Gabriel Rubin on Building a Creative & Resilient Agency

Justin Levinson (00:00.706)‍

Hey everybody, welcome to the Agency Side podcast. My name is Justin Levinson and I am here today with Gabriel Rubin, who is the founder of Curious and Company Inc. And we're really excited to have him here today and learn more about his story and how he became an owner of such a successful creative agency. Thanks so much for being here, Gabriel.

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Gabriel (00:22.479)‍

Yeah, absolutely. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me today.

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Justin Levinson (00:25.272)‍

Yeah, so let's get into it. I know it can be a long journey, but in short, how did you get into this particular space?

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Gabriel (00:34.61)‍

Yeah, well, I think my story is probably similar for many people, kind of among my age cohort who are agency owners. And that's to say, in short, I kind of stumbled into it, really. I was a young teen at the time that the kind of dot com boom was happening. And I'm talking like late 90s, really.

Mid 90s and just I was always kind of a tinkerer, know, and I was a toddler My parents told me stories how I'd take chairs apart, you know, take the screws out of chairs and stuff like that so I was like the tinker and when the internet became kind of a household Commodity that was available back in the dial-up days. I find myself at the time being just kind of obsessed with it consumed consumed by the New technology and the possibilities and stuff

And so I remember making my first website on GeoCities. you could remember what that is, yeah. Yeah, it's really, yeah, like spinning mailboxes and all the good under construction gifts and that kind of stuff. And, you know, I think everyone has their own kind of creative outlet and a lot of people in this industry, obviously, they're designers or creators in some way.

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Justin Levinson (01:37.021)‍

we've got two, yeah.

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Gabriel (01:57.157)‍

but even people outside of our field are creative kind of in their own ways. And so mine just happened to be kind of a blend of like I appreciated design. I didn't know it entirely at the time, you know, but I appreciated it. And then there's obviously the kind of the technology aspect of it. And it was just the right timing of things. And I know it's all in from a very kind of early age and...

You know, it wasn't a very crowded space at the time, so you didn't have to be great to kind of get your foot in the door. Um, and I, I just, stuck with it. And as I, as I got into high school, um, was, was doing kind of websites for local businesses and stuff. And I, and I had a portfolio. Um,

that at the time, if you remember, I'm really kind of showing my age here, like Calibre 10,000 and PreyStation and all these sites that are kind of like the halls of fame of web design back in the day. I looked up to those guys and tried to kind of emulate some of what they were doing and

So I had a portfolio online that was not great by today's standards, but pretty good for the time. And it was at a time when a lot of agencies were just trying to find talent and they would do anything. And they had ping pong tables set up and whatever they had to do to get, you know, attract young talent. And so I had to make a decision between going off.

to college and potentially maybe, you know, move into a big city to take a job as a designer somewhere. And they were flying me out. These companies were flying me out and kind of put me up at, you know, 18 years old in these nice hotels and stuff. And at the time I wasn't really after a job. think I was kind of just more for the experience of it all. And there was a company in LA, 65 Media,

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Justin Levinson (04:16.302)‍

Yeah.

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Gabriel (04:20.496)‍

who was an entertainment design company and they did websites for movies and theatrical productions. And they flew me out for an interview and I was hooked and kind of the rest is history there.

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Justin Levinson (04:34.488)‍

Dude, that's like a star in like children's athletics, getting that sort of whining and whining. And so you bypassed, did go to college, you went straight into the field and that was your entry.

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Gabriel (04:39.789)‍

Hahaha

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Gabriel (04:49.079)‍

Yeah, you know, I registered in school and I signed up at UNC and I think it was more, I don't know how much I was really interested in going to school. I just didn't know what was next and it's kind of like go through the motions is what you do. And yeah, that opportunity came along and I kind of weighed the pros and cons of both. And I say that hindsight now, I think probably at the time it was more like, I'm going to LA. This is going to be awesome.

But it was still so new then too. And I think at the time I had already kind of taught myself more than what I was gonna learn at college. And so it just made sense. It exciting projects and it was such a cool team and a really unique opportunity. yeah, I was like, I'm all in and packed my car up and drove across the country.

