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610: (Solo) The Secret to Finding Agencies That Don’t Burn You

9 min episode · 2 min read

Episode

9 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Investing, Startups

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Pre-hire vetting questions: Ask contractors how they handle problems when things go wrong and why they genuinely want to work with you, not just about rates and portfolios, to assess honesty and ownership.
  • Test before committing: Run small test projects on platforms like Upwork to evaluate contractor performance, responsiveness, and work quality before signing larger contracts or paying significant upfront fees.
  • Referral sourcing strategy: Get contractor recommendations from founders without financial kickbacks, review their published content to assess expertise, and use niche platforms like Behance or Dribbble for specialized talent.

What It Covers

Nathan Chan shares his framework for vetting and hiring contractors, freelancers, and agencies by evaluating character and alignment over portfolios and pricing alone.

Key Questions Answered

  • Pre-hire vetting questions: Ask contractors how they handle problems when things go wrong and why they genuinely want to work with you, not just about rates and portfolios, to assess honesty and ownership.
  • Test before committing: Run small test projects on platforms like Upwork to evaluate contractor performance, responsiveness, and work quality before signing larger contracts or paying significant upfront fees.
  • Referral sourcing strategy: Get contractor recommendations from founders without financial kickbacks, review their published content to assess expertise, and use niche platforms like Behance or Dribbble for specialized talent.

Notable Moment

Nathan recalls paying for lunch with a talented contractor who pitched ambitious plans, then completely ghosted him afterward, never following up on the proposed collaboration or partnership.

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Episode Transcript

Hey, founder fam. I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with Omnisend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for ecommerce founders. We've been recommending Omnisend to founder students for a while now because it just works. Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling to 7 figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results. Did you know on average, Omnisend customers make $68 for every $1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment? And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50% off your first three months with the code founder 50. Just head to omnisend.com/ founder without the e to get started. Alright? Now let's jump back into the show. Hey, founder fam. Nathan Chan here. Welcome back to another solo episode of the founder to founder podcast. These are short bite sized lessons, me sharing everything I'm learning as I'm building and growing founder over the past decade. So today, I wanna share with you something that can really make or break your business growth, and it's something that I see asked a lot in our community. I've been speaking about it and thinking about it with some of my founder friends lately, and that's around how do you find the right people to work with, especially in the early days of your journey or especially when you're looking to work with contractors, freelancers, and agencies. Hear the stories. Learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the founder podcast with Nathan Chandler. So whether you're hiring someone to run your ads, redesign your website, or even manage your customer support, it's not just about the skill set. It's not just about the output of the work. It's really about the person behind that skill set, and that's what today's episode is all about. It's how to find great third parties and how to filter out all the noise. Because I don't know about you guys, but I would get pitched probably, I kid you not, through my email, my LinkedIn, my Instagram DMs, even phone calls, probably at least 20 or 30 times a day, which is insane. Right? The people are always trying to sell me something. I reckon even more, maybe even 50 times. It's insane. People always try to sell me something. And some of these people are actually like what they do is really, really good stuff. But here's the thing, right, I wanna tell you a quick story. Right now, we are working with a agency, and it's a small little shop. And this guy, he's really strong at conversion rate optimization, landing pages, just online marketing. Not a massive agency, but just a really smart dialed in team, but it's a, you know, it's a young kid. Right? And I'll be honest. I didn't choose to work with him because of his flashy deck or website or …

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Books, tools, and gear mentioned in this episode

SignalCast may earn commission on purchases via these links.

Tools

  • BehanceRecommended
    use niche platforms like Behance or Dribbble for specialized talent
  • SPONSORS [Omnisend]
  • UpworkRecommended
    Run small test projects on platforms like Upwork to evaluate contractor performance, responsiveness, and work quality before signing larger contracts or paying significant upfront fees.
  • DribbbleRecommended
    use niche platforms like Behance or Dribbble for specialized talent

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