Frequent questions.

Three pillars: Marketing, AI Automation, Design & Build. We map modules across them into a custom retainer that fits the brief, never a fixed package.

Established small businesses and brands ready to compound. YouTube creators, e-commerce, immersive theatre, music, fitness, design. Most of our 600+ client engagements have been retainers, often multi-year.

No. Here’s why: 46 case studies, 600+ clients since 2017, 75+ working with us now. Premium prices for premium results. If you’re shopping on price, this isn’t the agency.

There isn’t a fixed menu. Cost is a function of scope: which pillars you need, how much volume, and how hands-on we are month to month. Tell us what you’re trying to do on the contact page and we’ll map a real number to it, usually within the working day.

Sometimes. Usually for design and build work like a website launch, a brand identity, or an AI workflow setup. For marketing, we prefer retainers, because results compound with repeated work rather than in a one-off project.

Our longest is nine years and counting. The average is multi-year. We design engagements around quarterly review points so either side can call it without drama.

Yes. Most of our 600+ clients aren’t publicly cited because the client preferred to keep it that way. We respect that without exception.

You submit a brief at /contact (or email us directly). We read every one by hand and reply by email within the working day, typically with thoughtful questions, an honest no, or a written proposal. We prefer talking in writing first.

Alessandro Lombardo runs the studio. Specific deliverables run through a network of long-standing collaborators: video editors, paid-media operators, designers and engineers. One person runs the practice, and specialists handle each piece of work.

London. We work with brands globally, mostly UK / EU / North America. Time zones rarely an issue. Most of the work is asynchronous brief + reply.

Yes. That’s the point of the newsletter at bootstrapmarketingnewsletter.com, and the in-house Field Notes at /blog. We publish the practice openly so you can read it before you hire it.

Mostly established small businesses and brands ready to compound. Startup work happens only when there is a real revenue engine running already and the founder is hiring expertise, not founders-as-marketers. If you are pre-revenue, the Bootstrap Marketing newsletter is the better starting point until you have signal worth amplifying.

Compounding retainers. A client we ran for 12 months who now wants 36. A campaign that pays back in 9 months and keeps paying back at month 36. We optimise for the relationship that survives ad-platform tantrums and quarterly board reviews. Vanity metrics rarely survive any of those.

NDAs are standard from week one. We do not take competing brands in the same vertical and the same geography at the same time. If you brief us and there is a conflict, we will tell you on the first reply. If you sign with us, we will not take a direct competitor for the duration of the retainer.

It depends on the channel, so we won’t promise you a date. From what we’ve seen, email flows and paid campaigns can show signal within the first few weeks. Improvements to paid media compound over one to two full sales cycles, because that’s how long it takes to see the effect on repeat buyers.

Your proposal says which numbers we expect to move first, and when we’ll check them.

You do. Your business owns its ad accounts and everything we make for you, and keeps all of it if you leave, subject to our terms and conditions.

An honest brief, sent through the short form at /contact. Be specific: a vague brief costs both of us a fortnight of misalignment.

Once we work together, read access to your ad accounts and analytics makes the work much better. Where access isn’t possible, we work from what you can share and tell you plainly what we couldn’t assess.

A monthly summary, a shared workspace, and email in between. Quarterly reviews are built into every engagement.

The cadence fits your business, not our reporting calendar. If your team prefers Slack, Notion or a weekly call, we adapt.

It depends on the engagement, but usually one payment cycle. Some engagements start with a minimum commitment of three to six months, agreed in the proposal before anything is signed, and ending one of those early carries an exit fee.

After that, quarterly reviews are where either side can widen, narrow or call it. Nothing is locked in beyond what both sides want.

Yes, both. We fit into how your team already works, whether that’s Slack, Notion or a weekly call. We do assess every job before we take it on, so we look at how the work is split before we say yes.