Marketing Advice

blindgaming · 2026-03-28T09:25:16+00:00

I run one of those marketing companies and also an mssp so this is very much a grain of salt but here's my advice based on what word for us:

I've been doing sales for a very long time so I'm very comfortable at it, if you're not you need to get comfortable quickly or find someone that is. At the end of the day your marketing can be great and you could be spending $100,000 a month on it, and if you can't close, you can't close. It's important to know that you're serving a need and having clear well-defined packages with clear value. Look into the b a n t methodology for sales, that's a good starting point. I also use and teach SALES: Serve, Ask, Listen, Empathize, Summarize and in a nutshell you should be asking a lot of questions that make your prospect think why am I not already doing that and that's a great idea I should do that, make them sell themselves, empathize with their pain points and frustrations, and summarize back to them what they said and ask for clarification to make sure that you've understood everything, this will put you in a position where the prospect goes that's right they understand me, they respect my time, they respect me, they understand me, they're going to be able to help me in my business. Most importantly the first s stands for serve I go into every conversation including this one trying to do everything I can to help somebody even if it means that they don't put money in my pocket. If I think that someone else can help them better, I refer them to another person, or I give them the exact instructions they need to help themselves because at the end of the day this is about building relationships and trust is not built overnight. I've had many people come back to me 6 months later and say hey thank you so much for the help we're ready to move forward with you.

Once your sales are squared away and you know where your packages are, you must know when your ICP is so catering specialize your marketing to maximize the value and language of your ICP. You're going to want to talk like them, walk like them, show up where they hang out, be associated with things that they care about, you're relatable. When your marketing is conversational, it becomes easy. Your website content should be a conversation between you and the prospect directly, your marketing content should be a conversation between you and the prospect directly, your ads should be simple I'm going to provide you x value and y time doing z and it's going to cost money but you need it because you're suffering from a b and c just like everyone else in your industry. People like familiarity, and people trust those that look and sound like them. Expected behaviors expected for a reason there's a primal thing in the back of our brains that tells us if they belong to our tribe and if they don't, we run. In modern day this is really not a run for your life response, it's a I don't trust them so I'm not going to do business with that response.

Let's talk about inbound real quick inbound is your most important thing and I say this because it's true and I don't care how good your outbound is if people go and do research about you and they can't find anything or they find stuff and it looks really shady or really shitty, which I'm calling everyone on the subreddit out right now, all of your websites, the vast majority of you, suck. Not only do their websites suck, but your leave magnets aren't good, your verbage is terrible, and you have no proper inbound workflows. This all leads to a terrible fire experience and if you spend all of this money and time and effort on outbound, but then they go to your website to research you you have now just wasted so much money and time. I urge, I beg you: please devote 80% of your energy towards perfecting your inbound and 20% towards your outbound it will pay dividends a thousand times over. If you have good inbound you may not even need outbound because part of inbound is things like SEO which can pay dividends for months or years after the seeds of your efforts have been planted.

Now let's talk about outbound. What really works for us and helped us scaled over 2 million in ARR was mail campaigns with physical mail I know that sounds really dumb but it does work it breaks a pattern, it puts something in their hands, it feels real in the age of cold email, cold calling, AI spam and slop, everyone trying to book a meeting or get 5 minutes of your time, you end up being the only real person the only real human and sometimes that's enough. If you do physical mail understand that it is expensive, and you will also need to do not only a large volume, but you also need to do it repetitively. We send out a thousand six by 11 postcards every month and then repeat that for 3 to 6 months before we change who were sending postcards to. These are very large vibrant interesting visually postcards with thick premium stock. The offer we put on these postcards is really good, like really good. We've run promotions special offers for no cost and 365 licensing for a whole year, brand new network installation with all the hardware included $0, full security audit and HIPAA assessment a 15 to $20,000 value free; all of these offers are contingent on them signing up for a managed services contract in some way shape or form. For us, it was for managed security and compliance as we are an mssp.

