r/agencynewbies

I am an AI engineer, who offers AI as service ( teach AI tools eg claude code, Implementing AI as workflows ie agents, automations etc into your systems or).

Over the last few months I have figured out marketing agencies face these challenges:

1. Skill gaps and lack of AI training/education (most agencies doesn't know beyond chatgpt)
2. Client reporting is repetitive and tiresome
3. Onboarding a new client takes a lot of time, can be automated easily
4. Uncertainty about ROI and business impact of AI
5. Being overwhelmed by too many AI tools, news and so on
6. Fear of getting replaced by AI
   ---

I’d love to know what challenges you’re currently facing that I may be able to help you with?

Just for the context, we run a small web development agency. We do SEO, cold emailing, etc but haven't tried Ads yet.

We have months when we are overwhelmed by the no of positive conversations going on but then suddenly there are weeks/months when we are not able to close any new clients. So its been on and off and its hard to plan our hiring. Sometime we are short of people/team members and sometime we are struggling for new clients.

Just wanted to understand as how you guys are handling it.

Looking for a White-Label Partnership 🤝

Running a performance marketing agency.

If you’re a web dev agency or freelancer based in the USA,uk,sweden,Australia who doesn’t offer marketing services to your clients — let’s talk.

Question for agency owners/people who sell agency services.

When you send a proposal, audit, strategy deck, media plan, or scope of work to a prospect, do you know what happens after?

For example:
- did they open it?
- did they read the pricing page?
- did they spend time on the case studies?
- did they revisit it before a call?
- did they share it internally?

I’m trying to understand if agencies would actually use this kind of engagement data to improve follow-up and close deals.

Would this be useful in your sales process, or is it just extra data that would not change much?

Hi, I am an AI Engineer.

I want to start an AI consultancy firm.

Niche I am looking for is primarily marketing agencies.

Is there a real demand for it? Do marketing agencies really looking for AI consultancy?

Nobody talks about the real numbers behind LinkedIn outreach for small agencies. So here is everything from my first 60 days running it properly with tracking.

The setup:

• 1 LinkedIn account
• 25 connection requests per day, spaced out across the day
• No connection note
• 4-step follow-up sequence after accepting

Week 1 to 2 (warmup, 10 requests per day):

• 98 requests sent
• 61 accepted (62% acceptance)
• 4 replied to first message
• 0 calls booked

Week 3 to 8 (full volume, 25 per day):

• 742 requests sent
• 468 accepted (63% acceptance)
• 71 replied to at least one message (15% reply rate)
• 14 booked discovery calls
• 3 became paying clients

but what this numbers teach me..

The acceptance rate is almost entirely determined by your profile, not your message. A blank or weak headline tanks it immediately. Mine went from 41% to 63% after I rewrote the headline to say exactly who I help and how.

The reply rate is almost entirely determined by the first message. Generic openers got 4% reply rates. Specific openers referencing something real about the person got 22%.

Discovery call to client conversion at 3 out of 14 felt low until I realized I was targeting too broadly. The 3 who converted were all from the same industry. The 11 who did not were scattered across 6 different ones.

The single biggest mistake I made in month one was optimizing message copy when the real problem was targeting. I fixed the wrong variable for 30 days before I noticed.

Total tool and software cost for 60 days: $134. Three clients at my average retainer covered that in the first invoice.

What does your current LinkedIn outreach setup look like and what numbers are you tracking?

Three months of sending connection requests. Maybe 400 total. Got 12 replies. Zero clients.

I was doing everything the YouTube tutorials said. Optimized headline. Personalized messages. Follow-up sequences. Still nothing.

Then I stopped following tutorials and started paying attention to what was actually happening inside the conversations that did get a reply.

Every single reply I got came from a message where I referenced something the person had actually said or posted recently. Not their job title. Not their company name. Something specific.

One example: I messaged a small business owner after seeing a comment they left on a post about struggling to get consistent leads. My opener was literally: "Saw your comment about leads feeling feast or famine. That is the exact thing I help with."

