How this small remote marketing agency is serving ecommerce clients and some serious work culture goals

You may not have heard of Hustler Marketing, but in its own quiet ways, this small retention marketing agency, to quote the Genz and also most of its employee base, is serving some serious company culture goals. For one, the agency has been 100% remote, even before Covid was a thing and its 60 odd employees with an average age of 25 work all the way from the sunny beaches of Indonesia to the Peruvian alps. In a cut-throat “18-hour weekday” glorifying world, Hustler Marketing employees are required to put in just about 120-140 hours a month and they get to decide their own working hours (and timezones.)

The company that’s been profitable from day one generates millions in revenue for its 80+ ecommerce clients, most of them in the DTC space, from end-to-end email and SMS marketing services. Zoom, Slack and Asana are almost the only tools of communication, organization and management respectively. In fact it’s only recently that for the first time since its inception, all the team members came face to face as the company flew all the employees to Budapest in a first-of-its-kind paid retreat.

Though the idea of company offsites isn’t new, it does offer a new perspective into the cultural mores of the new working world, led by small, remote companies that work mostly online. Even before the Budapest-retreat, Hustler Marketing offered a “$500 travel bonus” to each employee to travel and meet up with a member of their team. This initiative saw almost all of the 60-employees of the company fly to other cities or even countries to meet one or several colleagues at an individual level.

Bostjan Belingar, the agency’s 31-year old CEO and founder is the archetypal digital nomad himself, spending a few months at a time in different countries across the world. From its origin in Barcelona, to where it is today, Hustler Marketing has grown several-fold, both in size and revenue, boasting of 70+ clients on retainers, almost all of whom are ecommerce stores and the likes of DTC darlings like BlendJet and other stores that sell niche products. While Hustler Marketing is an email marketing powerhouse, it’s also expanded into other vehicles of retention marketing like SMS, Messenger, and content marketing.

Company retreats, own working hours and remote work ain’t the only perks- the company also offers a 13th salary as annual bonus to each employee along with regular schwag, anniversary bonuses, and services of an inhouse therapist. In an almost rare culture, they also offer paid assignments for senior leadership roles, as vouched  for by its marketing director.

While Hustler Marketing’s employees are happy to be working in their pyjamas and moonlighting as DJs and artists at night, while they run multi-million dollar campaigns for their clients during the day, or the other way around, make no mistake, Hustler Marketing is serious about work. The agency’s clients credit 20-45% extra revenue from the end-to-end retention marketing services done by the agency.  “Yes, we’re no Fortune-500 company, but we haven’t made any compromises on tight processes, an in-depth training system that could rival the biggest companies, a strict hiring criteria, and a no-bullshit policy.”, says Belingar. Sure enough, the employees can choose their own working hours, but there’re systems in place to track their time and productivity. Regular 1:1s and team huddles keep the accountability levels high amongst a young team.

The results show not only in the client success metrics but also in the HR team’s annual reports. The company reportedly boasts of a team 8.5% satisfaction rating, an ENPS score of 69, and an acceptance rate of 0.04% – less than Harvard’s.