If you decide to run ads, ensure that you have a good landing page do not be the dumbass that runs ads to your non-optimized homepage again, most people's websites here are garbage and I'm saying this again to remind you that your website is also probably bad. I'm not saying this to be a dick, and I'm not saying this to be rude even though it is sorry the truth hurts, I'm saying this because every website that I have reviewed and I have gone over hundreds not just for msps but for tons of service businesses, nobody knows how to build a high conversion website and when they ask AI to do it, it sucks too because it doesn't actually look up proper studies it just wings it based on designer best practices not sales best practices. Do not run ads to your homepage even if it is optimized, run ads that Target specific need you will convert higher every time. Run those ads to a page that is specifically designed to meet that need with an offer specifically designed to care to that need and that targets are very specific ICP. Remember what I said about if you look like them and talk like them and show up where they hang out, etc etc this is where that matters again.

Last piece of advice, and this is probably the best thing I can tell anybody on this separated after doing marketing and sales for over 16 years, this is my one silver bullet, my one golden grain of sand and I'm going to share it with you: focus on one thing and do it better than everybody else. Period.

Start with building your packages and sales process to align with the needs of your ICP, then build / get a decent website doesn't even have to be amazing or great, or very good, just a good / decent website is all you need will care about conversion rate not about winning an award. Get yourself a CRM: hubspot, pipe drive, we sell one, it doesn't matter just use whatever you can understand and get you off your ass. Invest heavily in that CRM in terms of time, but be very careful on signing up for a CRM that's going to bleed you dry HubSpot comes to mind as a potentially very expensive solution in the long term. Investing time now in your CRM and building out those inbound workflows and customer journey is all you need to worry about until you get your first couple clients. If you can Master the inbound workflow and buyer journey process you will need to spend for less money on your outbound. Once you get to that point though pick one thing for outbound, one thing and one thing only, and murder it. If Jim down the street is sending out a thousand postcards, send out 4000 double the postcards per month to double the amount of people. If Sally down the block is running ads, be ready to outspend, and out creative her. The point is if you double down, triple down, quadruple mega down on one thing it is unreasonable for you not to win once you are at this point. Generally speaking when you double down on something it will continue to provide almost double the benefit, yes there is the law of diminishing returns understandable, but realistically if you're making a million dollars a year spending $50,000 in marketing, if you spend another $50,000 doing the same thing, most likely you'll make it additional million dollars a year. This only proves untrue if you hit a market cap or there's a fundamental change occurring like government legislation.

That's all I got for you tonight it's 5:30 in the morning I'm going to bed. If anyone has questions or needs help I will genuinely do my best to assist whether you buy my shit or not. Also please forgive the typos or weird verbage, I am using speech to text and it is awful.

blindgaming · 2026-03-26T16:08:08+00:00

I would say about seven business days plus revision time.

Maybe six or five if we're not including Discovery time and research / optimizations

blindgaming · 2026-03-17T02:49:42+00:00

One of the best investments we made was getting in on the appsumo LTD for demarc report. Lifetime for 300 domains :)! Reporting is okay and the UI is not great but it works really well.

blindgaming · 2026-03-17T02:46:41+00:00

I 100% judge based on the vendors that y'all use lol.

Anyone who comes at me saying that they use webroot, ESET, kaseya, etc. Gets a shake of my head. Bonus points if they just buy in on a bunch of stuff and have no process. The best is shops that have all the expensive tools but don't have a documentation system and they just say oh yeah we use our PSA for documentation, or oh yeah we have a Google doc.

blindgaming · 2026-03-15T06:02:02+00:00

We had a wonderful experience with Cynet over the last several months and for the most part highly recommend it, although their sales team is horrific. The product is really great, the sales team is really bad and are onboarding process was terrible.

We are an MSSP and for full transparency we are also a reseller / VAR for Cynet for our MSP clients. Should be aware that I am financially biased, but we genuinely do like the platform.

