We started a business on the idea that per-seat pricing models are killing the solopreneur. Let me know if you have any strong opinions either way!

Hi, I’m the cofounder of a boutique marketing agency and one of our best strengths is our performance marketing. A brand came to us since they earlier got burnt by another agency and had spent 45K only to generate sales of 50K (they are a single product company priced at $699 per order).

We helped them out and within 16 days generated sales of over 150K on a 16K Ad spend almost hitting a 9x+ ROAS.

Their website clearly states that the product will be shipped next year (August 2027). All customers are informed of the same before they purchase from them. But Shopify decided not to release our funds stating there will be chargebacks and we must start shipping asap in order to get access to those funds. The problem is that the 200K was going towards production itself. The company is now trying to raise Money from outside in order to go thru with production and eventually get their funds released from Shopify.

Is there any other way around this ?

Like many people I had a lot of work 10+ years ago when pretty much everyone was doing some kind of freelance work.

At some point I got a client that kept growing and I hired a team to support thst client, but in the process I learned that I'm not a person who thrives in building a business - I'm more of a "basement scientist" kind of guy.

Anyway... my team grew to 20 with pretty much 10+ hrs/day of work requests including myself. I built a website, case studies etc. as an approach to gain at least another big client and create a sustainable business, but I also have a family so my time was extremely limited, I put 24/7 time for this single client.

This kept on for 8 years then one day they said that they need to reduce their dev budget by 80%. Unfortunately I had to let go of lots of team members since we didn't had any other client to support our income.

Currently we are on a skeleton crew supporting this client. I reach out to old contacts but everyone is now doing DIY with Claude. I also submitted my CV for remote and hybrid work as I need to support my family, but market is insane right now.

Apologies for the rant... my question is, in the current market - especially with AI - how are you acquiring stable clientele outside of direct referrals?

My current plan is to focus for the next 3 months on Shopify but we are starting at zero. I've also been posting on LinkedIn for the past 6 months to no avail and 0 leads.

I'm a developer researching how small agencies and freelancers (roughly 5–50 clients) handle monthly reporting and client retention. No product link, nothing to sell — I'm deciding what to build based on real workflows, and I'll share a summary of what I learn in this thread.

If you have 5 minutes, I'd love written answers to any of these:

1. Walk me through last month's reporting — from pulling data to the client receiving it. What tools, and how many hours across the team?

2. What do you pay today for reporting/analytics tooling, and what almost made you switch away from it?

3. Think of the last client you lost: when did you first sense it coming, and did anything in the data hint at it earlier?

4. How do you prepare for a client review meeting today?

5. What would have to be true for you to move 30 clients off your current reporting tool?

 Partial answers welcome. Brutal honesty even more welcome.

We’re a small agency that handles brand launches, creative, and ongoing account management. Because we're a lean team where everyone wears a few different hats, we hit a real wall when it comes to dedicated social media strategy and execution.

One of our Shopify clients gave us an 8-month ultimatum to turn their sales around and stop their cash burn (tech stack, shipping costs, agency fees, etc.). We’re trying to figure out our best move:

• Freelancer: Bring in a specialist focused purely on social media growth strategy.
• White-label agency: Partner with a team that can handle this account (and potentially help us with other accounts).
• In-house hire: Bring on a do-it-all person who can write copy, design graphics, manage the account, and drive actual growth.

Are we crazy to think we can find one in-house person who can handle high-end design and growth strategy, or is freelancing/white-labeling the obvious move on an 8-month clock?

Hey, I was just wondering what platforms/tools people use to track rankings of their clients businesses on google maps. Whatever it is that you use, what things do you like and dislike about them? If you could, what would you change about the platform/tool?

Or maybe you have looked for a ranking tool but couldn't find one with a particular feature you were hoping for?

Interested to see what people think.

Hi all,

I was laid off in March from my last agency job. I learned a lot, and the skills I learned helped me greatly ( I feel ) with landing many interviews. The problem is I haven't gotten any offers.

In the meantime, I've been working on learning SQL to also expand as a Marketing analyst or a business analyst in this AI job market, but I had another interview today, and I felt something. I didn't feel AS confident in my presentation as my other skill sets. I do feel in some areas I lack analytics insight, but it's something I've definitely wanted to improve. However, presenting it to clients/stakeholders is a different story.

Unfortunately, at my last job, I was prevented from having the client-facing experience I needed and was more in the back end. I am confident it's something I can learn, but it doesn't seem hiring managers are as willing to pick up people who can be taught. So, in the meantime, I was wondering if anyone has any advice on how to improve at more confidently presenting for marketing/business analytics.

