I Built My Marketing Agency From Scratch To $13K/Month
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi! My name is Sophia O’Neal. I am the CEO and Chief Brand Builder at Ignore No More, a marketing agency that specializes in building un-ignorable brands for SaaS companies.
We do customer interviews, branding and positioning, messaging, website design and development in Webflow, as well as marketing strategy and monthly execution. In other words, we do everything a head of marketing and supporting cast would, but on a productized monthly basis, with violently clear deliverables and deadlines.
Most of our clients own a bootstrapped SaaS company and want to get a hold on their marketing or take things up a notch - without going the full hiring route or getting a marketing co-founder
Today we work with between 2-5 clients/mo from around the world and bring in about $13K-$21K/month.
I’m 25 years old and Ignore No More is my 4th company. We’ve been profitable since Month 5 and are a team of 10 employees (4 full time, including me, and 6 part-time) spread across 7 countries and speaking 12+ different languages.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
When I was a kid, I always knew I wanted to own my own company. There wasn’t a big bang moment for me, but I remember hearing the adults in the room complaining about their jobs. When I asked why, the answer usually had something to do with their boss and not liking the work itself. The ones who had their own company like my maternal Grandmother, or side hustle like my parents, would say that even when it was bad at least they worked for themselves.
Being an employee just didn’t sound like fun to me. So I thought, “What would it take for me to be my own boss?” Beyond that, I wasn’t sure what direction I wanted to go in.
Enter my truly atrocious nearsightedness.
I’ve worn glasses since I was a munchkin and fell in love with Warby Parker glasses back when they were a very new company. When I got my first pair, the packaging was incredibly thoughtful, functional, and FUN.
I was like, “Who did this? Who designed this packaging to make me feel like part of the in-crowd as a literarian unathletic nerd? I want that job!” I did some digging and found out that the job title was brand designer and the brains that did it were a NYC-based agency called High Tide.
And I said, “Okay, well, I want to own an agency, I want it to be branding, and I want it to be part of a movement.” Those were the parameters. So over the next few years in college and after, it was mostly me going, “Okay, what's the skill set I need to have to run an agency.” And working lots of marketing jobs in multiple industries and starting companies to get the marketing and operations experience to do it.
After college, I became a marketing manager for a Chick-Fil-A franchise while still doing freelance work on the side. Working at CFA taught me about the power of first-party data. The nitty-gritty of how to manage a brand from the customer-facing front lines to email subject lines to corporate and to thousands of independently operated franchises.
It’s a masterful behemoth of a machine. I left knowing that the agency I would run would surprise and delight clients and employees with the quality of work and the joy of working with each other.
Running in the background while working at Chick-Fil-A was a camping goods startup I started with a friend while still in college. We were effectively trying to build the Honey of Camping, a tool that would help beginner campers find what they need across sites. While searching for a no-code way to make it work, I stumbled onto Webflow, which opened my eyes to the world of SaaS.
We were both non-technical, so I learned a lot about no-code tooling and started building out the logic for the site and the product. Eventually, we shelved the project (he got married, I got busy) but I was hooked on SaaS.
That lightbulb moment, coupled with the lessons learned from freelancing (team > the solo life!) and running project and marketing management for a boutique agency (how to set up fail-proof systems) I was dying to work in SaaS in a more formal capacity, and jumped at the chance when a local $10M B2B SaaS company asked me to run their rebrand and digital marketing strategy.
It was a steep learning curve.
There was a lot more than just implementing playbooks and sprucing the landing page. You have to understand the entire trajectory of the product line, understand the personalities of customers, the map of who controls purchasing decisions, and build the Martech stack from scratch. And, you know, execute on doing the work!
All things I'd done in previous roles in various capacities, but never all at once. It was a crash course, but an effective one.
I pulled it off but burnt out in the process. So I left and decided to pivot to freelancing to pay the bills and figure out how to launch an agency as fast as possible.
I’ll always say God wanted me to jump but I was too stubborn so He shoved me instead. I’m eternally grateful!
That was November of 2021 and the agency is Ignore No More. We build brands that are impossible to ignore through a combination of brand identity, design, and strategy.
I had $5K in the bank when I started. That was it.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
When I went from freelancing to agency I saw the funding horizon looming, and I was in the precarious spot of being super qualified but having most of my work be under NDA. Ouch.
