Edwin Choi - Founder @ jetfuel.agency

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom podcast. We have Edwin Choi with us today. He's the founder at JetFuel.agency. It's a marketing slash growth agency for 7 to 9 figure brands. Prior to that, Edwin occupied a bunch of VP marketing roles and started this agency around 2017. So Edwin, welcome to the podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've been up to.

Yeah, for sure. Well, thank you for having me. A very, very good brief intro. I'll just add a little bit more detail. So I have been involved in digital marketing since 2009, uh, so I've been doing this for better part of 17 years now, which is crazy to say out loud. It really stemmed from my love of selling stuff, right? Like, even as a kid, I love selling stuff. I actually had people at my school buying things from me when I was a child, either flipping cards or selling, you know, burned music CDs, you know, until I got in trouble. So I sort of brought that over to my professional career, right, and started with e-commerce. So I started 2 and a half years in the agency space after I graduated from university, moved on to a very fast-growing mobile accessory brand. We scaled that thing from $5 to $30 million a year in 4 years. And then in 2017, I started Jetfuel Agency. So Jetfuel Agency, we're a performance digital marketing agency. We do direct-to-consumer and omnichannel, and we primarily work for food and beverage brands, health and wellness, and then parts-driven e-commerce, right? So very large SKU catalogs. We do paid social, search, organic, you know, SEO and AIO ranking for ChatGPT and other LLMs, retention marketing, which is email and SMS. I've been doing that since 2017, so that's about 9 years now, coming up on the 10-year anniversary next year. Um, and we've been really fortunate to work with awesome brands, and now we are fully immersed in AI, like very, very immersed for the last 2 years. Like, that's kind of all we think, breathe, and sleep. So, uh, that kind of brings us here today, and we're building some really cool things. You know, we have a Jetfuel headquarters, which is our brain that everything connects to, and we have a lot of tools and processes and enhancements for our team. Um, and we've been 100% remote since 2017, so our team members are all over the world, every single, you know, time zone, country, whatever, right? Like, we're open to it all. So that's a very quick intro.

I love it, dude. So why leave your last comfortable VP marketing job and go start your agency? What led to that?

Yeah, I think I need 2 reasons, right? Like, when you've been tackling a challenge for a long time. So let's say you tackle a challenge for 4 or 5 years, as I have done, the problems start to taste the same. That makes sense? Like, you have a lot of problems, you never have a perfect cushy week, right? But you get energized because you're solving problems. Well, a lot of times the problems start to feel the same. So I think that kind of made it get a little bit stale for me, and the team was put in a great place. There was a part of me that wanted to see them grow without me. I was a very loud voice in the room, and that's number one. And then the second is, after I kind of took a little bit of a break and I was really thinking through it, I wanted to challenge myself. I was like, okay, anyone could do it once. Anyone can scale a company, just get lucky, right? Right place, right time. And then I was thinking, could I do it 2 times? Could I do it 10 times? Could I do it 100 times? That was like the question I had for myself. And I think an agency was kind of born from that internal conversation I had with myself, and then it encompasses my DNA, right? Right. And so every day I get to choose something that, that I love to do, right? So that's how the agency was born.

And you said you're obsessed with AI. Tell me about some of the agents you're running nowadays.

