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How to start an MVP Agency
In this mini course I’ll guide you on how to launch your MVP Agency and get your first client.
Right now there are people making $10K, $30K even over $100k per month just vibe coding applications with AI for other people without knowing any real coding themselves.
Here's people already succeeding with this:
The reason this works is because an MVP doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough to showcase the key functionality of the app or idea. It doesn’t matter if its not optimized for millions of users, it doesn't matter if the backend is duck taped together.
All it has to do is be good enough to validate the idea.
And in the past this type of mvp would still require hiring a full time developer or agency for 20-40 grand and waiting 3-4 months before even having something usable.
Now you can come in and replace that with $5,000 and 2 weeks of work.
Before you start.
One important thing you want to understand about agencies in general... is that they aren’t some sort of magical unicorn which farts money.
All agencies are is selling services to clients.
There’s been many agency “trends”, like social media marketing, ai automation or in our case mvp creation.
At the end of the day no matter what your offer is... you’re just providing a systemized service to a client.
This is basic grade 3 economics, supply and demand. It’s not rocket science.
#1 Do this first.
You need to learn how to make MVPs (or partner with someone that does.)
The magic of selling this service is that creating MVPs with the help of ai is insanely easy. You just have to ask ai how to do xyz and it will tell you exactly what to do, then take that info and put it into an ai coding tool like lovable or cursor ai etc.. and then keep prompting the ai until you're done.
I would start recreating popular apps that are simple like , , , etc..
This will give you the skills needed to know how to actually build a prototype and also something to showcase in your portfolio.
#2 Creating your MVP Agency
Step 1: Choose a name and domain.
Just choose some random word + mvp like lunamvp, flowmvp, swiftmvp, mvpful, mvplabs etc..
Domain name generators:
Step 2: Build your website
You can also ask AI to build the site for you but in my opinion spending too much time on trying to build the perfect website, create the perfect name etc.. are all things distracting you from actually going and getting clients.
Step 3: Setup your profiles
This links with the next section of getting clients, if you decide to get clients through X then go make your X profile, if from LinkedIn, go make a LinkedIn etc.. basic stuff I know you’re smart enough to figure this out.
Step 4: Setup Pricing
I suggesting keeping pricing simple and direct, don’t try to hide it behind some long and complicated book a call funnel like many other agencies in other niches do. There's no need for that, in the startup space direct value propositions convert better.
My suggestions are keep things around these ranges:
This would include just creating custom websites, pages, forms. If they have a design ready you can use ai to recreate the design into a live web pages.
This is the range I think most will fall into. Your mvp should have some real functionality behind it, with user authentication, some sort of backend etc..
In this price range the client will have higher expectations so your mvp should deliver on some sort of core functionality fully.
These are just my general ideas of how I would structure the pricing, maybe you’ll focus on just a single price point and service. Maybe you’ll offer all options. It depends entirely on you and how you plan to act on this whole opportunity. Look at what other people are succeeding with and just copy them tbh.
#3 Getting Clients
This is the sauce of this video cause getting clients which actually transfer the money from their bank account into to your bank account is the #1 thing every one struggles with.
Each one of these sections can be its own 6 hours course to explain all the nuances but I'm gonna trust that you’ll get the general idea and then do more research on your own and if you have questions you can leave a comment or better join my community and I’ll try to make a more in-depth video in the future about all of this.
1. Job boards:
Places like Upwork, freelancer, Fiverr etc.. where customers come directly to list their job requests.
PROS:
Ready to buy clients on demand
CONS:
Very competitive
Low quality jobs
People earning on Upwork:
People earning on Fiverr:
My main advice on getting clients on these platforms is you want to stand out as much as you can. Not with your price but by showing you're a real person. These places are filled to the brim with Indian and Nigerian agencies who just spam every job listing.
Record loom videos for your prospects reading back their job description to them and then talk about how you’re planning on completing this job. You will immediately stand out to the dozens of copy pasted chatgpt template responses they got.
Stick to a schedule and apply to jobs as fast as you can.
2. Brand Building:
Become active in the whole startup/saas/mvp/ai/coding community on and YouTube. Post what you’re working on, give your opinion on latest news, share what you build, create free templates and guides etc.. to grow a small following of other people in the industry and you’ll naturally attract people trying to launch some sort of startup idea and you can naturally pitch your service with no hard selling.
This is the same thing I’m doing with this YouTube channel, im making these videos to grow my reputation and later I want to monetize it by being the saas marketing guy people go to for advice on scaling their companies.
PROS:
You become an authority in the space giving you social proof.
Clients often come to you
Easy to close the client since they already know who you are and trust you.
CONS:
Takes a long time to build a following
Have to consistently be posting with no expectation to earn anything back in the short term
Examples of people succeeding with this:
Most people succeeding with this right now are on X just posting multiple times per day to get as much reach. Study what they post, what goes viral and with active posting you’ll land your first client in 1-2 months for sure.
I think an untapped audience might be on YouTube as very few people are selling this service on YouTube, the demographics on YouTube are different than on X but it could be a blue ocean posting tutorials and showcases of apps you’ve worked on and then having your site linked under the video.
