Jake SetterlunFounder, Setterlun University™ · 🚀 Helping Scale Your Online Offer to $1M/month @ Setterlun University™ (1,000+ Students) 🏆 2x 2CCX

From DIY Ads to My First Client (The Old School Way)

28 May 2025 · 1 min

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In this candid, first‑person narrative, the speaker recounts how he turned his personal experience with DIY advertising into a service business. After teaching himself social‑media advertising, he partnered with a close friend to launch a company focused on social‑media posting and advertising. Their client acquisition relied on traditional, offline tactics: sending proposals and mailers, conducting “cold audits” of prospective businesses, and networking through local chambers of commerce and industry groups. These efforts secured their first client—a owner of a chain of golf courses—who became the initial case study for their services. The speaker emphasizes the hands‑on, handshake‑driven approach to growing a business before the era of purely online marketing.

Chapters

I took that experience and then went into— it's like, hey, I could do this advertising stuff for people. I learned how to do it for myself. I can do it for others. So I started a little bit by myself and ended up partnering with a friend, very close friend, still friends with him today. Love him to death. If he's reading this, he knows who he is. But we had a company that was social media posting and advertising for people, and we worked together for a very long time. It did fizzle out, unfortunately. You know, we started out just kind of, you know, sending out proposals, sending out mailers, doing all that kind of stuff. And we had some good responses. We signed our first client that basically owned a string of golf courses, and we were doing social media posting for them. Um, joined a like in-person Chamber of Commerce. We, we joined a group of golf course owners. So I mean, a lot of that traditional business networking I do. That's how I started. That's how you grew your business back in the day. You didn't do all this online stuff. I was literally go shake hands, meet people, send out proposals, send out audits. We would cold audit people, basically say, hey, this is your company, this is what— how we think you could be doing better. And we would literally cold audit them. So crazy stuff.