u/AydinK10

Hey — solo founder, keeping this short.

Been building a tool for the agency prospecting side of the business — finding local businesses worth pitching, scoring their existing sites, and building a cold-pitch angle from real data instead of guesswork. Pre-launch, and I want real eyes on it from people who'd actually use this kind of thing day to day.

Looking for a small group of agency owners — web design, marketing, GMB, local SEO, solo studio, whatever shape — who'd be willing to run it on a real prospecting campaign for a few weeks and tell me what's broken. I'll set you up with full access, no card, no follow-up sales pitch, no commitment after.

What I want in return is honest feedback. 10 minutes written or a 15-min call, your choice. Even "I tried it and here's what's broken" is more useful to me than polite praise.

If that sounds interesting, shoot me a DM with what kind of agency you run and the city + niche you'd realistically test on. I'll get back to whoever fits the buyer profile.

Honestly more interested in the conversations than the signups at this point — trying to figure out what agency owners actually need before I keep building blindly.

— Aydin

Spent the last couple of months talking to freelance web designers and small agency owners about how they prospect. The answers did not line up with what I assumed.

I assumed they wanted more leads, better contact data, more emails per dollar. They actually wanted fewer leads, each with a reason to reach out. The bottleneck wasn't finding businesses — they had Google Maps. It was knowing which ones were worth pitching and what to say.

Things that came up over and over:

• "I don't want 1,000 plumbers. I want 30 plumbers whose sites are obviously broken so I have a reason to call."
• "If you can tell me the site is missing SSL or scores 23 on PageSpeed, that's already half the cold email written."
• "The 'no website at all' segment is the easiest close. No incumbent agency."
• "Most lead tools are built for SDRs at SaaS companies. Nobody builds for solo web designers."
• "I don't pay $200/mo for a tool. I pay $40–$80 if it actually saves me time."

That last one rearranged my pricing thinking. Stopped competing with enterprise-tier tools and built a Starter tier priced where the actual buyer lives.

If you're a freelance designer pitching local businesses, what would you add to this list? Curious what other gaps are out there.

(Building a small tool in this space — karshq — but mostly want to talk to people who do this work. DM me if you want to compare workflows.)

Sharing in case it helps. I made a really obvious mistake with cold

emails for about 6 months and I keep seeing other people in similar spots.

The mistake: writing cold emails to local businesses that opened with

some version of "I noticed your business and think your site could be

improved." You can probably guess the result. Reply rate around 1%.

Most ignored. A few told me to get lost (fair).

What changed it: I stopped writing emails about *me* (my services,

my packages, my agency) and started writing emails about *their site*

specifically. Concrete data. SSL status. Mobile-friendly check. Page

speed score. What was actually broken.

A real example of the new opener:

"Hi [name], saw your shop on Maps. Quick observation — your site is

loading in 8.4 seconds on mobile and the SSL cert expired last Tuesday.

That's costing you walk-in traffic from Google. Built a 1-page

audit if you want me to send it over."

Reply rate jumped from ~1% to ~7%. The replies were warmer because

I'd already done the diagnostic work for them.

The hard part is that pulling that data manually for every prospect

is 15–20 minutes. Either you're a small-batch high-touch shop (fine,

this is fast enough) or you need to automate.

I ended up automating it for myself with a small tool I called karshq.

Happy to share what I learned about the scoring methodology if anyone's

working on the same thing. The TL;DR is: don't trust any one signal,

weight 5–6 of them together, and always include the "no website at

all" segment because those close fastest.

What does your current cold email opener look like? Would be curious

to compare notes.