Full Service Agency vs Specialist (And Should You Sell Info Products?)

We used to tell agencies to niche down and stick to one thing. Now Alex sees it differently: if you sell SEO, sell every kind of SEO, so clients trust you for all of it and never have to go looking elsewhere. Chris calls that a sign of business maturity, the point where agencies start white labeling to raise LTV, but he doesn't think it works when you're starting out. His take on the modern niche is the service itself, like a link marketplace that only does links, which also makes you easier to pick when buyers ask ChatGPT for a specialist. He also warns about ending up with a $500 a month offer and a $50K a month offer under one brand (a Golf and a Bugatti from the same company), and tells agencies with big clients to start a side brand for productized work instead.

Then there's info products. Alex's first question is the obvious one: if your method works, why sell it and create your own competition? Chris's steelman is that agency work hits a ceiling, info products cost almost nothing to deliver, and real client results give them the credibility most info products lack. There's no magic secret anyway, just the same information repackaged for a different buyer, and the real business behind most info products is media buying. Chris reckons you could make a course in 30 seconds with ChatGPT, and he just wrote a book that way. On Tuesday he had ChatGPT pull in his newsletters, blog posts and an old ebook, he went through the draft, and by Friday it was on Amazon. It's also a free PDF now, which only costs you your email.

We also get into why crazy guarantees make B2B buyers look for the catch, why our homepage video needs specific claims instead of "this will increase your LTV," agencies putting a brand name on a process everyone already uses, the $200 a month Skool group Chris only reads through ChatGPT, Chris skipping Chiang Mai SEO for the Tropical MBA conference in Thailand and why conferences are really about networking, ChatGPT's new Dots agent for herding 20 open chats by voice (not in the EU yet), and the AI model naming mess.

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

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