How do you grow a two-person startup into a 100-person agency powering brands with creativity, media, and digital transformation? Wondersauce Co-Founder and CEO John Sampogna shares the secrets behind scaling fast, keeping talent inspired, and staying ahead with AI and emerging tech. Hear how this business acceleration agency helps brands break growth barriers—and what the future of agencies will look like in the age of human + machine collaboration.
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John, welcome to the show. I’m so pleased to have you on today. Thanks for having me. So to kick things off, tell us all about Wondersauce. Yeah, I mean, Wondersauce is about 15 years old. We’re based in New York City, about 100 people. We are a business acceleration agency. We help brands overcome different stages of growth through two kind of key service offerings. One being revenue acceleration, where we help kind of break certain thresholds, whether that’s like getting to market, making your first million. 10 million, 100 million, et cetera. We use creative content and paid media and earned to drive that. And then we do a lot of digital experience transformation in the sense of like using user experience and technology to basically rebuild brand infrastructure, everything from e-commerce to websites and mobile applications. So pretty nice balance of two sides of the brain. Well, let’s go back 15 years then. Let’s start there. You know, you scaled the agency from two people to over 100. What are some of the pivotal moments or decisions or both that helped you grow without losing your core identity? I mean, the funny thing is, I think our core identity has always been the idea that we’re always evolving and always changing. So it’s always felt a little bit different, which I think has kept us feeling motivated to keep our foot on the gas and ultimately keep delivering good work and staying relevant with the times. So when I look back at, you know, key moments, it was really tied to, like… winning big pieces of business or making specific hires that would help us with scale. So everything from like back in the day, like the first, you know, six figure project or first seven figure project and what that meant in terms of just like being legitimized and beating name brand agencies that are very good in their own right. And then you think about like from a very practical standpoint, like hiring your first producer or project manager or person to lead a specific discipline and what that means in terms of actually building scale into your organization. Acceleration is a unique word when it comes to describing an agency. That’s not one that I think has come up yet on this show. So that’s pretty cool. What made you decide to specialize in acceleration? Just, we’ve always been really broad by nature in terms of what we do. And it’s always been this idea that, you know, I’m 40 years old. I was in my mid-20s when we started the agency. And we come from a generation where I always say, like, we grew up with the internet and the internet grew up with us. So I never looked at the internet as a place to make money. Like, it just was a thing that one day when I was, you know, 10 or 11, I was like, we need to get AOL, mom. Please get it for me. And my middle school and years on Napster and LimeWire, college, free and post Facebook, everything in my 20s going on with the mobile app economy and everything like that. So when we built an agency, we wanted to basically build in the idea of just behavior and customer experience at every facet of what we do. So when I think about the idea of acceleration, We’re basically just using our skills of like truly understanding consumer behavior to help brands get out of specific ruts or get moving in a different direction, or in many cases, it’s getting off the ground to begin with. So while I think that the scope of our services could be looked at as broad from time to time, a lot of the goals are the same. It’s just like whether you have a 10-year-old digital infrastructure and your IT is super outdated, or you need to really shake up how you’re spending money from a media standpoint, it still ties back to this idea of growth. So building an agency where the two things we really focus on are repairing your own properties and then extending and scaling your marketing efforts was something that I thought was just really authentic to how the business came to shape. The landscape itself of agencies is shifting constantly, you know, from client expectations to, you know, the various platforms we use and have to participate on. How do you stay ahead of that curve while still delivering consistent results? That sounds like a lot of development time and, you know, sort of research time while you’re executing a lot to be doing at once. It’s just something that we’ve always had to do. I mean, I feel like it’s funny now because for the first time, it feels like everyone in culture right now is going through AI together. And I think this is the first time, given the democracy of the technology and how it is quite accessible for anyone to start playing with it. It’s really actually interesting to hear different perspectives, not only through the lens of work, but through the lens of just culture and society in general. But I look back at whether it was a new front end framework for building websites or a new big e-commerce platform that we had to learn or very much many, many things on the paid media side or creative side. I feel like when something becomes relevant to your kids and your grandparents, and it’s kind of spanned that entire generational gap, it’s something that needs to be worked into your business because it matters and it’s not a fad. We’ve always been really good at kind of like