How does a bootstrapped agency win clients like Mailchimp and WebMD, survive industry upheaval, and keep growing in the age of AI? Compose.ly CEO Michael Leonhard shares lessons on landing keystone clients, proving ROI with transparency, and balancing AI with human expertise.
When ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, it sent a shockwave through every agency boardroom. Budgets froze overnight. Clients who once signed off on monthly retainers without hesitation suddenly hit pause, waiting to see if generative AI would replace their agency partners entirely.
For content and SEO agency Compose.ly, it was one of those make-or-break moments. Michael Leonhard, co-founder and CEO, recalls that uneasy stretch in 2023 as a “limbo period” where leaders assumed AI could do everything from drafting blogs to running full campaigns.
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“It took a while for everyone to learn that while ChatGPT can help employees to be much more efficient, it doesn't eliminate the need for there to be experts at the helm,” Michael says.
Rather than panic at the prospect of their services becoming obsolete, Compose.ly leaned into the opportunity presented by artificial intelligence. They embraced an inevitable change and explored how the technology should be incorporated into their processes and operations.
Let’s unpack Compose.ly’s journey—from its bootstrapped origins to big-name wins, from client retention strategies to balancing AI with human expertise—and reveal lessons agency leaders must put into practice now.
Name
Agency
Agency Stats
Location
Michael Leonhard
Compose.ly
35 employees
100s of freelancers
100-200 clients
Est. 2016
Seattle, USA
The roots of a content marketplace
Michael grew up in New Jersey before attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to study information systems. After graduation, he joined Accenture as a consultant for three years before moving to a small startup where he founded the company’s U.S. office. That leap allowed him to “cut [his] teeth on basically managing, leading, and building” at a consumer electronics brand, where he scaled the company from three people to more than 30.
In 2016, he teamed up with his old college roommate to tackle a recurring pain point they had seen firsthand: Startups and SMBs struggling to execute SEO-driven content without in-house expertise.
“We felt that his SEO subject matter expertise, coupled with my operations and leadership experience, would be a great recipe for success,” Michael explains.
The initial vision was a content marketplace—one that connected vetted SEO writers with businesses that needed high-quality, search-friendly content. The business model was meant to be a self-service platform. Clients would browse the marketplace, choose writers, and manage the hiring and content production process themselves.
Michael compared Compose.ly’s first iteration directly to generalist freelance marketplaces, but focused on the niche SEO writing community with much higher quality standards. Unlike Upwork or Fiverr, Compose.ly accepted fewer than 1% of applicant writers, instead focusing on building a network of specialists who could deliver strong writing, subject matter expertise, and SEO know-how.
The problem? Marketplace sales meant one-off projects—single articles or small bundles—and didn’t create long-term relationships or recurring revenue.
Within a year, Compose.ly evolved beyond just a marketplace model, paving the way for a pivot that would land Compose.ly its first big-ticket clients.
The pivot that shaped Compose.ly into a full-fledged content agency
Like many agency founders, Michael discovered early that patience wasn’t his strong suit.
The marketplace model needed time to get off the ground. Establishing a market presence also meant waiting for SEO and PPC to gain traction and for fresh leads to come through the door. But as a bootstrapped company, Michael needed to get revenue in the door—and fast.
For Michael, that meant having to reach out to acquire customers.
The only thing that I could think of was to be scrappy, get out there, and start selling. But in order to justify the effort for sales, you can’t just sell one piece of content. You need to sell a long-term engagement.
Compose.ly flipped the script. They kept the platform they had built, but stopped asking clients to use it directly. Instead, Compose.ly’s team logged in as if they were the client—using the platform they had built as a workflow tool to assign content, manage deadlines, and handle reviews.
To add an extra layer of reliability and redundancy, Compose.ly assembled dedicated teams of writers for each client. If one writer was unavailable—out sick, on vacation, or with limited bandwidth—another trained on the client’s brand and style guide could step in without missing a beat.
Michael was now able to sell packages that bundled SME writers, editorial support, and project management, with account managers and customer support specialists supporting the larger, relationship-based contracts.
The struggling marketplace evolved into a growing content agency with real staying power.
Landing a big logo client: The credibility leap every agency needs
Once Compose.ly shifted to agency-style work, the next challenge was establishing credibility. Smaller contracts kept the lights on, but Michael knew landing a flagship client could change everything.
