Most of what gets written about a tool like Klaudius is written by us. So when a customer lays out exactly what their first month looked like — the real numbers, the method, what actually worked — it's worth more than anything we can say. Grant Richardson gave us his, and told us to use his name.
Grant runs Geaux Launch, a web design agency in Baton Rouge, Louisiana — so he already knew how to close a website before Klaudius came along. Keep that in the back of your mind as you read. But here's the part that matters whether you run an agency or you're just starting out: the work that produced his numbers — finding the businesses, building the websites, sending the pitches — Grant didn't do any of it. Klaudius did, while he slept. All he did was talk to the owners who wrote back.
The numbers
Here's how Grant described his first month, more or less word for word:
— Grant Richardson, founder, Geaux Launch
Lay that out as a funnel and it's a clean picture of local web work:
- 100+ businesses reached — found and contacted, mostly hands-off
- 21 replied — roughly a 1-in-5 response rate, where typical cold outreach runs 1-in-20 to 1-in-50
- 5 became paying clients — about a quarter of everyone who replied
- $400 per site + $100/month — so those 5 clients are ~$2,000 up front and $500 a month recurring, building from month one
The response rate is the number worth sitting with. It's not that Klaudius writes magic emails; it's that each business gets contacted with a real, finished site already built for them — not a "do you want a website?" pitch, but a "here's the website I built you, want to keep it?" one. That reframes the whole conversation, and it's why one in five wrote back.
What converted the replies
Klaudius created the opportunities; two things Grant did turned them into paying clients, and both are worth stealing:
"The way we promoted Klaudius was outreach with follow-ups every week if a business didn't respond. Everything snowballs after your first few clients, because then you get referrals."
- Follow-ups did the heavy lifting. He didn't pitch once and move on — he followed up weekly on the businesses that went quiet. Most replies in cold outreach come from the second and third touch, not the first, so following up is the single cheapest thing you can do: it's the same list working itself with no new prospecting. Klaudius ships a follow-up system for exactly this.
- Referrals compound. "Everything snowballs after your first few clients." The first sale is the hard one; each one after makes the next easier. Five happy clients in month one is a referral engine going into month two.
Where the recurring revenue comes from
The part that turns this from a side income into an agency is the $100 a month. Five clients at $100/month is $500 of recurring revenue that carries forward whether or not Grant sells anyone new next month — and it grows every time he does.
That retainer isn't just a hosting markup. It covers "hosting, website changes and updates," and it works because Klaudius builds each client a self-serve content management system — so ongoing edits are a managed service Grant can charge for, not unpaid busywork. It's the difference between selling a website once and having a client on the books. (We wrote about how that CMS gets built, from a single command, here.)
Grant's advice to other agencies
We asked what he'd tell someone else starting out. His answer was about positioning, and it's good:
"We're an American agency but we primarily target local businesses to get that 'personal' connection going. What I'd recommend for other agencies is to start narrow, then branch out. A name that strikes closeness and familiarity is seen less as a business and more of a friend. Business owners love that kind of relationship."
Start narrow. Sound like a neighbour, not a corporation. Then widen once the referrals are flowing. For a pipeline that can technically target anywhere, that's a useful discipline — the constraint is what makes the outreach feel personal.
What Klaudius actually did
It's worth stopping to picture the work behind those 5 sales.
To land 5 clients, an agency normally has to find 100+ local businesses worth pitching, research each one, then design and build 100+ real websites, and write 100+ personalised pitches to send them. That isn't a month of work — building a hundred bespoke sites by hand is most of a quarter, for a whole team.
Grant did none of it. Klaudius found the businesses, built every single site from each one's own photos and details, and sent the outreach — autonomously, while he slept. He woke up to 21 replies and closed 5 of them. His selling skill closed those deals. But Klaudius manufactured every opportunity he closed — 100+ finished websites, each one a real, tailored pitch, that he never had to lift a finger to create.
That's the whole point, and it's why this isn't really an agency story or a beginner story. Grant's closing skill is his own — yours will be wherever it is today. But the engine that produced 100 leads and 100 websites overnight is the same for everyone who runs it. It doesn't get tired, it doesn't need to already know how to build a site, and it runs while you sleep. Grant just had a head start on the one human part that's left.