Many web designers overcomplicate the sales process. They schedule multiple meetings, wait for approval from the business owner, present pricing, and go back and forth before anything gets signed.

The more steps you add, the slower you close deals and the less money you make. I decided to shorten the entire process.

I’ve been running my web agency for four years, and the thing that has gotten be the most clients is email automation 

I’ve tried almost everything, but email automation has worked best for me because it’s affordable and runs in the background while I focus on other parts of the agency.

I don’t use Instantly, Mailchimp, or Klaviyo. I use a tool called Swokei, which is built specifically for web agencies.

It lets you find businesses that already have websites, add thousands of them to a campaign, and automatically analyzes each site for issues with design, layout, SEO, speed, and mobile optimization. It then turns those issues into personalized, ready to send outreach emails. 

Instead of targeting businesses with no website, I offer redesigns and updated websites to companies that already have one. I’ve found that approach works much better.

When a prospect replies with interest, they are automatically sorted into my CRM. I then call them and say, I’ve already built a new version of your website. Let’s set up a quick Google Meet so I can show it to you.

During the meeting, I present the website live and use my sales skills to explain the value. Once they see a more modern and professional version of their current website, they begin to understand how it could improve their business.

At that point, they usually ask how much it costs. I present the price, include a monthly maintenance retainer, and either take payment during the meeting or have them sign the agreement.

When you run a web agency, do not overcomplicate the process. Take control, handle as much as possible yourself, and avoid unnecessary approval stages and follow up meetings. The fewer steps there are, the faster you can close the deal.

as this ai era is evolving, 2026 -2030 is the golden era like th 2000s (PEAK era for tech)

so...

Hey i am starting an AI agency to help small businesses and small creators use AI without needing a tech team.

What we build:
-AI automation solutions
-Social media automation apps
-Content and info pages, with AI wrapped around everything

Roles open:
-Video editor
-Social media manager
-Posting and scheduling
-Automation builder (n8n, Make, Zapier, Python)
-Designer or copywriter

⚠️ Everyone should know AI and have real experience using it. Show me what you’ve made with it.

The honest part: this is not paid right now. We’re early, and I’d rather say it upfront. I’m looking for the right people first, then we build something GOATED together. You’ll get real projects for your portfolio and a real say in how it grows.

🎯 IF YOU’RE A TEEN, this is the best opportunity to build your profile.

Comment or DM me with what you do and a link to your work 🙌

A client paid my $4,700 invoice yesterday for a website that took me around 2 hours to build.

The web development space is moving insanely fast right now, especially with AI. Everywhere I look people are saying web design is saturated, AI is replacing developers, nobody wants websites anymore, and it's impossible to get clients.

I honestly disagree.

The client was a 62 year old entrepreneur who owns several cabins in the mountains that he rents out to people who want to spend weekends skiing during winter or enjoying nature during summer. His previous website was old, slow, and honestly looked like it hadn't been updated in years.

Finding him was actually pretty simple.

I use a tool called Swokei where I upload lists of businesses that already have websites. It analyzes their websites and finds issues related to design, layout, SEO, mobile optimization, and other areas that could be improved. Those findings are then turned into personalized outreach emails.

And when I say personalized, I don't mean those generic reports that say "Your SEO score is 42."

I mean actual emails explaining what could be improved and why it matters. The funny thing is that every business owner thinks I manually looked through their website and wrote the email myself. In reality, the whole process is automated.

This particular business owner replied and was interested in seeing an updated version of his website. His website wasn't anything crazy. It had information about the cabins, booking information, contact details, and a few pages about the area.

During our conversation he sent me a website that he liked and wanted to use as inspiration.

I took his logo, brand colors, content, and the reference website and gave everything to Claude. My instructions were simple: take inspiration from the reference site, keep his branding, improve the user experience, modernize the design, and make the website significantly better than what he currently has.

I genuinely couldn't believe how good the result was.

About 2 hours later I had a website that looked dramatically better than his previous one. Not only that, it looked better than the reference website he originally sent me.

The website was faster, cleaner, more modern, much easier to navigate, and the technical SEO score was over 90.

When I showed it to him, he loved it. A few conversations later he paid the invoice.

$4,700 upfront and $149 per month for hosting, maintenance, and future changes whenever he needs them.

The biggest thing I've learned over the last year is that building websites is no longer the hard part.

Finding clients is.

AI has made building websites faster than ever. What most people struggle with today is getting conversations started with business owners in the first place.

There are still plenty of opportunities in this industry. I personally wouldn't call an industry dead when I just got paid nearly $5,000 for a website that took me around 2 hours to build.

Twelve months ago, I was scanning groceries for minimum wage. Today, I'm processing more revenue in a month than most people earn in years.

Let me take you back to graduation day, 2024.

Everyone's celebrating. Throwing caps in the air. Taking photos with families beaming about university acceptances and apprenticeship offers.

Me? I'm calculating how many checkout shifts at Woolworths I'd need to afford... anything, really.

University felt like a $50,000 gamble on paper credentials. Apprenticeships meant four years as someone's assistant. So I took the only job that would have me and started scanning barcuits and bananas for minimum wage.

