This Agency Lied About Scaling A Client To $100M

What is this agency that lied about scaling a client to $100 million?

Okay, so this one I thought was interesting. This little ad over here, this guy Noah Kuron.

So you can see, our strategy helped launch Vessi from a startup to $100 million in annual revenue.

Yeah.

Is Vessi a shoe company?

Shoe company, yeah. So this is an agency guy claiming that it shot up to $100 million in revenue, right? 6x lifetime ROAS, 263% improvement, right? And the founder of the company, he's like, these agency claims are getting out of hand. Rule of thumb, always divide by 2. In this case though, divide by 0. And then the founder of Vessi reaches out to this Noah guy. Okay, are you following? The agency guy. So, the founder says, hey, long time, man. Been seeing the ad you've been running with Vessi and getting too many people sending it over because the claims are way too wild. Can you turn it off? And then the agency guy says, hey, man, can you tell me what claims are off and we can get those corrected if they aren't? And then the Vessi founder's like, could you just take down all the ads using our name and referencing us? We don't want any of these marketing materials out out there. And then the, the agency founder, Noah, he's like, Tony, that's not really fair. Part of our terms and conditions is the ability for us to share our success stories. I have verified all the info in the case study is correct. I'm happy to work with you if there's something you don't like. Right. And then so this, this founder over here of Vessi just starts going off. And then I think this guy starts to respond. He's just like, dude, just take it off. Right. I think if you're the agency in this case, you should just take it off. Like, I don't know why agency founders try to keep these case studies up when it's clear that The CEO of the other company has a problem, your client has a problem, just take it off.

You know, I went through the same thing, right? Personally.

For what?

I hired an agency in Canada. I don't know when this was, call it like 7, 8 years ago. And they were helping me out with some technical SEO issue. And they were supposed to help with the implementation and all this kind of stuff. And I didn't have the time, already knew how to do it myself. And they helped a little bit. It wasn't working out well. I just had, My dev just ended up doing most of the work. Didn't pay him much at all. When I say much at all, like I don't know what the dollar amount was, few thousand bucks, 10 grand max or something small like that. And we pretty much didn't need help. It wasn't working out. Over time our traffic went up. I think it was like 30-ish percent from SEO using the stuff that I hired them for, but I already knew that stuff and I was trying to get them to just help implement it. So then they had a case study running on their website how they helped me and NP Digital grow our traffic by 30%. And I was like, dude, take this off. This is not anywhere near the truth. They're like, well, we disagree with you, yada, yada, yada. And I'm like, dude, I have emails of me not being happy. I'm like, this is just silly. And then they wouldn't remove it. I was like, sounds good. And they were just telling people like, we're the ones who drive Neil Oliver's truck. I'm like, oh my God. So I was like, all right, you don't want to listen? And they're like, nope. We did everything that's fine. You signed a contract. And I was like, dude, all right, fine. You want to deal with it this way? I'm just being really nice. I have lawyers on staff and so I don't have to pay legal bills, right? Although technically we also use outside firms as well. So we always have legal bills, but you combine both of them, you know, I can just, I probably spend more on legal. I don't know how much we spend on legal.

By the way, this is the stuff that riles Neil up. Neil will spend time on this.

Yeah. And we spend millions a year on legal, right? Just globally, internal and external costs. So I was like, you know what? Screw this shit. Screw this guy. I'm not dealing with this shit. And we just started sending him legal notices and we're like, we will take you to court. F off. You're not being nice. We're really kind. And yeah, all of a sudden they kindly removed it.

Yep.

And I was like, oh yeah, now you want to play ball?

Yeah.

Either do it now or you're just gonna get your ass sued.

Yeah. And so I just don't— like, you have to have some type of Like, how can you have not—

this is a—

you should feel some shame, right? When this is happening, just take it off. But these people don't feel shame. And by the way, Nick Shackelford, remember Nick Shackelford? He actually contributed. He's like, I was about to dust off our old Vessi case studies. And then the founder of Vessi was like, you never needed to because you guys crushed it and just let the work do the talking. See, that's when you know you just did good work and post it, but don't do it when you clearly didn't do it because that's a grift. That's why people hate agencies. This is one of the reasons. Yes. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil's called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

But I've also had the opposite happen to me as well. So we used to do the marketing for TechCrunch back in the day when Michael Arrington and Heather Horday used to run it, and we grew their traffic like crazy from search, had screenshots of the analytics, Okay? Had testimonials from Heather and Michael Arrington. Heather technically wrote it on Michael's behalf, but they both gave us authorization to use it. And literally the Google Analytics screenshots. Eventually AOL bought the company. And then, and at that time we weren't working with them anymore. Some guy took over SEO and then started making all these claims that Neil didn't do crap, I've done it all. And he kept sending AOL's team after us to remove it.

Wow.

The first time around, AOL and us just agreed that like, hey dude, here's the emails from Heather. And then eventually kept sending them and then he started getting people in the SEO community riled up like, yeah, he didn't do anything.

Yeah.

And then he's just like, look, we got him to remove it all. And I was like, this is just the dumbest crap. I'm like, I'm the one who drove the traffic and literally had quotes in an email from Michael Arrington and Heather Horday. But he's just like, nope, Neil didn't do anything. I'm like, I'm talking about before they sold it to AOL and I even put in there, Because my first go-round with AOL, I put pre-AOL acquisition. Like we had to put some disclaimers and stuff like that in there. And then now AOL doesn't own it. I think they spun it off to another company. But I was like, dude, I'm like, just chill out. And over time the brand started, it's still popular, but it's not as popular as it used to be. It's not what it was before. Yeah. So then we didn't care to fight it out. We're just like, all right, we'll remove it. But sometimes it can go both ways. And yeah, in these 2 cases, I felt, you know, I was in the right. But there's probably other scenarios where people have dealt with me or you where they feel they're right.

Yeah. So that's what it is, guys. If you guys have any other questions, let us know. And that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.