Blutui’s Mission to Become Agencies’ Secret Weapon by Boosting Margins

Blutui, a website-building technology platform, is a secret weapon for agencies big and small, promising a way to grow margins through automation and a white labelled product.

The seven-year-old New Zealand business can increase agencies’ digital productivity, in some cases, as much as 4,000x, but it has been flying under the radar, according to founder Graeme Blake, partially by design: the business has what it calls a “Fight Club rule”, never discussing or revealing its clients.

The tech platform allows agencies to build practically any scope of website for clients quickly, and maintain them easily. A project is set up “in seconds or, at the most, minutes, not hours or days,” Graeme explains, by implementing AI features and automating the tasks that typically slow down developers.

As Graeme puts it, “Blutui delivers growth and eliminates costly chaos”, giving agencies “under massive margin pressure” a shot at increasing those margins.

“In terms of time savings, agencies experience a minimum 244%-400% increase in productivity on smaller campaign landing pages, microsites and mid-range sites,” he adds. “We have instances with larger web-app scale projects where Blutui delivers a 4,140x advantage, saving literally hundreds of hours per project.

“This time saved allows developers to focus on higher-value work, like refining UX and UI, crafting amazing functionality, or exploring creative concepts … The work clients are willing to pay a premium for, and without sacrificing margin.”

Graeme founded Blutui in 2017. Previously an indie owner himself, Graeme knew there was a gap in the market when his agency, Pan, The Love Agency, “was experiencing increasing levels of chaos, disruption and to be perfectly honest, losses when it came to the digital delivery part of our business.”

He saw other agencies struggling with the same issue: outsourcing or turning down digital projects because it was too low-margin, or too tough to manage, and “relinquishing valuable client stickiness” in the process.

“We were early to embrace the full-service model, from brand, campaign, media, and what was then digital,” Graeme says of that period of time at the agency.

“Websites, mobile apps, web apps, banners. The lot. Anything a client needed, and this approach served us exceptionally well, until it didn’t.

“We were growing, we had super healthy billings, and our portfolio of clients was improving all the time. However, we began to experience the effects of technology fragmentation. You know, where you need a suite of different technologies and specialist teams to deliver on the naturally wide range of client projects. This meant employing, or contracting and managing, multiple teams to essentially perform open heart surgery on the myriad past and present projects.

“It’s not that we were doing anything wrong per se, but we knew there must be a better way. Except there wasn’t.”

Out of those frustrations, Blutui was born, taking its name from Tui, a native New Zealand bird. It’s more aggressive and territorial than the Kiwi, Graeme says, so to him, it symbolised the competitive edge agencies needed, but weren’t getting.

He canvassed the idea with industry contacts, including at Cannes in 2019 - “every agency was suffering from over-bloated technology, exorbitantly expensive licences, and inefficient teams.”

Pan, The Love Agency, acted as a test client, and when COVID hit, “many of our smaller agency clients fell off the books and left only a few whales, meaning we could focus on those to help inform the direction of Blutui.” The agency, along with investment from family and friends, funded the venture.

Running both the agency and Blutui simultaneously acts as a point of difference, Graeme says, because the team can react to agency needs in real-time.

“It’s a key differentiator in our offering to agencies. We are developing Blutui in a live production environment with continual input from our own studio.”

Blutui has grown to a team of 10, including six full stack developers, engineers, and AI specialists, with two more hires on the way. Charlie Cooper, Blutui’s product manager, previously worked in agencies in the UK and Australia such as McCann Health. Chief commercial officer Christy Fung has worked across Asia and the UK in fintech and gaming businesses, and Amir Mireskandari, Ogilvy Asia’s ex-chief delivery officer, is a board adviser.

Agency brand white-labelling is a key part of the offering, meaning agencies can present the platform to clients as their own proprietary tech. That’s what led to the “Fight Club rule”.

“We don’t publicise our client list or pricing because it’s not a competitive edge if everyone has access to it,” Graeme explains.

He can, however, talk about how anonymous clients have used Blutui.

“One indie in Sydney previously spent over five months trying to launch their website using a mainstream platform, only to face infrastructure issues that led to a failed launch,” Graeme says.

“With Blutui, they met their deadline in under three weeks, including multiple rounds of UX and UI revisions.”

Another global agency’s Southeast Asian office needed to deliver a big fast food brand website for a competition, and quickly. They smashed the three-week deadline by delivering the site in five days, Graeme says.

Graeme says the tech suits indies using freelancers or global networks with a slew of offices. The pricing structure differs from agency to agency though.

“Depending on the agency use case, we will tailor an enterprise arrangement or SaaS licence to suit. We understand that agencies don’t have time to waste trying to understand complex fee structures.”

Graeme’s ambition for Blutui is that it stops being an underdog, and becomes the renowned “gold standard for digital development” for “progressive agencies to deliver creativity and value for their clients.”

Last year, he focused on building the brand in Southeast Asia, and Europe, including the UK. Looking ahead, Graeme believes Blutui’s proposition will only strengthen, as agencies continue to feel the pinch.

“We don’t see any change to the ever-increasing margin pressure and competition for digital projects coming from outside adland, so 2025 promises rapid growth,” he says.

“But we’re committed to staying selective about our agency friends to ensure alignment with our vision for sustainable growth for them and for us. We don’t need to be big to deliver better.”