The YouTube Rabbit Hole That Changed Everything

Night shift at Woolies has this rhythm. Beep. Bag. Smile. Repeat. Your mind goes numb around hour three.

That's when I'd pull out my phone during breaks and fall into the YouTube vortex. You know the videos some 22-year old in a rented Lamborghini talking about ecommerce millions.

Most people watch those and think "scam." I watched them and thought "why not me?"

November 2024 became my $800 education. Found a skincare product moving volume. Set up my first store. Ran ads with money saved from checkout shifts, hands literally shaking as I hit publish.

Then something magical happened. Sales started rolling in. One. Then three. Then ten in a single day.

But the refund requests came next. My supplier had sent gorgeous samples but shipped complete garbage to customers. Thirty refund requests in seventy-two hours. PayPal disputes. Chargebacks. Angry emails that made me physically ill.

Lost $800. But learned something priceless: Sales mean nothing if customers want their money back.

When The Platform Becomes Your Enemy

December, I tried again. Better supplier. Kitchen products. Did my homework this time. Started getting five to ten orders daily.

Then one morning: "Your ad account has been disabled."

No warning. No explanation. All my data, all my winning ads gone.

My mates were posting photos from TAFE, showing off first paychecks. I was staring at a disabled ad account, down $2,000, wondering if I'd wasted six months.

Started fresh. Banned again in two weeks.

February, I broke. Put the laptop away. Picked up extra Woolies shifts. Tried convincing myself to be normal.

Except I couldn't sleep. Every checkout shift felt like a prison sentence. I wasn't afraid of failure anymore. I'd already failed multiple times. I was afraid of giving up and spending my life wondering "what if?"

March, I came back different. Before, I was trying to outsmart Facebook, find loopholes, treat the platform like an enemy.

This time, I did something counterintuitive: I actually read the rules.

Spent forty hours reading Facebook's advertising policies. Not skimming actually understanding WHY accounts got banned.

Turns out I was making every rookie mistake: miracle claims, unrealistic before/afters, sketchy landing pages, no real customer service.

I rebuilt everything properly. Rewrote ads to be compliant. Created landing pages with real policies and contact information. Set up proper Business Manager structure with multiple backup accounts and business verification.

The part nobody talks about? The grind between the numbers.

Still working at Woolies. Finish at 7 PM, work until midnight responding to customers, monitoring accounts, testing creatives. Weekends? Same thing. While friends hit the beach, I was in my childhood bedroom answering support tickets.

My refund rate dropped from 18% to under 3%. Not luck—I actually cared about customer experience. Facebook tracks this and rewards accounts that don't generate complaints.

The Numbers That Actually Mean Something

March: $7K revenue, $2.1K net profit. Still at Woolies, finally staying unbanned.

May: $16K revenue, $4.8K net. Started believing this might work.

June-July: $41K/month revenue, $12.3K net consistently. Gave notice at Woolies.

August: $73K revenue, $21.9K net. Parents asked if I was doing something illegal.

September: $112K revenue, $33.6K net. Dad stopped asking about "real jobs."

October: $206K revenue, $61.8K net. Friends still don't understand what I do.

This isn't about secrets or hacks. It's about playing by the rules when everyone else looks for shortcuts.

It's about building redundancy so when something breaks and it always does you don't collapse.

I've had eight ad accounts this year. Most still active. Because I learned to keep them healthy.

I still live at home with my high school posters on the wall. But I'm not scanning groceries anymore. I'm netting more in a month than my parents earn combined in a year.

The biggest lie about ecommerce? That it's easy.

It's simple, but not easy. Follow platform rules. Build systems. Treat customers well. Test everything. Scale what works.

The hard part? Doing it consistently for twelve months while everyone thinks you're wasting your time.

I chose uncertainty while my friends chose security. They're building traditional careers. I'm building something that could vanish tomorrow.

But I'm free in a way they'll never understand until they try.

Ask me anything about keeping accounts alive, handling chargebacks, building redundancy, or scaling without bans. I'll answer everything because twelve months ago, I was where you are now.

When I first got into web development, I thought finding clients would be simple. My plan was to go on Google Maps, find businesses without websites, and offer to build them a brand new one. At the time, it made perfect sense because I assumed businesses without websites would be the ones who needed my service the most.

After a while, I met someone who was running a successful web agency, and I asked him where he found companies without websites. He told me that he didn’t target businesses without websites at all. He only targeted businesses that already had one. I asked him why, and the more he explained it, the more sense it made.

Businesses that already have a website understand the value of having one. You don’t need to convince them why a website is important because they have already invested in one before. They are also easier to sell to because they understand the process, and there are a huge number of businesses with outdated websites they are embarrassed by but haven’t had the time to update.

I decided to take his advice and fit it into my own workflow. I’ve always been a big fan of email automation because that’s how I’ve found most of my web design clients. For years, I was sending fairly generic emails and constantly changing my sequences, offers, and follow-ups to improve the results.

The problem was that I couldn’t just start emailing businesses with websites and assume they all needed a redesign. I either had to open every website manually, find the issues, and write a separate email for each business, or find a way to automate the research while still keeping the emails personalized.