Mailchimp, the email marketing platform used by millions of small businesses, became the first big logo on Compose.ly’s roster. Michael says they landed the account by sheer grit and a compelling pitch. They got Mailchimp on a sales call, made their case, and promised to deliver results. The client liked what they heard, and the deal closed.
That first breakthrough shaped Michael’s advice to any agency leader starting out:
Try to get that big logo, even if it means giving some freebies or offering some really good value. Because if you can get one good logo, you can parlay that into other business. It gives you that credibility. It gives you that authority.
Michael Leonhard, CEO & Co-Founder, Compose.ly
Mailchimp validated the model. But it was the next big win—WebMD, one of the world’s largest health publishers—that pushed Compose.ly into a new league. Unlike SaaS clients producing branded content, publishers like WebMD live and die by content output at a massive scale.
“They monetize content, and they’re constantly producing content,” Michael explains.
Delivering at that level required a different kind of operation. Compose.ly had to expand its writer pool with even more dedicated subject matter experts, add editors to handle volume and quality, and dedicate account managers to keep communication flowing.
The agency also built redundancy so deadlines were never missed. It was about more than simply producing the content; it was about creating a machine that reliably published hundreds of articles without breaking client trust.
With Mailchimp and WebMD on the client roster, Compose.ly had proof that its model worked for both SaaS brands and publishers. That credibility made it easier to win over the next 100+ clients that now fill its pipeline, supported by a team of 35 staff and hundreds of vetted freelancers and SMEs.
The remote-first Compose.ly team connects virtually across the U.S. and beyond, supporting clients with high-quality content from subject matter experts.
However, not every publisher engagement lasts forever.
Michael is candid about how losing a cornerstone client impacted the business. The engagement ended not because of poor delivery but because of internal shifts on the client’s side and the departure of their main point of contact.
One of the riskiest moments for any agency is when your point of contact changes. You need to be able to quickly demonstrate exactly what you’re doing for the company and the impact that it’s had to the new point of contact. You basically need to sell your agency all over again.
Michael Leonhard, CEO & Co-Founder, Compose.ly
Without proper reporting, the agency was left to defend its value with article counts instead of impact metrics.
If we could’ve had AgencyAnalytics and had been more tapped into the results that our content was driving, I think that would have been a key factor in helping us retain many of our clients over time.
Content agencies face a unique challenge: Output is subjective.
The same article might impress one client and frustrate another. As Michael puts it, “You can literally take the same piece of content, give it to two different people. One will think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and the other is going to think it’s terrible.”
Subjectivity made it hard to prove value until Compose.ly built reporting transparency into every engagement.
In the early days, Compose.ly leaned on its own platform for client reporting. It tracked the basics—who wrote an article, when it was delivered, whether deadlines were hit, even ratings and reviews. Useful for accountability, sure, but once the content went live, the trail went cold.
Clients still had to ask: What did this actually do for my business?
Why do all of our clients want content and, in a lot of cases, a really solid foundational SEO strategy? Because they want to drive a certain result. They have marketing goals and expectations. A lot of times, it’s driving traffic, it’s driving leads, it’s driving deals.
Michael Leonhard, CEO & Co-Founder, Compose.ly
Since adopting AgencyAnalytics a year ago, every client gets a dashboard that connects the dots between content and results. Instead of simply receiving a tally of articles, clients see how those pieces drive results across multiple platforms—social, organic, PPC, and more. They also get scheduled, standardized reports and have access to their campaign dashboards at all times.
As Michael puts it, that’s the difference between reporting outputs and reporting outcomes.
We wanted to go one step further and say, ‘Hey, there’s a grander strategy here.’ We want you to be able to clearly see what the impact of that content is. AgencyAnalytics gives us the ability to really add that level of transparency and clarity for our customers without having to build it ourselves.
Michael Leonhard, CEO & Co-Founder, Compose.ly
And it’s not just reserved for the biggest logos. Whether it’s a global SaaS brand or a startup with its first marketing budget, AgencyAnalytics enables Michael and his team to deliver a consistent reporting experience that shows clients exactly what they’re getting and why it matters.
For Compose.ly, reporting has become a retention engine. It ensures the agency is never caught flat-footed when client leadership changes, and it gives new stakeholders an immediate picture of the results being delivered. It’s customizable enough to adapt dashboards to report on KPIs most important to each business, and personalize their service.
Finding the balance between human expertise and AI
With strong processes in place, a production model that fired on all cylinders, and an ever-growing roster of clients in need of SME-driven content, Compose.ly had set itself up for success.
