership with our clients.
But it also meant adapting to new channels. What you find is agencies find their groove and they just stick to those channels and they’re just like, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to milk this because we’re good at it. And then a few years go by and you’re behind the times. So we always try to get ahead of that. We’re very early adopters. Any time a new channel or platform or targeting method, we were ahead of the curve on that, and I think that really helped reinforce our partnership with our clients when they would say like, wow, I haven’t even heard of this yet or are you sure we should be doing this? We’d be pushing the envelope, pushing our clients to test this stuff.
And part of that was selfish for our own learning and so we can get ahead of it, but the other part, of course, was to make sure our clients were ahead of the curve. Anyway, so people, partnership, and adaptability, and I preached it. At every end of quarter, I did a recap of the company, how we were doing, new clients, what revenue was looking like, what new team members were looking like, and I always opened with the people, partnership, and adaptability.
So if you ever come across a former Growth Pilots person, it’s burned in their head because they heard it several times a year.
David (23:32): That’s great. I would have said people, partnership, and change because the acronym could have been PPC. Of course, you’d mentioned you’ve moved beyond that, PPC, so maybe it would have been stumping you. But I want the partnership one, and I guess the one thing I’ll say about partnership is partnership is a two-way street. I think that the best clients are the ones who treat agencies like they’re members of the team, and the worst clients are the ones who treat agencies like vendors. And when you’re treated like a vendor, there’s no partnership there.
Soso (23:58): I totally agree with that, and that actually has a lot to do with the ordering of those principles. We had once instance where we had a very abusive relationship from one of our biggest clients, and I shouldn’t mention this, but it happened to coincide with when we had this big internal change of refocusing the strategy on bigger clients. But this happened shortly after where one of our bigger clients was literally causing psychological toll on the team that was managing that account.
We tried to have realignment meetings with the client, me personally kind of smooth things over, but after a few more months, we ended up firing that client. I think they were our second or third biggest client. It was the hardest business decision I’ve ever had to make, but when I did that and the team saw that, I think it was kind of game-changing and people saw like, we’re not just talking about this idea of people. It’s truly being acted on. So double edged sword for sure, and yes, we took a massive revenue hit, but in the long term, 100% the right thing to do.
David (25:00): Yeah. There's a book that I know I've mentioned on previous podcast episodes called the No Asshole Rule, which just talks about how jerks in the workforce, whether as employees or clients, cost you more than any amount of revenue they could produce for you in terms of resignations and lawsuits and lower morale. So what you did, I think, was absolutely the right decision.
Soso (25:23): And it's tough when you're a growing agency. Again, it was like, I still think back to it. I would've made the same decision every time I go through it in my head, but it's just, you're right. Like the cost of that, I don't think there's a limit on the cost that I can take.
David (25:38): You and I have something else in common, which is that we both sold our agencies at some point. And you sold yours to Wpromote about four years ago? Is that right?
Soso (25:47): Yep. 2019. So it's been about three years.
David (25:51): Three years. We'd love to just hear a little bit about what your decision-making process was like when you decided to sell? This could be an entire four-part series. We could go into this forever, but what was it like to sell? Why did you decide to sell? Just give us a short summary.
Soso (26:07): This is one of those topics where, how do you know when the right time to sell is? I think for me, I had had M&A discussions well in advance of end of August 2019. Well, I guess technically our negotiation started that early part of 2019 with Wpromote. I had had interest before, and you just weigh these things out. The way that I thought about it was very clear. We were going to have a tough time scaling what we were doing to become a massive company given the way that we were operating.
What I always told myself is if I could find a partner who could take the ethos and DNA of what we're doing and really just apply it on a much larger scale, whether due to resources, reach, brand, bigger clients, I always said I would do that because I thought that that would allow us to continue the work and the mission that we were doing at Growth Pilots just on a grander scale with more reach and knowing that it was going to look different than the way that we were operating.
So that was what was in the back of my head. So I honestly don’t know exactly what triggered it. I think it maybe was just happenstance. You and I had several conversations. You were just a great mentor as I was thinking about what it was going to look like, what it could look like to sell the agency. I’ve gotten a lot of advice from great people, and it just clicked and felt right.
And so, yeah, it's not like this, like, oh, I wanted to go buy X, Y, and Z, or I wanted to retire and take time. It wasn't really about that as much as it was like, honestly, truly trying to figure out a way to scale what we were doing because it was clear what we were doing was not going to scale, if that makes. That was how I made the decision on my process around selling the agency.
David (27:53): And you sold it and then you had a three years of working at the bigger agency. Was that transition challenging to no longer be the number one boss?
Soso (28:04): For sure. So the structure was quite interesting. This is common with agency acquisitions. There's an earn-out component where you have to continue to meet the goals that you promised that you would as part of the deal. There was a period of time that was a 12-month period where we basically had full autonomy. We effectively continued to run business as usual with relatively little integration. Interference is definitely the wrong word, but just there was very little distraction. We wanted to get integrated from an admin perspective and then just get back to work so that we could hit our numbers because that's the way the deal was structured.
So that part, I would say, was a small adjustment period, but relatively small bumps just to get integrated in, get back to business as usual as much as it was. Of course, after the 12-month period was over, then we officially started doing like full integration. There's always going to be friction there because we’re doing things a certain way. And now our team has to learn this new way of doing things.
At the time, we were maybe 25 people. Now, we're a group of 25 people within like a 600-person organization. So the dynamics changed pretty significantly. And so it was a lot of fun going through that. Some of the team members would probably tell you this was an amazing experience and learned a lot and was nice to be part of a bigger organization with a lot more support and structure and career pathing and whatnot.
Of course, there was some who were like this just clearly isn't for me. I think that's pretty common with any acquisition. Again, getting a lot of advice from other people who had gone through an event like this, that seemed to be par for the course. That was how things were. I left early last year to start my next thing. I guess I was there just shy of two years post-acquisition.
