GramWorthy
CEO & Co-Founder · 2017–2018
A micro-influencer marketing agency that was profitable within two months. We chose not to quit Deloitte to scale it — because we didn't want to run a labour-heavy agency full-time.
What I Learned
- Profitability within two months meant the model was right. The chokepoint wasn't ops or delivery -- it was sales, and sales required time we didn't have as full-time consultants.
- The hard part of talent management is not finding talent. It's managing expectations on both sides of a deal simultaneously.
- Micro-influencer marketing worked because the engagement was real. We were early to a shift that is now conventional wisdom.
- A business having legs is not the same as it being worth building. We stayed at Deloitte because we'd learn more there than quitting to be marketers -- and on reflection, it was absolutely the right decision.
GramWorthy started from a simple observation: brands were spending money on macro-influencers with massive followings and mediocre engagement, and ignoring a tier of smaller creators who had genuine relationships with their audiences. We thought that was a pricing inefficiency worth exploiting.
My two co-founders and I built a talent book of micro-influencers and lifestyle creators across New Zealand -- over 100 by the time we wound down -- and connected them with brands who wanted authentic content rather than polished advertising. The agency model was straightforward: we sourced the talent, structured the deals, handled the brief-to-delivery process.
Profitable within two months. That's the number I'm proud of. It meant the unit economics were right from the start -- we weren't burning cash to figure out whether there was a business here.
The ceiling was also real, and it showed up somewhere unexpected: sales. Not operations, not talent sourcing, not delivery. Sales. Chasing down the next client was the chokepoint -- and all three of us were full-time consultants at Deloitte. The business model may have been scalable in theory. The hours we could commit to selling were not.
At some point the question became honest: did we want to quit our jobs and run a labour-heavy marketing agency? The answer was no. We were three years into careers at Deloitte -- the kind of exposure you can't buy and can't replicate by running a small agency. The calculus was simple: we'd learn more staying than leaving. On reflection, it was absolutely the right call. We closed GramWorthy cleanly while it was working, and none of us regret it.
The thing I think about most from GramWorthy is the distribution insight. We were never really selling marketing campaigns. We were selling access to an audience that trusted the person delivering the message. That's a different product than what most marketing platforms were selling at the time, and understanding that distinction shaped how I thought about platform businesses for years after.
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