#087: He Hacked Offline Ads And Made Box Trucks Convert Like Clicks

Essentially, at this point in the journey, Max and I have been working on it for 2.5 years. I'm about to graduate UChicago. The cushy consulting job is beckoning, and we are ready to sort of give it up. But we were at UChicago doing like a quick 1-minute pitch event, and someone in the audience was like, hey, you know, my dad is a private equity guy, public CFO, has like been in the trucking space for quite some time. I think you guys should have a conversation. And so when we had that conversation with this guy, Mitch Gordon, he breathed new life into the business. Like, Max and I were pretty ready to, you know, put the hats up, get those jobs. And he was like, no, guys, like, I actually think this is an incredible business. And so essentially, we had this very successful person validate that there was legs here and was willing to get involved. And so Mitch came on shortly thereafter as the CEO.

Welcome back to Season 4, Episode 10 of the Turning Pro Podcast. Today we have Tom Shea, who's the founder and CEO of Agile Media Group. Thanks for joining today, Tom.

Yeah, stoked to be here. You know, I thought I was just coming over for a sauna session. Not sure how you conned me into getting on here, but, uh, stoked about it.

We could do both.

All right, sounds good.

Um, I was saying to you before we started the podcast, someone asked me like, how do you get all your guests for the podcast? Because I think there's people who want to have podcasts, who maybe just like struggle to find guests. And I said my honest answer is if I am paying attention to someone or friends with someone and I'm very curious to have a conversation with them, that is my strategy. I'm like, yo, you need to come on the pod.

Yeah. And I mean, we've been friends for a couple of years, obviously. New York or nowhere. I think it's the best place. You know, we got like a huge density of founders, especially I'm in Williamsburg. I walk past this coffee shop, I see like 3 friends, 3 friends a week, I would say. Um, but yeah, you know, we, we got a podcast as well. It's, uh, it's a lot of fun and, uh, it's a good excuse to sit down with, uh, some old friends.

Dude, you guys have just been everywhere, which was like the first thing I said to you. I was like, I feel like over the last year for me being like one of the commerce enablement SaaS nerds, like you, we're more aware of everyone else and everything that's going on in the space than most. But man, like my socials and everything is about Agile. So I was like, I need to talk to this guy and understand what changed.

Yeah. I wish I had a short answer for that. But I think something that I've learned through the journey— it's year 5 of Agile— is—

Maybe just give people who are listening what it is first.

Yeah, sure. So we turn last-mile delivery trucks traveling the densest urban areas into mobile billboards on behalf of consumer brands. There's 2 things that make it interesting. One is a behavioral psychology hack. 96.3% of people who see a branded truck think it's delivering on behalf of the advertised for brand. So all these consumer brands that are trying to punch above their weight, they're wrapping these trucks and all, just like everyone wants to go to the Carbone with the 7-month waitlist, right? Everyone wants to try the product that seemingly all of their neighbors are trying. And that was actually showing up in the performance data. So that's why we're consumer specialists. What? And then the other part is what we raised capital on, our ability to attribute offline media exposures to online in-store in-app purchase events. So ROAS, for physical world media. But yeah, in terms of the run-up, I was talking to a friend about this the other day. I think what I've observed is 25% of people who do a test and learn with Agile, they fall in love. It's the same, hey, new year, new me, let's run the campaign. Or there's a moment in time each year that they just run it back, run it back, this is working. There's another 25 to 30% that seem to use us on a recurring basis. That may or may not be annual. So hey, new product launch, a new innovation, a new retail partner, a new IP or partnership. And then there's some cohort that just, you know, it served its purpose and they move on. But I think what has been cool is, you know, it's the same in wealth management, right? The compounding effect of interest and just time in the market that has, I think, buoyed the company to a point where, you know, I got a bunch of people where instead of this like super hands-on management, they know us, they trust us. It's been 3, 4 years. They know we're dogs and we're gonna work hard for them. And they just keep coming back. And then obviously we've learned a couple of different things to amplify our reach and get our name out there, which took a couple of years, and we can dive into all that stuff. But it's, you know, 2024 was our first, like, 12-month profitable year after, you know, 4 or 5 years of chewing glass. And then 2025 has been a pretty profitable year for us. So it's fun. It's getting a lot more fun than it was, I will say. And we're, you know, I think you're seeing us back out on offense, which is a lot of fun.

When was the last time you raised?

So we raised at the end of 2021. Brand Foundry Ventures led a $5 million seed round with 4, and then we have a bunch of awesome follow-on investors on the cap table. We walked away from a $7 million Series A from private equity at the end of 2023, which is a little bit stressful, if I'm being honest. At that point, we did about a $400,000 bridge just to, you know, we had about $400K in the bank. Burn rate was suggesting we were gonna need more money, but we were like close to figuring it out. And, you know, fortunately we haven't touched anything from that bridge. I just like put it in a separate bank account and pretended it didn't exist. And we were able to figure it out. So that's, we haven't raised capital since then. We still, Max and I still control and own the company, which is nice.

Very nice.

Barely. So like if we took on any other more capital, we probably wouldn't. Uh, but you know, we're sort of in the driver's seat and, uh, control our own destiny from here.