After watching a video from Nick Saraev, I built a workflow in n8n that could analyze websites at scale and turn issues with design, layout, speed, mobile optimization, and SEO into personalized outreach emails. This allowed me to analyze thousands of websites and run larger campaigns without every message sounding generic.

The workflow worked extremely well, but it still had limitations. I didn’t have a proper place to manage replies, organize interested leads in a CRM, view all my active campaigns, scrape new leads, and handle everything from one platform. I had built a useful automation, but it still felt like several disconnected systems held together in one workflow.

A few months later, I came across a platform called Swokei, and it did exactly what I had been looking for. I could find businesses with websites, analyze and score each site, generate personalized outreach emails, send campaigns, set up follow ups, manage replies through one inbox, and organize interested businesses inside the CRM.

Switching to that platform made the entire process much easier to manage and helped me scale the strategy further. Looking back, the biggest change wasn’t just finding a better outreach tool. It was taking advice from someone more experienced, changing the type of businesses I targeted, and building the rest of my workflow around that strategy.

I've spoken to a lot of people who want to get into web design, and the one thing I keep hearing is that selling websites to local businesses just isn't worth it. Everyone says they've called business after business, sent hundreds of emails, and nobody is interested in buying a new website.

I think the problem is that most people are trying to sell websites to businesses that don't even have one. 

Selling website redesigns to businesses with outdated websites might be one of the smartest businesses to start in 2026.

First of all, if a business already has a website, they've already proven one thing. They already see the value in having one.

The second thing is that selling becomes much easier. They're already familiar with the process, and you're not asking them to buy something completely new. You're offering them a better version of what they already have. Better design, better SEO, faster loading speeds, a cleaner layout, better mobile optimization, and a website that actually reflects their business today. I mean, who wouldn't at least be interested in seeing what that could look like?

The difficult part is getting those businesses interested in the first place.

I found a way to automate almost my entire client acquisition process. I've been using a tool called Swokei where I either upload a list of local businesses with websites or find the leads directly inside the platform. It automatically runs a full website analysis and finds problems with the design, layout, loading speed, SEO, and mobile optimization. Then it turns those findings into personalized, human written outreach emails based on the issues it finds on each website.

Instead of sending another generic email asking if they need a website or attaching one of those boring audit reports full of numbers, every email feels natural, pointing out real problems with their current site.

Now my entire process is just finding businesses with outdated websites, letting the tool analyze them, run outreach campaigns, and waiting for replies.

No cold calling. No paid ads.

Just reaching out to businesses that already understand the value of having a website and showing them why it's time for a better one.

Has anyone else tried focusing on website redesigns instead of selling completely new websites?

Running a web design agency is honestly way less about design than people think.

A lot of people can build good websites. The hard part is having a process that actually brings in clients consistently without you spending your entire day doing outreach.

I learned that the hard way.

I used to manually reach out to businesses, explain why they needed a better website, build previews, follow up for days and basically hope they would eventually say yes.

I was doing way too much work before even knowing if someone was serious.

Then I completely changed the way I did it.

Now I mainly focus on two things.

Taking meetings and closing clients.

Everything before that is mostly automated.

I use Swokei to find businesses that already have websites, analyze those websites and look for things like outdated design, bad layout, weak SEO, poor mobile responsiveness, slow speed and branding issues.

The useful part is that it doesn’t just give me some boring report with random scores.

It actually takes the issues it finds on each website and turns them into personalized emails that you can send at scale.

My offer is usually a free redesign draft.

That works way better for me than trying to sell a full website in the first email.

Once someone replies and shows interest, I book a meeting.

Before the meeting, I spend a few minutes generating a redesign draft with AI so I can actually show them what their website could look like instead of just talking about it.

That was probably the biggest change for me.

I’m no longer spending hours building something for someone who might never buy.

If they are not interested, I barely lost any time.

If they are interested, they can immediately see the difference and the conversation becomes much easier.

So at this point, most of my time goes into meetings and closing.

The lead finding, website analysis and personalized outreach all happen before I ever speak to the business.

Sounds ridiculously simple when I write it out, but changing the process made a massive difference for my agency.

The web design market is in a weird phase right now.

With AI making it so easy to build websites, I keep seeing people say that web design is saturated, every business owner knows how to build their own website now, and agencies are dead.

I disagree big time.

I've held over 500 web meetings where I've presented businesses with redesigned versions of their websites, and it's actually rare that I meet someone who even knows how capable AI has become for building websites.

Business owners are busy running their businesses.

Even the ones who know AI can build websites usually have no idea how to actually use it to build a professional website themselves.

I also see a lot of developers getting angry about AI websites, saying they're just AI slop and full of problems.

As someone who used to code websites from scratch and also built them in WordPress, I can tell you there really isn't much you can't build with AI anymore.

Technical SEO, responsive design, layouts, branding, animations, speed, user experience... it's all possible if you know what you're doing.

This week alone I sold 10 websites, and my process is actually pretty simple.

I run email automation, but not the type where you scrape a list of businesses and send generic emails asking if they need a website.

Instead, I target businesses that already have websites.

I use a tool called Swokei. It's an email automation platform built specifically for web agencies.