So I had to build a winning SaaS portfolio from scratch as fast as possible so I could pitch for more clients - the great circle of agency starting. And it needed to be to my unique formula of branding + website + marketing strategy because I recognized that at the beginning that trifecta set me apart.
I spent 3 weeks building out the agency branding and website, then posted on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving on IndieHackers that I would build a brand + landing page + marketing strategy for 4 lucky SaaS startups in a week each.
As much as I know you should charge for your work up front, the fact was I needed social proof so I could prove my work was worth buying.
This is exactly what I put on IndieHackers.
It worked. I got 4 (which ended up being whittled down to 3 companies) and built their brand, landing page, and marketing strategy for them in exchange for quotes and being able to use the work product in perpetuity. I also built the brands in public on Twitter and talked about branding and messaging on the platform constantly. Those were the first SaaS case studies.
Describe the process of launching the business.
My first 2 clients under the Ignore No More banner were Enneagram coaches, one from my network and the other a recommendation from the first one. It wasn’t the work I was itching to do, but it paid the rent! But by then I was desperately close to running out of money, and while I was getting traction and interest, it wasn’t materializing into cash fast enough - and I had to buy groceries.
Plenty of people will say “sales will get you a client in a week” and that is true in theory, but in practice, that is only the case if you know how to do sales. And It took me After three months of failing, experimenting, and trying everything from info-product launches, a featured post on IH, and networking with strangers on the internet I could pitch and close effectively.
January 2022 and February 2022, money was running thin by then. I’ll never forget running home from the grocery store to get my business debit card because it had $15 on it and my one had .50 cents. I was a “Dave Ramsey kid” so a credit card was out of the question. My church helped pay my rent and groceries for a month.
During this time I launched a landing page copywriting guide. It had an add-on for an hour of 1:1 landing page copywriting help with me. One of the founders who took me up on it loved my advice so much that she recommended me to a friend with a SaaS startup. That recommendation led to a new client who needed a brand new website, marketing strategy, and management for several months. That whole sales period was from Jan to early March. Not a quick process!
Around that time, my friend Michael Y. recommended I do marketing office hours - coffee chats I call them now - where I would answer any marketing question on the spot with a strategic, actionable answer you could try immediately after getting off the call.
I posted my Calendly link everywhere and it became a loop of people chatting with me, being blown away by how useful and sales-free the advice was, and recommending me to other founders they knew. Those calls became my growth engine. It was one of the best things I ever did.
I learned to write effective cold emails and made the coffee chat the CTA (providing value!). I’ll never forget the call that ended in a founder enthusiastically saying “Where do I sign?!” He’s still a client!
For most of 2022, our business was a combo of referrals, cold emails, and coffee chats.
I say “our” because for one of the non-SaaS projects I was out of my depth on the website so I posted on Twitter for a Webflow dev. A fabulous dev named Sergio DM’d me and was a great fit. He is employee #1 and he still works for Ignore No More while also doing his own projects!
The 3 biggest things I learned through that whole whirlwind were:
- How to ideate, create, and deliver on a tight deadline which comes down to exceptionally clear docs and disciplined SOP’s for each deliverable.
- How to manage cash flow so everyone pays rent. I still don’t have a credit card and neither does the company, so either I'm good with my finances or nothing works.
- How to sell. Marketing ≠ Sales. Marketing gets them interested, Sales gets them to sign. The first one I was already good at. The second one had a high, emotionally expensive, learning curve!
I learned far after that fact that if you don’t manage your stress it will manage you. My health deteriorated heavily during that first year. I didn’t even look like myself. (Still working my way out of that hole but that’s another story!)
And version 3.0 of the site this February with more products launched!
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Clients hire us for 3 reasons:
- Value - our “scope call” is a marketing coffee chat. I offer help and expect nothing in return. If you hire us, great! If not, then your marketing got an upgrade, and that’s the core mission of why I do what I do. But either way, the client gets value upfront
- Transparency - Our pricing is productized and live on the site and we have completely open slack channels and notion task management dashboard. The client knows who is working on their project and where every piece of the puzzle is at all times.
- Authenticity - I've started and closed multiple companies. I built - and then shelved a microSaaS product. I speak the bootstrap language because I've bootstrapped the agency. This isn’t faking till I make it. This is real! I love marketing and am unabashed in that love and making marketing work for a founder from the first coffee chat to every website design element and campaign suggestion.
