Big changes
Over the last few months, we’ve made some big changes: Parker has transitioned to a new role apart from the agency, we moved our podcast recording from Riverside to Descript, and we’ve overhauled our support portal, which now includes a chat widget, AI responses, and documentation.
Parker now leads Snapwork.io
Parker and I started Snapmarket in August 2023 with the aim to create a hyper-efficient marketing agency built on the latest technology as well as transparent, asynchronous communication systems. Though some assumptions turned out to be useful, some turned out to be untrue—we’ve learned that efficiency is not the most important value of a marketing agency.
We continued to learn over the years what was important for our clients: high-quality work built on high-quality relationships. This meant we needed to take our time to think through our work in more detail, and how the implications of that work impact other technologies, processes, and stakeholders downstream. That of course affected our pricing, but it also affected our whole orientation toward our company.
As we’ve grown, Parker and I settled more into our roles and passions. He improved his skills in technology and product development while I improved my skills in strategy and communication.
It became clear that, while a next-generation marketing agency like ours needed deep competence in technology, there was a growing interest in developing a standalone effort to embed our core processes into a SaaS product. That product has become Snapwork.io, an initiative Parker and Derek now lead.
We have grown so much. We’ve traveled the world together, held a braai with our South African friends, got kicked out of a sleeping spot in an Istanbul lounge, sat beneath the spires of Oxford, failed and succeeded spectacularly, and grew as husbands, fathers, and friends. Parker will now take on a new adventure leading a software company, consulting, and carrying forward his amazing children’s book projects.
Now it’s onto a new chapter from Snapmarket the agency. Thanks for everything, Parker.
From Riverside to Descript
Our podcast clients have recorded hundreds of episodes on a great platform called Riverside. Yet over the last few months we’ve made the transition to a new platform called Descript, which has been our video editing tool of choice for years. The change allows us to have a simpler editing workflow as well as better permissions access to our team and our clients’ teams.
The experience for clients is pretty much the same, but it’s worth sharing as it’s a visible and important piece of our tech puzzle. If you’re curious to hear more or have any questions about your experience, please let us know!
Support portal and docs upgrade
One of the assumptions we had with building Snapmarket was that clients wanted a transparent view into the tasks we’re working on every week. So, we built a custom portal to provide detailed task management dashboards, complete with research reports, a list of apps and training videos, visual brand and messaging information, and more.
It turns out most people are too busy to log into that app in the first place. No one cares how the sausage is made, as they say. While a few clients track their podcast episodes and other details in the app, most work with us through email and calls anyway.
As a result, we’re moving away from our app to a new platform powered by Productlane, which is a perfect fit for our Linear-based agency.
The new platform has a built-in live chat widget as well as AI responses if you’re looking for something that we’ve documented in our public docs. The layout of this platform looks different than our current app, but it works similarly—threads are tied to specific tasks—and the data structure remains the same since it’s built on our current project management platform.
Other tech upgrades
We’ve also made huge improvements across the board in the way we use AI. Claude has been our default tool for the last two years, and it’s more powerful than ever thanks to MCP connections to all our tools.
We’re also building internal documentation on GitHub with Cursor, which will provide our agents with comprehensive context about our people, projects, and processes. More to come on this as I’ll be writing and sharing the latest advances in our AI workflows.
If you want more details on how to build agent-forward processes with AI best practices, I’d love to talk.
Grateful to serve
Thanks for bearing with us over the last few months. We truly believe these improvements will increase our quality, efficiency, and speed of communication.
As always, we remain grateful to serve.
