Jake Setterlun explains how to find your first clients by choosing a niche you know, talking directly to potential customers, and diagnosing their real problems. He built his first business targeting golf courses using cold calls and mailers, discovered they needed social media marketing, and turned that into a paid service.
So chapter number 1 of how to start and scale an online business from 0 to 8 figures is going to be understanding who your audience is and who your niche is. So I recommend nowadays— back in my day we didn't have ChatGPT, but now it's super simple. You can literally go on ChatGPT and just start asking it questions. I recommend everybody that I coach and teach that when you're working with somebody or you're picking an audience to work with that you have some type of a story that you can relate to. So when I first got started, I was actually working with golf courses. I was a longtime golfer. So for me, it was a super natural progression for me to be like, okay, hey, golf courses, you know, I have this experience. I know I can speak about the business. I can speak about the game. Why don't I do your marketing? And that's how I got started. And the way that we literally got started was sending out mailers. Old school way. We would cold call, we would spend mailers. We didn't have money to spend on ads. We didn't really know about ads back in the day. So for us it was, you know, we knew how to speak to golf courses. We knew that we could get in contact with them cold calling and using mailers. And then from there it was, you know, what are we going to offer this golf course? So we started off, we realized that their social media marketing sucked. So it was golf courses, we're going to do your social media posting. Now that's how we started. And that's how I recommend everybody start is Come up with an audience and just start talking to them. See what they want, see what they need, and just do a little bit of background research on how are they running their business, how do they operate, how do their clients come through the door. After that, you can really understand what each specific audience needs. It's not always going to be marketing. You know, thankfully I got into that space. It's something that I've been able to excel at, but a lot of companies might not need marketing. They might need coaching. They might need backend automation help. So Really, you know, the online space is endless on what you can do as far as providing education, knowledge, services, et cetera. But you're never gonna understand what your specific audience needs unless you're having conversations with them. Once you have conversations, you can really understand and start to build a strong offer. So, you know, we got into the golf course space. We realized very quickly that number one, these golf courses need a lot. They need ads, they need social media, but they didn't wanna pay for it.
