How Betting on the Future Made Us Stronger Today

AI in marketing

There comes a moment in every company’s journey where you realize that adapting isn’t enough. That simply reacting to trends, testing a few tools, and waiting to see where the market goes is the fastest path to irrelevance. For us, that moment came almost a year ago.

We looked around and saw a wave forming—AI, agents, no-code platforms, autonomous systems, and tools that could compress months of work into days. But most people were dabbling. Experimenting on the surface. Talking a lot, shipping very little. We saw something different: a narrow window of opportunity to make the kind of deep, foundational investments that don’t just prepare you for the future — they give you an edge right now.

So we asked ourselves a harder question:
What if we could actually afford to go all in — and didn’t?
What would that say about us?
What would be left of us a year from now?

The answer was obvious. We didn’t want to be the agency that showed up late to the AI party, trying to fake its way into relevance with repackaged services and a ChatGPT plugin. We wanted to build real capabilities. The kind you feel in the workflow. In the speed. In the outcomes. The kind that makes clients say: “How the hell did you ship that in 48 hours?”

But to do that, we had to treat this as a core business investment, not a side project. And we had to think in systems — not tools.

The Growth Hacker Advantage

We were also lucky — or better yet, built for this. As growth hackers, we’ve always lived at the intersection of business and tech. Half strategic, half technical. Comfortable in code, obsessed with outcomes.

We’re the kind of people who “see dead people” — spotting patterns, inefficiencies, and opportunities where others see noise. That mindset made the transition feel natural. While others scrambled to understand what AI could do, we were already wiring it into the way we think, move, and build.

That’s what we did

We split our efforts into three dedicated teams, each tackling a critical layer of the new operating model. One focused on AI-powered content and creativity. One obsessed over developer velocity and automation infrastructure. And one went deep into the frontier of AI agents and autonomous workflows.

Not just testing tools — but operationalizing them. Not just using AI — but integrating it into the bloodstream of how we grow, create, and scale.

1. AI Assistants & Media Innovation Team

This team is building the creative engine of our ecosystem — exploring and deploying cutting-edge tools for audio, video, and content production. From audiocasts and podcasts to video formats, advanced prompting workflows, and media manipulation, they systemize how we create, research, and ship content at scale.

They operate in what we call “the last mile” — integrating tools via APIs, chaining AI steps, and ensuring that ideas turn into production-ready assets. They’re also the ones bridging traditional automation platforms like Make and Zapier with modern AI-first processes.

Their recent milestone? Launching our automated news bulletin and daily newsletter, now reaching 120,000+ subscribers with a 30% open rate. And they’re just getting started.

2. Developer Velocity & Infrastructure Team

This squad is obsessed with speed, flexibility, and shipping real value. Leveraging platforms like Cursor, Supabase, Lovable, and Vercel, they build blazing-fast web apps, plugins, and Chrome extensions — for us, our clients, and the market.

Their work is deeply integrated with our marketing automation stack, using listeners, webhooks, and smart database connections to create seamless, intelligent systems. They also harness AI for crawling, text analysis, and extracting actionable insights from raw data.

We now build in 5 days what used to take us months — and these aren’t just internal tools. Many of them become products we use, deploy for clients, and even sell.

This team turns technical acceleration into business leverage.

3. Autonomous AI Agents Team

This team is pushing the frontier of AI-driven operations. They design, build, and deploy autonomous agents that are deeply embedded in our daily workflows — handling everything from social media posting and content creation to paid advertising, SEO, and strategic growth initiatives.

The impact is already massive: it feels like we’ve onboarded an extra 40 full-time team members (FTEs) — without actually hiring anyone.

What makes this team unique is how cross-functional their work is. They tap into the assets, APIs, and systems built by Team 1 (Media & Assistants) and Team 2 (Dev & Infra) to create agents that don’t just act — they collaborate, learn, and scale across teams and projects.

This isn’t just automation.
This is autonomy with intelligence — and it’s redefining how we operate.

This has been a huge investment — nearly a year in the making. And it’s paying off in more ways than we imagined.

What started as a move to future-proof our business has become a competitive advantage. We thought we were playing defense. In reality, we were playing offense all along — moving first, experimenting early, making the tough calls, and learning fast.

Now, companies and agencies are coming to us. They’re asking us to implement the same systems for them — or to train their teams on the foundational elements we’ve built.

We invest today to exist tomorrow.
But the truth? This investment isn’t just preparing us for what’s next —
it’s already making us better today.

Was it risky?
Sure.
Was it expensive?
Definitely.

It was the biggest investment we’ve made — aside from our acquisitions. But what was the alternative? Not investing… and disappearing a year from now?

So here’s my advice to fellow marketers, founders, and agencies:

Invest today.

There’s a window of opportunity — wide open now, but not for long.
Don’t wait for it to become “standard practice.”
By then, it’ll be too late.

You either build with AI, or you get built over.