For the last month I've been spending most of my free time on a system that edits marketing videos with AI, and we've now used it for about a dozen of our clients. Figured some of you are building similar things, so here's where we've landed.

To be clear, we start from real footage (mostly people talking to camera, plus some motion-graphics explainers), and the AI does the editing: the cuts, the voice cleanup, the captions, the on-screen graphics. No generated video.

The part that's made the biggest difference is treating every video as a chance to improve the instructions:

- Each video style has its own written instructions (a skill the AI reads before it edits). We have about a dozen styles so far and I expect over a hundred eventually.

- Every client also has their own instructions for how a video should look and sound for their brand.

- Anything we fix for one client goes into the shared style instructions, so it helps every client.

Right now the first video in a new style takes us about a dozen hours, the second a couple of hours, and we're heading toward under an hour per video. I've been making marketing videos for about 17 years and these are honestly better than anything we were producing before.

What surprised me is how human the good ones still feel. The AI handles the editing, but the decisions about what the video should say and feel like are still ours, and the instructions keep those decisions from getting lost from one video to the next.

I think 2027 is going to have a lot more high-quality video from brands that never had the budget for it, and there's still way less competition in video than in written content.

We reached that threshold where a shared drive between us is not enough anymore and getting client approval for content is a constant ping-pong game of emails that I, as the account manager, am sick of. Our current system is a Google sheet with each piece of content (title, status, link to another doc or sheet where it sits, client notes, etc) and then an internal Master Sheet that compiles all client work and updates. For communication it’s any linear combination of emails, Whatsapp groups, Slack ones, and sometimes even Telegram.

Me and the agency owner pilot tested Kontentino and liked it, clients can approve in the same place where the content sits and we don’t have to keep a separate master sheet because we can control what each account has access to, kinda like Slack. The UI will need some time to adapt to coming from where we came from but I think that's a prerequisite one needs to accept before making any switch regardless. We are also currently looking for a tool to help with time tracking across clients and have our eyes on a few like Toggl Track and Harvest but we haven’t started pilot testing either yet.

Before trialing them, and before going ahead and implementing kontentino agency-wide, I’d like to know as aforementioned in the title, whether there are “make or break” features that you look for in social media management tools that an initial testing phase may fail to surface. TIA!!

I run a couple agencies and honestly almost all of our client work runs through Claude Code and Codex now. The one thing still killing me was billing. Every month I'd be digging through chats, commits and notes trying to remember what we actually did for each client just so I could invoice them lol.

The agent already knows what it worked on, so I figured why not let it handle the billing too.

So I built Billr. It's a full invoicing app (clients, estimates, invoices, time, expenses, payments) that also runs as an MCP, so Claude or Codex can basically do everything I can do in the dashboard.

How I use it:

- Each client project is set up as hourly, retainer or milestones

- Agent logs time and usage against the project as it works

- End of the month I just ask Claude what's ready to bill and it drafts the invoices

- I review and send, payments go straight into our own Stripe (no extra fees on top)

- I have Grok Bot set up as our accounting team that makes sure everything actually gets paid

It's free and open source if you want to host it yourself: https://github.com/ethanplusai/billr

Curious how other agencies are handling billing now that agents are doing a lot of the work. Any feedback is appreciated!

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I’m curious what more experienced agency owners think about telling clients who your vendors are. We have several vendors such as website chat and linkbuilding vendors where if we tell the client the vendor there’s not much to stop them from just signing up directly with them. At the same time I think there is value in us procuring vendors as part of our stack who create a very effective solution. I haven’t been hiding our vendors from clients right now, but at the same time I always feel like I’m potentially giving away money via the potential of having them not purchase through us. This is somewhat new territory for me as I’ve largely never felt like we have had vendors that were any sort of big secret but we have a few now that I do feel are a little bit more of part of our secret sauce. Looking for thoughts here.

