Seven Agencies Got the Email. Apogee Answered on a Saturday.

At 5:45 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, Sept. 12, Austin Rampt asked which mid-tier affiliate management companies were best. Austin is the co-founder and CEO of Zenbody, a GLP-1 telehealth company, and he wanted an outsourced team to run Zenbody's affiliate program.

Zenbody turned the question into an AI prompt and built a shortlist from the answers. About five minutes later, they sent intro emails to seven agencies. Apogee was on the list.

I saw the email on a Saturday evening and replied within the hour. By that night, Austin and I had a call booked for Tuesday, Sept. 15. Zenbody signed with Apogee on Thursday, Sept. 17. A record closing for Apogee in the last few years.

When I asked how Zenbody found us, Austin said, “The book and your written content did the work.” He went further: “That content is what made you stand out, since it showed how you think about managing a program rather than just listing services.”

Getting onto an AI-generated shortlist takes years of work before anyone asks the question. An AI tool can only recommend an agency it can find and describe. Apogee has managed affiliate programs since 2009. The blog covers how we recruit, report, and protect programs from bad traffic, and Think Like an Affiliate Manager lays out the whole approach in one place. When Zenbody asked which agencies were worth calling, we already had it all published and easy to find.

Apogee is a small, family-owned agency in Pensacola, Florida. Some of the agencies we compete with have hundreds of employees, and the Zenbody deal shows how a team our size wins against them. When the email came in, nobody had to route it to a sales team, wait for approval, or hold an internal meeting before answering. I read it and replied.

The Sept. 15 call brought the two decision-makers together: Austin, who runs Zenbody, and me, who would run his program. I showed him what Apogee has built over 17 years, and he told me what he needed. By the end of the call, he trusted us to do what he asked. 

Large agencies will keep winning plenty of business in 2026 and 2027. A small agency earns its share by being easy to find, answering first, and putting the person who will do the work on the phone with the person who owns the problem.

Seven agencies got the same email that Saturday. Apogee signed the contract five days later.