Selling an Experience, Not Just a Website
AdvertAI Marketing builds premium websites for businesses and brands around the world. Founded in 2023 by Garrett Leonard, the 11-person agency also engages with other agency partners to white-label fulfillment under that agency’s existing brand.
In this agency partner model, every new client brings multiple concurrent projects, each with its own timeline, stakeholders, and approval cycle, putting enormous weight on the project management experience. Here, Garrett saw the opportunity to differentiate himself with a better client experience.
The problem was his tooling: ClickUp handled internal task management well, but it had no client-facing layer. Intake ran through Google Forms. Feedback and approvals lived in Markup.io. Files sat in Google Drive. Everything else happened over email.
“We were dealing with scattered emails and no good way to share information with clients.”
He looked at Notion, considered building something custom on his own site, and explored stretching ClickUp’s native features to cover client communication. None of it fit. “There wasn’t a solution I found that was as simple and clear of an offering as Assembly.”
One Branded Portal, Structured Around Agency Partners
AdvertAI adopted Assembly in 2025 with a specific goal: give every client and agency partner one branded place to see their projects, talk to the team, and get what they need.
Garrett structured Assembly’s CRM to mirror his business model directly. A partner logging in sees all of their projects in organized tabs: status, files, messages, and deliverables. Gone were the days of hunting through email threads for the current state of five simultaneous websites.
That structure closed the gap his previous stack couldn’t. Clients stopped asking where things stood, because they could see it.
“That was actually why we came to Assembly in the first place: to find something that made us feel different from other marketing agencies and web design agencies. Something that felt unique, an experience you don’t typically get in this industry.”
The all-in-one portal experience became central to AdvertAI’s positioning in differentiating itself among other marketing and web development agencies.
Building the Missing Half: AdvertAI on Assembly Studio
Assembly solved the client-facing side. But one gap persisted: the connection between client conversations in Assembly and the internal work happening in ClickUp. Every client request still had to be manually re-entered as a task and routed to the right team member.
“We use ClickUp for a lot of our project management and internal task-related items. We’ve always been missing the opportunity to connect that with the front-facing, client-related tools like Assembly.”
The first tool that Garrett built was a comprehensive message center for his business, rivaling category-defining software tools like Front.
The Message Center sits on top of Assembly’s native Messages app, extended with the workflow logic AdvertAI’s project managers actually need to run a day of client communication. It has become the app the team lives in, including:
- Follow-up tracking driven by ClickUp: project managers can manage follow-ups corresponding to the relevant ClickUp project
- Integrations with Gmail: client emails appear in the same message list alongside Assembly messages, plus upcoming ClickUp due dates, internal notes, and billing history. The team added talk-to-text for longer messages and custom sound alerts for notifications
- Ownership: messages can be assigned to specific internal team members, with the ability to restrict who’s allowed to respond to which clients
- Reply later and internal tagging: team members can flag a message for later and receive a notification banner at the end of the day, or tag a colleague with a question directly on the conversation
- Response templates: AdvertAI sends five to ten standard response and update types every week, and those now live in the app as templates
- Suggest a Reply: new team members can draft a response and route it to a team lead for review before it goes out, a training mechanism built directly into the workflow
“That’s been a really great feature in training people.”
The Rest of the Stack, Rebuilt In-House
The Message Center was the first app, not the last. In just a few weeks, AdvertAI also built out:
- A design feedback app, an Assembly-native replacement for Markup.io, keeping client approvals inside the branded portal
- An agency rewards program, a loyalty app for partner agencies that tracks project milestone progress and unlocks tiered discounts after every 5 or 10 sites completed in a year
- An SEO dashboard for client-facing visibility into deliverables and reporting, plus internal site issue detection, replacing Bright Local and Keyword.com
- A project hub for custom onboarding forms, client surveys, and an AI content writing tool built around AdvertAI’s specific copy process
- A project starter app that provisions a new project across every Assembly app and ClickUp simultaneously
“We’ve been able to build out apps in just a few weeks that I don’t know if we could have done within five to ten years before Assembly Studio. It’s allowed me to create automations and workflows that I didn’t realize were going to be possible.”
Fewer Tools, and a Client Experience Competitors Can’t Beat
The most immediate result was consolidation. AdvertAI is in the process of retiring Markup.io, Google Drive, Bright Local, Keyword.com, and Google Forms, replaced by apps the team built themselves inside their own portal.
“It’s not only saved us money, it’s greatly improved the internal workflows we have, because there’s much less clicking between different platforms for all of our project managers to complete the day-to-day tasks we need with each client. It’s saved them a ton of time, and it’s been much less of a headache for them, not having to figure out where to go for the next thing. They can stay on Assembly for just about everything they do every day.”
For Garrett, the savings show up as reclaimed hours and less operational overhead.
“I’m already starting to see myself get hours back each week, because there’s less maintenance and fewer things I need to stay on top of. The apps are doing a lot of this themselves.”
The part he weights most heavily, though, is what clients see. Approvals, feedback, reporting, and communication all now happen inside AdvertAI’s own branded environment.
“Everything stays within the client portal now. They don’t have to jump to another tool for feedback: everything stays within our own branded area.”
“Our clients have said nothing but great things about all the apps we’ve shared with them. We’ve heard how professional everything feels, and how it’s really unique compared to any other experience they’ve had.”
As AdvertAI continues shifting toward an agency-first model, that differentiated experience is the growth engine, and the rewards program is already doing double duty as a pitch asset for new partners.
“Assembly Studio is something I’d definitely recommend to other agency owners, and really any business looking to not only make things easier for them, but make the experience a lot better for the clients they work with.”