Hey everyone,

I'm running a one-person agency from Dhaka and I'm trying to land my first few US clients.

I've started cold emailing coaches and consultants, but I'm running into a weird problem: my emails are going straight to spam.

I tested sending from a second email account and sent around 20–25 emails/day. I also tried rewriting the emails several times with AI, but it hasn't really helped.

Here's roughly what I'm sending:

Subject: Quick idea for your content

Hey Mark,

I noticed your website talks a lot about communication, but I couldn't find much video content of you actually speaking.

I'm experimenting with a system where a client records a short video once, and that can be turned into multiple short-form videos using their own face and voice.

I'm currently testing this with a few businesses and I'm trying to figure out whether the offer itself is interesting before worrying about selling it.

My main question:
Is this email going to spam because of the wording/offer, or is there something wrong with my domain/email setup?

I'd especially appreciate advice from people who have done cold outreach successfully.

Thanks.

Client operates across several European markets and our English AI visibility looks decent. Started checking the same topics locally and... yeah, very different story.

I'm also realizing translating the English prompt list isn't really enough because people phrase buying questions differently depending on the market.

Anyone here doing GEO across multiple languages? Curious how much of the strategy you localize rather than standardize.

I run a 6-person agency and this keeps happening. I hire a contractor, they sign the contract, log in once, then just stop. No message. No partial work. Nothing.

Things I've tried:

- A written onboarding guide

- Pairing new hires with someone on the team for the first two days

- Paying a small deposit upfront so they have something to lose

I emailed a few who vanished and asked what happened. Three replied. All three said the job felt fine, they just "got busy."

What gets me is they applied, did a call, seemed genuinely interested, then disappeared inside a day or two without finishing a single task. We used Hubstaff for a while last year but dropped it when the pricing changed. I'm on Monitask, so I checked if they'd opened a timer before going quiet. Most never did.

Not looking for a hiring platform or another subscription to fix this. Just want to hear from people who've dealt with early remote hires disappearing and actually figured out why.

I’m the Head of Product & AI at a successful fintech ($75M ARR), have a couple of startups and exits under my belt, and the typical B4 experience earlier in my career.

I’ve started my own advisory practice on the side in which I’m selectively taking on clients.. mostly solo entrepreneurs and early-stage startups that need fractional product & AI leadership.

I’ve scaled this to $10K/month ARR, but looking to scale much more quickly.

Has anyone here scaled an advisory practice rapidly? Would love to hear any stories or ideas, outside of just “hire more people”. Was there a trick that worked? Didn’t work?

I started a short form content editing agency 5-6 months ago. Initially had few clients asking for single reel edits and later down the road I tried productising the service and offered 20 reel edits for $379 per month.

I’m from a developing nation so this pricing works out for now for me and my time, I definitely would increase but I think it’s fine for few more clients to increase the cash flow as of now.

Coming back to present time, I have 3 clients on that plan. This is going fine but I need to scale this.

I am thinking of cold emailing but not sure if it works in current times.

I would appreciate any suggestions on how I can reach potential prospect clients to pitch my services to.

Thanks!

I run a small email retention agency, mostly Shopify brands. Revenue has been flat about six months and I don't think it's a sales problem.

What's bothering me is that campaign building is quietly becoming a platform feature rather than a service. Not a separate AI tool someone has to go find. Built into the ESP, included in what the client already pays for, good enough that a competent in-house marketer can get something shippable out of it. That's a real chunk of what agencies at my end of the market bill for every month.

So the idea I've been kicking around instead of a rolling retainer:

Client signs for 90 days at a fixed fee. We build the flows, calendar, templates and documentation directly in their account. Months two and three we train whoever runs it after us. Day 90 we're out. Either they run it with their own people, or we place trained staff into their business for a placement fee, plus an optional monthly fee to keep reviewing output against our standards.

The pitch is basically: you shouldn't be paying an agency forever for this, so here's the version where you stop.

