u/ConsiderationIll7901

I am in college, trying to build something this summer that will pay for my tuition. I landed on an AI agency, and I bought a course to learn Automation. I finished my website (Would love some feedback: [https://therage.ai](https://therage.ai) ). Now I have to put my newfound skills to work. I am having trouble actually getting the ball rolling. I would love some advice from experienced founders.

Any tips on starting and signing your first client?

I am in college, trying to build something this summer that will pay for my tuition. I landed on an AI agency, and I bought a course to learn Automation. I finished my website (Would love some feedback: https://therage.ai ). Now I have to put my newfound skills to work. I am having trouble actually getting the ball rolling. I would love some advice from experienced founders.

Any tips on starting and signing your first client?

Spent the morning helping a buddy get his first SaaS live. He's building a content tool, and watching his dashboard come together was honestly more fun than working on my own stuff.

Two things stuck with me:

-Seeing someone else's build fresh teaches you about your own. I spotted things in his flow I'd been blind to in mine.

-Building near other builders changes your pace. You both move faster when you're not doing it alone in a room.

If you're grinding solo, find even one other person building something. The momentum compounds.

Who's your build buddy, and how'd you find them?

Quick share for anyone juggling a full schedule and a side build. I'm a college athlete, so my day is mostly locked: practice, lifts, film, class. The business happens in the cracks.

Things that actually made it work:

Treating the leftover hour like it's sacred instead of optional

One concrete task per session, decided the night before

Accepting that progress looks slow day to day and only looks fast in hindsight

It's not glamorous and I'm not pretending I'm crushing it. But I went from no progress to real progress just by protecting small windows.

If you built something around a demanding job or school, what was your version of protecting the time?

This week I focused on one boring thing that quietly kills deals for a lot of owner/operators: follow‑up only happens when they remember. Leads come in (DMs, forms, texts, missed calls), then it gets busy, and the convo just dies.

So I built a simple system for myself: one place where every lead goes, a next follow‑up date so nothing sits in limbo, and a basic cadence (day 0 / day 1 / day 3 / day 7) so I’m not winging it. I also started keeping a quick “context snapshot” for each lead (what they want, what I last said, what the next step is) because restarting the conversation every time is where I lose momentum. I have found that building a custom CRM in Notion and having Claude edit the meeting transcripts is the most efficient way of keeping everything organized

Biggest takeaway so far: the tool matters way less than having a clear next step and actually sticking to a cadence.

Next week, I want to automate the boring parts without turning it into spam (intake to tracker, reminders on the follow up date, maybe auto‑logging meeting notes).

If you’ve run a service business, where does follow‑up break most often for you?

If you had a tech-savvy friend who owed you a favor, what would you ask them to build? I'm curious if all small business owners share a common problem. I did a project on this in my business class this year, and I thought I would explore the idea further. Our class found that most small businesses struggle with one of these things:

- lead follow-up/reminders

- appointment scheduling + confirmations

- onboarding (forms, docs, tasks)

- quoting / invoicing

- recurring reporting (weekly numbers)

- support inbox / FAQs

- internal handoffs (“who owns this next?”)

New here, and I learned the hard way that Reddit does not care about your enthusiasm if your account is three days old.

A few honest takeaways:

• Most good subs have karma and account-age minimums, and they auto-remove before a human ever sees you
• Commenting where you actually know the topic builds karma faster than trying to post cold (I always start with sports cards because that is something I love).
• Reddit rewards being a real community member first and a marketer a distant second

None of this is a hack. It's just paying dues. But knowing it upfront would've saved me a removed post and some confusion.

For the people who market here well, what's the thing you wish you knew when you started?

Not gonna lie, this one feels good to write. I'm a college athlete, so most of my day is practice, lifts, and my summer job to get ahead of tuition, and I'm trying to build a business with whatever hours are left over. It's not about how much you do in a day, it's about doing a little every day, and that's basically been my whole approach to this.

For months, it was just building. I built an automation that lists sports cards on eBay using AI to read the card and pull pricing comps. I built a lead tool for real estate agents. Super cool projects with zero revenue. Turns out the gap between "I built a thing" and "someone actually pays me for it" is way bigger than I thought.

That finally changed last week. Signed my first client, a company that wanted help with LinkedIn content. Here's the honest version:

• It's commission-only, $100 per converted lead. No retainer, nothing upfront.
• I put together an actual proposal instead of just sliding into the DMs with "hey I can help."
• It's not big money. Might make me a few hundred bucks. But it's the first time someone looked at what I can do and said yes, and that's a different feeling.

Few things I picked up going through it:

1. The proposal mattered more than I expected. Showing up with something structured made me look like a business, not just a kid with a laptop.
2. Commission only got me in the door. No track record yet, so taking the risk on myself made it an easy yes for them. I'll price differently once I've got results to point to.
3. The unpaid builds weren't wasted. They're the reason I was confident I could actually deliver.

Curious how everyone else landed client #1. Did you go commission/free to start, or hold your pricing from day one?