How to Get Your First Clients for SaaS Video Production: Cold Emails, Networking, and the Failures That Taught Us
The first cold email I ever sent for LeoStudio got a reply in four minutes.
It said: "Please remove me from your list."
That was it. No greeting. No explanation. Just a command, sent four minutes after I hit send, by a person who had never heard of me and would never hear of me again. I remember staring at that reply for a long time, because it was the first honest feedback I'd gotten on my outreach. And the honest feedback was that I had wasted my time and theirs.
I sent 340 cold emails over the next four months. I got eleven replies. Of those eleven, three were polite rejections, six were variations of "remove me from your list," one was a scam, and one—one—turned into a conversation. That conversation didn't become a client. But it became the first time someone in SaaS took me seriously, and that turned out to matter more than the client would have.
This is the story of how LeoStudio found its first clients. Not the polished version where the right email lands and the pipeline fills. The real version, where the cold emails mostly fail, the conferences mostly produce nothing, and the client comes from a place you weren't even looking. It's the story I wish someone had told me before I spent four months learning it.
The work we do now is on leostudiohq.com—the onboarding videos that cut time-to-value, the case studies, the whole practice. But none of it existed in those first months. There was just me, a laptop, and a list of email addresses that I was convinced would change my life.
The Starting Point: No Portfolio, No Clients, No Plan
I want to be specific about where we started, because the starting point shapes every mistake that follows.
LeoStudio had no portfolio of SaaS work. We had videos—restaurant promos, fitness explainers, a crypto launch film—but none of them proved we could solve a software onboarding problem. We had no relationships in the SaaS world. No one in my network worked at a software company. We had no case study with a number attached. No activation rate, no churn reduction, nothing that a SaaS founder would care about.
What we had was a hypothesis. We believed that video could reduce churn for SaaS products, and that most SaaS companies were doing onboarding badly. That hypothesis was correct. It was also useless, because belief is not a portfolio, and a hypothesis is not a case study.
So we did what every studio with no clients does. We went looking for them. And we looked in all the wrong places.
Attempt 1: The Cold Email Campaign That Failed
I built a list of 340 SaaS founders. I found them on LinkedIn, on Product Hunt, on Indie Hackers, on the websites of companies that had recently raised money. I wrote a template. I personalized the first line. I sent them in batches of twenty, five days a week, for four months.
The template was this: a specific observation about their product, a specific problem their onboarding probably had, a sentence about what we did, and a soft ask for a fifteen-minute call. It was, by the standards of cold email advice, a good template. It had a personalized hook. It had a clear problem statement. It had a low-commitment ask.
It produced eleven replies out of 340 sends. A 3.2% reply rate. That's below the industry average, and the industry average is already bad.
Here's what I learned from the replies. The founders who replied with "remove me" were not annoyed by the message. They were annoyed by the format. They had received a hundred emails that looked like mine, from a hundred studios that looked like mine, and they had learned to delete them without reading. My template was good, and that was the problem. A good template looks like every other good template. The moment they saw the shape, they stopped reading.
The one conversation that came out of those 340 emails taught me something else. The founder I spoke to—let's call him Daniel—said something I've never forgotten. He said, "I get thirty of these a week. The ones I reply to are the ones where the person clearly knows something about my business that I didn't put on my website."
I had been personalizing with what was on his website. He wanted me to know something he hadn't published. That's a much higher bar, and it's the bar that separates a cold email that works from one that doesn't.
We sent 340 emails and got zero clients. That's the honest number. Four months, hundreds of hours, and nothing to show for it except one conversation that taught me what I was doing wrong.
Attempt 2: The Conference That Produced Nothing
If cold email didn't work, I reasoned, in-person would. So I bought a ticket to a SaaS conference.
I want to describe this honestly, because the conference advice you read online is written by people who have never stood alone in a hotel lobby with a name badge and no one to talk to.
I had prepared a pitch. I had business cards. I had a list of companies whose booths I wanted to visit. I showed up on the first morning, walked into the main hall, and realized within about ten minutes that I had no idea what I was doing.
The hall was full of people who already knew each other. Founders who had gone through the same accelerator. Investors who had funded the same companies. Salespeople who had worked together at three companies in a row. It was a room full of existing relationships, and I had none of them.
I spent the first day hovering near booths, trying to catch someone's eye, failing. I spent the second day in sessions, taking notes, avoiding the hall. I spent the third day talking to two people, both of whom were vendors like me, both of whom were also alone, both of whom had no budget and no decision-making power.
The conference cost me about $2,400 when you add the ticket, the flight, the hotel, and the food. It produced zero leads. I came home with a notebook full of session notes, a stack of business cards I never followed up on, and a new conviction that conferences only work if you already have a network.
That's the thing nobody tells you. Conferences don't create relationships. They accelerate relationships that already exist. If you show up alone, you leave alone. The people who get value from conferences are the people who arrived with someone to meet.