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Justin Levinson (05:45.902)‍

That's awesome. Well, in terms of websites, I honestly think you guys have one of the coolest websites I've ever been on with the hand and the crystal ball that opens and shows all the work and everything. really, you know, your story really, like it adds up when I, know, terms of the design and what I, know, cause some, you know, some agencies, you know, it's not as important to them what the site looks like. But you're

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Gabriel (05:52.807)‍

thank you.

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Gabriel (06:02.158)‍

Yeah.

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Gabriel (06:11.821)‍

Yeah, you know, that's something it's kind of funny too. If you if you read any of the comments about our website, particularly from people who have been in the industry for a while and we were fortunate enough for it to have won a couple of awards to and a few from the FWA, which maybe you're familiar with. And Rob Ford, who is someone I think I won an FWA like way back in

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Justin Levinson (06:33.934)‍

Yeah.

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Gabriel (06:40.078)‍

2000 or 2001 or something. so I know Rob from a long time ago and the comments on online were all that. It reminds me of websites from back in the day when Flash was a thing and everything. You had all these crazy interactive experiences, a lot of times unnecessarily. Yeah, but yeah, we wanted to make a website that kind of reflected who we are.

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Justin Levinson (06:59.692)‍

Yeah, that's cool though.

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Gabriel (07:08.238)‍

and that kind of stood out from the crowd a little bit. I think we did a pretty good job. So I appreciate you saying that. But yeah, it was just that. It's like, do we, because everyone, every agency says that they're different and they do things differently. And at the end of the day, the stuff that we do is not really all that different. And so rather than just say, you know, we're a different kind of agency, we wanted to try to kind of...

maintain that appears of really being different and try to capture.

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Justin Levinson (07:43.31)‍

Yeah, I mean, even like the, know some people who will be listening, not be able to see the picture, because we do release a picture on YouTube, the aesthetic, just everything that's behind you, sort of is similar in ways to the website. So can kind of get a vibe for your, you've got a thing, you know?

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Gabriel (08:04.878)‍

Yeah, it's something about taking, you know, things from the past and kind of making them modern and not letting things just kind of die off like everything back there. It feels kind of like a time and place from from long ago, but it doesn't look at a place on a bookshelf in the year 2025, I think. And so the website, yeah, it's kind of the same way. And, you we're actually

At the time, the website's now probably two years old. But we, I don't know how much you played around like in the contact section of our website, but that's actually powered by chat GPT. So you ask it a question and it'll connect to chat GPT and, and, know, process your question and spit it back out and answer. And so now that doesn't sound very impressive whatsoever, but two years ago that was like, wow, I can't believe we're actually doing this.

So it just goes to show how fast this industry can change.

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Justin Levinson (09:03.224)‍

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (09:07.806)‍

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Maybe you could give us a little insight as to, know, exactly what you guys are doing at Curious and Company and the work you do just so our listeners can have a vibe on that.

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Gabriel (09:21.697)‍

Yeah, sure. So I met my business partner, Michelle Hammer, many, moons ago at an agency that her and I both worked at doing, again, media, digital media for entertainment, mostly movies, but also TV shows. And so her and I got back together about five years ago and brought her in and we kind of merged forces.

And she's kind of the company to my curious and the whole kind of ethos of the name is, you know, and strategy kind of married or design and process. so because of her and my background in entertainment and all of the contacts and clients that we have and our interests too, it...

made sense, we continued in the same genre. And so we primarily do digital media, social media, banner campaigns, that kind of stuff for entertainment. So mostly theatrical, but also some TV and streaming networks as well. And occasionally we'll take on kind of a one-off project. And so we're in the process now of finishing a really exciting project for

a nonprofit school in Atlanta called the Ron Clark Academy. And Ron was actually just featured, I think two days ago on Good Morning America. He has a really, really cool story himself. And the school we went to visit it, it's just, this place is incredible. It's for grades fifth to eighth, I believe, or fourth to eighth. But it's...

like a Disney theme park inside or like Harry Potter came to life. It's just such a cool place. But anyway, so we're finishing that project soon and they actually saw our website and reached out to us and were like, hey, we've gone through a few agencies now with the RFP process and no one's quite kind of checked the boxes, but we saw your website and we would love for you to pitch on it. And so we did.

