🧲 A $100k/year service from scratch

Working 3 hours a day (Case Study)

Author

Yannick Veys
February 01, 2025

Any sales guru will tell you that selling a service is easier than selling a product.

Most products require customers to invest money and effort to get the desired result.

With a service, you handle all or most of the effort; the client just needs to pay.

That’s also why you can sell a service for a higher price.

But how do you:

  • Sell a service if you have no leads?

  • Get leads if you’re a (digital) nobody?

Buckle up—I’ll show you how a friend did it.

He ended up with a $100k/year business, working only 3 hours/day.

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It’s a mini 𝕏 Direct Message CRM helping you get more sales by:

  • Nurturing leads

  • Managing projects

  • Keeping track of important conversations

  • Building quality relationships

  • Following up on your prospects

If you have no leads…

You’re like everybody else.

Nobody wakes up with an idea and a crowd ready to buy from them.

You have only two options:

  1. Grow an audience

  2. Work for free

For the first approach, check out Hypefury’s blog or podcast.

But when you want to launch a service, working for free is the fastest way to test it. Plus, if people like what you have in mind, it will naturally lead to your first sales.

This is how Olly started testing his landing page roasting service. He worked for free, but he was strategic about it.

How to work for free, the smart way

Working for free has a bad rep. And sometimes, for good reasons.

However, if you plan to launch a new service, you must do some free work. It’s your initial investment.

Use it to build trust and attract leads.

At first, Olly offered his service for free. He promoted it on IndieHackers and 𝕏.

Now, I don’t have the exact numbers, but I bet at first, not only did he work for free, but most of his initial leads had a low budget.

That’s normal.

That free work was valuable anyway. He got:

  • Testimonials

  • Views and engagement

Plus, he could publicly share his work for these first free customers.

After a while, requests piled up, and he had to put up a paywall.

Show your value in public

Once you have your first customers and testimonials, it’s mostly rinse and repeat—possibly on a larger scale.

Olly kept doing some free work to attract more leads. He targeted creators and entrepreneurs with a big audience:

Targeting big names can increase your service’s visibility.

You show your value publicly, and some big names you mention may even reach out for your expertise.

That’s it for now, everyone! We’ll meet again next week to discuss some more of this!

Feel free to reply to this email. It goes directly to me.

Cheers,

Yannick