We talked to Steve Weiss, founder of MuteSix, a performance marketing agency that is now part of iProspect and Dentsu. Steve tells us how he was borderline homeless when he started learning Facebook ads to promote his standup comedy with jeans in LA, why he invented a holiday called National Dry Cleaning Day for one of his clients, how a vacation convinced him to make his first hire, and how sneaking into a Facebook party in Las Vegas eventually led to his company's acquisition.
We talked to Steve Weiss, founder of MuteSix, a performance marketing agency that is now part of iProspect and Dentsu. Steve tells us how he was borderline homeless when he started learning Facebook ads to promote his standup comedy with jeans in LA, why he invented a holiday called National Dry Cleaning Day for one of his clients, how a vacation convinced him to make his first hire, and how sneaking into a Facebook party in Las Vegas eventually led to his company's acquisition.
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David Rodnitzky (David) (00:02): In this episode of Agentic Shift, we talked to Steve Weiss, founder of MuteSix, a performance marketing agency that is now part of iProspect and Dentsu. Steve tells us how he was borderline homeless when he started learning Facebook ads to promote his standup comedy with jeans in LA, why he invented a [inaudible 0:00:18] holiday called National Dry Cleaning Day for one of his clients, how a vacation convinced him to make his first hire, and how sneaking into a Facebook party in Las Vegas eventually led to his company's acquisition. Enjoyed the show.
All right, Steve. Thank you for joining us today on Agentic Shift.
Steve Weiss(Steve) (00:37): Thanks for having me, David.
David (00:38): Yeah, the audience doesn't know this, but we've been to talking for the last half an hour and there were tons of gold in our conversation that will never reach the audience. So I'm bummed. There's not some way we could have translated all that to what people are listening to the podcast, but suffice to say you and I have had a lot of similar experiences in the path to founding an agency and eventually selling the agency. Maybe what would be great to start with would be to just hear your founder story and how you came to start an agency and what happens at the agency.
Steve (01:06): Yeah, totally. Thanks. First off, David, thanks for having me. Sounds like you're building an incredible podcast. David just throws down nuggets of gold whenever I talk to him as well. So I can imagine when, if you're listening to this, you're going to get some crazy value out it.
But my background's a bit unique. I call it my path to starting an agency and then having a liquidity event. So I started, it all happened in 2012. I’m originally from New Jersey. I come from a rather diverse family. My Jewish mother, African‑American stepdad, and my stepdad was my world. And he sadly was one of the 11 people who passed away in Hurricane Sandy. I ended up living a very difficult time in my life, very challenging. I ended up leaving New Jersey and moving to LA. My stepfather would always tell me that if you don't follow your dreams, they'll never come true.
I actually had a dream to be a standup comic and actor. And you know, I was 26 years old, I guess, 26, 27, something like that. And I moved to LA with hopes and admiration and goals to be the next great Jewish comedian.
David (02:10): Did you get any gigs or anything?
Steve (02:14): I did. How it all started was they had these comedy shows in LA. So for all the new comedians that want to get into comedy, you have the open mic nights and then they have what you call the bringer shows. So some comedy clubs have open mic nights where you just get on stage and tell your 5 minutes of jokes and 10 minutes of jokes, and then they yank you off. Or if you want to have a more formal show and get 15 or 20 or 30 minutes of comedy, then they'll have bringer shows.
I wanted to go for the bringer shows, but the only issue is I didn't know anyone. I'm not from the West Coast. I'm from New Jersey. So I didn't really know anyone in LA, and I didn't want to sit outside, asking people to come to comedy shows like they do in New York. I'm sure if you ever walked Times Square, they're like, do you want to go to comedy show? They have a sign. I didn't want to do that. So how this kind of genius idea that Facebook would be my way of driving audience. I started testing out geofencing, wherever I wanted to perform comedy and using Facebook ads to drive audience to my shows.
David (03:10): And so was that successful?
Steve (03:12): It was, but it wasn't actually successful in the way you think it was successful. I've always been a bit of a marketer. My whole life, I've always been like trying to figure out the other way that people are thinking about stuff, like what's in the psychology, the consumer's mind, or what's in the psychology of what someone's going to think. At first I was like, I'm going to take my comedy videos, which I had a lot of, and I'm going to chop them up and run them as right‑hand rail ads on Facebook.