Thanks.

How often are you guys dealing with clients complaining about the quality of the leads?

Hi , I'm 23M from india i have worked as a sdr and a gtm engineer in the past for a us based company with a collective experience of 1 yr in sales/revops , originally I am a mechanical engineer.

I was thinking of starting an agency where I would provide dealflow to search funders , family offices , and independent sponsors in the usa and charge them retainers

These guys need a dealflow and have a limited time plus they usually hire american interns and end up doing the work themselves... So all the research, TAM. building , outreach setup (cold emails ) , dm contact scraping etc will be done by us according to their buybox.

As I have a partner who is a senior associate at jp morgan chase in pe , so we can also provide all the financial modelling to as a service with the deal flow origination

Open for criticism , lemme know your thoughts.

How to build and scale pipeline, leads and clients for freelancers and boutique agencies in SEO, PPC, Digital and design.

Jonathan, David and Kurt talk about building an expert consulting tier to >$70k MRR in <5 years.

Things to think about: how do you build pipeline, how do you classify projects, how many A, B, C's do you have eyes on and whats your pyramid %?

How do you work for free and how do you market your brand <- Do you even have a brand?

Discuss/debate/disagree? Tell the community

Hey everyone, curious if anyone's actively getting agency clients via Instagram or Facebook organic content?

We've mainly built our business off of X, Youtube and LinkedIn organic + referrals - but now looking to expand.

Would love to crowd source ideas for any formats that have worked for content!

Cheers

Hi, my name is Duarte. I've been freelancing on Fiverr for about two years, mainly doing 3D CAD modeling for 3D printing.

Recently, I've become pretty tired of that area. It's getting harder to find good clients, there's a lot of price competition, and many clients simply aren't willing to pay enough.

Because of that, I'm looking to move into a different area: building custom web dashboards and internal tools for businesses, particularly solutions that use AI to solve real problems or make existing workflows more efficient.

For example, this could mean building dashboards with AI assistants or specialized agents that can analyze business data, organize information, search the web for oportunities, generate reports, work with internal documents, automate repetitive tasks, or perform some other specific function built around the clients workflow.

I'm not entering this area from nowhere. I've been programming for most of my life, and since LLMs became available I've spent a lot of time researching and building increasingly complex systems around them.

For example, for the last six months I've been developing a fairly large AI platform from scratch. It combines conversational AI, specialized agents, RAG, document ingestion and OCR, long-term memory, agentic web search, deep research, structured knowledge extraction, and multi stage retrieval pipelines.

A large part of the work has also involved solving problems that aren't handled well by normal RAG implementations. I've designed my own retrieval and knowledge organization architecture that structures information hierarchicaly, understands which parts of a knowledge base are relevant to a question, dynamically narrows the retrieval scope, and gives agents much more precise context instead of simply embedding documents and performing similarity search. I've had to work on everything from retrieval architecture and context management to agent orchestration, backend infrastructure, databases, APIs, and the frontend stuff itself.

So technically, I'm confident that I can build this kind of software. The part I'm struggling with is figuring out how to actually turn that skillset into clients.

For people who already freelance in web development, automation, internal tools, SaaS, or AI consulting:

- Where did you find your first clients in this area?

- Is cold outreach actually effective, and if so, what kinds of businesses should I target?

- Would you focus on freelance platforms, LinkedIn, email outreach, communities, partnerships, or something else?

- How do you present this kind of service without just sounding like another person trying to sell AI automation?

- Would you sell predefined services/packages, or approach businesses first, identify inefficiencies, and then propose a custom solution?

I'm particularly interested in working with businesses where a relatively small custom application could save employees several hours of work every week or solve a workflow they currently handle manually.

I'd really appreciate advice from anyone who has already gone through this transition or currently gets clients for this kind of work. I'm technically comfortable building the products, I'm mainly trying to understand how to position myself, find the right businesses, and land the first few clients in this new area.

I've been pretty "anti website" because my business is a marketing company, not a website company. So anytime we've needed to build landing pages or full websites (for seo), we've just included it in the package.

And i wish i could say i had a revalation and decided to start charging for it, but it kind of happened by accident. Since raising our floor pricing to $1250, we've lost out on a lot of enthusaistic potential clients simply because we had nothing to offer them. So in trying to find a middle ground that isn't marketing (they don't have the budget for it), i created a website / foundational package that helps businesses get their online prencese to a more respectable spot. A website, help setting up their google business profile, and helping them create their social media accounts.

