Blacksmith Agency

I’m the VP of sales and marketing at Cloud 9 Software. We sell practice management software to orthodontists, pediatric dentists, and other special dental practices.

I have a very small marketing team. As part of our transformation from a family business, we decided to do rebranding for the organization. One of the first things we wanted to get started on was the website. We wanted a site that’d be more on-brand with where we wanted to go as well as create a website that was going to present more of a customer journey than the existing website did. We decided to bring on Blacksmith Agency.

They handled a complete rebuild of our website, included all of our new branding. We kicked off the project by confirming the desired scope of work that had been articulated in the service legal agreement. We worked with the Blacksmith Agency team to iterate through different ideas that would align with our ideas. Our team wanted the website to be more of a lead-generation platform with a focused customer journey.

Steve (Business Development) was our primary point of contact. At any given time, there might have been 2–3 other team members who’d come in and out of the conversation.

We heard about Blacksmith Agency through their outreach efforts. They found us, and we just happened to be exactly in the market for the types of services they offer. We had a conversation with them and were impressed with their messaging and the way they expressed their intent to help us and how they’d do it. We didn’t spend a lot of time looking at other companies to do the work because we were really impressed with the thoroughness of the effort they were putting into the sales cycle.

We invested roughly $65,000.

The project was from September 2020–April 2021.

They got everything done within the expected timeframe. In itself, this is a testament to the work they do. It was exciting to see everything come together. Blacksmith Agency has a terrific customer-centric sales process where they work with us to deeply understand our needs. It’s too soon to tell whether we’re going to hit our goal numbers, but the quality of the work is terrific. I’d be surprised if we didn’t get to where we wanted to be.

Overall, project management was good. We had weekly checkpoint calls. If we needed to move a meeting due to urgent tasks or because we didn’t need to meet, they were flexible in doing that. As we were walking through the QA process and discovered things that needed to be fixed, we had daily calls that were put in place to try to walk through the changes and fixes. They were aggressively on top of those so we could get up and running.

Blacksmith Agency brought a lot of great ideas to the table, both during the sales process and website build. Because we were a small team, there were a number of us who were working with them through the creative process. When they’d present an idea, it was often something that really resonated with us. It was very helpful to have their expertise.

I would’ve loved more of a tangible project plan. We knew the plan and what was coming in sequence. But as things were crossed off the list, it was hard to keep track of what was done and coming next. I never expressed a need to get a tangible plan so I’m sure if I had, they would’ve provided it. We had a lot of trust in Blacksmith Agency working through the process we had with them. I never had concerns that we were off track or not moving things along.

Go into your engagement with a good understanding of what you can expect from the bottom of your budget range to the top. That way, you can make informed choices as you’re working through the creative process. Knowing what’s going to move you up the budget continuum is something that's beneficial.

I work for Alloy, which is in the supply chain technology space. I am the EVP of marketing at my company.

I joined our company earlier this year and I’m the first head of marketing that the company had brought on board, so I was really putting a lot of foundational components in place — the website was one of those things. Our prior website was a static platform that sat on GitHub, so I wanted to move it off of that onto a content management WordPress system. As such, we looked for web agencies that could help us do the migration.

They set up the CMS infrastructure for us including the hosting. They also built our website as part of the process. We wanted to take advantage of the migration to do a refresh in terms of our look and feel of our content. The team also established standard layouts that could enable us to set up web content ourselves — as the marketing team — that’s the value of the CMS. Prior to that, we had to rely on our engineering team to make any changes to our website which was cumbersome and a burden for the engineering team.

We interacted with a primary project manager who worked with us throughout the entire process. There was a designer during the design phase. After that, we had one developer we were in contact with during the development phase. He also had people on his team that were working on our project.

I looked for different web agencies and checked what my network had used. I connected with a former digital marketing manager that worked for me at a previous company. That person was working for a company that uses Blacksmith Agency — the team set up their website and they did a couple of phases of work for them and was still their agency on retainer.

Our engagement ran from August–December 2020.

Ultimately, the success metric was more milestone-based — making sure that we got everything we wanted in a timely fashion. Our website officially launched last week and the whole company was really happy with it. The ability of the Marketing team to update our website without needing to burden our Engineering team is going to be a huge benefit moving forward as well. Overall, we are very pleased with the end result.

There were a couple of hiccups along the way where I felt the need to have a separate session with our project manager, apart from our standard working sessions. During those sessions, I provided them feedback in terms of things that I felt could have been done better. I think it happens with most relationships with vendors. Upon having conversations with Blacksmith Agency, the concerns that I raised were addressed quite quickly.

The quality of their work relative to their price point was well worth the investment.

There were moments where I felt it wasn’t the strategic relationship that I had expected, where it felt like they were just trying to tick a box to be finished with it versus making us feel like we were getting the customer service level that we wanted. After we had a conversation about that, it reverted back to what I expected. They rectified things pretty quickly once I actually told them my feedback.

Be very clear in terms of what you want your design, brand, look, and feel to be. Even though they have design resources, I recommend coming into the project with specific design elements, font type, size, spacing requirements and then working with Blacksmith to determine feasibility — especially from a web performance standpoint and best practices with regards to how that would render on the website.

We’re a tech company that primarily serves K-12 educators and students. Our product’s an educational digital portfolio that enables educators and students to show their growth over time.