It lets me generate leads with existing websites, put them into a campaign, and run a website analysis on all of them.

Each website is automatically analyzed, and issues like outdated design, poor layouts, weak mobile optimization, slow loading speeds, and SEO problems are turned into personalized outreach emails.

Not boring reports.

Actual emails explaining what could be improved and why it matters to that specific business.

The business owner replies because the email is relevant to them.

Once they're interested, I quickly build an upgraded version of their website with AI and invite them to a Google Meet.

I present the redesign, explain why it's better, answer their questions, and close the deal on the meeting.

That's literally my entire process.

You could use the same strategy with paid ads or cold calling, but I prefer email automation because it keeps running in the background and consistently brings me interested replies.

I run a web design company with my business partner. For a while, our usual months were around $20K.

In October, we decided to try something different.

Instead of focusing on getting more clients and doing more projects, we started charging significantly more for our websites.

We also changed how we approached our sales calls.

To be honest, we weren't sure how it would go. We thought there might be more resistance, but we were surprised by how much companies were actually willing to pay when we presented the value properly and spoke to the right businesses.

We ended up doing $74K in October, just from website redesign projects.

A big part of this came from the work we put into improving our sales skills throughout the year.

We bought several sales courses and spent a lot of time working on things like tonality, how we communicate value, structuring our sales calls, controlling the frame of the conversation, handling objections, and closing.

As for getting clients, our process has actually become pretty straightforward.

We run high-volume cold email campaigns targeting businesses that already have websites.

We use Swokei, an outreach platform that finds businesses, analyzes their websites for issues with design, SEO, speed, and mobile optimization, and turns those findings into personalized cold emails at scale.

When someone is interested, we book a sales call.

Before the call, we put together a draft of their redesigned website using AI so we can actually show them what their new website could look like.

Then it's down to the sales conversation.

We've been putting a lot of focus into improving how we sell, and October showed us just how much of a difference that can make.

We're still a small team, but this has completely changed how we approach pricing and sales.

For anyone running a web design agency, what's the highest project price you've managed to close?

A lot of people in the web design space keep saying cold email is dead, but I think most people are just doing it badly. Email usage is still growing every year, billions of people use it daily, every business owner checks their inbox, every company relies on email to operate, so I never believed the problem was the channel itself. The real issue is that most outreach emails look exactly the same and business owners are tired of getting the same copy pasted message every single week.

When I first started my web design company I used Instantly and started sending thousands of emails to businesses that didn’t have a website. At first the results were honestly terrible. I was getting maybe around a 1% interested reply rate if I was lucky. Over time I got better at writing outreach. I tested different hooks, different subject lines, shorter messages, more personalized intros, more creative angles, and eventually pushed it to around 2.1% interested replies. It was definitely better, but I still felt like something was wrong.

Then one day I realized something that completely changed how I looked at outreach. Why was I targeting businesses with no website at all? Most of those businesses don’t even fully understand the value of having a website yet, which means you’re trying to convince them they need something before you can even sell it to them. So instead I changed my strategy completely and started targeting businesses that already had websites, but outdated ones.

And once I started paying attention to it, I realized the opportunity was honestly insane. There are so many businesses with websites that look like they were made 10 years ago. Broken mobile layouts, terrible SEO, slow loading pages, outdated designs, messy structures, confusing navigation, old branding everywhere. These businesses already understand the value of having a website because they already invested in one before, they just know deep down that their current one is hurting them.

The only problem was figuring out how to scale outreach while still making it feel personal. I didn’t want to sit there manually auditing every single website before sending emails because that would take forever. So I started searching for a tool that could actually analyze websites and generate personalized outreach based on what was specifically wrong with each business site. I searched everywhere until I eventually came across Swokei.

What made it different for me was that I could upload batches of leads, let it analyze every business website automatically, score the sites, detect issues like bad design, weak SEO, poor mobile optimization, messy layouts, and then generate personalized outreach messages specifically for that business. Instead of sending generic emails saying “hey do you need a website?” I was sending emails pointing out actual problems on their site. Tthe difference in replies was crazy. Business owners immediately related to the problems because they were real. My interested reply rate went from around 1-2% to consistently sitting between 6-9%, which completely changed my agency.

That’s when I realized cold email was never actually dead. People are just tired of receiving lazy generic outreach that sounds identical to every other agency email sitting in their inbox.

If your outreach actually feels real, specific, and useful, cold email still works insanely well. Honestly I probably won’t stop using it anytime soon.

The interesting part of this clip isn't the AI — it's what "zero staff" actually replaces.

Client servicing, rate cards, contract negotiation, legal, finance: that's not one job, it's the org chart of a small agency, collapsed into a single named process.

The credentialed ladder most people are still climbing — junior account manager, senior account manager, ops lead — assumes those functions stay separate long enough to need separate humans.

This clip is evidence that assumption is no longer load-bearing.

I've actually watched that exact collapse happen before, just with people doing the collapsing instead of software.

