What would you do in my position, given I’m overwhelmed with building campaigns, personalizing messages, sourcing leads all day, and dealing with client revisions while aiming for $50‑100K months?
Great question. I was in your exact shoes not long ago. While running this channel I still had a few retainers paying $3,000‑$3,500 a month, but the work was highly custom, technical, and required endless revisions – a massive pain. I kept taking on too much, not the right kind of work. You’re essentially running unscoped, general‑purpose retainers without clear deliverables, so clients pay well but you can’t scale. My recommendation is to standardize your retainer packages. Treat your cold‑outreach agency as a product: pick one to two lead sources, automate or semi‑automate lead scraping, and create three tiered packages (e.g., 5k, 10k, 20k leads per month). Bundle the number of mailboxes/outreach volume into each package, price them with modest discounts for larger tiers (e.g., 25% off moving from 5k to 10k, another 25% from 10k to 20k). This gives clients a clear value proposition and lets you charge proportionally without a linear price jump. Standardize the validation/verification process with SOPs: pull an Apollo search URL, scrape leads into a Google Sheet, run them through a verification service, and keep everything repeatable. By limiting lead sources, automating scraping, and offering defined packages, you eliminate endless custom work and can scale efficiently.
I think the core problem isn’t the offer itself but the amount of outreach you’re doing. Based on the numbers you shared you’re probably doing far fewer outreach actions than a typical agency—maybe 24 × less than you think. If you tally every email, DM, call, or LinkedIn message you sent in the first month you’ll see you could have done many more. The growth equation is simple: more outreach equals more leads, which equals more clients. So before you scrap the model, double‑down on consistent, high‑volume outreach (cold email, LinkedIn, etc.) and track those metrics. Once you have a reliable pipeline you can decide whether to specialize, but the immediate fix is to increase outreach dramatically.
First, secure payment before doing any work—no client until money changes hands, whether 50 % upfront/50 % on delivery, 100 % upfront, or escrow via Upwork. Once paid, schedule a kickoff call. On that call, get the client onto all necessary platforms (Instantly, Smartlead, Lemlist, lead‑scraping tools, etc.) and have them sign up with email + password (avoiding 2FA hassle). Verify all connections work. Then scrape leads (about 30 minutes) using your preferred source. Next, create the offer using a hyper‑template: subject line for plausible deniability, an icebreaker line personalized via AI, a brief identification statement with social proof, the core offer, a risk‑reversal guarantee (e.g., full refund or $250 gift card if it doesn’t work), and a clear CTA (e.g., a 15‑minute call or video review). This offer assembly takes roughly 30 minutes and is industry‑agnostic; you just swap variables. After the offer, personalize the lead list (again ~30 minutes) via a drag‑and‑drop system that applies your template and enriches data if needed. Load everything into your outreach sequencer and wait for replies. Over the following weeks, send progress updates, track metrics, and iterate: tweak subject lines, icebreakers, offer copy based on reply‑rate data, keeping the 80/20 rule in mind—get 80 % from the template, refine the remaining 20 % from market feedback. The whole initial setup is about an hour of work, after which you can sell a campaign for around $3 000 plus a paper lead, leveraging the system for high ROI.
First, I'd recognize that where I'm physically located has virtually no bearing on how much money I can make — there's some impact if I'm from a region associated with offshore workers pitching people used to different price expectations, but assuming it's just me going to a new area, it doesn't really matter where I work or live. Second, I'd spend $184 of the $300 on Maker School — not because I need the info, but because the program bundles something like $20,000 in signup discounts and credits to AI providers. After the $184, I'm down to $116 but now have roughly $3,000 in equivalent credits and discounts, which is basically a 15x return before I've even used the program's actual content. Those credits use API pricing rather than plan pricing, so I'd sign up for something like a Claude Code or Codex plan (~$20/month), and once I burn through the usage limits there, fall back on the banked API credits and discounts, giving me effectively unlimited use of coding tools for at least a month — and if I need more beyond that, I'd sign up for something like Kimi K2 or DeepSeek's plan, which are less intelligent per dollar than a frontier model but plenty for the low-intelligence tasks I actually need. That leaves about $90. I'd put roughly $40 into an Instantly plan and another $40 into mailboxes, leaving about $16, then use a lead-gen platform like Apify (discounted through Maker School) to pull a list of ~15,000 leads. I'd rinse those leads through the Instantly mailboxes every day for the next month — realistically budgeting time for mailbox warm-up — and just focus on outreach daily: hundreds of individual touchpoints a day, religiously checking and responding to replies first thing every morning, sending Loom videos to anyone showing interest, following up relentlessly, and adding responders on LinkedIn and their YouTube to learn everything about them so I squeeze maximum value out of every lead — making my 300 leads perform like someone else's 1,000. Then I'd front-load as many sales calls as possible, offer reasonably low rates to lock in a first client and bootstrap credibility, and over-deliver heavily to maximize the odds of turning it into a retainer. The core insight: if you're even halfway current on this space's developments, you already know more than 99.9% of everyone else, and that's an extremely powerful arbitrage window right now — so join a discount aggregator (doesn't have to be Maker School, though obviously I think it's the best one), and flip as much of your starting money as possible into bootstrapping outreach.
Great question. I should make it abundantly clear that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. My hammer is cold email, so I try to solve every problem with it. Cold email isn’t always the most effective marketing method, but it’s like a video game where you keep playing the main character because you’re best at it. I would definitely use cold email. I’d start by pitching these SMA agencies. I’d go to Apollo and filter for 1‑11 staff, looking for digital marketing, digital agency, or creative agency. I’d use the OR operator to pull as many as possible—probably a list of 30 k to 50 k in the United States alone. Then I’d blast out my offer with the software, giving a free demo. I’d position it as if I’d read the person’s whole life story and built the software just for them. I’d mention that I’ve been following what they’re doing at [their company] and that I used to run a digital marketing agency (maybe I still do). I’d share that I’m suffering from XYZ problem and that this software is the solution I came up with. I’d want to put it in front of them to see if it has value. I’m 100 % confident that running their clients through my system will generate outsized returns, so much that I’m willing to guarantee it and give it away for free just to hear their thoughts. If they’re open to a quick call, we could jump on it. I’d approach this at the higher‑agency level, positioning myself as an agency owner talking to agency owners, not as a SaaS person trying to sell something. I’d get on as many calls as possible and frame them almost as partnerships: give them a trial of the software, let them solve their current problems with it, then use that feedback to improve the software faster and better. Once I have a ready‑to‑go version, I’d charge premium prices. And yes, I’d go straight cold email, starting with agencies because they tend to have more money than SMBs.