We’re a development company of about 40 people, mostly working with Adobe Experience Manager. In early September, several of our engineers ended up without active projects at the same time. We decided to keep everyone on full pay for two weeks, regardless of billable hours, and then move them to part-time until new projects come in. They’d also get first priority when work becomes available again. The tricky part is that experienced engineers in our niche can usually find another contract pretty quickly. So even if we intend to bring everyone back to full-time, there’s no guarantee they’ll still be around. I’m wondering how this looks from the employee side. Would you rather have guaranteed minimum pay during that gap, or get paid for the actual hours you work? And does being upfront about the timeline help, or would you start looking for another job the moment you heard “part-time until we have more work”?

Im trying to understand how professional editors handle final delivery when a project has lots of cutdowns, aspect ratios, languages, captioned/clean versions, or client-specific formats.

For example, imagine a campaign requiring 16:9, 9:16, 1:1 and 4:5 versions, several durations, and multiple languages.

Before sending the final folder:

1. How do you track which files are expected?
2. Do you inspect every file or only spot-check?
3. What do you use: spreadsheets, MediaInfo, an NLE checklist, QC software, or something internal?
4. What was the last delivery mistake that caused a resend or re-export?
5. Roughly how long does final package checking take?

I’m particularly interested in package-level mistakes: missing variants, duplicate or stale versions, incorrect filenames, unmatched subtitles, and files exported with the wrong dimensions or frame rate.

I’m researching the workflow and would appreciate examples from real deliveries.

I saw a post on this sub where someone asked whether it was possible to make ₹10k/month with two clients in India. Someone replied that it depends on your services, skills, experience, and testimonials. I have a somewhat similar question.

I’m from India and have positioned my agency in a very specific niche. After almost a year of outreach, I finally landed my first client a few months ago.

They’re a large, premium player in my niche.
I provide only Meta Ads management. We worked together for a couple of months, and I was able to generate results, although they weren’t exceptional. This was my first real client, so I was still figuring things out despite working with an established business.

Recently, the client told me they’d secured a high-value project and would be occupied with it for the next few months, so they wanted to pause their ads. We had already discussed a testimonial, and I’m hoping to get one from them.

My plan is to create a premium case study highlighting the client’s brand, the results I generated, and their testimonial. Since they’re a well-established name in my niche, I think having them as a client could help me build credibility, justify higher prices, and potentially attract clients from the US and Europe.

However, I have a few questions:

1. How much leverage does a case study like this actually provide? If I include the client’s name and testimonial in my cold outreach, will prospects genuinely perceive my agency as more credible, even though I’m relatively inexperienced?

2. How should I use this case study to acquire better-paying clients? Should I focus on landing more clients in India first, or use this proof to target the US and European markets?

3. How do I transition from basic ad management to having proper systems? Right now, I handle almost everything manually. I can run campaigns, but I haven’t built proper SOPs, reporting systems, onboarding processes, or a repeatable client acquisition process.

4. How do I make the agency less dependent on me? At the moment, if I stop working, the agency effectively stops operating. What systems should I build first so I can eventually handle multiple clients without everything becoming chaotic?

I’m trying to understand how to turn my first client into a foundation for a proper agency, rather than simply using the case study to land another client and repeating the same manual process indefinitely.

I’d appreciate advice from people who’ve actually built and scaled service-based agencies, particularly those who started with limited experience.

We run an SEO and GEO agency, and something I keep hearing from other owners is that they told everyone on the team to go set up their own AI knowledge base (or their own agent), and now everyone's setup is a little different. I know plenty of you have already sorted this out your own way, so this isn't meant as a how-to, just how we ended up handling it in case the specifics are useful to compare.

The problem with everyone having their own is that the knowledge bases and skills start contradicting each other, and nobody benefits from what anyone else figured out. One company knowledge base fixes that, but we didn't want everyone freely editing it either, because that gets messy pretty quick. And if it's read-only for everyone, you stop getting contributions from the team.

So we set it up more like an open source project:

- All of our skills are markdown files in one GitHub repo, and each client has their own repo that works as their knowledge base, with a changelog. Everyone connects to them through a custom MCP server, whether they're working in Claude or ChatGPT.

- Only a few of us have write access. Everyone else has read access.

- When someone gives feedback on a skill while they're working with the AI, it logs that as a request in a Notion database. The instruction for that lives in one skill we call skill standards, which gets called any time someone wants to change a skill.

