I'm Gil. I cofounded an agency after years of freelancing and grinding for the man. 2 years later, we have 3 full-time colleagues. AMA!
In early 2017, my partner and I quit our jobs and started a small web agency, Discosloth. I was 28 and Anya was 26, so we were young, dumb, and didn't have much of a network. We're still a tiny company, relatively, but have around 20 retainer clients and a staff of 3 of us full time at the company. We focus on search marketing (PPC+SEO) but we're also heavily into web development and building/maintaining communities online. We're also building a (still hush-hush) marketer-focused software tool which we hope to release as a beta this year. We're by no means the most successful group out there, but two years in our company is doing better than I ever thought realistic. I really think what we've done is accessible to anyone with a laptop, so I'd love to answer your questions and get a discussion going on how to bootstrap a company - whether service or product - as well as any other questions like what my favorite drink is, or how many countries I've been to!
Hey, how did you started to get your first customers? :-)
Our first few clients were word of mouth, just from our small network of contacts. However our largest clients came to us through branding. I am heavily active in writing (both content marketing on our blog, on LinkedIn, and published a book) and these bring us a lot of attention in our specific niche. We have never gotten a customer from outreach or cold calling, all of it has been inquiries either via finding our website organically or through reading our book and then contacting us.
Interesting... I’m thinking about starting one software shop and see how it goes on the long run.
Start creating content and quality resources in your field early on - it will pay off!
Thanks for the tip, I’ll plan a blog on Medium when I start building my company.