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Will Sartorius
Company
SelfMade
Location
New York City Metropolitan Area
Bio
Will Sartorius is a New York–based marketing and operations leader, currently CEO of SelfMade, focused on AI-powered marketing and creative intelligence. He’s grown at SelfMade from integrated marketing roles to Head of Creative Operations, COO, and then CEO. Previously, he was CMO at Inkerman NYC, consulted with Active Spaces, and began his career in finance at Deutsche Bank (analyst and summer analyst). He holds a BA in Economics from Bates College.
Will Sartorius is a New York–based...
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We unlock your marketing team with top-notch post-production services and AI-driven creative strategy
We unlock your marketing team with...
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Actionable Takeaways
Paid Creative Teams Were Brainstorming Blind:
While email teams were using detailed purchase data to write highly personalized messages, paid creative teams were still doing gut-feel brainstorming about who to target — the gap between these two disciplines was Will's original insight, and closing it with AI-powered customer review analysis became the entire foundation of SelfMade's rebuild.
A Prompt Is a Markdown File - Demystify the Stack:
The entire infrastructure of AI creative systems — skills, agents, markdown files — is just structured text; Will's clearest insight is that people overcomplicate it, and the practical reality is: a well-crafted prompt is a markdown file is a skill, and anyone with good taste and critical thinking can build these systems.
80/20: AI Volume + Human Depth:
SelfMade's model is 80% AI creative output (statics, animations, short-form UGC) that satisfies the volume demand modern Meta campaigns require, freeing 20% of human strategist time to write 2-4 minute scripts that AI genuinely cannot replicate — because long-form authentic human connection still performs best.
Human in the Loop Is Not Optional — It's the System:
You cannot just build an AI creative system and let it run; the only way to get better and better outputs is to have a human with a clear thesis actively training the system on what is good and what is bad — without that feedback loop, you just regress to the mean.
PAM Clusters Are Your Creative Foundation:
Before generating any ad, SelfMade defines the Persona, Angle, and Motivation (PAM) for every customer segment — this structured brief framework is what separates data-backed creative from generic AI output and gives the system something meaningful to optimize against.
Personal Brand as Business Development Engine:
Will's Friday newsletter on AI creative workflows — which he describes as giving away all his secrets — has become one of the most effective client acquisition channels; the counterintuitive lesson is that radical openness builds more trust and more pipeline than any outbound sales effort.
Regulated Industries Are a Copyable Playbook:
SelfMade built expertise in THC, sexual wellness, and other red-tape categories by learning how to scale one account without getting it taken down, then copy-pasting that three-stage compliance approach to every similar client — niche expertise is a competitive moat precisely because most agencies avoid it.
Skipper: Turning Agency Knowledge Into a Scalable Product:
The Skipper app operationalizes everything SelfMade has learned about AI-powered creative production — scraping buyer signals, building PAM clusters, generating on-brand ads — into a self-service tool for brands that either can't afford an agency or just need more volume than one can deliver.
Conversation Highlights
Will Sartorius, CEO of SelfMade, tells the unlikely story of rebuilding a nearly-dead agency into one of the most AI-forward creative production shops in performance marketing — and launching a product out of it. After taking over from a failed acquisition in March 2023, Will bet the company on a single insight: if paid creative agencies were still brainstorming their targeting in rooms based on gut feel, someone who could analyze customer data at scale with AI could outcompete everyone. Three years later, SelfMade delivers 5x the creative volume at the same cost, has built an AI creative-only team using Claude Code, and is launching Skipper — an app that scrapes the web, Reddit, Amazon, and Facebook comments to generate on-brand ads for D2C brands automatically.
Topics Discussed
- Will’s background: economics/Spanish → investment banking → Snap Incubator fitness startup → D2C men’s shoe brand → SelfMade employee → CEO
- SelfMade’s history: founded 2016, $19M raised, originally a photo-editing/Instagram posting app, pivoted to agency
- The failed 2022 acquisition and how it nearly destroyed the company — from $3.5M ARR to near-collapse in six months
- Taking over as CEO in March 2023 and rebuilding around AI when ChatGPT was just becoming mainstream
- Early AI insight: analyzing customer reviews with a Google Doc of prompts — the origin of today’s skills/markdown files
- The conference light bulb moment: paid teams brainstorming targeting vs. email teams using purchase data — the gap AI could close
- PAM clusters — Persona, Angle, Motivation (and emotion) — SelfMade’s internal creative brief framework
- 80% AI creative output / 20% human long-form scripts — the agency’s current creative model
- Why 2-4 minute ads still outperform AI short-form: “people are starved for human connection”
- Building AI creative systems in Claude Code — thesis + human in the loop to train what’s good vs. bad
- 20-30 ad type markdown files constantly iterated by the AI creative-only team
- 5x creative volume at same cost for clients
- Client profile: food and beverage, THC/cannabis, men’s and women’s sexual wellness — regulated industries with copyable playbook
- Personal brand growth: weekly newsletter on AI creative workflows (few thousand subscribers), podcast lectures, LinkedIn
- Becoming “the AI creative guy” — the self-fulfilling niche positioning loop
- Skipper app (getskipper.ai): scrapes web/Reddit/Amazon/Facebook ad comments, generates on-brand ads; beta, launching May-June 2026
- 2026 goals: scale AI creative offering, grow Skipper, launch comprehensive AI ads course (Q3)
