r/freelance by u/Tryhard_314 5mo ago I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: Hi everyone,
Like many of you, when I started looking for clients, I was overwhelmed by anecdotal advice: "Just cold email," "Use Upwork," "Network in person." I wanted to know what actually works.
So, I built a scraper to analyze the archives of r/freelance, r/upwork, r/webdev, and several other freelance subreddits. I processed over 200,000 posts and comments, used AI to filter for relevant information, and normalized the data to find out exactly how people got their first client and how long it took.
Here are the key findings from the data:
* In-Person is King (Speed-wise): The median time to land a client via In-Person Cold Outreach was just 1.5 days. It seems the "uncomfortable" work of showing up physically builds trust faster than anything else.
* The "Cold" Hierarchy: If you are doing cold outreach, the medium matters significantly: In-Person > Cold Calling > DMs > Cold Emailing. Cold emailing was the least effective and slowest of the direct methods in the dataset.
* Free Work Works: Offering free work seems to be one of the fastest ways to convert to a paying client, likely because it removes the initial friction.
Overall, the median time to find a first client was a
Open on Reddit r/Entrepreneur by u/kellyjames436 6mo ago Canceled my $15K/year ZoomInfo subscription. Built my own for $50/month. Been lurking here for a while, figured I'd share something that's been working for me.
Last year I paid $14,997 for a ZoomInfo Business plan. Used it to find B2B leads for my consulting work (mostly targeting German companies - dentists, lawyers, small businesses).
The problem? Half the emails bounced. Customer support basically said "yeah that happens." I was paying $1,250/month for a 50% accuracy rate. Insane.
So in February I got fed up and spent a weekend learning Python. Built a scraper that:
- Finds .de domains in my target niches
- Extracts emails from their contact pages (Impressum in Germany - legally required contact info)
- Validates them before I even send an email
Ran it last month on ~2,500 dental practice websites:
- Got 4,800+ emails
- Bounce rate when I sent: 4.7% (vs the 50% I was getting before)
- Cost: $43 in API fees + $12 AWS hosting
I'm not trying to sell anything here. Just wanted to share because if you're paying for lead databases and getting garbage results like I was, you might want to look into building your own.
Happy to answer questions if anyone's curious about the technical side.
Open on Reddit r/startup by u/rexis_nobilis_ 5mo ago I’ll find you customers on Reddit for free (and if I don’t, I’ll pay you $2) Yep. You read that right. I will pay you if I can’t find you a lead on Reddit. It’s part of my “shut up and prove it” strategy to keep myself accountable.
Basically we’re building a general AI agent that goes deep in any vertical of knowledge work + can iterate and carry-out very long running tasks that consists of thousands of steps, all from a single prompt.
Finding Reddit leads is only a fraction of what she’s capable of doing but it’s one that is popular among our current user base. We just finished doing a major update so what better way to test it but to put money on the one ($2 is a lot okay? You can buy a whole lottery ticket with it)Here are the rules:
* Just tell me what type of people you want it to search in the comments and your startup URL.
* If my general AI agent can’t create a csv, excel, json etc… list (it can create files) based on your lead requirements. I will send you $2.
* Those $2 will be sent to you via Venmo, PayPal or Zelle.
* If it fails, please let other people in the comments know so we don’t get the same request.
* If it works, please let other people in the comments know so we don’t get the same request.
* If there is any ambiguity, I will a
Open on Reddit r/IndiaBusiness by u/Original_Map3501 4mo ago Built this for myself to find potential clients on Reddit might make it public if others want it I originally built this tool **just for myself** because manually searching Reddit for problem posts was getting exhausting.
The goal was simple:
find people who are *actually asking for help* not validation posts, not high-competition threads, not stuff that’s already flooded with replies.
What it does right now:
* Scans specific subreddits
* Looks for real problem intent based on keywords (e.g. “how do I”, “looking for”, “stuck”)
* Filters for **fresh posts** with **low competition**
* Scores posts so I can prioritize which ones to reply to first
* Keeps track of which leads I’ve already contacted so I don’t double-message
I didn’t build this as a product or SaaS.