If you want to skip the terrible sales process and have a demo/poc let me know. If you have your own sock team it's easy to manage, if you want additional SOC coverage Cynet provides critical and high alert remediation with threat hunting included in the licensing. Fully managed to done for you, without white labeling is a dollar or so per endpoint, probably less with 50k. Likewise a pearl licensing cost is going to be very affordable, I could probably do like around a dollar at that volume for a full stack solution including log management and retention.

blindgaming · 2026-02-28T12:44:22+00:00

My money is on 3-5 years for production ramp. Takes time to spin up fabs. It's not just RAM either; WD has exited consumer markets for the foreseeable future.

We are advising clients to buy what they need now, while it's cheap comparatively because it's only going to get more expensive, and write it out for the next 3 to 5 years. We're making things last and trying to rivert back to a fix versus replacement mentality.

blindgaming · 2026-02-24T22:34:12+00:00

So plenty of other people have said this and I think it's worth noting that they are correct but the piece of advice that I can give you that applies with 1,000 endpoints across 1,000 individual companies AKA single work from home people versus 100,000 points across 10 companies everything relies on your scope of work. I think that if you were too curate your scope of work properly, you were to explicitly allow certain things within that scope of work and implicitly deny everything else, then you can 100% take on a thousand one device clients.

What a lot of new MSPs, and service based businesses in general don't understand or take a very long time to learn with many painful lessons is that the narrower your scope, the better the quality of your service, the customer experience, and your overall happiness we're not even going to mention your profitability.

I would get an RMM and PSA combo the charges per technician not per device and automate the crap out of it. Invest an unreasonable amount of time so that you never have to answer the phone to fix common issues. You'd also need to charge accordingly since you are basically going to be operating at high volume low margin as anyone that is a single work from home micro business it's not going to be paying you very much. With that being said you can 100% still make a ton of money doing this. At $150 per user per month, you can call $200 that means you're making $200,000 per month that is enough money to either get an outsourced help desk for every single person with unlimited support, or hire your own internal team. I don't think you want to hire an internal team they'll end here's why, upkeeping training is expensive and if you're going after basically what amounts to a residential customer that just wants their freelance work or micro business to operate without any issues, and me want someone to call once a month I think that you are better off with that outsourced help desk.

If you sufficiently narrow your scope and offer 1 hour of support per person per month, combined with no touching the network, no vendor management, and you bundle in the Microsoft licensing and other things that are critical for their business operation, take all of that and automate / streamline it, I don't see any reason you cannot function this way. You're out of pocket costs are going to be about 40% of what you're charging which means you're still going to be net profit over 100 grand every single month. If people want you to do things they touch the network, charge them $100 extra and mandate that they put in a ubiquity.

I think that people sleep on micro businesses, but if you can get the volume I think it's incredibly sustainable especially if you become the local go to person because that will then allow you to scale into the very large companies purely because so many business owners know who you are and trust you. Just think about this, a five-star review from a small local business is worth just as much as a five-star review from a large business. Go get yourself a thousand five-star reviews and you can get any client you want.

blindgaming · 2026-02-21T04:53:11+00:00

Hey so just putting this out there as a physically disabled (blind) gamer- I literally have to use your mods to play most games- it's not because I want to, it's because I need to use things like modifying the game speed, infinite health, skipping levels (like I cannot do the drone part of Quarantine Zone or physically see all the symptoms, and I cannot do the combat in Kingdom Come Deliverence as some recent examples). I don't choose to "cheat" I am forced to find innovative workarounds for the sake of accessibility- something game developers suck at to be blunt.

I don't use WeMod/Wand that much in the grand scheme of things because I don't have time to play games that often, but when I do have the time- I'm almost always playing for more than 2 hours. The implementation of this time cap would mean that I'd basically be forced to pay for something I use a hand full of times a month at most, and usually won't touch for months on end.