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Gabriel (11:43.275)‍

That shows the importance of actually standing out and inducing a little bit of difference.

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Justin Levinson (11:48.59)‍

Totally. That's fascinating. When you guys both launched the agency, was there thoughts in your mind that were like, oh, maybe I should just stick freelancing or working for another agency? Or were you pretty determined, like, I've got the clients, I'm ready for this, I have the perfect partnership, I'm gonna roll with it.

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Gabriel (12:12.396)‍

Yeah, we were, we were both pretty determined and I personally already had experience starting an agency, um, about that was 2011, 2010 maybe. Neoganda. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's fine. And we did the same thing as well. And we were in business, um, for, for about six or seven years. And I was there for, for, for about five years.

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Justin Levinson (12:25.034)‍

And you thought that? is it? Yeah.

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Gabriel (12:40.556)‍

Before I took kind of a hiatus from our industry, but it was a different time then. That was kind of the high point of these flash websites where it talked about unnecessary, where was like every website had to be a flash website and you had to wait for, you know, two minutes for it to load. So different time, but I had already kind of done the rodeo once and learned some lessons.

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Justin Levinson (13:03.162)‍

Yeah

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Gabriel (13:10.42)‍

along the way. so when, when her and I started talking about the prospect of, of, of kind of maybe going at it together, I was already kind of doing what you describe was kind of selectively taking projects as, as kind of glorified freelancer where, you know, I've been in the industry for a long time. And so, so I knew a lot of people and I would get requests from, time to time about, know, putting together a team to, handle a project.

And so it of got to a point where it was like, well, I just missed working with a regular team, you know, and being creative kind of on a day-to-day basis and working towards something bigger and kind of greater than myself and then whatever the next project was. And so the star is kind of aligned and we were all in on starting, you know, a real agency.

together and the timing probably couldn't have been worse because it was right at the end of 2019 and headed right into 2020. And we all remember, you know, what those were like. But yeah, yeah. But we were very fortunate to, you know, obviously couldn't predict what was going to happen. And so her and I started in January of 2020 and by March

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Justin Levinson (14:23.138)‍

Try to forget.

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Gabriel (14:39.195)‍

It was lockdowns and stuff and hell of a time to start an agency. But luckily she was working for her previous agency in Los Angeles remotely for quite a while at that point. And I had been remote for a long time myself. And so we kind of already knew the ropes and were positioned just kind of by happenstance.

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Justin Levinson (15:02.723)‍

Yeah.

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Gabriel (15:08.863)
to be kind of well suited to ride the wave of COVID. And so we were very fortunate, but we kind of were able to, like I said, survive the first year, year and a half and came out and we're just ready to go.

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Justin Levinson (15:28.43)‍

Yeah, I can totally relate to that. I also started a business in that same time period. And yeah, I felt I had an unfair advantage as well as being very positioned well as a remote worker before that. And that I think played to our favor as well. And also there's like something to be said about sort of like.

you know, buying when the stock is sort of down, you know, you're kind of getting in at, you know, it's going to weed some people out, but then there's going to be others that are going to kind of capitalize, unfortunately, on the misfortune that others are going to experience.

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Gabriel (15:59.176)‍

Yeah, you're exactly right. And just like the market too, mean, you can't time it, right? And so it just we were just very fortunate, very, very lucky to have kind of the right circumstances. I mean, totally unfortunate, but very, very lucky that we had that experience going into it. And it is very difficult to for sorry, for large agencies like that to to adapt, you know, I mean, wasn't remote work wasn't unheard of.

at the time, but to have to transition like that, that, I mean, could cripple an agency. And so everyone was busy kind of reacting where we were just like ready to go.

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Justin Levinson (16:43.278)‍

Yeah, it definitely taught me that I think there is a real advantage to having a small, nimble team and kind of, you know, go whichever way it needs to go in whatever time, whatever the times bring us. Curious when you had told me your previous agency and then you had some lessons learned going to the next, were things specific that you sort of knew that you wanted to do differently when you started this agency?