It’s just been helping me:
* spend less time scrolling
* reach people earlier
* focus on real problems instead of guessing ideas
It’s working well enough that I’m considering making it public **if others would actually find it useful**.
Not selling anything here genuinely just curious:
Would a tool like this be helpful to you, or is manual searching still “good enough”?
Happy to answer questions or share how I built it.
https://preview.redd.it/oyyotkctivhg1.png?width=1919&format=png&auto=webp&s=f79b864ab2
Open on Reddit r/startup by u/ccrrr2 9mo ago Is this something you would even pay to use? Hey Startupers! How you all doing?
Alert: THERE IS NO PUBLIC VERSION OF THIS PRODUCT I DON'T EVEN HAVE A DOMAIN, I USE IT LOCALY FOR MY OWN NEEDS :)
Over the years in the startup world I gathered insane amount of data from different resources which helped me to acquire initial users for mine and my clients saas.
Because I am too lazy to use bunch of different tools to achieve my targets, I built this tool which I use locally (from my terminal) to acquire initial users/customers with organic marketing, basically you add your product link/idea/description and you get all the data you need to get your first users and take your product off the ground.
There are 28 mini tools which compliment each other:
1. Target Audience Discovery (Analyze and creates Demographics, Psychographics, Behavior, etc...)
2. User Persona Discovery ( Analyze and create Individual Targeted User Persona)
3. Value Proposition Generator ( Analyze your product and creates value prop)
4. Go To Market Strategy Blueprint ( Generates complete GTM blueprint)
5. Landing Page Copy Gen (Creates high converting landing copy)
6. Multi-Platform Launch Copy (Generates launch content for multiple platforms like PH, IH, HN
Open on Reddit r/smallbusiness by u/newsletter12 4mo ago How to find local clients for B2B services? Hey folks,
I’m trying to improve how I reach local businesses for my B2B services (SEO & web development) - basically doing cold outreach, but in a way that’s efficient and not too spammy.
Let’s say you have a product or service aimed at restaurants, garages, or small clinics in a specific city. What’s the best way to find and contact decision-makers at those businesses?
I’ve been experimenting with Google Maps searches (for example “restaurants in my city”) and collecting emails manually, but that’s honestly too slow. I saw on reddit a tool called [mapshunt.com](http://mapshunt.com) \- it automates part of that process: you type the industry and location, it scrapes local companies from Maps, finds their websites and contact emails, and even lets you send a mailing directly. It’s basically a local lead generation and cold email assistant.
I’m curious - how do you guys handle this? Do you prefer using CRMs with imported lists, LinkedIn automation, or maybe manual personalized outreach? I’d love to hear what methods get real engagement instead of silence.
I've never used any Excels, CRM etc, just make a calling / messages day and looking for companies.
Open on Reddit r/LeadGeneration by u/Reikoii 12mo ago Clay is great… but $300+/month just to hit an HTTP API? I’ve been getting into cold outreach lately, and while tools like Clay are impressive, I find the pricing hard to justify-especially when you want to integrate with external APIs.
To use your own HTTP API in Clay, you need to be on the $300+ plan… and that’s before even accounting for the cost of the third-party APIs themselves. For solo founders and small teams, that adds up fast.
So I’m building something simpler.
A lightweight platform where you can:
* Import your spreadsheets (or create them from scratch)
* Enrich data using **your own APIs**, without usage restrictions
* Automate your flows at a fraction of the price
Would love to hear your thoughts:
* Would you use something like this?
* What features would make it a no-brainer?
* What are the most painful limitations in your current stack?
Appreciate any feedback!
Open on Reddit r/sales by u/drnprz 10mo ago What's the easiest way to find new leads with verified emails? I'm trying to build a decent list of B2B leads for cold outreach, but I keep running into the same problem, I either find decent companies with no contact, or I get emails that bounce. I've used a few lead gen tools but most of them are a pain to use or don't give verified emails.
What's your go-to setup for finding new leads and making sure the emails are actually valid?
