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This transcript has not been edited — please listen to the podcast to confirm any statements made by speakers.
Alex Ford-Carther, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder of Sprinter:
In today's episode, we'll talk about our experience working with various marketing, and product agencies, including Sprinters parent company, Coder. We're going to break down the common problems that these agencies face and how software platforms like Sprinter can solve them.
So right when I started coder back in 2015, right, right, so we've been around a little bit. And obviously before that kind of, we weren't doing our own thing. In various kinds of service delivery models, you at your, your agency prior, and then I was kind of just doing some freelance consulting stuff. Kind of give, give the listeners a little bit of your background and kind of where you live in the agency world, and then kind of bring them full speed ahead of like, where we're at now, and kind of how we kind of are going.
Brian Shields, CEO & Co-Founder of Sprinter:
Yeah no, so I mean, like, my dad ran an ad agency back in like print and radio and my mom was a pretty graphic designer, my sister was an ad sales and stuff, we kind of came out of that space, like I started in debt and capital markets and banking. And like, you know, working with the technology teams that we had, like, we'd have like, a 24/7 development cycle with like two engineering teams in Ireland, India, and Poland. And, you know, we get an update, like once every quarter with like a powerpoint deck of like, new updates in the software, but like, by the time we got it, it was already out of date. Like it, there was no like, kind of streamlined communication. You know, later in my career, I was working at a marketing agency where I was flying around, like, you know, kind of putting out fires and like helping kind of, you know, course correct digital digital marketing strategies with clients like all across the country, a lot of the times they didn't have the internal technology team capacity to actually implement some of the changes that the marketing agencies would need them to do. And then just like when we were running our own agency, and we were working with, like startups and small businesses, and we were kind of like, we became that kind of outsource technology team. A lot of times, we'd see that they still were lacking on the marketing side, or the design side, or whatever. And so we were really kind of looking at how there were all these different tools for product management, you had all the troubles of the world, and all these different Kanban tools and stuff like that, but they didn't actually connect you with the talent you needed. And then you had these different kind of marketplaces where you could go and like look for a freelancer, but then you'd have to go to the different place to actually set up the tools to manage that freelancer and like, you'd have to do payments, you'd have to connect everything to like the other platform. And like, we really kind of saw that there was a lot of inefficiencies in the different models, if you're trying to just kind of like scramble together, like your own thing, whether you're a business owner, or like a founder on a budget, or just like an independent person, like working on your own project, kind of assembling the team that you needed and managing that team in an organized fashion in a way that you knew that you were going to maximize your budget and minimize your risk. And kind of doing that in a streamline tech transparent way, was kind of difficult with a lot of the tools that we saw that were out there.
Ford-Carther:
Yeah, I mean, it was a huge, huge barrier to entry. To be honest, you know, we've worked with plenty of startups and business owners, and if you're not tech savvy, like, you want to get into tech, or you want to start something like, there's no real like, pathway to do that,
Shields:
Yeah, there's still a lot of hand holding within the kind of traditional agency model. You know, that's what they're paying for, like they're paying for that kind of client experience. They want someone who can kind of either give him the white glove, but if you're trying to kind of roll up your sleeves and build it yourself, or like get something going, there's that definitely gap between like the hey, here's like the cheap freelancers and here's like the full agency kind of experience. And in that kind of sweet spot in that pricing. Like, there's a lot of great talent that's out there that like, could kind of be unlocked, if the economics of the agency game were a little bit more transparent, a little less opaque. And people could kind of understand a little bit more how to kind of take ownership of their own careers, so that they can kind of break down that kind of agency-client relationship and figure out where they kind of lay within that stack.
Ford-Carther:
One of the big things that I've, you know, started to code early on, for me it was aligning client expectations. With you know, we talked about maybe working with people who are not tech savvy, or maybe have never built software before. Maybe we don't quite understand the delivery cycle of a marketing plan or a marketing initiative, where we ended up having to kind of be that hand holder. You know, maybe kind of let's jump into like, how we solve for that. And kind of
where those pain points really live and kind of how we kind of try to eliminate those what was Sprinter and kind of really the basis of you know why we built Sprinter and the platform itself.
