A new client landed with us recently from Norway, and the project they brought over was a difficult one. Other developers had already tried to sort out the underlying issue and had not gotten there. The store needed to keep running while the fix was figured out, the team was small, and the budget was not infinite. That is the shape of work that most agencies politely decline. We took it on, and we took it on with a guarantee: we fix it, or the client does not pay. That is what we mean by the fix-or-nothing guarantee.
The reason this is the engagement model we run on hard projects is the same reason we have built almost every other rule at MageCloud the way we have. When the work has genuine uncertainty in it, the merchant should not be carrying the financial risk of the uncertainty. The agency should. We are the ones who are paid to know what is fixable and what is not. The merchant is the one who has a store to run. Pushing the uncertainty onto the agency is the natural direction of the trade, and it is the only direction that makes the engagement honest.
MageCloud Fix-or-Nothing Note
What a Fix-or-Nothing Guarantee Actually Means
WHEN IT APPLIES
The hard jobs other developers could not finish
Not every project. The specific case where the prior team has tried, the merchant is stuck, and the path to the fix is not obvious.
WHAT THE CLIENT PAYS
Nothing, until the fix lands and is tested
The merchant carries no financial risk while we work the problem. The agency carries all of it.
WHAT WE GET IF WE WIN
A relationship built on the hardest job
The clients that come from these engagements stay the longest. The trust earned on a difficult project compounds harder than the trust earned on an easy one.
Paul Ryazanov · MageCloud · running fix-or-nothing engagements on hard ecommerce projects since the early agency days
Why We Take the Hard Jobs at All
The economics of the agency business push most operators to filter out the hard jobs at the discovery stage. The reasoning is straightforward. A hard job has uncertain timeline, uncertain budget, uncertain outcome. The clean jobs pay the bills and the hard jobs eat the margin. Most agencies internalise the maths and start declining anything that does not look like a clean job within the first ten minutes of the call.
What that pattern misses is the back end of the relationship. The clients who come in through a hard job, where another agency could not figure it out, become the longest-running clients on the book. The trust earned by fixing the unfixable problem is qualitatively different from the trust earned by delivering a clean job on time. One is a transaction. The other is the start of a relationship that lasts years. That is the same logic that sits behind how MageCloud has kept clients for three years without a single contract. The hard projects produce the relationships that the easy projects can never produce.
What “Nothing” Actually Means in Practice
The “nothing” half of the guarantee is the part most agency operators recoil from. The merchant does not pay if the fix does not land. No retainer to recover the time. No partial billing for the discovery work. No invoice for the consulting hours we put in. If we do not deliver the outcome, the financial cost of the attempt sits with us, not with the client.
In practice this happens occasionally. The last time it did, we spent roughly 40 hours of consulting work on a problem we could not fully resolve in the window we had. When the month ended I did not send a bill for those hours, because the result had not landed and the rule running both directions is what makes the rule work at all. The same principle that sits behind why I cut a client’s invoice in half sits behind this one. The merchant did not get the outcome they paid us to chase, so they do not pay.
Why the Promise Is Worth More Than the Margin
The cost of running this engagement model is real. Some hard jobs we take on do not land, and the consulting hours go to zero on our side. That is the agency carrying the risk. The reason we keep the rule despite the cost is that the win rate on these projects, when we do win, is what builds the brand. Every Norway client, every UK retailer, every US ecommerce founder who has come to us with the project that another team could not finish and walked out with the project working has told other founders the same story.
That story does not get earned by clean discovery calls and beautifully designed proposals. It gets earned by being the agency that took the hard project on and made it work, with the financial risk on us if it did not. The compounding from that pattern over a decade has been the single biggest driver of the MageCloud client book. The math is not subtle. We win the hard project; the client tells the next founder; the next founder comes in with a project that is also hard. The flywheel runs on the fix-or-nothing guarantee.
When the Guarantee Does Not Apply
The guarantee is not the default for every project. It is the default for the specific case where the project is genuinely difficult, prior developers have tried, and the merchant has a real risk of being stuck without help. Clean discovery jobs do not need the guarantee, and offering it on every project would dilute it to the point of meaning nothing.
The honest read is that we offer the guarantee on the projects where we believe we can deliver but cannot promise the timeline or the path. Refusing to take a hard project at all would be the safer business decision in any given month. We do not run the business that way because the long-term return on the harder jobs is higher than the short-term margin on the easier ones, and the relationships built on the back of a successful difficult engagement are the ones that keep the team busy for years.
Where to Find Me Next
If you have a project sitting on your desk that another team could not finish, or you want to compare engagement models with other agency operators, come find me at the next Ecommerce Camp UK. The marketplace room is full of operators trading exactly these stories.