What do you think was like the big moment for you, or like the light bulb moment over the last couple years? Because I know you had a volatile journey where like it was working, it wasn't working, you thought about walking away, you didn't walk away, and now you're on this rocket ship. Like, I think you can look back and probably recall a couple moments where it's like you went right instead of left.

Yeah, you know, I think, um, the things— and it's funny because like over time that they'd be— you get less dopamine out of it. But there were a couple early massive wins where people were doing multi-hundred thousand dollar deals. I'm like, at this point, I'm like 26, 27. I'm like, are these people sure they want to give me $300,000? And that was just super validating and super motivating to get some of those early wins. And it's helped us create this flywheel, right?

There's—

what's cool about our business is there's embedded social proof and a flywheel that exists by virtue of having something physical out in the world. I think it's a lot more challenging for other sort of service providers to create that flywheel. But I'd say a couple early wins and then truly just campaign performance. Because we're so performance-focused, I mean, I got the numbers, I got the sales impact, I got the sales lift. And when we were seeing that tell the right story specifically in consumer, it wasn't always telling the right story for these other B2B SaaS companies that we were working with. I was like, Oh shit, like I think we have something here. And then, you know, just head down, keep grinding to get the word out there.

What I want to understand for myself about this concept of attribution.

Sure.

What is the formula or the method to be able to go to a brand and say, we are responsible for this much attribution on a truck?

Totally. Yeah.

So, and I'm sure that's probably the number one question you get from everyone.

Absolutely. And, you know, we were a pandemic child, so. At that point, D2C was the golden goose for a lot of these brands. But yeah, so let me tell you a little bit of how it works. So in every single asset we have under management across North America, there is a GPS embedded in the truck. And that truck, that GPS has a callable API that streams to us every second, latitude, longitude, and timestamp. So we know where the vehicle is by way of API. We hit that API endpoint, and then every second, we draw a moving geofence around it, capturing mobile phones directly within the vicinity. And once we capture someone's mobile phone, there's a lot we can do with it. The first thing we're able to do is what's called ID stitching. We can go from that person's mobile phone to their desktop, tablet, connected TV, spouse's devices, et cetera.

What a world we live in.

But it's important, right? 'Cause it solves for what I call platform promiscuity. Like, the majority of the people we're gonna capture, it's gonna be their mobile phone. But they might make a purchase decision or engage with that brand on their desktop or tablet. So being able to ID stitch and go from essentially device level to household level allows us to better understand the story. We're able to resolve to the exposed audience demographics and psychographics, age, education, house and income, race, as well as interest groups like organic shopper, expecting parent, celebrity obsessed, et cetera. We're able to take those IDs and pipe them to lower funnel channels like Facebook and TikTok to retarget. And then the part that you had asked was how do we do attribution? So if we are, we'll start with the e-commerce business case 'cause I think it's simplest for the audience. If we were working with a company like Athletic Greens, we'd be putting a pixel on their homepage and their post-conversion page that are listening for the same population exposed to the brand vehicle. Now, it would be a fun and convenient narrative to try to sit here and say, oh look, someone saw the Athletic Greens truck and then showed up on your website and did something. But that tells you literally nothing of interest as a marketer because that is one touch in a media mix that has organic social, paid social, influencer, affiliate, CTV, direct mail, word of mouth, right? Like, so to sit here and say someone saw the truck, showed up on your website and bought something, Agile in good faith cannot take credit for that conversion. It would just be too far too superficial. So the business case we had to then solve for in the go-to-market was if that's true, how then do you solve for incrementality? So everything I just told you about capturing people near the truck and following their behavior to the website, that is the hypothesis group and the hypothesis group only. But simultaneously and at all times, we build a control group by taking the truck's live GPS information, go 10 minutes backwards on its GPS route. So where was it 10 minutes ago? Drop a pin there using software, and we call it our ghost truck. And then we draw a second geofence around the ghost truck to capture an unexposed population. So you can picture this. There's a real truck. There's a fake truck, which is just software. On a 10-minute offset, both moving through society, both being geofenced every second, one creating an exposed, one creating a control. Then in doing so, we are creating a clean test environment where between those two populations, all other potentially confounding media variables are held constant. They'll have had equal likelihood of exposure to influence or organic, direct mail, you name it. The only difference is one has seen trucks, one has not. And then we look at the conversion behavior between those two populations and isolate the difference. So if there are 500 conversions in the exposed group, uh, where the truck is, In $450 in the control group, we're able to say something like, your X-dollar media investment in Ad Child drove these 50 incremental conversions, which based upon your AOV and LTV results in a return on investment of X, for example. And so that's the e-com version. I know that's probably a deeper dive, but we can also do retail point— we do retail foot traffic, we can do mobile app downloads and subsequent activity, and we now have an offering for retail point-of-sale system lift as well.

Oh my God.

Can you tell I've done that pitch before?

Yeah, you're— you've practiced that a couple times. Um, there's a lot to unpack there. I— a couple questions. So the first one is that I'm actually still on is just this concept of like people have no understanding of how available their data really is. I mean, obviously being in this world, we know, but it's like you walk by a truck and you're captured as a statistic in some model that is, you know, and then all these things follow that.

Yeah.

Um, Is there any sort of like privacy piece in the, in the regards of like the capture of the data?

Totally.