We had a website that didn’t match our company both internally and externally. When new users visited the website, it wasn’t clear what the action they needed to take. This left money on the table. We decided to solve those problems by starting from the ground up.

We engaged Blacksmith to entirely overhaul our website including design and development. They managed the process from ideation through the development of every pixel on the site. Their team created a structure and built a new website with a lot of new features that enable us to market better.

We directly worked with a business development teammate. We had an all-hands meeting with a lot of their team, which was 5–7 folks on their end. Day to day, we worked with a project manager and a developer.

Blacksmith approached our CEO and me via LinkedIn. We had an RFP for the site, so the timing was great. Without asking, their team fully audited our website. We liked their proactive approach to solving our problems. Blacksmith was much more engaged than other firms. They wanted to win our business and that carried throughout the project.

In total, we ended up spending about $70,000.

We started in earnest in March 2020 and finished in August.

As an education company, we needed the website overhauled by the time that school started. That’s when we see a massive influx in traffic. Blacksmith hit that deadline, which was a core success metric.

Their team accommodated us and moved quickly towards the tail end of the project. At times, however, it felt that our team drove the deadline more than Blacksmith.

They dug into our business through an in-depth questionnaire. Their design work was fantastic and transformed our brand in many ways by influencing our collateral. Their design was exemplary and captured our audience well. Also, their developers were talented, fast, and had great ideas for how to solve our problems.

They could’ve had a greater sense of urgency. We also came in with a specific budget. Although their team knew that we were at the top of our budget, there were times when they tried to push us to develop more features. That frustrated us.

Firstly, I would recommend them to anyone. Secondly, make your timelines clear. It can be difficult to get a final date because you can’t predict what happens during it. As much as you can, settle on a timeframe.

I am the former senior marketing director of Tempo Automation.

At that time, the company had gone through a successful series A fundraising campaign and was looking to do a successful series B fundraising campaign. The management felt that having the right website would contribute to that.

Blacksmith Agency developed the WordPress website. They moved it from HubSpot, which is where it was previously hosted. Along the way, the team built a lot of custom tools for us in WordPress. For example, they customized a page builder for us so that whenever we wanted to build a new landing page, we could do it on our own without their assistance.

We worked with a project manager who was our main point of contact. There were also two engineers who were dedicated to the project, but we didn’t interact with them, as well as a technical support teammate.

I got a cold call, from them and it happened to be just the right place and the right time. At the time, we hadn’t determined a formal budget for the website rollout, but when the project finally came up, we began working with them.

We spent about $25,000–$30,000. After the rollout, we had an ongoing retainer with them to do maintenance and enhancement work of $5,000 per month.

The bulk of the work took place in December 2017 and January 2018, and the app was rolled out in February 2018.

It was a great experience, and the team was easy to work with. The custom page builder that they made for us was very helpful. The first iteration of it wasn’t usable, but they were very responsive in terms of addressing the issues and providing a solution.

The team managed and structured the projects very well while being agile enough to make changes on the fly. I appreciated their responsive and structured manner, as well as their ability to respond to changes and challenges very quickly.

They offer very good value for money in that their resources are in Arizona, which is a more affordable area. It feels like you’re working with top people at a lower rate. Working with them provided a good combination of value for money and quality of work.

Blacksmith Agency probably should’ve been a little bit better about explaining upfront why one approach would be better than another. There were certain things that had to be rethought-out in going from the design agency to Blacksmith Agency.

You will get the best value out of Blacksmith Agency if you have a definitive project. This means knowing what you want, having a design, and having a timeframe mapped out. The team is very good at bringing their resources in.

I’m the senior marketing manager for HPI Real Estate investment and services. We’re a full service commercial real estate firm.

We wanted to redevelop our website, which was essentially an outdated, static template. It wasn’t mobile responsive and didn’t have any performance tracking abilities.

Blacksmith completely overhauled our website, managing the platform’s full redevelopment. Their team created mockups and wireframes. They then built the site on WordPress and implemented a whole bunch of features including CTE tracking. They also made the site mobile responsive.

We worked with 5–6 people.

I spent about three years talking with different agencies to understand their costs and value propositions. Blacksmith reached out to a colleague with a cold e-mail about their services. Around the time that we spoke with Blacksmith, the conversation about redoing our website popped up again. I was blown away by their approach. Their presentation was completely different than other agencies’ proposals. That put us in a comfortable position to pursue the project with them.

We started the project in December 2018 and launched the site in May 2019.

They took an ROI approach to measure the results. We used benchmarks to gauge the project's success. Across the board, our metrics improved. We doubled our monthly website traffic. Internally, every single person loved the site. It was a successful project.

They used top-notch tools that allowed us to track their work hours. Their team utilized InVision to send us sketches and wireframes. Because of our inexperience with development, we ran into obstacles. But Blacksmith explained the process well and fielded all of our questions.

Their approach to the entire project stood out. When we talked to Blacksmith, I remember being caught off guard because their team went through and explained their ideas in detail, discussing how people interact with online pages. They impressed us right off the bat. I appreciated the approach that their team took to the project.

No, I can’t think of anything.

This isn’t specific to Blacksmith but I always tell people to be mindful of their budgets. We weren’t familiar with the cost of development and assumed that adding 1–2 features wouldn’t impact the budget much. But if you’re not careful, the budget can really increase.