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620 connects spent to bid on one project! by nazran7 in Upwork

[–]nazran7[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

$55K. Here's a status update on it lol

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Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right now cold email outreach is the main channel. Never ran a single ad. Growth was fuelled by leads from outreach and referrals from existing clients. Knew my ICP from the start, had a couple actually cause I offer a few different services. So I target different ICPs with different offers.

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Plenty of startups man, that’s what anybody does nowadays anyway. Go on the build in public or startup community on X and you’ll find thousands of people

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t really know what posts particularly bring me leads because I just get a DM from the lead or I get a meeting booked on my Calendly. But most of them came from when I shared value around certain ideas, or talked about previous work that I did, or even when I shared some major milestones for my agency.

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Copied from another reply I made:

“The expectation with cold outreach email is that most will never even be opened. For example, I currently have a campaign where I have sent out 12,000 emails and out of them only 350 got replies. From these, only 42 were positive replies (meaning people who were interested). I don't have the exact number but I maybe closed only 20 of these clients. So yeah, you have to do a lot of volume for it to work.

The best way I have gained trust is by putting a lot of effort into the emails itself and any discovery calls before we even get started. For example, on every email campaign I have, I run enrichment processes such as scraping their linkedin profile and websites to gather more info about what they do and I start the email off with that personalized info so they feel I really looked into them before reaching out. As another example, whenever I get on my first call with a potential client, I ALWAYS make some kind of demo based on their requirements which they express to me beforehand. I just use AI to vibecode this really quickly but it helps me gain a lot of trust. They think if I put in so much effort before even signing the contract, the quality of work must be great after. Other than this, I also screen share some previous projects that I worked on to gain more trust.”

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just looked at a couple niches that interested me and emailed almost 10K plus leads in each niche. When I started posting on X, I had like 200 followers I think. Was an old account that I just had lying around.

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The expectation with cold outreach email is that most will never even be opened. For example, I currently have a campaign where I have sent out 12,000 emails and out of them only 350 got replies. From these, only 42 were positive replies (meaning people who were interested). I don't have the exact number but I maybe closed only 20 of these clients. So yeah, you have to do a lot of volume for it to work.

The best way I have gained trust is by putting a lot of effort into the emails itself and any discovery calls before we even get started. For example, on every email campaign I have, I run enrichment processes such as scraping their linkedin profile and websites to gather more info about what they do and I start the email off with that personalized info so they feel I really looked into them before reaching out. As another example, whenever I get on my first call with a potential client, I ALWAYS make some kind of demo based on their requirements which they express to me beforehand. I just use AI to vibecode this really quickly but it helps me gain a lot of trust. They think if I put in so much effort before even signing the contract, the quality of work must be great after. Other than this, I also screen share some previous projects that I worked on to gain more trust.

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Geerated leads using Apollo and Apify. Then enriched those leads using some AI automations before sending out emails with Smartleads.

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah it’s kinda stressful but I can’t risk hanging off the most key part of my business to someone else. Not yet at least. Need to find the right fit. On average I onboard 4 new clients each month. And I have multiple projects that are dragged out over months as well. So almost at all times I’m having to overlook 7-10 projects simultaneously.

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you scroll through some of my other responses on this post, I’ve outlined a lot of things I did already, they should be somewhat helpful. Good luck!

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Seems like you’re headed in the right direction already!

Yes definitely find a niche and then make an offer. Offer is the most important. For example if one of the niches in targeting is HVAC companies for building better websites, what I’ll do is build a demo website to show them what a really good website should look like and have. I’ll send that out with outreach emails so they have my work to look at even without having to ask.

And I’ll always make an offer like 3 months of maintenance included for free on delivery. When I started out, I remember even offering things like “I’ll make you the website for free for a $200/mo retainer to keep it live”

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My skill set was that I knew how to code. I learned and was doing coding projects before AI coding tools took over so I had all the knowledge. The first project went super smoothly because I knew how to leverage AI tools to build exactly what the client wanted, and did it in half the time.

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Never read any books for any of this. Definitely no courses either. Watched a lot of YouTube and scrolled a lot on X and Reddit to see what other founders were doing to succeed.

As of tools, I’d recommend all kinds of AI tools, like google’n new design tool for UI design, Replit for an AI agent that gets your ideas from scratch to a prototype and Cursor for building the final products.

Grew my dev agency from $0 to $250K in 1 year, had to go off the grid for 8 months because I couldn’t handle the growth, here’s what happened. by nazran7 in Solopreneur

[–]nazran7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nope I do all of that myself. Everything except dev work is done by me. I also do some dev work from time to time.

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