Like what if someone walks into your radius, but they have certain settings or certain like ways to not be the fool that got caught by the truck on the street?

Yeah, totally. So, um, first off, what's important to know is it's GDPR and CCPA compliant because it's using anonymized location data. So when you capture someone's phone, you're not getting Ben Sharf, you're getting XYZ123. It's like a hashed character string. which is important, because if it were capturing any personally identifiable information, or PII, it would no longer be compliant. You can't get a name, you can't get an email address, you can't get a phone number, you can't get a physical address, which is an important part of the story. However, with that anonymized character string, you can feed it into identity graphs and resolve to, okay, here are the other devices, here's some metadata around that individual to inform campaign strategy. Your question is more around, like, capture rate, privacy settings, things like that. So fortunately, we were insulated from iOS 14.5 because we were always using location services, which are opt-out by default, opt-in willingly. However, what that means from a, like, a brass tacks perspective is the capture rate of the United States at any given point is 10 to 20%. So you're not capturing every single person's mobile phone in that area. And so when you're displaying results, you cannot just display, here's the outcome. You can't go from 10 to 20% to 100%. Without also including a margin of error. And so when we are displaying results, not only are we showing what's observed upscaled, we're also showing the standard deviation in the upper bound and lower bound to be able to answer the question, hey, here is what we observed if we were to model this out. However, in terms of its predictive power and the confidence of these results, if you were to run this campaign 100 times, all other variables held constant, your CAC or your ROAS would be between these two outcomes 95 out of 100 times. Of those times. So, what's been nice is it's always been like statistical modeling. And you know, like, trust me, I'm a math geek. I would love for it to be one to one. It just never will be. And, you know, I think our job is more how do we move the ball forward and advance the category as opposed to try to, you know, strive for something that probably will never be possible. Unfortunately, just over time, the macro privacy trends have been net positives for us because it's, it's just leveled the playing field. Like digital is getting closer to parity with out-of-home. So that's been a really nice, I think, tailwind in terms of bringing the company to market.

Another question I have about this in terms of like the strategy for the trucks.

Sure.

Like, are they parked on corners? Are they just doing a normal job of some kind?

Yeah.

Because I feel like the concept of just a truck can mean a lot of different things. Like, is it a truck that's just in the middle of Kansas on the highway like that? No one's seen? Seeing versus parked in SoHo?

Yeah, so I have a fun story here, and I'd love to pretend this was premeditated, but this, like everything in venture, and I think startup, there's a little bit of luck. So when we were evaluating the business plan, on the surface, this business sucks. If you take the operations of last-mile delivery trucks, 89% of the market operate 1 to 5 trucks in his or her fleet. So a lot of small business USA, you think about how we're in 50 markets and got hundreds of trucks out there today, That is just so many goddamn points of contact to try to have to communicate.

And just for my own clarity, is that you have a bunch of like vendor relationships for the truck management?

That's right. So like Bob's Bread Delivery Company in New York, who might be delivering to bakeries, he might have 2, 3 trucks. And, you know, I got a campaign with 30 trucks, like, okay, we got to manage all these people. That sounds pretty miserable. But while the operations is extremely fragmented, the underlying ownership of the truck, the title of the truck is extremely consolidated among the leasing companies in the market. So think of these as Penske, Ryder, National Lease, Ideal Lease. 89% of the market, super fragmented from an operations perspective, but from an ownership perspective, about half of the market is held by these players. And those players essentially functioned as our supply side aggregators because they own the title, they have a GPS in the truck. We're able to go right to them and say, listen, we'll cut you in on this monthly payment, but what you need to do is open the historical GPS information of your leased-out assets, let us simulate it in an anonymized, like, clean room, and then reach out to those partners to facilitate the introduction. And that's how we're able to leapfrog, you know, 'cause this isn't the first time this company's been tried. Like, there's a graveyard of companies that have tried the truck-side advertising company concept, but the part was this, like, miserable, the part that killed a lot of 'em was this miserable guess and check of performance. 'Cause, you know, you can't have the truck that's just on the middle of the highway, right? We need it in SoHo. Like, that's what we need for this to work. That's what we need to be able to return the capital of the people that are trusting us with their media budgets. So that was a really strong accelerant that allowed us to move quickly instead of just dealing with like a miserable death by a million cuts.

So two questions on that. The first one is, was there like a very long sales cycle for that where it's kind of like once you get their buy-in, it's like overnight the value of your company is so much higher because you just unlocked like this, you know, fleet of trucks. And then the second part to that question these smaller business owners, I'm assuming they have their right to say they're not interested in participating in this, but there's probably a financial benefit where they're like, why would I not?

Yeah. So what's really interesting from like a market dynamics perspective, and honestly, this is more like a venture pitch than it is like a sales pitch, but I think you will find it interesting. So if you think about the truck leasing companies, they are in a fully commoditized market. They compete on price and service. They offer the same truck to the market. It's literally the same OEM, same manufacturer. So you're actually competing on price and service only. When we're working with these companies, if we were to send them, let's say we're allocating $500 per truck per month as Agile's budget to be able to pay out to trucking partners. Well, for the leasing companies, what we would do is we send the $500 directly to them, they would pocket $150, or some percentage as a, hey, we're facilitating this situation, we wanna be cut in on it, and then they end up reducing the monthly lease obligation, uh, of their partner. So Bob's Bread Delivery Company, instead of paying $1,500 per month, he's now paying $1,150 per month for his lease. And so that gave them a price advantage.

