My team manages paid ads on Meta and Google for SaaS companies that serve the creative online business space.
And before I tell you Dubsado’s story, here’s something you should know about us: we’re not just an ads agency. We are the customer your software is built for.
My team lives and works inside the tools we run ads for — which means we understand your customer’s pain points from the inside out, because we’ve felt them ourselves.
They wanted to reach those people without losing what made them special.
But they knew there was a much larger market of potential users who had never heard of them.
Dubsado is a CRM and client management platform built for creative service providers — photographers, wedding planners, coaches, designers, virtual assistants, and anyone running a service-based business who needs to streamline their contracts, invoices, and proposals. After a decade of growth fueled almost entirely by word of mouth and community, Dubsado had built one of the most loyal, vocal followings in the online business space. And they’ve done all of this while remaining fully self-funded; no board of directors, no investors, just a team building for their customers.
The entire foundation of their ads account needed to be rebuilt.
Before we started working together in June 2024, Dubsado had made several attempts at running paid ads — but nothing had ever really stuck. As co-founder Jake Berg described it, they’d "dedicated a lot of finances towards ads, but didn’t really see a large return on the investment. We would kind of just pause all ads altogether for months or almost like years at a time and then try it again and kind of run into a similar circumstance."
The reports they received previously were surface-level — clicks, impressions, reach. But the metrics that actually tell a SaaS company whether their ads are working, like cost to acquire a free trial and trial-to-paid conversion rate… those were nowhere to be found.
When my team and I got access to the ad account, the tracking was overinflated and unreliable. Some of the creative was targeting the completely wrong audience and the strategy wasn’t built around Dubsado’s actual customer — the scrappy, creative entrepreneur trying to get their business running without duct-taping five different tools together.
We…
We also pushed to incorporate UGC and use real stories from real Dubsado users, because nothing converts a creative service provider like hearing from someone who is exactly like them.
Started fresh with creative that actually spoke to Dubsado’s ideal customer.
Rebuilt the pixel
Fixed the events being optimized for
Rewrote the targeting strategy, and
The first thing we did was get clear on the metrics that matter for a SaaS company like Dubsado: cost to acquire a free trial, and conversion rate from free trial to paid subscription.
At the time, Dubsado’s trial-to-paid conversion rate was sitting at around 10%. That became our baseline, and the number we aimed to beat.
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You can run the best ads in the world, but if the landing page loses people or the email sequence doesn’t convert free trial users, you’re leaving money on the table and wasting your valuable adspend.
From day one, my team took a holistic approach to Dubsado’s growth. We weren’t just managing the ad account.
Optimized the pages we were sending traffic to
Collaborated on email sequence strategy to improve trial-to-paid conversion
Worked with their developer team to ensure tracking was clean, and
Advised on their webinar pages when they launched that channel
"Melissa has been so forthcoming as a partner around ideas that go beyond ads. She really cares about your success.
So she's been great at saying, ‘have you guys thought about this related to your email marketing? Or have you thought about this when it comes to your customer onboarding?’”
“Having metrics associated with how our ads were performing was kind of the first win that clicked for us.”
For Dubsado, that was the signal that this partnership was working. For us, it was proof that our strategies were working and it was time to start scaling the adspend.
Jake Berg said,
We started with a combined monthly ad spend of just over $2,000. By September of 2024, we were consistently hitting and beating that 10% trial-to-paid conversion goal — something their previous ad efforts had never reliably achieved.
One of the hardest things to do in paid ads is scale spend while still hitting your goals. As we proved that we could scale spend while maintaining consistent results, Dubsado trusted us to increase the budget.
In July 2025, we had a breakout month. During a summer discount sale, our Meta ROAS hit 10.5X. Their previous sale month had delivered a 5.5X ROAS. Annie had never seen numbers like that across any client she’d worked with.
That fall, we increased the overall budget nearly threefold… and the results held.
In October 2025, Dubsado hit 2,290 free trials — 181% of their goal, and the highest trial volume in the company’s ten-year history.
The online business and creative service provider space is our home. My team uses the tools our clients build. We understand what makes a creative entrepreneur pull out their credit card — because we ARE that creative entrepreneur.
When Dubsado needed to pivot quickly — whether it was the launch of Dubsado 3.0, a price increase, a new 21-day trial structure, or a live event that needed more registrations — we moved fast.
Angela said, “They're always available, always able to really pivot really quickly. We will say to them, ‘we have this thing we want to capitalize on and do really quickly’ — and they're always responsive, go above and beyond getting things done, and moving the needle as soon as possible.”
And we don’t just show up with good news. Annie appreciated this most:
“There's no sparkle to obfuscate when things are a little bit down. There's candor and constructive feedback like, ‘the volume was a little bit down, here's what I'm thinking about that.
Here's what I'm seeing.’ I've seen a lot of agency people who try to put a positive spin on everything. And if that's obfuscating the truth, that's just really tricky. So the whole team has done a really good job at candidly saying, ‘here's what's going on. Here's what's happening, here are the positives and here’s where there's room for improvement,’ and then always coming to the table with, ‘here's what we want to do next.’"
That’s how a two-year partnership gets built and stays strong.
"The people that she chooses to surround herself with in regards to the team — they’re all just really sharp. You can tell that they really enjoy what they do and they make you feel taken care of. No matter what the problem or goal is, you're working with someone who's going to get you there."
"I feel like they are like a true partner. They come to us with so much strategy that I would have never thought of on my own whatsoever. Their ads expertise is phenomenal just in general. They're always saying, ‘here's what we're seeing, let's test it out.’ ‘We see this post is doing really well, can you spin up this creative for us?’ They're always really proactive in a sense of coming to us with things that will push it, instead of just being reactive and doing what we're asking. You want to have that expert in your corner that is coming to you and saying, ‘let's do this.’"
"She is an exceptional blend of creative, big picture thinking, and heavily focused on the data and the numbers. And I find often, especially in leaders of agencies, they index on one or the other of those sides, and then they hire to supplement. What I've noticed from Melissa and from Shani, and from other people that we've worked with on the team, they all balance both of those things really well, which I think makes for the perfect partner on digital ads."
By month three, you should see a 2X ROAS
In the first two months, you should expect to break even
while we audit your existing tracking, rebuild your pixel and conversion events, establish your baseline KPIs, and test creative angles to learn what resonates with your audience. This is the foundation phase — and it's what makes everything that comes after it work.
there's no reason we can't see a 3X ROAS by month four
and we'll only work to improve those numbers from there.
If your website conversion rate is sitting at 1.5–2% and you have a trial-to-paid conversion rate of at least 5%,
“[Ads are] a long game — stick with Litchfield Media beyond two years and really invest in that relationship. Know that the algorithm in marketing is an ever-changing landscape, and
in this team you're definitely going to have somebody that is consistently trying to look for ways to beat the algorithm and help you reach those business goals."
when you work with Litchfield Media, you’re going to get
“someone who's professional and puts in the work and is going to fight hard for your business to grow."
If that sounds like the partner you've been looking for, let's talk.
Click here to book your discovery call