following the apple. um mantra of like I always admired Apple for never being first with technology but when they do something it’s super intuitive and it’s just done right and I feel like you can you can burn a lot of time and a lot of um money chasing every single new tool and technology that comes out and it’s dangerous. But I think like always being aware of like the big swings and what’s actually happening, you know, for instance, like, you know, we’re all very familiar with, you know, chat GPT and Gemini and all that stuff from like a, large language model standpoint. We’re using it for many different tasks. And I think over the last month now, you’re starting to see things like Veo, where people are creating short form video from their phones in many cases. It’s starting to get to that critical mass moment where it’s like, we’re not very far away from shipping polished 30 second spots in a pitch. Three concepts that a client could literally hit play and watch. So this needs to be something that… I don’t care if you’re a copywriter, a designer, a technologist, you need to have a working understanding at Wondersauce of this technology because it’s going to be something we’re using in an accelerated manner in many use cases. Talent is everything in this business. What have you learned about attracting, retaining, and growing top creative and strategic talent in today’s climate? Yeah, I mean, it’s everything, right? That’s our intellectual property is our people. So you’re only as good as them, and the last thing you need is an aggressive turnover. So retention has always been something we’ve focused on here, and thankfully it’s something we’ve always been pretty good at. For me, I think the beauty of advertising and marketing and working at an agency is being able to work across so many different industries and so many different business models. So when you look at that, many agencies can offer that promise. What we always focused on was this idea of investing in your personal growth and this idea of atypical growth, where you may start as a producer, you may end up as someone on the operations team. You may be a creative and end up as a strategist. This idea that we want to grow with your interests, and as long as you have a passion and a talent for something, we want to help guide you there. We’ve got amazing stories of… interns eventually becoming ahead of a discipline or starting a new office or opening up a new discipline for us. And I look back at the case studies of those individuals as some of the proudest moments I have at Wondersauce. So when it comes to just building and retaining talent, it’s about constantly thinking about career planning from a very atypical standpoint. It isn’t just about like, well, I’m a producer and if I do a good job, I’m going to be a senior producer. It’s more about understanding longer term what makes that person tick. And if you can understand that, you can ultimately build a career that leads to retention and someone being a bit more happy in their job. Always a win. Yeah. Looking back, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced during your growth journey at Wondersauce? And How did you overcome them? Doug, the growing pains of scaling a business is very funny. And I look back on those days very, very fondly because we were so young and so naive and we didn’t really know anything. And I think when you’re doing something for the first time, there’s this bliss to the way you make decisions where it’s innocent, it’s pure, and there’s not every layer of risk that goes through your brain. Right now, I always say, I wish I can go back to when I was 27 because Now I hear something and I’m immediately like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That’s all the risk. And I’m like, I don’t want to touch that. And there’s something nice about just being able to dive into something. But I remember early on thinking that the partners of the business had to do everything and be the best at everything to be successful. And if we had blind spots, it was a weakness. And what I soon learned was you should really be vocal about your weaknesses and the things you don’t think you’re good at. And that forms like a very organic priority list of what you need to hire and bring in. So if you’re incredibly passionate at defining strategy or creative direction or whatever it is that made you pick this industry, That is something you should try and hold on to for as long as possible. And if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re faking the financial side or the organizational side or the client side, and those are things that you don’t enjoy doing, you’re not quite good at, you should look to basically make yourself obsolete as soon as possible. And you shouldn’t actively try and evaporate what makes you really great. And I always see that happening with many founders. They’re like, I’m still way in the weeds and it’s ruining everything. You might be in the weeds, it might be causing chaos, but there’s something about you being in the weeds that’s leading to good work. So don’t try and completely remove yourself from that because it’s what’s leading your clients to picking you again and it’s leading your teams to actually rally around you. So I think it’s really about being vocal and almost celebrating your blind spots because that allows you to bring in people that enjoy doing it and will do it better than you anyway. If that particular lesson is super interesting, is that something that you were self-aware enough to figure out for yourself? Or was it something that you learned along the way with the guidance of others or a little bit of both? It was a little bit of both. I remember like vividly the first time we brought on a producer and they