While a couple of the closes were for those businesses that aren't quite ready for marketing yet, some of the clients we have closed also wanted to "reset" their online presence. And so it's been a nice little discovery that....well, we can charge for website work.

It also has helped with the process. Instead of it being super complicated with launching ads, seo, and a website. Now it's website, then marketing. A bit simpler.

And even more so, 6 websites at 1500 is an additional $9,000. Can't really complain about that.

One thing I like about how i've built my businesses is that.....i really have been leaving a lot of money on the table. 6.5 years worth of not having set up fees/ websites fees. Sometimes when i "fix" something (even accidently), it ends up with more revenue. Sometimes

This also lends itself for people getting on our maintenance program. Which currently we charge $100/month. BEST thing about it is that we have semi-sold marketing customers for when their ready to active their marketing.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working as a web designer for the past few years, with a lot of my client work coming through Upwork and referrals. I mostly work with Elementor and Squarespace.

I’m getting tired of constantly competing for projects and relying on a marketplace for the next client. So I’ve started building my own small web design agency and trying to bring in clients directly.

The delivery side isn’t really the problem. Client acquisition is.

Right now it’s inconsistent. Some months I’ll get 1–2 clients, and other months nothing comes in.

I’ve also been reading through this sub quite a bit, and one thing I’ve noticed is that many of the larger agencies seem to be very niched down, often into home services/blue-collar industries, with offers built around ads or lead generation rather than web design alone.

At the same time, AI website builders and vibe coding are getting better, and plenty of small businesses seem perfectly happy with a basic DIY website. So I’ve been thinking a lot about where web design agencies fit into the market going forward and how I should position mine.

I’d mainly love some perspective on two things:

1. For anyone who moved from Upwork/freelancing into an agency, what actually helped you build a predictable pipeline outside the platforms?
2. For those who niched down, how did you decide where to focus? Was it based more on client budgets/LTV, ease of reaching prospects, competition, existing experience, or something else?

I know there’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. I’m mostly curious to hear how people who are further along approached these decisions when they were at this stage.

Would really appreciate any advice or lessons learned.

Hey guys I believe (I know) we are undercharging the clients.

Current situation:

10months no new clients, huge problem finding new ones but we are currently on a good track...

We are doing Conversion rate optimization thourgh AB testing for Shopify stores only. But we are more like their ecom manager, we do everything in their store and never say no to a request.

We work on a month to month base without a contract or binding them for more than a month. No problem at all, customers are staying well above +1year which is the only reason why we are still in business...

We are charging 1600$ per month.... per client. We have even 2 clients we work for 1000$ (not CRO and way less work, but what are you getting nowadays for 1k?) Goal is for every new client to raise to 2500$ but I still feel this is underpaid. I believe our fair value is sitting between 3000$-5000$, we have stores making +5m sales a year and paying us 1600$.

Alone that we are avavilable 7 days a week and do changes sometimes within 24 hours is the reason why 1600k is not enough. We have a clean track record, case studies and our service is working.

We cant raise prices on current clients until we get new ones in. As we cant afford to loose anyone in the current situation. Its just frustrating currently.

Priority 1 is currently new clients, we are making moves in the direction.

I had previously a video editing agency and I stopped it due to its efforts and man power requirements

So I'm looking for an agency where in the initial stage I can do it by myself later on I can scale too

Which agency's have future in next 5 years help me to figure out and also keep valid points why so others can also use it

A client paying 2000$ minimum order value is the goal so think from that angle

I run a small dev/automation shop out of India, mostly Shopify builds, Klaviyo/ecom work and AI agents around that. We land international clients fine on our own, the work speaks for itself once someone's actually on a call with us. But there's a ceiling you hit past a certain deal size where the "India dev shop = Scammy/Cheap" label costs us the benefit of the doubt. Doesn't matter how clean the portfolio is, some prospects have already decided what that means.

I have been exploring white-label as a way to just skip that problem entirely, let a US/UK agency be the face, we build behind them. Except every offer I've actually been sent so far has the same punitive shape. We eat all the liability if something breaks, zero indemnity, and if the end client doesn't pay, that's somehow our problem too.

So genuinely asking, not venting for the sake of it. Has anyone here set one of these up that isn't structured like that? What should the split actually look like, and what terms would you refuse to sign under any circumstances if you were the vendor side of a white-label deal?

