I flew the whole team to Barcelona

Why you’re getting this: You’ve interacted with Haven or AdTribe before, and this is my weekly-ish update on my journey to building an AI-native agency. Zero pressure to stick around, just click unsubscribe if you don’t want to get it.

I went quiet for six weeks. No dramatic reason. It was the busiest stretch of the year: we flew the whole team to Spain, I saw my parents for the first time in 5 years, we launched a new creative offer, and we made the most important hire in the company’s history.

More on all of it below.

Alright, let’s get into it.

For the first years of AdTribe we all worked from one office in Ukraine. Games after work, negronis on Fridays, life was great. Then the war started and everyone got scattered. I ended up in Canada, the team spread across Europe, and we’ve been working like that for almost 5 years.

Here’s the thing though. Every time we ran an internal happiness survey, the same answer kept coming up: “I don’t feel like part of a team.” People love the flexibility and nobody wants to commute again, but they missed each other. Most of the team had worked together for years and only knew each other through a screen.

So this year I finally did something about it. We rented a big house near Barcelona and most of the team lived there together for a week.

My accountant thinks I’m crazy. On paper you’re spending serious money on people drinking wine and wandering around Barcelona haha. But you learn things about people during a week like that you’d never learn on Zoom. Who takes care of others. Who quietly fixes a problem before anyone asks. Who’s up first with the laptop open and who closes it last. And at 2am, after a few bottles of wine, people tell you what they actually think about the company. The stuff that never comes up on a 1:1 call.

By the end of the week they looked like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years.

One of the guys said something on the last night that stuck with me: “Money is important. But who you work with is more important. I wake up excited to start my day.”

That’s the whole game in a services business. Our average team member has been with us 4+ years, and I see a direct link between team retention and client retention. When the team is strong, clients stay.

So that’s my rule now: remote all year, plus one week together in person. We’re already planning the next one.

In January our Head of Paid Media left to serve in the Ukrainian army. I promised in this newsletter that we’d hire someone to own operations, so the business never again lives or dies by one person.

It took me eight months to keep that promise.

Tetiana joined in mid September as our first Head of Fulfillment. One month in, she runs delivery across the whole agency: client communication standards, the creative department, invoicing policy, the day-to-day decisions that used to pile up in my DMs.

Her two priorities for this quarter: make our creative department profitable as a standalone offer, and cut the time media buyers spend on communication (right now it eats more than half of their day).

And she’s part of a bigger pattern I only noticed recently. One of our recruiters now takes most of the Haven sales calls. Our Head of Performance takes the creative offer calls. Tetiana runs fulfillment.

Piece by piece, I’m firing myself from every seat in the company. What’s left is the job only I can do: bring clients, set direction, and stay out of the way.

And next week comes the real test. I’m going on vacation for two weeks. First time in my life I’ve taken two weeks off. It’s the best test there is: do I actually have a business, or do I still have a job.

Scariest thing I’ve ever done.

Our worst offer just became the easiest sale of the year.

For context: we used to sell a $149 creative package that was losing us money with every batch (I complained about it here in May). So over the summer we hired two designers above market rate and rebuilt the whole department around creative strategy instead of design requests.

This month we finally turned it into a real offer: performance creatives with a money back guarantee.

We closed the first few clients almost without trying. The last time selling felt this easy was the media buyer placement offer, and that one became a whole business line.

Early feedback has been very positive, especially on the creative strategy piece 👇

The reason the offer sells is simple.

Every brand needs more creatives than their team can produce, and the design subscriptions everyone tries have the same problems: unlimited but one at a time, beginner level output, and you still have to tell them what to test.

Ours is different, and the whole pitch fits in one line: ad creative built by the people who run the ads. Every client starts with a full creative strategy. We run a research pass on your reviews, your competitors’ ads, your comments, and your own winning ads. Out of that comes a strategy document: the findings that actually matter with the numbers behind them, the buyer groups worth going after, the angles for each one, and the three concepts to test first. A media buyer writes it, our senior designers execute it. 15 new ads a month for $799. We deliver the first batch, and if you’re not happy with it, we refund the whole amount, no questions asked.

Here’s the research section of one of these strategies, built from 5,257 data points, so you can see it’s not a mood board 👇

The whole offer is at creative.adtribe.com if you’re curious.

Now comes the hard part: fulfillment. Selling creatives is easy. Producing high quality creatives at scale, week after week, is not. That’s exactly what Tetiana and our Head of Performance are building right now, and it’s their number one priority for the quarter.

I’ll share how it goes.

Talk soon,
Dmitry