Sturgeon runs a marketing agency and was discussing whether agencies survive AI. He said his team reviews recordings of its sales calls and asks what is going unsaid, and this is what they found. He compared it to planes that can fly themselves but still carry a pilot.
I don't need to be Nostradamus to tell you this and know I'm right. Everything that's creative and is subjective and is based on your feelings, that's all going to disappear. But everything that is problem solving with humans in front of a computer and scratching their head being like, fuck, why isn't this working? That's going to stay here for as long as a human is in front of a computer. Like I'm building a restaurant right now and I hired my old creative director who has a two-person agency. Why? Because I want the joy of talking about fleshing out ideas with another human and I'm paying a premium price and the guy makes a fuck ton of money and his life is good, but he'll never be able to scale that. But he's the agency of the future. People will still pay 20,000 bucks to work on a brand guideline and because they love it. But then there's a whole new segment being created for people using AI, you know?
So the question is, what is a customer segment who still wants the human touch? And one of them is these personal things like a restaurant, maybe. And in marketing, it's not restaurants probably, but something as corporate as RevOps. It's possible. It's possible that you say AI can do many things. If a human being isn't checking our calculations and analysis about revenue, then we're just not comfortable. It may not even be legal. Or even like, what about when AI is better than doctors at diagnosis? Okay, I think a lot of people still want to talk to a doctor, even if the doctor's not as good. Now, they may be irrational. Maybe, maybe, maybe not. I don't even know, but that's what I bet.
Yeah, planes can already fly themselves, but we would never put up with there being no guy there, right? So that's already happening right now. Another thing, too, Mario, that I've noticed is that because we review sales calls all the time, we have game tape every single day. One of our clawed questions against our fireflies is what's not being said, right? Because that's a really important question. What they aren't saying is that they want to pay for accountability. So they're choosing us because they want someone to yell at when things go wrong. When things break on AI, what are you going to do? DM the anthropic guy? Like, who do you talk to? So people are willing to pay bigger prices now for human accountability. Is that something that you've come across?
100%. And I was actually looking into your trust pilot yesterday or so. And so many reviews of I hired them six months ago and I'm working with them now. So happy and all that. This brings you the level of confidence that you can do repeat jobs and be happy and not be screwed over, especially if you, for example, work with marketing directors who used to be a team of 10 and then the SaaS apocalypse happened and became a team of one and a half, but they are still expected to deliver the job of 10. And then they need true support and someone who owns it and has the accountability and the agency of doing that. So that trust factor, it's not going to go away. To Jason's point for doctors or to your point about pilots, you want to know that someone who knows how to do that is there and can step in and is going to vet and validate and all that. In our context, the problem is that you, John, know how the business runs and how to do everything and all that stuff. And I may know how to do everything in the business, but it's not a scalable endeavor.
Yeah. Look at this problem the same way right now at 28 clients. Remind me what your headcount is 30, 35, 36. That doesn't make sense to me. Like it should be very inversed. Like if you wanted to scale it, like I'm looking at uh-oh.com, our headcount ratio is going to be even better than marketing because there's not many deliverables. So there's not like somebody who has to sit there and like make a thing, right? But it should be about 20 people per 100 clients, like if we suck. But I expect it to be a lot better than that. Ingus and Zazzy is a lot trickier because we're making things like there and we're also unlimited, which is also dumb because clients abuse us and they show up to the buffet and they bring their pickup truck and a shovel, right? But we let them do that because it proves our model is correct. So right now, are you at max efficiency for 28 clients and even more headcount than there are clients? Or are you addicted to cheaper labor in a Bulgaria? Because I feel like if you were in America, you'd be like, I can't afford this. Like I need to, I need to figure out how to be more efficient.
We're at 67% utilization, which is not ideal. Normally. What does that mean? How