Back then, didn't work. Maybe if there was a newsfeed ad, it would work. And so then I had this brilliant idea. Facebook didn't have, I could talk about now because I won't get in trouble because I'm no longer running Facebook ads. But I had this genius idea. I was like, what if I just took other famous comedians comedy and I built like a page on Facebook, like a fan page, and said I Iove Will Ferrell or I love Chris Rock or I love any of these great comedians. And then I built the fan page and I'd run an ad from the fan page that said, Come see me perform here tonight in LA geofenced to that area. Then I would say-
David (04:13): Wait, so [inaudible 0:04:13] was Will Ferrell or was it you?
Steve (04:15): No, as if it was like coming from his fan page. And then I would geofence it and then say, use my name at the door. To get in, you have to use the word Steve.
[laughter]
David (04:31): Basically, where this is going is you got a lot of people come to this show and then they were really pissed off when they got there.
Steve (04:37): The thing is, some of the ads, I'd say you have a two drink minimum. Some I would have, but when they got to the club, comedy is about drinking. If you're not an alcoholic, you probably won't love comedy. You go to the club, you have two drinks, two drinks turns to four drinks, four drinks turns to eight drinks. Before long, you don't even remember why you're there. You're like, oh, I think someone’s performing, but I don't really know who’s performing. Isn’t that funny.
So the hope was they totally forgot why they were there. So I was getting a lot of people into these shows. This is 2012/2013. I was packing these shows. People were like, how do you have such a big following. You’re not even that funny. I was like, well, you know, people just love hearing me tell jokes.
David (05:20): How many people would you get at your best show?
Steve (05:22): I got like 25, 30. I wasn't like running a big budget on Facebook, but I think one show I got 25, and out of those 25 people, I probably knew 3 of them, so probably 22. I never got my comedy to ever convert.
David (05:37): In hindsight, do you feel like you had good bits.
Steve (05:40): I really had some good bits. My business partner, Dan, Dan Rutberg if you want to stalk him on LinkedIn. You LinkedIn message Dan Rutberg after this podcast and say was Steve funny at comedy. If you’re listening to this, I want everyone to do that because he’s one of the few people that has seen me perform live.
David (05:57): This is a good test to see how many people are listening to the podcast.
Steve (06:01): Well, we're all going to promote on LinkedIn.
David (06:03): Can we do a geofencing of this podcast. Do all the friends of Dan Rutberg or whoever they think I was.
Steve (06:08): Dan Rutberg, friends of Dan, but yeah. So that's how it all started at one of my shows. It was other show or networking event. I met a guy- because at the same time, I was like looking for a job. I was borderline homeless and my mom sent my car here. So I was kind of living in my car and parking under LA Fitness and sleeping in it. So at the same time, like I was actually looking for a job. I was applying for jobs, tech jobs, waiter jobs, and you know, waiter jobs in LA are actually really hard to get because everyone's here to be an actor. So they had the same ideas that I had, and I was struggling.
So I went to like a networking event and someone was like, can you run ads for my business? I was telling them about how I was using Facebook. And that's how MuteSix started. It was a candle company that was brand new on Shopify. And yeah, I started running their ads, and for long we had some success and that's where it all started.
David (06:57): That's an awesome story. In the early days, were you just a pure banner ads Facebook stuff? I always think of MuteSix as having a lot of experience with video creation on Facebook.
Steve (07:10): Yes. What we saw initially was that a lot of agencies started as Google agencies. 3Q is a great example. You guys were the best at search. You guys built the whole system around search. And what we saw was that direct-to-consumer and marketing through digital was changing and evolving, and to be good at driving new customer acquisition, you had to be good at creative. But every single one of these companies that were big outsourced their creative to one agency and had another agency that was doing their media buying. So we wanted to come in. We saw Facebook was the fastest growing platform, and we wanted to come in and say, listen, we can do both the creative and the paid media together, and you don't have to use any other agencies, and we could do all the performance for you.
David (07:54): Makes sense. Why do you think other agencies didn't pick up on that?
Steve (07:57): I think it was slow moving. I don't think Facebook exploded at the rate that people thought it’d explode. I think that when newsfeed opened up and that's when the explosion happened. Do you remember when newsfeed ads opened up? People are like, oh my God, what's going on? I'm seeing ads on my news feed.
David (08:13): Yeah. I remember when FBX died and that was the right rail going away.
