Automating Your Agency and Managing Client Approvals with Jimmy Rose of Content Snare

Gray MacKenzie hosted. His guest, Jimmy Rose (James on LinkedIn), co-founded Content Snare, a tool agencies and web designers use to collect content from clients. Jimmy also runs the Agency Highway podcast, the Web Business Weekly newsletter, and a Zapier course. After the Content Snare backstory, Gray spent much of the episode on a question he was wrestling with at ZenPilot: can workflow automation be productized, or does it have to stay hourly consulting?

Every agency Jimmy interviewed had the same problem

It’s a software product, predominantly used by marketing agencies and web designers to get content from clients, because I don’t think I’ve spoken to an agency who has said, oh yeah, we’ve got a great process for getting content, it works every time. It’s a problem that basically every agency has, and it exists because we had the problem too.

(Listen at 1:14)

Jimmy didn’t set out to build it. While he still ran an agency he sat down with local agency owners to pitch a briefing tool and asked each one to walk through their process and “tell me about what sucks.” Nearly every one of them talked about getting content and information from clients. Content Snare is the third software product he and his business partner have built. The second, Silver Siphon, pushed Stripe transactions into Xero and was later sold. Before that, Jimmy was a control systems engineer automating mining equipment with code.

The Zapier course started with 80 pre-sales

Gray asked when automation went from something Jimmy did for himself to something he taught. Jimmy called it a “massive pet hate” to watch people do work they don’t need to do, and he kept saying so. Eventually they asked him to show them.

He said, I will pay you to teach me how to use Zapier. And I went, nah, you won’t, you’re full of it. Everyone says things like that until the credit card’s on the line… But eventually I ended up doing a pre-launch and I think I got about 80 sales before it even existed.

(Listen at 8:52)

He calls the course a side gig. Many buyers are freelancers and agencies adding automation as a service.

Fixed pricing automation work is hard, so pad the price

Gray laid out his problem: ZenPilot was good at getting agencies set up in ClickUp, there was a layer of workflow automation above that they weren’t touching, and every automation consultant he’d met charged hourly and too little. Could it be productized?

If someone comes to me and they want to automate something, it is really hard to fix price, because they’ll probably be using a different project management system… One guy came to me with Salesforce. I’m like, I’ve literally never even seen inside Salesforce, but we did a project, and he just pays me hourly consulting and I just put a decent rate on it, like 250 or something, and then it becomes worthwhile.

(Listen at 13:31)

The alternative he’s tried comes from interviewing Jonathan Stark about value-based pricing on Agency Highway.

I was like, this is probably going to take me a few hours, but I’m just going to like two and a half times what I think it’s going to be in hours. And what happens is it encourages me to do a really good job. And when something comes up, which it will, because something always happens in automation… it’s not a big problem to spend an hour and a half on it, because you’ve just put this bigger price tag on it.

(Listen at 15:13)

Specialize, and expect hiring to be the hard part

Jimmy thought an agency focus would make productizing easier: agencies run a predictable subset of tools, so over time you learn how long each integration takes and can price it. Try to automate anything for anyone and, in his words, “you’re definitely going to struggle to productize.” The bigger constraint is people.

I don’t know how I would hire someone to help me with automation because it’s not just knowing how to use Zapier, it’s knowing a general idea of how databases work… Knowing how all these things work is kind of necessary to be able to integrate things. And that’s a hard person to find. That’s someone that’s been running a business for five plus years.

(Listen at 16:25)

Gray agreed. Plenty of consultants know ClickUp inside and out; what’s hard to copy is knowing how an agency ought to be structured in the first place.

Marketing a problem people don’t know they have

Asked about 2021 plans, Jimmy said marketing has been the bane of their existence. Collecting content badly is so normal that most agencies never think of it as solvable.

A lot of people don’t really click and go, oh my God, yeah, I didn’t know there was a better way to get content other than throwing Google Drive links at people and sending them emails. It’s just what people do… Something like 80% of our trial signups are from people just searching for Content Snare. So I have no idea what to focus on.

(Listen at 25:42)

The branded searches mostly trace back to referrals and Facebook group threads where someone finally snaps about clients not sending content. What’s starting to work is content: turning popular podcast episodes into posts and writing for what people search.

Gray also plugged Web Business Weekly (issue 106 went out the day they recorded) and asked how it’s assembled. Jimmy reads every article himself through Feedly, so the picks stay his, and a Push by Zapier browser extension sends each one to his socials or into an RSS feed that Revue reads, where he drags the links into newsletter categories. His tip for Gray’s Slack discovery channel: react with a custom emoji, have Zapier watch for it, and roll those messages into a feed. He also runs TextExpander snippets for everything from his email sign-off to full podcast guest emails, and recommends Integromat (now Make) once you’ve outgrown Zapier: more powerful, harder to use. Links: contentsnare.com/weekly and jimmyrose.me.