were just like super organized and they took chaos and put it into spreadsheets and software. And I remember like two or three weeks in being like, I don’t know, is this going to work? And then it worked. And we were just like, wow, we don’t have to worry about like that anymore. And this is always that software we were using way back in the day, like Bandcamp or something like that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was all organized. I was like, wow, that’s wild. So it was little things like that. And then it’s also even when you look at a creative discipline, and you might have creative co-founders that are amazing at what they do. are they kind of like individual contributors and are they really great at doing the work and they have no interest in managing? Then it’s almost like, let them keep focusing on that and teach others by doing. And then maybe you want to fill that team out with more of a creative manager who can actually help instill the review process and career paths and a lot of the things like resourcing that aren’t necessarily fun versus have that person that really just wants to get in and do the work So there’s a lot of different ways you can kind of go about building a business. But yeah, we kind of learned it on the fly through just experience and firsthand. You know, I like to end these on something of a crystal ball question, and we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but I’d like to flesh it out a little bit because I find your responses to what we were discussing earlier fascinating. When you’re thinking about emerging technologies, you know, AI, automation, creative tools, even things like augmented reality, how do you feel that they’re going to fit into the agency model of the future, thinking in terms of one to five years down the road? I think it’s going to be as soon as one year. I mean, it’s already happening now, but I think it’s going to be dramatically different a year from now. I think that we’re 100 people, and I imagine that we’ll have days where we’re competing with five-person companies and 500-person companies. And… What I believe is that the future is going to be really embracing the idea of being T-shaped, as corny as that sounds. I think that there’s going to be the thing that you were hired or trained to do, and there’s going to be a bunch of other skills you’re going to have to constantly invest in to strengthen, because I really believe that… the days of hyper-specialized companies are going to come to an end. And it’s going to be really about customer journey thinking and going from A to Z and being able to advise and execute across as much of that as possible, or at least understand the implications of that. Just because technology is that much more powerful and it’s not going to be enough to just work in a vacuum. So for me, I think that the only thing I know about the future is that the next 10 years are going to be So much more different than the previous 70. And I think that the role of an agency will still very much be a thing. It’s going to look completely different. And I think like the labels we have of specific roles are going to change and you’re going to get people who are comfortable taking on a lot more. and collaborating together and strengthening ideas and execution by like a shared understanding of how this technology could be harnessed in the right way. So I really, really do believe it’s going to be more of a focus on individuals who can kind of like understand a few different things and then ultimately understand the balance of like human and machine knowing that we ultimately have to find that balance. You know, the hyper-specialized organizations thing is interesting. These days, when you’re entering the job market, a lot of young people are struggling to figure out, you know, what is my focus? I want to be good at this, but I also need to have my eye on this. Do you feel that individuals looking to break into the industry, especially on the agency side, are going to need to be less hyper-specialized, I guess is probably the best way to put it? I’ll tell you what I’m looking for. I mean, and this is something that I’m not even joking. I would most likely, you know, interview people that sent us an email with obviously like qualifications and everything like that. Like it has to have some layer of diligence here. But what I’m looking for is someone to basically say like, I went to school for X and I think I’m really good at it and I’m excited to learn more, but I’m super pumped about the unknown of the next few years. I’m already really fluid in X, Y, and Z. I think this technology is the most powerful and I’m going deep, deep here. And I can’t wait to see what people like you think about this stuff because I’m fascinated by it and I’m spending my nights and weekends immersing myself in it. You send a cover letter or an email to agencies like that, you will get a response. people want to see right now, hire people that are hiring is excitement to dabble and jump into the unknown. There’s not going to be formalized courses or training for this stuff. The only training is going to be literally doing it and learning from it and talking to your colleagues and getting better together. So when I’m, when we’re looking for entry-level folks, it’s, it’s honestly like an, an excitement score is something that like we would weigh very high right now. Amazing insights there. That’s got to be useful for a lot of people. If one wanted to find out more about yourself and Wondersauce, where should they go? You can check out my LinkedIn. I’m fairly active there. And of course, you can go to our website, wondersauce.com. John, thanks so much for taking the time to do this today. This has been fantastic. Thanks, Richard.