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Gabriel (16:49.085)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Gabriel (16:55.518)‍

Yeah.

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Gabriel (17:02.622)‍

Yeah.

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Gabriel (17:12.67)‍

Yeah, that's a really good question. think a good lesson learned for me that I would encourage anyone who's going to start a business with another person is to really know what it is that you want to get out of the business and why you're starting the business. And I got a very early start, as I mentioned, in my career. And then that led to the

being again in a position where I was able to start an agency at a pretty young age. I think I was 20, 25 when I started my first company. And, you know, obviously there are plenty of entrepreneurs who do that sort of thing and are hugely successful and they just make the right decisions at the right time. And not to say that, you know, that wasn't the case necessarily, but I didn't really know. I was just passionate about the work.

when I started Neoganda with my old business partner, Matt Cooper. And he was 15 years older than I was. And so he was in a completely different place in life and needed different things out of the business than I did. And they weren't things that I was mature enough to talk about or even, you know, wasn't aware that that was something that I needed to consider. I was just, hey, we're starting this business and we're doing what I love to do.

And this is going to be great. um, and it was, but it kind of came to a crossroads where the money, let's say was, was really in, um, banners at the time. And I mean, it's still, you know, it's a very, very lucrative business. There's a lot of business out there. Um, but I didn't find it all that engaging or interesting. And.

came to that point where I was like, well, this business can't be the best at both things. So which lane we have to pick a lane. for me, that was my kind of, my first, where the alarm bells went off, where it was like, okay, maybe I'm headed somewhere that I don't really wanna be going. Even though the agency had been successful and I think we grew to 15, 20 people.

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Gabriel (19:39.264)‍

over the course of a couple of years and we were doing good work and had really happy staff and a good team. But again, like I said, it wasn't where I saw my future as a creative person. And so I thought it was best for me to step back and kind of find my roots, so to speak.

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Justin Levinson (20:02.514)‍

Well, having agency at 25, that's interesting. mean, I know, you know, my head was not screwed on correctly at 25 at all. And I definitely think now at 40, you know, with, you know, can see, I can understand, you know, with kids in that house and mortgage and all that other stuff, there's a giant difference from the 25 year old brain to the 40 year old

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Gabriel (20:27.929)‍

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, you need you need both, not necessarily the helm, you know, but but you need that that young creative energy. but then you need that kind of captain of the seas who knows, right, like where the ships got to steer for the long term viability of the business. even now, you know, it's always kind of a dance between the two. And so

it in hindsight, you know, I don't know that I would have done things any differently because all that to say, um, when you are going into business with someone, make sure that those are the types of things that you talk about and that you're a hundred percent on the same page and you've talked through, you know, all those nitty gritty details about what happens if one of you decides that you wake up one day and you don't want to do this anymore.

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Justin Levinson (21:23.214)‍

Yeah, I would not been prepared to have those conversations at 25. I was not a very good communicator. I do miss some of my like teen angst that I carried into my 20s, that bratty edge I had in the things I used to do. I was definitely cooler than I am now. it's...

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Gabriel (21:29.831)‍

Nor was I.

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Gabriel (21:47.323)‍

Well, you know, there's something to be said for that. one of my very first coworkers and one of my design heroes who I haven't talked to for too many years now, his name is Fernando Ramirez and he owns an agency himself called Watson DG. yes, they're, yeah, the most amazing every time, every, every, everything that they do.

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Justin Levinson (22:06.917)‍

yeah, these are your design work, yeah.

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Gabriel (22:14.794)‍

I just, I'm in awe of, he's always been such a brilliant creative and it's no question why anybody would want to work alongside him. He's a really great creative director, but I met him at the very first job I took in LA at 65 Media, which to their own detriment, they were really kind of a breeding ground for their own competition. There were so many people who I know who,

started there or went through there and kind of learned the ropes and then went off to start their own agencies. about the kind of young angst, there was a project, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And gosh, the director's name escapes me right now. Do you know, off top of your head?

