You already know how to make people stop scrolling. What happens next — the offer, the way it is said, the page that has to close it — is a different craft, and it decides what the attention was worth. That part is ours.
A narrow list, and the brief is done by the same hands that hear it — nothing gets relayed, nothing gets inherited. If a job sits outside the four, we say so on the first call rather than learn it at your expense.
Written and visual content, made against a plan rather than a mood: the pieces that carry a position, the ones that answer the question everybody asks you, and the ones that sell something. When a thing has to be filmed, or you have to be somewhere on a specific day, we organise the production around it — schedule, location, people, shot list. You get the working files, not flattened exports.
The applied version of your visual identity — the version that has to survive being cropped to a square on a small screen. Type, colour, layout, templates, and the rules that let everything you publish look like it came from the same place. Covers, thumbnails, the packaging around an offer, the document you send to a partner. Editable files, and a short set of rules for using them after we are gone.
The site is where the money is actually made, so we build it and we keep it running. Pages that load, one clear action per page, forms that reach an inbox you control. Alongside it, the mailing list and the plain reporting: what came in, where it came from, and what it was worth, in a document you can read without a login.
Before anything is made: who the audience actually is, what they already buy, and what they would pay you for. Then the words — what you sell, to whom, in what order, said the same way on every surface. Then the structure around it, so the business stops depending on you answering messages at midnight. You end up with a written position, the sentences to say it in, and a map of how an enquiry becomes a payment.
Five phases. Each one ends with something you can hold, and nothing moves on until the one before it is on paper and you have read it.
When: Week one.
You give us access rather than summaries: the site, the analytics, the mailing list, everything you have published, the sales numbers if there are any. We read them ourselves. We also read what your audience is saying and what the people selling to them are charging.
a written read, four pages at most, saying where the money currently comes from, where it is leaking, and the three things we would change first. Plain sentences. It is yours whether or not you continue.
When: Week two.
We turn the read into one page. Not a deck — a deck is built to be presented, and this has to be built to be argued with. It is written by the person who did the reading, and where the reading changed our mind about what you asked for, the page says so instead of quietly routing around it.
a single page naming what gets made, what gets rebuilt, the two things we are testing first, what result would prove each test right, the date we review it, and what we are deliberately not doing yet. Disagreeing with a plan is cheap. Disagreeing with work that has already been made is not.
When: Weeks three to five, depending on how much has to be made.
The site, the pages, the templates, the first run of material, the way payment is taken. If something does not exist yet — a page, a set of covers, a route to actually buy the thing — it gets built before anything goes out. And every route is tested end to end first: a form that arrives nowhere is worse than no form.
the site and the pages live, the templates and the material in editable files, the accounts opened in your name, and a one-page map of what was set up and where it lives.
When: Ongoing, weekly.
Work goes out on a rhythm you can plan around, and changes are made one at a time — a week that changes five things is a week that teaches nothing. What went out, and why, is written down as it happens, so a result can be traced back to a cause months later.
a weekly note — what went out, what came back, what we changed and why, what happens next week, and anything we need from you. A longer monthly review that reaches a decision rather than a summary: continue, adjust, or stop. One call a month, or more when there is a reason for one.
When: Whenever you ask, including the day you leave.
You do not have to be leaving to ask for this. Any part of it can be handed over at any point in the work, and the last month of a good arrangement should look exactly like the first.
everything. The domain, the site files, the source files, the publishing and analytics accounts, the mailing list, every document. Nothing is withheld over a final invoice, and nothing arrives in a format only we can open. We remove our access and confirm in writing that it is gone.
This is the problem you probably arrived with. If one of these is close to yours, write to us.
Views are up, revenue is flat, and nobody can point at where the gap opens. The content is doing its job. Everything downstream of the content was built in a hurry, once, and never revisited. Most of this work is structural, and it pays for itself before anything new gets made.
Each piece was made at a different time, by whoever was free, against a slightly different idea of what the business is. Nobody chose the inconsistency; it accumulated. The cost is that a stranger arriving from a post has to work out what you are before they can want anything, and most of them will not bother. This work starts with reading, not making.
Something real is being sold — a service, a drop, a membership — and the only thing driving it is whichever post happened to land that week. It works until it doesn't, and it cannot be planned around, resourced, or repeated on purpose.
Creative, commercial and editorial decisions all go through one calendar. Everything works, and everything waits. The work here is taking specific pieces off that calendar permanently, not "supporting" you.
A studio without opinions is a pair of hands. These are the ones that change what we would do on a Monday morning, and each of them costs us work we would otherwise be paid for.
A follower count sits on a platform that can change its ranking overnight, without telling you and without owing you anything. A mailing list, a site, a record of who bought what — those survive the change. So most of the work is converting the rented thing into the owned thing while the rent is still cheap, which means the list gets built first, in the months when a fifth channel would have made our reporting look busier.
A spike brings people who came for the post, not for the person. They arrive with no particular reason to come back, and the platform that sent them is under no obligation to do it twice. Six months of steady work leaves you with a library you can reuse, an audience that expects you on a particular day, and enough evidence to act on. It is the duller thing to sell and the only one that compounds, so we will not build a plan around a hit.
Someone watches, wants, taps — and lands somewhere that makes no reference to the thing they just watched. The interest was real for about four seconds and nothing on the other side recognised it. Repairing that handoff costs less than making more content, and it is the only repair that makes everything already published worth more. It is also the least flattering thing we can say to a person who makes the content, and the smallest invoice we could send them. We say it anyway.
Every launch is a guess about who buys. You can test that guess by reading and asking for a week, or you can test it by making a month of work and finding out in public. Both answer the same question. Only one of them bills you first. Research is the cheaper instrument, so it goes first — and if the brief is to skip it because the moment is now, we decline the work rather than take it and hope.
A result you cannot explain cannot be repeated, scaled, or defended to whoever paid for it. So the plan states in advance what would count as this working and what would count as a reason to stop — including the number at which we would tell you to stop paying us. A prediction made afterwards is not a prediction.
The domain, the site, the source files, the publishing and analytics accounts, the mailing list — created in your name, on your own business account, with access granted to us rather than held by us. This is plainly against our commercial interest. A studio that holds your accounts is difficult to leave, and difficulty is not the same thing as loyalty. We would rather be kept for the work.
None of this is a philosophy. It is what we would do with your money, written down before you have given us any.
Most studios keep this list for the second meeting. Reading it now is cheaper for both of us. There are also two things we do not sell at any price: a guaranteed number, and a studio that agrees with you.
Not once, not as a favour, not to make a launch look busier than it is. Bought numbers make every real number after them unreadable, and the first thing they cost you is the ability to tell whether anything is working.
If a figure cannot be traced back to a source, it does not go into your copy, into a report, or into a sentence about ourselves. Everything we write about you has to survive somebody checking it, and the same rule applies to everything we write about us.
Views are an input, not an outcome. If nobody can say what a million of them would be worth, there is no way to judge the work and no reason to make it. We will say so, and we are not the right people to take your money for it.
Putting work behind a page that cannot close, a product that cannot ship, or a price nobody has tested is an expensive way to buy proof that you have a problem. We will tell you it is not ready and tell you why, which is not what anyone hires a studio to say.
Write two paragraphs: what you have built so far, and what you want to be true in six months. The reply comes within two working days, and the first exchange and the call after it cost nothing and commit you to nothing. If we are not the right studio for it, you get that answer instead — usually with what we would do in your position.