Episode Details

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Most agency owners don't fail because they're bad at delivery.

They fail because they underprice, overcomplicate, and build businesses that trap them instead of freeing them.

Today's featured guest unpacks the type of life he envisioned when he set out to start an agency, it took to scale from charging $2,500 a month to closing $45,000/month retainers, surviving a market collapse, and making the counterintuitive decision to split one agency into two.

Eli Rubel is the founder of Matter Made, a B2B SaaS marketing agency, and No Boring Design, a premium design studio serving high-growth tech companies. He entered the agency world in 2019 after burning out on the venture-backed SaaS model, despite a previous exit.

What drew him to agencies wasn't prestige or scale; it was a desire to take control over his time, lifestyle, income, and location. Agencies, when built correctly, offered the fastest path to freedom without sacrificing ambition.

Over the next few years, Eli scaled MatterMade aggressively, navigated a brutal tech downturn, and rebuilt his business with sharper positioning, stronger pricing, and clearer operational boundaries.

In this episode, we discussed:

• Why hiking prices was the right choice early one

• How and why he decided to create his second agency

• The reason that shared services failed fast

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After years in venture-backed SaaS, chasing growth at all costs, Eli was done with a model he realized was grinding him down. The pressure, the lack of control, and the delayed payoff didn't align with what he actually wanted: family, flexibility, and financial independence.

Agencies offered speed to cash and autonomy, which SaaS didn't. Instead of swinging for a hypothetical future exit, Eli chose a business model that paid well now and let him desig