Compound 2024 year in review

3 learnings from growing the agency to over $1M in revenue.

Tommy Clark
December 30, 2024

Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

2024 was quite the year. I cycled through the ‘it’s so over’ to ‘we’re so back’ cycle more times than I can count.

Today’s edition of Social Files is more of a personal one—breaking down 3 of the biggest lessons I learned scaling Compound to our first $1M year.

Let’s get into it.

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Compound 2024 year in review

3 learnings from growing the agency to over $1M in revenue.

I started the year unsure of whether the agency would make it.

We were doing fine. It was a ‘nice little business.’ But I just didn’t see how it could scale. I was over the hump of making my first few hires—but I hadn’t learned how to hire well.

Vision was cloudy. It drove me nuts.

I ended the year feeling more confident in the business than I ever have. Complete 180. Though I know it will be difficult, I see a clear path for Compound to grow from just north of $1M in revenue to [redacted] in revenue.

Our team is exceptional. We’ve been fortunate to work with a roster of some of the best SaaS startups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Oh, and I’m having fun building the agency.

Here’s a snapshot of the before & after:

DEC ‘23

~$490K in revenue
4 team members

DEC ‘24

~$1M in revenue
11 team members

Profit stayed about the same YoY, which was intentional as we reinvested this year into building out a proper team.

I thought it might be helpful for me to share some of the lessons I’ve learned on our way here over the past year. And let me be clear. I have by no means figured it out. Our business is healthy. We do great work for clients. But I have a lot to learn. I’m just sharing what I have learned, so far.

Your people are your product.

True in every business. Especially true in the agency business.

The theory of constraints states that any business has one primary constraint keeping it from growing. Founders love to distract themselves with work on things that aren’t the true constraint. I’m no exception.

On one hand, Compound has had a waitlist since we launched in Q2 2023. Demand has never been an issue. Supply, on the other hand…that’s been tricky.

Stellar writers & editors who excel in the agency setting, understand how to ghostwrite for other individuals, pass the vibe check, and fit in our ideal salary band are hard to come by.

And once they’re in, you need to train them. You need to set, and hold, an immovable standard. Then you need to make sure they have the resources & support to meet that standard. That’s a lot of work. It’s not always fun.

Correction. Most of the time, it’s not fun.

Creating marketing content is fun. It’s also something I’ve done thousands and thousands of times. So I’m pretty good at it—which makes it more fun. Being good at things is fun.

I could justify time spent on content, since it was bringing leads in. Problem is, we couldn’t service all of those leads. We also had good retention, so I’d just be getting all these leads only to tell them ‘well, we’re actually at capacity for the next 3 months’ (first world problem, I know).

So for a while in early 2024, we spun our wheels. Revenue would inch up, but we were still stuck at the same level (~$70-80K per month). Trapped in purgatory.

I wish I could tell you I had a moment when recruiting and management just clicked for me. In reality, I got lucky. I made a hire in July ‘24 that shattered the ceiling I thought we had on the business.

This hire showed me what a true A-player looks like in action. Competent. Proactive. Holds a high standard with an iron fist (I mean this as a dear compliment). She was, and is, an extension of the standard I wanted to hold. This was what we were missing.

Honestly, up until this point, I think I gaslit myself into being to easy on the current team. And this hire expanded the Overton Window for how high of a standard I could hold.

This is when management became fun for me. Not because it’s easy. Not because everyone on the team did everything perfect all the time. Because it showed me that the right people want to be pushed. The right people want to speed up, not slow everything down.

Being on a team of high-performers is fun.

Reminds me of my senior year of high school, when our basketball team made a deep playoff run (Lost by 1 in overtime on a contested buzzer beater from 28-feet out in the championship game. Pain.). Our coach was hard on us. He held us to a ridiculously high standard. For instance, in practice, if we didn’t point and acknowledge a teammate who hit us for an assist, we’d have to run suicides. Every time.

That was the most fun I’ve had in my basketball career.

Freshman year of college, our team was atrocious. Yet practices were pretty chill. Conditioning in high school was harder. ‘Pretty chill’ got us a 3-27 record, and routed by 60+ points during one particular game.

I literally stopped playing basketball the next year.

I know which type of culture I’d rather have at Compound. My top priority in 2025 is to continue to create this culture of excellence at the agency. It attracts the right talent, and it’s a hell of a lot more fun for me to lead that type of team.

Ok. This all feels good. But how does this improvement in team materially affect the business?

The math is simple:

A better team means better retention, and higher LTV (lifetime value).
A better team means I can pitch higher pricing with confidence that we can deliver. Our pricing has increased ~50% on average since the end of last year, churn constant.
A better team means I can begin to layer in new parts of our offer and focus on building the business instead of putting out fires (there are still fires, just not as many).

I tell our team weekly: Quality client work solves all of our business problems.

That quality client work is a function of the team we build. The people are the product.

Don’t let other people build your business.

It’s scary easy to ‘best practice’ yourself into building a business you don’t even like.

Playbooks, blueprints, checklists, they’re everywhere. And a lot of them work! You should probably study them so you're not running around in the dark. But taken too far, they can be dangerous.

I’m certainly not the first person to build a marketing agency. According the recent estimates, there were ~90,800 marketing agencies in 2023—and that’s just in America.

Point is, there are plenty of folks who have done this successfully. Studying how they’ve done it is helpful.

Zooming into our corner of the internet, ‘productized’ agencies were all the rage in the past year or so. You take a simple, repeatable service, build out the SOPs, and scale that to the moon. By keeping the process and scope of work constant across clients, it makes the agency more ‘scalable.’ It also allows you to hire cheaper talent and keep margins high.

Makes sense in theory. Also feels soulless.

