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4 Simple Methods to Find New Customers For Your One-Person Business (Even if You Hate Coming Across “Salesy”)

Kurtis Pykes
The Startup
Published in
9 min readJun 25, 2024
Created by the author using Midjourney

It’s only a matter of time before you’re out of business if you’re not getting new customers through the door.

That’s given you suck at retention too.

There’s no exceptions to the rules.

You can be the nicest person with lots of potential, but you’ll still go broke.

This was the exact archetype of a guy I met on the plane from the UK to Morroco.

He caught me reading a book about capturing leads on LinkedIn and used that as his cue to tell me about his once-thriving online fitness business, which he started during lockdown and used to generate $20,000 in monthly revenue.

But since the world opened back up, he’s had no new customers, and his existing ones are falling through the cracks.

What used to be a class of 40 is now 3 people here and there.

The problem he was solving during lockdown (people not being able to leave the house but wanting to stay fit) no longer exists, and he’s struggled to evolve.

Here’s 4 tips I gave him to start finding new customers…

#1 Get clear on who you help

As the popular adage goes, “If you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.

The same rule applies in business.

You can’t make a product or service for everyone; you must tailor it to certain archetypes.

This will help you later when you’re looking for customers and creating content—more on that later.

When I asked my mate on the plane who his target customer was, all he could reply was, “Busy people.

Busy doing what?” I replied.

This question completely stopped him.

He didn’t know how to answer – “All sorts of things [lists a bunch of activities].

A lot of people in business make this mistake…

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The Startup
The Startup

Published in The Startup

Get smarter at building your thing. Follow to join The Startup’s +8 million monthly readers & +772K followers.

Kurtis Pykes
Kurtis Pykes

Written by Kurtis Pykes

I help solopreneurs, coaches, and consultants turn LinkedIn into an inbound lead machine - stand out, attract premium clients, and reclaim 8+ hours a week

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