Ty Smith

All business advice contradicts other business advice.

Speak to everyone you can, learn religiously, and follow your own compass.

It’s the only way.

Only 4 years too late

If you're using Grok Bot, paste this into your bot right now.

It stops you from blowing through your usage, and your most important work never stops.

"Set up a usage throttle for all my routines.

1. Rank every routine from tier 1 (crucial, never stop) to tier 5 (cut first). Whatever keeps your business running or makes you money goes high. Nice-to-haves like research, monitors and reports go low.
2. Create a routine that checks my weekly usage a few times a day and compares it to how far through the week I am.
3. If I'm on pace to go over, switch off tiers starting at 5 and working up. Never switch off tier 1.
4. Make the first step of every routine: if my tier is off, stop silently.
5. Turn everything back on when my usage resets."

How mine runs:

On pace for 105% of my limit, tier 5 goes off.
120%, tiers 4 and 5.
140%, tiers 3 to 5.
160%, everything but tier 1.

No surprise overages. No babysitting. The work that makes money keeps running.

A lot of agencies will promise you twice the impressions we can get for the same price.

They probably can.

Most of them use generic, low-quality overseas accounts that don't understand the product and get pointed at everything.

The impression numbers look great. And they're cheap.

But read the comments. Nobody did any research on the product. It doesn't look organic in the slightest.

People can tell.

It doesn't trend on X News. It doesn't build social proof. And it definitely doesn't bring you real users.

What works for us:

1. A curated list built with the client, so the people seeing it can actually act on it
2. A really tight engagement window
3. Spend under $10k per campaign

That's how we get clients trending on X News for 75%+ of their launches.

If impressions are all you want, go cheap. If you want a launch that matters, go curated.

Early on I got so stuck in the day to day that I couldn't work on growth at all.

The shift for me was accepting a simple truth: growth means you can't do everything yourself.

The E-Myth idea I believe in more than almost anything: small businesses stay small when owners spend more time working in the business than on it.

If you're doing all the work, nobody is growing the agency.