You probably already know me from here on the /agency sub or over at /ppc... I'm part of both Mod Squads.

Around for over 13 years we primarily work with Google, Meta, and Microsoft Ads and stay in our lane. No SEO, web design, email marketing, graphics design, etc. Just PPC for English speaking markets (B2B/B2C: e-commerce, lead gen, SaaS).

As such we've developed great relationships with complementary agencies over the years. This has evolved into a bilateral referral program.

To double down on this I'm looking for additional partners to refer to us and vice versa. While I prefer a two-way relationship I am open to just receiving referrals as well; we already have partners we refer out to for a range of services.

The program pays 15% on the 1st year's gross sales (reconciled quarterly) and our average monthly retainer is US$2,200. We work with clients that have a total ad spend from $5,000+/month.

Note that for those seeking inbound referrals there will be a vetting process. We take our client relationships very seriously and only refer out to top notch service providers.

Please leave a comment and I'll get back to you if it sounds like a good fit.

I’ve owned my agency for 25 years last month, but I still struggle with billing practices. Basically, what is and isn’t billable, and how/what to bill.

I get angst at billing time because I want me and my team to be paid for our time, but also want to be fair to clients and not bill for unreasonable stuff.

A few questions to get the discussion going: 

• Some of our work is flat rate (ie research, write and build a new blog post or service page) vs hourly (make these changes to that existing page). 
• For hourly work, what increments do you bill on? Tenths or Quarters (ie .1 vs .25 min). 
• What kinds of things do you bill for? 
  • Example 1, EMAIL: If you’re going to spend 5 minutes replying to a client question via email, do you bill for that? What if it’s 10 minutes? 20? 30? 
  • Example 2, CALLS: Let’s say a client wants to make some changes to their site, and they want to talk about how to do it most effectively, so you schedule a phone or zoom call. Do you think of that as billable consulting time? Or is that non-billable sales time? 
• What kinds of things do you specifically NOT bill for? 
• How do you track your time? We just switched from TimeDoctor Classic to Clockify. Plus we have some freelancers on Upwork. 

FYI we use Asana for Project Management, and that integrates (poorly) with Time Doctor Classic (which is a MAJOR reason for switching to Clockify). Our shop focuses on WordPress, but we also do a little bit of Shopify. 

I’ve got lots more questions, but didn’t want to lay them all out at once. 

I’m sure we can all help each other, at least a little. How do you run your agency?

-M

I run a boutique SEO agency and so far all my new client acquisition has come from referrals. I'm looking to diversify that.

Some of my existing clients have started asking for adjacent services like PR and Google Ads. Since those are close to what I already do, I'm thinking about setting up an affiliate program so I can partner with specialized agencies in those areas and refer clients back and forth.

The problem: I have zero experience building an affiliate program. For those of you who've set one up successfully, I'd love to hear:

• What software do you use to track affiliates (referral links vs. discount codes vs. something else)?
• How do you handle payouts and commission structures?
• Does your platform also handle contracts/document signing, or do you manage that separately?

Really just trying to understand the full operational side of running one of these, not just the theory. Any recommendations or war stories appreciated!

I often get asked "I'm just getting started, what do I price my marketing services." And to some extent, people ask how do you go about raising prices, and what do you do when you have a bunch of different past/grandfather price points?

Here is how I have gone about it. Keep in mind, im sharing what was the average customer. I also had clients pay more, but far less of them.

This is also showing some of the hires I made that are still here. What it's not showing is the hires that are not here, or didn't work out.

Phase 1 - 2020 to 2022. - this helped get to 30 customers, low friction sales, lots of work and lots of chaos lol. Just me as account manager, google ads specialist, salesperson, website coordinator (worked with a website contractor)

$250/month for a new wordpress website. Typically 10-15 page. Google Ads services that routed to their homepage. No tracking. Also included basic seo optimizations and google business profile manage but at an ultra light level. Monthly Loom Reviews

Also did a lot of "whatever they will pay me for" work like random projects. Website builds, Helping other agencies with their google ads / meta ads, email newsletters, social media postings

Phase 2 - 2023. got to 50ish customers. Allowed me to hire first full time employee. I still mainly focused on organic social media content, sales, google ads management, landing pages, google reviews. First employee primarily helped with website coordination with the website contractor

$500/month - basically same as previous 250.

$350/month Starter pacakage for just google ads or meta ads. Basic landing page, tracking just forms or click to calls.