Sorry, that's because the, the, the main big guy is subsidizing part of their lease with the dollars you're giving them?

Yeah, so if we gave $500 to the leasing company, leasing company's pocketing $150, and then they're giving $350 to the trucking operator, but instead of giving him $350 or her $350 in cash, they're reducing the lease obligation. And the reason that was an interesting play for them is if you think of their business, they make $150 in margin per month when they lease out their truck, Agile agnostic. Now, if that thing has an ad, they're making $300 per month. So from an IRR, like business decision perspective, that fundamentally changes their entire business and the pie in the sky. And like, I have my head screwed on straight, but like when you think of the leasing business, You take a Penske writer, they're underwriting a lease obligation to Bob as a function of his credit risk equation. And when the lease obligation is not $1,500 a month, it's now $1,150 per month, the entire analysis of who they can underwrite as counterparties fundamentally changes. And theoretically, if we can keep the demand up, which we're trying to do, you could open at least 20% of the market that you previously couldn't touch or do business with because of a credit risk equation.

In terms of new trucks you can add into your fleet?

In terms of like trucks they can lease?

Yeah, more supply for them to put ads on.

Totally.

Wow, that's so fascinating.

Yeah, it's, it's a very interesting— and we don't talk about that part often, but there's like a really interesting market dynamic component to this business.

Is that like an— I mean, I'm assuming you think about this, but is that like an obvious exit opportunity for you guys as a business? I'm like, why would we not just buy you and monopolize this concept?

Totally. And what I like about it is it's just so different from their business, right? Like Madison Ave marketing and last mile delivery trucks, they cannot be further on the spectrum. So I like the make or buy equation odds. But absolutely, in terms of like, listen, so, and we won't get too deep into this, but like there's artificial supply side caps on the big out-of-home companies. There's 4 public ones. There's like, okay, if we're looking for more supply to, increase our market cap and our enterprise value, we need to go make an acquisition. There's private equity where, you know, a lot of out-of-home assets trade on EBITDA multiples. And so, you know, we're marching down that path. But in terms of whose company we could like actually completely flip on its head, I think the truck leasing companies stand the most to gain from, from our services. No question.

Yeah, because it's just like the next innovation on it. I guess the other side of it, and this might be Crazy. But is there a world that you guys ever take a leap into the business that they're in, or is that just like—

it's a good question.

That feels like some Elon Musk shit. Yeah, I'm going to go buy up all the truckers.

I, you know, we've talked about it like, what about like autonomous?

I don't know, autonomous trucks.

Like, totally.

You don't need people. You just own the trucks that are driving around.

Yeah. Early days at Jowl, we, we looked into some partnerships where we're like, hmm, we have unique— so people on the trucking side, they like to talk to us. Right, because we're giving out money and we're not really asking for a ton in return. And so like, you know, we've sent millions of dollars in the past couple of years back to these partners. And so we're well received on that side. And there was a point in time where like we started playing with like a gas card, like a co-branded Agile gas card. If you download, if you like get this credit card, you get X dollars off your gas when you fill up. At one point we thought about like, you know, all these people are trying to sell, sell them on truck leases. And they're like, stop calling me, right? I don't wanna talk to the sales guy, but they will pick up the phone for Agile. And so is there an opportunity to be like, hey, I know your lease is coming up in 3 months. I know you're using X, Y, and Z company. Have you considered moving over to this company and here's a discount? We haven't gone down that path. The path that we have started to go down, which you might find interesting as a business in a business concept, is our economies of scale in print and installation have become truly powerful, where to the point where we can actually start bullying a little bit.

What is that process? Do you guys have your own in-house warehouse or something where you're doing this?

No, so we did the math on vertically integrating, and honestly, shout out to this guy, but we went to go buy a $75,000 printer, and we were like, okay, we'll get a warehouse in Brooklyn, we'll print it, we'll ship it ourselves. And my co-founder tells a great story. We're actually at a site visit where all the printers are, And they're like, hey, um, it's like, why are you buying this? We're like, oh, you know, like chasing margin, chasing the comments. The guy was like, oh no, like, if that's what you want, like, you should not be doing this. This is only if you like need speed or if you need like an oh shit moment coverage. But there's a—

The sales guy said this to you?

The printer sales guy. To his credit, honestly, like, I'm gonna push this guy business for life for this move. He's like, here is a massive print house that I wanna introduce you to. They have over 100 of these things. And you will never beat them from a price perspective, 'cause you start doing the math on how much those printers cost, and like how much their economies of scale have taken off. And so we use a third party for the printing. They've been great partners, they've grown alongside us, and to their credit, we've pushed them to continue to lower rates and invest in our growth, and that's played out. But now, because those have become so powerful and aggressive, we have started to build out Agile Ops as a service where a lot of distributors that have all these trucks and brand them, and we're not doing any of the sales, we're just the entire back office. We receive the creative, we print, install, do all the specs, etc. And there is a play there where we start to layer in the technology and try to become more involved in the sales force. But we do have this very rapidly growing business within a business. Where no one's selling anything. We're just executing, leveraging the economies of scale growth we've had over the years.