Steve (08:18): Yeah. Goodbye. And everybody took away the right-hand rail ads. I was like peace out right-hand rail. I don't think marketers realized immediately the importance of creative. Whereas coming from a comedy background, I realized that creative was the most important ingredient in being successful. And if I didn't have a comedy background, I don't know if I would have realized that as quickly as I did.
David (08:43): I think that one of the things that I've observed, that's a truism for everyone I've talked to on the show is that you end up focusing on whatever is the new thing that's coming into the market at the time that you're starting your agency.
And so like for me, in 2000, I'm older than you, in 2000 I was working at a startup, and I was like, all these banner ads are terrible. Why would I buy these? And then someone said, well, we should try this little company that does pay-per-click ads. And I was like, oh, that looks a lot better than alternative. And I learned it. And for you, you happened to be at a moment in your career where the only way you could try to make comedy work was Facebook ads. Had it been 10 years earlier or 10 years later, you probably would have been into search ads or today you probably would have been in the mobile ads or something like that.
Steve (09:25): Yeah. I'd be all over TikTok. I'd be like TikTok. I'm going to be the best comedian on TikTok. But timing is so important in these businesses. I'll venture to say that I don't know if I'd be where I'm at today if I didn't start when we started. The luckiest we got was that we were in a time where there wasn't a solution to a problem of how do I do creative for social and how do I use that creative to drive new customers. Those two areas, and we solved those two problems better than, I believe, almost anyone on the market.
David (09:57): Was it a very easy choice to transition from the comedy to the agency? You said you had this candle company. Did the business just start flowing in like crazy or did you have-?
Steve (10:06): No, it didn't. At the time, they were running a lot of ads. I asked a friend of mine who also is into advertising to help me with their ads. And I didn't know if it was a fad. I was starving. I wanted to figure out how to pay the bills and get an apartment and set my life up. I think I moved to LA. I was still kind of not very comfortable living out here. I didn't have stability in my life. So I was actually trying to get a job. The pivot to running ads for candle company was a means of survival. And I went at it as hard as I could. Every single day. The reason being sick was so great at first because I probably spent 13 hours a day trying to finance for a candle company.
I was so fixated on driving sales for candle company that I edited all my creative. I edited all the video. I literally was doing all the photo shopping. I did all the copy. Like it was every single ounce of energy I had was I want to drive ads to the candle company, and that's why we were successful. I think we grew them from almost, I think, 40K a month in spent to almost 4K a month in spend to 400,000 or 500,000 in spend. And that's how it all started.
David (11:13): It's interesting. I recently saw a Tesla drive by with the license plate ‘SELF‑MADE’ on it. And I was thinking like, what does self‑made mean? Because for me, I have to say that when I started 3Q, I figured I had about six months of cash in the bank. If I failed, I could fail for six months. And to be honest with you, I also have parents who they're not rich, but my dad's a doctor. He does okay. So if I failed, I had a lot of fallback options. You're coming from the exact opposite side of it. You're saying I was homeless and maybe failure didn't matter because you were already at the bottom financially. So you had nowhere else to go.
Steve (11:49): I had about $900 in the bank, $1,000. I had my mom who was like really worried about me. She thought it was the most irrational thing for me to come and move to LA. I think if I didn't make it work- I had self-confidence that no matter what, I find a way to get on my feet, but worst case scenario, my mom had a two bedroom townhouse in the middle of Jersey, which I could have been a 29-, 30-year-old guy and going back to live with my mom in her two-bedroom townhouse. Worst case scenario, I go get a job at fast food or something. And I would've found a way to be happy. I guess the realization is that I have a very positive mentality about life. I've seen a lot of really sad stuff growing up in Jersey. There is a lot of tragedies, a lot of people that I’m close to that been through a lot of sad events. I felt very fortunate that I was there. I don't know. I was confident that somehow I'd figure it out, but yeah, you're right, I had no backup plan. There was never a backup plan. It was make this work or make this work or make this work.
David (12:50): Honestly, that's a great philosophy. I commend you for it. So in the early days, you got the candle company. And then how did you get your next client? Was it just a candle company? What happened?
Steve (12:59): I love traveling. I'm working, get the candle company, and I'm like, I need to find a place to work out of. So I'm at this networking event, and I meet this guy, John, who's an affiliate marketer. And he lets me work out of his office. He's got a little office, no windows, he's got a dog that shits everywhere. So it was really difficult.
