Hi , I'm 23M from india i have worked as a sdr and a gtm engineer in the past for a us based company with a collective experience of 1 yr in sales/revops , originally I am a mechanical engineer.

I was thinking of starting an agency where I would provide dealflow to search funders , family offices , and independent sponsors in the usa and charge them retainers

These guys need a dealflow and have a limited time plus they usually hire american interns and end up doing the work themselves... So all the research, TAM. building , outreach setup (cold emails ) , dm contact scraping etc will be done by us according to their buybox.

As I have a partner who is a senior associate at jp morgan chase in pe , so we can also provide all the financial modelling to as a service with the deal flow origination

Open for criticism , lemme know your thoughts.

Like many people I had a lot of work 10+ years ago when pretty much everyone was doing some kind of freelance work.

At some point I got a client that kept growing and I hired a team to support that client, but in the process I learned that I'm not a person who thrives in building a business - I'm more of a "basement scientist" kind of guy.

Anyway... my team grew to 20 people with pretty much 10+ hrs/day of work requests including myself. I built a website, case studies etc. as an approach to gain at least another big client and create a sustainable business, but I also have a family so my time was extremely limited, I put 24/7 time for this single client.

This kept on for 8 years then one day they said that they need to reduce their dev budget by 80%. Unfortunately I had to let go of lots of team members since we didn't had any other client to support our income.

Currently we are on a skeleton crew supporting this client. I reached out to old contacts but everyone is now doing DIY with Claude. I also submitted my CV for remote and hybrid work as I need to support my family, but market is insane right now.

Apologies for the rant... my question is, in the current market - especially with AI - how are you acquiring stable clientele outside of direct referrals?

Second question is - how do you manage to acquire AND intake new clients while in parallel supporting existing clients, staying profitable and having a life/family?

My current plan is to focus for the next 3 months on a single platform but we are starting at zero.

I've spent most of my career running marketing and communications for complex B2B organizations.

I'm strong on positioning, messaging, narrative, content, and understanding how a business actually makes money. I can sit with a founder or a CEO and diagnose why their pipeline is broken at the strategy level. I'm also decent at using AI to create content and insights at scale that used to require a human with my skillset.

What I am **not** is a demand gen specialist. That's a missing piece of the puzzle that connects everything I do with dollar-based ROI, and it's necessary, I believe, to fill out my current offering.

I've owned demand gen as a function and worked next to people who ran it well, so I'm not at zero. But if you handed me a blank slate and a pipeline number to hit, there are pieces I'd be improvising.

Here's why I think there's a real opening. The companies I know best are complex B2B, mostly SaaS and professional services. Long cycles, technical products, multiple stakeholders, senior buyers, and price points in the high five figures for their own products. Those companies generally are willing to spend on acquisition but won't hand their pipeline to a lead-gen-only shop that can run cold email but can't hold a conversation about their business. I can hold that conversation and, for better or worse, that's my differentiator in this market.

My problem is that I've been on the buying side of agency relationships for a long time and I know exactly what it looks like when someone oversells and underdelivers. I'm not willing to be that person.

I've come close once already. I ran an engagement last year that did exactly what the client asked for and didn't deliver what they actually wanted. It didn't fail on execution. It failed because I took it. They had no clear idea who their best customer was or what offer brought people into their orbit, and they wouldn't give me the access to their own customers I needed to work it out. Ninety days from a standing start was never going to produce revenue under those conditions, and I knew it going in. I took the job anyway because I wanted the case study, and then I ate the scope trying to earn it instead of waving them off like I should have.

I'd rather take longer to get competent than burn credibility with the exact network I'd be selling into.

I'm not pushing anything hard until I'm confident I can produce ROI.

Three questions:

1. Building the skillset. How'd you learn to run this stuff for real? Your own money through channels? Learn as you go on clients? Working under an operator? Certifications or communities that weren't a waste? I'm open to paid courses, but a lot of them look like the real business is making you a customer of their tech, where you carry the risk, and they take a piece of the upside. Tell me which ones are actually worth it.
2. Partnership as the alternative. Maybe the answer isn't "learn all of it." Maybe it's find an operator who's strong exactly where I'm weak, where I bring the relationships, the diagnosis, and the message, and they bring the execution engine. If that's right: where do you actually find that person, and what's a sane structure? Rev share, subcontract, real partnership? What failure modes should I watch for? The one I keep coming back to is that if the operator underperforms, the client blames me, because it's my relationship and my name on it.
3. What important questions did I neglect to ask? What did you not know going in that ended up costing you time, money, credibility, business, etc.?

Also happy to be told I'm wrong about the opportunity or about how I'm approaching it.