Is there like a dependency risk in just being reliant on like one partner that's doing all your printing? If one day like you have a disagreement on price or what, printers break, I don't know.

Yeah, totally. And there's multiple options in the market and we're always revisiting those contracts year after year and RFPing them out. But to the same extent that there's concentration risk from a relationship perspective. There's also like true deep trust between the partners.

And a price benefit.

And a price benefit.

Because you're not going to get that price if you're spread across 5 partners because the volume isn't there.

Totally. Totally. So they've been great partners. I feel very fortunate that we have them in our corner. And then on the installation side, we do have like some pretty big partners to be able to do flat rates across the country and then a bunch of like local market partnership as well.

Does this ever expand beyond just trucks? I guess my second question is like, are there specific parameters of the trucks you're using or targeting?

Yeah, yeah. So mostly a performance basis. So, and then we tend to stay on box trucks as opposed to like Sprinter vans because while Sprinter vans are common for like micro mile delivery and like you'll see them in the city, what's interesting is the installation process because it is not a flat surface requires a very specialized skill set. You think like high-end luxury cars, wrapping grooves in all of these very nuanced places. And so what was happening was COGS was 3x-ing for an asset where its performance wasn't 3x-ing once you take into account the need to wrap that. So we've liked the simplicity of the box truck. It's really, I think, a unique benefit. But in terms of what else besides trucks, there's a good story of us getting in a lot of trouble for scaffolding ads around New York City, which I'm happy to talk about.

Hell yeah.

And then Another one that's playing out is, I don't know if you've seen this trend with these autonomous delivery robots on college campuses, but we have a partnership with Starship. They've got 1,100 robots across the country. And we've largely been a fulfillment partner where we're doing the print install, but now we've integrated the technology to be able to measure and things like that. So that's one that I feel is on brand and nice because it's, it's delivery. And the reason they approached us in the first place was they're like, yo, you built a, you built a category. Like, we're looking to learn a little bit from you guys. And so that's been a really fun partnership. Their sales team has been lighting it up. And I think there's, you know, that's like it's a really sought-after consumer, like someone who's just coming into having purchasing power. They're going to have the greatest LTV of all time. They might not have it now. And so you need to have like a stable business where you can invest in going after that cohort, in my opinion. But I do think that's going to be a really interesting advertising segment. And it's on brand, which is nice.

I feel like there's also an inevitable opportunity with like these autonomous truck companies in the long run, even if they're doing like long cross-country routes, like, okay, you lower the rates because you're not in SoHo, New York all the time. But I feel like there's still like value capture there.

Totally. In, you know, early days, Agile, this goes back to like 2018. The first model was digital screens on these long-haul trucks. And the ad delivery was time, location, and contextually aware. I could talk about why we spun off of that, but when we were making the move to static, we're like, okay, we have all this access to these 52-foot trucks that are going from Chicago to Savannah, Georgia. But ultimately what we realized is going back to the COGS and performance routes, it was like, okay, instead of getting 60,000 impressions a day, this thing's getting 10,000 and it's greater surface area. I do think there's a play there though. It's just, you go down the list of highest percentage shot, and then you get to the next one.

That's more of like private equity buys the business, and they need to squeeze out anything they can. It's like that's when they buy the autonomous trucking company themselves and vertically integrate. What about in terms of ideal customer profile? What's a perfect brand for you?

Good question. We used to not know this, but now we sort of have hard parameters. And there's always exceptions to the rule. People use us for launches and stuff when there's no data. But generally speaking, where we draw the line these days is if it's a D2C-first business, think like Athletic Greens, predominantly sold over the internet, we wait till they have at least 5,000 daily website visitors or greater before we will take the business. If they are a high-AOV retail-first brand, think like a Sephora or an Ulta-type brand, we wait till they have at least 9 to 10 doors in the market that we're activating in. And if they're a low-AOV consumable, think like an Olipop, for example, we wait till they have at least 25 doors in the market that we're activating in. And then if they have their own brick and mortar, we're generally looking for 4 to 5 before we feel comfortable taking the business. And, you know, that's all rooted in performance data. And it's, you know, always going to be a moving target as we get better and as prices change and things like that. But I think people appreciate like being able to sink their teeth into a generalized statement. And that's where we draw the line.

Yeah. Well, what would you say would be the number one reason this business would fail?

If it doesn't work, number one reason this business would fail. That's a good question. I, I feel like it's got to be like an execution risk, like running out of gas. Like there's been a couple of times, no pun intended, been a couple of times where I was like, oh man, dude, like I should just get like a nice cushy consulting job or something. No, why would it? I don't know, maybe I am a psychopath startup founder and you need to be a little bit delusional, but I don't think it will.

Yeah, I mean, that's also a fair answer. I just always wonder if there's like macroeconomic trends that keep people up at night. I think your business is different. I actually think your business becomes more valuable the more that the world goes digital.

Totally.

I think that, right, like this concept of, oh, talking to someone in person, it's like, oh, going outside and like doing something that's not in front of my computer. I I, I'll go off on a whim and say I think your business is in its infancy.

Totally.

Your business scales with the adoption of technology, in my opinion.

