Then convenience fees. Chris has paid agencies that pass the card fee on to the client, and he thinks Wayfront should let agencies do the same. Alex would see that fee on a $300 checkout and close the tab. Chris says if a fee is all it takes to lose a prospect, they didn't want the service enough, since buyers rarely compare near-identical agencies and business purchases usually go on the company card. We also hit Chris remembering PayPal once banning fee pass-throughs, Alex flagging possible EU rules, and commodity services like link building where people do price shop.

We also get into AI raising the baseline for agency work, a Wayfront agent clients could text on WhatsApp or iMessage to create orders and tickets, the tiny apps we build for ourselves with AI, Chris's demo calls and the demo workspace, and Wayfront becoming a registered trademark (SPP never could have been). Plus Alex's break in Malaysia, Chris programming his KNX garden lights with AI instead of paying for the installer software, Claude tracking down Alex's PC crashes, about $1,000 of API-equivalent usage in 30 days, and Jev, a yes/no model Chris is testing for spam tickets and about 10x faster agent navigation.

No Custom Work is Chris and Alex from Wayfront, the client portal software for agencies selling repeatable productized services. New episodes every Wednesday.

Try Wayfront free for 14 days, no credit card required: https://wayfront.com/trial

Then lead gen. AI tools that find leads, call them and book the meeting, inbox pitches promising 50 leads a month, and why big promises fall flat without a believable mechanism behind them. Alex hangs up on every cold call, Chris says it depends on how aware the buyer already is, and we get into the two ways a pitch misses, all promise and no mechanism or all features and no benefit.

We also get into Chris prepping his first BrightonSEO talk and how new speakers start in smaller rooms, building a Google Knowledge Graph entity so Google and AI tools know who you are, how easy LLMs are to game, and GEO as a way for SEO agencies to raise prices. Plus customers sending AI-written support tickets, Chris hiring a running coach after two years of relying on AI while Alex sticks with his AI coach at day 66, and Opusfived, the parody where Claude can't change one button's color.

No Custom Work is Chris and Alex from Wayfront, the client portal software for agencies selling repeatable productized services. New episodes every Wednesday.

Try Wayfront free for 14 days, no credit card required: https://wayfront.com/trial

The second half gets into the AI question every agency is working out. Clients run your feedback through AI and send it straight back to you. Some industries will publicly flame you for touching AI at all, while plenty of clients are already asking you to use it.

Also in this one: why agencies spend four months setting up a portal and never launch, connecting AI to a client portal through MCP, the weekly call where Chris and Alex audit their own product with fresh eyes, shipping a feature with no changelog entry, and whether Grok, Claude and ChatGPT are interchangeable now.

No Custom Work is hosted by Chris and Alex from Wayfront, the client portal software for agencies selling repeatable productized services. New episodes every Wednesday.

Try Wayfront free for 14 days, no credit card required: https://wayfront.com/trial

From there: demand constrained vs fulfillment constrained agencies, why better margins let you outspend competitors on client acquisition, and how budget brackets mean a 5K client and a 50K client are being served by agencies that never actually compete.

We spend a while on white labeling. Alex would mark up 1.5x, the industry charges 3x, and the real value add turns out to be niche fit and curation. That leads into why adding services outside your core competence quietly degrades everything, and why doing one thing repeatedly compounds because you end up fixing the system instead of the project.

Then the AI half. What clients will still pay agencies for in ten years (risk and accountability, mostly), Chris's simplest AI workflow using MCPs pointed at a folder of plain text files, a check-in on Buddy, Grokbot and Hermes, and the CEO agent pattern people are running.

It closes on agentic commerce: a client's AI shortlisting three agencies and buying the service without a human clicking anything. Alex thinks it's too early, Chris wants to build it anyway, and Wayfront's central MCP endpoint is coming either way.

We disagree for most of the first ten minutes. Alex argues a cheap product is easier to sell than a $5K retainer. Chris argues the process is identical at any price, and that the real advantage of a high LTV client is the marketing budget it unlocks for you. Both of us end up moving.

Then it turns into a conversation about what AI actually changes. Chris calls it the AI dividend: delivery gets faster and cheaper, so you hand that back to clients as more value rather than keeping the margin. Someone emailed Wayfront recently asking whether the platform supports fully AI delivered services, and it does, so we go through the setup with the MCP, order forms, and an agent that fulfils the work and updates the order.

In this episode:

- What agency owners actually want from SaaS: MRR, margin, zero marginal cost per client

- Whether a $100 product is genuinely easier to sell than a $5K retainer

- Why a $3K and a $10K client need the same hand holding

- Jason Cohen's take on what "too expensive" really means when a client leaves

- How much of your churn is your fault, and how much is just the client's own situation

- The AI dividend and passing the savings on instead of pocketing them

- Running a fully AI delivered service with the Wayfront MCP, order forms and agents

- The dumb AI workflow that works: tell your agent to check the MCP every 15 minutes

- Press release distribution as a service that is already automated

- wayfront.ai and everyone shipping their own AI harness

- ChatGPT voice mode pulling status updates from your other chats

- Testing your own signup flow to refine it, plus swapping magic links for OTP codes

- Launching a client portal in a market this crowded

From there: hourly billing caps your income now that AI multiplies output, Jason Cohen's Hidden Multipliers on spotting unprofitable clients, and why SOPs clear enough for anyone to follow can now be automated.