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Justin Levinson (23:06.166)‍

I don't, know who did the music for it, but I can't remember who directed it.

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Gabriel (23:07.899)‍

Yeah, it's, it's, cannot believe I don't know. I'm sure the listeners will know. And yeah, but he was, like I said, I said, really creative director and knew he had, he had a vision for every project and it was an interactive website and it was, you know, it really kind of a heady type movie and the website kind of reflected that. And there was one section of the website that had

He had designed it with this kind of like bluish background color and I could be getting the colors wrong, but with this kind of blue background color. And the director was, was very, very involved in this project. It wasn't just, you know, getting approval from the marketing department at the studio. The director had his hands in everything. And the director said, he liked the website, but this particular section needed to have, I think a pink background.

And you know, the notes came down to Fernando and he said, no, it's staying blue. they're like, what do you project manager? What do you mean? It's staying blue. So yeah, they, they, it goes back and forth, back and forth. And he says, I will quit. I'm not making the background. The director of the movie is telling him to make it better. So he doesn't change the background and he doesn't get fired, but.

He ends up leaving, don't know, year or two later and then goes on to eventually start Watson. And now he does all of the websites for that director. And so it's funny how like that kind of angst and that determination and that he saw his creative vision through it. And I don't know if you would think that it would just pissed the director off to the point where it's like, like, you know, blackballed or something, but no, he just, and it's...

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Justin Levinson (24:58.947)‍

Yeah

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Gabriel (25:03.787)‍

An insult that I don't remember the director's name right now because... Yeah, yeah, same.

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Justin Levinson (25:06.67)‍

I've forget it too, when it hits me, gonna, yeah, I'm gonna my senior moment here, but that's pretty cool. mean, yeah, that takes some guts sometimes to take a stand and to, you know, advocate for what you really believe when somebody at the director level is, know, director of the movie is involved. I don't know if I have the guts.

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Gabriel (25:30.828)‍

Yeah, I don't know if would have been that brave either, but it paid off for him.

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Justin Levinson (25:35.806)‍

Yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty wild. Yeah, I guess. Are there any, I guess, like, awards or accolades or things that, like projects that, you know, stick out of yours that you're that you're most proud of in your career?

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Gabriel (25:55.724)‍

Yeah, that's... We have not been, as an agency, Curious & Company, really cognizant enough of the awards and submitting ourselves to them and kind of playing along in that space as we should be. I think it's important for people to do...

this hard work to be recognized for the efforts. so, mean, you mentioning that reminds me that we need to be kind of more on the ball this year. But the type of work that we do now, it's starting to shift a little bit. As I mentioned before, in the past, had these big websites and it was easy kind of to just, there was one piece and you would go to this one.

piece of creative and he would interact with it and it's pretty easy to of like rate it right like that was such a good website what a good one-off and they still have these of course but a lot of work we do now websites are really not in the wheelhouse we do them but we're very selective about them because they're so time-consuming and so we'll do a theatrical campaign social media let's say for a film title

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Justin Levinson (27:11.757)‍

Yeah.

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Gabriel (27:21.63)‍

And there'll be 50 pieces of creative, you know, that we do that run all over the place. It'd be, you know, a paid in feed ad on Instagram or a page takeover on something. And it's just, there's so much and it's so spread out that I find it pretty overwhelming as an agency owner to kind of even stay on top of that stuff. so to answer your question in the past very, very long time ago.

One of the very first websites I worked on was Lemony Snakeheads, a series of unfortunate events with Jim Carrey. And that won a few awards, a key art and Cleo and some other things.

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Justin Levinson (28:06.52)‍

sweet.

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Gabriel (28:07.105)‍

Yeah, but as of late, no, but get back to me maybe next year and hopefully have a different answer for you.

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Justin Levinson (28:13.632)‍

Yeah, I I'm always I keep on them mainly in the recruiting industry. always like going through all the awards. My team is always looking through who won, you what and what people were part of which projects and trying to get to know every single person in the industry. So it's kind of fun to comb in there, but it is a bit overwhelming. And yeah, I mean, it's something that's exciting for for creators to share on their on their LinkedIn page and have discussions and be complimentary of each other. So can be a fun community thing.

