Pivoting My Agency
A couple of months ago, we decided to pivot lilAgents.
We started off as a Seattle-based marketing / software development agency.
We had some success, but we quickly ran into issues.
Problem 1: ICP. We didn’t know who our audience was. Best we got was “SMB” which barely counts.
Problem 2: Offerings. We ended up with 5 offerings, which was difficult to market and to pitch. We had competencies in these areas, but instead of positioning ourselves as being ridiculously good at one thing, we tried to show everything we could possibly do.
lilAgents is now in the business of operations automation. We want to partner with medium-sized businesses that want to save time. Doing less busywork and more meaningful work that moves the business forward.
Check out our new brand video.
This gives you a taste for what’s possible. When you automate busywork, you don’t only free up your own time as a business owner, but you also free up the precious time of your hires to focus on why you hired them in the first place.
If your workforce is spending 10% or more of their time manually filling out spreadsheets, copying and pasting data between applications that should just talk to each other, or having to remember to follow up to messages that got dropped, you would benefit from a service like this.
One key issue with our old set of services was it quickly became a commodity where we had to reinvent the wheel and constantly justify ourselves based on hours used/not used. It wasn’t sustainable and didn’t promote long-term retainers.
We had two 10+ month client retainers church or pause around the same time, which was our wake up call to this. Marketing, and some development tasks alone aren’t enough anymore. Savvier business owners get the feeling they could do some of it themselves, and are more hesitant to spend in those areas, even when they’re getting results.
Something to be proud of, though, is our customers were satisfied with our work. Live on our site right now, we have 6 real 5-star reviews from current and former customers who really loved what we did for them.
So rather than supplying something that can be easily replaced, we want to be trusted partners that help keep owners and orgs up to date with the latest and great automation possible, agentic or otherwise, to compete with their competition while also saving them boatloads of time and energy.
You don’t have to look far to know artificial intelligence has a mixed reception. It’s clear the path forward is about using human-derived discernment and taste to determine when automation is appropriate and helpful, and when it’s reductive or counterproductive.
That’s the kind of partnership we want to have. Let us be the AI nerds that take care of all of the busywork you don’t want or shouldn’t have to do, so you can be freed up to do what you do best.
Here’s a candid #BuildInPublic style video I shared to my network on some of the nitty gritty details related to the pivot: how much revenue we made each year, what our biggest mistakes were, and what our biggest wins were.