Instead of · 4 min read
Alternatives to a marketing agency
An agency is the right answer when you know which channel works and need it executed at volume. Before that, you are paying two to eight thousand a month for somebody to run the same experiments you could run yourself, and they will leave with what they learned.
You have built something, a few people use it, and growth is flat. Somebody suggests hiring help. It is a sensible instinct: marketing is a skill, you do not have it, and people who do exist.
The problem is timing rather than principle. Most of what an agency sells assumes a thing you have not established yet.
What you are actually choosing between
A full-service agency
Retainers commonly run from a couple of thousand a month upwards, on a three to six month minimum, because that is how long their process takes to show anything. They are built to run channels at volume: ads, content programmes, paid social, SEO.
Every one of those is a scale play. Scale multiplies something that already works, and if nothing works yet, you are paying a monthly fee to multiply zero.
A fractional CMO or growth advisor
Typically two to eight thousand a month for a few days of senior attention. This is genuinely the best money in the category when you can afford it, because you are buying judgement rather than execution, and judgement is what you are missing.
Two caveats worth knowing before you sign. Their experience is usually from companies with a sales team, a budget and product-market fit, and the playbook does not shrink cleanly to a solo founder with forty users. And when they leave, the reasoning leaves with them.
A freelancer for a specific job
The most underrated option on this list. A one-off engagement with a clear deliverable, rewriting your homepage, setting up analytics properly, producing a landing page that actually converts, is cheap, bounded, and does not require you to know your channel strategy first.
If you only take one thing from this page: a single paid session with somebody good, on the specific question of what your homepage says to a stranger, beats a six month retainer at this stage and costs about one percent as much.
Doing it yourself, badly, on purpose
The first ten customers of most software companies were found by hand by a founder who did not know what they were doing. This is not a consolation prize, it is the actual mechanism, because the by-hand version is where you learn the words your customers use.
You cannot outsource that and get the same result. An agency will produce copy from your positioning; only you can find out that your positioning was wrong.
When to hire, for real
Three conditions. Meet all three and hiring is a good decision rather than an expensive way to feel busy.
- You know which channel produces customers. Not which channel you like. One you have seen convert at least a handful of times.
- You know roughly what a customer is worth, so you can tell whether the retainer is profitable or a bet.
- The constraint is your hours, not your knowledge. You know what to do and cannot do enough of it.
Hire execution once you have judgement. Hiring execution to supply judgement is how the money goes.
The gap this leaves
So the honest summary of the options is: retainers are premature, fractional is right but expensive, freelance is good for bounded jobs, and doing it yourself is correct but you do not know how.
That last one is the real problem, and it has two parts. Not knowing which thing to do next, and not knowing whether the thing you did last week worked. Both are decision problems rather than execution problems, which is why more output does not fix them.
Where we fit
Do This Next is not an agency replacement and will not pretend to be one. It does not run your ads, manage a content programme, or take work off your plate. It has no opinion about your brand.
What it does is the narrow part:
- Reads your site and says what it thinks you have built, who wants it, and what is holding it back, with the evidence it used.
- Gives you one next move, why it comes first, how long it should take, and what would count as it having worked.
- Remembers the outcome, so the advice in week ten is informed by weeks one to nine. This is the part a departing consultant takes with them and a chat window never had.
It costs 19 a month, which is roughly one percent of a fractional CMO and is priced that way because it does roughly one percent of the job: the deciding, not the doing. The Product Check needs no account and no card, so you can see the quality of the reasoning before deciding whether it is worth anything to you.
And if the answer that comes back is that you should go and hire somebody for a specific job, it will say that. That is a legitimate output, and diagnosing the bottleneck is what decides it.