David (29:55): I think that obviously if you're a 20-person agency versus a 600-person agency, there's no possible way that those cultures and processes and responsibilities are going to be the same. So it's impossible to imagine it'd be the same. And as you said, at a 600-person agency, there are a lot of really strong positives about being able to throw resources at something and being able to offer multiple services, multiple locations, having money to invest in technology. But at the same time, there's often not as much speed, not as much innovation, and maybe not as much of a connection to the work that you're doing.
We talked earlier about how we were meeting one on one with founders and helping them scale into billion-dollar businesses. That's not what happens on a daily basis at a 600-person agency, but it's neither a hundred percent positive or a hundred percent negative is the takeaway.
Soso (30:51): Yeah, exactly. And of course there's the flip side, too, which is Wpromote acquired us. We had this very special understanding of working with these companies that we have. When they looked under the hood, they're like, holy shit, what is this? You have these clients are punching way above your weight class. And the sizes of our clients were competing with some of their biggest clients from a revenue perspective. They're like, you got this small, tiny team. What's going on here?
That was a big part of the appeal. We were able to bring a lot of that DNA over. When we did fully integrate, that was really the charge that I had. We spun up a new department called growth and innovation, which was really focused on these clients that Wpromote just didn't really understand that well, which were these like hyper-growth companies that didn't fit the traditional agency mold from a resource and revenue perspective.
Again, that's a second area of positive friction where they previously weren't really looking at these opportunities kind of just like doesn't really make sense. But then when they saw the way that we executed and operated, it really allowed Wpromote to operationalize what it meant working with these companies. That was the whole point of the acquisition was to allow us to do that where we could take what we were doing for our clients and really just extend it and meet both sides, almost hand off the work that we were doing to the much bigger machine of Wpromote that had all these resources and service offerings and channels, etc.
David (32:12): I think I need to get Mike Mothner, the CEO of Wpromote, on the next podcast. And he's going to be like, Growth Pilots was a train wreck. They had no value whatsoever. Why did I buy them?
Soso (32:26): Mike’s amazing. You should definitely get him on the podcast. It would be awesome to hear his side of the story. We spent so much time together before the acquisition. I think that's the other big thing I talked about. I optimized for people as part of the acquisition, too. Of course, it’s like the owner of the agency, there's the financial benefits. But as I was thinking about this, the team had a very big interest in like place in my head as we were negotiating and evaluating potential acquirers. So anyway, I got to spend a lot of time with all the three Mikes who head Wpromote and from a culture perspective. Just like they take very good care of their people. They're great people. And that was like the thing that frankly sealed the deal for me.
David (33:04): Yeah. That makes sense. They're great folks, last question, I guess, is just tell us what you're doing now because you have pivoted again. I just love to have everyone hear what you're up to these days.
Soso (33:13): Yeah. I left Wpromote last year. The realization I came to through running Growth Pilots was, I absolutely loved working with founders at the super earlier stage to help them figure things out. Along the way, building Growth Pilots, I started angel investing. That's really what I fell in with is working with these founders and truly being helpful to them.
So we're officially in business. Now we just did the first close, but I'm now running a pre-seed venture fund with a couple of partners. We're doing things differently in that we're bringing like an operators lens. Basically the playbook that I took at Growth Pilots is really what I'm trying to recreate here, working closely with a small number of companies but in very full contact, high contact, and getting involved early and benefiting when these companies take off from the work that you're doing. I think that's one of the big learnings from the agency side is you help these companies grow, and it's great because you get revenue from them.
But relatively few agencies invest or take equity for the work. But if you look at it on the whole, when you work with companies like we did, geez, we would be a very different looking business had we fought for equity in these companies. And that's a hard conversation to have anyway. So the angel investing was a really interesting outlet because it allowed me to get equity in these companies for the exchange of dollars, but then me providing that support and help and helping them grow, that really resonated with me.
And so, yeah, that's what I'm doing full time. Now I'm investing in super early like idea stage founders with a lot of potential and working closely with them to help them build their companies. I'm super excited about it. We've started investing as of just earlier this year and it's been a lot of fun and I’m looking forward.
David (34:54): A friend of mine in venture capital once said to me, the job of a venture capitalist is to sell money. And if you think about it, what you're doing, there's been this trend now for the last couple years I think maybe started by Andreessen Horowitz where they're trying to provide value add beyond just their investing dollars. But obviously you're doing that at the angel level. You're coming to someone saying, yes, I'll give you money, but more importantly, I'll give you a playbook that has been successful time and time again to grow your marketing and your business into something much more sustainable and successful. I think it's a smart strategy.
Soso (35:29): The funny realization for me is while growth is my background and DNA and the skill that I've honed, I've ironically really enjoyed working with founders before they're even ready for growth. It was a unique thing that I learned about myself that not only do I enjoy it, but I think I'm good at it. But helping founders navigate just early stage company, like what does it mean to raise your very first round of capital, what does it mean to get the product market fit, that's really where we're focusing. And then once they find it, that's really when we can press on the gas and add our skills and bringing growth.
One of my other partners knows how to scale people extremely well. We add these on top and it just pours fuel on the fire. That's what I'm up to and just super excited and grateful to be able to work with companies at this stage.
David (36:18): Soso, this is great. I had like 20 more questions we could have asked you. And as I said, we could have probably spent four episodes alone just talking about the process of selling a business, but congrats on the success and congrats on your next pivot. And we'll have to check in in a couple months and see where things are. I'm sure they'll be in a great place.
Soso (36:35): Awesome. Yeah. Thanks again for having me, David. And thanks for all the help along the way.
David (36:38): Absolutely. It's been a pleasure.
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