In this episode of Web Legends, we sit down with Ian Harris, founder of Agency Hackers, one of the most influential and unconventional communities for agency leaders in the UK and beyond. Ian takes the messy, human parts of leadership and turns them into connection and collective growth. From running internal communication campaigns for brands like Bupa and EY to assembling hundreds of agency owners at events across London and Ibiza, he has reshaped what an agency community can be.
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From Failed Side Projects to a Newsletter That Stuck
Ian jokes that his entire history of business failures lives in old WordPress databases, every forgotten install a project he got bored of. Before Agency Hackers, he tried around 10 businesses, including a children’s nightclub and a secret steakhouse serving Wagyu at an undisclosed location. He was hooked on the cycle of buying a domain, making a website and a logo, then losing interest. Agency Hackers was the one that stuck, largely because people would not let him stop it.
It began in 2017, not as a community but as a plain email newsletter sent from Outlook, just Ian writing up little stories he heard around the industry while working at an agency. People kept asking to be added. Once it hit 1,000 subscribers, he emailed asking what they would buy if this were a business, and agency leaders, who love being asked for their opinion, replied with ideas. That was the foundation.
Going All In, One Week Before Lockdown
By March 2020, Ian was running so many live events that he had used up all his holiday time at his job and quit, with a full calendar booked for the year. A week later, COVID made live events impossible. It felt like the worst possible timing, but it turned out well, because agencies suddenly needed a rallying point, and Agency Hackers became it.
The events are shaped by relentless feedback. After each one, the team asks attendees how they would improve it and promises to publish the negative comments alongside the positive ones, which encourages people to write more generously. Ian treats complaints like software bugs to fix. Years ago, the feedback was that events were disorganized and speakers were poor. Now it is mostly about the sandwiches, a sign that the real bugs are solved.
Who Agency Hackers Is For
The community targets independent agencies, typically six to eighty people, across a mix of disciplines: digital, UX, PR, and creative. Deliberately mixed, because a room of three hundred UX agencies would share nothing. The audience skews mature, with a good sense of humor, people who have their act together but have not solved every problem, wrestling with team building and three-year plans rather than chasing a first client.
The flagship is the Super Summit, a two-day conference in Ibiza at the end of September drawing 250 to 300 people, now heading into its fourth year and expanding to Miami in April, with quarterly events in New York. Ian is candid that these blend holiday and conference, and if they ever stopped trying hard on the content, people would rightly be annoyed, since they could just go on holiday for free. This relationship-led model is familiar to anyone running white-label partnerships, where trust does the heavy lifting.
The Real Problem Is Always People
Through the membership’s Agency Board, small groups meet for a full-day, chaired session each quarter, with board packs prepared in advance. The recurring theme is that the challenges are almost never systems; they are people. Ian notes leaders often already know the solution and just need help seeing it, which is why the group half-jokingly says someone gets fired every day at 3 pm. One member carried out a difficult senior firing in the half hour before a meeting, saying a weight had been lifted and he could not have faced the group otherwise.
His networking advice for a room of two hundred strangers is simple: remember no one else knows anyone either, then just ask people what they are working on, because most people like being asked about themselves.
Fun Rapid Fire Round
Asked about founders who stood out, Ian named Carrie Rose of Rise at Seven, whom he watched grow from scrappy beginnings to a big multi-market agency, Mike King of iPullRank, a robust character on the US scene, and Peter Kang of Barrel Holdings, whom he calls the Warren Buffett of the agency world for his acquisition streak. On his own ambitions, Ian quipped that he is trying to be the Warren Buffett of Catford.
He also shared the chaos that comes with thirty events a year: a canceled event that stayed live on an old landing page, leaving two travelers at a closed venue, and an Ibiza boat party scrapped at dawn for high winds, forcing a scramble for a new venue whose owners demanded twenty thousand euros in cash to open. His team of six, mostly journalists, keeps the content sharp, which is why the newsletter remains worth subscribing to.
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