Keep content in-house; hire agencies only to scale a proven format

Host… embedded into the team, they don't have equity, so a lot of times like sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But you guys just learned. You you turned I mean coding is a science, like you just realize that marketing is also a science and it's just another skill that you can learn. Are you still doing all the marketing yourself? I know you said you built some internal tools to automate some stuff, but have you hired like marketing people?

PeterUm, pretty much all ourselves right now. We've worked with agencies a little bit before, but I think with agencies the incentives never fully align. And you will have good experiences. I just think that, from first principles, if one company's using an agency versus one company has it in-house, the in-house team is always going to win, cuz they're not having to pay, you know, 20% margin there. So that's kind of the way we think. We want to in-house as much stuff as possible. We would only use an agency if it's to allow us to gain knowledge which we previously don't have or which we believe don't believe we could actually get.

PeterI think for most stuff now, we've been around, we know most of the, you know, the tricks of the trade. So, you work with a few affiliates, not that many anymore. Mostly ourselves. Myself and my brother, Joseph, do almost all the content. Just going to get challenging now we have two apps, we're probably going to look to expand the team there, a more structured affiliate program in place, but for now, it's almost all us in internal tooling.

HostLove to to see that. Yeah, I feel like agencies can work, but like usually you want to outsource your stuff after you figure it out yourself. Or if you're going to hire an agency, right, you got to kind of instruct them on like the general direction, like the strategy, because you're you're the one that knows your audience and your product the best.

PeterYou use them more for scaling when you find something that wins and maybe you haven't got the ops team put in place to be able to say, "Okay, let's get this pumped out across, you know, 50 accounts." There's a lot of agencies which are capable of doing that, in which case you're happy enough to pay the 20% margin, you know the unit economics, you know it works, and eventually you can in-house it. It just lets you stand up that function quite quickly. But in terms of like actually finding a winning format, I think you need to do that yourself.

PeterAnd that's not to say agencies can't do it. They most definitely can. It's more that you will understand your audience so much better, you'll make much better product decisions if you're the one that actually gets in the customer's shoes and creates content that resonates with them.