I don’t know man, I like doing great marketing. Cookie cutter templates that you force on your clientele for the sake of better unit economics is the antithesis of great marketing.

I also thought about what my life would look like in the ‘successful’ version of this business. I didn’t like what I saw in my mind—a Google calendar slammed back-to-back-to-back with meetings I didn’t want to be on. Stressing about sales because we got on the “volume hamster wheel.”

This was my gut feeling since day 1. Problem is, I went against that gut feeling for a few months. We had slammed into that revenue ceiling I mentioned earlier. Pricing was kind of stuck (or so I thought). What should we do?

Well, we had demand for our core service—Linkedin content for founders. Pricing was stagnant, but I could sprint to expand the team and then take on more clients.

This spreadsheet is telling me we can double the business in 3-5 months. I don’t really believe in trying to stack as many clients as possible. That doesn’t seem like it’ll scale well. Maybe my gut feeling is off. Everyone is telling me to just hire more. I see other people on social media winning like this (famous last words). Let’s do it.

This was toward the tail end of Q3. The plan was to go from ~15 clients to ~25 for our LinkedIn content service by the end of Q4. Easy enough.

I quickly realized that this was not the path I wanted to follow. Not yet, at least. Remember, hiring was our bottleneck. By October, I had made a few key hires and was starting to understand how to do it well. But it wasn’t repeatable yet. And scaling from 15 to 25 clients required pretty much doubling our team overnight. The math didn’t math.

Everything looks easy in V1 of the spreadsheet.

That gut feeling was still lingering, too.

From Day 1, I wanted to build Compound into a premium, boutique agency. David Ogilvy talks about the idea of building the best agency, not the biggest. I agree with this world view. My actions at the time didn’t.

Why?

Well, going the premium route takes longer. It would require us to increase pricing, so we could work with less clients—and still grow revenue. And as such, do things that would allow us to increase prices well above comps. This means hiring top talent. Training that talent on our marketing philosophy, beyond cookie cutter SOPs. Layering in another service or two (there’s only so much you can charge for Linkedin content).

It’s harder.

Why do you think everyone tries to productize a $5K a month service?

Ultimately, the choice wasn’t a difficult one, though. Even if we did double the team, stack more clients, all that…the margins still kinda sucked. So yeah, maybe I post on LinkedIn that I have a “$3M agency” in 6 months. But I take home the same as when we are at $1M?

The ‘return on brain damage,’ as Andrew Wilkinson would put it, just wasn’t there.

All that said, I do think I had to go through that phase of trying to ‘productize’ the agency. Before that, I was solo. I didn’t have a team.

It’s cliche—but I had a job, not a business.

Trying to copy others a few steps ahead of me taught me valuable skills about delegation, hiring (and how not to hire), what clients we work best with, and more. I couldn’t skip that step.

In 2025, I can build the premium agency I always wanted to build, with a solid team & processes as a foundation.

Win anyway.

I went through a really, really tough breakup at the beginning of September. Long story, far beyond the scope of this essay.

But wait, there’s more. 20% of our revenue churned unexpectedly at the end of October.

Point is, Q4 was hard.

Yet, Compound ended the quarter with a record revenue month. We’re up more than double year-over-year. Objectively in the best spot we’ve been in since our inception.

One of the most rewarding parts of business is continuously proving to yourself that you can solve problems and do hard things. There were plenty of days during the past 3 months when I did not want to take client calls. Film content. Show up for our team on all hands meetings.

Doesn’t matter. Chart’s still going up and to the right.

This simple quote from Alex Hormozi resonated with me deeply: “Win anyway.”

I mean, what was I gonna do? Stop? Yeah. Right.

I’m not sure what it was, but we speed-ran through a lot of milestones in those 3 months. Maybe it’s because I had more time. Maybe I had a chip on my shoulder again. I don’t know.

I debated including this part in the write-up, since plenty of people are going through things far more difficult than a hard break up or a few clients churning. I think this lesson is helpful, though. Plus, my Content Editor’s been pushing me to share more personal learnings—not just B2B SaaS sauce. So here you go.

Looking ahead.

2023 felt like a chaotic mess.

2024 was a year of building a real foundation & team.

2025 will be the year we actually press down on the gas pedal.

I’m excited. Particularly excited to keep building and training our team. I feel like I’ve hit a level of proficiency in leadership where I can see the results of the work now, but I’m still early enough that there’s a lot to learn.

I don’t anticipate us aggressively hiring, but I do know we’ll need a handful of Content Writers and Content Editors. If you’re skilled in those areas, want to join an agency working with some of the top startups in tech, and resonate with any of the above—get in touch.

I’ll also be sharing more of my personal learnings as a founder. Like I mentioned, my team’s been pushing me to do more of this. I’m also inspired by what founders like Tyler Denk is doing with Big Desk Energy and what Daniel Dalen is doing with his YouTube channel.

I am debating whether to include these types of write-ups in Social Files going forward, or have a separate, personal, newsletter. Let me know what your opinion is.

I hope you’ll understand that I won’t share revenue numbers until after the fact. That’s one pillar of the ‘build in public’ movement I disagree with. Lessons are best shared after you get the win.

That said, the journey to [redacted] starts now.

Oh. Yeah. I should have probably mentioned I launched a software company, too. It’s called Bluecast, and it helps you write Linkedin content, faster.t…

🗃 FILE CABINET

Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.

The most valuable Linkedin training you’ll ever watch by Tommy Clark 🎥
How to Rebrand Yourself in 2025 (and why you should) by Oren John 🎥
The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi 📕

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, thanks for allowing me into your email inbox every week. I’m excited to devote more time and resources into making Social Files the best B2B content resource out there.