Product updates, playbooks and stories from teams building with Atwork.
Retainers are not automatically better. A retainer is the only model where the agency carries both scope risk and demand risk, so pick by which one you can measure.
Revenue is a lagging indicator: by the time it moves, the decision that caused it is two months old. The four leading numbers to put in front of it.
Asana is the cheapest honest option for client access in this bracket. Agencies leave because it has no concept of a client, a retainer or a sign-off.
Trello's free plan caps boards, not people — and agencies make boards faster than hires. Where the board model breaks, and when to stay on it anyway.
Agencies leave ClickUp over the cost of owning the configuration, not the price. Where the drift starts, what gets metered, and when staying is right.
Scoro asks whether the job made money. Productive asks whether your people are booked. Which question is louder decides the tool — and the seat minimum matters.
Monday and ClickUp cost about the same. The difference that bites is the automation cap: 250 a month then 25,000, against 1,000 then 5,000.
Which marketing-agency jobs you can hand to an AI agent today, which you cannot, and where the line is — including what it can and cannot publish to.
An AI agent does not fix an operations problem — it compounds whatever your operations already are. What to fix first, and how to tell whether it is working.
Four ways to start an AI agent — assign the task, mention it in a comment, move the status — plus how to stop it and what a workflow can hand over.
The retainer math agencies skip: fee divided by hours actually delivered, what counts as an hour worth logging, and four options when a retainer is underwater.
Why finding freelancers is the easy part: pencilled versus confirmed bookings, which paperwork bites and when, and the invoice that never arrives.