We built the tool we desperately needed

When I first started my marketing journey, I had no case studies, nothing to piggyback off results-wise. I came from software engineering. I had to take any clients I could to make it work, and most of them unfortunately were the legendary nightmare clients who expected everything for nothing.

But I finally landed one whose business looked solid, a big detailing studio with fancy cars. First month I was given not that impressive of a budget, around 1000 pounds. I set everything up, launched the ads, and then came the part nobody warns devs about: calling the leads myself.

There were also a lot of calls where people just wouldn't trust us. So I started texting them before the call with our Instagram, which looked absolutely stunning. That helped a lot. Then I started sending custom messages depending on the car the customer had and THAT worked even better. Then I built some automations so before they even talked to me on the phone, we already knew if we had the right person, if they were free for a chat, and if they saw social proof. Those three things helped a lot with my silly accent calling strangers.

At first I wasn't doing any nurturing because I was the one calling leads myself. Then one day I thought, why not message all the hundreds of people sitting in our CRM doing nothing? I created an offer, put those people into an SMS + email + voicemail drop workflow, and pressed the doomsday button. First minute: nothing. Second minute: nothing. Five minutes later: messages and calls start coming in to the point where we can't keep up. It felt surreal, like that scene from Better Call Saul when Jimmy just aired the ad and people started fully booking with him.

That made the guy $30k in 30 days. I was on 15% commission, so I got £4.5k that month, which was CRAZY to me at the time (average salary in my country = £1k). It also proved the thing Inflowave is built on: the money is not in more leads. It's in speed, follow up and personalization, at a scale no human team keeps up with manually.

I wanted more clients like him, so I outsourced the phone calls. But my commission-based hires were biting into margins hard, so I told the guy we'd increase our fee. BAD IDEA. Next month results weren't as great, and my client got cocky. He wanted to cut commissions and call the leads himself. I stupidly agreed. Long story short, he was calling leads after work instead of instantly, people weren't picking up, and a week later he blamed ME for "not getting results".

Lesson learned: if your client tries to mess with the process, just say NO. Also get your testimonials ASAP from early clients to avoid this nonsense.

From there it snowballed into a real agency: 100+ client Instagram accounts and a team of 30 VAs. Behind the scenes it was chaos. A sprawling Google Sheet the VAs never kept up to date, Make.com automations duct-taped together, and a stack of ManyChat, GoHighLevel, Linktree, Calendly and Stripe that constantly broke. I documented the whole grind in public on my YouTube channel, Boring Marketing.

Every tool solved a tenth of the problem and created a new one. Nothing shared context: the ad platform didn't know what the DMs said, the calendar didn't know which lead was hot, the Sheet knew nothing at all. Make.com wasn't enough. So I started building my own software.