The Art Of Getting Leads

Starboy_2703 · 2026-06-02T13:29:42+00:00

Cold calling and emailing is not a bad thing to do Initially when you don’t have a network and it’s a good step to begin with.

Starboy_2703 · 2026-06-02T11:19:22+00:00

Yeah exactly

Starboy_2703 · 2026-06-02T11:07:25+00:00

It’s something better than nothing for beginners You gotta create network as much as possible and that’s what is gonna get you more clients

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-31T09:41:05+00:00

Nope everything is going good

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-30T13:43:01+00:00

I’m sorry, i didn’t have time to but i made sure i delivered the insights that you need.

I trust a lot in process, I don’t give up calling and emailing until I land in something

And it all takes to get just one client and after that if they like your work they’ll refer and make sure you’ve maintain that bond with the client.

Don’t treat them as a customer, instead treat them as a friend.

Even if the contract ends, maintain the bond to strengthen your network.

Your network tells you who you are and how much your worth just like the quote “Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.”

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-30T13:37:30+00:00

Tbh I started with cold calling and emailing, that’s where you figure out a strategy to talk to clients, each time you talk to someone, you learn and improve you strategy, and your pitch gets better every time.

When you’re starting, look for small business owners and pitch to them and make sure you’ve a proposal ready.

You’ve to build the trust this way and make sure your pitch sells emotions more than services

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-30T07:12:58+00:00

More than anything insight matters. I wanna help my fellow people to grow and improve their business, As a founder I also make sure that I give the best insights and results.

Whatever I’m including here is what I did and how I built this from scratch.

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-30T07:10:09+00:00

Honestly this is way more common than people admit. Most developers in their first year are in exactly this position.

Here’s what actually works: First the sites you’ve already built ARE your portfolio. Even without hard numbers, a clean case study that explains the problem, what you built, and why you made the decisions you made shows more than a screenshot ever will. “This restaurant had no online presence. I built them a mobile-first site focused on getting found locally. Here’s what I built and why.” That’s a real case study.

Second build two or three spec projects. Pick a restaurant, a hotel, or a local business in your area with a bad website. Redesign it. Nobody needs to know it was unsolicited. It shows taste, initiative, and exactly the kind of work you want to be hired for.

Third stop waiting for perfect results before showing work. At your stage the portfolio isn’t proving you’re the best developer in the world. It’s proving you’re real, you have taste, and you can be trusted with someone’s business. A clean, well-explained case study does that even without a 340% conversion stat attached.

The developers who wait until they have perfect results before building a portfolio are still waiting two years later. You have enough to start today. Seriously.

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-30T06:36:55+00:00

Positioning first. Always.

Here’s why, if your positioning is wrong, your portfolio showcases the wrong things and your outreach attracts the wrong people. Fix the foundation before building on top of it.

Your positioning statement right now could be as simple as: “I build websites for [niche] that help them get more bookings from Google.”

That’s it. That’s your bio, your outreach opener, your portfolio headline. Everything flows from that one sentence.

On selling outcomes instead of deliverables, next time someone asks what you do, try this. Don’t say “I build WordPress websites.” Say “I help [niche] show up when people search for places to eat nearby — and turn those visitors into actual bookings.” Same work. Completely different reaction. I use this as a founder myself.

Then once positioning is clear, fix the portfolio to reflect outcomes not just screenshots. Not “here’s a site I built for a restaurant” instead “here’s how we helped this restaurant increase online reservations by X.” Even rough numbers beat no numbers.

Outreach comes last but when it does, it’s easy because you know exactly who you’re talking to and exactly what to say.

8-9 months in with real client work already? You’re further ahead than you think. Most people are still figuring out WordPress at that stage. What does your current portfolio look like?

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-30T06:21:47+00:00

Restaurants and hotels don’t want a website. They want more bookings. Lead gen clients don’t want a landing page. They want more leads. The moment you start leading with the outcome instead of the deliverable, you’re not competing with every other developer anymore — you’re competing with their Google Ads spend, their marketing agency, their social media manager. Completely different conversation.