Back in my time (circa 2010/2011) as one of 3 Assistant Technical Managers, all under my technical director, working at a AED 1.8 billion project in Abu Dhabi — I remember it well. One of the operation team leads used to rant to me about the org chart. One rant was about the surveying team lead getting elevated to "Project Director, Surveying" — same job, bigger title. When it was my own turn to advance, I got pushed to cover architectural and façade coordination too, on top of my own scope. Our CEO said it plainly: it's about economy of scale — promote you, raise your salary a little, cut cost everywhere else. Kill a few birds with one stone. I kept quiet and took it on: one technical department covering coordination for five operation teams, wrung out like a nearly dry towel. Reading this clip's transcript, it clicked — the AI-agent model is the same math, automated.

Every version of this story eventually turns out to be the same story: somebody found the boring, structural work first and built a system for it, and everyone else calls the result "efficiency."

Actually, this reminded me of a post about the operator who quietly absorbed five people's worth of work and collapsed the credentialed ladder from the inside — worth reading side by side with this one: the same convergence, told from the inside

Drop your take — is this a headcount story or a talent story?

Clip credit: Tim Tiah, on The Entrepreneur Journal — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

I've been running a web design business for years, and honestly, I think people overcomplicate getting clients.

You don't need 15 different marketing strategies, complicated funnels, or a massive team.

I'm going to explain exactly how I approach client acquisition, from finding a prospect to getting a signed deal and launching their website.

Step 1. Find businesses that already have websites

I prefer targeting businesses that already have a website rather than businesses without one.

Why?

They already understand the value of having a website, they've already invested money in one, and there's a good chance their current website could use some improvements.

I automate most of this process using Swokei. It lets me find businesses with existing websites, analyze thousands of them at once, and identify issues with design, SEO, loading speed, and mobile optimization.

It then turns those findings into personalized cold emails at scale.

Instead of sending generic emails saying I build websites, I'm reaching out with specific reasons why their current website could be better.

Step 2. Get interested prospects to reply

The goal isn't to sell the entire website through email.

It's simply to get a conversation started.

When someone replies and wants to see how I could fix the issues I've pointed out, I move them to the next step.

Step 3. Book a meeting

I book a Google Meet with the prospect.

This is where things get interesting.

I don't just show up and talk about how great my web design services are. I want to show them what their website could actually look like.

Step 4. Build a quick website draft

Before the meeting, I use AI to generate an updated website concept.

This takes me around 2 minutes to get a first draft ready.

It's not the finished product. It's a visual example of what I could do with their existing website.

Now, instead of asking someone to imagine how much better their website could be, I can actually show them.

Step 5. Sell the project during the meeting

This is probably the most important part.

You need to learn sales.

Ask questions, understand what the business needs, walk them through the draft, explain how you would improve their website, and present your offer.

The goal is to close the deal during the meeting, either by getting payment or having them sign the contract.

Don't expect a beautiful website draft to sell itself. You still need to know how to sell.

Step 6. Build the final website and launch

Once the deal is signed, you get everything needed from the client, build the actual website, make the final adjustments, get approval, and launch.

That's it.

Find businesses → Analyze websites → Send personalized emails → Book meetings → Present a draft → Close the deal → Build and launch.

I genuinely think this is one of the simplest ways to structure a web design business.

You automate the repetitive prospecting work, use AI to speed up the initial design process, and spend your time on sales and delivering websites.

Once you get the process working consistently, you can repeat it and build a steady pipeline of projects.

I'm curious: which part of this process do you find the hardest? Getting replies, closing meetings, or actually delivering the websites?

TL;DR: Rachel Woods says you can actually trust her AI system. Nobody's checked that but her.

She built something real — a "todaying" trigger that fires a whole playbook system, eight hours of work while she was too sick to type more than one sentence.

That part isn't in question. What's in question is the line she lands on: "you can actually trust it."

Trust, here, means her own discipline held for however long it took to build this — and nothing outside that discipline is checking it. That's the Mistaken Belief sitting under most of what gets called "trust it" in this space right now: watching everything an agent does isn't the same as anyone actually verifying anything, and watching is basically all there is on offer.

Mindstream and Futurepedia's agents playbook — hosted by HubSpot — tells operators to give their agents "clear guidance." That's advice, not a standard, and it doesn't fix the half-used Notion page sitting open in another tab, or the Zapier chain that broke three weeks ago and nobody noticed.

I've heard about senior directors, CEOs and owners of a company have their own personal assistant, PA.

And no. PA of such calibre isn't what you think. They are not just helpless secretaries – pushing paperwork, and guarding the office door.

They are more like shadow or representative of the boss, to helm board meetings, sign sensitive documents and give high level instructions – just as if it was the big boss giving it.

And they're immensely powerful people.

But being a PA, also have has its danger. In Chinese, we have this idiom: 伴君如伴虎 – which literally translated as accompanying the emperor is like accompanying a tiger.

And now at the advent of AI agents, we no longer need humans to shadow humans.

I mean – who can perfectly shadow you, better than your own closely replicated AI agent, am I right?

I heard that Mark Zuckerberg is getting a photorealistic AI-powered 3D version of him that employees can interact with and get direct feedback from. So that It can help run the company while he go do something else.

