“I’ll just post on Upwork” is not a client strategy. Here’s what I built instead.
Let me tell you about a specific kind of panic. You open a spreadsheet. You name it “potential clients.” You stare at row 1, column A. And you have absolutely nothing to type.
Not because you’re bad at your job. I’ve run a web agency (dricomm.com) for years — I know how to build a good site, write decent copy, deliver work people are happy with. That was never the problem. The problem was always this: knowing who to talk to, and knowing what to say that isn’t “hi, I do websites, need one?”
The skill nobody teaches you
Here’s something I think gets missed a lot: “finding clients” and “doing the work” are two completely different skills. You can be excellent at one and genuinely stuck at the other. Most freelance advice assumes if you’re good enough, clients find you. Sometimes that’s true. Mostly, it isn’t — especially early on, especially in crowded fields.
So what do people actually do? They post on Upwork and compete with 40 other bids. They wait for referrals that may or may not come. They tell themselves they’ll “get to marketing” once they have more time — which never comes, because the work itself takes all the time.
I did all of this. For years, across multiple projects (dricomm, and later around.md). And I noticed something: it wasn’t that I lacked opportunities. It’s that finding them took hours I didn’t have, and once I found a business that might need me, I still had to figure out what to actually say to them that wasn’t generic.
Nobody guarantees you a client. But the odds aren’t fixed either.
Here’s the mental shift that changed things for me: waiting for clients and hunting for clients have wildly different odds, even though neither one is guaranteed.
If you wait — you get whatever comes. Could be nothing for months.
If you hunt — and you hunt specifically, picking businesses that visibly need what you do (a restaurant with a site frozen in 2019, a clinic with no online booking, a shop using stock photos instead of their actual products) — you’re not gambling anymore. You’re starting conversations with people who were already halfway to needing you. You just showed up first.
That’s the whole idea behind what I’ve been building.
What SignalsHunt actually does
You paste your own site. An AI reads it and works out who your realistic first client is — not a vague “small businesses,” but something specific. Then it searches real local businesses on Google that match, and — this is the part I care about most — it actually visits each one’s website and looks for something concrete: an old copyright year, no mobile-friendly layout, no online booking, stock photography, missing social links, whatever’s relevant to what you do.
Then it writes you three messages — an opener and two follow-ups — that reference that specific thing, instead of “I help businesses like yours.”
You still send it yourself. You still have the conversation. I didn’t try to automate the human part — I automated the part that was eating my time and killing my momentum before the human part ever got a chance to happen.
Does it work? Honestly — yes, but not magically
I use it myself for dricomm. So far: over 100 emails sent using it, real replies from real people, one paid client, one more in an active conversation right now. Not a hockey-stick story. Just a tool that turned “I should really find some clients” from a dread-inducing task into something I actually do, consistently, because the hard part — the staring-at-a-blank-list part — is gone.
Who this is actually for
If you’re good at your craft and bad at (or just exhausted by) the hunting part — this is for you. Web designers, developers, copywriters, SEO folks, marketers, photographers, consultants. Anyone whose bottleneck isn’t skill, it’s the first move.
Free plan gives you 5 real leads, no card needed, just to see if the whole idea even makes sense for your niche: signalshunt.com
I’ll be honest that this is still early and growing — but the core idea, I’m convinced of: the odds are better when you hunt. I just wanted to make the hunting part take a minute instead of an afternoon.
I like that you automate preparation, not the conversation. The product risk I’d test is whether specificity actually feels credible to the sender. A detected issue such as an old copyright year may be technically correct but commercially weak. Before generating copy, show the user the evidence, why it may matter, a confidence level, and one counter-signal such as recent social activity. Then let them approve the observation. That turns SignalsHunt from a copy generator into a judgment aid. For validation, I’d separate positive replies, calls, and paid work; one client from 100 emails is encouraging, but those stages will show whether lead selection or wording is the limiting factor. Which stage currently leaks the most?
This is epic
the "who to talk to and what to say" problem is the real one, and you framed it well. upwork fails not because its bad but because everyone there is already shopping and comparing on price, youre one of 50 bids, so you compete in a race to the bottom. the higher-leverage move is reaching people who arent actively shopping yet but have a visible trigger (they just launched, just raised, just rebranded, or have an obviously broken/outdated site). the "what to say" then solves itself: you reference the specific thing about THEM, not "hi i do websites". generic outreach gets ignored because it could have been sent to anyone. one caution on any system that automates finding these: the trigger has to be real and the message has to stay human, the moment it feels mass-sent youre back to being ignored, just at scale. the skill nobody teaches (that you named) is exactly this, relevance beats volume, and a reason-to-reach-out-now beats a pitch every time.
Ouch, I think I'm really stuck with this problem too! It really is extremely hard to find clients for online jobs. Imagine Upwork is already the best site for online job seekers, but it's still a test of faith to find even one client.
One nuance from doing a lot of this kind of outreach lately: "visible problems" are a double-edged signal. An outdated copyright date means the site is neglected — but businesses that neglect their site usually neglect the budget for fixing it too. My replies come overwhelmingly from owners showing signs of trying — a fresh redesign, active socials — plus one concrete gap. And the best-converting group by far is people who publicly asked for feedback somewhere. Permission beats precision: one warm "you asked, here's what I found" outperforms ten perfectly-targeted cold observations.
This resonates. Being good at the actual work and being good at consistently finding clients are two completely different skills, and the “blank spreadsheet” problem is very real. I also like that you’re focusing on specific, visible signals instead of generating generic lead lists. A personalized message based on something the business is already struggling with should give you a much stronger reason to start a conversation.
The early results sound realistic too—one paid client from 100+ emails isn’t a huge success story, but it’s useful validation that the process can generate real opportunities. I’d be curious to know which signals have produced the highest reply rates so far.
Brilliant insight, Serghei. I completely agree that finding clients and doing the work are two entirely different skills.
As a software engineer, I face the exact opposite problem. I build the products perfectly, but I hate the hunting phase. That is actually why I started building premium, production-ready Next.js templates (HadiKits) to cut the delivery time in half.
For an agency like dricomm, combining a tool like SignalsHunt for outreach with a solid arsenal of enterprise-grade templates for rapid delivery seems like a massive competitive advantage. You get the client, and you deploy the site in days, not months.
Would love to connect and chat about how you currently handle the delivery phase at your agency.
The 100+ emails → replies → one paid client is useful evidence, especially because you’re running it against your own agency.
What would you need to see from users who aren’t you before you’d consider the product itself validated — not just the outbound method it enables?
The official launch will be coming soon!
Looking forward to the launch.
I actually sent you an email a couple of weeks ago as well — whenever you get a chance, have a look. Would be good to continue from there.
nice:)
Thank you!