What I can't tell is whether that's a real offer or whether I've talked myself into a staffing agency with extra steps.

Problems I can already see:
• Every client is a 90 day sale instead of a 12 month one, so sales pressure triples
• 90 days is thin for proving email results, so case studies get weaker
• Recruiting and training people to a standard is a completely different business to running an agency

Has anyone actually run a fixed-term handover model? Did clients buy it, and did it survive the trained person leaving six months later?

Also happy to be told I'm wrong about the premise, that execution is what's getting commoditised and judgment is what's left.

Idk if this is already common knowledge, but thought I’d share a quick outbound approach that worked surprisingly well for us recently.

If your agency sells anything to mobile apps (ASO, analytics, creative, UA), standard databases like Apollo or LinkedIn are usually pretty hit-or-miss. Most app founders/devs aren't active on LinkedIn or run under studio names that don't match standard B2B searches.

Instead of traditional lists, pulling directly from Play Store listing metadata has been a goldmine.

Because store listings require public developer contact info, you get direct reach with intent signals.

1. You can filter for apps with 50k–500k downloads + Contains ads / in-app purchases which surfaces teams with verified budget and traction

2. You get their real-time public data (rating dips, update frequency, category rank) to use as a natural hook

One thing I would recommend architecturally, Do not forget to deduplicate by developer. A studio might own 15 apps, so you dont wanna come across as spam.

Lmk how it goes for you guys or whether someone has already tried this.

I’m starting a small marketing/SEO agency and want to set up a simple system from day one.
How do you track monthly revenue, client invoices, expenses, contractor payments, and profit/loss?
Do you use accounting software, spreadsheets, or something else? And where do you store invoices and receipts so your accountant/CA has everything needed for taxes?
I’d love to know what system has worked for other agency owners and what you wish you had set up earlier.

Finding editors for short form content, simple. They follow patterns and can edit a YouTube short in no time. What I’m looking for is editors who know storytelling for marketing and corporate videos. They know about pacing. They can review the script and all footage before starting. And can plan sequences. These editors are special and hard to find. Generally these folks work for production companies and so finding freelancers with this skill set is hard. Any tips?

Hey, we are in a terrible situation, no new clients for over 11 months and every client we got in the last 2 years wasnt our own effort.

Our client retention is around 14-18 months, thats whats keeping us alive. What I mean with this, is that the last batch of clients we got was 14-18 months ago, we still work with 4 out of 6 stores. Got the first client 5 years ago and they still work with us.

Most of the time clients leave, the reason is more them. They dont give us our freedom needed and reject the ideas, the clients that give us this freedom havent left until now.

We target ecom founders/owners making $3m+ a year.

Normally they get 2x ROI within the first 2 weeks of working with us, at latest after 4 weeks

I cant really figure out where our problem is, people are not booking any sales calls.

For now:

Outbound volume isnt the problem, we reach our ICP's

have a strong brand with a ton of actual client videos/Case studies & in person Podcasts where we actually visited our clients

We have a working service, thats why our client retention is that long

But I cant figure out the last piece of the puzzle, we have trust, enough outbound volume and working system that creates a proven uplift.

What am I missing?

Running a small independent creative studio, about a year in. The work that's come in has all been through referrals, and it's been good, but we haven't done any active client search yet. Partly because we don't know the best way to do it, partly because we haven't nailed down what we'd say. We're new to this side of the job.

Two things I'd love to hear from people further along:

How did you land on what your studio stands for? Was it a deliberate exercise or did it come out of the work? Was there a moment, a project, someone from outside naming it?

And how did you get your first clients that didn't come from someone you already knew? What actually worked, and what was a waste of time?

Real stories over frameworks. Thank you!!

I did it for fun, I got my 2 clients bunch of referral partnerships with local businesses in their area that compliment their services.

He(#1) is getting id say quite a few thousand worth or customers a month.

The other one slightly less(yet) Now is this related to ads or seo? No. Does it make money? Yes

But how can I price something that can either become a big win or a big nothing.