Now within those 3 things, I've tried a lot of marketing channels and campaigns. Each year I've done a plan and a retro on what’s worked for us!
Here’s the link to the actual FigJam for the 2022 to 2023 marketing plan.
A lot of my best marketing ideas have been from ongoing brainstorming between my teammates and me! It’s one of the joys of having a half-freelancer team. We’re all looking for clients and our services are complementary, so when one person finds a channel that works they’re quick to share, and then we all iterate and find what works for us!
My most successful CTA is the coffee chats by far! But I think LinkedIn as a distribution channel and how-to guide (in multiple forms!) is going to be the winner for 2024.
But our clear, authentic messaging on the website plus transparent deliverables and pricing is usually what seals the deal for new clients and keeps them coming back. It took some time to productize (we’re 80% productized now!) and I walked through my thought process for the first time here and then the second round of fine tuning here, but now our services are broken into 3 clear categories:
- Positioning & Messaging
- Website Design & Dev
- Marketing Strategy & Execution
Positioning & Messaging begins with customer interviews and surveys, followed by brand positioning, brand identity, ideal customer profile(s), new target audiences, and churn analysis. Once we’re good on those fronts, we build a mini marketing plan outlining the top 3 channels/campaigns to try, initial ROI estimates for them, and resources required for each channel/campaign.
Website Design & Dev is rooted in that messaging and includes a lot of thought processes that a head of marketing may be involved in, but an out-of-the-box website agency might not. Like long-term architecture and how that ties into marketing automations, product, and long-term optimization.
And finally, we get to the marketing strategy and execution management! There’s no one-size-fits-all here. We make each engagement custom to the client and based on the marketing insight we pull from customer interviews and where their marketing infrastructure currently stands. That’s because the best marketing campaigns are built around customer needs, not a marketer’s imagination.
I’m dead set on doing those services in that order. It's one thing to say "Let's talk to customers" but another to listen and turn what they say into conversion-lovin’ copy and actionable marketing strategy! If a potential client's not down for that, we're likely to say “no thanks.” I say “we” because even though the buck stops with me, it’s the Ignore No More team that gives us our edge.
When it comes to having repeat clients disappointment (not outright anger!) is what I’ve found to be the #1 reason a client doesn’t refer to us or no longer wants to work with us. Disappointment is a result of unmet expectations. So I'm clear about expectations for the price (decided in advance and stuck to unless there’s a clear scope change!), the timelines, and the deliverables and give constant communication throughout the project.
Our repeat and highest referring clients are the ones I've had the clearest and most up-front communication with. It gets easier with time to communicate bad news, but it never gets easy.
With an international team and client base, there are also a lot of cultural differences in work! Early on I made some assumptions, and now I ask upfront about everything and give a lot of cultural wiggle room! And I always assume good intent. It’s one of the things that supercharges the company culture and is the cause - not the result - of the goodwill we have with clients.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Short term goals:
Keep it fun. Grow while maintaining our level of flexibility internally and excellence externally.
Operations: automate and grow - but not scale yet! I want to stay in “fun”.
I love Les McKeown’s approach to growth vs scale (highly recommend his books and podcast episodes on the Carey Neuhoff Leadership Podcast)
Short term money goals:
I’m here to make money, but creating a joyous workplace is equally important to me.
That being said, my numeric goals this year are to
- Get us to $25K/mo in recurring revenue from retainer clients ($12K+ increase from 2023’s/MRR)
- 1 rebrand/quarter at $6K+
- 1-3 website projects/quarter at $10K/site
- Hit $300K for our annual revenue (2x 2023’s revenue)
To get there, that means an average of 3-5 sales calls/week.
With January wrapping up, I can confidently say we’re on the way to hitting that MRR goal by the end of Q1!
Long term goals:
Long term I’d like to Ignore No More to be a combination of SaaS incubator, and marketing department-as-an-agency while staying a raging fun place to work across both sides of the business!
Mailchimp was founded out of a web development agency. F’insweet is one of the best agencies in the world and has over a half-dozen tools it’s bought or built in-house. I fully see Ignore No More as either being the progenitor of a hugely helpful SaaS tool or the incubator for a collection of helpful tools that together make a lasting impact on other small business owners' lives.
We’re the Chick-fil-A of marketing agencies. We help build software companies that have the same or similar mindset. Long term I'd like to build full-blown SaaS companies with CFA DNA. Their form completely depends on the problems we see across clients and in our daily lives. We’re about unique, thorny problems we can jump into and make a huge difference in the end customers’ lives, not just copycat solutions.
