Every time my client roster is full, my marketing falls off a cliff.

Or, in other words, how my systems and capacity have failed to plan for the exact same scenario every month for 22 years.

Back when I was freelancing and consulting, before I ever turned it into an agency, before I was ever diagnosed with ADHD, the only consistent thing about me was one problem:

Every time my client roster got full, my lead pool went empty.

Basically, I stopped marketing because I was too busy doing client work. It wasn't because I figured "times are good, I never have to market again!" On the contrary, I was usually acutely aware of my lack of marketing activities and how that was going to come back to bite me.

But a combination of executive functioning, object permanence, and time blindness would put me into this same pattern over and over.

1. Do sales and marketing like a boss!
2. Get lots of clients and customers!
3. Completely forget to do sales and marketing while serving new clients and customers...
4. ... oops. Le panic.

After several years of implementing this, uh, "system" that some people refer to as "feast or famine", I started to realize some key things.

First, I noticed that the majority of my clients came either from referrals and word of mouth (because I was, and still am, good at what I do and prioritized building rapport and connection with clients) or from following me for quite some time and seeing just the right piece of content.

It was never about an exact linear flow of 12 carefully curated pieces that took my clients on a journey. It was about the totality of what they'd learned from me, stuck in their mind, and then them having a need at the exact time that I posted or emailed them something about being able to meet that exact need.

That's it.

No carefully manicured 52 email, 17 segment autoresponder sequences with retargeting ads and a live (or "live") webinar, culminating in a high-pressure sales call.

I sold $60k/year packages with PDF proposals, reviewed live on a call, that someone got onto because they had a need, and I had the answer, they trusted me enough to see if my answer was right for their need.

It was just... Showing up persistently over time, making friends, making a difference, and waiting for them to have a need that lined up with what I had.

Second, I came up with good content ideas while I was working with my clients, but the problem wasn't a lack of ideas - it was the cognitive load of context switching between marketing and sales activities, and serving the clients I had.

Over time, I built a series of systems that helped me keep the bare minimum lights on for marketing while I was knee deep in projects, and started to build out 3-6 months worth of scheduled work ahead of where I was.

Anchor clients on 3, 6, and even 12-month project-based contracts kept things going, and systems like regular outreach, referral requests on a schedule, and jumping into new niches with a research project to follow the dopamine meant I was busy enough to start hiring and scale into an agency.

Eventually, I started teaching these systems to other people, and helped many freelancers climb past six figures in revenue (sometimes for the first time) without putting them into a feast or famine cycle.

The thing is, when I started teaching, I was no longer in a "low volume, high investment" category of services. I often would need 10-20 clients at any given time to close the gap and keep the lights on.

And persistent referral, word of mouth, and research projects didn't keep the pipeline full of 500+ leads per year. Those systems simply don't work at that scale without consistency.

So, I did new things. For the first time, I built an audience. Then I hit 20k total subscribers/followers/whatever across that audience. Then I hit my first 1M view year. Then my first 1M view month, followed very quickly by my first 2M view month. It took me almost 20 years to make $1M with my freelancing (it started off very small, for a very long time), and because I learned how to build an audience from scratch and market to and engage with them, it only took me about 4.5 years to grow that to $2M with my teaching added, too.

But the same problem kept cropping up.

Every time I'd get really into building something new or helping a bunch of my clients with something, I'd stop posting as much. Views would go down. Revenue would slow. I'd have to climb back into daddy Zuck's arms and beg plead, post until my thumbs were bleeding to get back into the algorithm's good favour - only to have the cycle repeat again a few weeks or months later.

The reality of interest-driven social media and volume-based businesses like mine is that persistence is the thing that separates those who succeed from those who don't - but consistency is what separates those who have regulated nervous systems from those whose journey with marketing on social media has more in common with a pinball machine than an Instagram aesthetic.

We could sit here all day long and discuss whether or not this is good, whether interest-based social media algorithms are generally positive for society, whether allowing billionaires to capitalize on the free labour of tens of millions of creators who are just trying to eek out a living in order to sell ad space to their competitors so they can buy another bunker is actually what society wants...

But instead, when AI tools started being able to write code? Real code that you can ship on your own servers, not that build-on-rented-land, vibe-code-a-piece-of-junk-in-a-weekend services that shall remain nameless so I don't get sued?

I realized I could solve the problem.

So, I did.

First, I tried to program an LLM to be my "brain" and coach my clients like I could. It was... Okay. Kind of a fail though. It would never be as good at digging beneath the problem someone showed up with to find the real problem that needed solving, among a myriad of other issues.

