F*ck Agencies

I want to tell you about a conversation we had with a fellow Lean Mfer yesterday…

He pitched us his web3 idea, his marketing approach, and his go-to-market strategy.

We asked him… “Who’s going to do all the marketing for you?”

He said: “I found this proven 9-figure web3 marketing agency, they will take it over.”

It felt like the world stopped turning for us. We looked at each other and thought “Holy moly - people are still working with agencies out there?”

We told him: “Stop right there. You will not only waste a lot of money, time, and energy, but you’re better off just doing it all yourself (even if you’re an engineer).”

I continued…

First.

Agency Principal Problem.

To quote the late and great Julius Caesar:

“If you want it done, then go. If not, then send”.

In lean words, this means:

Nobody will ever care about your tasks, goals, or vision as much as you do - so you might as well just do it yourself.

If you outsource it to somebody else, that is not incentivized in the same way as you (usually equity) - the results will suck.

Ok… ok…

There are some things you can’t do.

We’re both not engineers, designers, or great “boring tasks executors”.

So for some roles, you will have to get somebody on board. Since even 1 person Lean Mfer Companies are limited to some extent.

The problem if you chose to work with an agency…

In most cases, they just do the management of the person that actually does the job. Which links to the commonly known rule that all business is ruined by middlemen.

The agency coach of the year that “shall not be named”, call this “agency arbitrage” or some B.S. We think it’s an outright scam.

If we pay you to do the work - you do the work, nobody else.

Second.

Most agencies are just virtue-signaling empty clouds. Hiding behind websites with so many animations, that you need to take a vipassana straight after just to recover from the dopamine overload. It’s all fluff, all flex, but no real execution.

To quote a dear friend of the movement, Nassim Taleb: “Never hire a well-dressed trader.”

Or in other words… If “web3 marketing” is what you do best - why don’t you launch your own project and bag $10M, without selling your services for $5.000 per month?

And last…

Since it’s really hard to incentivize a group of managers (agency) towards a common goal of the company, or to give them equity, they usually bill you by the hour, which leads us to the last problem.

“People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones”

Boom.

So if you want success, a mansion on the hill, young ladies feeding you grapes and ledgers full of BTC.

To round it off with a fellow friend of the movement, Warren Buffet:

Well here is a better deal.

How about learning everything for free.

All the things we teach, and preach can be found for free on our YouTube channel. Subscribe and enable notifications (even if you usually don’t do that).

See you tomorrow,

T&A