All word of mouth so far from an industry I’m intimately familiar with. So maybe YMMV, but I started by saying, “hey, let me build something for you, if you like it we can figure out how to pay for it” then I started just doing things and they’ve kept happily paying the invoices.

I’m on vacation right now, but my main customer is constantly adding new feature requests, etc. and until I went on vacation their work was as good as 2 or 3 customers per month, “oh can you do this? What about this?” I honestly am looking forward for them to throttle back a little because I could use another similar volume customer, but I hardly have enough time to really invest to make that happen until they get all the things they want and while they’re paying me I ain’t going to stop.

It was also pretty cool, because there’s a young engineer working there in a non-engineer role as a human forklift. I said, “hey, I need help implementing all this stuff” now he has a raise, and he is kind of like an embedded customer support person, and I don’t have to stress about it so much.

Regardless, just build.

The phone call automation for their front desk saves something like 40 hours of work a month just of people looking up customers to call about their schedule etc. And that’s just one tool and I deployed it in like 4 days. It’s really not that hard, just go out and make people’s lives easier and stop trying to scale or whatever.

I personally worked for a company in mountain view whose main product was an automated form filler for pest control operators and there cali EPA documentation.

It was something that looked like it was originally written in visual basic and than rewritten in react for tablet devices.

I'm still under NDA but the above figures related to per company\ per month sales are about right