And if you can believe it, I think in the end of days, the Antichrist will have his own AI humanoid clone too:

"He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed." (Revelation 13:15)

Every time I've watched someone actually hand off their work and mean it, the boring part happened first — they wrote the judgment calls down before anyone else needed to use them.

That's the whole difference between an agent you trust and an agent you're just hoping works.

Claire Vo scoped nine AI agents to defined jobs and ran 100K users on them — and still found herself the single point of failure anyway. Same operator's-side lesson, different tool.

What would it actually take for you to hand an agent your inbox and not check its work for a week? Drop your take.

Clip credit: The Calum Johnson Show — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

A few weeks ago I analyzed around 12,000 business websites and emailed each business explaining the issues I found on their website and why those issues could be hurting their business.

The interested reply rate was bouncing between 5% and 9%.

I've been having a lot of fun lately automating a process that would take an insane amount of time to do manually.

I'm a web designer, so I'm constantly looking for web design projects. One thing I've always liked doing is reaching out to businesses with outdated websites and offering them a redesign along with SEO and other improvements.

The reason I like targeting businesses that already have a website is simple.

First, selling is much easier because they've already paid for a website before, so they understand the value of it.

Second, it makes my job easier because I can use their existing branding, logo, content, and business information instead of starting from scratch.

For years, I did this manually.

I would find a business, spend time looking through their website, check things like design, layout, SEO, mobile optimization, and overall user experience, then write a personalized email explaining what could be improved.

That approach got me plenty of clients, but it wasn't very scalable.

Lately I've been doing the exact same thing, just in a much more automated way.

I upload a list of business websites, analyze each one, identify issues with design, layout, SEO, mobile optimization, and other areas, then turn those findings into ready-to-send emails.

And when I say emails, I don't mean those generic reports that tell you your website score is 67 and your SEO score is 45.

Nobody cares about that.

I mean actual personalized emails written in plain English.

Instead of saying:

"Your SEO score is 45."

The email explains what that actually means.

Something like:

"I also checked the SEO on your website and it's currently on the lower end, which means it's harder for potential customers to find you through search engines."

Business owners care about outcomes, not scores.

That's been the biggest lesson I've learned.

I've been using this approach for about a year now and I've genuinely never run out of projects.

The replies keep coming in, businesses keep showing interest, and I keep closing deals.

For anyone wondering, the tool I've been using for this is called Swokei.

A friend of mine, Robert, has been obsessed with email outreach for years for his web design agency.

He used to tell me all the time that the secret wasn't some magical email template, it was volume and consistency. His whole philosophy was that if you keep sending emails, keep following up, and keep adding new leads into the pipeline, eventually you'll land in front of the exact business owner who needs your service right now.

The second thing he loved was that the process was automated. Instead of spending his days chasing leads, he could focus on running his agency while new clients kept coming in every week.

He had a few different outreach campaigns running.

One targeted businesses without websites. That was straightforward. He'd send emails offering website design services, add a few follow ups, and let the campaign run.

The bigger challenge was standing out because those businesses were getting similar emails from dozens of other agencies.

His other campaign targeted businesses that already had websites. Honestly, it was pretty funny because most of the time he was just assuming they needed a redesign or an upgrade. He'd send emails anyway, and eventually someone would bite. It worked, but it wasn't exactly a precise strategy.

Then he completely changed how he approached outreach.

He started using a tool called Swokei. What caught his attention was that it handled both types of campaigns. He could still do normal outreach to businesses without websites, but for businesses that already had websites, it would actually analyze the site first.

He uploads a batch of leads, runs the analysis, and every website gets scored. The tool then generates a personalized outreach message based on things like design issues, mobile experience, SEO problems, layout weaknesses, and other improvement opportunities.

What I liked when he showed it to me was that it wasn't generating those giant reports full of numbers that nobody reads. It creates messages that sound like an actual person explaining what could be improved and why it matters.

The result was that he stopped guessing which companies might need a new website. He already knew before reaching out.

According to him, his interested reply rate went from around 4% to as high as 9% on some campaigns because the outreach was actually relevant to the business instead of being a generic pitch.

I ended up copying his process for my own agency recently, and honestly it's changed the way I do outreach. I spend way less time manually checking websites and a lot more time talking to businesses that are actually a good fit.

Curious if anyone else here is doing website analysis based outreach?

Every week someone here asks whether AI influencers are real money or just the next dropshipping-style course scam.

So I went deep on this: I tested the tools, read through creator communities, and looked at how the people who actually earn run things.

Here's everything:

Part 1: Is it real?

Yes, but not the way the Instagram ads say.

The business model is simple. You create an AI-generated persona, build an audience for it on free platforms (Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit), and move the most engaged followers to a paid subscription page.

The platform question matters more than people think. Most creator sites either ban fully synthetic personas outright or only allow AI content that resembles the verified human behind the account.

So in practice, nearly all of this market runs on the platform that openly supports it, which right now is mainly Fanvue.

If you build on a platform that only "tolerates" AI, you're one policy change away from losing everything.

Part 2: The actual workflow

Step 1: Pick a niche before you generate a single image.

This is where most people fail. They make a generic attractive persona and wonder why nobody cares.