Yeah. And, you know, I wrote— like, my background is machine learning search software. Like, that's— I come from that world and I got to be careful to just make sure I don't have, like, gross confirmation bias. But I do believe with the proliferation of AI and, like, the digital economy that, like, physical worlds there's scarcity, right? It's just like real estate. And like, I look at the business a lot like we're investing in Williamsburg before Williamsburg got hot. Because if you can control the land, the land will have value over time because of the inherent scarcity. And so with the proliferation of AI, I think like outdoor advertising and IRL and one-to-one, that actually becomes like way cooler because it's the digital arena is just gonna get easier and easier. And it's going to be like a true mark of like, oh, this is a real brand. Like this, this actually has community and people and it's almost going to become like aspirational. Like, oh, you do Out of Home? Like, that's a cool brand. And people identify like, you know, you're trying to create an identity for the brand. And I think people love that stuff. And we've seen it with these like activations and sampling events. People just lose their mind over IRL.

I mean, again, I think it's because people are fucking lonely in this world. Totally. Because technology is just further perpetuating that. Do you guys, do you guys do a lot with events as well?

Yeah.

So like music festivals, I guess, is the obvious question, knowing you're a junkie.

Yeah, I am. See you on the farm. Shout out, Tom. Yeah. So interesting part of the business. 4 or 5 years ago, absolutely not. We did no events. We were just performance out of home, set it, forget it. Much like we are out of home, right? You do a wall posting, you do a billboard, it just exists in the wild and we report out on it. But I'd say 2 years ago, Lanie Crowe from Saie Beauty Brand, she was like, yo, this shit's on wheels. Like, what can we do? Some— you want to do something with it? I was like, uh, like, uh, like, I don't know, what do you got in mind? She's like, all right, well, what if we fill the truck with a bunch of products and we do free sampling in front of Sephoras around New York City? And so we did that. The event went really great, like to the point where I was a little scared. It almost was like a liability 'cause a bunch of people were like swarming and, you know, in the street inside the road. Yeah. However, that became the first time someone was like pushing us outside of our comfort zone and sort of reimagining what this could actually do. And I think what people have struggled with with experiential marketing at large is that stuff's expensive and no one's really measuring performance on it. And it's like at a minimum you're spending $10K, you're probably spending $50K. There's a funny story. Amy Liu from Tower 28, she was trying to do one of those branded coffee carts that you see these beauty brands do all the time. She's like, shit's $50 grand, Tom. Like, can you just buy one and I will be your customer 8 times a year? And so I got really deep in the experiential world. Then I was like, okay, experiential has a problem where it's just aggressively expensive and sometimes it's warranted. Permits cost a lot of money, labor costs a lot of money. But that experience and those learnings kicked off what I call experiential light, where if there's a tentpole brand moment, retailer moment, or in-market moment, like a music festival that's gonna aggregate a lot of high-indexing individuals for the brand, what we've been able to pull off is taking the asset or the truck off its route mid-cycle and deploying it in support of that moment. And so things that we've done, like launching brands into Target, we took the trucks into a Target parking lot, did an interview on the street series with random people. Those things, those clips have 20 million views across channels. We've done free sampling, we've done concerts, conferences. You could dream it, we could support it. And I think the critical part is we can support it inexpensively. And I think reflecting on why, and now every campaign has one. Literally every single one has a moment built into it and we comp the first moment. And a lot of campaigns have like 10 moments in them. But I think the punchline on that experience and why it's taken off is people always like out-of-home as a channel because of its ability to create random moments of serendipity. Right place, right time, something good happens. But because the investment is on wheels, instead of sitting back and hoping for the serendipity, we've moved to manufacture it by making sure the brand shows up at the right place at the right time. And so it's been a really cool experience. One, because it just authentically like helps and works. People are so grateful for an inexpensive experiential IRL moment. And like we scrap, like we're not doing permits over my dead body. Are you doing a permit, to be honest?

And like, you ask for forgiveness.

Yeah, right. Like they say, shoo, and we go 3 blocks down and we go back to what we were doing. But the part, you know, it's been cool because the brands love it and it's been performant. It's also been great for Agile. And like, I'd be remiss not to talk about that part. If we create the shareable moment and we keep it inexpensive such that people adopt, the net effect is people are then posting about Agile, whether it's directly or indirectly. You know, we don't put our branding all over it. We want the brand to have 100% share of voice. But the net effect of that is, and I see it in the search trends, people start searching Jones Road Beauty truck or Ouai truck or Glossier truck. And I've now moved to make sure that as soon as the campaign's live, we're pushing an SEO-optimized blog post because previously we were not getting that traffic. But now we're like, oh, people are actually searching this stuff. And so now we have this automation where you use AI to create a blog post to capture that influx. And so it's been a cool little wheel. For our business.

You, I would say from my perspective, are riding a high right now relative to the journey you've been on with like the health of the business, the growth of the business. But it hasn't always been that way.

That's true.

Right. And so I think it's as a founder who understands the journey that you've been on, it's so amazing to be able to like sit and talk about finally, fuck, like it's working. There's cool things to talk about. But I want to talk about some of the moments that were not this.

Sure.