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Gabriel (28:28.898)‍

Yeah.

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Gabriel (28:42.787)‍

It is, you know what I really appreciate too, nowadays when I see the depth of the level of credits that a lot of the awards give to people who, you know, who played an important role in a project, but maybe they weren't like, you know, the senior art director or the creative director or whatever. And I remember in years past, it was kind of a top level talent that would get featured. And now I'm seeing more and more.

In LinkedIn posts too, I love seeing it when someone was the project manager of a project or lead and they give kind of credit in a post and they reference everybody who was involved. It's nice to see and kind of like pay respects to people who were involved.

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Justin Levinson (29:34.604)‍

Yeah, it totally takes a village and I appreciate that. I know technology is part of what you do. I'm always interested in technology. I know we talked a little bit about the GPT that was that's on the website, which I know you said might not be that impressive now, but I don't have any GPT on my website. So I'm in that still. But, maybe you can tell tell us a little bit about the technology, you know, in terms of how that's working within what you guys are doing and what you're seeing on that front.

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Gabriel (29:45.442)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Gabriel (29:51.362)‍

Hahaha

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Gabriel (30:04.362)‍

Yeah, it, the AI space is, it's a little bit of a hobby horse of mine. I, I'm certainly by no means an expert, but I definitely have kind of an appreciation for, for its capabilities. And we use it a lot internally and I use it a lot personally and so do some of our creatives as well. and it's not just limited to the creative team, but.

Everyone in the company, we have a company wide, a few accounts for kind of like the various large language models and other things just to kind of help with overall productivity and stuff. But from a creative point of view, it's, there's pros and cons to it. And I see them both and the cons are pretty terrifying. And I don't even mean like, you know, the Skynet taking over Terminator.

style but just in terms of the the watering down of content and and how kind of just

how easy it is to create something and throw it away because it doesn't take any effort really. And I say that as a generalization because it's pretty obvious, at least right now, even to this point. The content that's AI generated that stands out is kind of night and day levels above everything else and that stuff still

requires someone who really knows what they're doing. And not only that, it requires someone who, just like design, has a good eye. And so the way I kind of see it is, you know, when I'm hiring for a new design position, let's say, and in that I could be biased because I myself didn't go to school, but I am much less inclined to look at someone's CV.

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Gabriel (32:14.813)‍

and try, you know, look to see where they went to school or where they graduated in their class or anything. All I really care about is how they present in a conversation and their portfolio. And I think what that boils down to is one thing that I don't think can be taught in school is having a discerning eye, knowing what looks good, what doesn't. And I think AI kind of

falls into the same category where you still have to know, you have to that sense of taste, of composition, of when something looks good and when it doesn't. so, often a bit of a tangent here, but kind of the way I see AI is as a tool like everything else in the creative's kind of toolkit. And so,

All that to say the way we've been leveraging it internally and it's still kind of dicey because there's, I think still kind of a gray area about how you can use some generated content and all of our clients are super sensitive about it as well. Like who owns really the copyright and it's still ever evolving, but we've been using it still.

regularly, it's so helpful to just kind of fill in the blanks, but especially so in the pitch phase. So I think we still use a lot of, you know, traditional production to produce the content after winning a job, but for pitching in particular, to be able to kind of start to realize and otherwise,

impossible or very expensive idea before you've gotten the project or approval on anything and be able to share like, okay, this is not it exactly, but this is kind of it. What do you think? So, and then in terms of just the value that it's added to the internal processes, being able to automate certain things have.

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Gabriel (34:38.686)‍

Have a brainstorm session and then as soon as the brainstorm session ends, automatically that conversation is fed through AI to kind of collect the notes and parse things out and create a document, make things available to the entire team. So there's so many kind of just unique value adds that we found for AI so far.

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Justin Levinson (35:02.766)‍

Yeah, I think of that, you know, it really is like, you like that Joe Jackson song, you can't get what you want till you know what you want. You you still as a prompter, you still have to have the vision to know what and I feel that it does sort of it can enhance the creative opposed to kill it if it's done skillfully by the right person already sort of has that vision.

