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.
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.
You’ll have to land your first client just like any professional—by proving you can deliver results. Even without a traditional résumé, you can show proof of generated outcomes. A quick way to bootstrap is to market yourself through free channels such as LinkedIn DMs, Instagram DMs, X (Twitter) communities, schools, etc. Build a system that consistently gets interested prospects, then sell that system to others. For instance, run a LinkedIn outreach funnel that generates about five qualified leads a week (a booked meeting). You may not close those leads yourself, but you can guarantee lead generation for clients.
To get opportunities you can start with free or low‑cost channels. On Upwork you can create a profile and bid for jobs even though it costs a bit of money, it’s one of the easiest ways to start. Cold email is another option: reach out directly to prospects. Join online communities such as Reddit, answer questions, provide value, then post your own content; people will contact you naturally. This approach costs nothing. You can also spend a small amount on paid ads (around $100‑$200) which are still relatively cheap and scalable. Other tactics include cold DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram (though I don’t treat Instagram as a sales platform), commenting on YouTube videos, asking for referrals from anyone who might need your services, and re‑activating past clients. Basically, keep reaching out, introduce yourself and explain that you do AI automation and can solve a problem for them.
If you're running an automation agency, you have three main options to find clients. First, Upwork: it's the simplest, straightest path for beginners to get your first dollar online, though the ROI is lower than other methods. Second, cold email: cost per acquisition is super low, you can scale it, and you can use AI to personalize outreach; check out my previous videos on my main channel @Nix for details on customizing and personalizing emails. Third, communities: post high-value content daily or every few days in groups where your target customers hang out; this frames you as an authority and quickly builds an inbound presence without the hard work of recording hundreds of videos. In Maker School I provide a daily regimen: send 10 Upwork applications, make a community post, and do cold email outreach each day. I recommend about 270 cold emails per day (nine mailboxes with 30 emails each). With a two-step sequence, that yields roughly 3,240 contacts per month, leading to about 90 engaged people, and assuming a third respond positively, you get around 30 leads per day—fantastic for your pipeline. This is what's working today given your photography background; you don't need to cold‑approach bigger businesses unless you want to, as it's often a pain.