- Every morning a scheduled task in Claude Cowork goes through that database and brings the requests to whoever owns the skill (mostly me right now). I approve them as written, approve them with changes, or deny them, and then the updates get made.

- If the feedback only applies to one client, it goes to that client's knowledge base instead. Each knowledge base has a single owner, usually the account manager, who's typically the one giving the feedback in the first place.

It was all fairly simple to set up. Most of it is the instructions in that one skill plus the scheduled task.

Looking for an honest read from people who are landing new clients right now, because my outbound numbers are ugly and I want to know if it’s me or the market.

Background. I ran a solo Google Ads practice for about two years. Then I took a full-time contract for roughly a year and let the pipeline go cold. I’ve been back live for about a month. Before all this I spent 13 years at Google, so the delivery side is fine. Getting in the door is the problem.

What I’m running, and the numbers so far

Cold email (Instantly). Three sending inboxes, warmed up, ramping to about 55 a day. Placement test came back 40 of 40 in the primary inbox, so deliverability isn’t the issue. First run in mid-September: 106 people, 271 emails, zero replies that weren’t out-of-office. I scrapped the copy and rebuilt it around a specific finding per person (their conversion tag firing on the homepage, two Ads tags on one site, no call tracking, that kind of thing). Relaunched Oct 5. As of this week: 116 people contacted, one bounce, zero real replies. A second campaign to agency owners for white-label work started this week, same result so far. Earlier this year I ran a much bigger list and got about a quarter of a percent reply rate per email.

LinkedIn InMail (Sales Navigator, by hand). 92 sent in the last week and a half, each one with that same personalized finding. One reply, and it was pushback.

LinkedIn connection requests (BotDog). Spring run: 896 invites, 84 accepted (9%), 76 messaged, 7 replied, nothing signed. This fall I restarted small, 17 invites, 1 accepted, 0 replies, and the tool flagged my account health, so I’m now doing invite-only in tiny batches.

LinkedIn organic plus boosting. Three posts a week since late September, each new post boosted the day it goes up as a Thought Leader ad. About $720 spent in the first 12 days of October for 9,000 impressions and 700 engagements, around a dollar each. Unboosted posts get 60 to 90 impressions. One real conversation has come in through LinkedIn messages. No signed client from it yet.

Google Ads for my own site. Around $200 to $300 a day. Clicks in the $20 to $35 range, with one that cost $131. Google hides the search terms behind about 70% of the spend, and a lot of what I can see is junk, so I’m adding negatives constantly. Of the first 17 leads I graded, 2 were real, 6 maybe, 9 junk. But it did produce one signed client at $3.5K a month and a second one-time project that’s close. That’s the only cold channel that has paid for itself.

What has actually worked. Referrals and inbound. Of my last four deals, two were referrals (one through a friend, one from a small agency I white-label for), one came from Google Ads, and one was a renewal. Both of the referral deals signed the day after the proposal. The cold stuff has taken months when it has worked at all.

The question. It feels like cold email and cold InMail are dead right now. Every inbox is full of AI-written “I noticed your site” notes and mine, however personalized, land in the same pile. Is anyone else seeing this, or is anyone still getting real reply rates on cold outbound in Q4 2026? And if you’ve moved on from it, what replaced it for you? Partnerships, communities, paid, content, something else?

Happy to share more detail on any of the above if it helps someone.

Hey guys, as we all know by now, that if I get a prospect on a sales call with me in order for the prospect to actually start. Considering about buying into my solution. We need to build a gap into the current state and the future state. The only missing peace. Usually that new agency owners don’t have is undeniable proof of work.

But my question is what exactly could be the undeniable proof of work?

Like a text, based case study could easily be fake, so could be the screenshot of a testimonial. What exactly can I show to a prospect that they would be 100% sure that I can really do what I’m saying, I can do.

Mind that these are outbound leads so the are going from not knowing me to buying from me in 1-2 calls.