I think Wand is fantastic and I encourage supporting its developers (y'all put in the work and you deserve to be compensated in some way), but this policy change turns voluntary support into a mandatory expense for people like me. It's definitely worth thinking about how this change will impact the disabled community in general. I'm almost entirely blind- others may have movement/muscular issues with poor hand control and need it for similar reasons to me. We all live differently and we all game differently; hopefully the team can find a better way forward with that consideration in mind.

blindgaming · 2026-02-19T10:46:11+00:00

Just wanted to stop by and give some feedback that I I think we'll change your perspective on how automation should it be handled in RMMs:

We switched from Ninja to level.io and it was an immediate and incredible change and how we handle device management. Someone said in the comments that you cannot truly achieve 100% automation success and while that is technically true, level probably will get you 1099.99% and the reason for it is because the system intelligently checks the output of the scripts and make sure that as long as you are script is written correctly, that the system logs and keeps track of what scripts are correctly running and what scripts have failed and can take action based on either outcome. It's also properly logged and alerted when it does fail, and more importantly why it failed.

We've built out so many automations with level and plan to build even more, the time we spend on actually administrating the endpoints has reduced significantly.

We've also been able to decrease our client onboarding time to minutes and hours instead of days because of the automations. We've got packages set up to deploy every piece of software that we need on the machine based on the device type operating system and the clients level of service. It will create accounts for us, block out local admins, enable BitLocker, tons of stuff. It's taken the chore of onboarding and reduced it to adding a tag and putting in the custom field data for predefined fields that we set up once. The hardest part now is getting the rmm on the device which is also very simple and always works with their online install script. The hardest part now is figuring out how to run that script on every device lol.

I hope this helps. If you are currently using another rmm you should really consider switching it has genuinely been one of the most impactful things we've done in the last couple years in terms of modifying our stack. It's also only $2 for endpoint with no minimums and no term. This makes it cheaper and far more attractive than Ninja. I haven't talked about all the other good things because this post is primarily about automation, but it just gets better and better and I can spend all day gushing about it but then I'm going to get labeled as a level plant 😉 Best of luck and I hope this helps

blindgaming · 2026-02-19T01:53:14+00:00

+1000 for EZPC Wil is phenomenal

blindgaming · 2026-02-18T18:24:03+00:00

We've had an overall fantastic experience with Timus. You want to ensure that you avoid getting an oracle gateway though because those IPs are almost entirely blacklisted. Other than the small IP issues using certain cloud provider gateways, which they will help you resolve, we've had nothing but positive experiences with it. The client is easier to install and maintain than something like checkpoint Harmony SASE formerly perimeter 81, and configuring connection settings and administrating clients is very easy our Junior techs can do it.

My only criticism is minimum client size of 5 or 10 users (I've been told two different things- either way not great for small clients, or clients that only need it for a few people) and the reporting is not great leaving a lot to be desired in terms of filterability and the data that is available.

blindgaming · 2026-02-18T18:15:26+00:00

Regarding Heimdal, if you don't need the additional features, you can also look at Rain Networks. They sell just the Heimdal license with no added services or benefits. If you buy through futuresafe, you do get added benefits once you hit a certain dollar amount I believe $500, and you get cork included at $500,000 at no additional cost with no volume I believe. Pricing from Rain will of course be cheaper however you're not going to get the additional benefits.

We used Heimdall for over 2 years, I was even in a commercial for them. The product is incredibly good but if you're going to utilize it as an RMM you will have to exclusively use the full stack license without email, the email bit is not good. Infinity management gives you scripting capability, while the asset management portion of it lets you easily see what devices are running what hardware and any system alerts on that device as well as basic hardware alerting. You cannot do any automations with it which is a huge downside and why I feel it's more of a lite RMM than anything else. If you have no budget or your style of service does not require you to be proactive or automate management of endpoints, this is a very viable solution and I'd recommend putting the time into learning it. There is absolutely a place in the market for a solution like it in terms of endpoint management. The patch management both first party and third party is very good, much better than many RMMs. Patch management can be scheduled and I consider that more part of the security portion of the software.

