How I Built the Delivery and Content Systems Behind an Ecommerce Email Agency

I'm Max Sturdivan. I run email and SMS retention marketing for ecommerce brands, including subscription management. I built the agency through client work, delivery pods and content that showed brands what we could do.

At the start of the interview, the interviewer put the business at roughly $650,000 a month and I confirmed it. That was the monthly business figure we discussed; I also explained how I paid myself separately from the business profits.

Sitting on the Fence Cost Me Months

I was a college student doing email marketing for side money. Even though I had savings, I was hesitant to pay for coaching.

So I spent a few months watching free YouTube content. It was useful, but I had no accountability and I barely moved. Eventually I booked another call, committed, and that changed the trajectory.

Within about eight months, I went from roughly $7K a month to around $40K a month. I described the commitment and direct access to coaches as the difference after those months of trying to learn from free content alone.

Starting With Cheap Work and Honest Pitches

Early on I assumed business owners would not want to hear from a kid with no experience. What I found was that most of them are overwhelmed and mainly need someone to figure things out for them.

So my first line in every proposal and cold outreach was that I am not an expert. I'd say there were probably safer and more expensive options out there, but what they'd get from me was a lower price and someone hungry to work harder.

I started hourly on Upwork and treated the early work as getting paid to learn. I also rebuilt emails for brands I wanted to work with and sent the mock-ups straight to them. That approach got real conversations and a few deals.

Learning on Real Accounts Beat Studying

I didn't spend months studying before I started. I gave myself a couple of weeks of basic YouTube content, set up a store so I could click around inside Klaviyo, and then went straight into outreach.

I also recreated two emails a day from brands I admired. The early ones were bad, but they got better, and they became the portfolio I showed prospects. It was practice and sales material at the same time.

For me, practicing on real work and doing outreach mattered more than continuing to study without taking anything to market.

Raising Prices and Hiring One Role at a Time

When discussing the move from freelancing into an agency, I gave $3,000 a month as the lowest monthly fee I had charged. I had three clients at that level, bringing in around $9,000 in monthly client fees. That left room to bring in help as the work grew.

When I got overloaded, I didn't panic. I hired part-time help one role at a time, starting with a designer I paid per email, then a Klaviyo technician, then an account manager. Each hire freed up time for sales and content.

That's how our first pod formed: a copywriter, a designer, a Klaviyo tech and an account manager. Each pod handles about six to eight clients, and it's the unit I think about when I plan capacity.

Client Ascension related reading: the client acquisition guide discusses matching channels to an offer and judging cost per client over a full sales cycle.

Content Changed Where Clients Came From

I started posting on Twitter around the middle of 2022 and began YouTube at the beginning of 2023. In September 2023, while studying abroad, I took a call with a brand that had watched my tutorials and was ready to buy. I had thought of the videos as sales assets for prospects, so getting a client directly from them changed how I approached content.

A recurring format was recreating emails for recognizable brands. A Gym Shark reel got me about five clients, by my account. I used the familiar brand to make the video interesting to people outside email marketing while still demonstrating the work I could do.

Instagram is now the biggest source of leads for us. I keep the videos simple, mostly me talking to the camera, and I keep a backlog so I can post even on busy days.

The newsletter connected the content to the sales process

My Instagram and YouTube content led into free guides and a newsletter. I had guides for specific parts of the service, such as email copy, design, welcome flows and cart-abandonment flows. A guide gave someone a reason to leave their email after watching the content.

At the interview, I described a 30-day nurture sequence and manual newsletters on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A writer helped with a base draft, but I approved the topics and went through each email myself. That support was recent; I was still closely involved in the writing.

Founder-Led Sales, Then a Closer

I ran founder-led sales until we were around $100K a month. At one point I was doing at least six hours of calls a day, which was too much on top of content and the team.

When I hired a closer in early 2025, I trained him heavily on email marketing. By the time of the interview, the minimum price for new clients was $5,000 a month, and we screened for whether a brand could support that engagement.

About half of our deals were closing on the first call in the process I described. For the others, I recorded an audit personally and the closer used it on a follow-up call. That gave the prospect something specific to discuss rather than another generic sales conversation.

Retention Is About Trust, Not Just Results

At the time of the interview, we used month-to-month contracts and I put monthly client retention at around 95%. Among clients who had left, average tenure was about eight months. That churned-client figure was not the average for the whole client base.

I saw unexpected churn as a sign that a client might not feel comfortable raising concerns. We gave daily updates for the first 14 days, an automated statistics report every Monday and a manual qualitative report every Tuesday. Clients needed to see what we were working on as well as the results.

The smaller wins matter alongside scheduled reporting. If a test improves something for a client, I want the client to hear about it. Trust builds when they see what we're paying attention to.

Client Ascension related reading: Dan’s HubSpot agency account offers another service-business perspective on pricing, acquisition and operations.

The quality of the team mattered to retention

I tracked retention by pod and said the quality of the people was the biggest factor. As we grew, recruiting agencies helped us find experienced email strategists and account managers instead of relying only on the freelancers I could reach through Twitter.

Referrals from people already on the team became a major hiring channel. We put a referral request into the employee onboarding roadmap around day 45. By the interview, we had two internal headhunters: one focused on designers, copywriters and Klaviyo technicians, and the other on account managers.

The agency figure was separate from what I paid myself

I said I paid myself a set salary of about $18K a month. I kept roughly three times the company's expenses in the business bank account before moving extra profit elsewhere. Those were the arrangements I described, rather than a breakdown showing the agency's exact profit margin.

Adapted by Client Ascension with AI assistance from Max Sturdivan's interview. The first-person narrative follows the source speaker’s account. Watch the original video