@DavidofSeattle
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We book 40-50 high-intent sales calls in 90 days for financial professionals, agencies and high-ticket offers. Funnel & outreach, One system,Full guarantee.
Book a call here➡️
Joined June 2010
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Most people use Claude wrong.
They ask it to write better ads.
But better ads won’t fix a cold traffic offer strangers don’t trust.
If people click but still don’t book, the leak may be the offer, page, proof, CTA, follow-up, or the call feeling too risky.
The better move:
make Claude act like a hard-to-convince cold buyer and ask:
“Why would I not trust this?”
“What would stop me from booking?”
I made a Claude Cold Traffic Offer Sheet.
It gives you the prompts to find the leak before you spend more on ads or outreach.
Comment “CLAUDE” and I’ll send it.
Must be following so I can DM you.
Most agencies don’t fail because they can’t get clients.
They fail because they never build a system that can consistently get, close, and retain the right ones.
Getting from $10K → $100K → $1M isn’t just about better clients
It’s better positioning, stronger delivery, and a repeatable acquisition engine.
Most people think agencies are a beginner business.
Get lucky, maybe hit $100K a month.
Be exceptional, maybe a million.
Neil Patel on the other hand has scaled his to over $150M a year.
So I sat him down and we walked through every single stage…
0 →10M… 10M→50M… 50M→100M and beyond.
We also got into the thing he says almost every agency owner gets wrong.
And what he did in year three that took him from SMB contracts to eight-figure enterprise accounts.
Check it out below 👇
00:00 From Selling Leads to Building an Agency
06:06 The Brazil Origin Story
10:34 Scaling from $5M to $100M+
13:56 The Real Difference Between SMB and Enterprise
21:37 Why Enterprise Clients Rarely Leave
23:57 The M&A Playbook Behind NP Digital's Growth
30:35 Landing Global Brands Through Acquisition
32:00 How Earnouts Keep Acquired Teams In
36:34 Why Neil Isn't Selling (or Managing) Anytime Soon
42:47 Building an Enterprise Team by Poaching Right
48:46 Search Firms and the Hidden RFP Gatekeepers
52:42 Land and Expand: The Real Enterprise Playbook
59:04 Why Neil Wants People to Stop Knowing His Name
1:06:51 Poaching Lessons from iProspect
1:12:44 Why Neil Will Never Take the Company Public
1:15:33 What AI Is Actually Doing (and Not Doing) for Agencies
Sometimes you’re not charging too much.
You’re just talking to people who don’t have the budget for what you offer.
Same service. Different buyer. Completely different conversation.
the difference between a $3k retainer and a $43k mandate isn't your offer.
it's who you're making the offer to.
the operator closing $3k retainers and the one closing $43k mandates are often selling the same thing.
same skill set. same deliverables. same results.
different room.
the $3k buyer has a budget for your category. they formed it from the last three people who did what you do. and no matter how good your pitch is, you are being evaluated inside a price range they set before you opened your mouth.
the $45k buyer has never bought what you're selling in the form you're selling it.
the fee is a rounding error relative to what the problem is costing them. the conversation is never about price. it's about whether you're the right person.
same offer. different room. completely different number on the wire.
the ceiling isn't your positioning. it's your market.
dm me if you're ready to change the room. not everyone gets a seat.
Cold email might not be the problem
Bad targeting is.
If your emails are reaching people who don’t have the problem, no amount of personalization will save them.
Replies are great for capturing existing demand, but outbound lets you create conversations with the exact people you want to reach
The real play is knowing when to use both.
Cold email got us zero customers.
Replying to strangers' posts instead is now 21% of our signups.
Personalization is pretty much worthless. The moment every founder can generate 10,000 "personalized" emails a day, mentioning a company name and a funding round stops being personalization.
The buyers today aren't in the inbox anyway. They're on Reddit asking or researching "what do you use for X." They're on Hacker News complaining their tool doubled its price. They're on X describing your product's problem in public.
The playbook:
1. Track conversations, not just your brand. Competitor names, category terms too.
2. Answer the question first, say who you are. No second accounts, no manufactured mentions.
3. Don't mention your product every time.
4. The founder replies for highest effectiveness.
Not counted in that 21%: signups from AI assistants, whose recommendations are built on the same public conversations.
It doesn't scale like an email sequence. But a sequence reaches a crowded inbox, this reaches someone actually thinking about the problem.
