Darkroom: Using Marketing as a Secret Weapon for Startup Scale

Ethan Peyton: Hey everybody and welcome to the Startup Savant podcast. I'm your host Ethan and this is a show about the stories, challenges and triumphs of fast-scaling startups and the founders who run them. Our guests on the show today are Lucas DiPietrantonio and Jackson Corey, co-founders of Darkroom, a high-end digital marketing agency working with commerce companies to generate profitable growth. Now, I think we all understand what a digital marketing agency does, but Darkroom is a little bit different than most agencies and we're going to get into what that difference is and how you can learn from what they are bringing to the table. 

But before we do that, I want to remind everyone that the best way to support the pod is to subscribe on whatever platform you listen from. The algorithm has an insatiable hunger and we want to feed it. So if you like the show and you want to help us out, just hit that subscribe button. All right, let's jump into this conversation with Lucas and Jackson of Darkroom. Hey guys, welcome to the show. Could you please introduce yourselves?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah, Ethan, thanks so much for having us. My name is Lucas, co founder here at Darkroom. I focus a lot on business development, driving revenue forward for the agency and then some of our other strategic initiatives.

Jackson Corey: Great to be here as well.

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah.

Jackson Corey: My name is Jackson Corey and I'm Lucas's co founder and the chief creative officer at Darkroom. So I oversee all of our creative efforts from design, digital engineering, video, animation, production, et cetera. So that's a little bit about what I tackle on a day to day.

Ethan Peyton: All right, thanks for the introductions guys. We're going to get started. Now normally I want to start these conversations by asking what the business does, but in this case I feel like we need a little bit of foundation to be laid first. From the outside looking in, Darkroom looks like a top tier marketing agency. Your website highlights companies that you've worked with and results that you've helped them achieve, which is pretty on brand for an agency. But in your company profile, the very first line is darkroom is a venture builder at heart and that feels like something different than just a marketing agency. So let's start with this. What is a venture builder?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah, I'm just curious where you're getting that too. Some of those words. But a lot of what we do at the agency is we focus on scaling revenue for our clients and predominantly in the growth stage, b to B sector. So when we talk about venture building, a lot of the clients that we're working with, they're high scale companies, meaning they have large growth ambitions, they're venture backed, their private equity backed. We've also worked with countless bootstrap startups, but I think the common through line between all these different startups is they want to grow revenue, they want to grow profitability, they are building to be acquired. They're building to have more valuable businesses. And what we help them do is strategize on the effective ways to leverage advertising, creative marketing, communications to actually help them achieve those goals. So I think that's probably what you're reading on the about description of us being a venture builder. It's really assisting these companies in growing the foundations, their marketing foundations, helping them rethink some of their marketing challenges and then setting them up for scale.

Ethan Peyton: Cool.

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah.

Ethan Peyton: And I know that digital marketing agency, like I said in the beginning, it's a pretty understandable concept. But whenever I read Venture Builder and that is for folks that are looking for that profile, it's over@startups.com podcast and then you can find that profile there. When I read that, I was like, okay, I got to dig in. I got to figure out what exactly this is.

Jackson Corey: Actually, if I could add to that too. This is, I think, good context. Lucas and I, when we started the agency, we started primarily designing brand identity systems and delivering website and digital product experiences for clients. And then we slowly expanded and expanded and expanded our service offerings. And today we're fully integrated advertising and marketing firm. And I think even in our inception and to this day, we are selfishly always kind of building for ourselves. And what I mean by that is we're two entrepreneurs, we're investors, and we're trying to builder a firm that we would want to use for our businesses. And that means that we hold our team to an extremely high standard. We hold our processes to an extremely high standard. And I don't just say that as like a platitude. We really look at it as like, would we hire our own agency? And honestly, a lot of times we're actually doing that with businesses that we invest in or that we founded on the side of our agency. So we have kind of a unique perspective in that we really care about the bottom line of our clients businesses and we actually think about not just top line revenue, but also EBITDA and profit. Whereas a lot of this industry, this marketing industry, they're either massive firms who sell very expensive ideas or there are really boutique marketing gurus who are kind of like playing the arbitrage game of paid social. And so we're trying to build something that is for founders first. So I just wanted to shed that color on our perspective a little bit.

