I've Told People to Avoid Startups for 20 Years. I'm Not Sure Anymore.

Here's a thing I've said probably a thousand times: don't work with startups.

If you're a marketing agency looking for clients, startups are usually a bad bet. They don't have money. They want equity deals. They'll nickel and dime you on a $500 project while raising $2 million. I've believed this for basically my entire career and I've been right about it roughly 95% of the time.

Now, working with startups can make sense in other contexts. Building products for them, investing in them, joining one early. But as agency clients? The math almost never works.

So this week I recorded a sponsored video about Alibaba's CoCreate competition and when they came to me, I told them straight up: I'll do this, but I need to talk about what I actually talk about. I need to take my own angle on it or it's not worth doing. They said fine.

And the angle I landed on was this: maybe the advice needs some nuance.

Because the founders in this thing? They're building physical products. They're getting access to capital, manufacturing, distribution. One past winner crowdfunded $1.2 million. These aren't "I have an app idea" startups. These are people with funded, tangible businesses who are about to need every service in the stack.

The core principle is still right. Always work with clients who have money. That hasn't changed. But the definition of "who has money" is shifting. Founders who are winning competitions, getting accelerator funding, building physical products through platforms like Alibaba — they actually DO have access to capital now in ways that weren't possible five years ago.

I'm not saying go chase every startup in a coworking space. That's still a recipe for unpaid invoices and "exposure" offers.

But if someone just won a pitch competition or closed a funding round? They need marketing, analytics, ops, content — the whole 99 Services stack. And in the past, I would have advised you to write them off because of the word "startup."

That's the angle I took in the video because it's genuinely what I believe.

Watch the full video here.

To Your AI-First Success,

Jeff Sauer