In the meantime we’re going to build more info-products and turn them into micro-saas’ and interactive web apps where appropriate (if that’s the best way to access and use them!). And test, try, ideate, and try again!
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Don’t compromise. Twice I took a client with a big ticket price but a less-than-stellar attitude. The money helped us out immensely, but it took 6-months+ each time to recover from the emotional damage to the team of having a disrespectful client who would belittle them or their work.
I work very hard to make coming to work a joy and to be the middlewoman when necessary. But at some point, you can’t manage away a client’s entitlement and rude behavior. The first time you could call beginners mistakes, the second time I should have known better. Now I just say no. The money will come, and gritting our collective teeth to power through “that client” isn’t worth it.
Something unexpected that has turned into a huge win for us is my approach of 1st-party data from the beginning as a holdover from working at Chick-fil-A and flat out hating running ads as a freelancer. Now that we’re moving to a cookie-less future we’re not scrambling to conform to the new rules!
While in a traditional career path, I felt like my varied interests and sector experience made me a hard sell it’s been one of the biggest booms as the lead strategist for clients. I’m not stuck in any one way of doing things and we’re constantly experimenting on our own marketing and then immediately using what we learned on client projects. I can pull together pieces from different industries and campaign experiments and create a unique campaign.
My biggest productivity “hack” is having my schedule as a template in Notion like this:
My weekly plan and daily task list. I don’t do items in all of the headings every day, but it helps me not forget something that needs to be done and be able to slot it where my brain can batch and take care of it. Works great with my time-blocked schedule!
That way when I start my day I don't have to think! Otherwise, I move tasks around and call it work, or chicken out of doing something I'm intimidated by.
I wish I’d realized earlier that even though you love your job there are days when the motivation doesn’t materialize. Doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, just means your brain isn’t completely there.
Re-evaluating if I’m working on the best problem only I can solve and then sticking to it and making it fun is key to getting me into a flow state and walking away from the day productive.
Take a vacation. Practice Sabbath. Turn off your phone at night and have a full morning routine before you turn it on in the morning. If you don’t pro-actively control your time and devices, they will control you and it’s not cute when they do. I love my mostly phone-less nights best!
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
WEBFLOW (of course!) - the only ride-or-die tool we recommend and what our website and all client websites are built on
Notion - project management internally and externally. It’s the agency's brain!
Slack - communication, 64, no repeats or hesitations (okay plenty of typos but other than that)
Figma - design for website projects, flows for campaigns, and mental maps for strategy sessions
Loom - the team is in 7 timezones - Loom is an absolute lifesaver meeting multi-person meetings are NOT going to happen often.
TL:DV - records all of our meetings and creates brilliant summaries. Their use of AI for meeting summaries and action items is outmatched. Not to mention that their IG is a source of constant hilarity.
GSuite - meetings on Meet, emails in Gmail, GCal for life.
folk - our CRM. it’s a new tool with some bumps, but it’s way better than managing a CRM in Notion. Great customer support too!
We use a bajillion tools for clients, but those are the main ones I use to run the company regularly and pay for.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Craig Groeschel’s leadership podcast, plus his book Winning the War in Your Mind
If you don’t know how to talk to yourself, you for sure as heck can’t think your way out of the daily business fires that are going to pop up. And his leadership podcast is an excellent resource for time-efficient ways to level up as a leader. Following his advice has dramatically improved me as a manager.
Les McKeown
Before listening to this podcast episode I thought that growth and scale were the same thing. They’re not! Les breaks down how to hit predictable success in a company, the stages of a company, and the types of leaders and employees you need to make a company run well and be prepared for more growth or to hit scale if you choose.
Right now we’re in the stage of “Fun” and I plan on keeping it there for a while, which means growth, but not scale. Once we hit the 5 year mark I'll evaluate whether I want to take it up a notch.
It’s revolutionized how I approach growth, hiring, and the need for speed in the agency. It was recommended by a longtime friend, mentor, and life coach - I’m so grateful!
The episode getting to predictable success.
This is the follow-up episode where he expands on the type of people you need in an org to run well.
And finally, the episode that talks about whether growth means it’s time to scale - or not.
