We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ahmed Al-Sayeed and Adeeb Zaman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ahmed Al-Sayeed and Adeeb Zaman, thanks for joining us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

We own and operate a series of businesses in the eCommerce space. We are fully vertically integrated and do everything in-house from branding, manufacturing, marketing, content, distribution, customer service, etc. We own 5 eCommerce DTC brands.

The main business we’d like to expand on today is Agency X which is our content and marketing agency. We had been in eCom for 5 years before we decided to launch Agency X.in January 2021. As brand owners, you begin to realize that the agency world is extremely profit driven and operates with a churn & burn mentality. Most brands still have no choice but to work with agencies because they can’t afford or can’t manage an in-house media buyer due to lack of experience. We were on that same boat initially.

After multiple negative experiences, we fired all our agencies and built our marketing and content teams in house. Over the course of time, we became extremely good at it after regularly spending over $5M a year in profitable ads on instagram, google, facebook, tiktok, etc. After successfully scaling multiple of our brands we realized that brand owners needed the help of someone that actually understood what’s important. Most DTC brand owners are bootstrapped and the only way to fuel growth is either retained earnings (profits) or very expensive debt. The problem with most agency models is that they work on a performance fee basis which allows them to get paid more and more as they spend more on ads. They give little thought to the profitability of the brand itself which ends up being super detrimental for the brand. Every once in a while when they scale a really strong brand with great product market fit, they scale it too fast due to seeing an opportunity for themselves to make a lot of money but that in turn breaks the systems of the brand and ends up being a very negative experience for them.

We sought to break that model and instead focus EXCLUSIVELY on profitability for brands. After all, we’ve done that for ourselves for well over 5 years so why couldn’t we do that for others?

Thus began Agency X!

Ahmed Al-Sayeed and Adeeb Zaman, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Adeeb and I (Ahmed) have been best friends since high school (2007). We happened to ride the bus together and just kicked it off from day one. As we grew older, we both shared a similar problem which was that we had no idea what we wanted to do with our lives. We both became college drop outs for years and worked odd jobs. Eventually a friend of ours introduced us to the new world of facebook advertising and dropshipping. We spent 8 months in the trenches really testing it out and learning. We worked an average of 12 hours a day and took home no more than an average of $100 a week during that time. Soon after however, we did crack the code and eventually hit our first $1M in revenue in 2016. From that point onwards, it’s been high growth year over year.

We build incredible and fun brands in the gifting and wall decor space. Canvas Freaks was our first baby and is doing about $5M a year in revenues. We do own and operate the manufacturing facility which fulfills for Canvas Freaks competitiors as well and we’ve built a booming business out of that as well. Animefy Me and Pokepet Shop are awesome brands where we work with a 300 person network of artists all over the world to illustrate people and their pets into anime characters. Our brands have ammassed over 600K followers on social and generate combined revenues of over $15M a year.

Our agency, Agency X operates all of these brands in the eCom space for us. Bringing the value within Agency X to other brand owners across the eCommerce space has been our goal for this year. We’ve been partnering with very unique and incredible brands where we see lots of potential and we have been helping them scale significantly and most importantly, profitably.

What makes me proud as a business owner is that we’ve never hired overly skilled outside management. Every single person in our company at a management level or an executive level has worked their way up from an entry-level position. We’ve trusted them and provided freedom and room for people to fail and grow. Seeing team members double and sometimes even triple their salaries since starting with us is what makes us extremely happy.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Focusing on money exclusively can be incredibly detrimental to your business. We were taught early on that profit was the only thing that mattered but as we prioritized short term profits for certain brands we ended up truly killing the long term branding opportunities. One example i can give is that in 2019 Christmas we had very early success with Animefy Me after we first launched. We didn’t have proper systems at the time but given the incredible profitable orders coming in we just kept on scaling. We couldn’t see past the money and ended up taking on way too many orders that we were not able to deliver on time for Christmas. We ended up refunding so many people and also working our butts off to make things up to customers. Ultimately the brand took a huge hit and we had to turn off ads for over 2 months until we got everything under control. The short-term profits ended up really tarnishing our reputation and we’ve spend another 2 years building that reputation back up. We learned that you have to put people first. Customers, employees, etc. We absolutely lost more during that period than we made.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

iOS 14.5 is known as the ultimate tragedy for Facebook marketers and DTC eCom brand owners. We didn’t know what to do once the iOS 14.5 tracking update occurred but we moved quickly and attempted many different platforms. Luckily TikTok was a hidden blessing for us at the time. All the thousands of hours i spent scrolling it paid off because we began learning how to make content on there very quickly for our brands and ended up actually spending over $2M on the TikTok platform in the last year on ads very profitably. This pivot was terrifying because it broke everything we thought we knew about online advertising and content but we were able to relearn quickly!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ag3ncyx.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ahmed_al_sayeed/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmed-al-sayeed/
• Other: www.canvasfreaks.com www.animefyme.com www.pokepetshop.com