Also in this one: SparkToro's report that marketing agencies are 500% more likely to use Claude, Chris's move to Grok, LinkedIn's new "AI slop" flag, and the reactivation email so plainly written a customer thought it was phishing.

From there it's founder brands on LinkedIn: why walls of text flop, why hooks and memes win the feed, and what positioning looks like for a personal brand. Plus the $5 Fiverr CEO verdict and the shady world of pay-to-publish directories.

Then the practical stuff: the Wayfront redesign is rolling out to every workspace with a mobile experience that finally feels like an app, the feedback button is back, and Chris finished a BigQuery data warehouse that pulls ads, analytics, and survey data into one place so AI can surface insights instead of static dashboards. And yes, our AI agent quietly changed the pricing on a side project, and someone tried to pay. We wrap on why leads need 7 to 10 touchpoints before they buy.

Then we get into Stripe. It used to be the design gold standard and now the proration setting stays hidden until after you click continue, which is a strange place to put the thing that decides when your client gets charged. Same lesson applies to us: our own CLI and MCP sat under Modules for months and customers had no idea they existed.

We also cover the Airtable sale to Bending Spoons and what liquidation preferences leave for founders, the illusion of choice across review sites that quietly own each other, why we pulled the client logo strip off our website in favor of case study numbers, and why "book a call" is fading as a CTA now that buyers show up already knowing exactly what they want.

Plus a Backlink Pilot update and where the Wayfront redesign stands, including native dark mode.

From there it's why you can't build a product for everyone. Refusing to ship proposals, sacrifice as proof of positioning, and how agencies end up specialized by cloning their one great client.

Alex also breaks down his AI weight loss setup: a Claude project that tracks every bite using memory files and his Notion recipes, roughly 4kg down in a few weeks (and yes, it scolds him about protein). Plus Mac Minis, local LLMs, and running an entire company from a phone.

They close with the plan to revive Backlink Pilot as an AI slop playground: a zero-dollar business running fully automated content, why "fully automatic" really means 200 hours of setup, and AI avatars that now pass job interviews. Next week: hiring a CEO on Fiverr to run the slop company.

So this episode we go back through the counterarguments properly. What you do if your services genuinely range from $50 to $50,000. Whether price works as a quality signal in services nobody can touch before they buy. When "starts at" is the honest answer. And the comment that got us, which is that our own Plus plan has no price listed anywhere.

From there we get into the client portal redesign we're shipping, why every design goes stale about a year after launch, and how Apple quietly decides what counts as outdated for the rest of us.

Chris also updates us on personally texting trial signups, our AI survey showing almost no agencies are running real agents yet, and what an agent could actually do inside an agency.

We finish on the free plan idea: no fixed trial length, free until you land your first client. Whether a 14-day countdown creates any real urgency, and why we still won't take a credit card upfront.

From there, we cover whether free tools still work as an SEO play now that everyone just asks AI, why AI skills break a week after you build them (and the multi-model "counselor" approach that fixed one), agencies repackaging the same services as generative engine optimization at premium prices, and how 2006-era spam tactics work again on AI search engines.

We close with what the rebrand to Wayfront taught us about brand SEO, the rise of risk-reversal offers, and productizing your taste and experience as AI skills rather than just your deliverables.

They also get into the product-led model for agencies (let the packages do the selling instead of chasing people), pricing psychology and why charging more can earn you more respect, and the competitor fear that keeps most agencies quiet about their rates.

Plus: conference season, the new AI Fear & Greed Index survey, and the Wayfront updates shipping right now including AI onboarding and semantic search in the app.

Wayfront is the client portal and billing platform for agencies that sell productized services. Your order form kicks off onboarding automatically, the work lives in the client portal, and your team can use AI from day one.

Try Wayfront free for 14 days (no credit card required): https://wayfront.com/trial

The big question: is AI killing agencies, or just changing the job? Joey makes the case that it's raising the bar rather than wiping anyone out, and we get into why everything AI touches starts to look the same, why hand-made and weird wins now, and how vibe-coded websites are drifting down-market.

We also cover the OpenAI ad platform and its total lack of support, the ticket Joey sent that pushed us to move our MCP to every plan, how he runs client orders through Claude and the Wayfront MCP, white-labeling and the two kinds of clients, and whether starting an agency is still the fastest path to your first 10K a month.

Joey Sendz runs Instant Press. Chris and Alex host No Custom Work, brought to you by Wayfront.

We also get into the AI stuff we've been building: Wayfront skills on GitHub, the CLI overhaul, semantic search, and our agent Buddy running CRM follow-ups. Plus reactivating old trials and why B2B marketing has to go wide now.

03:34 We're the experts but can't put it into words

04:30 The "Wayfront approved way" and taking feedback

05:55 The ugly Apple Ferrari

08:51 Cutting AI buzzwords from the homepage

10:32 Training for a half-marathon with Claude

12:59 Why rigid rules break AI agents like buddy

15:56 The pizza order fail and consumer "dumb mode" AI

18:43 Building AI agents into the app vs rule builders

21:36 New client review and approval flows

22:43 Free merch and quiet-luxury branding

29:59 Still not indexed on Google

32:49 A phone number field where the founder texts you

34:51 Counter-outreaching the PR spam