The CRM for Talent Agencies Doesn't Exist. So We're Building It.

By Jin Lee, founder of Ads Cubic. LinkedIn

Here's the thing I keep coming back to: "The state of CRMs is mostly focused on marketing agencies, not talent agencies. We've accepted a combination of different tools that live across apps and platforms (HubSpot, Monday.com, Trello, Airtable), and we constantly synchronize data across them, racking up subscriptions. The vision of the Ads Cubic platform is one system that covers everything a talent agency needs: enhancing talent discoverability, managing contact relationships, creating new and managing existing collaboration opportunities, tracking deliverables and due dates, managing invoices, and even making it easy to file taxes. We've become accustomed to paying for systems that only solve a slice of each. We want to change that."

I wrote that down as a note to myself about six months ago. Reading it back now, it still feels like the most honest framing of why this product needs to exist.

The Stitched-Together Stack That Everyone's Running

If you manage talent for a living, your tech stack is almost certainly some variation of this: a CRM built for B2B sales (HubSpot is the most common), a project management tool for campaign tracking (Monday.com, Trello, or Asana depending on how many tabs you're willing to have open), a spreadsheet or Airtable base for your roster, a separate invoicing setup in QuickBooks or Wave or a cobbled-together Google Sheets template, and a shared inbox or Gmail label system you've trained yourself to maintain.

Every one of those tools is genuinely good at what it was designed to do. HubSpot is excellent at sales pipelines. Airtable is a flexible database. Monday is a reasonable project tracker. The problem isn't any individual tool. The problem is the seams between them.

When a brand emails offering a $12k deal for one of your creators, you open the deal in your email, create a contact card in HubSpot, add a row to the Airtable roster to note the opportunity, create a task in Monday with the deliverable dates, and then six weeks later when the deal closes, you re-key the invoice amount into your accounting tool. That's the same information, entered four times, across four systems that have never spoken to each other and never will.

Nobody designed that experience. It accumulated. And because each tool is tolerable on its own, the full cost of the stack is invisible until you stop and count it: the monthly subscriptions (HubSpot alone starts at $15/user/month for basic CRM features, and that's before the marketing hubs), the hours per week spent copying data between systems, the deals that slipped because the follow-up reminder lived in the wrong app.

Why No One Built It for Talent Agencies

The honest answer is that talent agencies are a small market compared to marketing agencies, sales teams, and enterprise SaaS buyers. HubSpot wasn't ignoring us; they were building for the buyer who closes the most seats. That buyer is an SDR at a software company, not a talent manager negotiating creator deals.

So the CRM category optimized for contact management and pipeline tracking because that's what B2B sales needed. Project management tools optimized for agile software teams and marketing campaigns. Invoice software optimized for freelancers and small accounting practices.

Talent agencies got to pick from that menu and make do.

The deeper issue is that what a talent agency actually does doesn't map cleanly onto any of those categories. It's not purely a CRM problem because you also need deliverable tracking. It's not purely a project management problem because you also need a contact database with real relationship history. It's not purely an invoicing problem because the invoice only makes sense in the context of the deal that created it, the creator who fulfilled it, and the brand relationship you want to protect for the next campaign.

A talent agency is managing a web of relationships (between creators, brands, agencies, managers, and legal teams) while simultaneously running what is effectively a deal pipeline, a project management office, and a small accounting firm. None of the tools built for those individual functions were designed to work together. And none of them understood that the relationships and the operations are the same thing.

What the Seams Are Costing You

I want to be specific here, because the cost of a fragmented stack is usually invisible until you add it up.

The subscription cost is the obvious one. If you're running HubSpot Starter, Monday.com Basic, Airtable Plus, and any invoicing tool, you're probably spending $150–300/month before you add seats for a second manager or assistant. That's $1,800–3,600 a year to maintain infrastructure that introduces friction instead of removing it.

The time cost is harder to see. In my experience talking to managers running rosters of 10–30 creators, data synchronization consumes somewhere between 5–8 hours a week. That's not management time. That's not relationship time. That's copying deal names from one tab to another.

The error cost is the most expensive and the least measured. When a deliverable date lives in Monday but the deal context lives in HubSpot and the creator's availability lives in a separate calendar, someone misses the due date reminder because it wasn't in the tool they were looking at that morning. A missed deliverable on a $15k campaign doesn't just cost the campaign. It costs the brand relationship, which could have been a $60k renewal six months later.

These aren't edge cases. They're the normal operating conditions of every talent agency I've talked to.

What a Single System Actually Looks Like

When I describe what Ads Cubic is building, I usually watch people nod slowly and then say something like "but that would be really complicated to build." It would be. That's part of why no one has done it.

The capability list that matters for a talent agency is: finding and surfacing the right talent for a given opportunity (discoverability), tracking the full relationship history with every brand contact across every deal you've ever worked together (contact management), building and managing the active deal pipeline with all its stages and stakeholders (opportunity management), tracking every deliverable with its owner, status, and due date (deliverable management), generating and tracking invoices tied to those deals (invoicing), and at year-end, not handing your accountant a shoebox of PDFs.

Those capabilities aren't separate products bolted together. They're one workflow. A deal becomes a project becomes deliverables becomes an invoice becomes a tax record. In the current stack, each step is a manual handoff to a different application. In a single system, the deal data flows into the project, the project data feeds the invoice, and the whole thread is searchable in one place.

This isn't a theoretical architecture. It's a pragmatic acknowledgment that the data already connects, and right now you're doing the connecting by hand.

Why We're Building It, Not Just Writing About It

I'm not publishing this as a "here's an interesting industry problem" think piece. I'm building the answer.

Ads Cubic started with email: making it easier to spot real brand deal opportunities in the inbox, filter signal from noise, and track relationships with contacts who reach out. That problem is solved well enough that managers use it every day.

But email is the entry point, not the whole job. Every deal that comes through the inbox eventually needs a place to live, a timeline to track, an invoice to issue. Right now our users solve that by going back to Monday or Airtable. We're building the system that means they don't have to.

The product we're working toward covers the full arc from first brand contact to final payment. If you want to follow along or push on the direction, you can reach me directly at hi@adscubic.com.

One thing I keep in mind: the tools we're building against weren't built for this industry. That means the bar isn't "better than HubSpot." The bar is "actually designed for talent agency work." Those are different targets, and the second one is more achievable and more useful than it sounds.

If the fragmented stack is costing you hours you don't have, that's the problem we're solving. The CRM for talent agencies doesn't exist yet. It will.