It was challenging at first to work in an office with no windows and a dog that craps everywhere, but it was an office, and I was very fortunate. And so he let me work at his office, and the turning point happened when I went to every single networking event I could find. Anyone who'd meet me for coffee that's in business, whether you're a venture capitalist, whether you're an e‑commerce brand, whether you're just a sales guy at some SaaS company, I will meet you for coffee, and I will get to know you, and I'll meet 20 people a day.
So I made it a point that my goal was I wanted to make five cold emails a day, five a day. If I could do five cold emails a day, then I know that I'll find a client. I’d find clients. If I go to two networking events, this is pre-COVID, two networking events a week, I know I'll find a client. And little by little, I go to networking events and I start meeting people.
And one client comes, he’s like, “Hey, I can't make this work. Can you run our ads?” “Sure. Let's give it a go.” And before long, I had three or four clients and they were paying me $5,000 a month, and I wasn't sleeping much. I was literally up all night running ads, and that's kind of how it all started.
David (14:22): That's the classic hustle. That's great. You would send a cold email, were you literally just like, Hey, here's a company in Santa Monica that looks like they do Facebook ads. I'm just going to find the CMO on LinkedIn and write them or what were you doing?
Steve (14:32): Yeah. So my strategy was that I'd connect with them on LinkedIn, and I send them a message just saying- at the time you remember a lot of e‑commerce brands didn't really believe that Facebook was more than a channel to connect with your high school friends. So you go back to 2013, 2014, it wasn't like everyone's running ads, let me audit your account. It was, Hey, Facebook is a great acquisition channel. Can I show you?
So I literally start that as like saying, Hey, I'm making Facebook work at scale for other companies. Can I show you what I'm doing? And some people would say, sure, like Steve, I'll meet up with you for coffee or I'll take a phone call with you. Other people obviously didn't respond to some guy who's like hitting them up on LinkedIn. It was before you're getting hit a hundred thousand times on LinkedIn with cold emails, but I definitely made a lot of connections, and I started meeting venture capitalists in LA. And they started introducing me to people. They saw that I was a guy that was very determined and very thoughtful. And so then they started introducing me to people. I just made it a point that I want to meet or reach out to five people a day. If I could do that, the business will grow.
David (15:37): How far into the business did you continue that? Did you do it like years into the business or at some point the traction wasn’t there-
Steve (15:44): I think once I started building a team, I started spending more time with my team, mentoring them and trying to tell the story of MuteSix of how it all started and trying to really take some of the learnings I had about not being scared to fail, about being consistent every single day. I started trying to take these lessons and really train and mentor my team to really take some of this stuff and apply it to what they're doing. I think probably in 2015, 2016, that's when I kind of got out of that, like reach out to as many people, once I had it kind of semblance of a network.
David (16:13): And how did you decide when you needed to start hiring? At what point did you realize that you could no longer do, if you were at 13-hour days with one client and going up to 16-hour days? When did you hire?
Steve (16:25): I love traveling. So I would spend my last dollar, no joke, David. I would take every dollar I make. Some people would go party. Some people go to Vegas. I was a big believer in experiences. So I would take my last dollar and go to Cuba or go to Costa Rica go somewhere far away, Argentina, Brazil, everywhere.
So end of 2013, I really, really wanted to go to Cuba. Cuba was not really open for business, but you could easily get there Mexico city. So I mapped out a way to get to Cuba. I was like, this is a place I really, really want to go like history. And I just wanted to learn about Cuban culture, etc. And the first thing I learned when I was planning the trip was, holy shit, they don't have Wi-Fi anywhere in Cuba. So if I ever want to keep traveling, I got to find people to work while I'm traveling.
So what ended up happening was my future business partner was a guy, aforementioned Dan Rutberg, he was working at an SEO agency next to the office next door. I was asking around, and he volunteered to manage my accounts while I was traveling in Cuba. He never managed Facebook ads before, he had no clue how to do paid ads, but he's like, Steve, I want to learn. I'll like manage your accounts while you travel through Wi-Fi-less Cuba.
So I put this blind faith in him and that's how we became partners. And then he would eventually do a good job in making sure that the clients didn't all leave and everyone bounced. And then I convinced him to leave his SEO agency and come on to what became MuteSix and be my business partner.
