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.
Agency owners meeting in Montreal
My girlfriend and I went to Montreal for a few days. Without a doubt, Montreal has the best restaurant and bar scene in Canada. First night we went to a random place near our hotel called Papito, and it was one of those meals where you're like, why do I ever eat anywhere else.
But that's not the main reason we went.
One of the agency coaches I've been working with (shoutout Damiano) organizes dinners for agency owners in Montreal and Toronto. To my surprise, the agency community is pretty tight, and it was great to finally meet people in person I'd only ever talked to over Zoom and LinkedIn.
I'm so bullish on IRL meetings that I say yes to most of them. I usually go in with zero expectations, genuinely just wanting to connect with people from the same industry. Being an agency owner is a lonely journey. But turns out the more hands you shake in real life, the more money you make.
So if you're organizing anything interesting in marketing or AI, give me a shout. Especially if it's in a city I love so I can write off the trip as a business expense lol
Agencies are a human business. Don't forget that.
I say this as someone who's spent the last few months obsessing over AI. Building Claude skills, automating onboarding, creating databases, trying to make everything as efficient as possible. So this is partly a note to myself.
A lot of agency owners right now are so deep in the AI rabbit hole that they forget what they actually are. The agency business is a human-first business. That's never going to change.
Your clients don't care about your AI stack. They care about results. They pay you money for one thing: to make their business grow. That's it.
The trap is using AI to cut costs instead of using AI to deliver more. There's a version where you automate everything, pocket the margin, and call it innovation. And there's another version where you use the same tools to give your clients more value for the same price. Better reporting, faster testing, deeper analysis, things that weren't possible a year ago.
One builds a real agency. The other hollows it out.
The agencies that survive the next few years won't be the ones with the most automation. They'll be the ones that stayed the most human while everyone else optimized themselves out of the relationship.
AI is getting better every month. The only moat you have is being a real person who gives a shit.
Haven is firing on all cylinders
I started Haven with no real plan. No pitch deck, no marketing budget. Just a few agency owner friends who kept asking me to help them find great media buyers in Europe.
That was a little over a year ago.
Today it's a full business line with three full-time recruiters and Hanna leading the team. Every single client has come through referrals. I still don't have a pitch deck. I keep saying I'll make one and then another referral comes in and I forget about it.
One of our clients sent me this email last week:
When I look back at how this started, it was literally me helping a couple of friends find talent because I'd already interviewed over 1,000 media buyers for AdTribe and knew what good looked like.
Turns out you can build a whole business out of that.
Talk soon,
Dmitry