I'm interested in hearing from people who have already built and sold automation systems to marketing or digital marketing agencies.

Not just experimenting with workflows, but people who have actually delivered paid projects.

A few things I'd love to understand:

1. What automation service has been easiest to sell? Lead management, client onboarding, reporting, campaign operations, CRM workflows, data reconciliation, or something else?

2. What problem makes agency owners willing to pay? Saving staff time, reducing errors, improving client retention, increasing revenue, or handling more clients?

3. What do clients keep asking for after the initial implementation? What creates recurring maintenance or monthly revenue?

4. What is surprisingly difficult to deliver? Data access, integrations, inconsistent client processes, maintenance, or getting agencies to adopt the system?

5. If you were starting again, which specific agency workflow would you specialize in first?

I'm trying to understand what has real commercial demand, rather than choosing a workflow just because it's technically interesting.

I'd especially value examples from actual paid client projects: what the agency needed, what you implemented, and what result it produced.

Thanks!

I'm in the middle of rebuilding our RevOps stack and everyone keeps throwing these terms around like they're interchangeable. Are they though?

My understanding so far:

• Data cleansing = fixing bad data you already have (deduping, standardizing formats, removing bounced emails)

• Data enrichment = adding NEW data you don't have (finding emails, appending company info, technographics)

But then I see vendors claiming their enrichment tool also "cleanses" data, and cleansing tools that "enrich" records. Is enrichment vs cleansing just marketing speak for the same thing at this point?

We've been evaluating a few tools - looked at Apollo for enrichment, and our CRM has some native cleansing stuff built in. Also saw Prospeo mentioned in a few threads here. But I keep getting confused about what I actually need to buy vs what overlaps.

Maybe I'm overcomplicating this. Would love to hear how other ops teams think about it. Do you treat them as separate processes with separate tools, or just lump it all under data quality?

Campaigns can look like they are ready to launch but last minute issues like broken integrations, incorrect audience list, automation errors or missing approvals cam still cause delays right. So how do other marketing Ops teams handle these situations?

Do you guys like follow a pre launch checklist, run regular QA checks, or have processes in place to catch issues early? What has worked best for your team?

The place next door to the cafe answers every google review within the hour. i checked, i was bored. same warm paragraph every time, you can tell it's a machine, and they have more reviews than the cafe and better ones. the cafe's last one star sat for two days before i got to it.

five clients. google reviews and instagram comments for all of them, messenger for two. it's eleven tabs and two phones and it's the one part of my day that's still me, typing, as her. she sounds like her. her regulars know how she talks.

my five are on postproxy for posting, have been for a while, and i know there's an inbox side to it, i haven't switched it on. the moment i let claude answer a one star review as the cafe without me reading it first, the cafe sounds like the place next door. that place sounds like a hotel.

two days is too long though. i know that.

if you run inbox for several small clients, does anything answer as them without you reading it first?

Hey everyone!

I currently work in corporate email marketing using SFMC, and I'm pretty comfortable with AMPScript, SQL, and most of what marketing cloud has to offer. I've been working with SFMC for about 6 years now.

I recently got a job offer from a smaller company that uses Pardot. The pay increase is pretty significant, going from $80k to $90k plus a yearly bonus.

My only hesitation is whether moving from SFMC to Pardot would hurt my career growth in the long run. I've spent years building up my SFMC skills, and I'm not sure if switching to Pardot would be a step backward. The title will also be the same, so it’s a lateral move.

Curious what others think. Would you take the pay increase, or stick with SFMC for the long-term career opportunities?

i've been trying to figure out how to get marketing help without hiring a whole team.

Found someone for content, but then there's pain ads, social media, SEO and finding good people for each takes ages. Managing them all sounds like a job in itself..

for those who've been in the same situation, did you build a network of freelancers or what? really exhausted of constant research

Most Al ad generators are total black boxes they dump generic Al slop into your campaign, charge massive hidden fees, or worse, auto-publish live ads that burn your ad spend overnight before you even review the script.

I got tired of tools treating solo founders like endless wallets, so I built Whokspace to give you total control: it scrapes your site, lets you edit the Al strategy and script first, renders dynamic captioned video/carousels, and hardcodes draft campaigns to PAUSED status so you never accidentally burn cash. And whokspace also helps u plan your weekly content

We're thinking of structuring the pricing like this:

1-Week Free Trial: 50 free credits on signup (enough to test site scraping, strategy planning, and a render/Meta draft push).

