Show the value before you ask for the money
How Glint Creatives won its first clients with no funding,
no team, and no reputation.
Started Glint Creatives from a small room in August 2012. One real
skill, hand-crafted UI design and clean HTML, built from scratch
without templates. My bike, and a fund from my parents to begin.
No outside funding. No backing.
For the first several months, it was just me. The research, the design,
the UI, the HTML, and the marketing, all done by my own hands. One
objective only. Best possible output, and a client who was genuinely
satisfied.
My approach was different from the start. Before meeting a business, I
studied the client and their competitors in full, then designed a
sample home page showing exactly how their website could look, and
carried it into the meeting already built. No money asked. Nothing
promised. Just a clear vision on the screen in front of them. I did
this for 45 to 50 businesses in those first six months, and I would
meet the same client four or five times before anything was signed. A
few of them still tell their teams that the founder arrived with a
finished design before they had even asked.
Out of all those demos, seven or eight became paying clients in the
first six months. The rest did not, and that was part of it. I kept
going with patience, without losing energy, treating each meeting as
its own thing rather than counting the ones that did not convert. I
never resented a client for hesitating. Why should anyone pay for a
website before they had seen what I could do? So I showed the value
first, and let the work earn the trust.
That temperament, more than the design skill, is what carried the
first year. Only then did the team slowly begin to form, one person at
a time, each brought in around the work itself, not around any hype.
