Hey, community, I'm doing research to define the buying process of our ICP so I wanted to run something by you. Just to clarify, I don't have anything to sell I'm just genuinely interested in learning more about the buying cycle for hiring an agency. 1. Have you ever worked with an agency before? 2. At what point in your startup's development did you decide to outsource? 3. How did you go about selecting a vendor? In return,I can share a research document that shows 34 acquisition channels that worked consistently for founders, this document is based on an analysis of 440 interviews with founders. (again, no company mentions so it doesn't come off as self-promo). Tnx

1. Yes 2. ROI between Build Versus Buy crosses over a threshold - sometimes its a market opportunity that wouldn’t be addressed yet and the internal resources/market understanding would benefit from having external folks (especially in the past few years where recruiting a team had been cost prohibitive) 3. Word of mouth / referrals

1. Yes 2. Missing knowledge or capacity of the core team, one-time project. 3. Word of mouth, referrals. In rare cases, Google. 4. I would add one more question: When would you never hire agency? In our case, anything related to core product/core technologies and ongoing projects.

1. Have you ever worked with an agency before? YES 2. At what point in your startup's development did you decide to outsource? At the very beginning. In the beginning it doesn't make sense to hire a marketing staff, and even one marketer that can be broad and deep is expensive. The decision to bring in-house, to me, a financial one. Agency margins are brutal, so when the company is able to allocate resources to marketing staff to bring costs down, it makes sense. Then I continue to use agencies for specific "scalpel-like" expertise that is not an ongoing need (e.g. brand definition or re-brand). 3. How did you go about selecting a vendor? Word of mouth if possible. I have also used Google for specific combinations of expertise, or even working backward from companies I admire. 4. When do you never use an agency? When you're not getting the ROI from the costs. Sadly, this is very often the case because agency incentives are inherently misaligned with the client's.