AI Agents for Marketing Agencies

**Jordan Ross** (0:00)
Welcome to How to Build an 8 Figure ABC.
My name is Jordan Ross, and I'm your host. And over the course of this journey, we're going to be interviewing 8 Figure Agency owners and going through the systems that I've seen work and we've implemented into our clients' businesses that have helped our clients add a half a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue over the last handful of years. I myself have already hit the 8 figures in annual recurring revenue, and when I got there, I wasn't happy. I was stressed, I was dissatisfied, and I didn't like the people I was working with. So I clicked the restart button and went from 12 million in annual portfolio revenue back down to the mid 7th figure level to a climb back again. And on this journey, I'm going to be documenting my process on how I'm getting back to 8 figures and bringing you expert industry leaders who will tell you everything they did to get there as well. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the episode.
The world of venture backed agencies is here, and there is more venture capital going into the world of marketing agencies than ever before because of AI. And today I have one of the people at the forefront of this curve, Jason Hu, the founder of Nexad. He is backed by A16Z and 0.72 ventures. And his platform, his product is here to help you automate literally as much as possible when it comes to running an agentic AI native agency. So Jason, first and foremost Ben, good to see you. Thanks for coming on the panel.

**Jason Hu** (1:24)
Yeah, good to talk to you.

**Jordan Ross** (1:26)
Jason, for everyone that doesn't know you and Nexad, who is Jason and what's Nexad?

**Jason Hu** (1:31)
I'm Jason, a little bit background of myself. I graduated from UChicago in 22 and afterwards, I have been working at Silicon Valley. Previously, I was an AI researcher at Chicago. I was doing some early NLP work. You know, before the world LLM become very, very popular, it was called natural language processing. So I was doing some kind of work there.
Afterwards, I joined another AI company in Silicon Valley, see it grow from I was the second employee, and right now, they're at around 50 people.
So it's been a super exciting round to participate in the AI wave. So around a year and a half ago, I left the company to start Nexad. At Nexad, we are building the AI native platform for marketing agencies. The goal on the high level is pretty simple. We know AI is literally changing everything. I'm sure most of you are using Claude or ChatGPT on a daily basis, but I think the potential is much more than that. They are generalized thinkers. They can automate so much of the work in marketing. And I've seen them bring people real value.
Like one of our clients, they literally double their profit margin by improving the efficiency of the employees. But sometimes it can be super daunting to use. So I think our goal, our mission, is to help our clients, help all the agencies to improve work efficiency and to remove the AI dread. Yeah.

**Jordan Ross** (3:03)
Which I love, right? We stand for a similar mission.
We were talking beforehand on the different types of archetypes that you see, and I see too, right? That has evolved in this marketplace. People at the forefront who are like 20 different command centers and people that don't even know what that means. Can you tell me the different types of maybe marketers that you've seen at this initial AI wave? And then maybe explain who that person is, what that means, how they use AI differently, and then how have they used your product? And what's the impact then for them?

**Jason Hu** (3:40)
Yeah. This wave is huge, it's changing everyone. And we're working with many of the market agencies, and primarily three types, based on their knowledge and AI adoption level. The first type is those who are not that familiar with AI. So we have a client called Bruce, he's like an independent marketing consultant based in Brazil. He's not that familiar with AI. All his previous experience was using ChatGPT, and so he's like hearing all these buzzwords, we're not exactly sure where to start. And second are, I think, the vast majority of agencies and people who care about AI, curious about AI, and maybe have tried some tools like Creative Generation or some agents, even like Claude Cowork. But more like on the point solution, right? Like, okay, let me run this analysis, generate this image, but not really setting up an agentic workspace to chain all these things together. And the third type is really the type we were talking about. Like, I have a client, he's really expert. He's managing 20 Claude agents at the same time. So I think these people have all different needs and different personas, but there are common themes and pain points we identify in the process of AI adoption, right? For the first half of people, it's like how do you even get started? Okay, I have ChatGPT, but that's more like general chat. Now, how do I start using AI in my marketing workflow? So in our product, we actually have a super easy to use interface onboarding guide, and we actually prompt you. It's not you prompt AI, our AI proactively set up pipelines of workflows where, okay, you can generate reports, you can generate creatives, and all the other things you can think of to help make a very smooth transition period. For the second type of people, so I remember vividly there's one of our customers talking to me. He's like, it's impossible to catch up with the way of AI.