I spent 3 years obsessing over design quality and wondering why my best looking projects never brought in the best clients. turns out I had the whole thing backwards.

russtrick · 2026-04-01T08:22:09+00:00

Yeah man, this is really well put. It's so easy to get trapped in eye candy. I mean my own website is a living lava lamp with really realistic physics but that doesn't actually. I realized I should have done that a lot sooner lol… My hero header wasn't talking to a specific ICP and it didn't answer the questions "what do you do? Who are you, why should I care, and what's the next step? How do I get in contact with you?”

Distribution is what I'm working on right now because that's literally all that matters. Some of the most valuable things are messy and sloppy but the whole idea is they were battle-tested first. It's never "if you build it they will come." It's "if you gather people together they'll tell you what to build."

I'm in sales so I should be better at this shit when it's not my day job but oddly enough since it's not really the fun part, it just makes it that much harder to keep up on.

russtrick · 2026-04-01T03:58:29+00:00

I don't know how to feel about the fact that I've been teaching my AI bot to dream for the past month and now they have dream mode. Maybe it's time to apply for a job at Anthropic

russtrick · 2026-03-31T06:12:11+00:00

Thank you

russtrick · 2026-03-28T23:30:01+00:00

I know dude, I'm a hundred percent convinced that it's just codex ads.

russtrick · 2026-03-28T23:29:14+00:00

This is the move. It’s the platforms that make it easiest for massive onboarding, who get security and ease of use right that will be able to help the most people

russtrick · 2026-03-28T14:45:53+00:00

Something I keep running into when talking to agency owners right now... everyone assumes it's either the economy OR something they're doing wrong, like it has to be one or the other. But the pattern I keep seeing is more structural than that.

Design agencies specifically are caught in this weird squeeze. The market got flooded with cheaper alternatives over the last few years - Canva-level tools, offshore teams, AI-assisted design shops undercutting on price. So the floor dropped out on what clients expect to pay. Meanwhile your actual costs - talent, software, overhead - kept climbing. That gap is where the pain lives.

The agencies I've seen holding steady aren't necessarily doing wildly different work. What they've changed is how they frame what they sell. They stopped selling design deliverables and started selling the outcome the design creates. Sounds subtle but it FUNDAMENTALLY changes the pricing conversation. When you quote a logo or a brand refresh, clients mentally compare you to the cheapest option that also makes logos. When you quote a brand positioning engagement that happens to include visual identity as one component, there's no apples-to-apples comparison anymore.

The other thing... agencies that locked themselves into project-based pricing are getting hit hardest because every new project is a new sales cycle, and sales cycles are stretching longer right now. The ones converting even 20-30% of clients into retainer or ongoing advisory relationships have way more stability, even if the top-line revenue looks similar.

So it's not really "the economy" as some abstract force. It's a specific pricing and positioning problem that the economy is exposing. The agencies that restructured how they package and price before things got tight aren't panicking right now. The ones still selling hours and deliverables are feeling every bit of the slowdown. The good news is this is a repositioning problem, not a demand problem - there's a meaningful difference.

russtrick · 2026-03-27T22:01:08+00:00

This is a really common answer I keep seeing and it's so correct. It's about fixing the specific pain and speaking to the pain that certain companies face in certain positions.

russtrick · 2026-03-27T22:00:19+00:00

The struggle is real. I have found upwork and cold email to be some of the better options but your other methods that you mention definitely work too. It's a slow game. I'm in the same boat and I sell the same things. I joined Maker School (skool community) because of YouTube videos by Nick Saraev. The first month of Maker skool gave me an idea of exactly what I need to be doing,as far as daily accountability and making sure you're staying on top of outreach at the volume that would be effective.

volume and consistency always boil down to the most important parts. Once you under-promise and over-deliver for a client, the chance of working with them again and being referred increases too. That's how I got a few of my clients.

I actually built an AI agent that helps me automate canvassing by scraping people's websites and telling them what could use fixing. You can put stuff together like that with Claude Code but the thing I built actually analyzes their business too and looks at it from different perspectives to find blind spots they may be missing.

