We’re a small two-person design and dev studio, coming up on our first year.

With AI, more small businesses just do it themselves now. We’re trying to find the ones who still want it done properly and right now we’re doing outreach to reach them. It’s early and I’d rather learn from people who’ve been at this longer than keep guessing.

A few things I’d like to know:

1. Where do your better clients come from - outbound, referrals, partnerships, inbound?
2. Does cold email still work in 2026 or has AI-written outreach killed it?
3. How do you open a first message with something specific you noticed on their site or straight to what you offer?
4. Do you attach an example or a mockup or is that a waste of time?
5. How many do you send a day?
6. Any tools you’d recommend?

Happy to share what we’re sending if it’s useful to pick apart. Thanks 🙏🏻

Been going back through the clients who left and I'm not sure I read any of them right at the time.

Looking back the pattern is the same. The emails get shorter, they stop asking questions, and you tell yourself that means things are running smoothly.

I used to treat a quiet month as a good sign. Now I think quiet is just what it sounds like when someone is slowly losing track of what you actually do for them.

So which way do you play it. Do you check in on the quiet clients, or leave them alone because no news is good news?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working in the SEO and PPC space for a long time and am preparing to launch my own agency. While I’m confident in project management, client delivery, and team leadership, I haven't had much direct experience with sales.

Since I have a lean fulfillment team, I’m the primary person responsible for driving revenue, so I’m eager to master the sales process and pipeline development. I already have solid case studies and a portfolio from past client work.

Could you share any recommended resources, frameworks, or tips to help me get started with B2B agency sales and building a reliable funnel?

I'm currently looking for a remote Local SEO/SEO position with an agency, ideally working with US-based local businesses.

I have 4+ years of experience across SEO and content, with the majority of my recent work focused on Local SEO and home-service businesses.

My strongest area is Google Business Profile + local/onsite SEO, particularly for roofing and construction companies.

Some of the work I've handled:

• GBP optimization and ongoing management
• Local rank tracking and competitor analysis
• Service/location page strategy
• On-page and technical SEO
• Local citations and local authority building
• Review/reputation strategies
• Google Business Profile content
• GSC/GA4 analysis and reporting
• GoHighLevel workflows and lead automation

I currently work on a roofing/construction SEO campaign in the US and have case-study experience showing improvements in GBP visibility and lead generation.

I'm looking for something long-term, whether that's a full-time remote position or an ongoing role supporting an agency's SEO fulfillment.

I'm based outside the US and am comfortable working US hours.

I'm a full-stack and AI developer, and I'm trying to find clients, but I haven't had any luck so far.

I tried Fiverr, but my gig never seems to appear in search results, so I honestly don't know what I should do next.

I also have a LinkedIn account with 7k+ connections. I post from time to time about my projects, achievements, and what I'm building, usually in a storytelling style. However, my posts don't seem to reach recruiters or potential clients.

So I'm wondering:

How can I actually use LinkedIn to get freelance clients?

Is LinkedIn Premium worth it for finding clients?

Should I focus more on Upwork? Is it still possible to get clients there with a new profile?

What other methods have actually worked for you?

I'm confident in my technical skills and have several projects to show, but I'm struggling with the client acquisition part.

I'd really appreciate advice from developers/freelancers who have actually managed to get their first clients, especially through LinkedIn, Upwork, or other channels.

Hi all.

I'm a website developer, and I'm looking for an agency to partner up with.

We’ve grown a software agency almost entirely through referrals. Now we’re thinking about trying Upwork and other platforms.
We’re a small software agency and, honestly, most of our clients have come through referrals and word of mouth.
We’ve been fortunate to work with some really great clients and build everything from web and mobile apps to custom software and business systems.
The funny thing is that we’ve never really tried the typical freelancer platforms. We haven’t seriously explored Upwork or Fiverr. Most of our work has simply come from people recommending us to someone else.
Now we’re at the point where we want to be more intentional about bringing in new clients and are considering trying platforms like Upwork and other online communities.
For agencies or developers who have actually done this:
What worked for you?
Did you focus on smaller projects first?
Is Upwork still worth the effort for an experienced team?
What would you avoid if you were starting from zero?
Not looking for generic advice. I’d genuinely like to hear from people who have gone from mostly referrals to a more predictable client acquisition process.
Would especially love to hear from other small agencies and founders.

I run a growth company working mainly with small and local businesses.
Our biggest problem isn’t delivering or closing warm opportunities.
It’s getting enough new opportunities consistently.
Word of mouth and referrals have been our strongest source by far. When someone comes through a client, knows somebody we’ve helped, or already has some trust built in, we do really well.
But that’s also the problem.
I don’t want the growth of the company depending on whether somebody happens to mention our name this week.
We’ve tried different forms of cold outreach, content, networking, LinkedIn, etc. I’m trying to figure out what is actually worth going all-in on instead of doing 10 acquisition methods halfway.
For agency owners who have gotten past relying heavily on referrals:
What actually became your predictable client acquisition channel?
Cold calling?
Cold email?
LinkedIn?
Paid ads?
Content/inbound?
Partnerships?
Something else?
And roughly how long did it take before that channel started producing consistently?
Not looking for a guru answer. I’m more interested in hearing what actually worked from people running agencies right now.

trying to work out if you got similar issue.