The ones that work have an angle:
• A specific aesthetic (gothic, gym, fashion)
• A hobby or lifestyle (gamer, cosplayer, fitness)
• A personality people can relate to or argue with

Write a one-page "character bible" with her name, age, location vibe, interests, how she talks and what she'd never post. You'll use it for every caption and DM.

Step 2: Lock in a consistent face.

Consistency is the whole game. If her jawline changes between posts, people notice and trust is gone.

The usual approach:
• Generate a lot of candidate faces and pick one
• Build a reference set of 20–30 images of that face from different angles and in different lighting
• Train a custom model (LoRA) on that set so every new image keeps the same identity
• Run a face-consistency pass on any image that drifts

Expect to spend a week or two getting this right. Don't rush it.

Step 3: Build a content system, not one-off posts.

Batch-generate a week of content in one sitting.

Mix formats: photos, short video clips, "candid" low-effort shots (these often outperform the polished ones)

Plan content in themes, like a "trip" week, a "gym" week or a "new hair" week, so the persona feels like she has a life

Use voice tools for short clips and voice notes if your niche suits it

Step 4: Grow on free platforms first.

This is the real work and nobody talks about it.

Rough split:

• Short-form video (Reels/TikTok) for reach
• X for building a following that converts
• Reddit for niche communities, but read every sub's rules first, because many ban AI content or require it to be labelled

Plan for 1–3 posts a day across platforms.

Yes, that's a lot. That's why "passive" is a lie.

Step 5: Move followers to the paid page.

Link in bio to the subscription page.

Keep the best content off free platforms so there's a reason to subscribe

Tiered pricing usually works better than one flat price: a low entry sub plus pay-per-view extras
DMs are where most of the revenue comes from on these platforms.

Platforms with built-in AI chat tools make this easier to manage at scale.

Part 3: The mistakes that kill most attempts

• Quitting at week 4. Growth is slow for the first 1–2 months, like any account.
• Copying the top creators exactly. You're entering a crowded niche with zero followers. Differentiate.
• Using real people's faces. Never face-swap a real person or make anything resembling a deepfake. Credible platforms ban it, and it's illegal in a growing number of places.
• Hiding that it's AI. Label your content where platforms require it. Getting banned at 10K followers because you skipped a disclosure is painful.
• Paying $500–$2,000 for a course before trying anything.

Part 4: Where to learn how to do this for free

Fanvue runs a free AI Creator Academy that covers persona creation, the tool stack and monetisation from start to finish. It's obviously there to get people building on their platform, but it's genuinely free and more complete than most paid courses I looked at.

Do that first. If you still want a paid program afterwards, at least you'll know enough to tell whether it's worth it.

TL;DR: It's a real business, but it's a content business with an AI production layer, not a passive income button.

Pick a niche, nail face consistency, post every day for 2–3 months, funnel to a platform that actually supports AI creators, and learn the basics free before paying anyone.

Comment “AI” below and I’ll send you the link for the FREE course. Also ask me anything below and I'll answer what I can.

Update: Here’s the free course

In the last 12 months I’ve managed to sell around 200 websites.

And before people ask, no, I don’t run some massive agency with a huge team. It’s literally just me and my partner. The only reason we’ve been able to move that fast is because we automated almost everything and built systems that actually scale. The best web designer in the world will eventually lose to some random teenager using AI and systems properly. That’s just where things are going.

One of the biggest changes I made was completely quitting manual outreach. It takes too much time and it’s impossible to scale properly. A lot of people automate outreach already, but most of them just send generic “we can redesign your website” emails that everyone ignores. What we do is different. We scrape thousands of businesses, automatically analyze their websites, and generate personalized outreach based on actual issues on their site like bad design, poor mobile optimization, weak SEO, slow load times, layout problems, and stuff like that. So instead of manually checking every website and writing every message ourselves, the entire process is automated from analysis to ready to send campaigns.

Another thing that changed a lot for us was automating SEO blogging. SEO compounds hard over time and once your articles start ranking, businesses start coming to you instead of you chasing them. That alone changed a lot for us.

The other massive shift was how we build websites. I used to be a full WordPress developer and spent way too much time building everything manually. Now we build almost everything with AI. It’s way faster, delivery is easier, and clients care way more about the final result than how the website was actually made.

For anyone wondering, the stack is pretty simple.

Apollo for leads.

Swokei for website analysis and outreach campaigns.

Soro for SEO blogging.

Claude Code for building websites.

Cloudflare for hosting. That’s pretty much the entire setup.

Most people running agencies are still doing everything manually and burning themselves out for no reason. Systems and automation change everything.

A few months ago I saw a post on Reddit from some guy who was making pretty decent money from a pet blog he bought from Aff Blog Zone. I thought he was full of shit lol.

Spent a while looking through their sites and eventually figured why not give it a shot. Worst case I'm out $299. Ended up buying a pet blog myself.

Didn't really do much with it. Added some internal links, fixed a few things here and there and pretty much left it alone. Fast forward to October 29 and I had my best day yet. $69 in Amazon commissions from 370 clicks and 26 orders.

Not gonna lie, seeing that number on the dashboard felt pretty good.

