Working with a Full-Stack vs Niche Agency?

...and the power of "Specific Knowledge."

Author

Marius Olesen
June 19, 2024

Hey, it’s Marius from Ad Space.

I had a tweet that received a lot of engagement recently, so I wanted to share it with you and break down the idea.

As always, our goal is to share as much value as possible in the Newsletter.

I hope this helps you make better decisions right after reading it.

Here’s the Tweet

Have you ever heard the saying, "Jack of all trades, master of none"?

Well, that’s very true.

Whether it’s your:

  • Ad Creatives

  • Email Marketing

  • Landing Pages

  • Customer Service

  • Etc.

You don’t want to work with people who are a mile wide and an inch deep.

You want to work with experts in that given field, so you can reap the rewards of their labor and experience.

You want all of their specific knowledge applied to your business.

What is specific knowledge, you might ask?

Well, let’s get into that.

Specific Knowledge

When choosing a person for your team or hiring an agency.

You want to make sure they are extremely talented in one field, and one field only.

“The first thing to notice about specific knowledge is that you can’t be trained for it. If you can be trained for it, if you can go to a class and learn specific knowledge, then somebody else can be trained for it too, and then we can mass-produce and mass-train people…

Very often specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s just being figured out or is hard to figure out.”

- Naval Ravikant.

Think of specific knowledge as building judgment in a specific domain.

That’s leverage.

And if you want to scale, you need more leverage, at scale.

This could also include other people’s leverage.

Instead of spending time and energy figuring out how to do something, you can pay someone to do it for you or teach you how to do it.

🤯🤯🤯

The funny thing is, they’ll probably do a better job than you would.

It will save you time and money.

You can even ask them to teach you once you gain insight into how they apply their specific knowledge to your business.

So how can you apply this to e-commerce?

Specific knowledge can be very much applied here as well… but perhaps not in the way you think.

Let me show you what I mean.

Applying Specific Knowledge For Your Ad Creatives

Judgment in its original form meant something like:

“Capacity for making decisions.”

You, as the person responsible for marketing at one or multiple brands (whoever you are reading this…)

Would have the most specific knowledge regarding how your brand is positioned in the market.

You’ve consciously or unconsciously started to recognize patterns and match them to the complex environment which is the market.

You’re an expert, so to speak, especially about your brand.

And that’s why you can’t afford to work with generalists.

You should aim to be the person who is an inch wide and a mile deep.

Then let other people deploy their leverage and drill that inch-wide hole a thousand miles deep.

This is where you win.

Summary

You want to gain as much leverage as possible by working with or hiring people who can go a mile deep instead of just an inch.

Use other people’s leverage, which they’ve spent their resources on, to improve your business.

You make more money this way, and it saves you time.

Rate this Ad Space Episode!

This was a bit of an alternative episode on Ad Space, but I felt the need to get this off my chest since I see a lot of people getting it wrong.

If you could take 5 seconds out of your day to rate this episode, it would mean the world to us

Helpful Links

Reply to this email if you have any questions or further content you want covered.

Best,

Marius

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