LatAm hire on Upwork or LinkedIn ($1,800-$2,400/month). Apollo Pro + Smartlead + Calendly + Pipedrive. Total burn: ~$3,500/month. No clients yet. This is the build phase.
Tap an existing client. NDA the discount. Deliver. Screenshot every confirmed meeting, save every reply, build the case study deck while the work is happening.
Use the case study from days 31-45. Sell at $5,000-$7,500/month + $500/BANT-verified meeting. Don't discount. Don't quote anything below the floor. One "no" beats one bad-fit client.
By day 90 you should be at 4 clients, ~$22K MRR, two SDRs, ~62% gross margin. If you're not. Go back to the SOW. Something in the pricing or the qualification SLA is misaligned with delivery cost.
The one thing every appointment-setting agency owner gets wrong
The pricing page sells "meetings." The actual product is reduced selling cost for the client's AE team. A client whose AEs spend Tuesday afternoons on bad-fit discovery calls is paying twice. Once to your agency for the meeting, and once to their AE for the wasted hour.
When you price on BANT-verified meetings, when you build the SOW around qualification SLAs, when you refuse to count vanity bookings. You're not delivering "more meetings." You're delivering fewer hours of AE waste. That's a different product, sold to a different buyer (the VP of Sales, not the CMO), at 2-3× the price.
Most agency owners spend 18 months learning this the hard way. The ones who learn it in month two run profitable shops by year one. Read this article again before you write your next SOW.