David (18:01): I have two thoughts on that. The first is just sharing experience that I went to Panama for a month, and I decided I was only going to answer emails once a week and see what would happen. I had a pretty big team at this point, but it reminded me of a Johnny Carson quote. He said “Three days after dying fingernails and toenails stop growing and phone calls taper off.” Did that happen when you don't respond to emails, really?
Steve (18:29): It's like the world doesn't actually end when you don’t respond.
David (18:32): My other question, I'm just curious, other than Cuba, what are the top two or three places you visited?
Steve (18:37): Oh, definitely got to put New Zealand up there. I would say Turkey, New Zealand. I just got to put Thailand up there. Those three. Those are the first three that Turkey, New Zealand, and Thailand. I know those are three weird ones, but like I just thought Thailand, if you get out of Bangkok, go up north, go around the country, the culture, there is some of those amazing, nice people you ever meet. So those are my top three. What about you?
David (19:04): I've been to two of those three. I've been to Turkey and Thailand. I did like both of those. I would say I went to Namibia, which was pretty amazing.
Steve (19:12): Could I take it back actually? I'm going to remove New Zealand and put Kenya in there.
David (19:20): Kenya's on my list as well. East Africa is definitely on my list. And Namibia would be up there. Actually, I went to Tunisia many years ago when it was safer to go there. That was pretty cool, and then maybe Israel.
Steve (19:33): Israel’s cool.
David (19:33): So much to see in such a small country. Those would be my three. So I guess getting back to the agency, in the early days, if you could have done something differently, what would you have done?
Steve (19:43): I talked about this a lot. I revered people that worked at big companies because I could never get a job at a big company. So I thought they were smarter or they were like better. I don't know. I just thought like understanding people's journey. And we hired a lot of people, and we made mistakes on lots of people and we didn't give the right people the right opportunity sometimes.
So we’d hire someone that we looked at their resume, oh, you've worked at Google or Facebook or this big LinkedIn or whatever the big company is, we'd hire you. And they weren't necessarily a fit for our position. But like at first, we thought like, wow, these people must be a lot more civilized than us. They must have a lot more experience than us. I could never get a job at Google. Maybe they're smarter than me.
So I always thought that, at least initially, I always hired based on what people used to do instead of looking at a candidate and saying, how can I predict the person most likely to have the brightest future. And I think that that's how you got to look at recruiting is that you got to find people that will have the brightest future in your environment. You got to hire for both the environment and bet on a person's future instead of their past.
David (20:48): Is there something someone would say or do in an interview that would be indicative that they are going to be that great bright future person?
Steve (20:56): Yeah. I ask questions like did you play any sports teams or were you a part of a company? Were you a member of a team? And then I would ask what were some of the biggest challenges that you went through when you were a member that team? Maybe it was, Hey, we had a really stressful project and no one knew how to do it. And instead of looking at the outcome of what happened with the challenge, I love the people that say that our team members were really stressed out. I wanted to make sure that I could help my team anyway possible to win. And I did this. I spent the little extra time with this team member so that they understood how to solve this part of the problem.
And I look at people that are able to really work well with others and really have a deeper understanding and empathy for other people. I think empathy is like the number one thing. So I always look for, can they work and can they enhance the value of the team beyond can they do the job? Because a lot of people can do the job. There's a lot of do-the-job people, but can they actually help people overcome their own weaknesses? And if they can, I want that person on the team.
David (21:56): Yeah. One of the questions that I always asked was, tell me something that you've accomplished in your life that you're particularly proud of. And I think that gives people a chance to share something that's empathetic. One of the ones I really remember is a person who's still at 3Q who said, well, I had a friend who had a disease and we rallied around and raised $20,000 at like a danceathon for my friend. And I was like, it's a lot better than saying I doubled the ROI of the oil company I worked for, something like that.
Steve (22:28): The other question I ask every single person I've ever interviewed in my career, and I'm not the best interviewer, I'm just a normal guy when it comes to this, but I asked him, what would you say, David, is your biggest weakness.
David (22:39): I try too hard. That's the answer. I try to hard.
Steve (22:44): But then you dig deeper into that and you say, listen, if you can admit your weakness and your faults and what you’re good and not good at, you're going to win over a room. When I used to do sales on MuteSix, I would start my sales presentation to sell MuteSix digital marketing. I'd go into a big company, you name it, Disney or whoever, and I'd say, listen, guys, I want to match expectations here. I'm not the smartest marketer in the world. I literally start every single sales presentation with I'm not the best here, guys. There's a lot better people, but you got me.