That person booked a call the same day.

The messages that got ignored all opened with some version of "I help businesses like yours achieve growth." Which is technically true and completely meaningless.

Here is the exact structure that started working for me:

• One sentence proving I read something real about them
• One sentence connecting their situation to what I do
• One question they can answer in under 10 words

That is the whole message. Under 60 words. No pitch. No portfolio link. No "would love to hop on a call."

It took me 3 months of failure to figure out something that now takes me 3 minutes per message to execute.

For anyone else stuck at zero clients from LinkedIn, what does your current first message actually open with?

Hi, i'm solo SEO/GEO consultant looking for agency partners. Based in Berlin but flexible on timezones.

Looking to partner up with design/dev or marketing agencies that don't offer ongoing SEO/GEO - happy to handle the search side for your clients.

We’ve had a few inbound leads recently mention AI tools instead of Google search, which honestly surprised me.

Made me curious whether this is becoming an actual channel now or if it’s still too early to matter.

I’ve been seeing more conversations around AI visibility and services like ShowUpWithAI, but I still can’t tell whether this is really different from strong SEO/local SEO or just a new layer on top of it.

How are other agencies looking at this?

Wasn't planning to write about it but a few people have asked so here's what actually happened.

I run outreach for a handful of clients. Things were working fine on HeyReach until I started scaling past a certain number of accounts. 

Not breaking exactly i would say, just getting hard to handle. Replies that were coming in across 8-10 accounts had no way to manage them without logging in everywhere and manually staying on top of every thread. 

I'd have a warm lead reply and by the time I got back to them two days later the conversation was cold.

That was the real problem for me.

I looked at the numbers one month and realized I was probably losing 30 to 40% of interested replies just to slow follow ups. 

The other thing was voice notes. A few people in communities I'm in were getting noticeably better reply rates using them. HeyReach doesn't have this. I wanted to test it properly.

So I switched.

The Clay thing is real and I'll say it upfront. HeyReach has native Clay integration. SalesRobot doesn't (they apparently tried and it didn't work out). If Clay is central to how you build lists this genuinely matters and I won't pretend otherwise. I use Clay but it's not the whole workflow so I could live with it.

3 months in, the inbox management is the thing that actually changed my day. There's an AI  that drafts replies for you to approve. I run it in copilot mode, spend maybe 15-20 minutes a day reviewing and sending. 

The slow follow-up problem has basically disappeared from my life.

Voice notes took a campaign or two to figure out but the reply rates are higher on accounts where I use them.

The ban rate is fine. Zero issues across all accounts. 

Reply rates are roughly where they were on HeyReach, maybe slightly better.

Overall, good tool if you are looking at using AI to manage your LinkedIn replies.

Currently running an agency, with around 200 people on payroll, plus 60 active contractors across 30 countries. We do enterprise B2B work and project-based contractors are usually senior specialists getting paid between $40k and $200k per engagement. What we've tried so far for the contractor side: 1.Rippling for the W2 portion. Works but I pay through the nose for it. 2. Wise for the contractor payouts but have some issues where contractors in Ghana literally cannot receive Wise transfers anymore because of some change last year. 3. Paypal, briefly, but won't even start on it. Actually quite many contractors now ask me to pay in stablecoins. So I started to explore but nervous about the AML side and I don’t really want to touch it but it feels inevitable. Any experiences with it?

Hey Guys i run an agency where we help business to rank higher on AI Chatbots like Chatgpt, Perplexity, Gemini etc. So, I got tired of cold emailing from Apollo and getting maybe 1 reply per 200 emails. The database is not worth it now as it seems to me because everyone is hitting the same people.

So I started doing something different. Now I go to Meta Ads Library, search for businesses in my niche that are actively running ads and reach out to them instead.

This is working very good for me becuase a business running paid ads right now is a business that has a marketing budget at the same time they are actively trying to grow and have someone making decisions

That's a completely different conversation than cold emailing a random contact from a database.

