Justin Wohlstadter
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
3K followers
500+ connections
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3K followers
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Justin Wohlstadter shared thisThis was a nice email to receive! Agencies using our new Pitch product are winning more business. 👇️ ... If you haven't heard, Pitch is a product we built specifically for agencies going after new business, with every part of the process in one simple playbook. You upload a brief (or even just a company name), and thousands of our AI agents simultaneously research everything about your agency, your prospect, category, competitors, and stakeholders through all of our data (all live social, trends, GWI audience data, events just to name a few). In literally 2 hours (or less), you get back a full playbook with angles, proof points, room intelligence, and an honest read on where you'll win (and where you'll get cut). Fully tailored to your agency and the exact projects you're gunning for. We built it because every agency has the same problem: you can't pull your best people off billable work for an opportunity that might not pan out. So pitches get under-resourced, or you pass on them entirely. This is the kind of feedback loop we were hoping for. Ship the product, get it in people's hands, and see if it actually helps them win. Which, by the way— it does! If you run new business at an agency and want to try it, DM me or comment below. No active Waldo subscription or commitment needed. I'd love to hear from you.
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Justin Wohlstadter shared thisOur fearless COO Lindsey Sullivan had 6 minutes to pitch WALDO to a room of 27 hungry brands yesterday at Cartograph AI's Innovation Workshop. She led with: Your Claude or ChatGPT setup is incredibly powerful, but it has no idea what your brand sounds like on TikTok right now, what your competitors are running on Meta this week, what trends are just noise, or what your audience is actually saying on Reddit. 𝗜𝘁'𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴. 𝗦𝗼, 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗽𝘂𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰. If it isn't clear, the whole reason Waldo exists is to fix that. (I'm a little biased I guess). But my bias can't be all that biased when an investor of ours connected Waldo to Claude, asked it to pull brand sentiment data, then asked Claude to build a live dashboard from it and refresh it daily. And the whole thing took one sitting (importantly, with no engineering team involved). Anyway, thanks to Jay Friedman and the Cartograph AI team for building the room. And so proud of Lindsey for delivering the message! If you were in the workshop, or are intrigued by the idea of building a whole dashboard with no engineering experience, DMs and comments are open.Justin Wohlstadter shared this40+ global brands and agencies came together for CartographAI's first Innovation Workshop. Eight tech vendors each had seven minutes to show their brilliance. Pictured here, the venerable Evan Bowen of Placements AI showing how end-to-end media workflow can be fully unified. Not pictured, but equally impressive were Chalice AI, Arima, Evorra, Evertune AI, WALDO.FYI, Incremental, and Adverteyes.ai So many amazing technologies being developed today. Brands and agencies can now research and get full assessments on any martech/adtech vendor in minutes on our site - link in comment.
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Justin Wohlstadter shared thisAn agency that wins 3 out of 5 pitches will always outperform one that wins 5 out of 20. The math on this is ugly, yet almost nobody runs it. Think about what goes into a single pitch. 1. You're pulling senior strategists off billable work. 2. You're spending on freelancers. 3. You're burning weeks of your best people's time on something that is, by definition, speculative. ...and when you lose (which statistically you will, more often than not), more than losing the pitch, you lose everything those people could have been doing instead. The default instinct at every agency is to pursue as many opportunities as possible. It feels like the right move (especially with things tightening up). But the agencies that consistently grow actually aren't pitching more. In fact, they're getting disciplined about which opportunities deserve their best people, and killing the rest early. Nobody really teaches this. There's no new business playbook that starts with "here's how to say no." But the discipline of walking away from a pitch you're unlikely to win is probably the highest-ROI decision an agency leader can make. We think about this a lot at WALDO, and it's why the first thing our Pitch product does is give you an honest read on whether a pitch is worth entering at all, before your team spends a single hour on it.
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Justin Wohlstadter shared thisWe've been quietly showing agency leaders our new Pitch product. I expected positive feedback, but not for people to call it "therapy." We'll take it though. 😆 Every agency knows what great pitch prep looks like. And at every agency, that process is held together with duct tape. We know because we're agency people. We lived it before we built WALDO. So when we started showing Pitch to agency leaders over the past few months, the reactions surprised us. Swipe through to hear it from them 👇️
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Justin Wohlstadter shared thisThe new pitch product we just launched is really Jenny Nicholson's brain child. Like, she literally downloaded her brain into it. 👉🧠👈 So cool to see such a creative genius work. Awesome job Jenny!! ✨✨✨
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Justin Wohlstadter shared thisToday, we're launching Pitch: the only product on the market built by AI & agency experts that 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 tells you how you'll win (or lose) the room. Every agency has the same unspoken problem: - Your strategy team is fully billable. Pulling them into a pitch that might not convert is hard to justify. - So you either wing it, pass entirely, or spend $10K on extra help and hope for the best. - Nobody has enough time to really decode the RFP, research the decision-makers, and put in the leg work. ... Until WALDO had something to say about it. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸? 𝗟𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝟮 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽𝘀: 1. Upload a brief (or just give us a brand name if you're just prospecting). Our team of AI agents – trained by agency experts who have spent decades on pitches – immediately get to work. 2. Give it 1-2 hours. That's it. A full pitch playbook will hit your inbox with custom angles, decision-maker profiles, copy-paste-ready stats and quotes, and lots more. All sourced, all uniquely tailored to your agency. Of course, like with any Waldo product, it's all backed by real-time social data, live ads, trends, and audience signals you cannot get anywhere else. Tim Whirledge (ex-McCann, Droga5, BBDO) said some people will have to "pick their jaws up off the floor." Michelle Gordon at MWW said her team can finally focus on storytelling instead of fact-finding. Agencies shouldn't have to choose between doing great work for existing clients and pursuing the next one. Pitch lets you pursue more, work more efficiently, and win more of the ones you go after. 𝗚𝗲𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: ordnl.link/1qF1pu5 — To celebrate launch, the first 100 people to comment "PITCH" below will get 50% off their first pitch. The right agency could use this to win a six-figure account they would have otherwise had to pass on. Excited to get you access.
