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.
We moved into a house
Big life update: my girlfriend and I moved into a house in Vancouver. The whole week has been unpacking boxes and driving between furniture stores, and my new hobby between calls is scrolling for what else we need to buy.
It's wild how much work it takes to just maintain a house. On our first day we had three different home service companies show up. One guy only does plumbing. Another one only kitchen cabinets. A third one only A/C. In Ukraine all three of those would be one person, and that person would probably be my dad 😁
I also spent a full hour trying to understand the garbage logistics. Multiple bins, rules about what goes where, a pickup schedule I had to actually study.
Thank God we're renting and the owner takes care of all of it.
But I couldn't be happier.
Having a real home office instead of a table in the kitchen, having a proper backyard... it honestly feels like a dream.
We built a landing page workflow with Claude and Higgsfield
Last week our head of media buying got the whole team on a call and shared a workflow he'd been quietly testing since July: how to build landing pages with Claude Code and Higgsfield.
Here's why I'm excited about it. Most landing pages are built by a designer or a dev who has never opened the ad account. They get a brief, make something pretty, and it converts like garbage.
Meanwhile the media buyer is sitting on everything that actually matters: which angles win, which hooks get clicked, what people say in the comments, what the reviews complain about. All that knowledge usually dies inside the ad account because the buyer can't code or design.
Until now.
This workflow removes the wall. You feed Claude the client's context, point it at a few reference designs, generate the visuals with Higgsfield, and get a working page out the other end. No designer, no dev, no three week turnaround.
The example from the call: a creatine brand. Instead of one generic product page, you build one lander for lifters that talks about physical performance, and a separate one for the 45+ crowd that talks about mental clarity. Same product, different proven ad angle on each page. The headline that wins in the ad becomes the headline on the page.
This only works because of boring groundwork we did months ago: every client has a GitHub repo with their full context. Offers, audiences, objections, research, audits. Our head of media buying tested the flow himself first, turned it into an SOP, and recorded a tutorial for the team.
The short version, if you want to steal it:
Put all client context in one place (we use GitHub repos), refresh it with a client interview every quarter
Before generating anything, ask Claude to interview you. 20-30 questions. The difference in output is massive
Give it reference designs from Dribbble plus the client's fonts and colors
Generate the images with Higgsfield (or Nano Banana for simple backgrounds)
Refine with screenshots, not words. 5-10 edits per batch
Write for an 8th grader. Benefits, not features ("contains magnesium" becomes "3x more energy"). One CTA on the first screen, sticky button on mobile
Deploy to Netlify for testing, then hand the file to the client's devs. On Shopify use a builder like Replo instead of custom code
We're not building landing pages for every client yet. But the flow is in-house now, the capacity is there, and soon this becomes part of our white label offering (creatives and email already are).
Stay tuned.
The COO who caught us poaching
This week I got a meeting request I don't get every day. The COO of a company I won't name wanted to talk because our recruiters had messaged about 12 of his employees in a short window. His question, more or less: what the hell is going on, are we under attack?
Fair question.
If I saw 12 of my people getting pinged by the same agency in a month, I'd assume the same thing.
The honest answer was more boring: no one ordered a raid. We're in the business of finding the best performance marketing talent on the market, and his company simply employs a lot of it. When clients ask us for the best, our recruiters go where the best people work. Sometimes that means a bunch of his people hear from us in the same month.
So I told him exactly that. Your company is on our list because your people are that good. We don't message people at mediocre companies.
Hard to be mad at that.
We spent the rest of the 15 minutes talking about how the hiring market for media buyers actually works, and by the end the tension was gone. No conspiracy, no competitor ordering a raid. Just a competitive market where great people get noticed.
There's a chapter in the Netflix culture book (No Rules Rules) about this exact thing. Netflix encourages their employees to take recruiter calls and even go to interviews, then bring what they learn back to the company. Their logic: if your people know exactly what the market offers and still choose to stay, you've built something real.
If you've built a team of A players, recruiters like mine are already in their DMs. You can't stop that. The only real defense is being a company people don't want to leave.
Talk soon,
Dmitry