Most agency "our story" pages make it sound like a straight line. Had an idea, built the thing, here we are. Ours isn't a straight line, so I wanted to write down the actual one somewhere, even if it's not the version that goes on the homepage.
I've been freelancing since 2009. Content writing first, but I came from a computer science background, so I was also the freelancer who could build the site, not just write the copy for it. Page builders at first, then real code once I got better at it. Somewhere along the way SEO showed up too, and honestly it wasn't really a new skill, more like the thing that was already sitting at the intersection of writing and building. PPC and social media came after that, picked up because clients needed them, not because I planned a career path.
Starting in 2016 I started moving through agencies too, five different ones over the years, while still freelancing the whole time. I'm not going to name them here. That's not really the point of this post anyway. The point is that seeing the inside of five different shops instead of just one is what turned "huh, that agency was kind of a mess" into "oh, this is just how a lot of agencies run." Talented people stretched way too thin. Pay and support for the people actually doing the work treated like an afterthought. Sales closing a deal on a promise the delivery side never even heard about until the client brought it up. Client updates that lived in whatever email thread hadn't been abandoned yet.
The idea for building something different first showed up in 2021. I didn't act on it. Freelance work and agency work both have a way of eating every hour you'd use to start something new, and the idea just sat there.
I actually tried to start ADMS twice in 2023. Both times it fizzled. Not from one dramatic reason I can point to, just the normal way a side project loses to whatever client work is due this week, until enough weeks go by that the momentum is gone and you're back to square one. If you've ever tried to start something on the side while still doing the thing that pays your bills, you know exactly what I mean. The idea doesn't die. It just keeps getting quietly deprioritized until you stop telling people about it.
What actually got it going for real was, honestly, just deciding to treat it like a real launch instead of a someday project. ADMS started operating for real in May 2026. Not a cleaner story than that. I just stopped letting it be the thing I'd get to eventually.
I still consult for a few agencies, which might sound strange to admit while running my own. It isn't a conflict for me. It's the same work, and it keeps me looking at the industry from more than one angle instead of just my own. I've also started learning LLM prompt engineering this year, on top of everything else, because it's genuinely changed how I work day to day and I don't think that's going away.
If you're sitting on an idea you tried and dropped once or twice already: that doesn't mean it was a bad idea. Sometimes it just means it wasn't the right week yet.