The audit is a fixed-fee engagement before any retainer kicks off. We treat it as a procurement step, not a sales step. You pay for it. You own the output. If you decide not to retain us, you walk away with a 60-page plan you can hand to your next agency.
What we look at:
Every paid channel, every organic source, every lifecycle sequence. Two days of read-only access to your dashboards.
Last 30 to 60 days of recorded discovery and demo calls. Mapped to ICP, objections and pricing friction.
Cohort retention by acquisition source. Where does growth leak? Marketing rarely owns it but always has to find it.
Top three competitors on SEO, paid and lifecycle. What they're doing well. Where they leak attention.
Real conversion rates by stage, sourced from your CRM. We rebuild this in the warehouse if your numbers are platform-attributed.
Levers picked. Sequencing. Budget envelope. What we won't take on, with reasons. Delivered in a working session, not a slide read-out.
We turn down about 1 in 3 audits at this stage. Sometimes the lever they need isn't marketing. We say so in writing.
This is the only week of the engagement we don't recommend running anything live. The team spends it on planning, ICP brief sign-off and Slack setup. You spend it on internal alignment so we don't lose week five to lawyers.
The written ICP that drives every page, every campaign and every sequence. Signed by you and the practice lead.
Two levers picked from the audit. Sequenced for the 90-day window with weekly KPIs. Budget envelope written down.
The senior operators who'll be on your account daily. You meet them. They start reading your repo of past work.
Weekly meeting set. Monthly reset set. Slack channels created. Read access to your dashboards confirmed.
By Friday of week 4 you have: a signed ICP brief, a sequenced 90-day plan, a weekly KPI scorecard template, a Slack channel with five operators in it and your own copy of the audit deck for board use.
This is where most of the work happens and most of the noise also lives. We protect the noise with cadence. The weekly meeting is at the same time on the same day. The monthly reset has a fixed agenda. The Slack channel is the single source of truth and we kill side-channel emails on week one.
What ships by week 8 on a typical engagement:
One channel only. Built on the rebuilt funnel math. We don't run multi-channel paid in week one.
Activation flow rebuild. Hits within two weeks of go-live on the cohort that signs up that week.
Crawl, indexation, internal linking, schema. Whatever was broken now isn't. We don't ship content over a broken site.
Templates approved by editorial. First 40 pages shipped. From here it's 50 to 80 a month.
Reporting goes live in week 5. The Looker dashboard sits at one URL. You have read access. The data refreshes from the warehouse every six hours. We don't email screenshots. We send links.
Paid and lifecycle peaked their work by month three. SEO and content compound from here. The team narrows by month five: fewer operators, more leverage. Reporting cadence drops from weekly to bi-weekly. The monthly reset becomes a quarterly business review.
Most clients stay 18 to 24 months. Some graduate to in-house and we help build the brief and run the interviews. About one in five steps down to a quarterly retainer for ongoing technical SEO and editorial pillars only.
Six-month minimum on retainers. After that, monthly notice. If we miss the agreed KPI two months running, we waive the third while we re-plan. That's happened twice in 15 years. Both times the problem was upstream of marketing.
The cadence is non-negotiable because it's where most agency engagements go off the rails. Predictable beats heroic.
Calendar is illustrative. Real cadence ships in week 4 based on your team's timezone and meeting load. We don't add meetings. We replace the ones your existing agency probably runs three of.
We rebuild your reporting layer in BigQuery or Snowflake during the audit. Your platform attributions become inputs, not the source of truth. The dashboard you see is the one your CFO can sign off on. Below is an illustrative redacted view.
What's on the dashboard: ARR, pipeline, CAC, activation, retention, SEO sessions, demos booked, burn vs plan. Eight numbers. Anything not on the dashboard isn't on the engagement.
The Friday note recaps the week in plain prose. It links to the dashboard and the specific decisions we're recommending for Monday. We send it Friday by 5pm in your timezone.
The SaaS practice runs its own dashboards, its own cadence, its own reporting templates. Not borrowed from the Web3 side. The two practices share no client data and no operational tooling.
If anything on the engagement is off, you have three named escalation paths. Response inside four business hours on level one. Same day on level two. Same hour on level three.
There is no general inbox. We don't operate a ticketing system. The path is always one of three named humans. We've found this works better than any helpdesk for engagements at our size.
| Phase | Duration | What you get | What you pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 · Audit | 3 weeks | 60-page audit PDF, full-funnel diagnosis, written verdict on what we will not take on, 90-day plan | $18,000 fixed |
| 02 · Plan | 1 week | Two priority levers, 90-day execution map, weekly KPI targets, locked budget envelope, owner assignments | Included in audit |
| 03 · Execute | 12 weeks | Full-stack team embedded, weekly review, monthly reset, paid and lifecycle compound first, SEO at week 16+ | $7,500+/month |
| 04 · Compound | Month 4+ | SEO and content moats start paying back. Team narrows, leverage rises. Most clients stay 18 to 24 months | Reduced retainer |
The whole SaaS marketing process is published here. No hidden steps. Start with the audit →
Three weeks end to end. Week 1 is data pull (warehouse, GSC, GA4, HubSpot, Salesforce). Week 2 is competitive scoring and ICP rebuild interviews. Week 3 is verdict-writing and plan-building. You get a 60-page PDF, a 90-day execution plan and a written verdict on which two levers we'd lead with.
Same time, same day, for the life of the engagement. Monday async standup, Wednesday tactical review (60 minutes), Friday weekly summary. Plus a monthly KPI reset on the first Monday of each month and a quarterly board-prep report. Slack is open all week. No general inbox.
Three differences. We run all seven services under one team, not parallel vendor contracts. We rebuild attribution at the warehouse, not the platform. We treat lifecycle marketing as half the work, not a nice-to-have. The compound phase (month 4+) is also built around how SaaS revenue works (expansion, retention, NRR).
One dashboard. One URL. Refreshed every six hours from the warehouse. Eight KPIs tracked monthly. Quarterly board-ready PDF. Annual review for renewal. No vanity metric reports, no 40-tab spreadsheets.
Three levels. Level 1 is the embedded account lead. Level 2 is the practice director. Level 3 is the founding partner. All three reachable by direct Slack DM or phone, response SLAs in writing. No general inbox. No ticket system.
Yes. Redacted sample audit PDF shared on request, after the 30-minute audit call. The sample is from a real engagement (client name removed). Shows depth, structure and exact format. Most buyers ask for it. We share inside 24 hours of the call.
We tell you on the audit call before any commitment. Roughly 1 in 3 audit calls end with us recommending another agency, an in-house hire or a different engagement model. The 30-minute call qualifies both directions. If we can't move you, we'd rather say so before money changes hands.
The audit is the first step and it's a fixed fee. You walk away with a written plan whether or not we work together.