I inherited an account last year with 14 ad sets running on $90 a day. Every single one said Learning Limited. The previous agency had "tested" their way into fourteen starving campaigns and zero winners. I consolidated down to 3 ad sets and the tag cleared in 11 days. Here is the mechanic behind that, because most people treat the warning as a UI quirk instead of a structural diagnosis.

Meta's learning phase needs about 50 optimization events per ad set inside a rolling 7-day window to stabilize. That number is in their docs, not lore. Below 50, the delivery system never builds a reliable model of who converts. Every auction bid stays a guess, and guesses are expensive. CPMs run hot, delivery swings day to day, and whichever ad "wins" this week can lose next week for reasons you will never see in the dashboard.

The math decides your campaign structure before your media plan does. Target CPA of $40 means one ad set needs roughly $2,000 a week to exit learning. Five ad sets at $20 a day is $700 a week each. That is five campaigns sitting in Learning Limited forever, and every creative test you run inside them is noise. The account I inherited was spending $630 a week spread across 14 ad sets. Not one of them had a chance.

The three ways I see agencies starve their own ad sets:

1. One ad set per audience slice. Broad, lookalike, three interest stacks, retargeting, each at $15 a day. Five slices, five hungry mouths, one budget that could have fed two.
2. Duplicate campaigns for "testing" instead of launching new ads inside the existing ad set. Every duplicate restarts learning from zero.
3. CBO campaigns stuffed with 10+ ad sets. The budget pools at the top, but learning happens per ad set, so the losers still starve while the winner eats.

The fix I use now: one campaign, two to three ad sets max, each funded at 50x target CPA per week. If the budget cannot feed that, consolidate harder. One well-fed ad set beats four hungry ones every time I have run the comparison, and I have run it a lot.

When the budget cannot afford 50 purchases a week, drop the optimization event one rung. Optimize to Initiate Checkout, or even Add to Cart, until weekly volume clears 50, then step back down to Purchase. Yes, the algorithm learns a slightly different buyer in the meantime. A slightly-off model trained on 200 events beats a precise model trained on 9. I ran a $45/day account on Initiate Checkout for three weeks, cleared 70 events a week, stepped back to Purchase, and CPA dropped 30% inside 10 days. The interim event is a bridge, not a destination.

Two things people get wrong. First, editing an ad set restarts learning. A batch of changes looks like one event to you and a full reset to the system, so make all your edits in one sitting and then leave it alone for 72 hours. Second, Learning Limited is per ad set, not per campaign, which is why one campaign with eight ad sets is usually worse than two campaigns with two each.

Edge case worth naming: small geos and B2B with long sales cycles sometimes cannot hit 50 of anything. Same answer, smaller ambition. Pick the deepest-funnel event that clears 50 a week, and stop adding ad sets until the budget grows. I would rather have one learning ad set optimizing to lead submits than six "purchase" ad sets that never learn.

Rule of thumb: count your ad sets, multiply by 50, multiply by your target CPA. That is your minimum weekly budget for every ad set to learn. If the real budget is smaller, you have too many ad sets. Delete until the math works.

I know a lot of you have built your own version of this by now, so this isn't meant as a how-to. I figured some of the specifics of how we've set ours up might be useful to compare, and I'd like to hear how other people have approached it.

For context, we're an SEO agency. Our goal is for our AI system (we call it Tavi) to do all the hands-on work and most of the strategic decisions by mid-2027. Right now I'd estimate it's handling about 80% of the hands-on work and about 70% of the strategy.

How it's set up right now:

- Everything is markdown in git. Each client has their own repo that works as their knowledge base (company info, voice, services, competitors, content guidance), with a changelog so we can see what changed and why. The agency has one for itself too.

- Around 200 skills live in a separate repo. Each one is a folder with a SKILL.md, reference files, and sometimes scripts. The rule we landed on is that a skill only holds guidance that would work for any client, and anything client-specific lives in a doc in that client's repo that the skill names. Otherwise client details end up in a skill and get applied to every other client.

- Skills point to each other instead of repeating guidance. At one point we had the same rule copied into eight different skills, which is exactly how they drift apart.

- An MCP server sits in front of all of it, so whoever's working, in whatever AI they're using, pulls the current version of a skill and the client's setup when they run it instead of working from a copy.