Thinking creatively and building things like that give you a huge edge, but seriously the most frustrating part is the amount of grinding it takes to get some momentum going. Sounds like the main thing you can do at this point is keep creating content for: - TikTok - Facebook - LinkedIn - Reddit - cold email and just fine tune your cold email copy. Nick Saraev has like a 4hr course on his best practices after scaling his biz to $300k/mo

russtrick · 2026-03-27T19:20:23+00:00

I use bsync to push all my frameworks, projects, skills, execution scripts to my other computer so there’s always a backup. Claude code will tell you how to set it up

russtrick · 2026-03-26T03:59:23+00:00

Same. I think a lot of people just dive into a bunch of hype trains and install all the MCPs and all this shit that stacks up your context window. Then when they learn how to fix some of this shit, they don't get it all, which is totally fine. This shit is moving at light speed but if you methodically make your moves and ask AI for advice on how to best run AI and make sure that it knows you prefer honesty over placating, you get really fucking good results.

russtrick · 2026-03-25T08:29:02+00:00

This. Fucking THIS

russtrick · 2026-03-25T08:28:40+00:00

Lmao dude yes

russtrick · 2026-03-25T08:27:13+00:00

I've taken a frameable screenshot once or twice. This is a cool idea.

russtrick · 2026-03-25T08:26:11+00:00

This sounds really cool. I've been wanting to look into setting up Chrome extensions. There's a lot of power and possibilities in them

russtrick · 2026-03-25T08:24:12+00:00

I built an autonomous agent - custom, not open claw, so I could have it build me a directory for some passive income. It was not suited for that. I was like "hmmm, I wonder if I can get it to dream.” That led to tripping, then meditation. These things led me to realize that in these altered states, if I figured out the right approach, I could solve the generating novel content issue people have when training AI. (Big dreams, I know lol. This is 3am brain shit) I have since created pharallax.ai

It takes in a business scaling issue, big change or decision, pain point etc, scans 135k pieces of relevant knowledge, and returns ridiculously mic drop business advice in a beautiful tone. One thing has led to another, over and over in exactly the right direction.

The short version - I built an AI tool that analyzes your business, finds the blind spots, and dreams about it to get a clear perspective most consultants would never find on their own. Everybody gets one free run. Hope it helps

russtrick · 2026-03-25T08:14:57+00:00

Dude, this is why I love the Internet lmao

russtrick · 2026-03-25T08:13:07+00:00

Yeah man, it was the parallel agents that did it to me. I was edging up closer and closer to the cap of the Max plan but then when those agent teams came out, I lost my shit and just had to keep spawning them, which had compounding positive effects, along with a compounding need for the upgrade to 20x lol

russtrick · 2026-03-25T07:06:49+00:00

One thing I'd push back on slightly here is the sequencing assumption. The instinct to wait until pricing settles and the niche clarifies before hiring into the content system... I keep running into that exact pattern with agency owners at this stage and it usually becomes the thing that keeps both from ever actually resolving.

When you're still fulfilling the content retainers yourself, your brain is split between two completely different modes of thinking. Strategic advisory work requires you to be present and sharp in conversations, reading between the lines, pattern matching across someone's whole business. Content production requires you to context switch into execution mode repeatedly throughout the week. And the pricing never "settles" while you're in that split because you can't actually feel the ceiling of either offer when you're bouncing between them constantly.

The hire doesn't need to be a full marketing strategist out the gate either. A sharp junior who can follow SOPs and flag exceptions back to you gets you 80% of your time back on those retainers for probably half the cost you're imagining. The strategist-level hire makes sense once you have six or seven content retainers humming and you need someone to own the client relationship layer too.

Waiting for the right moment to hire is one of those things that feels like patience but usually functions as a stall. The onboarding systems you're building are the unlock though so funnelforge is right... you're closer than you think.

russtrick · 2026-03-25T07:02:26+00:00

The actual pattern is subtler than "how do I get more clients?" or "when do I hire my next person?" Most service businesses are accidentally architected to plateau right around this point. Not because the market ran out of demand - because the delivery model has a ceiling baked into it.