Shields:
Yeah, man, at the end of the day, what it comes down to is that there's too much friction in product development, right? Like, whether it's using a bunch of desperate tools that don't necessarily, you know, share data resources between them, or just communicating with different stakeholders that have different levels of technical expertise or design, aesthetic, different design, aesthetics, or anything like that. And so it was always about how to kind of optimize that client experience, making sure that we could manage their expectations, making sure that they knew when deliverables were gonna be due, when they would be delivered, and making sure that they could know you know, who's doing what and when, if it's on time, if it's on budget, and making sure that they were comfortable with where they were in their product development lifecycle. And a lot of times that was managing expectations with budgets. And a lot of times it was managing budgets with resources. And so for us, it was about how we can best capture this in a way that doesn't need to be a manual process in terms of the consistent communication and client reporting. So what we went about doing with renter was making sure that we could actually kind of, you know, architect some data visualizations to capture all the different inputs of who's doing what and when. So you know, what Tom, Dick and Harry are doing, and make sure that the client can see that all in real time without actually bothering the engineers or the designers themselves. So what we're able to do is kind of make sure that in a non intrusive way, we're able to provide that client with the transparency in terms of what's going on within their team. But at the same time, making sure that they know, kind of, you know, when things are gonna get delivered, and what's gonna happen next within the roadmap without necessarily that handholding, because we wanted to make sure that was more of an automated, kind of seamless experience for them. And so by connecting the end to end of the client dashboard experience, with the team management side of things, we're able to kind of make sure that that information is collected and displayed properly.
Ford-Carther:
Yeah, I know, we're not the only agency that dealt with a lot of the issues that we dealt with working with various clients. I'll give you some numbers here. So just in the United States alone, there's 6000, plus digital agencies, US advertising agencies bring in $60 billion per year. You know, so this is a huge market that we're trying to address, and one that as we've talked to various agency owners, we've partnered with quite a few groups and building out various projects, you know, in our experience. You know, talk to, you know, working with different agencies and kind of figuring out what some of their pain points are that kind of mirror some of ours and kind of as we started really noticing that, oh, like, hey, like, this is a problem that everybody deals with, like I shouldn't like, the client sends me something in a Google Doc. And I've got to translate that into tasks and deliverables for our team, like, talk to some of that, that we've kind of experienced, that's a really good, like, where it's like, you know, you're getting notes from a client in one form. And then your team's using a different tool. And all you're doing his copy pasting and like drag and dropping, and like for us being able to actually just quickly be able to make that into tasks and have it go right into a product roadmap and be assigned to somebody, something that we kind of addressed within the sprint or user experience, which I think was like a really good kind of solution for that specifically. But I do think that, yeah, just, you know, kind of across the board is making sure that everyone knows what's going on. Right. And so, you know, us being able to, like I said, capture the time tracking and making sure that goes right through with the payment flow is kind of a key point there.
Ford-Carther:
Well, we've talked to different agencies, and I know people I know, groups that literally have someone on staff that all their job is to do is take the reports and put them into PowerPoint.
Shields:
Yeah, and yeah, exactly. And like, I mean, that's what like, Yeah, I mean, why do account managers, right, how many managers do we need to put together power point decks of data that could just be pulled from Google Analytics?
Ford-Carther:
Sure.
Shields:
And so it's like the idea of building out these dashboards and making sure you're able to capture all the data inputs, you need to be able to run your business. Like, if you're a business owner, and you're working with like a modern technology stack, you should feel like you have a Captain Kirk, on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, like you should have everything in front of you, you know, just like pull it up on screen, like he got it, and you're good to go. And I think that too many businesses are still being run in an analog fashion. So it kind of goes back to your point in terms of your question about, like the age working with other agencies, right. I think that the general trend in the US economy and really across the western world is that more and more people are taking sovereignty over their own career. And more and more people are kind of building their own boutique agencies and being able to collaborate the people that like working with because turns out that the best thing about working for yourself is that you can fire the guy that you sit next to, right and I think that a lot of people want to take a little bit more ownership over what they're doing with their career. And so people are able to specialize, whether you're a design group, a video group or an animation studio. Or WordPress, or web flow group, right. Maybe we're a Rails shop. I think that being able to kind of, you know, collaborate across agencies is kind of what makes the space so fascinating and like what we're kind of seeing and like the kind of you know, the old world, you know, model is that you kind of see this conglomerate growth right. Really all you got that they all roll up to like a couple of big, like super agencies, right and you get like the pupusas group and like I don't have like the alternatives that are out there. And I think that you're gonna see that not necessarily be the model going forward, I think you're gonna see it a little bit more a more fist a little bit more decentralized. But I think that you're gonna still see a lot of the agencies kind of sharing common tools and working together and sharing resources in a way that they're not going to be a single balance sheet, honestly, in a single business, but they're still going to be able to work together in a way that they weren't really able to do with, you know, the early iterations of the internet.
Ford-Carther:
I mean, that's why I think Sprinter and in the way we designed it so important, like, I think we're building the infrastructure for some of the smaller, smaller groups, or just maybe people who are at an agency right now that want to, like jump out on their own, like, we've built the infrastructure to allow someone to do what we did, and we eliminated some of that learning curve, and dependency of like, setting up all these different solutions and systems and kind of put it into one one tool that, you know, we think is going to be important. And as far as kind of that collaboration component with, with agencies and different providers across the network.