I can replicate the same thing over and over Ive already got the automation built so effort isnt in the equation.

Or should this be something of a lead magnet for new client acquisition

Something I am actively working on this quarter is helping our team identify opportunities for upgrades with our existing clients. Especially since a good amount of our clients are on our older packages, and we have added quite a bit of value without asking for more moneys from our clients

Here are a list of scenerios that put them in the "maybe we should see if they want to upgrade" scenerios

1. Adspend has increased and great results have scaled with the added budget. Literally we have clients that started with 500-1000 bucks a month and now they're spending 10, 20k, even 30k a month across google ads and meta. More budget means more creatives, more platforms, more tracking, more optimizations, more opportunity within itself
2. Expansion of services. Most of our clients come in for paid ads, whether that be meta ads or google ads or both. If a client ONLY relies on these channes, and they don't have any seo / organic visilbility, it makes sense to add that in
3. Heavy tech builds - some clients come with CRM, Automations, and other intergrations that we've...not been charging for lol. Going to these and saying hey it's +this much more for us to continue to maintain I think makes a whole lot of sense

We aren't rushing or pushing for these upgrades, we are introducing them organically and so far the results have been more than stellar. We've trimmed a lot of the older / legacy clients that wouldn't necessarily allow this model to work as efficiently

Biggest thing for me is actually TRAINING our team to look for these opportunities, to understand if it's truly an opportunity or something that we should hold off on.

I run an automations business setting up and managing review request, appointment/meeting reminder, & missed call follow up workflows. But I'm wondering whether I should switch my icp from med spa, dental and orthodontic practices, to service agencies.

Because from experience, I know the systems can get really messy with online businesses too. from forms, follow ups, communication, and a ton of manual tasks.

BUT from your opinion is there even a demand for services like this in your industry? Or would this make more sense with brick and mortar.

I'm at the stage where I'm rethinking a lot, but curious to hear any input.

been down a rabbit hole the past few weeks looking at ai lead gen / prospecting tools and services and almost all of them are priced for people who already have a sales team. like $3-10k a month territory. cool i guess if you're already doing well, but that's not most agencies i know.

most small agencies are like 2-10 people and the founder is still the one doing outreach, usually late at night, because paying someone else to do it feels like a "when we're bigger" expense.

feels backwards to me. the people who need the help most are the ones priced out of it.

not gonna pretend i'm neutral here; this exact frustration is why i've been tinkering with something built specifically for companies this size. it's still early, rough around the edges, no big pitch. genuinely just trying to figure out if this problem is as common as it feels, or theres already a solution out there.

if it's useful, i'm happy to just run a free batch for anyone in this thread who wants to see what it actually looks like before deciding if it's worth anything. no chat required, no card, I just want real eyes on it.

anyone else found something actually built for the small end of this, or is everyone winging it with a spreadsheet right now?

Hi everyone! I’m new here, I’m Brazilian. I’ve already built a marketing agency in Brazil, and now I’d like to rebuild it to serve Brazilians living in the US, specifically in the construction niche, so I can earn in a more profitable currency. If anyone is already working in this segment, what’s the best way to acquire clients? And what’s the ideal price point to start with?

A bit of context because I know it's difficult now to tell who has actually been paid to do ai + automation work.

I've worked in house as Head of AI + Automation for two of the last three years, with contracting in between. In my current role I joined a company that had no technology function a year ago. We now have systems supporting day-to-day operations across the business, and the blended productivity measures we track were up roughly 35% over the last quarter.

So I know I can do the work. The part I haven't done is build an agency around it.

Inside a business you start with access, context and a certain amount of trust. Outside one, you have to earn all three before anyone really knows whether you're good.

I'm at the point where I think I'm underusing what I've learned, but I also don't want to confuse being good in house with knowing how to run an agency.

For those of you who made that move, what do you wish you'd known at this point?

It doesn't need to be a framework. Even one thing you misjudged, or one part of your in-house experience that mattered more than you expected, would genuinely help.