Paid Acquisition Channels:
I love paid media. Because it's very predictable and scaleable. You just have to crack the formula for what the right offer is for you to get 2 dollars back for every 1 dollar spend, and just like that you’ve built yourself an ATM machine that you can just dump money into and get double back.
I won’t cover these in depth here because each of these can be a 10+ hour course, but I'll give you the cliff notes on how to get started and if you need more help then just message me.
5. Cold Outreach:
This is the lifeblood of most agencies (outside of referrals). Cold Calling, Cold Emailing and Cold Messaging. Costs a bit of money to setup all the needed tools such speed dialing, email inboxes, automation software and a lot more.
The secret to cold outreach is scale. If you just message 10 people per day you’re not gonna achieve anything. You need to scrape large amounts of leads and then send them hyper personalized messages and follow ups at massive scale to see any sort of traction.
6. Paid Advertising:
Running google search and meta ads are your best options. If you’ve never run paid ads before then again there will be a small setup cost but a larger learning how to run ads that are actually profitable.
For google you would setup search campaigns for keywords related to mvps, startups etc.. and pay to be ranked #1 for them and get people to book a call with you and then close them. There's a lot more nuance that goes into this but that's the short version.
For meta ads, you would first need to create some nice ads talking to your icp and pitching your service. Then create a lead funnel to get them to book a call and close them. Again a lot, lot, lot of nuance and details with this but that’s the basic version.
#4 Who do you sell to?
Besides the first client acquisition channel (job boards) that I mentioned. To make any of the other channels work you need to niche down a specific customer profile you’re gonna sell to.
But if you’ve never sold anything to anyone you have no idea how to do this, that’s why the job board strategy to just apply to everything you can and try to land your first few clients is smart because this will teach you what the market actually wants which you can then extract to build a real offer around.
This is the key thing you must remember:
You can’t frame your prospect around your offer, you have to frame your offer around your prospect.
If you try to sell “mvp development” and start blasting dental clinics you scraped off google, you’re not closing any clients obviously. But if you frame it as let's say some sort of custom build crm service to automate data entry for dental clinics, you’ll probably get some replies. Now I still think this is a bad niche in general for this but you get the idea I’m talking about.
So start going where your customers are, for example most non-technical people who want to start a saas will be inside of online communities, forums groups, X etc..
List of forums:
Use keywords like saas idea, co-founder, mvp, hiring etc.. when searching through all these places and you’ll start finding people actively needing help with creating some kind of software or website or app.
All of this market research and community diving will compound into growing your personal brand. Making everyone know that you’re the guy when it comes to mvps.
Another angle is you can try targeting agencies, there's been a huge rise in ai automation agencies where they build automations for businesses using or n8n. They already have customers paying them for automating stuff like reporting, data entry, creating contracts etc..
But very often these automations are setup inside those automation dashboard and are very technical and difficult, you could offer to create basic front ends and connect their automations to the front end so that their clients have something more user friendly to use.
You can also reach out to e-commerce business owners, I come from e-commerce background and I know for a fact literally everyone has some annoying issue or bug that they wish could be a app/plugin/extension, you can pitch them your mvp services to bring that idea to life
These are just a few ideas I came up with from the top of my head, start actively researching and posting and you’ll naturally attract people around you and it will make coming up with ideas on who to sell to a lot easier.
#5 Closing your client
Once you do manage to get your first client, you need to get on a call together and disucuss exactly what the idea is, what they want the mvp to look like, what it has to do and all other important details.
If you don’t do this properly before you start working on the project you’re going to be wasting a lot of time going back and forth with the client.
I suggest using for ai recording and note taking so you can remember everything your client says and helps you create SOPs and documents using ai afterwards too. But any ai + recording transcript would work.
Here's a basic breakdown of questions you should ask your client to get you started, you can remove/add them as you see fit or use ai to expand on them.
Questions to ask your client:
A. What’s the Big Idea?
1. What problem do you want your MVP to fix?
2. How will you know it’s working (e.g., people sign up, they like it)?
3. Why are you making this MVP (e.g., to test an idea, get money from investors)?
B. Who’s It For?
4. Who will use your MVP (e.g., young people, parents, gamers)?
5. How will they use it (e.g., on a phone, computer)?
C. What Should It Do?
6. What are the most important things it needs to do?
7. Are there extra things you want later but not now?
8. Do you have any references to others apps/sites similar to your idea?
D. What Should It Look Like?
9. Do you have colors or a logo you want to use? If not, should I pick?
10. Does it need to look fancy, or is it okay to keep it simple?
E. Tech Stuff
11. Should it be an app, website, or something else?
12. Does it need to connect to anything they already have (e.g., another tool)?
F. Time and Money
13. When do you want it ready?
14. How much money can you spend on it?
G. After It’s Done
15. How will you check if people like it (e.g., ask them, look at numbers)?
16. Who will take care of it after I give it to you?
After your talk repeat back to the client everything they told you and ask them to correct/change anything you didn’t understand fully.
Then use ai to summarize down your call and create a detailed plan for you as well as a contract that the you both agree on.
Send that document to your client let them read over it, request changes where needed, approve, sign and pay you.
✅ Start building the MVP once everything is agreed on!
Important tips:
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