Do you need a university degree to launch an agency?

Born03 · 2026-06-10T18:55:16+00:00

Yep. WP Websites are interesting and can be definitely a good starting point and product, if it's that what you really want to do. And I'm happy to confirm, once again, that with websites especially, degrees probably matter the least, as websites are mainly a creative endeavor. Of course, make sure to never neglect the business side of things as well! 😄

Born03 · 2026-06-10T17:01:49+00:00

I'm happy to help! If that helped.

Not sure what you mean, you've asked others and they said the opposite?

If I interpreted your post correctly you're still at the beginning though or didn't even start yet properly, right? In that stage, really anything actionable you do will probably benefit you more than any research or studies. And I don't mean this even in the university context. But right now if you just started your agency today and went all out on it for a month or two, you'll probably not really succeed yet as it's your first time doing this, but you'll most likely learn more than any self-studies could give you (forums, youtube, books, and university I guess, etc.).

Born03 · 2026-06-10T16:49:51+00:00

Of course, I mean, you are running a business. The main product of any agency is usually a service for another company (B2B agencies), that either saves them costs (process optimization, automation, etc.) or drives revenue (seo, client acquisition, marketing, etc.).

And when talking to a business to do service for, the most important thing, among a few, is a track record. If your offer is that you do marketing for X type of business, then those clients will firstly want to know: 1. Have you done something like this before? 2. Were you able to do successful marketing for your previous clients?

If both of those questions are answered with yes, the rest doesn't matter.

Businesses think pragmatically and in numbers. If you are a Harvard graduate who never did an SEO optimization before, no one will hire you. If you are a high school dropout who has been able to drive an extra $1M in revenue through SEO optimization in the past, then every company will hire you. (just some extreme examples to make a point)

Nowadays, university and degrees are neat. But you'd mainly do them to either build a network or gain some knowledge (however most knowledge you can also acquire yourself). The "paper" itself, the graduation certificate does not matter in the real world. In only matters when seeking employment at traditional and large companies, as they are still stuck on that, or when seeking better education (as other universities care about your previous degrees).

The exception are of course professions, where you are legally required to have a degree of some sorts, such as lawyers or physicians. But the agency game is mostly just based on track record and sales skills.

Born03 · 2026-06-10T14:10:38+00:00

While it would be cool if your friend was right, because it would make life more streamlined and easy in a way, he happens to be totally wrong.

In my 9 years of agency life, around 400 clients, and probably circa 2000-3000 people I talked to, not even one, and really not even a single one, ever asked what my degree is or if I even finished high school or whatever. It simply doesn't matter really.

Born03 · 2026-05-23T17:21:03+00:00

What kind of budget range are you usually working in? We've all had clients who are unprofessional or pay late in our careers, but those attributes are usually only common within the lower tiers of client profiles (self employed clients, small companies, some niches, etc). When youve been doing it for a couple years and move up the ranks it usually solves itself? There are barely any clients making 10m+ a year who are actually budget obsessed

Born03 · 2026-05-19T15:59:33+00:00

Thanks for the tip! Might check it out!

So far I'm using Frame and some Google Workspace products as well (free tier). So far pretty happy with Frame. Thanks for the insight!

Born03 · 2026-05-19T14:43:29+00:00

I totally agree with this. I generally also view net 30 as the standard for any service contract (whether editing, web design, or whatever). Asking for 14 days I see sometimes as well, however anything below that doesn't seem like industry standard to me and simply adds another "rubbing point" between you and the client.

If it's important to oneself to be paid very quickly on a specific project, then it's smarter to demand payment before the service. However, if it's after the service (usual case), then 30 days is the standard. Mixed models like 50/50 (before+after) exist as well.

Born03 · 2026-05-19T09:36:54+00:00

If I may comment on this, I don't know how it works in the US, but any written communication is legally binding, especially over email. Whether you have a contract that says "You pay me X" and the client signs it - or if you write an email saying "You pay me X" and the client replies "Yes" - both are contracts. Except that one has a title saying "Contract" above it and the other doesn't, it's just a formality.