I'd be curious just outside of AI, know, is sort of in your mind, disclosing you don't have to tell it, tell it, but your current tech stack is like what other programs do you use? do you you know, what do you like as I know you come from a design background? You know, what is it? What does that tech stack in your agency sort of look like?

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Gabriel (35:50.537)‍

Well Adobe everything. I think I'm probably showing my roots here a little bit because there's so many of kind of like one-off technologies and tools that we've been able to add to the broader team. But personally, outside of those and the...

Adobe toolkit and some other 3D apps and that kind of stuff. I can't really add a whole lot of value to the conversation there because I was so slow to get on Figma, know, all of these other applications that teams find tremendously valuable, especially when you work across a large organization and outside of

you know, Slack and some project management software in Adobe and the AI kind of arena, which every day seems like there's a new tool there. I couldn't even begin to name them. I'm old school. just give me Photoshop, After Effects, and an internet connection and I'm pretty happy.

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Justin Levinson (37:08.674)‍

Yeah, no, I totally understand that. I get a cold email every day about some new technology that I should be embracing that's gonna change my life. I'd be spending every day trying out a new tool and I would never do anything except for try out new tools if I answered.

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Gabriel (37:22.962)‍

Yeah, I know. It's a full-time job. Well, do you have one? Maybe you can educate me. What should I be using? Whatever some of your guests say.

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Justin Levinson (37:28.468)‍

well, you know, I would say that I don't, you know, a lot of the guests have talked about Figma, that's been a popular one. And then talking about the things that you've been discussing as well, Slack. I mean, I don't think there's, I haven't spoken to a lot of people that have like a gigantic tech stack. But I, you know, I'm always just curious, you know, I have a huge tech stack, but it's, you my, you know, my other passion in like creative recruitment, it's more.

geared towards like sales and automation of like outbound, like recruiting agents are becoming the new thing right now.

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Gabriel (38:04.206)‍

detracted the conversation but I am curious a little bit to know maybe one or two tools that you're using in that regard because as an agency owner you know a lot of our client base is built in we work with the same there's only so many movie studios and TV networks but at the same time yeah I think one of the things about that about sales that agency owners kind of forget and I'm guilty of myself is that

It's not an on-off switch, you know, the sales cycles, the website's not like we just create a website and send a few emails and ends there. Or when things get slow, you send a few emails and then trying to kind of get something going again. But it's a constant drip that has to be always going. And so as a small agency owner, you kind of have to do a little bit of everything. so think that speaking just kind of,

plainly, that's certainly one of our weak spots is that the sales cycle and being on top of it. And I think having a process for it is key.

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Justin Levinson (39:15.468)‍

Yeah, mean, there, there, you know, recruitment is basically, it's just kind of like high level sales. I think that there are a lot of there are a lot of things that could be beneficial things. I mean, we use something called source whale, which is pretty fantastic. It is, you know, it does do a drip campaign for for for email, but it doesn't automate the LinkedIn and

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Gabriel (39:43.847)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Justin Levinson (39:45.09)‍

What I like about that is that LinkedIn automation is something I've used in the past and had it be effective, but it really doesn't work in terms of what LinkedIn really wants you to be doing. And if LinkedIn is your top lead generation tool, the last thing you want to do is get banned from LinkedIn. And I did something that can happen because there are limits. And even if you set the parameters on those limits,

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Gabriel (40:03.486)‍

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (40:12.31)‍

If you mess up, if you're connecting with too many people while it's auto connecting with people or your messages are getting too spammy, you're going to have a problem. I've chosen to not do the path of the LinkedIn automation. So, SourceWale is a really great tool. I know they're making these things that are not just recruitment. I mean, it could work for business development. I think in a creative agency too, it's essentially the same thing.

You're building out campaigns. are their multi-channel and you can even text people. I don't ever do that to people or cold call. I don't really, I have cold called here and there, but I think that's another part of the business that's going away.

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Gabriel (40:56.433)‍

What a grueling, punishing endeavor that is.