Yeah, yeah. So I think one of the things that we really like to do is we like to, you know, obviously we like to save time, but I think the thing that's more interesting to me is how do we 10x the quality of our work? Like 10x, right? So one of the things that we do is it's called a competitor gap analysis, right? So let's say a client comes to us, they onboard, we take a look at all their creative, Right? So we have an agent that takes a look at all their creative, all their KPIs, and then it classifies it for us, right? So they're like, okay, here's the value props that work really well. Here's who we think they're talking to. Yeah, et cetera, et cetera. Here's all the call to action. So they kind of build a grid for that performance grid. We have another agent that does the same thing for every single one of their competitors, like all of their creative they've been running, how long they've been running it, what we think the creative is, who are they speaking to? So we have like a whole bunch of other grids, right, for all their competitors. Then we have another agent that lays all the grids together and it kind of circles the things that no one's saying. So it says, oh, no one's talking about this particular feature, or no one's talking about this particular emotion, or no one's using this type of video. So it circles all those. We call that the gap. And then we go and we work out, okay, for our next 50 ads, I want them attacking all the gaps, all the things that no one's saying in this space. So what winds up happening is that, you know, obviously some of them lose, but some of the winners for those run really well for us because the audience hasn't seen an ad like that before, but it's something that they care about. And it stands out more in the auction because it's more unique looking. And it's also saying something that other people are not saying in this space, right? So that's like a very oversimplified version of what they do, but it's also an example of that used to take us a lot of time to do that manually, a lot of time. Now we can do it automatically, right? Have it run overnight, wake up, everything's there for you on a silver platter. Obviously you need to QA, evaluate, and use your own human judgment your own human tastemaking to make sure that the ideas are actually good, because some of them stink, right? But it really speeds it up and allows our team to build things that are very useful for our clientele very quickly.

Have you stopped hiring since, uh, this agent flurry?

Have I stopped what?

Hiring. Hiring.

No, you, you keep hiring. You keep hiring, you keep, you hire different people, right? You hire people who are, they speak the language, they know how to prompt, they understand data, they understand cleanliness. You keep hiring. Maybe you don't hire for the exact same role anymore. So maybe that person that used to be an intern or entry level used to kind of just do all that research for us. That role probably doesn't exist, but you still need people who are senior that understand how all the puzzle pieces work together. and they can run these agents and understand the inputs and outputs. So we're still hiring for those people, right? And it's still important, but the roles that we look for are probably very different.

Okay, interesting. Yeah, I hire partners only. I don't hire anyone that's hourly, I think, for so many reasons, right? Like, if they know how to prompt, like, why would they even need a job? Because at this stage, they can fully automate pretty much everything, right? the only type of person I would accept in my agencies are partners. So other savages like me that want to have like one piece of the pie, right, of the full puzzle, can still add value, can still be like fully entrepreneurial and so forth. Do you still hire partners? Like, what's the structure of the business up there? Are you solo or do you have co-founders?

I am solo, but we have, you know, obviously like a leadership team, like pretty much any other agency. It's very much like you said, no matter who we hire, no matter what your title is, no matter what seniority, you have to have that ownership mentality, right? That you're going to own the result, that you're responsible for the result, and you're rewarded for the result, right? I don't think we necessarily call them partners, but it is important to find people that have that sort of mentality, right? Where it's not someone else's problem, like everything's your problem. Everything's my problem, everything's your problem. We all share that same mentality. And I think that's really important for everyone because in the age of AI, if you don't have full ownership of what's going on, you can't point at Claude and say it's their fault. It's really the person running it.

Depends. If you prompt your Claude to be recursive and to learn off its mistake, Right? Like, it needs to own up. I mean, you're right. Like, what is ownership, right? For an AI, they don't really know what owning is. They have a concept of it. Technically, Claude, if their agent fails, that's the company's fault. So Claude will make sure that agents are also careful. But what I found is that agents are too careful, right? Like most of the time. But I also hate it when they mess up things, right? And I thought they wouldn't mess up. I thought they would learn. But sometimes they don't learn. Sometimes they mess up stuff. And then you're like, yeah, what happened here? It's like running on the latest model and you just email my newsletter 12 times in like 10 minutes, which really happened today, by the way. That's a real use case.

Yeah.

I was like, what the fuck, dude? Like, what's that? Yeah. Like, do you What's your full agentic orchestra? Does it have one unified real-time memory? Have you built a full agentic system so that it can fully learn across all your clients?

Yes. We have a couple of layers. We have our own MCP. Let's call it, if you think of a wheel, it's the hub. Everything's being fed into the