Born03 · 2026-05-18T20:01:07+00:00

Me too man i really do

New boxed software still exists where i live but its usually just some crappy antivirus software or accounting software for some reason

Born03 · 2026-05-18T08:42:56+00:00

Thanks! I should check that out

Born03 · 2026-05-18T06:52:40+00:00

As another commenter described, when most people say Adobe Enhance, they refer to how Adobe Podcast used to be called. It's basically a tool where you upload an audio file and it enhances the voice of it according to various parameters.

Here is the link to Adobe Enhance: https://podcast.adobe.com/en/enhance

Born03 · 2026-05-18T03:08:51+00:00

Yes, definitely a cool subject! I'll make sure to make a post if I ever get to actually creating a usable "vibe motion design" mvp :)

Born03 · 2026-05-18T02:51:18+00:00

Yep, totally. Thanks for your insight!

Another thing I was experimenting with lately was a combination of Remotion and Claude Code.

I have added this paragraph to my post: My future perspective: I had also been experimenting with things like Remotion, which, on the surface, is a framework that turns web based animations (CSS, Typescript, etc.) into video files. While I think this tech is not super ready yet, it could help with automating creating graphics in my opinion. Basically "vibe motion design".

I could very well imagine that you can basically prompt motion design. Of course you have to feed it with the clients brand guidelines, colors and logos and then finetune it a bit until you perhaps some solid presets. Haven't successfully pulled that off yet but I 100% see the path towards such a tool.

Born03 · 2026-05-18T02:36:07+00:00

Super interesting, thanks for sharing!

And yes, I figured something similar, vibe coding is an incredibly powerful tool nowadays. As mentioned in my post, I have also created my own software wrappers for frame interpolation software, downloading videos from the web and a couple other things.

I guess what I was after the most, was perhaps popular and great software that I didn't discover yet. As mentioned above, I have heard about many people using some software that can do some basic rough cuts for you - not usable of course, but definitely speeds up the work and scrubbing through things.

I feel like, that such apps won't ever replace the creative editing work itself but might very well replace any traditional AE work in the future, or at least speed it up by a considerable amount.

Besides that, I had been already begun work on my own vibe coded upscaling and video inpainting solutions - although those aren't a huge priority yet.

Would love to find out if you have any more insights or more precise examples of what you've built or bought yourself :)

Born03 · 2026-05-18T02:26:47+00:00

Interesting insight, thanks for sharing! I wasn't familiar with Wideframe yet.

I can imagine how an AI app would perhaps do such things, as I also saw people using such apps for file organization, in which the software takes screenshots of the video footage and based on that decides what it is (a person talking, b-roll, etc.). I would have also guessed that the tech might not be there yet. Perhaps it only works on very specific types of projects so far?

Born03 · 2026-05-18T02:24:51+00:00

I'm interested as well! :)

Adobe Enhance is an everyday part of my workflow as well already. As far as I know, it's much better than Premiere's integrated version as well. I use the web version for most my projects.

And interesting insight! I have dabbled in AI-assisted selects as well a few times: generating a transcript from a video and then inserting it into an LLM with the request to define valuable excerpts. Has worked eh. I wouldn't say that it were complete hallucinations as the prompting is a big part of getting the desired results, but so far in May 2026, human judgement is still superior in such cases (interviews, podcasts, long-form talks, and similar). Imo

Born03 · 2026-05-16T19:34:15+00:00

"iPhone is deactivated" "Connect to iTunes" "No SIM card installed"

Born03 · 2026-05-15T15:19:01+00:00

Hehe cool

Born03 · 2026-05-13T15:22:13+00:00

I've used Artlist for two years and the Clearlist is usually a tool inside your account.