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Justin Wohlstadter shared thisWe showed a 25-year agency growth consultant something we've been building. In 10 minutes, he went from "okay, that's interesting" to "oh, now you're 4X-ing your credit card swipes." This person has spent his career helping independent agencies win the pitches that define their trajectory. He knows the economics cold. So when we walked him through what we've been testing at WALDO, we wanted to see if a veteran who has sat through thousands of pitch preps would find it genuinely useful. His first reaction was about the research depth. He saw competitive positioning, audience signals, and cultural context that would normally take a team days to assemble, generated in hours. Then he saw the pitch angles (which are creative approaches tailored to the agency's actual body of work, with sourced proof points and room intelligence on each decision-maker). 𝗛𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲: "𝗪𝗵𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝗮𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗿𝗲 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗼𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝗶𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺 𝗯𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗳." Then he saw you could run the same thing for your competitors, and THAT is when the credit card comment came out. We're building this because the cost of entering a pitch has always been too high. Agencies are passing on great opportunities strictly because they can't resource. We're working to end that. If you want to see what he saw, DM me or comment below.
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Justin Wohlstadter shared thisThe illegal cannabis market in California produces 8x more weed than the legal one. In the state that legalized it. The fine for getting caught growing illegally? $500. I know — not exactly what you'd expect a tech founder to be posting about on a Friday morning. Especially not me. 🤣 But when your product uncovers six cultural tensions hiding inside a $32 billion industry and the teenagers who invented 4/20 literally called themselves "the Waldos," you can't just sit on that. Not when your product IS named WALDO. (Yes, 4/20 was Monday. Wanted to make sure we got our numbers right. This felt like "Friday content" anyway.) Here's why you should care if you work at an agency: Wingstop sold rolling trays. Bic dropped a $4.20 weekender bag. Jimmy John's memed their way into a BOGO deal. Meanwhile the original 4/20 gathering at Hippie Hill — in San Francisco, where the whole thing started — was cancelled for the third straight year because nobody would sponsor it. That's a cultural brief hiding in plain sight that your social listening tool probably just filed under "positive sentiment." Read more here 👇️ — then ask yourself what your tools found on 4/20.
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Justin Wohlstadter posted thisOmnicom is planning $1 billion in labor reductions and WPP's revenue dropped 8.1% last year while Publicis grew. If you run an independent agency, this is the most interesting window you've had in a long time. TLDR: Holding companies are consolidating to survive. That means spending freezes, layoffs, teams asked to do more with less while the parent company figures out its next chapter. And it creates real disruption for clients. Meanwhile, the AI tools that holdcos are spending billions to build internally are available to a 15-person shop for a few hundred dollars a month. It’s, for the first time ever, the same competitive intelligence, audience data, frameworks, etc. A small agency with good thinking and the right tools can show up to a pitch with the same depth as a team backed by a global network (which is exciting if you’re an indie shop, and potentially scary if you’re a part of a holdco). It won’t be like this forever. But right now, indie agencies that invest in their intelligence infrastructure have a real shot at winning business they never would have been considered for three years ago. Exciting, isn’t it?
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Kal Amin
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Lucas J. Pols
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Travis Kirk Lowry
founders that have only ever worked within a large company tend to be empty vessels. the most valuable skill at a big company is identifying who has (or could soon have) power and then aligning with and advocating for their ideas as if they were your own. take a spin through the recent YC class and you see a pattern of big company mids all founding the same AI for xyz... its not really their idea, it just sounds good. the board meetings will be especially painful. founders acting like they work for the investors, seeking approval, lost in the woods. there are exceptions. but they tend to be founded before zirp. when founding a company was hard and low prestige and there wasn't capital at every turn. an empty vessel doesn't jump into the abyss without first raising a $5m round from the 9 figure 'seed firms'.
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Matt Rappaport
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Salesfully.com
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Medha Agarwal
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Peter OBrien
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