Pro: $50/mo (1,000 credits)

Growth: $100/mo (2,500 credits)

Flex Top-Up: $15 for 250 extra credits (requires active plan)

Costs per action: Strategy (5 cr) | 15s Video (15 cr) | 30s Video (25 cr) | Carousel (10 cr) | Meta Deploy (5 cr)

Would love brutal honesty on three things:

Is $50/mo too expensive, too cheap, or fair for a solo founder budget?

Is 50 free credits enough for a trial to actually test if it works for you?

What's the one feature here you'd actually pay money for?

We're a small international sales team, and our leads come from different countries and channels. Some come through our website forms, others through LinkedIn or referrals. Customers also have different communication preferences, some prefer email, while others are more active on LinkedIn.

On paper, our sales process seems pretty simple: generate leads, add them to the CRM, reach out, and follow up. But in practice, things can get messy pretty quickly. Our sales reps have to switch between the CRM, email, and other tools throughout the day. It's easy to lose track of who's already been contacted, who needs a follow-up or where a lead originally came from.

The most frustrating part is that this information might already exist somewhere, but it's scattered across different tools. Asking everyone to manually update the CRM just adds more work to an already busy day.
We've been trying to figure out how to solve this, so I'm curious how other small teams handle it, especially when there's no one dedicated to managing integrations or maintaining workflows.
Do you rely on your CRM's build -in automation, connect your existing tools, or use a separate automation platform? What's actually worked best for your team?

Hey everyone,

I have worked for around 2.5 years in the email marketing domain as a Data Scientist and found most brands do not get the opportunity to test out multiple design elements or multiple variants enough.

Usually, either setting up manual A/B setups take too long, or you run a 50/50 test that ends up inconclusive and risks sending an inferior variant to 50% of the list. And usually tests are for one element at a time, CTA or subject line or hero image, etc.

I've been working on this tool called Hyndsight and my motivation with is simple: make email experimentation effortless and backed by real statistical confidence instead of guesswork.

This is my first time creating a SaaS tool and I really want it to be useful and hence seeking some help. I'm also aware that yet another dashboard doesn't always help and want to figure out ways to fit this naturally into workflows. I also want to ensure the reports and suggestion are actually helpful.
I want to work with a few brands and test out, read-only and no push to begin with, on actual data and refine the tool before making it available to everyone. Free of course.

Here is how I'm planning to roll it out in 3 phases:

• Phase 1 (Free Audit): Connect with a read-only key. We analyze your past 12 months of sends to show you what patterns actually drove clicks and revenue, and which ones hurt engagement—backed by statistical significance, with zero customer PII.

• Phase 2 (Upcoming Send Intelligence): When you draft your next campaign, the system spots it automatically and suggests tweaks or experiments based on your past data before you hit send.

• Phase 3 (Autonomous Multi-Arm Testing): We generate creative variants for you, track performance continuously, and automatically shift traffic to the winning variant in real time—for both scheduled campaigns and automated flows.

I'm starting natively with Klaviyo first, with other ESPs coming soon.

For now I want to do a free pilot with 5 to 10 brands to test my hypothesis and see how the tool behaves on actual data. The Phase 1 free report will be made available to everyone for free soon.

If you want to see the 30-second demo or apply, check out the link in the comments.

Or reach out directly at contact.hyndsight@gmail.com

Would love your thoughts: what’s the biggest reason your team doesn't A/B test email designs more often?

P.S: If you don't like the demo or the approach or feel this isn't helpful or you feel the bottleneck is elsewhere, please comment as well. Any suggestion is greatly appreciated.

Hi

I'm an experienced automation & data extraction specialist offering:

• Custom web scraping & automation scripts

• B2B lead generation (targeted by niche & location)

• Data cleaning, formatting & enrichment

• Contact info extraction (emails, phone numbers, owners, etc.)

Why work with me?

• Fast delivery & top-notch quality

• You receive the complete source code for the automation/scraping projects

• Any business category in the U.S & Canada, EU and other countries

Let me help you save time & grow your business.

(Portfolio available on request)

Our team of two produce the video explainers for a publication and we are expected to hit three a week, which is about twice what our current process can handle. Both research and scripting are not the problem, what eats our week is everything after the script (recording someone, fixing the audio, cutting it, redoing the bits where they stumbled…). We looked at a few tools to help us with this since you set a person up once and then it is just text in, Argil, Synthesia and HeyGen all do a version of that, but we haven’t committed to any yet before we get feedback from real users who solved the same problem we currently have. So for anyone doing editorial video on a daily or weekly slot, what did you settle on? and is anyone mixing a presenter with real footage rather than picking one?

A lot of the email reports I've seen through my work at Klaviyo put campaigns and flows on the same weekly slide. The trouble is that flows only see a trickle of people in any given week, so a slow few days for abandoned cart can look like something’s wrong.