David (23:14): See, I would start mind by saying, I just want you guys to know I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I am smarter than Steve Weiss. One of the questions I would ask people in interviews, which is probably a very unfair question, I would say, describe the color blue. And I asked it because I kind of want to just see how someone's brain works because there really is no answer. There is no answer. There's probably a scientific answer that I'm not aware of.
Steve (23:45): The way I would answer that question, Steve, tell me about the color blue. I would say that there's this thing that covers your eyes that immerses you in this experience, and when you look at it, you just get excited, and that’s the color blue.
David (24:06): That's definitely a memorable response. I wasgoing to ask you, though, related to that, since we're talking about how you describe things, did your comedy background come in handy as you created creative, and was a lot of your early creative funny stuff that was working?
Steve (24:19): It was. I had a very sarcastic view of life in a lot of ways. I didn't take myself too seriously. I think I take things seriously, but I didn't think so highly of myself and have an ego. And I think I went into each kind of creative. We'd have like these creative meetings initially. And I would say, what could we do here that differentiates the brand, that brings delight to people's lives as they're scrolling through the newsfeed. Like what could we do here? And comedy is the first thing that you do to really get people laughing and get people really excited. We worked with a company called Rinse. I don’t know if you've ever heard of them. They're a mobile dry cleaning company in San Francisco. We came up with National Dry Cleaning Day. It's like can you remember National Dry Cleaning Day? We made the creative look very official. We were like this is an American holiday. We put like an American flag next to the National Dry Cleaning Day.
David (25:11): That's hilarious.
Steve (25:12): And we had some fun with it because we wanted people to take a moment and say like, wow, I didn't remember National Dry Cleaning Day. I got to go do something about this. This is not good.
David (25:20): That's awesome because it sounds like the world's most boring holiday. It would be the most boring holiday.
Steve (25:28): You can keep a lipstick on a pig so many different ways, David.
David (25:32): Yeah. Do you feel like, generally, is comedy the most effective form of advertising? Look at a Super Bowl ad. Probably 98% of the Super Bowl ads are comedy at this point.
Steve (25:44): I guess the question is what kind of company are you? If you need to make a sale, this spot needs to convert at this rate. It has to or else we're dead, then no. And comedy might not always be the best thing, but if you really want to build a brand and make sure people don't take themselves or the brand too seriously, and you want to appeal to a softer side and have empathy, then I do think comedy is the best type of ad for that. But like it doesn't always work for conversion. It just doesn't, and it never will. I think comedy serves many other purposes. Obviously virality is very, very important for comedy. I just think that you have a better shot at going viral and getting all that earned impressions with comedy. I'll say that.
David (26:26): Yeah. Makes sense. I tried it a couple of times with search ads and it never worked, but I think it's a different medium, obviously. Someone on Facebook is bored and looking for something to entertain them versus someone on search who is looking to fulfill a task. But I remember there was a weight loss company and I came up with the ad ‘Why Wait to Lose Weight’, which I thought was so funny. It didn’t work. Failure.
David (26:50): I didn't even make it to even attempting to be a comedian like you.
Steve (26:53): Did you use the word weight?
David (26:56): I think weight to lose weight or there was a gay dating site where I said, there's someone out there for you. I thought that was funny. Zero. And maybe this suggests that I'm not funny, Steve, because you were in the business. So you may be thinking like, yeah, it works. Just your ads don't work.
Steve (27:11): I don't know, man. The thing I learned about comedy is, to be successful, standup comedy, you don't actually have to be funny. That's not a prerequisite to actually being good at comedy. That's the one thing I learned from all my years as a comedian.
David (27:24): How does that translate because how can you be successful if you're not funny?
Steve (27:27): There's a lot of not funny comedians. I'll say this. Someone needs to find you funny, but you don't actually have to be funny.
David (27:36): Okay. Interesting. Just like going to the point that you don't have to be the smartest person in the room to be the most successful person in the room.
Steve (27:43): Usually the most successful person in the room isn't the most smartest person in the room.
David (27:50): And related to that with success, I think a lot of people listening to this are going to know about MuteSix, but I think just so we can make everyone know, you sold the company a couple years ago to a pretty big agency. Maybe just talk about what that was like.