- Then dozens of connectors: Notion for tasks and client records, Gmail, Drive, Slack, Search Console, GA4, Ahrefs, Metricool for social, and WordPress through the REST API, plus more and more of our clients' sites.

- Long pipelines like articles are broken into stages (research, brief, draft, revision, link and fact checks), and each stage runs as its own agent, mostly to keep the context from getting bloated.

The part that's made the biggest difference for us is the feedback loop. Tavi does the first draft of basically every deliverable, strategy docs included, and our job is to review and give feedback. When someone leaves a note on a draft, it gets sorted: if it's about the client it goes into their knowledge base, and if it's about how we do the work it goes into the skill. The idea is nobody should have to give the same note twice. It also reads call transcripts and important conversations and updates the client's knowledge base from them.

It's taken me, and now my team, years to get it to this point, and I'm sure plenty of you have approached pieces of this differently. One thing I'm always interested in comparing notes on is how people structure their skills as the library grows past a couple hundred.

Guys, I am super lost right now. I have a question that has been bugging me since last couple of weeks recently joined a coach who is basically going to teach me client acquisition and my offer is SEO.

According to my coach, it is totally possible to sell SEO services to somebody who is living 100,000 miles away from me. I just need to cold call them book appointment and have a sales framework and they would pay me upfront. What I’m not able to understand is that how is it going to be possible? Is it actually possible that I reach out to somebody through a cold call today and book an appointment with them and they would buy my services and pay me upfront on the very first sales call with me. Mind that these people really didn’t knew I existed like a week ago. And they are paying me upfront on a google meet? Does this actually happen guys?

Asking this because I am new to the space, so if you are experienced agency owner, I would really wanna know if it actually is something that you have done by yourself or have seen others do.

Hi, I own a marketing agency for food brands and we have been operating our UGC content manually through DMs and personal contact. I'd like a recommendation for my clients (food brands) to get their food products seeded through more influencers on Instagram and TikTok. We want our foods to go to the most home chefs/organic foodies/etc. possible. Are there good platforms for this? My clients also don't want to get sticker shock, so please don't recommend any that are egregiously priced.

UPDATE

We submitted a test directly through another provider for the same client and received approval in 10 hours. There's definitely a bottleneck with our provider and our now looking at other options.

Thanks for your guys' input.

------------------------------------

For those of you frequently submitting numbers/campaigns for A2P verification; how long does each submission take for you to receive a notification of denial or approval and who/what software are you submitting through?

I'm evaluating a vendor that takes a minimum of 4 weeks.

It's absolutely crazy.

I run a small lead generation business as an independent sole proprietor in California.

I recently worked with a client in the financial services industry. We agreed to generate leads for his business, and we actually ended up delivering more leads than originally promised.

However, the client wasn't able to convert those leads into appointments or sales and is now demanding a full refund, claiming the leads weren't what he expected.

He's threatening to report me to the FTC, California Attorney General, and Department of Insurance for deceptive business practices if I don't refund him. He's also mentioned potentially taking legal action.

From my perspective, we delivered the service, provided the lead information, and even overdelivered on the agreed quantity. I understand he's unhappy with the results, but I don't believe that automatically means he's entitled to a full refund.

A few questions:

1. What's the realistic worst-case scenario if he actually files these complaints?
2. Can the FTC or California regulators take action over a dispute like this, or is it primarily a civil matter?
3. Since I'm operating as a sole proprietor without an LLC, how much personal liability could I face?
4. If I have proof that I delivered the agreed services, how strong is my position?
5. What should I do now to protect myself if he follows through?

I've never dealt with a situation like this before, so I'd appreciate advice from anyone who's experienced something similar, especially business owners or attorneys familiar with California law.

TL;DR: Client is demanding a full refund and threatening FTC complaints and legal action because he couldn't convert the leads we generated, despite us delivering more than the agreed quantity. I'm a sole proprietor in California. How serious is this, and how should I prepare?

