Do you want to hear a story about how I wasted close to £100,000 on marketing.
If you’ve followed my content for any period of time, you’ll know my pet topic is about trying to stop non-technology founders from wasting ALL of their money outsourcing their projects with software development agencies.
In my experience non-technology founders more often than not lose all their money, have to give up their dreams, and go back to their old jobs. Unlike most stories fetishising failures in entrepreneurial life, survivorship bias means we never here from those people.
And I was wondering, “how do I bring this story to life”, and I realised I have lived experience of this. So here we go.
A few years ago I decided to start up an IT support business. Having spent my whole life in IT, I thought this would be easy because I completely understood WHY businesses need IT.
So I would do “some marketing” and sometimes something would work – like at the start weirdly just spamming people on LinkedIn worked – but eventually I wanted to get something a bit more solid and so I found some people who would help me, specifically a business coach and a marketing single-person-agency-type person. I also hired a salesperson.
The total spend on all this over the course of about a year came to just under £100k. And the output from any of this activity was nothing. That close to six-figure spend resulted in zero new clients. In fact it was worse than that because the one client we did get through all that activity I ended up taking to court for non-payment.
What went wrong for me was exactly what goes wrong for non-technology founders.
Non-technology founders almost always waste their money when outsourcing their IT projects – but the agency is NOT acting in bad faith. Instead, OTHER FACTORS cause the failure.
And it’s the same here – the business coach and marketing person did work with me in good faith, but the advice they gave me was wrong because they DIDN’T DEAL WITH STARTUPS.
My problem in the IT support business was fundamental. I understood WHY businesses needed IT service, but I had NO IDEA how to position the offer, nor any idea how to execute a consistent marketing strategy even if I did. Plus, in that market there are structural problems of oversaturation, consolidation and commoditisation that NO ONE can start an IT support business from scratch anymore.
So everyone was wondering why this didn’t work, because from the coach’s side and the marketing person’s side, what they did for client tended to work, so why wasn’t it here. And from the employee’s side it wasn’t working, even though I kept telling them that it should. None of the four of us could see the problem was that all that was going to happen here was I was going to spend a life-changing some of money and end up with nothing but regrets and the odd opportunity to make YouTube videos about it.
Fundamentally, all of those problems came from the same source. None of us knew how to START a business, but all of us knew how to GROW a business. None of the help that I was buying in to bootstrap this business was stage appropriate. It was all resource used later on in a business’ life in order to grow it.
It’s this “lack of seeing eye to eye” that effectively guarantees that non-technology founders fail when working with agencies. It’s not at the agencies that are at fault, they’re not working in bad faith. They see an opportunity to help the founder and they take it, but they don’t realise that they don’t have an offer for the founder that is scale appropriate. Agencies purely exist to augment existing technical teams in existing businesses; they don’t exist to
So don’t be like me – if you’ve got some money to spend, make sure you are bringing in people who are scale appropriate.