I went to two more conferences that year. Both produced nothing. I stopped going after that.
Attempt 3: The Freelance Marketplaces That Commoditized Us
The third attempt was the most demoralizing.
I signed up for three freelance marketplaces. I built profiles. I uploaded our portfolio. I started bidding on projects.
The experience was a slow education in how the market values video work. The projects were real. The clients were real. The budgets were not. A SaaS company would post a request for an onboarding video, describe exactly what they wanted, and then attach a budget of $400. Twenty studios would bid on it. Eighteen would underbid each other until the price hit $250. The client would pick one at random, and the video would be mediocre, and the client would conclude that video doesn't work.
I bid on about forty projects over two months. I won one. The client paid $600 for a video that took us eighteen hours to produce. That's $33 an hour, before expenses, for work that required a scriptwriter, a designer, and an editor. We lost money on it.
The lesson wasn't that marketplaces are bad. It was that marketplaces are built for a different kind of work. They're built for commodity video—short edits, simple animations, templated output. A SaaS onboarding video that's supposed to reduce churn is not a commodity. It's a strategic intervention. It can't be priced against a template, and it can't be sold in a bidding war.
The moment you compete on price, you've already lost. Because the client who picks the cheapest option is the client who values the work least, and the work that gets done at that price is the work that never had a chance.
We stopped using marketplaces after the $600 project. It was the right call, and it took me too long to make it.
Attempt 4: The LinkedIn DMs That Almost Worked
LinkedIn was the fourth attempt, and the closest we came to something real.
I started sending connection requests to SaaS founders with a short, personal note. Not a pitch. Just a note. "Saw your post about onboarding—genuinely good take. Connecting." Something like that. No ask. No link. No agenda.
Then I'd engage with their content for a few weeks. Comment on posts. Share their articles. React to their launches. And eventually, if the engagement felt natural, I'd send a DM asking for a short conversation.
This worked better than anything else we'd tried. I got about a 15% response rate on the DMs. I had maybe a dozen real conversations over three months. Two of them turned into small projects. One of them turned into a client we still work with today.
The reason it worked is that the DM wasn't the first contact. It was the twentieth. The founder already recognized my name from their comments. The relationship existed, in a small way, before I ever asked for anything.
But it was slow. Painfully slow. A dozen conversations over three months, and two of them produced work. That's a 17% conversion rate on the conversations, which sounds good, and a 4% conversion rate on the DMs, which doesn't. It worked, but it didn't scale.
The truth is that LinkedIn DMs work if you're willing to invest three months of relationship-building before you get anything. Most studios aren't. Most studios want the shortcut. There isn't one.
Attempt 5: The Thing That Actually Worked
I want to tell you that the thing that worked was something clever. A strategy I figured out. A channel I discovered.
It wasn't. The thing that worked was a friend-of-a-friend introduction.
I was complaining about the pipeline to a friend over dinner. Not complaining—I was being honest. He asked what kind of clients I was looking for. I told him. SaaS companies with onboarding problems. He said he knew someone. A former colleague who had just joined a Series A startup as head of product. He offered to introduce us.
That introduction became our first real SaaS client. Not a project. A relationship. The kind of relationship where the client tells you the problem, trusts you with it, and measures you on the result. The video we made for them cut their time-to-value by more than half. It became the case study that became every other client we've had since.
That's the thing nobody wants to hear. The first client came from a warm introduction. Not from cold email. Not from a conference. Not from a marketplace. Not from a DM. From a person who knew a person who trusted me enough to make an introduction.
Warm introductions convert at a rate that cold outreach can't touch. Ten to twenty percent of warm intros become conversations. Five percent become clients. Cold email is 3% conversations and near-zero clients. It's not close.
If I had known that in month one, I would have spent the first four months doing nothing but asking everyone I knew—personally, directly, without embarrassment—who they knew in SaaS. Every friend, every former colleague, every acquaintance, every person I'd ever worked with. Because the introduction is the asset. The introduction is the entire game.
The Four Lessons That Now Shape How We Find Clients
After that first year, we rewrote how we approached client acquisition. Here's what we now believe.
Warm introductions beat cold outreach by an order of magnitude. One introduction is worth a hundred cold emails. If you're a studio starting out, your first job is not to build a list. It's to make a list of everyone you know and ask them, individually, who they know. This is uncomfortable. Do it anyway. The discomfort is the price of the first client.
Cold outreach works if it's honest about what it is. The emails that worked weren't the ones that pretended to be a warm introduction. They were the ones that were honest from the first line. "I don't know you. Here's why I'm writing. Here's what I noticed. Here's what I'd like to talk about. If it's not for you, I'll leave you alone." Honesty is a differentiator now, because so much cold outreach is pretending to be something it isn't.