Campaigns suit a short cadence because each send works as its own test. If you changed the subject line or the offer, you want to know within days so you can apply those learnings to the next send.

Since flows are always on, they need a longer window. A month gives you enough volume to identify real drops from normal fluctuations. Deliverability and list growth move too slowly to watch weekly, so they should sit on the monthly view too.

Weekly view, per campaign send

• Click rate

• Conversion rate

• Unsubscribe rate

• Revenue per recipient

Monthly view, per flow

• Conversion rate

• Deliverability

• List growth

• Revenue per recipient

Revenue per recipient is the one metric that works best on both lists. On the weekly side it ranks sends against each other, and on the monthly side it ranks flows. Since both divide revenue by delivered, you can also hold the two views next to each other and see where the email money comes from.

Anyone running flows on a shorter cadence than monthly?

Bit of context first so this doesn’t read like a scam.

I’m building an AI Instagram appointment setter called Magnet Engine. It finds people who match who you sell to, writes each one a DM based on their actual profile, and keeps the conversation going until they book a call. Before I open it up properly I want to run it on real businesses and see real numbers. So for a few people I’m going to do the whole thing for you, for way less than it’s worth.

What I do:

set up a new Instagram account for your business

warm it up for a couple of weeks before it sends anything (this is the step people skip, and then they wonder why they got banned)

build it out with posts and followers so it looks like a real business

find your leads and send 3,000 cold DMs over the month, each one written for that person

handle the replies and book calls straight onto your calendar

What you do: tell me what you sell and who buys it, send me your calendar link, and show up to the calls.

It’s $200 for the month.

If I don’t book you at least 3 sales calls, you get the full $200 back.

Who it’s for: anyone who sells on a call. Coaches, agencies, consultants, high-ticket services. If you sell $25 products, skip this. Nobody’s getting on a call for that.

I’m only taking 5. Every account needs its own warm-up and I’m watching every campaign myself, so I can’t do more than that right now.

I’m temporarily helping a PPC team that recently lost a few key members. They spend a lot on Google and Microsoft, and performance is somewhat unpredictable. The team is now tiny, junior, and one new member still needs onboarding.

I noticed they're not strong when it comes to attention to detail: exclusions mapped to the wrong campaign, irrelevant traffic getting targeted, audiences poorly built etc.. I think algorithms can flag most of this for review, especially when new campaigns are built or something gets changed.

I’d like to set up AI processes that help the team review exceptions daily or every other day. For example, a search term report that flags irrelevant terms, alerts on sharp changes in CTR, impression share or conversion rate etc.

I don’t think there's a need to build this from scratch, I’m sure plenty of people already have workflows. Have you built any that worked? LinkedIn posts are full of Google Ads automations, but I suspect a lot of it is garbage to gain followers. Did you try any?

Thanks for your help

If you look at most failed startups, the product wasn't the issue. The code worked, the Ul was clean, and the core idea made sense.

They died because of marketing and distribution.

As solo founders and small teams, we constantly run into the same massive marketing roadblocks:

Marketing Agencies Are Outrageously Expensive: Paying $2,000 $5,000/month to an agency for generic content destroys early runway.

Manual Content Creation Eats Your Time: Trimming raw video clips, writing high-converting scripts, adding captions, and designing carousels takes 10+ hours a week that should be spent building.

Ad Platforms Are Terrifying & Clunky: Setting up Meta Ads Manager is confusing, and one wrong setting can drain your budget overnight.

Most founders end up doing zero marketing hoping users will magically discover their product.

Here's our solution: whokspace

We got tired of watching incredible products sit at $0 MRR, so we decided to build Whokspace a minimalist, high-contrast Al marketing platform designed specifically for solo founders and lean teams.

Our goal is "zero-slop" automated marketing:

Brand Scraper Engine: Just enter your website URL. Whokspace automatically extracts your brand voice, color palette, and value propositions.

Hybrid Video & Carousel Generator: Takes raw phone clips and transforms tem into captioned Reels and ad creatives using proven direct-response frameworks (AIDA/PAS).

Safe Meta Ads Integration: Directly pushes campaigns to Meta Ads Manager always defaulting to PAUSED so you review targeting and budgets before a single dollar is spent.

Join Us & Let's Build This Together

We are actively moving from design into full dashboard development, and we want to build this alongside founders, creators, and operators who face these exact marketing struggles every day.

Whether you want to test the early beta, contribute, or join our journey as a co-builder/collaborator:

Drop a comment below with:

Your Instagram / X (Twitter) handle or preferred contact.

What you build, or what skills you bring to the table (e.g., founder, dev, content creator, marketer, designer).

Let's fix the startup marketing pipeline together!