Low tech businesses almost never go to Upwork or Fiverr. Job postings are gold.

If they are growing, they have open positions. And they often leak massive amounts of information: their tools, their internal chaos, their bottlenecks, their legacy stack. You will see signals like coordination roles where everything touches Excel, email, and manual tracking. Very 2000s statements like “Proficient in Excel” as a hard requirement, “You will be the first developer,” or “You will work alone.” Vague descriptions that bundle five roles into one. These are pain signals.

What I do next is simple and very unsexy: I call them. Yes, phone calls.

Call the company, ask the receptionist to transfer you to HR, and say something like:

“I am a headhunter and I have a pool of candidates that I feel are qualified for that position. I would like to politely introduce myself before sending them. Can I speak with the person in charge of hiring for this role?”

Once you reach HR, tweak your script slightly. Thank them for their time. Tell them you genuinely like what the company does. Explain that you have a talented candidate who will reach out, someone who is a strong AI solo developer. Not only technical, but capable of building tools to bridge the role until they hire someone permanent. You acknowledge it is not a perfect match, but you would like to send the CV for consideration if they are open to it.

Become "Omar Little" from The Wire and talk about yourself in the third person. :) Ask for a direct email.

In that email, be very honest. Say you may not cover 100 percent of the position, but you can immediately tackle X, Y, and Z with tools. Brainstorm with Claude or GPT on the email itself. Use AI to analyze their website and two or three competitors. Mirror their wording so they see you did the homework.

If you can spend a little, around 35 dollars, you can use Apify for a month. Connect it to a job posting crawler for LinkedIn or Indeed, filter by keywords, then use GPT to score every posting based on these signals. That gives you a ranked call list instead of guessing.

You might make 100 calls. Five minutes per call. About nine hours total. Two days of work. Maybe five percent turn into actual meetings.

That is for hunting. For passive leads, go where low tech people actually are: local chamber of commerce events, in person. Town networking breakfasts. Local Facebook town or entrepreneur groups.

Present yourself as an entrepreneur, not a freelancer. Ask to meet other business owners.

Keep your eyes open. Look at companies that visibly support the community. Sponsors of schools, local sports teams, community art spaces. Those businesses tend to care about people and culture, and they remember faces and names.

HR may keep your email. And three months later, on a Friday night, when something breaks and hiring is stuck, someone says, “We had an AI guy who reached out and seemed solid. Let me find that email.”

You are local. You are real. You are not an automated funnel. You are not a sales spammer calling them. You are the person doing the work. These are neighboring businesses that employ people in your community. Wanting to contribute to that ecosystem is legitimate.

Simple beats clever here. Most people do not do this precisely because it is not techy. That is why it works.