In this conversational narrative, speaker A explains how he, Jacob, and Dylan entered the direct‑to‑consumer (DTC) space about eight to nine years ago by contracting on email and SMS retention for DTC brands. Their collaboration led to the founding of the agency AppLov, initially positioned as a retention‑focused partner. Recognizing the need to be involved in broader growth discussions, they quickly expanded services to include paid‑media acquisition and financial strategy, aiming to understand and optimize the economics of their clients’ businesses across all channels. More recently, they built an internal self‑service tool called Allen (developed at AppFlow) to enable brands to personalize their marketing efforts. The speaker also highlights the long‑standing personal relationships among the founders, emphasizing the strong daily collaboration that underpins the agency’s culture.
Chapters
How do you end up walking in and deciding that you want to get into this space? A lot of people, when you ask that question, they kind of realize that it's kind of ended up here through a bunch of a chain of events. But with us specifically, we have— Jacob and I both have a pretty similar background here, but we essentially were contracting for some brands in the space, doing some work on the retention side. So email and SMS primarily is what we really got into initially, a bit over 8 years ago or so, almost 9 years ago in the DTC space. So quite a while ago, essentially got in on that front, contracting, managing email and SMS for some DTC brands. Eventually, Jacob, myself, and our other partner Dylan formed AppLov, which is our agency So that's the space that we've been in for quite some time. Initially started as a retention-focused agency there on the email and SMS side. Very shortly after that, branched off into offering more on the paid media and also finance side. So that's a big angle that we took initially was really ingraining ourselves in the actual growth discussions of the brands that we work with. So not just being a retention partner, but also being a partner on acquisition, of course, but then actually more importantly was really understanding the economics of their business and then actually strategizing growth across the board on all channels. And that's how our journey in DTC progressed. Until recently when we also started Allen, which is a tool that built internally at AppFlow, also a self-service tool for brands to use. And that's again, we'll probably get into more as we talk to personalization, but that's really the journey on our end. So Jacob and Dylan, 2 of my best friends from growing up as well. So we have a really great thing going on. It's fantastic working with each other on a daily basis, but that's the Sparko summary, kind of how we got into the space.