Ethan Peyton: Yeah, I think that's really helpful. I think the extra perspective in that kind of context outlines the kind of difference between marketing agency versus Darkroom. So you mentioned that your service offerings were kind of built up over time. It started out as sounds like branding and brand identity, but have you always been the kind of like, we care about your bottom line or did that come more with some of the different services that you all started to offer over time.

Lucas DiPietrantonio: It definitely developed over time. Jackson and I started this business really as a consulting operation, and a lot of it was based on Jackson's skill set as a graphic designer and as a really talented one. And my experience in the software development outsourcing space. So what we did was mostly design work, and we were a design firm when we first started doing visual identity design and digital products, simple digital products, websites and UI design. And then naturally, we've continued to evolve, hone our services, identify spaces where we could be a lot more valuable to our customers. And now our core service is entirely differentiated. And there's a couple of really key competencies that we work with at the agency data infrastructure, our core creative competencies, which are an evolution of where we started and then a lot of what we do in terms of driving revenue growth on both the process and on the more tactical side, like acquisition, media retention, marketing. So these are naturally just developed over time, and they're continuing to develop. We just added Amazon as a service function, and we're consistently thinking about ways to improve our product to provide maximum impact to our client. So it's been a natural progression. And I think what the greater trend in the advertising space is to have, and really where the value is, is a lot of these advertising problems are consulting problems at the core. And so advertisers need to be thinking about the bottom line of their clients. They need to be thinking about driving profitable growth, because every single marketing dollar is ROI driven at this point. So it's been a natural progression, and we've responded to the way that the market has reacted as well as the things that Jackson and I get excited about. Like Jackson said, we've always wanted to be in a seat where we're driving growth for clients. We're the engine that we would kind of hire to fuel our own brands. And in order to do that, you need to be thinking about growth and profitability.

Ethan Peyton: So what does the relationship between Darkroom brand the clients look like? It sounds like it's probably quite a bit deeper than just the standard, like, hey, we're going to run your paid marketing campaigns, or, hey, we're going to design a logo or whatever for you. What does that relationship really look and feel like?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Most of our relationships now, we've developed a proprietary framework that's kind of a way of assessing and diagnosing some of the different challenges that the businesses that we're engaging with face in terms of getting to that next growth goal that they have. So we come in and we have a process of discerning those issues and then testing a series of hypotheses. And these are definitely rooted in the scientific method of introducing new revenue programs, introducing quick wins, and then expanding those initiatives over the course of a  and multi year relationship. So that's it in a nutshell. There is a lot of stuff that our team has worked on from a day to day client services perspective. We've really focused on infrastructure project management data with our teams and the ways that we work with clients. Jackson and I share this sentiment. A lot of failed relationships on the agency side come down to misaligned expectations and misorganization for the most part. So we've spent a lot of time on organizing ourselves and aligning expectations to be able to drive good growth for our clients. Jackson was the one actually who built a lot of the notion infrastructure reporting. There are a lot of bad habits that have just been developed in the agency space. We wanted to give people a fresh approach with new tools. So that's been, I think, something interesting about the way we work.

