Landing That First Client
This is a short story about landing my first paying client a few years ago when I was starting my web firm.
I launched the site for my new web business on April 2. It was ready for launch the day before, but I just couldn’t bring myself to launch on April 1 due to that day’s association with foolish endeavors. For the next few months, I continued to play music gigs and do construction work part-time, while I refined my skills as a web site builder and continued to market my web services.
Nearly every week, I attended some sort of consultants’ group meeting or met for coffee with some established web-services provider in my area. I was networking with people as much as I could stand, but it hadn’t paid off for me yet. My new business was nearly six months old and I didn’t have a single paying client signed up for services.
One of the tech meetings I attended was with a group of volunteers planning an event near my home called Penguin Day. The intent was to bring geeks, consultants, nonprofit staff and open source software developers together for a day of learning and conversation. This was the next-to-last meeting of the volunteer planning committee before the event.
One of the volunteers was reading through a checklist of everything the committee had accomplished, and what it hadn’t. Of the remaining goals needing completion, two included the creation of a website and an online registration system.
It was about two weeks before the event, so the committee was about to give up on the site and the registration system when I spoke up. I said “I can have the site and the registration system online and ready for you by noon tomorrow, if you can give me the information you want on the site and a list of fields you need to capture in the reg. form.” The committee of tech-savvy volunteers giggled nervously and looked down into their notes in an attempt to be polite about my outlandish claims.
Four hours after the meeting ended, I emailed the lead volunteer on the committee a temporary URL for an EE CMS site that was all set up and awaiting his content. I also sent him a link to the reg form. He was a little surprised at how fast I accomplished this. I had built the site in EE and the registration form in PHPList. At the time, EE was pretty new to me and building a fully functional site in four hours was a personal challenge; I just wanted to see if I could do it.
By the next evening, the new site was live and we had the registration form working and connecting people to PayPal to make payment. I was able to add my firm to the list of sponsors for providing the website, hosting and the online registration.
In the two weeks prior to the event, the website received plenty of updates and the online registration system processed about half of the 100 or so participants. The site worked! There were some on the volunteer committee who grumbled about the site being built on EE because EE was a licensed product (not free open source), but no one complained about how well everything worked.
The night before Penguin Day, I told my wife I was going to snag my first client at the event. I didn’t know what organization it would be, but I was determined to find a client there. The next morning, while getting ready to leave the house, I kept telling myself I would come home with a new client’s contact information. On the drive, I imagined striking up conversations with people looking for a web site developer/designer.
Had you seen me that day, you would have thought I was running for office. I wore a nicely pressed shirt, a full-color homemade nametag with my new firm’s logo on it and I had a pocket full of my business cards. I purposefully introduced myself to everyone in the room and tried to hand them my business card and talk to them about what it was my web firm did. I talked about my firm as if it was well established and a recognized name, even though none of these folks had ever heard of it before.
At lunch, I asked if I could join a table where people from three different nonprofits were sitting. Halfway through lunch I moved to another table. By the end of the day I had handed out about 50 of my business cards and had collected about 20 from other individuals. I told everyone who would listen what it was my web firm did and that it was currently accepting new clients.
Even though people had never heard of my firm, or me, being a sponsor of the event meant my logo was printed on the handouts and I was given a couple of minutes to introduce myself and my firm to a captive audience.
The evening after the event, I sent personal thank-you emails to everyone I had an email address for. I thanked them for attending the event and asked them for any feedback I could pass along to the volunteer committee for planning the next year’s event.
Within two weeks, I had my first two clients signed up for website services, and I had met both of them at Penguin Day. The best part of this story is that, all these years later, those first two clients are still with the firm.
When I started in this business, I didn’t have a network of established contacts that could refer services to me. So I had to start from scratch, surfing the Internet for local meet-ups and tech-related trainings that I could crash as a way of getting out in front of potential clients. It was not the easiest way to get started, but it worked.
Presenting at technology meet-ups (like Penguin Day) continue to be a good investment of my time. I volunteered to present at another event about a year ago on the topic of how nonprofits were utilizing the new web technologies, and I ended up with five new clients from an audience of about 40 people. That has to be my most successful presentation to date.
How did you get started? How did you meet your first paying client? Did he come to you by referral, did you meet her at an event, or did that person just find you online? Please share your story with us.
