We spent 90 days running an agency's deal flow. Then we built Scout24.

London · A coffee shop in Shoreditch · Eight months ago

Michael ordered a flat white. I ordered something stupid with oat milk. We had a deck open on a cracked MacBook and a list of forty-three agencies we'd cold-emailed the night before. Three had replied. One had said yes.

That one yes is the reason any of this exists.

We'd spent the previous nine months in a flat in Hackney building the early version of what would become Scout24. Not the product you see now — the ugly, taped-together, half-CLI, half-Notion version. A system for finding brand campaigns before they went public. Outbound to brands before they'd written a brief. Source monitoring across hundreds of platforms most agencies have never heard of: private Slack groups, niche Substacks, Discord servers where brand marketers actually hang out, Telegram channels in three languages, internal procurement portals you have to be invited to.

We knew it worked. We'd done it for ourselves and a handful of friends. We just hadn't done it for a real agency with a real roster and a real P&L looking at us.

The agency that said yes had forty-plus creators. Beauty, wellness, lifestyle. London and LA. Not the kind of agency that needs saving — the kind that's doing fine, posting decent quarters, and quietly suspects they should be doing twice as well.

We told them we'd significantly grow their deal flow in 90 days. Then we picked a number that scared us and said it out loud: five times their current monthly pipeline. They laughed. Reasonably. And then they gave us a shot.

The embarrassing part

It wasn't because the market was quiet. February is loud — Q2 budgets are landing, wellness brands are spinning up summer campaigns, beauty is locked into Coachella prep. There was money everywhere. We just weren't catching it.

We'd left half our outbound stack sitting idle. The source monitoring was running — pulling briefs from the usual platforms, scraping Notion docs marketing teams forgot were public, watching three private Slack groups we shouldn't really have access to. But the outbound engine — the part where forty-seven actual humans go and contact brand marketing leads directly, before any brief exists — was barely ticking over. Two scouts active out of forty-seven. We were running the equivalent of a Ferrari on one cylinder.

Seven days in. Zero deals. The agency owner sent a polite email asking if there was, quote, "any update." Michael is very good at staying calm in those moments. I am not. I went for a walk along the canal and considered moving back to Mumbai.

"We had a private jet sitting on the tarmac with the engines off. We fixed it over a weekend."

Saturday and Sunday in the Hackney flat. Domino's twice. We turned everything on properly. All 847 sources live. All 47 scouts active and assigned territories. Outbound going out to brands every single day based on signals we were tracking in real time — funding rounds announced that morning, new "Creator Partnerships Lead" hires posted on LinkedIn at 4am, product launches teased in Substack newsletters, ad spend on Meta spiking past a brand's three-month average, podcast sponsorship slots quietly going unfilled, even subtle stuff like a DTC brand suddenly hiring a Shopify Plus dev (which almost always precedes a launch push).

Monday morning, week two. Twelve briefs in the feed. Three matched the agency's roster perfectly.

What happened over the next 90 days

The agency closed deals with Glossier, Oura, Liquid Death, Olipop, Vuori, and a stealth-mode skincare brand we still can't name in writing.

That Oura deal is the one I keep coming back to because it perfectly shows what the system actually does.

That is the entire product right there. Not finding briefs faster than everyone else. Finding briefs that everyone else never sees, because we went and created them before they existed.

So we built Scout24

After 90 days with that agency we had proof. Real numbers. Real brands. Real deals closed. But we had something more valuable than the results: a repeatable operation we could run for any agency in the world, with one switch.

Forty-seven scouts, distributed across London, Berlin, New York, LA, Lisbon, Bangalore, Singapore, and Sydney — chosen specifically so we have eyes on every market in every timezone, all the time. Eight hundred and forty-seven sources monitored, of which 213 are private (closed Slack groups, paid Discord servers, invite-only Substacks, brand procurement portals, niche industry mailing lists). A two-track system that runs every day — outbound to brands showing buying signals on one side, deep source monitoring across nearly a thousand platforms on the other. Average time from a signal firing to a campaign appearing in the feed: four hours. Median across the last 30 days: two hours, eleven minutes.

What the machine actually does, every day

Most platforms in this space are a search box on top of a scraper. Scout24 is operations. Here's a normal Tuesday:

We packaged that entire operation into Scout24 and opened it up to talent managers.

Every manager on Scout24 gets access to all of it. The outbound deals our scouts pulled directly from brands before they were posted anywhere. The source monitoring across platforms most agencies have never heard of. The roster-matching engine that flags briefs your creators are statistically likely to win. The whole machine, running on their behalf every day while they focus on the part of the job they're actually good at: closing.

Some found. Most hunted.

Why this hits different from every other platform

Most deal platforms are waiting rooms. Brands post a brief, two hundred managers sprint at it simultaneously, the brand gets flooded and responds to three of them, and everyone else spent four hours on something that went nowhere. The math is brutal: if a brief is public, your odds of winning it are roughly 1.5%. We've measured it.

Scout24 is not that.

When a brand signals they're about to spend, our scouts are already in their inbox by lunchtime. When a brief goes live on a platform nobody is watching, it's in our feed within two hours. The manager sitting on Scout24 is often the first and only person the brand has heard from. Their win rate on Scout24 briefs averages 17% — roughly an order of magnitude better than the open market.

The agency we worked with did not suddenly get smarter. Their creators did not get bigger overnight. They stopped being reactive. They stopped waiting for briefs to come to them and started seeing deals their competitors didn't know existed.

$40K a month to $200K. Same team. Same roster. 90 days.

Who's already inside

Without naming names that would get me in trouble: thirty-something agencies across the US, UK, EU, and APAC. A few you've definitely heard of. Most you haven't, because the best ones are quietly closing seven-figure quarters and would rather you didn't notice. Combined roster across the network sits at around 4,200 creators — every vertical from sports to finance to esports to mom-influencers to long-form YouTube.

The thing they all share: they were already good at the closing part. They just needed the top of the funnel to actually deliver.

Who this is actually for

The math

We cap new members at around fifty per month. The feed stays valuable because the people in it are serious. Too many managers and brands stop responding. We've watched it happen on other platforms. We keep it tight on purpose.

Right now there are spots open. The managers already inside are looking at 1,200 live campaigns, a significant chunk of which were pulled directly from brands before anyone posted them anywhere. Some of those brands are ones you pitch regularly. The submissions are already going in.

Week one doesn't count. Everything after that does.

Not ready to sign up yet? Completely fine. Book 30 minutes with Michael first and he'll tell you straight whether it's right for your roster. He's considerably more patient than I am. cal.com/michael-gratteri-creator24/30min