Acquire Agency
What started as a project to “acquire agency” evolved into a thirty person team with hundreds of clients, focused on developing growth strategies for SaaS & e-commerce startups. Coming from the slipperiness of qualitative foresight strategy, growth marketing opened me up to a world of real-time numerical call and response—dispatches from the hive mind of impressions, clicks, and purchases. As co-founder, I built nearly all of the business processes, oversaw research and client output, and hired the entire team, then managed it. At our peak, we were managing millions of dollars in daily advertising spend across 50+ active clients.
Background
Acquire started during the first meaningful wave of mass-scale programmatic advertising in 2016; a period where cheap CPMs were coalescing with zero-interest rate policies and a blitzscale startup ideology that propelled countless e-commerce businesses, and ultimately put Donald Trump in the White House.
I wrote about the experience for The New Republic in 2023, reviewing Ben Smith’s book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral as Buzzfeed, Vice, and Gawker were announcing their bankruptcies.