- Andrew Diamante’s Lazy Labs thrives by leveraging AI for digital marketing in New Zealand.
- Lazy Labs delivers consistent results with a lean team structure.
- Diamante aims to expand services, including high-quality video production.
I personally love hearing the stories of founders that struggled and then came out of it to achieve some success. But are still very much in the grind thinking of how to get bigger.
That’s how I would describe Andrew Diamante, who I had the pleasure of chatting with the other day. Andrew was living in Cebu, Philippines and had started a sneaker company that produced sneakers under the brand of HBX.
They grew HBX (https://hbx.com/) to over 40k likes and followers in just one week, largely due to giveaways. And this clued them into the power of social for ecommerce.
Through this process he got to know numerous influencers and noticed how social influencers pushing products via ecommerce was really starting to take off.
Some of these collaborations worked a bit, some didn’t. But it basically prepared him for his next launch…. Lazy Labs – Digital Marketing.
Lazy Labs was started in 2020 at the height of the pandemic
All of a sudden everyone was jumping into online marketing, whereas things had still very much been done the traditional way in Philippines till then.
And so clients came fast and Andrew quickly scaled to something like 50 employees. He had over 30 clients and things were looking good.
But things had grown a bit too quickly. It was hard to ensure the performance of all these campaigns were up to par. And so it wasn’t long before clients began to churn and Andrew needed to scale back the operation.
He ended up having to let go of almost all the full-timers except one over the next couple years.
Andrew moved his home to New Zealand and focused on clients in his local community
After moving to New Zealand Andrew realized that there wasn’t much strong competition for merchants in his local area.
They were very relationship-based when they sold to people in the community, but needed digital marketing if they were to go wider. And so Andrew decided he’d fill this niche.
He would charge a monthly retainer for his services and then run ads on Meta, Google and Instagram. Also he began dabbling with AI and came up with a way to use Chatgpt to automatically tweak campaigns for him so that they would perform better.
By doing these process improvements he was able to run the agency with just one other full-timer and two part-time staff.
Delivering results
With his new lean structure and use of AI, Andrew was now able to deliver good results to his clients quite consistently.
One example he gave was a supplements company where they were spending ~$300 per week and making a 10x return of $3000 on ad spend (ROAS) for them.
Another example he gave was a private school that wanted to reach a wider base of potential students… and so he was successfully able to do this for them.
Looking forward
These days Andrew is looking at how to expand and take on some additional services. One key one that he is dabbling with is film & cinematography.
He is able to make high quality, cinematic, videos that he films himself and then uses to improve the results from ads.
Very few competitors make the effort to create such high quality films and so he explained that its an easy way to differentiate.
In any case it seems like Andrew and his team have built a good foundation from which to now grow. Particularly given the fact that he seems to be ahead of the curve on delivering results with the help of AI.
If you’re interested in talking to Andrew for your business, you can reach him at: andrew@lazylabsmarketing.com