Steve (28:05): It actually was a really bizarre story. How it started was I really wanted to get a Facebook rep. I don't know if you remember back a couple years ago-
David (28:15): Yeah. Only the holding companies had Facebook reps.
Steve (28:18): Only if you're doing something truly magical will you get a Facebook rep? It's almost like wishing on a genie bottle for a wish. It's like, I wish to get a Facebook rep. No one got a Facebook rep. So I had this brilliant idea. I knew one person at Facebook and they somehow got me an invite to the Facebook party at, what was the conference in? In
David (28:37): South by Southwest or no
Steve (28:38): That was in Vegas. It was the one in Vegas. CES Facebook party. And I go the party. I somehow bypass the entrance, my name wasn't on the list. I talked them into letting me in. It was kind of sketchy. I was like, “I'm with MuteSix, this big agency that spends a lot of money on Facebook.” They're like, “Nope, don't see you on the list.” But somehow they let me in. At the party, it was free drinks, open bar. I ended up actually taking three drinks at the bar, three vodka tonics, and I turned around and spilled them over this guy from New Zealand. And it turned out he was the Chief Creative Officer at Facebook. And I ended up speaking to him for a good hour, just laughing.
I don't remember what we were talking about. We both were not sober at the time, but we were both having a good time. Just people watching and laughing. And he had a very jolly sense of humor. And I never talked to this man again after the party. And it turns out he was really good friends with the CEO of Dentsu, and the CEO of Dentsu went to this guy and was like, which agencies do you think we should buy? And the guy remembered MuteSix. He's like these MuteSix guys are doing something interesting. And then the CEO of Dentsu then communicated that to the Head of M&A and the Head of M&A then slid right into my LinkedIn inbox. And that's how I met Carlos, and that's how we were able to do such a great deal, became part of Dentsu, and Dentsu is a great company. They had so much things in the network that I learned, and I can't tell you how amazing of a partnership it was over the last three years.
David (30:08): So at MuteSix, before you sold to them, how many people are there today?
Steve (30:11): We were 172, I think 160, 170, something like that, ballpark. When I left Dentsu, I think we were about 470. Don't quote me on this. I'm not looking at any sheet or anything, but ballpark.
David (30:28): Wow. That's amazing. And the company was started in 2012. So we're talking about-
Steve (30:34): 2012, early 2013.
David (30:36): In a decade. Wow. That's amazing. You just left. It was a couple weeks ago, I think, right?
Steve (30:43): Yeah. Almost a month ago now.
David (30:46): How does it feel to not be at the company that you birthed?
Steve (30:49): I miss it. I honestly miss it. I think some of my best friends have got along great with the Dentsu team, other companies in Dentsu with the MuteSix team. I root for them. I miss them. I know every great thing had to move. You have to move on, but like I miss it. There's a part of me that I left there, and I continuously root for them to crush it. But now I just keep reminding myself of the future. I had a baby daughter. I got married. Now, I'm just evaluating what to do next, to be honest. I don't really have a set plan.
David (31:17): Congratulations on that 10 years. That's amazing. If you look back at the state of what MuteSix provides, the video creative and the Facebook advertising today and the state of it when you started the company, what do you think has changed the most?
Steve (31:28): I think competition. I don't think people thought that Facebook would be a channel that would have this much scale. I think that scrutiny with great success comes a significant amount of scrutiny. Those are competition scrutiny are the things that really jump out at me. And sometimes I just think that I wish I could have done more to help more charitable stuff using Facebook. I don't know. I always think this is a massive opportunity to have a positive impact on the world and maybe I didn't do enough. I know it might sound weird, but I think about that a lot.
David (32:00): Maybe that's your next pivot? It’s not too late.
Steve (32:02): Maybe.
David (32:03): What would you tell someone starting an agency today? What's your one piece of advice?
Steve (32:07): Prioritize the people. Build a learning management system, make sure that you capture all the insight of your team, and then build a system or a structure to align the interest of your team with the growth of the company. Those two things, learning management system and build a compensation structure to align the compensation of your team with the growth of the company. Those are the two things.
David (32:29): Well, Steve, thank you so much. It's great to connect and look forward to keeping in touch.
Steve (32:33): Yeah, definitely. Thank you, man.
David (32:36): A new episode of Agentic Shift drops every Wednesday. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or visit agenticshift.com to see the latest episode.