Crestffield retweeted
There are several reasons to choose cold email over ads, and likewise.
But honestly, it depends on where you are in your business/agency.
If you have the resources and the patience, by all means, do both.
Crestffield retweeted
COLD OUTREACH AND PAID ADS SHOULD NOT BANTER EACH OTHER.
BUT THEY SHOULD COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER.
IF YOU WANT FAST ANSWERS, USE COLD OUTREACH, BUT THERE IS A LEARNING CURVE.
YOU WOULD UNDERSTAND HOW BUYERS RESPOND.
WHICH PAIN SPEAKS MORE TO THEIR MIND.
WHICH OFFER GETS THEM TALKING.
AND, OF COURSE, THE OBJECTIONS THAT MAY OCCUR.
NOW PAID ADS TAKE THAT COLD-OUTREACH-OPTIMISED OFFER TO MORE PEOPLE.
THE ADS BRINGS IN THE TRAFFIC.
THE FUNNELS QUALIFIES THEM.
TRUST IS THEN EMBIBED WITH FOLLOW-UP.
THE SALES CALL SHOWS WHAT NEEDS WORK.
THOSE LESSONS ARE THEN TRANSLATED INTO THE NEXT AD AND THE NEXT COLD OUTREACH.
IT'S A SYSTEM THAT KEEP ON LEARNING AND IMPROVING.
Honestly, I think the bigger issue with SEO outreach is the message, not the lack of an incentive.
If the pitch feels copy-pasted, offering a backlink or sponsorship won’t save it.
Find the right person, show why your product actually fits, and make the ask simple.
Good outreach should feel like a relevant opportunity, not a trade.
Doing outreach for SEO backlinks is lucrative only if you write the right thing and give something in exchange
You won't make people reply back if you just ask like this:
"I am impressed with the quality of your articles, and I would like to contribute to your blog... bla bla bla"
I usually delete these emails, mark them as spam.
Instead tell them this:
"hey there, i am John, the owner of X, a tool that does bla bla, and I think if fits here ____. Are you open to mentioning it ? In exchange, I can offer an exchange to X website (something that's quality) or a sponsorship"
Many people actually answer back if you offer them something good
This is simple
But this is very tedious and takes time
Thats the reality of SEO, and thats why customers hire me to do these things, because it takes time.
The offer matters, but I think distribution is the real bottleneck.
You can have the perfect offer and sequence,
but if you're reaching the wrong people, none of it matters.
Get the right people first. Then sell.
The biggest AI opportunity nobody is talking about?
Mid-market companies. $5M to $50M revenue.
Too big for cookie-cutter solutions. Too small for enterprise consulting.
Drowning in manual workflows. Have the budget. Have zero AI expertise.
They know they need to change. They have no idea where to start.
That's AI paralysis.
And it's everywhere right now.
The market is wide open.
All it takes is the right offer and a cold email sequence.
A slow sales team can leave your business light-years behind the competition.
If your setter is not on the call within 60 seconds to 2 minutes,
You have a really big fucking problem.
You will find more success if you qualify leads within the first 2 minutes.
After that, it just goes downhill from there.
I have specifically used zero AI in my ads.
Not because AI is not up to par,
But because it has zero framework on your market.
It has no idea what’s printing and what is not.
Best-case scenario, I use it for basic work like outlines. AI is not there yet.
Paid ads can take you from $25k/month to $25k/week.
But if your offer doesn't convert, you'll just lose money faster 😂
Get the product right. Make sure people want it. Then scale.
That's the part most people skip.
Software monetization isn't dead bro.
Building a cheaper, faster model is cool, but you still need people to pay for it.
The real opportunity isn't just building better models. It's finding a problem people care enough to spend money on.
Monetization of software is dead now.
Anyone can clone your app in few hours, copy your ads, ditto your positioning.
I see a new opportunity now.
Monetization of SLMs (small language models)
You can fine-tune 0.5B to 12B models for specific use cases.
Then sell licenses to these models like you do for SaaS.
Models like Deepseek v4 pro, GLM 5.3, Kimi k3 or even GPT 6 Astra are really smart at understanding fine tuning jobs.
From preparing the dataset, LoRA adapter, to exporting the model as GGUF or MLX, these models can do end-to-end jobs for you.
I've fine-tuned 20+ models in last pne year and I'm surprised that not many people on X talk about this.
A fine-tuned SLM can beat a SoTA model on specific use cases.