Yeah, I know that you've gone on a crazy journey. There were more founders involved in the business. You had moments where you didn't know if this was going to live on as a business that you were involved in. Like, walk me through that journey.

Yeah. So backing up to just like early days, Agile, I started after undergrad. I did Boston College undergrad and I joined a company called McMaster Car Supply Company. And the way to think about it is it's Amazon.com, but the products are all hardware. So screws, nuts, bolts sells into like a Boeing or a Tesla where the big customers massive company, like 7,000 employees, super old sleepy company. And when I joined at the LA office, I was in this management rotation program and they had within 2 years asked me to move to headquarters to join the software team full-time. And so I accepted that. And a few things changed in my life at that point. I met my now wife, Hannah. I met Hannah.

Shout out Hannah.

I met my co-founder Max, who's— this was his business idea, by the way. And I enrolled at the University of Chicago for a nights and weekends MBA. So part-time MBA. And so Max had this business idea. The original business idea was very different. It was digital screens on the back of those long-haul trucks. And I had some technology chops at the time. He said, okay, can we find a way to make the ad display time, location, and contextually aware such that if you're driving down the highway for the 5 miles leading up to exit 6, if there's a McDonald's, display an ad that says, hey, getting hungry? Turn off here. And then the second it changed, we passed that exit, change it, change it, change it. When we're near the arena, put the Bulls score, start doing weather alerts and things like that. Hey, Ivana. So anyway, going down that path, that was the business for 2 and a half years. And we actually got screens on trucks. We built out all this technology. We really chased that. And we had the benefit of using the University of Chicago experience to advance the company. So essentially, what we did— I know.

She can't keep a straight face with this dog. Sorry.

You want to get on here, Bono? You got anything to say? But anyway, so we used UChicago to advance the business for essentially 2 and a half years. And they have their own Y Combinator spinoff thing, right? Every university has one at this point. And there's what's called the New Venture Challenge. It's where Venmo came out of. It's where Foxtrot, Simple Mills came out of. And so we got into that with our original business idea. And when we actually went to go pitch, you can win money, right? People invest at the end. We got absolutely dragged, like destroyed by these VCs. And so they had two fundamental, fundamental issues with the business model at that time. The first was we were using these like $40,000 digital screens. Like these things were expensive. Max and I, like, you know, dipped into our personal bank accounts to get it. And they were like, listen up, kid, you don't need $2 million for this business. You need $20 million for this business. And guess what? No one's going to fund this business because you haven't even proven that there's demand for ads on trucks. No one's done that yet. And so we'd encourage you to go find a less expensive, more scalable way to prove that there's actually a market for ads on trucks. The other thing that was challenging is because we were using long-haul trucks that were going from Chicago to Savannah, Georgia, we knew nothing about media. Max is a consultant, I'm a software engineer. And so we had this vision of, okay, the trucks went from Chicago to Savannah, Georgia, turn the lights on every McDonald's. We'll just sell into McDonald's and Overnight we'll have an ad for the entire route. What we did not know is media dollars get allocated at a national, regional, and local level. And so we couldn't do national because we didn't have a nationwide presence. We couldn't do regional because we were neither in Chicago nor Savannah, Georgia for any extended period of time. And so that left only one segment of the market that we could go after, the local franchise owners. Like people like my dad being like, hey, knock knock, like can we do business? And so those were the two challenges of the business. And I remember being like, eff these guys, they're idiots, we're going to do it anyway. And then took a beat, swallowed my pride, and realized, OK, that's actually pretty good feedback. And so essentially at this point in the journey, Max and I have been working on it for 2 and a half years. I'm about to graduate UChicago. The cushy consulting job is beckoning. And we are ready to sort of give it up. But we were at UChicago doing like a quick 1-minute pitch event, and someone in the audience was like, "Hey, my dad is a private equity guy, public CFO, has been in the trucking space for quite some time. I think you guys should have a conversation." And so when we had that conversation with this guy, Mitch Gordon, he breathed new life into the business. Like Max and I were pretty ready to put the hats up, get those jobs. And he was like, no guys, like, I actually think this is an incredible business. And so essentially we had this very successful person validate that there was legs here and was willing to get involved. And so Mitch came on shortly thereafter as the CEO. And then we were like, okay, none of us know anything about media. And so Mitch introduced us to Mark Chershon, who was the ex-chief client officer at Publicis, one of the big ad agencies. And so That was our motley crew. We were 4 founders, and we were 4 founders before we raised the family and friends round, and before we raised the seed round, the $5 million seed round. And so that was a moment in time where we were ready to put it up. And then another thing that played out, and to nobody's fault, is, you know, we had a 4-headed dragon when we were trying to build the company. And once we actually had capital, we were trying to figure out, You're good.

Oh no, there's water in it too. Sorry, we have to pause. The dog just spilled a plant.

I can go back in.

Okay, cool. Yeah, go for it.