We run a handful of retainers with a small team. the AI setup works, but it is held together with tape, and I do not think that is unusual.

Three things I am curious about:

• which tool does your team actually open every day? ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, something inside your PM tool.
• paid team plan, or is everyone on their own account?
• how do you get brand guidelines, client rules and pricing into it? Custom GPT, a project with files, a doc someone pastes in every time, or do you just re-explain it each session?

More interested in what did not work than what did. If you set something up and quietly abandoned it, that is the answer I'm looking for.

Hey everyone,

8 months back I quit my job and started a small digital agency. Mainly working with fashion and wellness brands.

Thought it would be exciting. And it is.

But also 90% of the time it’s just me - client calls, invoices, fixing website at 2am, and overthinking 😂

The good part: I’ve worked with 15+ brands now. Learned a ton.

The hard part: Still don’t know if I’m doing things "right".

Anyone else here running something solo?

What was the weirdest thing you had to learn in year 1?

Would love to hear your stories. Feeling less alone helps 😅

Small web dev/SEO agency here. Built a site for a client (excavation/paving niche) under a standard 50/50 deposit + final payment structure. Wrapped up revisions on a call July 30th, sent the final invoice ($1,150) same day, he said he'd knock it out "today or tomorrow." Cool, no issue.

July 31st comes and goes. I follow up — he says he's traveling, back "Wednesday." Fine, I say no rush, enjoy the trip.

Wednesday comes and goes. Nothing. I follow up again, politely. Nothing. I call, text, follow up again over the course of two weeks — dozens of attempts at this point, phone and text. Total silence.

Then I realized he's already put the logo I designed for the site into his company email footer before paying the balance that (per my own ToS) is what actually transfers ownership to him.

My terms are pretty clear: site doesn't go live until paid in full, ownership doesn't transfer until paid in full, and there's a clause where extended unresponsiveness puts the project on hold / eventually allows me to cancel and keep the deposit.

I'm about to send a formal final notice citing the terms directly, with a deadline, and flag that the logo use needs to stop until he pays. Planning to escalate to small claims if it goes past that.

Has anyone dealt with a client like this? Curious if:

1. This is the right move or if I'm missing a smarter play
2. How you've handled clients who start using unpaid deliverables before settling up
3. Whether it's worth trying one more direct call vs just going straight to the written notice + deadline

Appreciate any war stories or advice.

Hired a marketing agency to help in order to see what I was doing wrong with my marketing as well as to learn to better fulfill for my future clients. They ended up creating a very low entry ad that got a ton of leads (but all of low quality). This ended up burning cash not only on ads, but automation and ai as well. These leads were either too broke for my service or had no intent of buying anything. I’ve asked for optimization of ads to fix the target audience and it’s been a month and I still have not been able to schedule a review with them. I had to fix a bug they put when setting up everything because they took too long to respond. My previous marketing campaign preformed better than what im currently paying for. I had more appointments booked and higher intent leads. Overall, I thought an established marketing agency would help but now I’m down $6k and $1.5k in ads. I want to call the bank and get my money back but I signed a contract -_- Rant over.

Im currently working on a product that has LOTS of potential but im struggling to get answers from agencies. the reason I say that it has lots of potential is because the idea has already been validated but our version simplifies and saves much more time but I cant get responses from agencies even through email and linkedIN.

Where do i get in contact with these agency owners or workers so I can get their input ?

Hey everyone,

I’m currently building an ERP designed specifically for communication, creative, marketing, and digital marketing agencies.

I’ve worked in digital marketing for years, and one thing I keep seeing is agencies running their operations across a Frankenstein stack of tools: project management software, spreadsheets, Google Drive, email, WhatsApp/Slack, invoicing software, password managers, editorial calendars, random docs… and a lot of tribal knowledge living in people’s heads.

So I’m experimenting with the idea of bringing the most useful parts of agency operations into one system.

But before I disappear into the classic developer trap of building 200 features nobody actually wants, I’d love to learn from people who run or work inside agencies.

I’m especially interested in hearing about:

• What does your current agency stack look like?
• What processes are still painfully manual?
• What information do you constantly have to search for?
• What gets lost between sales → onboarding → production → approval → invoicing?
• What creates the most chaos between clients, PMs, creatives, marketers and management?
• What dashboards/KPIs would actually help you run an agency?
• What automations would save you the most time?
• What do existing agency management tools do badly?
• Have you ever tried implementing an ERP/CRM/agency management system? What went wrong?
• What features sounded great in theory but were useless in practice?
• What features would make you say: “Ok, I actually need this.”

Some areas I’m currently exploring include client management, project profitability, quotes, contracts, recurring services, editorial planning, approvals, quality control, passwords/access management, documentation, email integration, resource allocation, deadlines, client portals, reporting and AI-assisted workflows.