This is my exact process:

1. First i go to Meta ads library (it's public and freee)
2. Then set the country (I personally select Countries like Australia, Euthopia, Sweden these guys have the money at the same time they aren't getting hundreds of Cold emails like the people present in US & Uk are getting )
3. Search your niche keyword (e.g. "online coaching" / "real estate leads" / "Shopify store")
4. Filter to only show ads active in the last 7 days
5. Only select businesses that are running 2+ ads (means they're serious about advertising, not just testing)
6. Go to their website, then find the founder/owner on LinkedIn and message them(only if they have posted atleast once in recent 2 months else they wouldn't even accept ur invitation) otherwise u will have to email them.

Also add a bit of reference to their ad in the message, that is the key part. Nobody does it. It immediately gets their attention so they read ur full message, after this it totally depends on how u represent ur product or what u are offering.

It takes about 20-30 mins per lead manually. But the reply rate is 5-10x better than any other cold email method i have used.

If Anyone else doing this would like to hear ur opinion or if u want to add anything else which works for u better, please share it.

Other than this if u want to know anything else do let me know

I am starting fresh my own social media marketing agency I am thinking of basically targeting the service providing businesses to make their brand existence on social media also help them in generating leads.
Need some advice from experienced people in the business that which sectors should i target and how to contact the decision makers directly because i mostly end up contacting the sales team. Also any other advice for the same would be really helpful.

I have worked plenty of years with some marketing agencies now i have a content writer, performance marketer, both of them will work as freelancers for me and i can handle the branding and designing part.

I’ve been using GHL for around 6 months now for outreach + automations, and honestly… parts of it still feel weirdly unpolished.

The workflows themselves are fine, but the overall client experience feels fragmented:

• calendar invites look disconnected
• email notifications feel generic
• branding isn’t fully consistent
• some emails land in Promotions
• Workspace + GHL don’t feel truly synced

Then I look at bigger agencies and somehow everything feels seamless:

• cleaner deliverability
• properly branded notifications
• better inbox placement
• unified domains/subdomains
• polished backend systems

It almost feels like there’s some “infrastructure layer” nobody talks about publicly.

I’m starting to wonder if the difference is less about GHL itself and more about how the backend is configured:

• Google Workspace setup
• DNS/authentication
• sending domains
• white-label structure
• CRM syncing
• tracking domains
• Outlook/Gmail reputation

For those running larger agency setups:
what actually made things start feeling “premium” instead of DIY?

Would genuinely love to know what changed the game for you.

My agency is pretty new and i signed my first client recently through cold calling. I have 700ish to run ads now. I need help building out my funnel and my creatives. My offers are ai receptionist,ai spam filter, Marketing(still new at it tho, i’ll give guarantees after i deliver for my first client) websites and seo. I’m 16 and i signed my first client for 1300 setup and 500 per month for website and seo. I’m doing his marketing too but it’s going to be another deal I told him once I give him results he can start paying me. My niche is hvac. If anyone has any experience building a good effective funnel that will convert for my budget then drop it. I’m currently watching youtube videos right now on it.

after reading about YC’s spring and summer 26’ request for AI-native agencies & service companies

I decided I’ll shift our current startup from being AI GTM Engineer SaaS (it’s an AI agent for GTM) to an AI-native GTM team/agency that uses this agent itself to sell the outcome to a very narrow ICP in B2B tech

But then

I realised that me, my co founder and the rest of the 4 engineers don’t actually have deep experience in GTM, sure, they’re all superb SWE’s and my co founder is an AI/ML engineer who built many agents but

How will we perfect such an agent that should serve these companies without actually one of us having deep domain expertise

So I thought, since we wanna go down this route of AI-native service companies because the potential is immense

Why don’t we act as an engineering team for existing successful GTM agencies and help turn *those* AI-native instead with the AI-agent we were initially building while we manage it, expand it into deeper workflows, maintain it, etc on a retainer basis

We’d be “AI-nativizers” for them instead, I mean the whole point of having or turning a service company into being AI native is to increase margins to near software like (70-90%) and make it easier to scale without adding headcount or losing on profit

I hope this doesn’t just sound good in my head but, we initially started as a software company many months ago then pivoted to SaaS then now repositioning to this

“Helping existing GTM agencies increase margins by 15-20% and scaling without adding headcount or losing on profit using our vertical AI agents that we imbed into every workflow to turn them AI-native”

Would love your insights on this, founders!

