Agencies

“A lot of people want to move to us and they're paying agencies eight, 10, sometimes even 15,000 dollars for the process. For what is essentially a workflow problem? A product that sits In the middle, guided process, templates, maybe a lawyer review at the end …”

“I was talking to someone from Iceland yesterday, and he was telling me they're getting so much business because they're 60 to 70% cheaper and more effective than traditional agencies, and they're all Vibe coding on Replit.”

“There's an opportunity to use something like this and basically do client work, but the service is, instead of having literal humans do it, you have, I mean, you're going to have some humans manage it, but a lot less humans, maybe a 20th of the amount of human…”

“HubSpot famously this Tested selling through agencies instead of direct. They ended up being 50% of the revenue after four or five years.”

“We looked at our user base and about 50% were small businesses, but the other 50% were these web designers, digital marketers, agencies building websites on behalf of small businesses. And they, like, the data showed us that they were growing faster for us tha…”

“The agencies don't know how to do this. You've got to do it yourself.”

“Agencies often just start hammering boards together when they're building their company. And so what we did that worked really well for us is we would like literally map out our version one, you know, the kind of scrappy startup sort of thing. And then we map …”

“If this keeps mainstreaming like I think it is, I also think that some of these teams are going to buy direct from the platforms and not just ask an agency to run it for them.”

“I suspect that these agencies that we're working with are going to grow and they're going to start adding more services, much easier services, deliver paid ads, these other things.”

“The big problem that a lot of agencies have is at the end of the year, they're making five percent EBITDA, three percent EBITDA, seven percent EBITDA. Like, they're very hard businesses to run because, you know, people aren't utilized.”

“If someone's average utilization rate, let's say, is above 70%, like, make it red. Like, that's scary. The potential burnout mode... I've owned agencies long enough to know that you, that's not the way to build a sustainable Business.”

“AI is going to have a massive impact on the margins of agency businesses long term. As this technology, being AI, lowers the cost of intelligence, agentic workflows that support smaller agency teams will start giving these businesses the type of leverage that …”

“I believe agencies are going to be ground zero for new AI tools and workflows to be built, and if agency owners are ambitious, long-term minded, and commercial enough, they can use the cash flows of their businesses to incubate non-agency products.”

“Agencies are a really good business right now because it's super manual, like it's humans doing things. It's in a particular niche, like a good agency is focused on SaaS, FinTech. They're the best at, you know, just this one niche.”

“The problem is that the market for people who offer paid ad services are either agencies, which are too expensive and like too big and just confusing, or douchey guys who are like 25 wearing a gold Rolex and look kind of intimidating.”

“Most agencies don't make that pivot because they are so addicted to the amazing money, to the 152 150 dollars an hour that they can bill, versus how do I justify building this thing that's doing a few hundred dollars a month and may never make more than a few …”

“Agencies for BDRs and SDRs never work with a few exceptions. The reason they never work is because with. 20 clients, you never learn the product.”

“I think one, because it's basically paid R&D to figure out what you want to build outside of just the agency, and they're great for cash flowing and you don't need money up front, but to Andrew's point, they are extremely difficult. Any client service business…”

“I think we're going to see more agencies doing programmatic SEO too. Cause like, you know, you had this one to two year window where you can do it, and I think search just changes.”

“And I think kind of in a meta way, there are agencies that can absolutely help agencies run their operations better, and they'll do so with a mix of automations, offshoring, and AI, which I think will be a game changer for agency businesses in the future, and …”

“Since, you know, there is no opportunity for us to go direct to customers, ah, you know, this middle men, which are like agencies, ah, hold us hostage, both in terms of entry, revenue, and renewal and expansion. This business is a bad business, right?”

“Our little trick we learned around this from the folks at Red Ventures was to get long wind down provisions in the agreements. And it's funny cause I'll tell this to agency owners and you'll see their head just explode when we talk about it. And I'm, you know,…”

“Now I would say, actually, nowadays it's probably easiest to buy in tech Ironically, engineering, because there's so many fantastic agencies that do it. As long as you've got a very good, strong product desire, you can basically hire people to do that for you.”

“That's a little bit outside of the indie maker stuff, like the wall of love from Twitter and G two and product. And now we're kind of going way beyond that and focusing on e-commerce and big agency stuff.”

“Switching over to agencies and agencies manage lots of mailboxes. So they're much higher value customers. They're harder to land and they have more indefinites and more technical requirements, but they're also far more profitable and it's a lot easier to do su…”

“It was kind of intentional to start focusing on those agencies more because I could see that that was where my support costs would be lower because they're going to have essentially a standardized process internally for managing their own customers and then be…”

“I think agencies will be a lot more decentralized and I think the employees will have a lot more equitable control over how it's run and where the profit goes.”

“The most fundamental things is about figuring out your growth model, the initial channels that cannot be outsourced, and you need to figure that out on your own.”

“Agencies are a little bit like a law firm or an accounting firm or our consulting firm where you've got this kind of flat linear growth that happens over time.”

“We have a fairly small amount of customers, but we're serving 40,000 paid companies, and that's purely from the multiplication effects of going through agencies and franchise companies. So our software is currently installed on 40,000 company websites.”

“The moment we integrate into the any agencies, you know, environment, Alpha is going to be the only software that they're going to use.”

“In terms of agencies, it's really about not outsourcing your strategy, right, and the ideation. What they should be doing, let's just take messaging, for example, or product marketing, or even PR, right? They have the relationships. They can help up level your…”

“So we sell to agencies, to consulting firms, to law firms, accounting firms, these companies that are selling hours, they need to understand their profitability on a, in real time.”

“The most successful SaaS companies start as agencies.”

“SaaS apps by nature are more profitable than agencies”

“Very successful SaaS companies come out of agencies, because you already know the problem, and you already have a built-in customer base.”

“Agencies are a really shitty business model. It's the easiest business to get into and the hardest business to get out of because once you're in it, And once you have that much infrastructure, we had ten million dollars a month worth of payroll. Think of what …”

“Agencies are usually terrible businesses. They don't really make very much money.”

“No agencies will typically pay up front for an annual plan. Like, I know that our competitors are selling annual plans, but if you go look at any agency website, how many of them actually have marketing automation on their site? Very few. Because they just can…”

“So now our so now our customer base is now 60% agencies versus 40% small businesses and, Three years ago, it would have been 80% small businesses.”

“This is why I love having agencies do media training too, because agencies can really tell a CEO, actually, you look like a complete dweeb, or this message completely did not resonate, where the employee sometimes has a harder time landing that message.”

“There's between 40,050 thousand agencies operating locally in the United States.”

“But software companies typically have gross margins of 85%. Agencies rarely have margins greater than 50%.”

“A lot of the most successful SAS companies come out of agencies.”

“We've got about 1400 agencies around the world and about 6500 businesses on the platform.”

“I think at the end of the day, the ability to creatively approach problems that the agencies have, I think will always be an advantage to in-house teams, and at least that's what we've seen so far.”

“You know, agencies typically in an ideal world are keeping four months. I think anything more than four months is amazing. To be honest with you we're typically keeping three to four months.”