Follower of Christ. Run 5 companies. Builder-operator sharing how systems create leverage. Always looking to connect w/ agency owners and local operators.
Columbia, SC
Joined November 2011
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"Book a call to see pricing."
Translation: we're going to guess what you'll pay.
I own an agency. Here's what we charge:
[UnderdogOS: $1995 a month]
[Add in Ads management: $2995 a month]
[Unlimited Marketing: $4995 a month]
Took me 10 seconds to type.
If a vendor won't give you at least a range before the first call, ask again.
If they still won't, you got your answer.
Copy this.
I started writing job ads like sales letters.
Applicants keep replying "you described me perfectly."
The exact structure:
1/ Open with their world. "You're the one who catches the typo nobody else sees."
2/ Name what's broken at their current job.
3/ Show a normal Tuesday here.
4/ Pay range up front. (Yes, really.)
5/ One specific instruction to apply. Miss it, you're out.
Number 5 filters out everyone who didn't read.
Steal it.
I love that everyone mentions using bots to manage brand mentions as a primary use case.
Like, 99.9% of businesses don't need this.
Have a customer complaining and preparing to leave because he gets too many leads. Can't make this stuff up.
"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."
- Warren Bennis
Been thinking about this a lot lately as I act as the middleman between two bots for hours a day.
A guy got told "book a call to see pricing."
So he vibe-coded the software himself.
That's the new competition for agencies.
Not another agency. The client, AI, and a free weekend.
Post a price range (even a rough one).
Hiding it just pisses people off.
I just vibe-coded a B2B SaaS instead of buying it, because the salesperson insisted on a meeting before sending me the price.
Have seen @levelsio write about this and now I experienced it myself.
A salesperson reached out to me on LinkedIn about a platform that uses Apple + Google Wallet to boost webinar show-up rates.
Super smart. We have 20,000 webinar attendees a year at Obsidian, so I wanted to buy it.
I asked for the price. The answer: the fastest way to get one was to book a meeting.
I replied "I don't do calls" and asked them to just send the price so I could buy.
They totally understood, but I still needed a meeting.
So I asked AI to build it into Obsidian's own marketing system (also made by AI and replaced our 4k EUR monthly monday dot com subscription).
About an hour later, I had a working prototype in Google Wallet.
Apple Wallet is ready too, just waiting on 1–3 days of verification.
Price of their software: no idea, but I would have bought it for $100 monthly immediately if I could.
Price of ours: 1 hour with AI while watching Toy Story 5 with the kids, plus $99 a year for an Apple Developer account. Google was free.
Always envied people who sell b2b saas, but not right now.
Mark Cuban this week: healthcare costs will get more people fired, or not hired, than AI.
The "not hired" part is the one I see.
Owners I talk to aren't scared of robots.
> They're scared of the renewal email.
Double-digit premium jump. Same headcount. Suddenly "we'll hire in Q1" turns into "we'll see."
AI is a spreadsheet debate.
Benefits are a cash-flow decision.
If your plan is to wait for insurance to get cheaper… that's not a plan.
Trying to figure out how to get more leads?
Here are the 3 things we make sure all our clients have running:
- Cold outreach (social DM's + email)
- Founder-led content
- Asset-driven SEO (resource first)
When we get these three things setup, the client almost always wins.
Not gonna lie…
Last week we put offers in front of multiple copywriters.
And hired one.
People look at me like that’s backwards.
“Isn’t AI supposed to mean fewer writers?”
Maybe.
Or maybe the shops that can still hire people who write like humans are about to look very different in the feed.
I've started writing my job ads like sales letters and the response from applicants has been amazing.
A lot of them say, "Wow, you described me perfectly."
I did the same thing we would do for our marketing.
We clearly identify our persona and write directly to them.
Does exactly what you'd expect. Cuts straight through the noise.
Growing by word of mouth is awesome, but incredibly hard to forecast.
You can systematize referrals.
I did it by aligning the incentive for referring with the referrer. What's important to them?
Would you hire a personal trainer who's out of shape?
Same logic applies to marketing agencies with no marketing.
"Shoemaker's kids have no shoes" is a nice excuse. It's also why you're losing deals to agencies who just say: "you found me. I'm going to help people find you the same. That's the pitch."
Most companies don’t have a people problem.
They have a clarity problem.
There is no definition of "done".
So then we (the owner) become the system.
Systems create leverage because they let average days still produce good work.
"If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you."
— General James Mattis
You're right to call that out, and I want to be straight with you about what happened rather than guess.
Ahhh. @claudeai, what is going on lately? Why does every conversation have to be like we are starting from scratch?