But I’m deliberately not looking for validation of my current feature list. I’d rather discover things I haven’t thought about yet.

So agency owners, project managers, account managers, marketers, creatives, developers, freelancers working with agencies, etc.:

What would your ideal agency ERP actually do?

Success stories, horror stories, weird workflows, feature ideas, mistakes to avoid and examples of tools you love/hate are all welcome.

I’m happy to share what I’m building as it evolves too.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I'm looking to start an agency and sell my services to restaurants.

I've always been passionate about food, cooking, and menus in particular, so even though the niche isn't the best (thin margins and whatnot) that's who I want to target.

I have an idea: I want to build and set up digital menus. I'm thinking QR code mainly, but nfc tags could be an option too, maybe an upsell.

The market is still virgin. I live in Italy, small tourist city, and I'd say 1/20 restaurants have a qr code menu set up. 1/2 restaurants do not even have a website, and most websites are just bad to be honest. A lot of times when I want to eat out I look for a place's menu but I often find myself having to decipher a 2yo picture uploaded from Stephanie with her old smartphone (when I even find a menu) and that's just a turn off for me. Some people do have a pdf menu linked to their website, but what I offer would be completely different.

Here's what I'm thinking:

-Automatic translation in various languages (Lots of tourists in the area, especially during summer)

-Pics of the main/most sold items (which I would take with my smartphone and then use ai to make them look like professional content, without modifying the actual dish itself or making classic ai slop)

-Whatsapp agent so the owner can add, remove, modify dishes on its own with natural language

-Tags so people can identify vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, spicy food etc.

-Menu is web-based so it can basically become their actual website (or a page of it) if they do not have one (basically upselling a website here...)

- Some menu engineering maybe?

Any advice on my offer plan is greatly appreciated.

I was also wandering how you would market such a service, since I know that getting clients is the hard part. I can generate a quick preview of the menu and send it to the owner, asking for a meet up, or just straight up go there myself. At the start, I could also do it for free in exchange for testimonials and feedback, even though I fear no one would actually value my offer if they are not paying for it. Any advice here is also appreciated

Thanks everyone.

Hey everyone, I need some help. I have been freelancing on Upwork for the last 3 years, mostly Python backend work with Django and Flask, and later moved into AI engineering. I also worked at a software agency for about 10 months.

My Upwork account got suspended last December, so now I want to start my own software agency instead. But I am totally lost on the sales side. I don't know how to find clients or get projects. If anyone here has done this, how did you get your first clients? Any advice would really help. Thanks.

Hi, I just started a new AI UGC agency, and i feel overwhelmed and confused about finding the ideal client.
My niche is B2C SaaS Businesses and my subniche is Budgeting/Personal finance apps.
My offer includes Ideation, Scripting and 8 fully edited AI UGC Ad Creatives with 2 hook variation each.

I'm a video editor who've been working in the paid ads niche for quite sometime and worked with other agencies before so i know what a successful ad creative looks like.
But the problem is that i dont have any portfolio/testimonials to showcase to potential clients and to tackle this ill be sending personalised emails with a free spec ad to businesses.

And im using Facebook Ads Library to find businesses which are already running ads.
But here's my main concern, it feels like that there are a lot of things that needs to be in place before a business can be a potential lead.
For example,
- The company size shouldnt be too big
- Ad creatives should match what i can deliver
- Their contact details should be available

Thats how i feel right now and its making me so confused, i know that im doing something wrong and there must be a better way to approach this.
I dont wanna do bulk cold emailing just yet as I feel like it would put my business email at risk

Can someone please guide me?
It would be really helpful 🙏🏻
Thanks Everyone

I've owned and run a few agencies over the years, and I'm genuinely curious how newer agencies are leveraging AI right now, because 2026 is a different world than the one I built mine in.

And I don't mean simple stuff like using ChatGPT to write copy or speed up research. That stuff shaves minutes off tasks that were never really the problem. I mean the deeper layer: what lets you take on more clients, turn work around faster, or deliver something you couldn't before?

My own lens on it, for what it's worth: I look at everything through chop and hops.

Chop is how fragmented a task is, all the little manual steps inside it.

Hops are the jumps between platforms to get one thing done. Export here, reformat there, paste it into the next tool, chase the asset, upload again. The stuff that quietly eats most of a solo operator's week.

One thing that opened my eyes was running a timesheet on myself for a week, not for billing, just for truth about where the hours go. I started to challenge my process and steps to force a change in how I got stuff done faster and with better outcomes.

So I'm curious where others are landing:

What tools or setups are genuinely delivering outcomes for you, not just saving a few minutes?

What have you tried that disappointed you?

And has anyone cracked the one-person-operating-like-a-team-of-five thing, or is that still mostly talk?

For context on my bias, I've spent 40 years on the creative side and the last two building AI agency tools in this space. But I'm asking because I want to hear what's real out there, not to sell anything.