How My Productized Service Agency Got Me a Job

This is the final installment of a 7 part series about starting my own productized service business. In the previous parts, I discussed formalizing my business idea, building the MVP, branding and design, and creating a sales process. In this part, I’ll let you know what happened!

Update 

It’s been a little over a month since my last blog. So much has happened in that time that it’s hard to summarize into a single “update” section. Put briefly, very shortly after launching my LinkedIn campaign, I connected with another agency that was doing similar work to me and “merged” Culture Industry into their agency. 

I’ve had quite a few thoughts about what this means for me, and I think this presents an under-discussed but valuable description of why starting an agency is a very good idea right now.

What Happened?

Here is a brief rundown of what happened: One of the posts I mentioned in the last piece got a bit more traction than the others. It was an overview of a bunch of companies that I thought were interesting in the AI/automation space. 

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I tagged a lot of those companies which is probably why it got a bit more exposure than the others. One of the tagged companies, Clay.com, liked the post. This suggested to me that the company might still be small enough to be open to some kind of agency partnership. 

Working on this hunch, I found a public Slack run by Clay itself. Initially, I wanted to talk to someone from their team, but I noticed a channel for job opportunities involving the software. From there, I found a company that was hiring for a position that was almost exactly what I was hoping to do at Culture Industry.

I sent their team a Loom video explaining Culture Industry and by the end of the day (maybe 5 hours later), I’d been hired. 

Considerations 

This is the first time I’ve had a salaried job in nearly 2 years so naturally the decision to switch back didn’t come lightly. I think there were 2 main points thought about: 

1. Particularly with software-based agencies, the biggest differentiator is usually money: know-how has more or less been democratized through YouTube tutorials, so the biggest hurdle is often the ability to afford the software itself.
2. The flywheel effect is real: because agencies themselves are often indistinguishable, the most effective way to get new clients is to have an existing network or reputation. 

The timing of Culture Industry impacted how I thought about this. I’d stopped traveling in April and came back to my childhood home to get my life in order. My freelance writing work had dried up (ChatGPT has been a bloodbath for the industry) and I didn’t have a lot of “runway” (read: money) left to spend building something amazing. 

I think Clay itself was a good wake-up call for me. It’s an absolutely unbelievable sales tool, but the cheapest version of it is $150 a month (with only 2,000 credits). Every sales tool is like that. Trying to scale a business with that much overhead, without any proof of my abilities, and with zero pipeline felt unnecessarily risky and consuming of time I didn’t have. 

Therefore, when this opportunity presented itself, it felt like the perfect way to get good at something with a group of people who’d already figured out a working model. And to be cash flow positive while doing it – how could I say no? 

Learnings 

My biggest takeaway from this is something that I think is wildly under-discussed in the world of agencies – and I think it’s the absolute best justification for building an agency right now: solo agencies rarely stay that way. 

The Agency

This fact was instantly clear to me once I started working my current job. The founders had themselves started other agencies before merging and forming the one I currently work at. Before that, they’d worked at other ones. This appears to be the standard experience.

It makes sense that the agency model would be especially prone to mergers and partnerships. Agencies themselves are extremely flat. Clients are effortlessly transferable. Everyone uses the same tools. Strategies spread like wildfire. The meaty parts of agencies are often personal connections and an understanding of the landscape.

This is the most compelling reason why you should use a template (productized service especially) and quickly build an agency around your particular skills. By embedding your skills in an agency, you get access to an under-saturated job market where an ever-increasing number of high-growth, high-margin “competitors” are constantly looking for people to scale with. 

I recommend looking into the groups and communities (Slack channels, Discords) associated with your favorite SaaS tools. These companies rely on agencies to onboard clients – and agencies use them to position themselves in those networks. Even if you stay solo, it’s the best way to become a part of the conversation. 

Why Now?

Right now is perhaps the best time ever for this. The AI revolution has unleashed an uncountable number of new and confusing tools into the business world. The effort required to onboard employees to those tools is often more costly than just paying exorbitant amounts of money to have an agency do it for you. 

This reality applies to almost every business built before the AI takeover – and so the potential market is massive.

Conclusion

I can genuinely say that I didn’t anticipate this conclusion when I started building Culture Industry. For much of my recent life, I’ve been convinced that the only kind of job I’d ever want was one where I had absolute freedom to do what I wanted when I wanted to do it. 

However, the fully remote AI-powered agency is a new kind of business – and I do think people need to start building a vocabulary for what it looks like. I’m a contractor (which also feels pretty standard for the industry) and the work is so client-based and variable that my working style hasn’t changed much. Agencies operate in a comfortable middle ground for me. 

We’ll see what I end up doing with the cultureindustry.ai handle (maybe a writing project of some kind). In any case, thank you for following along and I hope this series gave you some ideas for why you should start your own agency!