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Justin Levinson (41:00.308)‍

It is, but one thing that's cool, and I'm not sponsored by Source Whale at all, but one thing that's kind of cool about that is that it keeps track of all of the different openings and if people are opening your emails and if they're Reddit, if somebody clicked on it 14 times, it'll show, and they clicked on it five minutes ago. And then you can call them at that exact minute and I can be like, hey, Gabriel, what's up, man? This is Justin Levinson. You'll be like, dude, I just opened up your email.

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Gabriel (41:14.461)‍

you

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Gabriel (41:18.385)‍

There's some interest there.

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Justin Levinson (41:29.186)‍

what, this is so weird. I'll be like, wow, it's cosmic. Yeah, I know. Am I looking over your shoulder? So it's that sort of like high level stuff that some of these new things are doing. But there's also like ones I don't use. One is called People GPT, which might be something that you could be interested in. It's also called Juicebox. It's essentially like, you know, it's a data scraper from just like, you know, it's...

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Gabriel (41:29.777)‍

Yeah, you look pretty solar with it. Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (41:54.766)‍

It's absolutely ridiculous, but it'll scrape data from all over. That's good data and will help you automate campaign, multi-channel campaigns for reach out and business development. Salesforce has got something called, I was looking about, think her name is Eva, the AI agent, which is just like the person literally like is like a member of your team. like gets like your personality, has a personality. It's like does tasks for you. It learns on its own. I mean, it's kind of,

It really feels to me like Eva is going to replace like 90 % of recruiting recruiters out there pretty soon.

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Gabriel (42:32.71)‍

Wow, I'll tell you what, we're working on a pitch right now and one of the ideas that I'm working on involves an AI agent and so I've been a lot of research and kind of, I also, when I started out as a designer and Flash websites were a thing, animating them and bringing them to life was

was a huge element of that. And so I had kind of my own ideas about how I wanted things to move and animate on screen and behave and function when the user interacts with them. And so rather than kind of hand that off to somebody else, I wanted to be able to kind of bring my vision to life. so I learned to code and I already knew HTML and CSS, a little bit of JavaScript, not to say that,

that's coding by any means, but back in the days of ActionScript. And so I taught myself to code and over the years I've just kind of stayed up to date and I'm by no means a hardcore coder, but I think just kind of understanding the logistics of things and, you know, knowing how things should be structured and, you know, the logic basically.

the steps of bringing an application to life. And so, so I've been kind of playing around in the space of AI and programming these things too. And there's a service called Tavis, T-A-V-U-S. And it's, it's also a large language model, but a video one. And you can create these personas based on

man prompts and you can you know it it's kind of scary now just how well chat gbt knows you like anyone who's listening to this to ask it wait how well do know me tell me all the things you know about me and you're like oh my god I've told you too much but it so you you can create these personas you upload a video of yourself talking script it's like 90 seconds long

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Justin Levinson (44:43.448)‍

You

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Gabriel (44:54.919)‍

And it's probably old news to many people, but it creates a real time avatar that you can interact with of yourself. And it looks like you, it sounds like you, and you can do green screen knockouts and it's only going to get better. But yeah, a year or two from now, we could be having this conversation and I wouldn't even know if it was you or your AI agent that I was talking to. Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (45:18.05)‍

Not me. Yeah, I mean, it's like, yeah, this is like a new Black Mirror episode where I rip off the back and like, like,

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Gabriel (45:28.48)‍

Yeah. I don't even want to see Black Mirror episodes two or three years from now. It's going to be just way too terrifying.

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Justin Levinson (45:36.142)‍

Yeah, man, it's some wild stuff. But yeah, man, thanks so much for doing this and hopping on and talking to me. It's been a really fun conversation. And yeah, I look forward to following the work you guys do. hopefully we'll get to stay in touch. yeah, thanks for being here today.

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Gabriel (45:55.876)‍

Yeah, absolutely. I would love that. Please do keep in touch. It was nice talking with you. Thanks.

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Justin Levinson (46:00.62)‍

All right, Gabriel, have a good one, All right, bye.

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Gabriel (46:02.072)‍

You too, take care. All bye.

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