Then, in late 2022, ChatGPT exploded onto the scene.
The arrival of generative AI was a seismic shift for the industry. For a content-centric agency like Compose.ly, ChatGPT posed an existential threat. After all, who would need expert writers if you suddenly had access to infinite expertise at the click of a mouse?
Michael and his team faced a critical decision: Adapt or become obsolete.
Compose.ly decided to approach AI as a tool rather than a replacement. The agency embraced experimentation, building new processes where human editors are always in charge.
“When ChatGPT came out, we made the decision that we were not going to bury our heads in the sand,” Michael says. “We were going to embrace AI. We were gonna see how we can be the best at balancing the usage of AI with human hands to deliver the best content as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.”
That commitment has led to continuous R&D over the past three years. The team has tested custom GPTs, Claude, Perplexity, and other models to identify where AI could speed up research, streamline workflows, or cut costs without diluting quality.
Drafting purely with AI and then getting the human in too late in the process—you’re not getting as good content as you could if you did it differently.
You still need hands on the wheel. You still need writers managing ChatGPT. You still need engineers managing ChatGPT. You just can’t fire your staff and have ChatGPT be the engineer or be the writer, and do it all for you.
Michael Leonhard, CEO & Co-Founder, Compose.ly
Compose.ly’s policy today reflects that learning. Some clients still request fully human-written content, mainly in risk-averse industries worried about Google penalties. Others welcome AI-assisted workflows, as long as editors intervene early and often. In both cases, the rule stands: Human hands stay firmly on the wheel.
“We want to leverage AI to balance those two things,” Michael says. “We’re never going to come out and say. ‘This is just fully AI written.’”
But the implications extend far beyond content workflows. For the first time in two decades, search itself is under threat.
Michael notes that the future of SEO goes beyond Google and Bing. Increasingly, people are asking tools like ChatGPT for recommendations—whether it’s the best restaurants in a city or the top products to buy—and those large language models are now shaping the answers they see.
Our job is to reverse engineer what the LLM is looking at, just like everybody’s been doing for Google and Bing forever.
Michael Leonhard, CEO & Co-Founder, Compose.ly
That shift makes EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) more important than ever.
Clients increasingly want bylines from subject matter experts—doctors for health content, lawyers for legal topics—because human expertise is what signals authority to both search engines and AI platforms. It’s also what builds trust with readers, who can instantly tell the difference between generic AI copy and expert-driven content.
How agencies will continue to thrive in the age of AI
Looking ahead, Compose.ly sees its role as twofold: Helping clients rank in traditional SERPs while preparing them to surface in LLM-driven responses. To stay resilient, the agency is also diversifying beyond SEO content. Performance marketing, social media, and even staffing services are now part of its services mix.
For agency leaders, that means asking some serious questions about their business positioning:
What do we do really well? What are our core competencies? What can we lean into that could help us generate a new revenue stream?
Michael Leonhard, CEO & Co-Founder, Compose.ly
That strategy diversifies risk and creates more ways for clients to deepen partnerships with Compose.ly—an edge in an industry where single-service agencies often struggle to survive upheaval.
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Compose.ly’s story proves agencies can thrive through disruption if they adapt quickly and stay focused on what clients value most. From pivoting away from a struggling marketplace to losing big-ticket clients to navigating the AI shockwave, Michael has consistently chosen to lean into change instead of resisting it.
As he looks ahead, Michael believes agencies must approach AI with the same mindset: Embrace it as the new reality, while keeping human judgment at the center.
Everybody is going to want to continue using LLMs and the experience with LLMs are going to evolve. The challenge is figuring out how to ensure our clients are part of those answers.
Michael Leonhard, CEO & Co-Founder, Compose.ly
Michael’s journey offers a few clear lessons for agency leaders:
Land a keystone client early: One big logo will validate your model, build credibility, and open doors to more business.
Prove ROI relentlessly: Reporting is a retention tool that prevents churn when client leadership changes.
Keep humans at the center of AI workflows: Experiment with new tools, but don’t let automation replace editorial judgment and subject matter expertise.
Stay flexible in your service mix: Diversification spreads risk and creates more opportunities to deepen client relationships.
Agencies that embrace these principles will survive AI-driven change and build the resilience that keeps them growing—whatever comes next.
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Francois Marchand brings more than 20 years of experience in marketing, journalism, content production, and artificial intelligence. His goal is to equip agency leaders with innovative strategies and actionable advice to succeed in digital marketing, SaaS, and ecommerce.
