project_log: 017

Yo.

In the last year and a half I went from having 0 clients and 0 network to:

• Being consistently booked 3 months in advance.

• Doing $10K+ per month for the past 5 months.

• Having a global network that sends me more work than I can handle.

I got here by chasing relationships with Lead Getters, not clients.

Let me explain:

I struggled when I started freelancing. Consistent lead flow was my biggest problem. I was in this constant feast and famine cycle. I'd have work, then nothing, then work again, then nothing again.

I felt scared to raise prices because losing a project wasn't an option due to finances. I was also forced to take projects that didn't match my skills.

It was a shit time and wasn't sustainable. And It all came down to a lack of knowledge on how to get clients. So I gave myself an ultimatum: I either figure this consistent lead shit out in 3 months or I go back to my 9-5.

I think I figured it out.

The secret I found was to chase relationships with people who get you clients, over the clients themselves. These people are called "Lead Getters".

For me, the Lead Getters were design studios who didn't have an internal development team. I knew these people needed an external developer to bring their work to life. I knew these people had direct access to the clients I wanted to work with.

So I targeted them in my marketing instead of targeting clients.

Here's what it looks like to chase Lead Getters:

So how do we find these Lead Getters and how do we get them to send us clients?

Here’s how I do it in 4 steps:

1. Find your ideal Lead Getter

I’ll use myself as an example as I run through the steps to finding your ideal:

1. Identify your target client. — Businesses needing custom CMS development paired with an interactive website.

2. Brainstorm who might have access to your target client - SEO agencies, software providers, other developers, design studios.

3. Pick one you have easiest access to through social media or existing network — Design studios. I already had some following me on X from content I'd posted.

4. Get specific — Design studios that did not have an internal development team and were ideally in their first year or 2 of business.

You'll now have the first person you can target.

2. Create the no-brainer offer

'Make them an offer so good they feel stupid saying no' - Alex Hormozi.

We need to make it that people should send you the clients over someone else. I've found that the best way to do this is by solving additional pain points and paying huge referral bonuses.

Additional pain points are anything the Lead Getter is facing that you could solve alongside your core service. For me, that was motion design.

I noticed a lot of designers were bad at motion design. I also noticed that designers were spending hours creating animated mock ups just to show a developer what they wanted.

I knew that If I offered both web development and motion design, I'd save the design studio a huge amount of time and provide a ton of value to their projects. Making it silly for them to find someone else.

On top of this I offered a huge referral bonus: 20% uncapped of my project cost.

You may think this is too much. I agree with you. It is far too much. But the reason I went high was that I didn't have any clients anyway. So anything above 0 is better than 0.

I reduced the percentage by 5% every couple of months. I no longer offer a referral bonus because I've got enough demand that it doesn't make sense.

Create a referral bonus. Use it while you need it. Then remove it.

3. Create your reach out list

The goal is to create a list of people who match your ideal lead getter profile AND have given you permission to contact them. This includes:

1. All followers across all your social media channels.

2. Past clients.

3. People you've worked with in the past.

4. Anyone in your email list.

5. Your phone contacts.

Create a spread sheet of everyone who matches the profile and prepare to be a human.

4. Start reaching out as a human

99% of the DMs I receive on twitter suck.

They suck because the person (or robot) sending them isn't interested in me or my business. They want me as a client, they don't want to build relationship with me.

I don't know about you, but I like spending time with my friends because we have good relationships. Not because they want something from me.

You'll stand out by being authentically interested.

Find something you admire about the person or something you find interesting and message them about it. Don’t even think about talking about your services. Just reach out like you would to a friend.

Here's an example of the first message I sent to Yianni, a design studio founder. This message has generated $22.35K USD in the past 6 months.

By targeting Lead Getters over clients you can rapidly increase the amount of demand on your services. You can also meet some cool people along the way.

Ballpark update

For context, Ballpark is an embeddable estimation widget I’m building to help freelancers and studios get more leads for their business. It based on a strategy thats won me 10+ projects in the past year: Giving ballpark estimates as quickly as possible.

Progress has been a little slow this week. Had a cold which took me out for a couple of days. But made progress on the estimation email that is sent to prospective clients after they submit.

For now this email will be a template I create. In the future, a nice feature would be a custom email editor so you can design how you want the email to look.

Nothing visual to share here as the email looks pretty bad but the logic is there.

Project uploads

I was able to build the project upload flow that I talked about last week. This was pretty challenging as the upload form needed to be dynamic to match the type of project you were uploading. Stying is not implemented but stoked that this is now set up:

The project uploads was the final piece of logic I needed to complete before this is moving into final polish and testing. I set a goal to have this on my own site by the 31st of March.

I still have one week so maybe it’s possible. Maybe it’s not. You’ll find out next week.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading. Keep crushing.

— Will