Activity is not impact: how Selina Wragg grows startups with a remote team

Veuno works with startups, funded or not, that have a product or service and are looking for product-market fit. Selina describes the job simply: the client has built the thing, and now needs to know where to sell it. The agency runs experiments to find out who the customer is, where they are and where their attention goes, then puts the budget behind what works. "And then pour a bunch of gasoline on it."

Most of its clients are in the United States, and most came through referrals. Aziz has a theory about that: the agencies best at marketing themselves are often the worst agencies, because the good ones are too busy with client work and win clients by reputation. Selina agrees. Turning the lens on yourself is hard, and it always goes to the back of the queue.

Her team is spread across California, Ireland and the UK, Lithuania, Barcelona, Pakistan and Greece. Asked how she keeps them aligned, she gives a plain answer: organisation, shared tools and constant communication. Every project runs through Asana, and clients sit in the agency's Slack so anyone can message anyone.

New clients go through a set onboarding process, adjusted for each one, and every experiment has a hypothesis, a measure and a schedule before it starts. The whole team joins the client calls, not only the senior people, and there is no stupid question. When the agency takes on a client in an industry it does not know, the team learns the industry. And when something is not working, they say so and try something else.

Selina tests candidates with a short task, and she knows the practice divides opinion. It has a strict two-hour limit and is paid: "There's no way that anyone's time is free." The tasks are taken from real problems the agency has faced with clients. The point is not to see the task finished but to see how the person thinks.

After that, she trusts her instinct. One of her best hires was not her first choice; she took a weekend to think and went with her gut. Other people in the agency interview candidates too, and in a new hire's first year she checks in with the clients they work with.

Startup founders are anxious, Selina says, and more so when investors are watching. Her way of building trust with them is the same remotely as in an office, only slower: "do what you say you're gonna do and be absolutely 100% consistent with that." If the report is due on Tuesday, it arrives on Tuesday or before.

Aziz recognises it. Cush Digital has two golden rules: make promises and keep them, and never hide your mistakes. If a promise cannot be kept, saying so early is the same thing as admitting a mistake. He describes three kinds of agency. The 1.0 agency throws work over a wall. The 2.0 agency sells from a menu. The 3.0 agency works as an extension of the client's own team, and some clients put it on their organisation chart. Selina places Veuno there: either under a chief marketing officer who needs senior help, or reporting to the chief executive as a fractional marketing lead with a team that delivers.

Her hardest lesson came from her first hire. He covered while she was on maternity leave, and his updates suggested everything was running well. In her first client meeting back, the client asked for him to be removed. He had cut the weekly check-ins to monthly, and had treated the work as a menu: you chose this, so this is what I will do.

Her mistake, she says, was not letting him go until two years later. She does not blame him. "For me, the buck always stops with me." She had not set or communicated the expectations, or given him the support he needed. What she took from it is to hire people who care, not only people who execute well. For a remote team, she adds one rule: over-communicate. Nobody sees you working, so make sure they know you are.

Near the end, Selina names the thing that ruins a startup's marketing strategy: "when people confuse activity for impact." Being busy, producing content, trying to be on TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn at once because the channels exist. Her advice is to start with one channel, chosen for where the ideal customer actually is, and to give it time: 30, 60, 90 days. Historical data is useful, but she tells new clients plainly that she does not yet know what will work for them.

Aziz gives an example from Cush Digital's own work. A client had published 40 LinkedIn posts in a month. The team analysed a year of the client's data and found three post formats that performed far above the rest. The next month they published 10 posts in those three formats only. By the ninth post, Aziz says, reach, engagement and comments had tripled and followers had grown. A quarter of the work, three times the result.

The same confusion shows up on the client side. Aziz recalls a client who checked the Google Ads account and complained that nothing had been changed in 21 days. Nothing had been changed because the campaigns needed time to gather data, and they were working. This is the argument at the centre of the problem we see in most companies' marketing: activity measured instead of results.

Selina started Veuno to have full control of her time, and she extends that to everyone on the team. Work when you choose, as long as the work is done and there is at least four hours' overlap with the clients each day. She compares it with staring out of the office window on a sunny day, unable to leave the desk. She now works fewer hours than before her burnout and is more present in each part of her day.

Asked for the best decision that did not look smart at the time, she names quitting her job with nothing lined up. It became the agency. "I love my job, I love my work, I love my team, I love our clients, I love my life."

If your marketing is busy but not bringing customers, that is the gap our work as a marketing department is built to close.