Yeah, and so if you looked at our motley crew, you had Mitch Gordon as CEO, Mark Shashan as CMO, Max as the president, and myself as like the CTO, COO at the time. And you know, fast forward as we're trying to make that crew work, I think we just learned a lot about what the company needed and the different strengths. Honestly, we tried everything, like executive coaches, hiring a CRO, and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, it didn't work. We ended up splitting ways. But something that I feel strongly about is there would be no Agile without them. And so they're always— they're still equity holders. They're still involved as advisors. And I'm so grateful that they're part of that journey. Did it work from an operating perspective? Not in the end, but it did work for many years. And so I think that's just startups, right? Like you go in, you think you have a plan, and then as more information becomes available, the plan changes. And it's not for lack of love for any of those guys, but those were two pretty tumultuous moments. And then the third one was a CEO Series A in 2023. So we were out raising at the end of 2023. Very common business case, right? People who raised in 2021, there's a peak of a bull market, maybe a bubble, I'm not quite sure. But we knew that by the end of 2023, there would be a lot of companies looking for capital to keep themselves alive. So we started the fundraise start of summer of 2023 to try to get ahead of it a little bit. We signed a, or we received a term sheet for a $7 million Series A. It was by private equity. I'm not gonna name the names, but it had all these PE terms on it. And we were like, listen, this feels like it's gonna create misaligned downstream incentives. So thanks, but no thanks. We're just gonna keep marching along and try to find a different lead. They came back to us, said, hey, after all that heartache, let's just do cash for equity, clean term sheet, et cetera. So we do that, we sign it, and we get through due diligence. We also raised, $2 million on top of it, so they were leading with 3.5 of the 7 we were raising on the side from follow-ons. And then we get to the legal docs, and our lawyers say, hey guys, can you hop on the phone? We hop on the phone with our lawyers, and essentially they had built back all of the clauses that we had negotiated away up front when they gave us the second term sheet back into the legal docs. And our investors, or our lawyers from both sides, got on, screamed at each other for about 3 hours, And when we keyed in or when we clued in our seed round investors, they said, hey, you just learned everything you need to know about what working with these guys is like. Is that really who you want to do business with? Stop talking to them. Stop answering all their emails and just, you know, pretend they don't exist. And if you guys do need capital, you know, we'll provide a bridge. So we ended up doing a bridge early 2024 of about $400,000. Like I said, we put it in a bank account, put it on the side. And just pretended it didn't exist. But in terms of the, like, tumultuous moments that got us finally to the promised land, 2023 had $1.8 million in burn, uh, 2024 had $37,000 in burn, and 2025 is, uh, in Q1 alone with well over $100K in EBITDA. And so in terms of, like, do we have good people in our corner, were there tumultuous moments? I mean, a lot of things didn't go right, but far more things did go right in the end.

Dude, I literally just got chills listening to you say that because I like know off record like the journey that you've been on and it's just so fucking cool to see.

Thank you, man. Yeah. So, you know, listen, it's— I think I'm wired such that it's like, okay, what's next? Like, how do you keep it going? It's not like, okay, we're here, let's like take a beat and relax. But a lot of people been asking like, now what? And I'm like, I don't really know. I haven't really been here before, but give me a couple of days to like figure it out. I'll I'll try to figure it out and I'll let you know. But we're still such a small little speck on the industry. We're a rounding error for a lot of these public companies.

Totally.

And so we still got a lot of wood to chop, but it's a lot of damn trucks out there, so I'm excited about it.

Of all these experiences that you've had, what would you say was the biggest turning pro moment you've had on your journey?

Turning pro moment. I think we started the company when we were really young. I think one of the most disarming and things that put me in my stride is just realizing all of these people I admired and really looked up to, they're just like us. They're not smarter than us. They're just doing their best, trying their best. And I think I held these like successful people to like this like higher, like deity aspect. And I'm like, oh no, you're literally just like a giant kid just like me. And you're taking all the information you have, trying to do the best and you're working hard. So no one's really out of your reach. And I think that just leveled the entire playing field for me that allowed me to step into my own and turn pro.

Going at the last question I have for you, despite the fact that that is typically one of the last, because I just think you'll have a good answer to this given the journey that you've been on. If you could give advice to someone who's thinking about starting their own business, given the journey you've been on, what's something you wish you knew at the beginning?

Yeah, I think, Listen, I think good things happen to people that put themselves out there. And I don't think you set— you don't create your own luck if you're not getting yourself out there. And I think the most obvious tactical translatable moment for people who are early on the journey, you got to start posting is what it comes down to. Because at least for us, and you've seen the build in public trend, it's easy to look at that as like, that's cringe. That guy's egotistical. He just wants the attention. But at the end of the day, you're just getting your name out there. You're getting your reputation out there. And there's ways to do it that are not like shilling and they're actual tasteful ways to do it. But, you know, you got to get yourself out there. You need those at-bats and you need those opportunities and shots on net. And that content is king. Like, you look no further than like founders are trying to become creators and creators are trying to become founders. There's this really interesting, like, something in the water. So, I mean, you've seen us, we've leaned into it. I mean, we're on the Turning Pro pod. The people who know that and lean into it, I think, are the ones that stand to win the most.

Love it. Tom, I appreciate you coming on today.

Ben, happy to be here, man.

Can you just look at the camera and let everyone know where they can find you, what you're working on?

Sure, so you can visit Agile at www.agile.co, A-G-I-L-E. We're on Instagram, we're on Twitter. My Instagram is tshay.jpeg. And, uh, I'm usually the one that answers all the inbound, so, uh, shoot me a note if you're interested.

Love it.

That's a wrap. Thank you, Ben.