How can I get leads for a web design agency with no budget, choose the best automation (Agently vs N8N) to sell to agency owners, craft cold email DMs without social proof, and decide whether to make content for inbound leads, while being willing to work for free and do everything manually?
Great shout out to you, Zaid, for being 15 and pushing forward to improve your station in life. I understand money is tight where you're at, and as someone who was in a similar situation growing up, all I really wanted was more freedom and security—money was a constant issue at our dinner conversations, just like when my family immigrated from a former Soviet bloc country. So let's make it as cheap as humanly possible. At 15, many people will inherently not want to work with you because the biggest red flag for business owners is if you haven't done anything before; they don't want to risk reputation, money, time, or emotional state on someone unlikely to deliver. At 15, the assumption is you're young and haven't had time to do the thing, which will be a problem for you. My recommendation: you probably can't do anything that requires your face at least until you're older, unless your testosterone levels are through the roof and you have a Gandalf‑like beard—unlikely. I faced this at 21 with a baby face; people thought I was 16 knocking on doors and laughed me out of rooms. So strategically, don't copy what an adult does; adults selling to you won't take you seriously. Instead, try a faceless business model that leverages your inbuilt talents. A good example is faceless YouTube automation, which has blown up with the younger crowd because it leverages your strong taste in social media and ability to understand and follow trends—your brain is basically half algorithm anyway—and it doesn't require you to use your face. Running social media channels and brands, like TikTok or Instagram theme pages, teaches the same skills without needing your face on camera. You also don't need to learn a tremendous amount of automation to make this work; budget‑wise it's usually not crazy if you use free or low‑cost models. Remember, social media is free—you are the product—and you don't pay to use it for the most part. So, I understand you want to pursue this business model, but that's my honest recommendation. I don't have a lot of steps on how to do that; I'm just giving you my two cents. I would do that for a couple of years or give an example of that.
Yeah, tackle the situation. To be abundantly clear, you can do anything without money, but it's just a lot more difficult. It's like taking a 5‑lb dumbbell curl and turning it into a 100‑lb curl — possible, but it takes a lot of time, effort, and training. If you have even $20 to put toward this, your life gets tremendously easier. My recommendation is not to start a business with literally zero; if you don't have money, get a job or something similar and run that side‑by‑side with your entrepreneurial effort. Necessity is the mother of invention, and people have found creative ways to bootstrap, but I prefer to just get a job. I've been there — I'd bring tea bags from home to Starbucks for hot water, and my business partner would bring cheap cream cheese and expired bagels to make low‑cost meals. It's not a good spot. It's much better to get a job for a couple of months, save a little money, and then try entrepreneurship afterward. To answer the spirit of your question, I would do cold DMs on social media platforms — LinkedIn, X.com, Instagram, and so on. Unlike email, where you need to pay for mailboxes, lead enrichment, and tools (around $97‑$40 a month), social media platforms are free; you only pay with your attention, and the algorithms give you equal access regardless of wealth or fame. You need good copywriting principles and attention‑grabbing techniques. For example, you could say, 'Hey Pete, I can save you $10,000 a month in the next 60 seconds. I'll give you everything for free at the end of this, whether or not you want to work together.' That kind of hook gets attention. Aim for 20‑40 DMs a day across these platforms. If you do that consistently for a month, you'll reach about 1,200 people. With good copy, good offers, and decent Loom videos, you'll absolutely drive results.
Sorry, my windows are open and it's getting noisy—give me a second. To make a long story short, you should always want to sell to people who have money; that's one of the quickest and easiest hacks. I'm not saying nonprofits have no money, but they're not as incentivized to spend it, and in my experience they tend to spend money worse than most other people unless they're directly tied to a governmental organization just wasting thousands. So, unless it's that kind of situation, the opportunity cost of not having your Instagram/Facebook automation is low—creating that content for a nonprofit isn't all that important, and expense minimization is also low because it's usually just a volunteer or intern doing the posting. I focus on opportunity cost and savings: what's the cost of not having this, and what expenses are you minimizing? For a nonprofit, the opportunity cost is probably pretty low, maybe around $500 a month at most if you strip away all the BS and get down to brass tacks. Compare that to a business where posting on Instagram/Facebook makes a massive difference to the bottom line—say they're losing $5,000 a month without it—then you could charge about $1,500 a month (30% of that value). That’s equivalent to serving ten animal shelters at the lower rate. Ultimately, if your goal is money, optimize for money; there are much straighter line paths to profit than trying to sell Instagram/Facebook post automations to animal shelters. Figure out your prime directive: if it's money, go after it, while still keeping your personal moral code—making automations for agencies isn’t ethically wrong to me.
My personal brand now drives the vast majority of new conversations, opportunities, and clients for my agency; I couldn't run the agency at its current level without it. Initially, I did everything outbound—door-to-door—then moved to less intense but scalable outreach like cold calling, cold emailing, and cold DMs. Three to four months into my YouTube channel, I was making $40k–$50k a month from cold outbound with my agency. I started the YouTube channel to scale my agency, and shortly after, I landed a $20k deal without a single sales call, realizing I could use my subscriber base as a main lever for client acquisition. Many people try to skip the outreach step, thinking they can just start a YouTube channel and get clients from it. However, building a successful YouTube funnel is very difficult and risky; it often takes years of consistent content with no return. Moreover, if you lack outreach, sales, and marketing skills, you can't reliably turn strangers into paying customers. If your YouTube channel disappears or platform changes, you're left without a fallback. Therefore, I recommend not skipping the outreach step: first build a business using traditional outreach, marketing, and sales skills. Content is important, but the internet is full of people who only talk without doing. In my own agency, I no longer manage most projects myself; I have a consultant/account manager (Cody) and a backend/team manager (Geo) handling projects, while I act in an advisory capacity, especially for large enterprise deals like Mr. Beast that require many meetings. In short, you should spend your time and energy building skills that turn total strangers into paying customers. Once you've validated that ability—maybe earning $10k–$30k a month with your agency—you can then invest in more scalable outreach methods like your brand, Twitter, or YouTube channel.
My recommendation is to get the paid versions of the AI tools as soon as possible – they’re significantly better than the free tiers and will let you work the way businesses actually use them. Use a modest amount of money (e.g., $20 a month from a parent’s credit card) to subscribe and start delivering real value for someone, even if it’s just helping your mom with a task so you can practice. Don’t wait four months; you can start today. After you’ve set up a small service, keep consuming content like mine and look for problems people are struggling with. When you spot a pain point, reach out with cold emails, DMs, LinkedIn messages, or short videos offering a solution. I’ve found that many agencies have low‑hanging inefficiencies – for example, they don’t follow up quickly or personalize communication. By signing up as a client yourself, you can see these gaps and then build a service to fix them. Start sending a consistent number of cold outreach messages each day, scrape public creators to identify gaps in their funnels, and pitch ways you can improve their business. This proactive, value‑first approach, especially when powered by AI, is the fastest way to land your first clients and grow an agency.