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

How to Get Clients with No Experience

4 May 2025 · 1 min

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In this talk, the speaker explains how they launched their engineering business from scratch by first learning advertising and lead generation. In 2016 they ran ads offering prototyping services, contacted leads directly, and paid for the initial projects out of pocket to create a portfolio. They emphasize the importance of building a project list in engineering, describing early work like a simple chopstick holder, and how meeting clients in person helped them develop business communication skills. The experience also served to strengthen their résumé, especially when traditional internships were unavailable, turning self‑initiated projects into credible resume entries.

Chapters

The way that I basically grew my business and got started was I learned advertising and ended up doing lead gen. I'd get the lead, call these people up, and ran an ad that was like, you know, are you interested in, you know, doing some prototyping? Now, this was back in 2016. Cool to see that the first interaction I had with advertising was literally for myself. And basically, you know, again, I took on some of these projects and I paid for them out of pocket because my biggest thing is, you know, I need to build up a project list. That's a big thing in the engineering world is what projects have you worked on? So I remember the chopstick holder was super easy. We just created a B. I actually went and met the guy in person a few times. So a lot of conversations, you really learn in those first few interactions, how to talk about business, how to talk in a business, you know, manner. Obviously you get a little bit of that through engineering, and I had had an internship already, kind of was like, you know, you learn by talking to people. So the other side of me was like, hey, I'm just learning experience and I can take this, put this on my resume for, you know, still thought process is, hey, I'm gonna basically, you know, get into engineering and do that. But I'm building, you know, my resume because at the time it's like, you know, how can I maximize my resume? And, you know, if I can't get an internship somewhere, what can I do for myself?