That can drop API costs by 95%, make it 5x faster, and its your model, hosted privately.
Custom SLM > SaaS now. Dive into this space.
I had a client who told me, “Let’s add more questions to the forms to super-qualify them.”
TBH, long forms don’t equal qualified leads.
They actually mean fewer leads.
I would recommend this:
A yes/no question
Prospect contact
One or two qualifying questions
One trap question to eliminate bad leads
But most deals don't fall apart because of one big mistake.
They fall apart because someone skipped a small detail that looked unimportant.
That's why I always check the details early, whether it's a sales process or a business deal.
The little things can cost you the most.
Recently I was helping a strategic buyer on an acquisition. Closing had already dragged out longer than we hoped (not our fault). We thought we were on track yesterday.
As we were lining everything up to close, we realized my client hadn’t reviewed a key document tied to the sale of some of the seller’s assets before this deal.
In-house counsel and I figured it was probably just a checkbox. Still, better to look at it before closing.
Turns out there was potentially large liability exposure for our client based on the terms of that document.
Worth noting: AI caught some of the issues. It also missed two large items my client was very concerned about.
The deal didn’t die. We took the time to raise those items with the other side and work out resolutions before closing.
Some people give lawyers a hard time for insisting on going through the entire process before closing. That’s why we do it. An hour reviewing a document can save (or cost) hundreds of thousands of dollars
As pertaining outreach ai
its should be only used for research and deep personalisation
Personally ai sucks for writing scripts except you can train it
Trust me Your prospects are not existed to see ai slop
Crestffield retweeted
When working with agencies, SaaS business, and firms,
You would observe that you don't necessarily need more leads.
You need less bad ones.
The look on a fully booked calendar might seem fantastic, but it has no meaning whatsoever if:
Your target ICP has no need for your offer.
Your audience is broke.
They never show up.
They are indecisive.
Hence, stopping at just generating leads is low-quality stuff.
The pathway need to be optimised.
Your message must address the right target audience and solves a real problem they face.
Your landing page and form need to segregate all less-qualified prospects and keep only those who are fit.
Each prospect is monitored, evaluated, and funneled into a tailored sequence.
Then your sales team sees who is fit and who is not, and why.
Cheap leads just cost you not just money, but the timeframe to a successful campaign.
Quit punking out. The real number ain’t cost per lead.
It's cost per actual qualified sales calls, cost per new client, and cash made from the system.
This is what needs to be tracked.
Crestffield retweeted
One Lead Source Is a Risk
Having one lead source is a subpar growth plan.
It's a big NO.
If all the deals you get are from family and friends or client you worked with in the past.
If all your big signings are from content, you wait for the app to show your posts.
If all your clients come from cold email, you will definitely hit the ceiling of how many clients you reach.
Hence, I suggest multiple pathways.
Path one is the cold outreach.
We find the right ICP, write the copy, send it, follow up, sort replies, and book qualified calls.
Path two is paid ads.
We build the offer, ads, page, VSL, form, tracking, and follow-up needed to turn cold traffic into sales calls.
Both paths go into one CRM.
Now you see exactly where each leads come from, who showed up, who is a fit, and who bought.
You can start with one pathway and slowly imbibe the other with time.
If one slow month can affect your revenue, then one lead source is not just enough.
Send me a DM with the word "MACHINE" to receive the one-page roadmap.
Crestffield retweeted
YOU COPY IS NOT ENTIRELY THE PROBLEM IF IT GOES TO THE WRONG AUDIENCE.
PERSONALLY, FROM EXPERIENCE, BAD LIST IS THE PROBLEM.
YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE MIGHT BE SUPERB, BUT IF THE AUDIENCE IN THE LIST IS NOT DIALED INTO THE OFFER, THEN IT'S DEFINITELY A SPAM.
Crestffield retweeted
Your content doesn't need to go viral.
It needs to attract the right people.
I'd rather have 500 views from my ICP than 50,000 views from people who will never buy.
Crestffield retweeted
Don't wait until launch day to start marketing.
Build the audience while you're building the product.
Then launch day becomes:
"Here's what I built."
Not:
"Please someone notice me."
Crestffield retweeted
A lot of businesses don't need more traffic.
They need to stop leaking the traffic they already have
.
If people are visiting...
but nobody books...
or books but doesn't show...
or shows but doesn't buy...
you don't have one problem.
You have a broken part of the journey.
Fix the leak before pouring more traffic in.