But then I realized, I didn't want to replace the human parts of my business at all.

I wanted to do the coaching. I wanted to write. I wanted to help people.

What I didn't want to do was sort through all the things I had written over the past 5+ years of educating entrepreneurs to find the gems and resurface them, nor did I want to be forced into writing every day. And I certainly didn't want to batch a bunch of content and then have to figure out what it should all be and when and how it should be scheduled.

I wanted to show up, create content, coach and educate people, and then lay in the grass with a library book until the kids got mad I hadn't made dinner.

So instead of trying to replace my brain with a chatbot, I took the chatbot I had programmed with a lot of my brain, and taught it to use all my old content to run my social media instead.

We started with my social posts.

The Facebook and LinkedIn posts got fed in first, and the calendar started to fill up. It was wonky, and sometimes double-posted things, so we updated the strategy until it was picking actual good things to post.

Then, I added my longer form content. My blogs, my emails, my articles, my transcripts. A little more freedom to edit, because transcribed audio doesn't make a smooth LinkedIn post, but still my words, still my voice. Just without the ums and ahs and quite so many swears.

My calendar filled up more. Suddenly, I could just pop in once a week, approve everything in the queue, and my socials would run with my own content and near zero effort from me (and no AI slop content, either.)

But I was taking all my new posts and still putting them directly into Facebook, because habits and also it seemed hard to put them in this new app.

So I built an editor into the app that would let me draft a new post in minutes, add the relevant data to it in the content library automatically, and it would get scheduled at the right time - not just right away so I could get dopamine.

Mmmmmmm, strategy.

My main sales and lead gen tactic to this point was "hand raiser" posts. You know the type. "I have a thing! Put my special magic word in the comments and I'll DM you about it!"

I was doing that manually every time. In part because, well, Facebook profile instead of pages (so no API) but also because I didn't have a good system to automate it for me. ManyChat was complex and expensive and another place to go.

So I added that to my system.

Now when I created a post with a hand-raiser CTA, the system will automatically ask me to link it to a landing page for a lead magnet or an offer, and send then DM it to anyone who comments the magic word without me having to lift a finger.

And then add them to a lil CRM so I can follow up a few days later and check in.

I built a really, really cool content marketing machine.

And it uses AI for the pattern-matching intelligence layer (a thing it's actually good at) instead of trying to pretend it can write as well as I can.

But there was still a big gap.

My email list.

Yeah, I kind of suck at that one. I send out my best, favourite articles, I sometimes share books I'm reading, I'll send sales emails every few months if I'm doing an important launch (and enjoy all the fun unsubscribes because they often haven't heard from me in awhile... ahem...)

My list works when I treat it like the channel it is - a straight path to people who need my help, a way to provide value and do what I've always done. Show up over and over, embed myself in their brain as helpful, and when they have a need, magically pop up with a solution for it at the right time.

But consistency is almost harder with email than anything other than video content, because the bar to "success" is so freaking high.

It doesn't just have to be:

• Compelling
• Interesting
• Valuable
• Rapport-building
• With a catchy subject line
• Free from spam filter trigger words
• With 3-5 CTAs but sprinkled naturally so I can thread the needle between "not enough links for people to actually click" and "so many links that people get pissed off"
• And occurring in their inbox with enough frequency and recency that they don't think you're a random spammer when you pop up

But it also has to actively sell your wares without being so salesy that people who would buy from you unsubscribe before they can...

... and you have to go put it in a whole different user interface than you're used to.

So, I'm adding that feature now.

This is how I'm building Alex, really.

I'm seeing when and where I'm still using other tools, or not using Alex, or where I'm still inconsistent and not showing up, and I'm building something in the app that fixes it. Meets me there and runs a system so that my brain doesn't have to BE the system. A baseline of content, assembled from my own writing, resurfaced and shared strategically to support my goals, with a spot for me to share when I'm inspired.

And I'm going to keep documenting this journey here, because I know that many of you want to turn your knowledge and IP into systems that help implement for you, too. This is my chance to show you how I'm doing it.

Right now, I'm digging into my methodologies around email marketing + updating my research on deliverability, conversion, and best practices.

Then, I'm going to document a development sprint to implement those features.

Then I'll build it, test it, and launch it.

And then probably cry and sleep for awhile 😂

Rinse, repeat.

Make sure you're subscribed here if you want to get the updates as I post them.

(And if you want to check out my social media tool for ND founders like me, it's at runitbyalex.com)