How can I find clients? Can you give me three or four effective ways?
When you brand something as a mini‑SaaS it becomes more tangible and you can increase perceived value. For concrete pricing, check my value‑based pricing method. As for getting clients, the three or four effective ways I’d use are: 1) Upwork – the simplest straight‑line path for beginners with no sales or automation experience. 2) Cold email – the most scalable, low‑cost per meeting method (though it takes time and you need decent sales skills). 3) Direct outreach via LinkedIn DMs, X (Twitter) DMs, Instagram DMs, or recorded Loom videos. 4) Community posts – many people find clients that way. Those are the main tactics I’d recommend.
Debs Automate asks how to find clients. I explain that despite frustration, we are in the greatest era for client acquisition. There are two main buckets: inbound, where you create valuable content and monetize attention via a funnel (selling a service or product), and outbound, where you reach out to people with something valuable and try to sell them one-on-one. I started with outbound, door-knocking to sell marketing packages. Outbound is harder than inbound, but learning outbound makes inbound easy. If you can sell to a stranger and convert them into a paying customer, virtually all business becomes straightforward, especially for those making $0–50k a month. To do outbound, start with a data source of people who may need your product or service—such as LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Reddit, or Google. Find a deficiency in what they are currently doing and offer to resolve it upfront for little or no cost, then provide a strong guarantee on the back end. The person who initially asked about finding clients hasn't explored all possible outreach opportunities; there are more ways to get clients now than ever before, which is an interesting challenge to crack.
The number one way to acquire clients in the current year is not through posting vague things on social media. It’s by finding people who suffer from problems you can actually solve, quantifying how big those problems are in terms of revenue or savings, and then proactively solving those problems for them. After a few days, reach out and say, "Hey, I’ve been solving a problem that’s costing you $10‑20k a month. Do you want me to keep doing it? Here’s proof." That’s the most effective method today. It’s hard, which is why most people don’t do it. It’s easier to sit behind a laptop, blast LinkedIn or YouTube with generic content, but that won’t make money. To scale, you eventually build a personal brand, but to start you just have to reach out to people individually.
If you don't have an audience for your SaaS, I would not spend a bunch of time building an audience. By the time you build the audience, I don't think SaaS as an industry will really make much sense anymore, just given that AI can virtually rebuild anything and everything today for tokens on the dollar, so to speak. What I would do instead is build a two-step process. Rather than building your SaaS, building an audience, and then selling it, I would just build a SaaS and then sell it. You do this by going outbound, not inbound. You don't need to build an audience in order to go outbound — you literally just find people that would get a lot of value out of the product you're selling and go talk to them. There are a variety of different ways to do that; obviously Maker School is a big chunk of the outbound approach. You just reach out to people that have some sort of buying signal and then put your product in front of them in a highly curated way.
But anyway, how do you acquire more upmarket clients? I mean, I wish I could say there's a special system for upmarket clients. A lot of them tend to be more referral-based and gated. They won't take you seriously unless you can accomplish the first hurdle: finding a plausibly deniable reason to reach out to them. That means perusing the network of the people you want to get in touch with, making preliminary introductions or leveraging relationships, then using those connections to find your way to an intro. That's a big thing, but it's very manually intensive and not something you can automate. Aside from that, it's really just the same thing: sending cold emails and working your way up a decision-maker chain, delivering exorbitant value upfront. They're more bureaucratic, with longer sales cycles, but that doesn't mean they're impenetrable. Many cases exist of people in Maker School with zero experience who throw enough outreach to get the attention of a mid-level SVP or similar, then use that to ramp themselves up to a $25–$50 million per year business. It's uncommon, but it occurs.