Ethan Peyton: Yeah, it definitely sounds a lot, a lot deeper than just marketing. So it's really cool to hear that you're kind of getting in there and identifying many, many different things, not just like, hey, you guys aren't using the right channels or marketing channels or giving the right copy or something like that. In my mind, that's pretty standard, like, marketing stuff, but it sounds like you guys are going way deeper than that. So to build on that, I know that one of you mentioned that you're investors. Are you investors personally, or are these investments made from Darkroom?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah, a bit of both. Jackson and I have always we've always been really interested in the venture space. Like, we love startups. I think we're both kind of add, maybe me more so than Jackson, but we like to have our hands in a lot of different things. And consulting agency is a perfect platform to be able to see a lot of different things that are happening on the ground in different industries. So we have invested out of Darkroom. We have a venture fund. It's more of like an SPV. And we take some agency funds. It's called dark matter. And we invest in commerce, enablement software, basically businesses that have direct applications to the merchants and customers that we work with. So we've made some notable investments there. We just invested in a business called Banter. We invested in Triple Whale, which is pretty widely used in the shopify ecosystem now. And then we're also investing in consumer facing businesses, or B to C businesses that traditionally would be customers of darkroom, and we just really liked what they've been doing. And then Jackson and I both also invest as angels, too. So a bit of both there.

Ethan Peyton: Do you find that you're getting more clients for the agency through relationships that you're making through Dark matter, or do you find that you're getting more investment opportunities through relationships that you're making with Darkroom?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: I think the origination point for all of these conversations are through the agency, dark matter. We just launched the V one of that page on our website. We've kept it very much under wraps. It's just been like we've seen interesting opportunities and we've pieced together it's not even an official fund, it's just been an SPV or agency funds that we've put together based on the deal. Our goal long term though is to have that be a business unit that functions on its own. We have a variety of other priorities that we're focusing on right now but if you want to learn more about it, you can go to Darkroomagency.com DarkMatter and see some of the investments that we've made. But most of the origination regarding deal flow is through the agency right now and the kind of platform that we're building around that as us being practitioners of growth in the B to C space and naturally commerce enablement tools that are working with B to C businesses. They want to come and partner with Darkroom and then similarly good businesses that we're investing in, obviously they cross paths with us just by virtue of the type of business that they are.

Ethan Peyton: That's a good answer and I think we're hearing more about these like hey, we've got this engine and let's use this engine to supply them with more than one solution and I'm hearing that more and more and it's a really interesting game. Super cool to hear you guys are building that out and that it got announced here and we're going to put all the links and of course everything to that over in the Show Notes and I'll mention all that later but everybody can find the Show Notes@startups.com podcast. But let's get back to it. If I'm a founder of a company and of course in the niche that you all serve, why am I choosing to work with Darkroom over another high end marketing agency?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: We have a really interesting approach. There's a number of things I would say go to our website to really kind of see all of the things that we're doing. But it really comes down to our process. The type of people that we're branding to the table and then our model. Most agency, they're like recommending pre built scopes that they have that they're allocating to a client and saying yes we'll run your advertising programs or yes we'll run retention. And by and large Jackson and I have done that over the course of the agency and there's like a % hit rate in that scope being perfect for the client. So we kind of last year we're like, hey, this doesn't really make sense. We rethought our business model and kind of really were like what is the value that we're providing to clients? And it comes down to four things. There's process which is why people come to an agency, they're highly organized, they can operationalize teams really quickly. Strategy, we have growth strategy leaders who have done this many many times across the businesses that we've scaled and the experience they're bringing to the table. We have all the functional resources. So resources are another thing that you need to actually builder and activate revenue programs and we price down to the resource. So we're not allocating predetermined agency scopes to you. We're giving you the things that you exactly need that we discern through the business development process.

Jackson Corey: And just to be clear, when you say resources, we're talking about experts in very particular verticals. So Lucas just mentioned we have growth strategists who are basically like primary doctors for individuals, but for businesses, right, they can see the bird's eye. They have a lot of expertise and experience over many years guiding businesses in profitable growth and overseeing all these verticals. And then we have these resources, these people who are experts in certain areas, and we tether those people together into multidisciplinary teams. So I just wanted to make sure that was defined.

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah. And then I think the last piece and thank you, Jackson, is like the creative that we're branding at the table. There's been this age old problem of performance agencies really not understanding creative programs and then creative agency really not understanding data or the PNL or what's driving revenue. And we've really been working hard to be the bridge there. So there's that. And then with our cost structures and the way that we look at financing and opening up revenue for our clients, it's very PNL driven. We want to be very profitable with our clients. So we kind of, instead of rejecting the financial discussions and getting out of the PNL, we try and dive deep on that on day one with our clients, which I think is refreshing for them from a marketing partner.

Ethan Peyton: So I, of course, dug through your guys'website quite a bit and the outcomes that you show for the folks that you work with is pretty awesome. And I'm hoping that obviously everyone who works with you is getting similar or better results than that. But I want to highlight one thing on the website, and this comes from the FAQ page brand. You make it pretty clear that working with Darkroom shouldn't be a last resort to save a failing business. And along those lines, there's a quote that I want to read. And the quote is, if our assessment and calculations indicate that your business won't have a high probability of long term success, we will inform you. So that's pretty interesting to me. Sounds like there's a pretty heavy assessment. What does that assessment look like on the inside and what are like, the qualitative measures or excuse me, the quantitative measures that you all are looking at? And is there anything also qualitative that is assessed in that assessment?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah, so it's a mix of consultative questions and then frameworks that we're asking the client to deliver to us in addition to access across a lot of their media channels like Facebook or Shopify. We kind of basically peer under the hood and do a diagnostic of the business. And there are some qualitative measures like industry size sorry, market size, competitive forces. Like, we'll do a five force analysis, a SWOT analysis of the business, so leveraging some of the large competitive strategy frameworks that large consultancies use to assess the viability of a business in a given market. But I think, generally speaking, related to that FAQ question and what it boils down to is, like, Jackson and I just don't want to be working with businesses that aren't good businesses or that don't have a high probability of success because we don't work with that many companies. We don't have like, a massive business development team like other agencies, and we really just want to be working in long term relationships with our clients. And if we can see that there isn't going to be a good fit off the cuff, then we just prefer to let our clients know. So that's on the qualitative side, on the quantitative side, we're doing some really interesting things. On the data side, CLV analyses, which are customer lifetime value assessments, PNL assessments, to really understand what is the health of this business, what is the revenue size, and that will determine what fee structure from an agency these people can afford, what growth prospects look like. So they give our team a better understanding and if they're going to be a good fit for us, and if they have realistic expectations for growth.

Jackson Corey: One of the reasons we put that question on there is because, especially now that economic forces are putting a lot of pressure on businesses, you have a lot of brands in our space that are they're just looking for a silver bullet. They're like, we need a new agency, we need a new CMO, we need a new tool system, whatever it is. And that thing is going to bring us the momentum that we need to get back on track. And that's just really not the case. At the end of the day, you need to have a very strong product market fit that is continuously getting better internally. You need to have an organization that is collaborative, streamlined, transparent. You'd be so surprised at the number of businesses where leadership has really no understanding of their customer, of how their customer is responding to their product or service. And they're just sort of dictating from the hilltops, like what their team should be doing, brand their team is just scared and just following orders. And so those are other qualitative measures that we look at and we're like, this isn't a really great partner for us because there's so many functions other than marketing, which is such a major piece, but there's so many other functions to a business that are critical to our success as an agency. And so, yeah, Lucas and I, we're in this for the long term, for legacy, just as much as the actual business itself. And so we want to be partnered with Brand for years and years, not just a couple of months.

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah. And I think for us, a red flag is if your business is really generating a lot of returns through digital channels and that's the lion's share of revenue and the founding team is totally dissociated from what's actually going on at the ground level, that's a red flag for us. But we approach our business development and relationship process almost like a doctor would approach a private practice and the patients that they're seeing. Many businesses come to us with chronic issues like chronic conditions that have precipitated over years and by external factors like economic conditions, which Jackson referenced. And they are looking for an immediate cure, like that silver bullet that he mentioned. And that's just not the way of going through a diagnostic and an assessment and then getting someone on the right track. If you have a chronic disease, you need to go through the therapies that are prescribed and recommended to you by the experts to actually get back on track. And so we're looking for clients that understand that and have the wherewithal to be diligent and work with us as partners to get them into a place where they don't have a chronic disease. They are actually growing and maturing and we're helping them on that track. And unfortunately, just in the realm of marketing agency, a lot of what you see is chronic diseased companies who actually need some sort of saving. And that's usually due to factors at the top level of the company in terms of just leadership and not understanding foundational aspects of the business.

Ethan Peyton: So this assessment obviously has a, it shows, you know, who's going to be a good partner for Y'all and who's not going to be a good partner. But I think from the company point of view, this assessment could be a massive deep dive look into how the business is operating. And you all have given several different specific things that you're looking at, like doing SWOT analysis and the other sorts of analyses that you all are running. But besides just those things, I guess tactically and strategically, are there other things that founders and leaders within companies can do to self assess the probability of their own long term success? Because I don't assume that you want to give these assessments away for free.

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Well, some of it's like there's a part of it that's like intuition. It's like, have you validated that there's a need for your product in the market and that the product that you've actually built is well received and is competitive in the space. Just doing that right there would save people a lot of hurt down the line. I can't tell you how many times Jackson and I, we've talked to one of our growth strategists, being like, hey, this client has this growth goal. What are the major roadblocks? And it's just like this product in this space, it's just you're going to have to spend too much money or there are too many roadblocks to actually get it to be where they want to be. And it's like, why doesn't the founder understand that? The founder needs to be very realistic. And so that's part of it. Jackson I don't know if you have.

Jackson Corey: Any that's where the saying the customer is always right actually really comes in. Because we work with a lot of founders and we get it. We're founders, too. You're creative, you have a vision. You're bringing something that was not in existence into an existence, and you're like really excited by it and you understand its inherent value. But customers are busy, they're protective of their money. And if they can get something for cheaper at a perceived value or an objective value that is at or higher than your product, you have to just be real and look at the data and see, are we getting the sales that we need? And if not, I have to just be honest with my product. I need to bring the price down or I need to change the product in some way. So there's that. As far as quantitative things that you should be looking at, any founder should understand their customer acquisition cost on a daily, weekly basis. You should be looking at your customer lifetime value on different time horizons.  days,  days, twelve months, whatever it is. You want to get your buyback period to be as short as possible. Like if someone buys your product and then they don't need to buy for another three years, see what you can do to optimize that. Those are little ways that you can start to really optimize the business. The other thing that I would say, and this is a large part of our philosophy and our process, is thinking about marketing as building layers onto a cake or building layers of a pyramid, in the sense that you want each marketing program to be sustainable. You want it to be able to run and be incrementally improved over time in perpetuity forever. And ideally, you're able to train other people ultimately to do that, to drive that incremental value over time, so that you can start to move up the pyramid onto more complex, bigger business challenges. And so that's the way that we approach growth for our clients. We look at like, okay, do we have evergreen campaigns for your core products? And are those driving sales consistently? And are we able to incrementally improve? That awesome, let's lock that in and then let's go on and move to a new thing. How do we launch new products and how do we market those for your business? How do we unlock new sales channels and we move up the complexity ladder. So if you're a pre seed seed stage, maybe you've crossed six figures in revenue. Look at the way that you're rolling out marketing programs and ask yourself, are you doing it in a very scientific way or are you just sort of shotgunning seeing what sticks? And then it just kind of feels like chaos. Like if you feel like you're in chaos, that's a negative, like your warning signal should be going off anyway. Those are a few ways to respond to that.

Ethan Peyton: So I really like this idea of being scientific and actually it's something that I was just talking with, with another founder the other day and they were speaking specifically about we didn't measure anything, we were going off gut. Everything is gut feel. And obviously gut feel has some value. Being scientific and taking things in a very regimented way also has some value. What do you all think the proper split is between trusting your gut and going with the data and the facts and the verifiable numbers that can be shown?

Jackson Corey: Honestly, you should be looking at you're going to want to count on data nine times out of ten. Very few founders and executives, leaders, honestly have the intuition to go off of and be successful with. I'm just going to be honest. So you want to set up as many data points as possible to look at the correlations between certain things. And these are just fundamental things. Product market fit again, are we saving enough cash per month, per year to build more runway and be able to make new investments and things like that? Those are hard numbers that are hard to argue with. Where I think intuition comes into play is when you have a deep understanding of the community or the culture in which you are building products and services for. That's very hard to quantify objectively, like with data points. And if you're immersed in that culture, I'll just give you a few examples. If you're a fashion designer and you're a fashion founder, fashion brand founder, and you've been in the game, in the mix, in the culture of what's going on, what people are buying, other designers perspectives, how they're pricing, how they're designing their stores like you are in the mix. Brand Entrenched you probably have a really good intuition of what is lacking in the market, where your perspective, your perspective on fashion can wedge itself in. And that intuition comes through pattern recognition. So you're actually collecting a lot of data points that are more qualitative. And so that's where I think intuition could come into play for us. As a service based business, we researched the history of advertising. We worked with a lot of marketing firms. We were in the creative industry, in the software industry for years and kind of saw what was going on and had the intuition about what would work, how could we be different, how could we serve customers? And so I think that was super helpful and it continues to be. But those things need to be looked at as hypotheses. So just. To go back to my point about building sustainable programs. You can have intuition, but you need to just categorize that intuition as a hypothesis. Spend as little money as possible behind that hypothesis to start to receive positive signals from your customer base brand. Then as you start to get more and more positive signals toward that hypothesis, you can start to scale it with more money, scale it with more technology, whatever that means, and then ultimately become it hopefully becomes a fully integrated part of your offering. Just as an example of that, what I mean by that is you started this podcast. I'm sure you have a business goal, a business outcome for this podcast, and you probably had some intuition by that, or you saw what was going on in the market and you're like, hey, this podcast thing is kind of working for a lot of our competitors or a lot of brands that are in adjacent verticals. We should maybe try this instead of pouring ,, $, into podcast production for your first episode. Record in a closet, record on your laptop, record on your phone and see are people starting to listen, are they interested in certain topics over other topics? Right? And then you just start to scale and build out from there. So hopefully this answers your question. I think just to say it succinctly. Like, intuition is great as long as you're confident that you are steeped in the community and the culture of the community that you serve. And then you just treat your intuition as hypotheses that you test and then over time, scale.

Ethan Peyton: I'm super interested in the way that people think and kind of the structures in which they think. And you guys both seem both extremely intelligent but also extremely able to articulate your answers and your thoughts. I'm curious, what does it look like when you all need to make a decision for your own business, when you've got to come together and go through whatever, what is the process that you two go through together to make business decisions for your shared business?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah, so I think this is part of the fun and challenge of having a co founder is like really needing to come to consensus and make decisions together. So Jackson and I, we meet every week. We're always texting. I'm probably texting him more than you would like, but we're constantly communicating. We have our fingers on the pulse of what's going on with the business. And I think we're very attuned to different things that are happening because we have different perspectives in terms of what we're doing on a day to day basis. But I think for me, there's a great YC article about how to interact and work with a co founder. But you need to be consistently talking about the hard shit every week so you don't build up any emotional debt is what they call it. And I think it's Sam Altman who wrote the article. And so it's just about quick communication and through time. Obviously, you guys need to make decisions very quickly. There's hundreds of decisions being made every week, so the really important decisions we take a lot more time with, and then the quicker decisions that are just relevant to each of our functions. We trust each other to make those things individually. And then I think there are more, like, the strategic questions of, like, how are we moving the business? What are we seeing that we're just consistently talking about on a weekly basis?

Ethan Peyton: Jackson, you want to toss anything in there?

Jackson Corey: No. Super well said. I mean, I think we have kind of a shared consciousness, like Lucas said, so he's got his skills. He's reading and absorbing certain material that I'm not. Obviously, he's talking to a lot of our prospective clients, so he's hearing directly from the market and what their anxieties are and what they're asking about, et cetera. And then I'm more internal, and I'm absorbing stuff that he's not absorbing or whatever. And so whenever we come together and we do so quite frequently, we're just constantly bouncing those ideas off of one another. And so it just feels like one symbiotic sort of consciousness when we operate that way, it's super lucky, and it's very unique how we kind of come to the same conclusions. It's not always instant, but it's usually pretty quick because we're in constant communication and we're super honest and critical with ourselves, with each other, and about how we observe and give feedback to the people that we collaborate that are not each other.

Lucas DiPietrantonio: This is something Jackson, I have been really working to figure out how we can impart this onto the people we really trust at the organization that we're consistently talking to. When we talk about intuition, sometimes we just have intuition or like, we need to be doing this, or, we need to make a change here. And it's something that isn't necessarily rooted in data just yet, or we haven't processed and individually looked at all of the data points, but subconsciously, we just are like, hey, we can see that we need to make this decision that other people just can't they can't process or see. So that's actually something that we've been working on right now and trying to figure out how to make that more objective and build that into our business.

Ethan Peyton: All right, I'm going to see if there's a story here because I feel like there is. I want to know how you guys met. Were you both doing, like, karate in a garage and then turned your beds into bunk beds? Or how did you two meet and then decide, hey, we want to run a business together?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah. So Jackson went to USC with my brother. I think the first time I distinctly remember it the first time I met Jackson, I believe. Jackson. Wow. It was either at USC or it was in New York City. Actually, I think it was in New York City.

Jackson Corey: It was in New York.

Lucas DiPietrantonio: It was in New York City at a Dylan Francis concert, I believe. And no. So we just started off as friends and he was really good friends with my brother. My brother thinks that I steal most of his friends, so there's that too. But Jackson was always super entrepreneurial as as was I. He started a company called Ames and he's a perfectionist and was always pretty secretive about it and I thought what he was working on was really cool. At the time I had a silkware and tie company and I was just like trying to figure out my way in terms of starting my own company and my own business and just naturally attracted to what he was doing and was like, I want to work with this guy. So we ended up collaborating on a couple of things and he's a very talented designer as I referenced earlier. And at the time we were working with a dev shop on one of my products and Jackson's design was just above and beyond superior. We were like, hey, we should just start consulting, making money, doing this on our own. And that was kind of the genesis of things.

Ethan Peyton: Jackson, is all that true or is he just making this up?

Jackson Corey: It's all a lie. It was all a lie.

Lucas DiPietrantonio: I hinted some details.

Jackson Corey: Yeah, there's definitely some late night escapades in there, but yeah, that's pretty much how it goes. And one of my favorite memories, any founder will understand this, we came up with the name. We were on FaceTime for probably like  hours just laying in bed scouring the internet like, what are we going to name this company? And I think we were on Pinterest and we just saw the word Darkroom and we're like, oh, that could be cool. And it just took off from there. But it's just those little moments in the very beginning when it's just two people and an idea is really cool.

Ethan Peyton: Awesome. Thank you guys for sharing that story. We're going to move on to my favorite question and I'm going to ask it to both of you separately. Let's go with Jackson first. Jackson, what is your number one piece of advice for early stage entrepreneurs?

Jackson Corey: Oh, boy. I would just say think about what your idea could be at scale, at its peak, at its ultimate, what is the ultimate vision that you can envision, what is the impact that it could have on people, but also what is your ultimate, ultimate business objective as well. So there's a number of factors but it's basically the advice is like think as long term as possible. Define that target in your head or on paper of what the business looks like, what the exit of the business would look like, what the impact of the business would look like, all of that stuff and just be as clear as possible on that. Now, obviously that may change, but just try to always orient yourself to that. And the reason I say that is just because there's a lot of the advice of, like, just start small and just piece together atoms, you know, just get your first customer. And I think that's all important, super important, but I think not a lot, not enough people think about, like, why am I even really doing this? Until it's kind of too late and they get swept into the wave, the tide, and then things become really real. And that's a blessing. But it could also be a curse if you don't want to be in that business.