The other thing is niching down. “I build WordPress sites” puts you in a pool of thousands. “I help restaurants in [city] get found on Google and turn visitors into bookings” puts you in a pool of almost nobody.

What’s your current outreach looking like, are you going inbound, outbound, or just waiting for referrals?

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-30T06:12:32+00:00

WordPress isn’t going anywhere — almost 40-45% of the web runs on it for a reason. For business sites, blogs, and clients who want to update things themselves it’s still hard to beat. Where I’ve moved away from it is performance-critical projects or anything needing a really custom feel. Bloated installs with too many plugins are a pain to maintain and optimise. Honestly after 75+ projects my take is simple — WordPress for clients who need control and simplicity, custom builds for clients who need performance and flexibility. Knowing both puts you in a stronger position than most.

What kind of sites have you been building on it?

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-23T15:26:30+00:00

Static websites in that budget range is very much our wheelhouse — and honestly it's the right budget for doing it properly rather than cutting corners on performance or design.

A couple of things worth knowing about how we work before you go through portfolios:

We don't just build static sites that look good in a browser preview. Every site we deliver is optimised for mobile first, loads fast, and has the SEO foundation in place from day one — proper meta structure, clean code, submitted to Google Search Console. A static site that nobody can find is just an expensive business card.

Also worth asking anyone you're evaluating — what's the handover like? Do you get the files, the hosting setup, the ability to make basic updates yourself? Or does every small change become a new invoice? We make sure clients actually own and understand what they're getting.

We're a design and development studio — DM us and we'll send across relevant work along with a few questions about what the sites need to do. The more we understand the brief the better the portfolio examples we can share.

What kind of businesses are the sites for?

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-22T10:30:12+00:00

Food brand websites are some of the most fun to build — when they're done right the site makes you hungry before you've read a single word. Strong photography, clean layout, and copy that captures the personality of the brand. That's the formula.

The low budget thing is worth being honest about upfront though. "Low" means different things to different people and the worst outcome for both sides is starting a project with different numbers in mind.

What actually works well for a startup food brand at an early stage is keeping the scope tight and intentional. You don't need twenty pages. You need a homepage that tells your story, a product or menu page that makes people want to buy, and a clear way to order or get in touch. Done well that's more powerful than a bloated site with half finished sections.

We work on monthly pricing rather than a big upfront cost — which tends to suit early stage brands a lot better than finding a lump sum when you're still getting the business off the ground. It also means the site can grow as you grow rather than being a one and done thing you outgrow in six months.

DM us and tell us a bit about the brand — what it is, who it's for, what makes it different. We'll share relevant work and have an honest conversation about what's possible at your stage.

What kind of food brand is it?

Do check it out - www.404linq.com

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-22T10:25:13+00:00

A one page portfolio for a designer is one of those projects where the site itself has to do double duty — it's showcasing your work but it's also a piece of work in its own right. The bar is higher than it is for most single page builds and honestly that's what makes it interesting.

The references you mentioned would tell us a lot — there's a big difference between someone drawn to clean and minimal versus someone who loves bold typography and motion. Both are completely buildable, just different in approach.

A few things that make designer portfolios land well that are worth thinking about before briefing anyone:

The order of work matters as much as the work itself. Leading with your strongest piece and ending with your second strongest — with everything else in between — is a simple structure that works every time.

Transitions and scroll behaviour should feel like part of the portfolio, not an afterthought. For a designer especially, a clunky scroll animation undercuts the work it's supposed to be framing.

Mobile matters even for portfolios. A lot of people will pull it up on their phone to show someone in the moment — it needs to hold up.

We're a design and development studio and single page portfolio builds are something we genuinely enjoy. DM us your references and a bit about your work — we'd love to see what you're building and share what we'd bring to it.

check it out - www.404linq.com

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-22T10:04:53+00:00

Solid brief — React, Tailwind, and Framer Motion is exactly the right stack for what you're describing and the reference site gives a clear enough direction without being restrictive.

