You either sell painkillers or vitamins, and you want to be in the business of selling painkillers. That's the guidance one receives when crafting a strategy to build and sell new products.

At Gigi, for most of our customers, we've sold painkillers. We've had the good fortune of realizing the "pain" of our product is most acutely felt by the largest and fastest-growing agencies in the world. These agencies are unable to meet the demand of their existing clients and new clients with the human capital they produce organically, so they hire Gigi to meet the demand with token capital supply. The costs of Gigi are easily rationalized by choosing not to budget for future headcount growth at the previously planned pace and instead hiring Gigi to make their existing team members exponentially more productive. We didn't know this would be the customer segment that would gravitate to our product, but in retrospect we probably should have.

We do, though, have another group of customers who hire Gigi as a vitamin. These are agencies who may not have alarming and immediate hiring needs, but instead recognize that both the Amazon DSP and agentic AI are areas where they should be investing resources. In doing so, they leverage Gigi to build newfound growth vectors for their business and invest in building the muscle of deploying AI agents at scale across their enterprise.

A canonical example of this type of customer for us is the agency Voyageur. We first met with the Voyageur team last year when Gigi was in its infancy. At the time, their CEO, Shane, and their VP of Media, Matt, recognized that Amazon DSP was a nascent but growing media channel for their clients. They activated and managed their clients' ADSP campaigns, but admittedly (at the time) were doing so in a manner that was sufficiently good enough and wasn't at the high level of service they held themselves accountable to across other service lines at their agency. So, they hired Gigi. Within 6 months of hiring Gigi they were able to 3x their Amazon DSP spend under management, elevate the level of client service so that Amazon DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud went from sufficiently good enough to a strength, and win net new business with enterprise brands based on these newfound capabilities. Most striking is that they did all of this without hiring any new team members. They hired Gigi to enable the 10x media manager and it worked. Here's a case study that shares more of our shared wins together in detail: https://gigico.ai/blog/how-voyageur-hired-gigi-to-scale-client-operations-and-drive-a-5.4x-dpvr-for-a-beauty-brand

We talk to agencies all the time who have the inverse of Shane and Matt's perspective on building new growth vectors at their agency. In their view, sufficiently good enough is in fact good enough. Keeping the lights on and "setting and forgetting ADSP campaigns" is the bar they set across their agency, and they myopically perceive an investment in Gigi as a superfluous cost rather than a growth investment.

I was on a podcast recently, and the host asked me "who stops Gigi deals at an agency?" My answer: our biggest blocker in new deals is mediocrity, not a specific role (exec, functional leader, or media manager). I've shared in a previous post that AI adoption is a proxy for your most passionate team members. That post was targeted at leaders assessing AI adoption once it's already deployed across a company. What we've now learned is that this is similarly true for exec and functional leaders.

Choosing to invest in AI when it is a vitamin and not a painkiller is a signal of your own conviction in the growth prospects of your agency. The Amazon DSP is growing fast, and today's vitamin buyers, like Shane and Matt at Voyageur, are positioning themselves for the moment it becomes a painkiller for everyone else. The question for agency leaders is which side of that moment you want to be on.