AgencyLabs

Lead Generation AI for Agencies and Freelancers

February 13, 2025

4 min read

What is AgencyLabs?

The short version: A lead generation AI for agencies and freelancers.

The long version: AgencyLabs is a platform that allows agencies and freelancers to find new leads. Customers can specify which kind of leads they want (e.g. language, category, …) and AgencyLabs creates a list that fits the requirements.

Our Journey

On February 09, 2023, Pierre and I bought the domain agencylabs.ai. Soon after, we got to work.

Designing a logo, first time designing a website, which first went horribly wrong as you can see from our many iterations. First design iterations

But we did the work and kept designing, kept improving. Many hours and 19 iterations later, we landed here, at our final design.

Final Design iteration

Our design was quite complex, especially because we didn’t want the table or the little sections below “Unlike any other lead gen technique” to just be SVGs or images. We wanted users to be able to interact with them. The fun part began.

Such complex CSS led to a very steep learning curve for someone who’d done pretty much no web design beforehand, but it was fun.

Now we’re pretty much in the building phase of AgencyLabs. We were sometimes programming 8-10 hours a day. The motivation to release this tool to the public was immense. For about half a year, not one day went by without working at AgencyLabs, be it design, brainstorming ideas, learning marketing, or programming. Tims GitHub commit history 2023

I can’t even begin to tell you how much we’ve learned in this “short” amount of time. We didn’t just gain lots of technical knowledge, but also business, marketing, and design fundamentals.

The Launch

Launch day arrived, June 13, 2023. This was a long day because so much went wrong. We encountered so many new bugs that were introduced by factors we hadn’t even thought about.

How did the launch go? We kept checking our database for new entries (yes, we had no analytics at that point). Guess what. Nothing really happened. We may have had one user register, that’s it. I guess our marketing wasn’t on point…

We found ourselves in kind of a second phase. Lots of bug fixes and thinking about how to market AgencyLabs to the correct audience. We started a blog with actually useful content about the topics that interest our users. This method was way too slow to attract new users right now. So we created a Discord user account that was on nearly all of the Discord servers that our target audience was on. We named it ”!Tim Witzdam”. The exclamation mark resulted in the account being shown at the very top of the user list. We made this account stay online 24/7 with a game called “Get 100 free leads” and in the bio, you could see the agencylabs.ai link.

This is quite an unusual marketing technique, but it worked wonders. Thousands of people saw this Discord user account and visited AgencyLabs. Over time, many users also registered and started using our service.

This is it, a successful startup, right?

No. We had hundreds of new users coming in, but no one was paying. You’d get 100 free leads after you register, which pretty much everyone used. But why was nobody purchasing more leads?

Sadly, I still don’t have a concrete answer for that question. Our leads were good. Some were miscategorized or dead businesses, but most of them were high quality.

My theory is that with Discord, you obviously don’t attract real businesses which had the money to purchase leads. We just attracted (mostly poor) users trying to start their own business, which wasn’t a great customer base to have.

That’s it?

While new users kept coming in, we built new features, fixed many bugs, and worked on performance improvements, especially SQL joins (which we had many complex ones). Aka, we kept learning.

I think that was the biggest takeaway for us. The learning factor. We didn’t really build a successful startup, but we built our first big and relatively complex project.

Here are just a few things we learned on this journey: