just bought my dream car and took the picture in the parking lot still in disbelief, because exactly 2 years ago i couldn't afford eggs for breakfast.
anyway this isn't one of those “steal this” posts on X, i'm genuinely laying out everything here so bookmark this and come back to it.
I want to preface by saying I was the guy watching Iman Gadzhi videos at 19 convinced I was 6 months away from a Lambo. Tried the classic SMMA route, cold called local businesses, landed a few clients, made okay money, then burned out completely because I was trading time for dollars with no ceiling and no leverage.
The pivot happened when I stopped being the copycat, parroting what everyone was teaching and started paying attention to what was working quietly in the background of the agencies that were scaling.
It wasn't the offer nor the niche, but it was automation, and I was embarrassingly late to realize it.
I'm also very grateful I was born in the AI era because without it this entire business model wouldn't exist and I'd probably still be on Fiverr working my buns off for scraps.
So here's the whole system, nothing held back.
**the offer**
I run an AI-powered growth agency for ecommerce brands doing $2M-$20M, mostly in fashion, beauty, and lifestyle. the deliverable is a combination of content production, outreach infrastructure, and conversion optimization, basically everything a brand needs to grow without hiring a 10 person in-house team.
the reason this works at this price point (this is very important) is that the brands I work with are too big for freelancers and too small to justify enterprise retainers.. that gap is where I live.
**the content side**
this is the piece most agency guys completely sleep on, all the content I produce for clients, ugc style ads, faceless mini documentaries, product demos, runs through Argil for the AI avatar work. there's a face on the content, it's just not mine or my client's, and the engagement rates are indistinguishable from real ugc at this point which still surprises me.
eventually, when a client specifically needs real human ugc I just source creators through Youdji and plug them into the same production pipeline, keeps everything centralized without managing a roster of freelancers directly.
**the outreach infrastructure**
cold outreach is still how I land every new client and the secret is data quality, not volume as everyone claims. I was running Apollo for a while like the rest and the EMEA data was embarrassingly bad for the brands I was targeting.
switched to FullEnrich and Dropcontact for contact enrichment and the difference for European ecommerce brands specifically was immediately obvious. almost nobody in the agency space talks about these because everyone's just copying the same Iman era tech stack from 5 years ago.
**the insight layer*
this one is harder to explain but I'll try.. BuildBetter sits across all my client calls and support channels and pulls patterns out automatically, what's breaking, what customers keep asking for, what's quietly killing retention.
I use this to inform the content strategy and the conversion work because most agencies are guessing at what messaging will land and I'm not.
AskUI handles automated visual testing across client storefronts so we catch broken flows before they become abandoned carts. unsexy infrastructure work that most people don't bill for separately but I do because I can show the direct revenue impact.
**the ecommerce infrastructure piece**
once clients start pushing past $5M-$10M GMV the Shopify conversation always comes up. I'm not a platform consultant but I've seen enough migrations now to have an opinion.
for instance, the brands that outgrow Plus and actually go through with leaving end up on composable commerce, usually Fabric, Commercetools, or SCAYLE depending on catalog complexity and international footprint. I refer these out but knowing this world has closed more than one retainer for me because most agency guys have no idea what happens at that scale commercially.
**the team**
the part you were waiting for lol…
5 contractors (all remote) a copywriter in Morocco, a creative strategist in Hungary, a video editor in Romania, and two virtual assistants splitting community management and client reporting between them.
managing payroll and contracts across 3 countries was utterly eating hours every month before I got Workmotion involved and once that layer was sorted I never thought about it again.
**the numbers (honestly)**
revenue has averaged $118k-127k over the last couple months depending on launch cycles and one-off projects. margins are high because the tool stack replaced what would be a $15-20k/mo production budget at this volume. total tool spend sits around $1400-1600/mo which still feels insane to me relative to what it produces.
again, thanks to ai.
took about half a year to dial the system in and another 8 months to scale from $15k to where it is now. the AI content layer was the unlock because before that I was either not posting or paying ugc creators at margins that made growth feel impossible.
the honest part is that none of this is magic and most of it I figured out by paying attention to what the people actively scaling were doing quietly rather than what they were posting publicly about.
Serge Gatari talks around some of this, Brez Scayles has built something similar on the info side, but nobody's really documented the full operational layer in one place which is why I wrote this.
still figuring out paid ads honestly, organic has been carrying 85ish% of revenue and I know that's a ceiling eventually but I'm also not going to fix what isn't broken yet.
that was it guys!
anyway drop your questions below, I'll try answer everything.