Agent Insights Ep 14: Starting an Agency

Hello. Flint here, to tell you what I know about starting a scam-catching agency.

Starting a scam-catching agency can be difficult. While it doesn’t take that much effort to create a site and some application forms, setting up your agency such that it will stay active is hard. (Note that this assumes you want multiple people, and don’t want an open community page type thing.)

You want to have a platform, first. This is important, as it allows people to find you easier and acts as a place to store all important documents and forms, as well as letting you post scammers somewhere. I’d recommend using a platform like Blogger, as it’s easy to set up, free, and doesn’t have any linking restrictions or whatnot that would impact you, although social medias and other website platforms probably work just as well. I don’t recommend using a YouTube channel as the platform, although having one attached is useful. YouTube doesn’t store documents as well, and it can be a pain for multiple people to contribute.

It’s also important that you have somewhere where you can talk. I’d recommend Discord, as it has many features and bots that make things much easier.

You also want to come up with a name for the agency. This is not as important, because unless the name sounds really stupid, it won’t have much of an impact.

You can also create rules and rankings for future agents. While this part is fun, you should avoid obsessing about it. Ranks do not need to be complex, they can be as simple as [Poster>Admin]. There’s a good chance nobody’s going to join for a while, so don’t worry about this until you have a lot of people, then adjust from there. With rules, they should be mostly summarized as “don’t be a jerk or an idiot, also contribute”, and rules made to enforce other rules. Make sure your rules aren’t overly restrictive or too loose. However, don’t stress too much about them just yet, as you might not get anyone for a while, and even then, most people aren’t problematic.

Then, you can create applications. Make sure that you check them at least semi-often. You’ll want questions that weed out bad applicants and tell you useful information about them (e.g. time zone, what they want to be called, etc.). When accepting, you should accept most everyone at first, and then, when you retain enough people, start getting tougher. If people that you accept cause problems or are inactive, feel free to eject them from the agency.

You’ll want to make posts about scammers. This is important, for obvious reasons. I’d recommend coming up with at least a loose formula a post should follow, to avoid poorly made posts and spam when you have more people. Make sure to post regularly, because its very easy to set up the framework of an agency, and then forget to post/fall out of the habit of posting and become inactive. I’d recommend a schedule, or a quota.

There’s obviously a bunch more, but that’s an overview of the basic framework. Once you’ve done all this, just keep going until people start joining, at which point you can revise the rules/rankings/site/whatnot as needed. Bye!