Networking only works if you're building relationships, not hunting leads. The conferences failed because I was hunting. The LinkedIn DMs worked because I was building. The difference is time. Relationships require patience. Leads require luck. Choose the slower path. It's the faster one.
The niche solves the outreach problem. This is the lesson that took the longest to learn. When we were generalists, every email was a cold start—"we make videos, would you like one?" When we narrowed to SaaS onboarding, the conversation changed. "I noticed your day-three retention drops by twenty-seven points. I think there's a video-shaped reason for that." That's not a pitch. It's a diagnosis. And a diagnosis is always welcome, even from a stranger.
That last lesson is the one that changed everything. The reason our first clients were so hard to find was that we hadn't given anyone a reason to find us. Once we had a point of view—once we could walk into a conversation and say something true and specific about a problem the client had—the outreach stopped being outreach. It became a conversation between people who both care about the same problem.
You can see the result of that shift on leostudiohq.com. The case studies aren't about our studio. They're about the problems we solved. That's not a marketing choice. It's the natural output of a studio that stopped trying to sell and started trying to diagnose.
The Numbers: What the First Year Actually Looked Like
I want to give you the honest numbers, because most studios won't.
Cold emails sent: 340. Replies: 11. Clients: 0.
Conferences attended: 3. Total cost: roughly $5,800. Clients: 0.
Freelance marketplace bids: 40. Projects won: 1. Revenue: $600. Hours: 18. Effective rate: $33/hour.
LinkedIn DMs sent: roughly 80. Conversations: 12. Projects: 2. Clients retained: 1.
Warm introductions asked for: 40. Introductions made: 6. Clients: 1—the first real client.
Total months of effort before the first real SaaS client: seven.
That's the real timeline. Seven months of mostly failing before the first client that made everything else possible. Seven months of sending emails, attending events, bidding on projects, and building relationships that mostly went nowhere.
If you're in your first year, that timeline probably sounds familiar. If it doesn't—if you found clients faster—that's genuinely great, and it means you did something right that I did wrong. But if it does sound familiar, I want you to know that the failing is not the same as the failure. Every one of those attempts taught me something that made the next attempt better. The 340 cold emails were a waste of time and also the reason I understood what a good email looks like. The conferences were a waste of money and also the reason I stopped hunting and started building.
What I'd Do Differently
If I could restart LeoStudio with the knowledge I have now, here's what I'd do in the first ninety days.
Week one: List everyone I know. Not to pitch them. To ask them who they know. Every conversation starts with a question, not a pitch. "Do you know anyone running a SaaS product who's struggling with onboarding?" That's the whole ask. It costs nothing and it produces introductions.
Week two: Build one piece of proof. Not a portfolio. One case study. Find one SaaS founder who'll let us make a video for free in exchange for the data. The video becomes the proof. The data becomes the story. That's the whole marketing strategy.
Week three: Narrow to one problem. Not "we make videos for SaaS." Specifically: "we reduce churn by fixing onboarding with video." Specific beats general in every conversation.
Week four: Start writing. Publish the thinking. Not the portfolio. The thinking. The mechanism. The numbers. The failures. The point of view. Writing is how strangers find you before you find them.
Months two and three: Do the work well. Every project becomes a case study. Every case study becomes an introduction. Every introduction becomes the next project. The loop closes.
I didn't do any of this in my first year. I did the opposite. I sent cold emails instead of asking for introductions. I built a portfolio instead of a proof point. I described a service instead of a problem. And I published nothing, so no stranger ever found me.
The Final Word
I sent 340 cold emails and got zero clients. I went to three conferences and got zero clients. I bid on forty projects and won one that lost me money. And then a friend introduced me to someone, and that introduction became the foundation of the studio.
The first client is always the hardest. Not because the work is hard—the work is the same whether it's your first client or your fiftieth. The first client is hard because nobody knows you exist. You haven't built the proof. You haven't earned the trust. You're asking for something—attention, time, money—before you've given anything.
The way out is not a better email. It's not a better conference strategy. It's not a cheaper bid. The way out is to give first. Give a diagnosis. Give a case study. Give a point of view. Give a relationship before you ask for anything. And ask everyone you know, individually and without embarrassment, who they know.
That's what worked. Eventually. After a lot of failing.
If you're a SaaS founder reading this and you're trying to figure out whether onboarding video could work for your product, the answer is probably yes, and the way to find out is a conversation. Not a pitch. A conversation about your day-three retention and what's causing it.
And if you want to see how we think about that conversation—the diagnosis, the mechanism, the numbers—it's all on leostudiohq.com. The case studies are there. The thinking is there. And the contact page is there too. Not to sell you a video. To have the conversation we should have been having all along, instead of sending emails that ended up in the spam folder.
Tell them the SEO guy sent you. Tell them you know the first client comes from an introduction. Tell them you're ready to skip the 340 emails and get straight to the conversation.