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tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you." I manage a small full-stack design and development team. After 5 year

tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you." I manage a small full-stack design and development team. After 5 year, we have a pretty steady stream of clients. It wasn't easy. I like the idea of blogging to get leads - we haven't done much of that. Most of our clients come from referrals, but I strongly disagree about the don't send cold emails bit. I started sending out about 50 cold emails per month as an exercise, and have found a number of great long-term clients. It's a low probability game for sure, but it takes me maybe 1-2 hours per month and if I get a response I can generally determine if there's a good fit within a few back and forth emails.

thestepafter 9y ago
Would you mind sharing how you obtain the list of contacts for sending cold emails to?
- gk1 9y ago
  Send me an email and I'll share a few useful tools/companies for getting lists of cold prospects/contacts.
- mlevental 9y ago
  i'm not this guy but this is a useful framework for sending cold emails: https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-a-saas-startup-from-scratch-by-yourself-part-1-4d834e1df8c1 https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstr...
- finkin1 9y ago
  I use a combination of a custom scraping tool and paid curated lead services.
jseliger 9y ago
tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you." Yes. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, as well as some R & D businesses. By far our most useful way of finding clients (apart from referrals) isn't even marketing, precisely: it's our blog: http://seliger.com/blog http://seliger.com/blog . We write about whatever we notice in grant writing, and since we're basically the only people writing honestly and directly about the field, we get a lot of traffic, and a lot of people who're interested find us that way. It's both more effective and cheaper than Adwords. Adwords used to work really well for us, but it declined in effectiveness three to four years ago.

thestepafter 9y ago

Would you mind sharing how you obtain the list of contacts for sending cold emails to?

gk1 9y ago
Send me an email and I'll share a few useful tools/companies for getting lists of cold prospects/contacts.
mlevental 9y ago
i'm not this guy but this is a useful framework for sending cold emails: https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-a-saas-startup-from-scratch-by-yourself-part-1-4d834e1df8c1 https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstr...
finkin1 9y ago
I use a combination of a custom scraping tool and paid curated lead services.

jseliger 9y ago

tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you." Yes. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, as well as some R & D businesses. By far our most useful way of finding clients (apart from referrals) isn't even marketing, precisely: it's our blog: http://seliger.com/blog http://seliger.com/blog . We write about whatever we notice in grant writing, and since we're basically the only people writing honestly and directly about the field, we get a lot of traffic, and a lot of people who're interested find us that way. It's both more effective and cheaper than Adwords. Adwords used to work really well for us, but it declined in effectiveness three to four years ago.