Open on Reddit r/smallbusiness by u/august212023 1mo ago 0 to first cold email campaign in a weekend. step by step the amount of vague "just send cold emails bro" advice floating around this sub and others drives me up a wall. im not an SDR, i dont write copy, i dont care about subject line A/B tests. im the ops person who builds the infrastructure so our SDR team can actually press send without torching our domain or landing in spam. ive been doing this for about 2 years at a series A company and before that i was a backend engineer, so i think about this stuff as systems and data pipelines not "outreach strategy."
this is the actual step by step for going from literally nothing to a functioning cold email system over a weekend. not theory. not vibes. the actual sequence with actual numbers.
DOMAINS AND INBOXES
first thing saturday morning, b͏uy dom͏ains. you want 3-5 domains that are close to your primary domain but not identical. if your company is acmesolutions.com you grab things like acme-solutions.co, getacme.io, acmesolutionshq.com, whatever. dont get cute with it, just make sure they look plausible if someone glances at the from address. we use namecheap, costs like $10-13 per domain per year depending on TLD.
then you set up inboxes. we use Mail͏doso for this because the whole poi
Open on Reddit r/LeadGeneration by u/NotOkhae 4mo ago What api for email finding and verification actually handles 500-1k monthly requests without weird limits? So for companies building out automation for partnership prospecting especially at series B stage and beyond there's a common need for email finding apis that can handle decent volume and integrate cleanly with existing tools without causing problems, the typical workflow that creates bottlenecks is pretty manual where someone identifies potential partners, researches contacts, exports everything to csv, imports to crm, then outreach happens which is slow and doesn't scale well at all.
Requirements for this kind of integration are pretty straightforward from what people describe, needs a reliable api with good documentation that actually works in production, has to verify emails not just find them since accuracy matters a lot for partnership outreach, needs to handle something like 500-1k requests monthly without throttling or hitting weird arbitrary limits, and pricing can't be per request because that gets insanely expensive at volume and makes the economics not work.
Structured data matters too not just raw email addresses, stuff like confidence scores, verification status, data source information needs to come back in the response so filtering and qualifying can happen before
Open on Reddit r/hermesagent by u/AutoModerator 1mo ago 🌐 [MASTER THREAD] Web Search, Scraping, & Rate Limit Workarounds Based on the recent community reports regarding search failures and API blocks, here is the summarized megathread for **Web Search, Scraping, & Rate Limit Workarounds**.
As users scale their agents for business research and data collection, "Rate Limit Exceeded" errors and bot detection have become the primary blockers. This thread tracks the best tools and configurations to keep your agent's "eyes" open.
# 🚩 Top Reported Issues
* **Provider Burnout:** Users like[u/ajw2285](https://www.google.com/search?q=https://www.reddit.com/r/hermesagent/comments/1sisym1/hermes_keeps_getting_rate_limited_in_web_search/)are reporting that even with **Camoufox** (an anti-detection browser), searching and analyzing hundreds of business leads overnight leads to immediate rate limits.
* **SearXNG Instability:** While many turn to self-hosted **SearXNG** instances for privacy, reports show that these often get flagged by Google/Bing faster than official APIs.
* **Firecrawl Context Bloat:** In the[Token Bloat Megathread](https://www.google.com/search?q=https://www.reddit.com/r/hermesagent/comments/1sisym1/master_thread_solving_token_bloat_context_creep/), users noted that tools like Firecrawl often
Open on Reddit r/smallbusiness by u/Jeanne-Darc98 1mo ago Where do people actually buy leads that aren't garbage? I'm at the point where I genuinely wonder if anyone sells leads that aren't complete trash. Tried 3 different providers this month and the bounce rates are insane - like 40-60% of emails just straight up don't exist.
We're a small marketing agency trying to scale our outreach. Been doing manual prospecting on LinkedIn but it takes forever and we need volume. Looking for verified b2b contacts, mainly marketing managers and founders at companies with 50-500 employees.
Right now we're seriously considering Prospeo since they claim near-zero bounces and only charge for verified contacts. Also looked at Wiza but the credits system confused me and the data quality reviews were mixed. Anyone here actually buy b2b leads that work? What bounce rates are you seeing?
We send about 500-1000 cold emails per week so accuracy really matters. Tired of burning through domains because of bounces. My business partner is about ready to just hire another SDR instead of dealing with contact lists but I feel like there has to be a better way.
Open on Reddit