You know, we, you know, by virtue of being in the co working space that we were in, when we started our business, and, you know, we went to a we were walking out and someone was having a networking event as the guy that happened to go to high school with and we ended up doing, you know, a couple six figure deals with with that group based on that network effect. And so, by establishing what we're doing with the community, the network, we think that we can, you know, create those same kind of connections amongst the community as we as we grow, and as the network grows, it's gonna allow people to collaborate and then obviously, use use the software to do that,
Shields:
Like you said, I mean, like, we kind of built it not only for people that are existing agency owners, that might want to go and kind of, you know, start their own shop. And so it's kind of like, the, I've always loved the old Steve Jobs quote, of like, it's more fun to be a pirate and to join the Navy, right? And so it's like, well, we want to go to all the guys in the Navy and say, Hey, we can give you your own ship. Sure, right. And then you can sit wherever you want, if you want to sell on your own if that's fine. But if you want to join, like our fleet, like come join. And the idea of giving people the keys to their own freedom, right. And so the idea of like, hey, look, if you're a designer, and you want to run your own agency, it's a huge learning curve and a huge pain in the ass. And like, you've probably studied design in that business, you don't know finance, or marketing. And now you have to do your own sales. And like, everyone's got to do all that stuff together, as opposed to like, kind of like, going like taking a page from history big kind of building it up more of like, kind of like a techno guild type situation where it's like, hey, look like we can all kind of work on this stuff together. Everyone can have their own little groups in their own boutiques, but then like when you want to be able to kind of scale up and down becomes an issue, right? Like, we talked about something like the agency problems that we faced with, you know, growth is hard to handle as an agency owner, right? So it's like, okay, now all of a sudden, you're at capacity, right? So if things are going great, and now you it's kind of like an embarrassment of riches, you're like, “Okay, now I got this new clients, I've got this funnel, I'm trying to bring my bring in my new business, but I gotta bring on salespeople, I gotta bring in new designers, I gotta bring a new product managers and engineers, just a service contract.” And so kind of like the idea with Sprinter was being able to kind of bring together that, you know, that, like you said, the network effects of like those agency relationships onto a single platform where every individual agency can kind of have liquid human capacity, right. So like, you can basically scale up and down. So if you have a new client, you need to bring out a few more people, you can kind of tap the stable of talent that's in the network. Or if you need to, you know, you have excess capacity in your agency, and you don't want your people to get furloughed, you want to make sure that they're working, hey, we can kind of like lend them out to go play for another team. And I think that the idea of keeping that all within the same kind of, you know, the same network guidelines and rules as a membership model, is really kind of what makes Sprinter really attractive.
Ford-Carther:
Yeah, when we first started out, like our whole team was in house. And we definitely dealt with some of those pain points of, hey, like, we got really busy, we need to hire new people. And then they'd finish the project-
Shields:
when we need more space. You know, it's like, so just, it's, it's the problems of success compound, right. And so the idea of being able to make it so that people, you can eliminate the real estate constrictions by being distributed, right, but you can't eliminate the capacity constrictions. And so being able to make sure that you're able to tap that wider talent base is pretty key. And so being able to make sure that, okay, well, who is this talent where they work? And how can I trust them? How can we do this in a membership model? Where like the community police's itself, how can we do this in a way that everyone's agreeing to the same terms, that same rules, the same kind of guidelines and regulations, and make sure that all the payments are flowing through in a way that no one's getting, you know, like screwed around by banking fees and credit card transaction fees,
Ford-Carther:
or just clients not wanting to pay.
Shields:
And if you're, if you're working within a network of agencies, right, where like, it's pretty common for people that aren't in the agency space to be like, okay, one agency gets the client, and then they've got like two subcontracted agencies that have hired a freelancer like to kind of fulfill the engagement. So it's like everyone's got, you know, it's markups all the way up. And then you everyone's waiting on, you know, upstream deliverables from the other groups, right. And so it's like bringing that all together in a streamlined place where the efficiency and the waste is gone. The communication is fluid. And the reporting is transparent, and was really kind of like one of the key innovations we want to solve.
Ford-Carther:
Yeah, definitely, as we grew our business, and then obviously started building the foundation of Sprinter, like we switched from an in house team to more of a network model. And, obviously, the capacity issue went by the wayside, and that became negligible. And then but at that point, new problems arise in, you know, working cross borders, cross time zones, cross language barriers, those new problems kind of popped up. And so some of the stuff that we built into sprint, they're kind of solved for that as well. So, you know, whoever your model is, whether it's you got an in house team, and you need to, you know, scale up quickly, or offload some of your talent or you use, you know, a partner network where you kind of bill out as necessarily, I think we've kind of tried to account for that and what we're building and kind of, you know, take advantage of some of the tools and experience that we've had doing that and kind of built that into our software.