If reading it all at once is more your thing, then checkout his book Do Scale. I loved it as an Audiobook, it listens like a long podcast episode.
Live Fearlessly by Jamie Winship
This is the book that put life back into my bones and passion back into my job. If my identity isn’t right, then my vocational mission won’t be in alignment with who I am and what I am made to do. This book explains what identity is, where it comes from, and how to find it and align it with your job. If Amazon has an “Amazon wrapped” for books I recommended this year, this would be top across the board.
Throughline from NPR
I was homeschooled for most of primary school and one of the core things my sister and I learned was how to think critically. Over the years of college and the career slog, I slowly went into robot mode.
Throughline reminds me that everything is intertwined and every “fact” has multiple ways it can be seen based on where you’re standing and what your experiences are.
In leadership, especially with a global team and clients don’t assume regarding behavior, motivations, and background information. In marketing, it’s made me more in tune with all the ways a message can be read and delivered. This has improved my approach to copywriting and campaign strategy!
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Do the stupid thing. Feel free to embarrass yourself online. Launch the half-baked idea with as much fanfare as you would the “perfect” version. It might get you the next client you need to pay rent. And if it’s a flop, it will probably be forgotten. People often say the internet has a long memory - that’s only true if you're Elon Musk or the like. Otherwise, you’re forgettable. Take that as the blessing it is!
I was mortified giving away services for free after running marketing for a $10M SaaS co. But I paid my rent. And people saw it as a ballsy move, not a shameful one. (And even if they had, who cares!)
It will take you longer than you think it will.
Not to get too meta, but it took me over 3 weeks to write this interview, with about 1hr a day for 5-6 days for the rough draft alone.
It takes a good bit of time to create quality content, run a great marketing campaign, and build out a strong project management system. But those (and 1,000 others!) are the foundation required to move fast. Once you’ve done it 5x, then you can turn it into an SOP and automate some of this. Expect that and you won’t be as frustrated at how slow things move!
Be honest with yourself about why you want to do this. It’s hard. Hard. and the biggest payoff will take ~2+ years (I’m still not fully hitting it). If it’s money you want (and just the money) then get good at your job and get a manager job with a $250K salary somewhere. If you want it to be quality-of-life and control of your schedule, then prioritize that and take a slower path to growth. I’m the latter and it’s so worth it.
And if you want to be the unforgettable name in the niche? There is no rush to make it big. Making it sustainable is harder than making it big and that creates the foundation for you to grow and take risks in the future without betting on the house.
Speaking of - bet the house only when it’s just your house. I take lots of risks. But not the risks that will cost my employees paying their rent. For me, the success story of a lifetime isn’t worth the stress of missing payroll. I could make 2-3x the salary I make now as a head of marketing for a SaaS co. But I wouldn't own my life. I’d rather own my life.
There’s no shame in being a “small business owner” vs “startup founder”. Every startup starts out as a small business. The titles don’t matter. The recurring revenue and rent getting paid do set your ego on fire and let the flames light your way.
Your team is everything. Treat them like A-listers, not backup singers. I couldn’t confidently take on a single project if it wasn’t for the incredibly talented, curious, and driven peeps that I have the privilege of calling teammates.
Here we are at our first annual INM Retreat in Nashville, TN last May! (This year it’s set to be Morrocco!)
From Left to Right
- Anqa, our Account & Project Manager
- Sergio, our Webflow Wizard
- Me!
- Claire, our Copy Queen (who also runs Copy Island)
- Abhishek our Research and People Talker (if you haven’t read his Starter Story interview, go do that next!)
- Dhiya, our Copy Maven
- Midhat, our Word Master Flash aka Meme Mistress Most Supreme
- Aelia, our Marvelous Marketing Manager
Not pictured
- Umer, our Content Corralling Marketing Manager
- Marta, our second Webflow Maestra.
They’re the best coworkers I’ve ever had and make coming to work a moment I look forward to even on the roughest days.
My team wouldn’t be complete without the mentors I frequently turn to for advice on sticky situations, agency owners like Uros Mikic, and Michael Yagudaev, and the Power Team of April Sciacchitano and Rachel Seda at Mix&Shine who cheered me on from Day 1.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you want to chat, I’m active on LinkedIn and quick to reply to messages there! I’d love to meet you and answer your marketing questions over virtual coffee ☕!
If you want to learn more about the agency, the team, or our process then head over to the website.
If you have any questions or thoughts, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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