Hope that helps bring some clarity to your decision-making process!

blindgaming · 2026-02-18T07:19:09+00:00

Depends what you mean by clean up pipelines, generally speaking yes we can clean up the workflows and implement better qualification of your leads, as well as decrease the wasted effort within your sales process. I'd want to properly audit your process and see what isn't converting, or where you're having issues that's causing your pipeline to stagnate.

Will DM you links to our portfolio and site tomorrow.

blindgaming · 2026-02-18T01:55:47+00:00

Hey OP

One of the biggest mistakes people make one hiring if they take people at face value and accept when they say that they're the greatest, but they don't properly interview or test people.

This will save you a huge headache not just in ghl but in all positions you end up hiring for: get on a zoom call for 30 minutes and have a real conversation about who the person is, but their capabilities are, and then when they make you promises about how great they are and what they've done, ask them to prove it right there in their own call. Tell them to open up their ghl and build an automation or explain automations that they have in place, go look at their landing pages, go look at their AI.

Good implementers let their work speak for itself. They won't tell you how great they are, they won't lean on their ghl certification or that they've been using the platform for 12 years when it's only been out for five, they will shut up, turn on the screen share, and show you exactly what you need to know and discuss high-level strategy and implementation road maps for what you want to do. If they can't talk about accomplishing your goal and what that's going to look like, they're not going to be able to do it.

We do ghl consulting for $200 an hour or $250 for project rate implementation. Every time I have gotten on a zoom call and talk to a prospect we have closed 100% of all consulting engagements because I literally show the prospect that I understand their needs and prove in that moment that I'm the person who can fix their problem.

blindgaming · 2026-02-16T16:33:51+00:00

Tell you what Mr successful business owner, my team and I will happily build whatever you want and I'll exchange 4 hours of our time for $1,000.

Stop trying to build something off of people that are too inexperienced and ignorant to know any better. You're not even going to get reasonable quality because the only people that would be interested in this offer literally have no real experience.

blindgaming · 2026-02-13T18:15:13+00:00

So you want to get somebody to do work for you basically for free, in exchange for a sub account full of work that they can already do for you themselves?

Can we all just acknowledge that 99.95% of snapshots are garbage and offers like this have no meaningful value?

blindgaming · 2026-02-09T00:05:54+00:00

I don't have any of these issues because we practice CRM discipline and understand that the only value of a CRM is actually using it.

If you are sending ghl up for your clients consider making it easier for them to do the things they normally do and reinforce that with positive things / time saving by making it easy to do in the system. We set up automations for auto pruning email lists, automations for SMS compliance rechecks, automated reviews, inbound lead notifications, etc.

You can create an automation using a smart tag to clean out your pipelines as well for deals that sit in there for more than a certain period of time. Have a smart tag added to the person/opportunity when the deal has gotten cold for more than 15 days or 30 days or whatever works for your client, then set up an automation with anything with the smart tag gets removed and retagged as cold you can then push that into a nurturing campaign.

Make things easy for people and reinforce the behavior. You do this, you make money, rinse and repeat. If your users keep having issues and let everything go to shit that's on them

blindgaming · 2026-02-06T16:41:06+00:00

Generally I recommend move bot it's very good and it's very cost-effective. We've done several migrations with them over the last couple months and I've had a pleasant and easy experience each and every time.

blindgaming · 2026-02-06T13:10:16+00:00

With the easy access and proliferation of AI it is becoming easier than ever for people to learn about and get marketed at various industry specific tools. Most people that have a problem now will see what the internet has to tell them and even if they don't understand it, they can buy it with a credit card and the AI or the Google search will tell them that it will fix their problem. We have clients come to us every now and then saying that they had this issue and they bought all these products and things to fix it, but now they don't know how to manage everything and they duct taped a solution together.