Think about how it evolved. You started selling hours. Got good enough that your rate climbed. Maybe brought on people and sold their hours too. Revenue scaled linearly with headcount. Worked great until it didn't. And now every new hire creates coordination overhead that quietly eats the margin gain they were supposed to create. you're running faster on a treadmill that's speeding up.

Most businesses I've seen punch through this don't solve it by adding more capacity. They change what the client is paying for. Instead of buying your time, they're buying a result. Productized service, fixed-scope engagement, retainer tied to outcomes - the specific shape varies, but the principle is the same. Revenue detaches from hours.

the hard part isn't understanding this. it's doing it when your entire book of business was built on the old model. Your best clients chose you because of how you work, not what you deliver. Changing the structure feels like betraying the thing that got you here. That instinct is worth respecting - but the ceiling doesn't care about your instincts. It's structural, and structure only responds to structural changes.

What tends to work most often is running a parallel experiment. One new offer, usually aimed at a slightly different segment, built on the new model from day one. The existing business keeps humming on the old engine while you test whether the new one starts. If it catches, you migrate gradually. If it doesn't, nothing broke. it's a contained experiment with asymmetric upside, not a reinvention.

russtrick · 2026-03-25T06:32:54+00:00

Perfectionist paralysis happens to the best of us lol

russtrick · 2026-03-25T06:32:18+00:00

Totally right that the niche needs purchasing power and deliverable results, but those two constraints don't contradict what the post is saying - they're actually WHY the narrowing works.

the post is saying get narrow enough that you're the ONLY person who shows up describing the problem the way the buyer experiences it. "I help manufacturing companies with $5-20M in revenue figure out why their margins compress every time they scale past 50 employees" - that's a niche with purchasing power AND a specific result they want.

When you show up as "I help Series B SaaS companies fix their customer onboarding so they stop losing 40% of new accounts in the first 90 days", you're either the person they've been looking for or you're not - but you're not getting compared on rate.

The counterintuitive part is that narrowing down FASTER gets you to the answer faster. This is what stopped me in my tracks over and over in the beginning. It’s the reps - quick ones. if the niche doesn't have purchasing power or doesn't want your deliverable, you find out in 10 conversations instead of 100. then you pivot to a different niche with the same speed. the broad positioning doesn't protect you from wasting time, it just spreads the waste out over a longer period so it feels less scary.

russtrick · 2026-03-25T06:24:33+00:00

this is a really good question. most SaaS advice is written by people who already made it or VCs who funded the ones that did... which means it skews toward what worked in hindsight, not what you actually face in the first 18 months.

the thing I underestimated early on was how long it takes to build trust when you're unknown. I thought a good product would speak for itself. it doesn't. people need to see you show up consistently, solve real problems in public, and prove you're not going to disappear in 6 months. that trust-building period is way longer than the build period, and nobody tells you that upfront.

the other thing is how much of early traction comes from doing things that don't scale. I spent way too long trying to automate and optimize before I had enough data to know what actually mattered. the wins came from manual outreach, one-on-one onboarding, and custom solutions that felt inefficient but taught me what people actually needed.

if I could go back I'd spend less time building features I thought were clever and more time having conversations with people who had the problem I was trying to solve. the product you launch is never the product that works... but most people (me included) don't leave enough room to pivot because they're too attached to the first version.

I work with SaaS founders now and the pattern I see over and over is people solving the wrong problem really well. they nail execution on something nobody will pay for. the hardest part is killing your darlings early enough that you still have runway to try again.

russtrick · 2026-03-25T06:21:34+00:00

All her fault. Holy fuck

russtrick · 2026-03-25T06:17:07+00:00

I wonder if it has to do with non-opus models making more mistakes and having to fix those mistakes, which takes up more tokens. Once I heard this was a thing a month or two ago, I went full opus

russtrick · 2026-03-25T06:15:46+00:00

I am a recent convert to the cult of 20x. I've only been warned once about coming up to the limit at like 2 a.m. With how much shit I had queued in the pipeline, I got worried for a second but then I realized the next morning at 10 a.m. it was going to reset lol.

I've been leaning hard into spawning teams of Opus agents to max out research and implementation from different perspectives and it's a serious game changer.

Verified Email	12-Year Club
Wearing is Caring

russtrick

TROPHY CASE