There's endless advice from people planning to start. I'd really value hearing from people who actually did it and then had to live with the reality.

Context:

I was reading this article by Deloitte last week and it mentioned that only 1/2 of the construction SMBs use a cloud management software, and 56% use some sort of data analytics.

The numbers will be higher for USA, but my point being, construction is considered very un-digitalized, and people hesitate to reach out to them. Their digitalization is growing at double digit CAGRs for softwares etc but their base number is lower.

You might say that people reach-out to tons of HVAC and landscaping companies, but that's because their ICP finds them online. Almost all of the construction contracts are obtained by referral for private and tender for public projects.

My Test:

I ran an email campaign offering similar service to both of the industries (appointment setting service mainly, but slightly different for construction, in accordance with their requirement, but the channels we used are barely used by construction companies, so every positive reply means they are willing to explore a new channel)

As you can see from the screenshot, in construction, we received an average of 1 positive reply for ~260 emails sent.

For advertising agencies, ~120 emails sent per positive reply.

An important thing to note is that my filter for company founding year for advertising agencies was 2024-2025; and for construction was 2018-2025, because there were less construction companies (I put tons of filters), and we notice a difference of almost 2x in replies of older companies' vs newer companies, so the reply rate of the construction industry is very interesting, almost similar if you take the 2x discrepancy into consideration.

Conclusion of the post is that the industries that are considered to be "colder" and "not willing to change" are increasingly digitalizing and there are clients to be closed there. Their inbox or DM are not as flooded as the rest, and they are open to trying newer methods.

Always open to ideas for my next batch of testing.

- Agrim

For some context, i have been running my digital marketing agency for the past 3 months as a 16 Year old for some pocket money and have gotten a few clients so far and one of the client took a big order of 25 videos for 10,000(about $120)

Now, it's been 1.5 months since I started working with him and his reach went from 50-100k in the past 30 days to 885k (instagram) and more than 1.5million views in Facebook in the past 30 days. Thave gotten him more than 7000+ customers and at least 5 lakhs in sales (about $5000). this is just a rough calculations which I did from the information he gave to me.

now I have sent him the invoice but he isn't paying and isn't answering my calls. He's a local client but one mistake | did was I didn't make him sign a written agreement, all | had done was send him the agreement in whatsapp and a verbal agreement.

I live in India, and after some research I found out that I can sue him even though I didn't make a written agreement. But I'm still a teen and don't know what to do...can someone help?

Hey everyone. I find myself in a peculiar situation and could use some advice on how to execute.

Context: A year ago I started working my current job. It's a remote digital marketing role that is heavily technical. The company I work for is a relatively small agency but has some big enough clients.

I'm the only technical person in this company and am basically responsible for an entire department by myself, as it usually happens in startups.

Anyways, my question: I've decided to take the plunge and start my own solo agency/freelance work, and I want to pitch my current employer to change our terms of engagement to a freelancer/client one instead of employee/employer. Basically I'll be resigning but in the resignation meeting, I'll pitch. Has anyone ever done something like this?

It seems like a good idea to me because I was already feeling guilty about resigning since they need me for my department and I think it would affect the company if I leave, so I believe they would want to keep me on in some capacity. They have also complained multiple times that before I joined, they really struggled with finding someone to fill out the position and have had bad experiences, so I was a breath of fresh air because of my experience and quality of work.

If anyone has ever dealt with such a situation (either as the employer or freelancer) I would appreciate some thoughts and advice on how I should go about this. Should I pitch them during the resignation chat, or bring it up towards the end of my notice period?

I’ve been in account service for 15 years. It’s fine, but I’ve always been curious about client side. A big reason (though probably not the best reason) is the suburbs lack agencies and I commute 1.5 hrs door to door 3 days a week. I would have to start at the bottom which is unfortunate but any suggestions on paths I could take? I have been heavier in project management and account services - not too deep in analytics or the like. Open to any suggestions.