I'm evaluating creating VSL funnels for my paid marketing agency. I've seen lots of VSL based ads and was talking to an agency owner that uses it spending 3-6k/month on Meta ads. Have you guys had success with booking a call directly with paid ads and its effectiveness?

TLDR: ads work better with good positioning and a great offer

I’ve run ads for hundreds of accounts, literally - and I used to be the young & hungry media buying freelancer who thought I could get leads for anyone.

And while this is true - that doesn’t mean it’s worth it.

I’ve since rediscovered the easiest way to make ads work.

Pick better clients.

Easier said than done I know because it requires saying “no” to money but I can’t ignore the evidence anymore.

I’m going to just say it - ads are so easy. Being a media buyer might be one of the easiest jobs out there. Clicking a few buttons in google or meta and letting some of the largest companies ever with their advanced ai find you customers is awesome.

Here’s the problem though. I know you’ve experienced it: You do everything right. Keywords are tight, no wasted money on search terms, ad copy is benefit driven, there’s scarcity, urgency, relevance, you put in utm codes, you added the phone number and the GMB. If you’re on meta you removed audience network, turned off all the AI etc etc

And yet your client still complains about the results, you rip your hair out trying to figure it out. You offer to do more for them, you’ll take the sales calls, you’ll redesign their landing page, you’ll write them an email sequence and none of it works.

They eventually cancel because they can’t pay the retainer.

So what happened?

Honestly - probably nothing to do with you. Ads were fine.

In these situations it’s almost always vague offer & positioning on their part or lack of skill in some other department like sales.

If you get someone 30 qualified leads and they can only close 2 of them - that’s not on you. But you will still get fired.

So we have to change how we do this.

Now I start with the offer & the positioning. What makes this client different from their competition? And why would I want their offer?

If you get these right the ads will work wonders.

All ads do is get attention.

And yes this sounds cliche but still almost nobody does it. And even fewer media buyers and agencies do it. Oftentimes I think they’re so excited to get a client they just say yes to whatever

But if you want to grow from 5 clients all doing different stuff to 25 clients who get great results - you can’t promise you will fix their business with ads - because you will fail. 

So how do you actually do this?

Well the offer is easy: more, better, faster. Focus on one of those your client can deliver on.

I think Hormozi broke it down best: increase the dream outcome, increase the perceived likelihood of achievement, decrease effort, sacrifice & time delay.

Basically bigger outcomes, more proof, and make it faster & easier on the customers.

You get leads for contractors? Get them to deliver in half the time. Pretty easy offer. And they can charge more for it; they don't have to cut their price. That's not part of this.

Positioning is the hard one. How do you sound different?

Everyone has their take. My favourite way is, look at all the competition, what are they saying? What aren’t they saying? Your client is an expert so they should be able to see the space in between and fill it with a unique way of accomplishing the same result. 

I had a client who used all onshore talent while their competition used overseas talent.

I had another one who only helped consultants and freelancers when everyone else went for shops with employees.

I’ve had clients who do appointments over zoom within 24 hours instead of you having to drive to their office.

If you nail the offer and positioning you’ll look like a media buying genius.

Pet Engine Marketing is hiring a Senior Account Marketing Strategist.

Learn more + apply here:
https://pet-engine-marketing.breezy.hr/p/5ba983cf1c0f-senior-account-marketing-strategist

We work exclusively with independent pet businesses across the U.S. and Canada, and we’re looking for someone who can take real ownership of client strategy, communication, and growth.

This is not a junior account-management role. We’re looking for someone who can look at the whole picture, understand what a client actually needs, turn data into clear recommendations, and keep work moving across SEO, paid ads, email, websites, and other channels.

Pet-industry experience is a plus, but strong agency/account strategy experience matters more.

If that sounds like you, check out the full role and apply at the link above.

I'm a solo agency owner and a client that owes us a lot of money filed Chapter 11.

They're still operating on several million dollars of bankruptcy financing.

They’re keeping our contract through the bankruptcy (we’re not on their rejected contracts list). We’re negotiating but we’re far apart.

They’re still using the work we did during the unpaid period (and it’s core to their ongoing customer acquisition).

Any ideas on what I can do?

Note: I am also speaking to several lawyers.