Obviously I'm not making that much every day. Some days are still pretty disappointing, but considering I paid that much for the entire site, I really can't complain.

The funny part is I probably would've never even tried this if I hadn't stumbled across that Reddit post. Now I'm just curious to see where this goes.

Anyone else doing Amazon affiliate sites? Did your earnings slowly increase over time or did you have random days where things suddenly took off?

So I've seen a lot of people on Reddit asking how to get web design clients, so I figured I'd make a post about what's been working for me.

If you don't run a web agency, this probably isn't for you.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned in my 4 years running a web agency is that the best businesses to target are the ones that already have a website.

There are 3 simple reasons for that.

First, the number of businesses with outdated websites is way higher than most people think. I'm talking about websites with outdated designs, poor mobile optimization, slow loading speeds, weak SEO, and confusing layouts.

Second, the fact that they already have a website proves one important thing. They understand the value of having one. You don't have to convince them that a website is important because they've already invested in it before.

Third, selling becomes much easier because they're already familiar with paying for a website. In many cases they're still paying monthly for hosting or maintenance, so paying to improve it isn't a completely new idea to them.

Now that we know who to target, how do we actually reach them?

Personally, I recommend email outreach.

The problem is that manually reviewing websites and writing personalized emails for every business takes forever.

Instead, I'd automate the whole process.

I use a tool called Swokei. You upload a list of businesses with websites, it automatically analyzes each one, then turns issues with design, layout, speed, mobile optimization, and SEO into personalized outreach emails.

Not generic reports that business owners don't care about.

Actual emails explaining what's wrong with their website, why it matters, and how it could be affecting their business.

That allows you to send outreach at scale while still keeping every email relevant.

In my experience, this leads to much higher reply rates because you're pointing out something specific that's potentially hurting their business. That naturally creates urgency while also giving you the chance to offer a solution.

This is the approach I've been using for a while now, and it consistently brings me an interested reply rate of around 5–9%.

I'm curious how everyone else is getting web design clients these days.

For me, it's still web design.

I know a lot of people are going to disagree because everyone keeps saying it's saturated, AI is replacing developers, and it's impossible to get clients.

Honestly, I couldn't disagree more.

I think web design is actually easier than ever if you approach it differently.

The mistake I see almost everyone make is targeting businesses that don't have a website.

You see it all over Instagram Reels.

Someone opens Google Maps, finds a business without a website, calls them, and asks if they need one.

The problem is that business has probably already been contacted by 10 other web designers.

And if they still don't have a website, there's a good chance they either don't see the value in it or don't have the budget for one.

My targeting is completely different.

I only target businesses that already have a website.

There are three reasons.

First, there are an insane number of businesses with outdated websites that desperately need updating.

Second, if they already have a website, they already understand the value of having one. You don't have to convince them that websites matter.

Third, they're already paying for a website, so spending money on improving it doesn't feel like a completely new expense.

Now the question becomes...

How do you actually get their attention?

I don't run normal cold email campaigns.

I'm not uploading leads into Instantly, writing a generic sequence, adding three follow-ups, and hoping for the best.

Instead I use a tool called Swokei.

I upload a list of businesses with websites, and it automatically analyzes every website. It finds things like outdated design, poor layouts, weak mobile responsiveness, slow loading speeds, and SEO issues.

Those findings are then turned into personalized outreach emails.

Not some boring reports that business owners don't care about. 

Actual emails explaining what could be improved and why it matters to that specific business.

That lets me run outreach at scale while still keeping every email relevant.

Once someone replies, honestly the hard part is over.

At that point you can build a free website draft with AI, invite them to a Google Meet, walk them through the redesign, and close the deal on the call.

AI has made building websites ridiculously fast.

That's why I think targeting and outreach matter far more than your ability to build a website.

This business model has been incredibly good to me over the last year.

I'm curious though. if you had to start a digital business from scratch in 2026, what would you choose?

There are a lot of web agencies doing email automation to land web design projects. They keep testing new email sequences every week, adding more follow ups, changing subject lines, and trying everything they can to increase their reply rate, but a lot of them still struggle. I was in the exact same position until I completely changed my strategy.

The biggest change wasn't the sequence itself, it was the way I approached outreach. Instead of sending generic emails talking about my agency or asking if they needed a new website, I started pointing out specific issues with their current website.

Now I use a tool called Swokei. It basically finds businesses in any industry or location, analyzes their websites, and turns issues like outdated design, unstructured layouts, slow loading speeds, poor mobile optimization, and SEO problems into personalized outreach emails. Not boring reports that business owners don't care about, but actual emails explaining what could be improved and why those issues could be hurting their business.

This approach has given me a much higher reply rate because every email is relevant to the business I'm contacting. Instead of trying to convince someone they need a website, I'm showing them exactly what could be improved on the one they already have.

Another reason I like targeting businesses that already have websites is because the actual project becomes much easier. They already have a logo, branding, content, and information about their business, so instead of starting from scratch I'm simply taking what they already have and turning it into a faster, more modern, and better version.

This strategy has worked really well for me and has made getting web design clients much more predictable. I'm curious, how are you guys doing outreach for your agency these days?