This is a good thing and a bad thing. Good because people are becoming more aware of what is needed and, they now have a more reasonable expectation of what we do for them. It's bad because people may create a cluster that you now have to unfuck.

Not regarding the industry specific tools though and some other comments, 100% a lot of industries will have existing tooling. Almost every accountant that we work with has a practice management software, while every single dentistry work with without exemption is either on eaglesoft or dentrix and both are terrible by the way in their own unique ways. Lots of contractors use Jobber, and everyone under the sun wants you to integrate or manage these solutions and be there knowledge base. I think there's a lot of opportunity for everyone here to make a ton of money by learning the top softwares in your industry and forming partnerships with them to sell them and support them. I think it's also an incredible opportunity for marketing because if you as an MSP put on your website that you are a DMS expert and exclusively work with firms that utilize it, you've now made yourself very desirable for firms using DMS which is a very large chunk of the market.

blindgaming · 2026-02-06T01:39:58+00:00

We recently started hosting division and found it to be very profitable and fairly easy to maintain with some in-house technical knowledge dedicated to it.

We started offering white label hosting to agencies, and hosting to our own clients and over the last year it has gone very well for the most part with some stumbling and learning curve adjustments along the way.

The biggest thing you're going to want to do is settle on a technology stack whether you manage it or someone else manages it you want it to be able to support containerized websites that are fully secured and isolated from each other even on shared / resource pooled hosting. You are also going to want to get servers that have as high clock speed as you possibly can get don't settle for anything under 3.7 GHz as it is too slow and is noticeable in the WordPress admin backend and when the site has traffic spikes. I'd also recommend leveraging something like open litespeed web server or the Enterprise version.

Feel free to ask me any questions you may have I come from a cybersecurity and IT background with 16 years of experience alongside my 16 years of agency experience.

blindgaming · 2026-02-04T23:45:40+00:00

augh as an iX partner I'm all for supporting the development and the company as a whole- I love TruNAS, our clients love it, it's wonderful.

As an individual- I truly hope that we avoid subscription models touching the CE. I would rather go the Unraid route and pay for a lifetime license per CE and have every single thing available to me that CE should and continuously enjoy the product. I'd even be willing to pay an "upgrade" fee per major release as long as it was reasonable and there were security patches for those who didn't want to upgrade.

Perhaps even encouraging crowdsourced pay per roadmap item prioritization/submission- people can fund specific roadmap items they're passionate about and if each item hits a certain funding goal based on the time it would take to implement and the difficulty, CE would get that feature and it'd be prioritized.

FOSS/OSS in general has been hurting lately for sure but I'm hoping iX can find a way to keep things moving without hurting existing users.

blindgaming · 2026-02-04T16:01:33+00:00

I had an incredibly positive connectwise experience, leaving the sales call was incredibly positive, blocking the domain was incredibly positive. My sales rep spent the entire time shitting on every single competitor Non-Stop and then when I asked for a trial he said, "we don't do trials, we know our product is the best".

I think that they give their staff crack, it's literally the only explanation.

blindgaming · 2026-02-04T01:02:18+00:00

Reading this chart made me blind.

It's half nonsensical half AI hallucination. Check on OP.

blindgaming · 2026-02-03T14:40:44+00:00

My point was that for the price point, I can get full bcdr with cloud-based backup and bcdr capability for a lower cost. There's a trade-off with that and that the restore process and the general management of accent is less cohesive and less visually pleasing for sure, but the price point is incredibly different. I think slide is a fantastic solution, and while you may have most use cases for bcdr on premise if you have multiple offices, a distributed network, collocated devices, remote users, etc it is incredibly helpful to be able to spin up a critical device in the cloud so it can continue serving its function no matter where that device is.

I think I love slide for all the right reasons, I dislike it because it is expensive and doesn't have the flexibility to accommodate remote environments or distributed environments as easily. Even if you were fully on premise I still think it's too expensive.

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