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#316 · How to get your first automation clients (outbound!)

youtube ↗Client Acquisition

How do you find clients?

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.

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youtube ↗Client Acquisition

How can I acquire more upmarket or mid-market enterprise clients—should I use direct response or focus purely on content?

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.

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youtube ↗Client Acquisition

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.

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youtube ↗Client Acquisition

I’m a freelancer building automation solutions for French‑speaking SMEs, earning ~$700/month, aiming for €3k/month. How should I acquire clients? Should I focus on cold outreach, content creation, or paid ads? My sales call conversion is only ~5%; should I outsource sales or improve my own sales skills?

Outsourcing sales is a mistake; the sales skill is the only lever that will matter over the next five years, and agents can quickly learn the technical side, so you’d give away leverage and end up with roughly 30 % of the profit instead of 70 %. Sales is far more valuable than the technology itself—consider Netflix versus an AI‑generated clone: the clone lacks Netflix’s customer list, marketing, vendor relationships, and licensing, which are all distribution assets. Therefore, your focus should be on acquiring clients through cold outreach, not content creation or paid ads. Paid ads exchange money for time, which you don’t have; content creation also trades time for a delayed, uncertain payoff that could leave you without income for months. Instead, become excellent at cold outreach. Think of it as skipping the beginner zone in a game and fighting a level‑99 dragon: defeating one grants you twenty levels and lets you crush the beginners. Alternatively, cold outreach lets you sell your skills directly (one step) versus the longer path of building a skill, then a brand, then products, then sales. You’ll earn less in the long run but far more in the short term, which fits your one‑year goal to reach €3 k/month.

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youtube ↗Lead Generation

How do you sell and get new opportunities?

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.

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