Ethan Peyton: Awesome. Thanks for that answer. Lucas, same question to you. What's your number one piece of advice for early stage entrepreneurs?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah, I think Jackson's advice is really sound and I think visualization and roadmapping is a powerful exercise for me. For early stage founders, it is sometimes just about brute forcing it and just showing up. So I would just say, show up, don't stop, just continue to believe in yourself. And sometimes just momentum just begets momentum. So definitely important to have a long term vision, and I think that in and of itself is motivating, but you also just have to show up and put in the work. And if you just don't quit in the first three months, you've made progress there and ultimately you build a habit for just doing the thing that you need to do.

Ethan Peyton: Awesome advice. Thank you so much. All right, guys, what's next for Darkroom?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: I'll let Jackson take this because he's been working on some big stuff.

Jackson Corey: Yeah, there's a lot of exciting stuff. I mean, we have kind of like a three year roadmap that I won't go into super detail about, but the biggest thing that we're working on in the short term is our university, which is going to be an internal and external resource. One of the things that we noticed is that higher education universities, as well as more independent boutique online courses, they're failing the marketing industry. They're not providing nearly enough value, in our opinion, because the marketing landscape changes so rapidly with new technology, new tactics, whatever. It's really hard for bigger institutions to keep up. And a lot of the more niche folks don't want to give away all their secrets. But we feel like the only way to maintain, and not only maintain, but improve the quality of our own team is by treating our company like a research institution. So if you go to Stanford and you work in science, you're going to be working with a research professor who has a specific thing they're researching, and then they also teach. We want to treat our strategists, our top level people in that sort of way, where they're like, running experiments and they're working in the most innovative vanguard of marketing and then they're turning around and kind of teaching those practices and what they're learning to the rest of our team and to the public as well. So we think that that's a huge opportunity to build some community and just offer a ton of value by way of education. We mentioned Dark Matter where we're investing in more and more businesses. That's something that we're going to try to scale a little bit more in the next six to twelve months. And we're quietly working on software and AI for marketing as well. So there's a lot that we feel like we're leaving on the table if we don't invest in those things. We really want to be an ecosystem. Our mission is to be an ecosystem that really empowers the next era of business growth. So the agency is the kind of spinal cord of that, but there's just a lot that we want to be able to provide to this industry.

Ethan Peyton: Well, I'm really excited to see everything that you all put together. I'm definitely going to keep my eyes on Darkroom and the website just to I feel like I don't want to miss a thing because there's a lot going on and it all sounds super cool. But last question for you guys. Where can people connect with you both online? And how can our listeners support Darkroom?

Lucas DiPietrantonio: Yeah, so I think the best way you can follow Darkroom agency on Instagram, on TikTok, on LinkedIn, Twitter, and then Jackson and I are actually in the process of builder our personal profiles. So for me on Twitter, it's darkroom. Lucas on LinkedIn, it's Lucas t Pietro Antonio, which is a bit of a mouthful, but you'll find me the only one. And then Jackson, do you want to say your personal handles?

Jackson Corey: Yeah, just keep it simple. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. Just search Jacksoncory or Jcory. I read almost every DM, so hit me up.

Ethan Peyton: Sweet. Well, I'm not going to challenge anyone to spell Lucas's last name, so we're just going to put all those links on the show notes over at startups.com/podcast. Guys, this has been a ton of fun. I want to thank both of you for coming on the show. I want to applaud the level of success that Darkroom and everything else you guys are building is having. I think it's really cool to see. And this is cool. This is awesome. Keep going. Keep doing cool stuff because I want to learn everything.

Jackson Corey: Dude, thanks so much for having us on. Ethan, you're a great host. Pleasure, privilege, and likewise, dude. We'll keep tapped on you as well.

Ethan Peyton: All right, that's going to be it for this week's episode of the Startup Savant podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Before you go, it would be awesome if you could subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to and share this episode with anyone you think would like it. We will be back next week with more stories from another awesome founder. I can't wait to share it with you. And until fill. Then go and build something beautiful.