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.
Alright, let’s get into it.
Scammers built a fake business on our brand
Earlier this year my LinkedIn got hacked and I thought that was the worst of it.
Turns out that was just the warm-up, and this one is still going. A few weeks ago I started getting messages from strangers about jobs I never posted. Then calls. Then more messages. Every single day.
Here's what one of those calls sounds like 👇
Scammers built an entire fake business on top of AdTribe's brand. Cloned website. Lookalike domains. A fake "hiring team" offering jobs on our behalf.
The scam works like this: someone claiming to represent AdTribe offers you an "E-commerce Brand Assistant" role. You complete small tasks on their private "optimization platform" and supposedly get paid with commissions. In reality the whole setup exists to collect your personal information and, eventually, your money.
The scale caught me off guard. We're on our 4th lookalike domain now. Our team files takedowns with the registrars one by one, and a few weeks later a new domain pops up.
And it's not just the job scam. Our billing inbox gets a steady stream of fake invoices from "vendors" hoping someone in finance just pays. Go check what lands in your billing inbox this month. I'll wait.
Last week someone messaged me directly asking if the "AdTribe Boost platform" was real before giving them their personal details. Smart move. It saved them.
So let me make it official here too: AdTribe has exactly one domain, adtribe.com. An email from anything else is not us. We never offer pay-per-task "assistant" jobs, and we will never ask you to pay anything to work with us.
The silver lining, I guess: nobody clones small brands haha. Apparently we've made it.
What 550+ media buyer interviews taught us about the market
Back in July I broke down what companies actually ask for when hiring media buyers. This is the other side of the table: the candidates.
Over the last 13 months Haven interviewed more than 550 media buyers. That's after filtering 3,500+ candidates just to get someone on a call. And it's speeding up: August was our busiest interview month ever, 124 interviews in 31 days.
Since most of you hire media buyers one way or another, here's what the market looks like from the inside:
Only 1 in 5 candidates makes it past the first screening call. The rest fall on skills, the wrong type of experience, or English.
English is fading as a barrier. It still matters for client-facing roles, but with AI and text-first communication, what disqualified a great buyer three years ago barely matters if they're not the one on client calls.
The median salary ask is $3,500 a month. A quarter of candidates ask under $2,400. A quarter ask over $5,400.
App and UA specialists cost up to 3x what ecom buyers do. The talent pool is tiny, so talent dictates the price.
Single-platform buyers are disappearing. Only about 1 in 25 is Meta-only. Google + Meta is the default skill set now.
A strong mid-level buyer in Ukraine asks $1,500 to $2,500 a month. A senior app UA manager in Western Europe asks €80,000 to €100,000 a year. Both show up in your inbox under the same title.
The funnel ends at roughly one hire for every 20 first interviews.
We run this machine so our clients don't have to. But if you're hiring media buyers yourself right now, at least now you know the odds.
My best hires came from referrals
A friend once asked me to hire his girlfriend.
Normally a red flag. But I trust this guy a lot, so I did. She became one of our best senior media buyers.
And honestly, that's not even unusual for us. Over 8 years of running my agency, a dozen of the best hires came the same way:
My first employee was my university classmate. I hired Andrii as a junior media buyer. He became our Head of Paid Media and stayed 7 years.
One of our team leads referred our current Head of Paid Media. The agency operates on a different level since he joined.
One of our junior media buyers vouched for a good friend of his. We trusted his judgment and hired her. She's now one of the strongest buyers on the team.
Andrew Wilkinson calls this "hire one to hire three": every great person you hire knows two or three people who are just as good.
Here's why it works. Great people protect their reputation. They only vouch for someone when they're sure, because a bad intro costs them credibility. When your best buyer says "trust me, she's great", that's a stronger filter than any interview process.
It's also the only reliable way to skip the funnel above. One hire per 20 interviews, or one question to your best people. I know which one I prefer.
So if you've spent years raising the bar on your team, your next great hire is probably one question away. Ask your people who they'd want to work with.
Talk soon,
Dmitry