So about 10 months ago I launched my e-com marketing agency.

We specialise in ad creative production and affiliate marketing, combining them into a content flywheel acquisition system targeting brands doing over $2M/year. I came into this off the back of a few years doing fractional marketing work in the industry, so unlike a lot of new agency owners, I wasn't starting from zero. I understood the space and knew the basics on how to operate a business.

I signed my first 4 clients between July 2025 and January 2026 using a combination of mass Instagram outreach followed by a value-based Loom video sent directly to the founder or CMO, who would then book a call.

At the start of this year the results from the system started dropping off, and the tech started hitting failure points (IG accounts getting banned more frequently being the big one), which meant It was no longer realistic to keep it running.

Since then I've been trying to find a new predictable acquisition system I can automate or hand off to a VA like before, but the options in this space feel genuinely limited.

1/ Cold Email

Incredibly competitive. Ecom brands are getting 50 pitches a day, and finding quality, verified email data for qualified brands is insanely hard. Most of my ideal clients are founder-led or run by a small team, so their contact details more often than not aren't in apollo.

2/ Paid Ads

It works, but it's expensive. Average CAC for a qualified ecom client on Meta seems to be around $2k–$4k, and I don't think we have enough social proof or cohesive systems yet to sell to cold traffic profitably.

3/ Content (LinkedIn & YouTube)

This is where I'm putting in a lot of focus right now. Great long-term channels, but realistically it could be 6+ months before there's any meaningful traction.

4/ LinkedIn Outbound

Similar problems to email. My ideal clients aren't particularly active on the platform, and aggressive outbound campaigns can get you banned easily. It's a much better channel as a warm outbound channel, reaching out to people already engaging with your content or profile.

I hate complaining about acquisition channels since there are drawbacks to every one and you have to find what works but it really does feel like this arket is definately harder than other to crack.

Just curious to hear what others have done in this niche they've been able to see success with?

One thing that keeps breaking agencies is voice notes.

Not because voice notes are bad.

Because they turn important client context into messy, temporary memory.

A client sends direction in fragments.

Someone interprets it one way.

Someone else misses one detail.

Then the team executes against a half-remembered version of the brief.

What looks like a delivery mistake is often just context loss during handoff.

That is the part I think people underestimate.

Agencies do not only manage projects.

They manage fragile routing layers between clients, PMs, creatives, and execution.

Once instructions start living inside scattered audio messages, the whole system gets harder to trust.

What is the most painful piece of client context you have seen get lost in a voice note or messy handoff?

I used to think the best way to get clients for a web agency was paid ads or referrals.

But honestly the thing that worked best for me was targeting businesses with outdated websites.
Like you go on their site and instantly see problems. Bad mobile design, slow loading, old branding, weird layouts, no clear Cta.

Some of these businesses are actually good businesses but their website is just killing conversions.

At first I was doing everything manually. I would check websites one by one, write personalized feedback, then send outreach emails myself.
It worked pretty well but it took forever.

So I started automating the whole thing with Swokei.
Now it analyzes websites automatically, finds flaws, turns them into personalized outreach, and runs the email automation too.

The cool part is the emails don’t feel spammy because every business gets actual feedback about their website instead of some copy pasted “hey need a redesign?” message.

Since doing this I’ve been getting clients consistently every week and sometimes daily.
Way better results than paid ads honestly. Even referrals.

I think it works because business owners already know their website is outdated deep down. When you point out the exact problems and how it affects them, the conversation becomes way easier.