Flow Ninja organizes first Agency summer nights mixer in NYC

The house martini at Primo’s arrives in two parts. The first pour fills a chilled glass, and the rest waits beside it in a small carafe buried in ice.

On the Tuesday after Labor Day, trays of them moved through the Art Deco lounge inside the Frederick Hotel while more than 40+ agency founders and senior operators settled into its corners.

The occasion was Agency summer nights, NYC edition, the first event we have ever hosted in New York. We ran it together with DBA Studio, and somewhere between the sidecars and the last question from the room, it turned into the most useful conversation about running an agency we have had all year, in a room that felt more like a reunion than an event.

A room full of agency founders and operators

The evening was invite only, small on purpose, with an exclusive guest list rather than an open door.

The room was full of studio founders, brand builders, creative directors and growth leads. Most were fellow agency owners and operators, which is exactly why the talks could be as unguarded as they were.

Two founders, two talks, and a shared idea

The talks were the heart of the evening, and the two hosts gave them together.

Uros Mikic, our founder and CEO, talked about how we run Flow Ninja today and what changed with our rebranding, and Laura Zheng Doyon, founder of DBA Studio, talked about the positioning work her studio does and the transformative repositioning she led for us.

Two speakers with two different stories arrived at the same conclusion. The change that did the most for our business this year happened before any design or code, when we traded the Webflow agency label for a name dug out of our own work, Website Operations.

Laura told the story of finding that name, and Uros showed what happened to our numbers once we made the switch.

From Webflow agency to Website Operations

Uros opened with the change that has defined our past year.

For the full decade behind us, we described ourselves the way our whole corner of the market does, as a Webflow agency that designs and builds websites. The work had outgrown that label long before we noticed.

“We spent a lot of time together to figure out who we are, what we do, and how to call what we do. And we ended up naming it Website Operations or WebOps.” - Uros Mikic, CEO of Flow Ninja

He drew a contrast with how positioning tends to happen now, in an AI market where, as he put it, everybody is prompting their positioning with Claude in five minutes. Ours took months of interviews and arguments.

Today, Website Operations describes the full arc our WebOps team of roughly 70 people runs for clients, from strategy, branding, design and development through to SEO, AEO and ongoing growth. Those clients include Upwork, Checkout.com, 6sense, HoneyBook, 21shares and F1.

Then came the talk about the concrete results. Uros acknowledged that repositioning is something that is not really easy to account for on a balance sheet, but it has made a huge difference on our business lately and shared the number that almost made the room sit up.

“Since the beginning of the year to now, I think we are projected for almost 50 percent growth YoY.” - Uros Mikic, CEO of Flow Ninja

He ended on what the repositioning actually changed: It gave us clarity about who we are and what we sell, and the growth followed from there.

What Laura noticed from the outside

Laura founded DBA Studio after leading design at HoneyBook, and her studio creates positioning first branding at founder speed. Her client list runs from Ariana Grande and Yeezy to NYFW, The Village Alliance and the National Women's Soccer League.

The project that connects her studio to ours is the repositioning of Flow Ninja, and her talk walked through how that work actually happens.

She treats positioning as excavation.

"Positioning is literally finding out what currently is true, what is it that they do well, who is it that they serve really well. Finding that middle is a very weird and interesting and very psychologically heavy thing. It is really just finding the truth." - Laura Zheng Doyon, Founder of DBA Studio

In our case, that meant an intense run of interviews with the entire team. What they showed is that even though we started as Webflow natives and were among the first in the category, we had become much more in the meantime.

On top of that foundation sat strategy and branding, design, development, SEO and AEO, a whole operation the old label never mentioned. We had outgrown our own positioning, and the dig gave us the language to name that evolution. WebOps.

She made the fuller version of the excavation argument at flowConf in May, and our flowConf 2026 recap covers it in detail.

What the room wanted to know

Questions from the room went straight at strategy, and the first was blunt. Why are you not raising money?

More followed over the next half hour.

• Why not double the team while the growth is there?
• What does it take to become a Flow Ninja client?
• How do two friendly agencies avoid competing for the same work?
• If everything goes right, where is the business in ten years?

Uros took the funding and headcount questions together, and gave the least fashionable answer an agency owner can give in a growth year.

“We are not looking to double the agency in headcount. We are more looking to ensure that we actually have a good service, and that we can scale the service.”

Scaling a service business runs through people learning, he argued, and that has a natural speed limit.

On clients, he separated direct enterprise engagements from partner work, where another agency brings the relationship and we handle the fulfillment.

The competition question answered itself, since the two studios already send work to each other.

And the ten year answer was the most personal of the night: a team where everyone can grow into a C level role, and a market where “whenever somebody thinks of enterprise websites, they think of us.

What hosting in NYC actually took

A day later, Uros published the unvarnished version on LinkedIn. Events are hard, he wrote, really hard, and a big city raises the difficulty. His list of what worked against us was specific.

• The date fell right after Labor Day, so plenty of invitees were easing back into work after the long weekend.
• Fashion Week and the US Open were both on, and some of our partners understandably chose real matches.
• Finding a venue people genuinely want to come to is expensive in New York.
• A share of the people who sign up will never show up, whatever you do.

More than 40 people came anyway. Uros called the night a huge success and attached one exciting piece of news to the recap, a Flow Ninja office opening in New York in 2027.

Where the series goes next

Agency summer nights was designed as a series, and New York was only the first city. More editions are coming around the world, and the questions asked in that room are already shaping what the next ones should cover.

If you run an agency or a senior web, brand or growth function and want to be there next time, keep an eye on our Luma calendar, where every upcoming edition goes up first. And if the partner conversation is the part that interests you, the Flow Alliance is where it continues.