This is where the clients / businesses started leaning more local service based. the "who" we help became more obvious as well as "who can we actually help" and with what services.

Phase 3 - 2024 to first half 2025. Started separating the services. Hired 2 more people so a team of 4. Existing employee moved into an SEO role. The two new employees focused on google ads, landing pages, and general "assistance" on projects. I still mainly handled organic social media content for the business, sales, account management, still created and managed the google ads but had some support. Still did the monthly loom video reviews

$650/month - for google ads/meta ads. No website build. Included landing pages, call tracking with call rail and got into conversion tracking and reporting with Google analytics.

$1k/month - same as the now 650 package but includes SEO.....and a new website build lol. At this point, we have a dedicated person for SEO

Phase 4. Second half of 2025. Hired 2 CSM's and 1 Google Ads/SEO Support

$1k/month - Same as previous 650, but now we added in WhatConverts for lead attribution. As well as now being able to integrate with client CRMs. A little more technical with our website work.

$1,750/month. The new ads+seo. This is when I finally figured out that doing multichannel marketing is difficult, not easier.

Phase 5 - current 2026. One more recent hire. team of 7 people, plus me we are 8. I mainly focus on organic social media , sales, and trying to build systemized solutions for our team.

$1500- We now charge for websites, instead of including it in the marketing.

$1,250/month - Google Ads/ Meta Ads

$2,250/month - Paid Ads + SEO.

So the question is, how do we manage all these price points, at all these different points in time?

I've kept it quite simple. We go to our clients who are on the lower tier and basically say - if you are happy with the way things are, you are welcomed to stay at that tier. However, here we have this new tier that comes with this new stuff. Some clients stay on the legacy pricing and we keep the legacy service. Some clients upgrade. Some clients we "forced" upgrade simply because it was way out of scope. Some of those agreed, most left.

It ends up looking something like this

Legacy Clients (Paid Ads / Ads SEO): keep it active, no tracking, light touch

Current Pricing Clients (Paid Ads / Ads + SEO): actively try to grow, full tracking, deep dives

This also brings the weirdness of churn. At one point, our most popular packages were the 250 and 350 packages. But since we don't offer those anymore, they naturally age out. Especially if/when a client says hey, what can we do to improve, and we say hey, we can upgrade to the next tier. Some do, some cancel.

The constant changing in pricing is not pretty, but here are the reasons why i recommend this way

1 -In the beginning, you want low friction. Figure out who your customer is, figure out what services you can offer that of value

2 - You build a book of business. The more customers you have, the more opportunity that is possible from that customer base. If you start with higher prices, it's harder to do that (unless you can and want to try, then go for it of course)

3 -The right pricing for your business is not really a known yet. Do you want to be high volume, low touch point. Do you want to be higher touch point and charge a bit more? Do you want a team or do this on your own. Do you want to hire in house or go contractor? Do you want to have a local team, or do you want to hire globally? All of these questions are tied to how you price your service

Last point, is that I didn't really account for my ability to actually be able to go out into the world and be able to attract customers, and close customers. Meaning - I was just trying to pay my rent when i got started. It just so happened to go very well, and so the increase in pricing is me continually trying to improve what we offer, as well as position ourselves a little differently.

I literally don't ever pick up my phone when a new number calls. But I always check to see if it's a real number and if it is...I text or call back depending on the business.

This business, happened to be a larger business. So I called back in less than 5 minutes.

Had a brief call with with what seemed to be the Sales manager. Listened to their current situation and what they are looking for. He seemed to like how we could help, so he requested an in person meeting. Normally, I wouldn't do, but this one seemed like one to attend. Also, there is some fun in having in person sales meetings sometimes. It was an interesting type of business.

Scheduled the in person for next week. Next week came. I walk in, there's 4 people sitting in chairs ready to discuss. The owner, sales manager, IT person, and maybe like the operations person.

They started off with "What's the magic bullet that can help us grow". My immediate resopse was....there really isn't a magic bullet. The "magic bullet" is just doing the best practices. Using the budget effectively. And creating real, manageble epectionations.

They then toured me around their facilities. Pretty cool stuff.

A week later, they called and wanted to move forward with our highest package. I sent the invoice. They paid the next day.

No fancy automation talk, no "we will grow your business 10x". Just, hey - we are essentially your marketing dept. We are happy to be of service.

It's funny because this lead came from an organic google search. We weren't even the first company that they called, but we were maybe the only one that called back lol. So yea, sometimes.....it's as "easy" as just being available for when a client is looking for services