From a Childhood Bedroom to an Exit: Building EK Creative

I founded EK Creative in 2020, taking sales calls from my childhood bedroom, and grew it to $4M in ARR in three years. In 2023 Agital acquired the agency. The lessons that mattered most were simple: say yes before you have every answer, listen to clients, choose great partners, do things differently, and build brick by brick.

Where the EK Creative story actually starts

In 2017 I quit my job and moved to Monterrey, Mexico with $4K in savings. I went to support the woman of my dreams, now my wife, as she chased her own dream.

That move didn't look like a career strategy at the time. It was a bet on a person. Looking back, it set the tone for everything that came after: make the call that feels right, then figure out the details.

When I started EK Creative, I was taking sales calls out of my childhood bedroom. No office, no team, no brand anyone had heard of. My first post on LinkedIn had zero likes.

I mention these details because founder stories usually skip them. The exit gets the headline. The bedroom, the savings account and the silent first post are what it actually looked like.

Lesson 1: Listen to your clients, especially when they tell you what others missed

EK Creative exists because of one client. In 2019 I was running Meta ads for a fashion and apparel brand that sold through Facebook Live. They were doing around $50K/month and wanted to scale fast.

They told us that previous agencies hadn't understood their business or their niche, and they were clear about what they needed: drive traffic to the lives. I was hesitant, but I listened.

I started running live replays in Meta purchase conversion campaigns. The tracking was awful. I couldn't see their live sales data and Facebook showed no ROAS, so I was nervous I was wasting their money. Then they called an emergency meeting with our account manager and said:

"Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. It's working."

That client grew from $50K/month to $1M/month in about 6 months. More importantly, it showed me that no one was taking the time to understand where live shopping fit into a performance marketing strategy. That gap became the business.

The lesson I still repeat: always listen to client feedback. Your clients often see the opportunity before you do.

Lesson 2: Say yes before you have all the answers

Then TikTok found us. They were launching TikTok Shop, liked our experience in live shopping, and asked us to become one of the early TikTok Shop Partners (TSPs).

I remember being on my way to meet TikTok for the very first time and not being sure what to say. We weren't even sure what TSP really meant, or whether we fit a definition that kept changing.

We said yes anyway. We started onboarding clients to TikTok Shop in Q4 2022, and we had the 2nd-ever TikTok Shop purchase in the US. I invested a lot into it before there was any guarantee it would pay off.

About three years after that first meeting, I was on stage at TikTok's NYC HQ hosting the Go Fish Digital x TikTok for Business summit, the biggest event I had ever hosted. Saying yes before I had all the answers changed everything.

Lesson 3: If you want to differentiate, you have to do things differently

Saying yes didn't mean it went smoothly. After we'd invested heavily, TikTok came back with some less-than-ideal feedback:

"We aren't sure if you're a TSP. You are too focused on performance marketing. TSPs go live for clients, they offer full service, not just consulting or ads."

I could have treated that as a reason to back off. Instead, my answer was that we knew more about live than anyone in the US. We would start live as a service and do it differently, and better, than anyone else.

And we did. Live became our fastest-growing service in 2024. I've written up what we learned running those lives separately.

Feedback that stings is often a map. The thing TikTok said we were missing became one of the things we were best known for.

Lesson 4: Partnerships were the biggest levers

If I had to name the two biggest levers in building EK Creative, both were partnerships:

• CommentSold. We started working with them on Facebook lives in 2018, years before TikTok Shop existed.
• TikTok Shop. Becoming an early partner put us in the room as the platform launched in the US. (I've written separately about what makes TikTok Shop profitable.)

Hard work matters, and so does good positioning. The strongest growth we had came from building alongside partners who were betting on the same future we were. My advice is short: find great partners, build great solutions together, and great things will happen.

Lesson 5: Progress comes brick by brick

Put the timeline in one place and it looks fast. Quit my job in 2017. Moved to Monterrey with $4K. Started EK Creative in 2020 with sales calls from a childhood bedroom. $4M in ARR within three years. Acquired by Agital in 2023. A year after the acquisition, we had our first child.

Living it, it never felt fast. It felt like one conversation, one client, one post at a time. The LinkedIn post with zero likes and the stage at TikTok HQ are part of the same line; there's just a lot of unglamorous work in between.

Great things don't come at once. They come over time, built brick by brick, step by step.

What I'd tell a founder starting from zero

If you're early and it feels like nobody's watching, that's normal. Here's the short version of what building EK Creative taught me:

1. Say yes before you have all the answers.
2. Listen to your clients, especially when they tell you what others got wrong.
3. Find partners who are building toward the same future you are.
4. When someone says you don't fit the mold, build something that doesn't need to.
5. Keep stacking bricks.

The bedroom was just the first one.