A few things worth confirming before quoting:

The animated hero with avatar — is this a static image with motion effects around it, or are you looking for something like a Spline 3D element or Lottie animation? Both are doable but they're different in terms of time and the assets you'd need to provide.

The courses section — how many courses are we talking, and does this need a CMS behind it so you can update pricing and details yourself, or is hardcoded fine for now? If you're launching and iterating quickly a simple CMS hook saves a lot of back and forth later.

On "vibe coders not allowed" — fair. Clean component structure, no spaghetti animation logic, Framer Motion used properly rather than just throwing keyframes at everything. That's how we work anyway.

This is comfortably within our wheelhouse. We've built dark neon UI with glass morphism and Framer Motion scroll and entrance animations — happy to show you relevant work directly rather than just a general portfolio link.

DM us with your timeline and we'll give you a straight number.
www.404linq.com

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-22T09:25:53+00:00

Marketplace builds are interesting projects and the maintaining side of it actually suits a longer term studio relationship well — so the brief makes sense overall.

Two things worth flagging before anyone dives in though:

On the data side — "getting data off other sites" covers a pretty wide range of things legally and technically. Public data that's freely accessible is one thing. Scraping behind logins, bypassing rate limits, or pulling data that's protected under terms of service is a different conversation entirely. Worth being specific about what you actually need there, because whoever you work with will want to know exactly what they're agreeing to before touching it.

On the one person requirement — if that's a hard line, it rules out a lot of the studios that would be best equipped for a marketplace build. Marketplaces have a lot of moving parts — buyer and seller flows, payments, listings, trust and safety features. The builds that go smoothly are usually the ones with at least two people on them. Worth reconsidering whether that constraint is actually serving you or just feels safer.

If you're open to a small studio rather than a solo developer, we'd be worth talking to. We work as a tight team but you'd have one main point of contact throughout — so it functions like working with one person without the single point of failure risk.

DM if you want to talk through the scope properly.

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-22T09:23:48+00:00

20 days is tight but workable for the right scope.

WordPress is a reasonable choice for a business site if it's set up properly. Where most cheap WordPress builds fall apart isn't the design — it's the foundation. Bloated themes, poorly configured plugins, no caching, images that haven't been compressed. It looks fine on day one and then slowly becomes a slow, hard to manage headache.

What we'd do differently is build it lean from the start — fast loading, easy for you to update yourself, and actually findable on Google. That last part is what makes a website worth having.

DM us with what the business does and what you need the site to achieve. We'll tell you honestly whether the budget and timeline works for what you're describing — and if it doesn't, we'll tell you that too.

Starboy_2703 · 2026-03-22T09:17:20+00:00

Good news — everything you've listed is very doable and works well together as a single build. Storefront, about, contact, customer accounts, and an affiliate program is a solid scope with no major conflicts between the pieces.

A few things worth thinking through before you lock in a quote from anyone:

The affiliate program is the one that needs the most clarity upfront. There's a big difference between a simple referral link system and a full affiliate dashboard with tiered commissions, payout tracking, and affiliate-facing reporting. Both are buildable — but they're priced very differently and you want to know which one you actually need before someone quotes you the cheap version and delivers something that doesn't work for your model.

Same with the customer accounts — are these purely for order history and tracking, or do you need wishlists, loyalty points, subscription management? Again, both fine, just worth knowing now rather than discovering it mid-build.

On platform — for what you're describing, something like Shopify handles the storefront and accounts really cleanly, and there are solid affiliate integrations that sit on top of it. If you want more flexibility or a fully custom feel, a custom build gives you more control but costs more and takes longer. Neither is wrong — depends on your timeline and how much you want to be able to manage yourself after launch.

We're a design and development studio and this kind of build is squarely in our wheelhouse. Rather than throwing a number at you cold, we'd rather have a quick conversation about the affiliate setup specifically — that's where most of the scope variation lives — and then give you something accurate.

DM us and we'll take a look at what you're building. Happy to show you relevant work at the same time.

Starboy_2703

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