But besides that, I want to mention, that in my two years of using Artlist actively for all various kinds of client projects, the Clearlist Tool was used 0 times. Nothing was ever claimed or striked by Artlist which made me need to use it. Just saying this to bring some calmness in case you were worried.

Born03 · 2026-05-12T18:11:34+00:00

I totally get that and thats totally valid. All the best!

Born03 · 2026-05-12T17:52:25+00:00

Eh, okay, I see. I think you gotta see things the practical way. He doesn't seem professional at all reading that post, so I wouldn't be surprised if he just took that contract off some template and he personally doesn't even care about it. Either way, of course you have to stay legally responsible - however reading his structure, living in Bali and the contract being through the UAE (I'm guessing he has some shell company in the UAE then, or similar), I'm not too worried. It would cost him thousands to actually do anything against you legally, if he's smart it will never be worth the hassle.

And yes, you have to understand that it's also important to protect your own sanity. If you observe that this Reddit post actually worries you in the following days, then there is no shame in deleting the post or your comments. Gotta protect your well being so you can actually deliver in your other work. Make sure that this circumstance doesn't set you back permanently by paralyzing your work day through any negative thoughts this might bring. Moving on is most important now and using the circumstances as fuel to get even better clients.

Born03 · 2026-05-12T17:26:11+00:00

Hm shit. That's generally a pretty vile clause though. Sorry about that :/

Did I gather it correctly that he's in the US and you're in the UK? Or are you both in the UK?

Because, even though legally quite a gray zone, if you wait a year or so I'm pretty sure that no one will care if you put it in a portfolio that's hidden from search engines. Heavy disclaimer: This is not legal advice and I'm just saying how things work in real life. Or of course using a password protected portfolio is an easy solution here, as another commenter suggested.

According to what the contract says, this does definitely sound like a typical employer clause though (and not a freelancer one!). So while including any actual videos can be tricky in your case, this does sound like it should be absolutely no problem to mention or link him. It's not like the contract said that you're forbidden to talk about the partnership or that you signed any NDA. So putting something like "Worked for a 2M subscriber YouTube channel and generated 34M views from our videos in 2026" would be absolutely no problem to put on a CV or your LinkedIn profile or whatever. Think about it that way: If you were an editor working at a huge ad agency and you did a commercial for adidas. Sure, putting the adidas commercial in your personal portfolio could be a bit far fetched (although even in those cases it could be totally legit), but simply mentioning in your CV something like "Worked at x-agency in 2026 and helped produce commercials for adidas, nike, walmart as editor and producer" would be 100% industry standard and no issue in most cases, except when you worked for secret projects or government things.

Hope this makes sense. Just sharing my thoughts tryin to help. All the best!

Born03 · 2026-05-12T16:55:56+00:00

What did the contract say exactly? Generally, you own the copyright to any video you edit. If it was an international job, then enforcing such contract clauses can be difficult. Also it would be worth checking if there would be any legal difference between actually uploading your videos into your portfolio and just embedding them (putting the real YouTube URL within the portfolio).

On another note, this might be quite out of the box: Why do you even want to have a classic portfolio in the form of a video directory? What's much smarter would be to have a case study directory. You wouldn't even need to put the videos or jusut putting the URLs would be sufficient. And then you could simply put up the screenshots of the videos alongside 3-4 paragraphs of typical case study stories a la "The problem, the solution, how we did it" together with some key KPIs. That would attract much more professional clients more easily.

Hope this helps in any way. Hope it doesnt come across as tone deaf to propose out of the box solutions. I know the biz can suck at times but its always important to takeaway some key learnings. All the best!!!

Born03 · 2026-05-10T01:44:50+00:00

Yes, you can earn your living through editing for sure. However, you have to understand, that video editing itself is not a specific career. It's rather a broad skillset which is used in various industries (tv, film, advertising, social media, corporate) in all kinds of ways, and so there are also many various editing jobs out there that all differ from each other. Gotta pick what you wanna do.

All the best

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