Will and Co-Founder Tom built digital marketing agency Buttr from the ground up. They’re self taught and knew there was a gap in the market for someone who bridged the gap between highly creative and highly data driven advertising.
Will talks through AI adoption and how they’ve built a business that’s grown at over 70% a year, without raising a dollar (incredible).
Tell us about Buttr – what do you do and why is it different?
At Buttr, we make and run high converting ads on search and social platforms. Most agencies split “creative” and “media” into separate teams, or separate agencies entirely. We treat them as one problem. In today’s media landscape the ad is the targeting. The platforms’ algorithms do most of the audience work, so the biggest lever you have is what you put in front of people and how fast you learn from it.
What sets us apart is how we operate. We’re rebuilding the agency to be AI-native. We’ve built our own internal tools that let our team query live ad data conversationally, automate the grunt work, and analyse creative performance at a level that used to take days. That means our people spend their time on strategy and ideas, not spreadsheets. Clients get faster, more high quality insights and more creative testing for the same spend.
What led you to co-founding your own business?
Honestly, I’ve never had a traditional job. I started at 17 sourcing antiques from scrap yards and reselling them, and I’ve been building things ever since. My business partner Tom was a lawyer at a notable firm. Both of us are self-taught. For me running my own thing was less a leap and more the only path I knew since I’ve not worked in any company that wasn’t mine. Tom and I fundamentally saw a huge gap in the market for someone to tackle the hard and complex problem of delivering both a highly creative and highly data driven advertising service.
What’s something you wish you knew before you made the leap?
Growing revenue and growing profit are different games. It’s easy to add clients and headcount and end up with a bigger, more stressful version of the same margins. At times, we played too much of a “defense game” which cost us our potential scale. On the flipside, there were periods where we potentially scaled too aggressively, which posed cashflow challenges.
Some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced so far (and what others could learn from them?)
We built Buttr without any outside capital. Every hire, tool, and bet came out of our own cash flow. That forces discipline, but it also means you feel every mistake. What I mentioned above about balancing cashflow during high scale periods is a perfect example of this. Essentially, if we were not hyper vigilant of where money was going, what expenses we had coming up, and how we needed to allocate capital during any of these periods, we had no VC or PE safety net to fall back on.
More recently the challenge has been structure. As we grew, the old “everyone reports to the founders” model stopped working. We’ve restructured the team so the people closest to the clients own the results.
What’s something you got right and are particularly proud of?
Staying bootstrapped and still growing fast. We’ve grown at over 70% a year compounded across the last few years without raising a dollar. I’m also proud that we moved early on AI. Rather than waiting to see how it played out, we started building our own tools, and it’s already changing how the team works day to day.
How has Future helped you along the way?
Future Advisory has been more than compliance for us. From helping set up the right structures as we grew, to building proper financial reporting so we could make decisions on real numbers, they truly have been a partner in our journey. As founders from a non-finance background, having advisors who explain the “why” and not just file the paperwork has made a real difference. Working closely with the team, I have learned a lot in the process which has also sharpened my skills as a founder.
What’s a big misconception about the work you do, and what do you wish more people understood about marketing?
The biggest misconception is that performance marketing is about clever targeting and hacks. Those days are mostly gone. The platforms have automated the targeting. What’s left is creative and the volume and speed of your testing. Most businesses underinvest in creative and overinvest in tinkering with settings.
The other thing I’d want people to understand is that marketing is a system, not a campaign. You don’t “do some ads” for a month and judge it. You build a machine that learns what works and compounds over time.
If a small business owner knows they should start to invest in marketing but doesn’t know where to start… what would your advice be?
Start with your numbers, not your ads. Know what a customer is worth to you and what you can afford to pay to get one. Without that, you can’t tell whether anything is working.
Then pick one channel where your customers actually spend time and commit to it properly rather than spreading a small budget thin across five. Make more creative than you think you need, test it, and let the data tell you what to double down on. Give it enough time and budget to learn, typically a few months, not a few weeks. If you bring in an agency, look for one that talks about your margins and business goals, not just clicks and impressions.
Want to learn more about Buttr? Have a read here.
If business advisory is something you could benefit from, learn more or get in touch.
