How I'm Finding Clients for My Own Agency

Everybody I have worked with trusts me.

That is not the hard part. The hard part is getting a cold person to warm up enough to find out.

So right now I am running two ways of finding work at the same time. One of them works. The other one has made me zero sales, and I have been at it for months.

I am writing both down while I am still in the middle of it.

Upwork works because the person already knows they have the problem

On Upwork, about 50 applications gets me around 5 interviews, and about 1 of those becomes a client.

It works for one reason. The person posting the job already knows something is broken and is actively looking for someone to fix it. I do not have to convince anyone that they have a problem.

That is rarer than it sounds.

The cost is that it is a lot of sales effort for each one. You write the application, you tailor it, and plenty of them go nowhere. No reply, no reason given.

So the work is literally just a matter of volume.

One thing I have found helps: recording a quick video or a Loom and attaching it to the application. Not a polished one. It just makes me a person instead of a paragraph.

The hard part is everyone who is not already looking

I know I can build these people something good. The gap is that they have never heard of me.

Here is the tension I keep running into. People don't want to be sold to, but they do want to buy.

I know I can help. People don't want me to say that. They want to decide on their own.

I have not solved that. I am not going to pretend in this note that I have. Every version of "here is what I can do for you" that I have written feels like the thing people are trained to ignore, including me.

Getting cold people to warm up is the actual problem. Everything else I am doing is an attempt at it.

What I am actually running right now

Two directions at once, on purpose, because I do not know which one is right.

Direction one is an agent that finds leads for me every day. It pulls about 10 people a day off LinkedIn. Then Claude Code does the research on each one and looks for companies that seem interesting to me.

I started by looking for long established companies with small sales teams. I have since moved toward RevOps people, meaning the person who owns the sales tools and the sales data, often as the only one doing that job.

I built it, and I keep rebuilding it. It is a daily thing, not a finished system.

Direction two is LinkedIn Sales Navigator, by hand. I find RevOps people and send connection requests. For every 10 connection requests, about 1 person replies. The people who reply are generally willing to take a meeting.

Now the part that matters.

No meeting has been powerful. There have been no sales from any of this yet. Zero.

The plan for now is to keep going, because volume is the only lever I trust here, and I want to see whether the good ones show up further down the list. That is a theory. It is not a result.

Why keep going with something that has produced nothing?

Because of what I think is sitting underneath the cold outreach.

A lot of people want to use Clay, which is the tool a lot of sales teams now use to build a list of companies and people and fill in the details about them. They just do not know how to use it well.

Clay is genuinely hard to learn. There are many pieces, and new features keep arriving that you then also have to learn.

So the bet is this. Most people do not have time to get good at Clay and Claude Code on top of their actual job. I can come in and build it with them, on top of the system they already run, rather than replacing it.

When that lands, the effect on their bottom line can be large.

The open question is just how I find those people. That is the whole thing. I have a service I believe in and a list of ways to reach people that have not worked yet.

Why publish my own funnel while it is not working

The people I have learned the most from are the ones who show exactly how their business works. Not the ones selling a course about it.

I want to get really good at helping people build with Clay on top of what they already have. Writing down the ugly part seems like the honest way to get there.

There is also a selfish reason. This is for me in the future too. I am sure that as I get better at this I will have different opinions on it, and I want to be able to see what I actually thought in September when none of it was working.

I might be wrong about the whole approach. If you have made cold outreach work for something like this, I would genuinely like to hear how you did it.