OLABODE OLUWATOBILOBA | GrowthOps

iPhone XR in 2026? e better make you use android

Walahi, if 3 people are serious about making their first ₦1M before the end of the year, forget trying to find ₦1M clients in Nigeria. Go after dollar-paying clients. At roughly ₦1,500/$, you only need around $670 to cross ₦1M. That could be one $700 project, two $350 projects, four $175 projects, or a combination of smaller projects. The easiest way I’d approach it is to build a 3-man sales squad. Pick ONE service that businesses already pay for, then split the work. Person 1 handles cold email, researching companies, finding decision-makers and sending personalized emails. Person 2 focuses on Upwork, searching for relevant jobs and sending quality proposals. Person 3 handles LinkedIn and Instagram, finding founders, marketing managers and business owners, connecting with them and starting conversations. Then all three of you jump on Google Meet together every day for 3-4 hours and lock in. If you're broke, contribute money together for internet, necessary tools and anything else you genuinely need. You don't need an office. You need laptops, good internet, reliable electricity, Google Meet, a good offer and three people who are actually ready to work. When one person gets a client, the work doesn't necessarily have to be done by that person alone. You can split the workload between yourselves based on everyone's strengths. One person can handle strategy, another can execute, another can handle research, reporting or QA. The client doesn't necessarily need to know that three of you are working behind the scenes. What matters is that the person they hired communicates properly, the agreed work gets done and the quality is consistently good. Don't lie about your team if a client asks directly, but you don't need to turn your internal workflow into the main selling point. And don't only think about one-off projects. Try to convert good clients into monthly retainers. Instead of getting paid $300 once and starting from zero again, you could offer an ongoing service for $300-$500+ per month depending on the work. Two $400/month clients is $800 every month. Three people can share the workload and keep prospecting for the next client while maintaining the existing accounts. Create one Google Sheet and track every prospect: company, contact, platform, date contacted, response, follow-up date and status. Set daily targets. Something like 30-50 targeted cold emails, 10-15 strong Upwork proposals and 20-30 LinkedIn/Instagram outreaches between the team. Follow up with people who don't respond. A lot of clients won't reply to the first message. Your process should be simple: find businesses with a problem, identify the person who can pay you to solve it, reach out, start a conversation, get on a call, close the project, deliver extremely well, then ask about continuing the work on a monthly basis. But this only works if the three of you actually have the infrastructure and discipline for it. Good internet. Reliable electricity. Laptops that can handle the work. Clear communication. And most importantly, all three people need to be ready to lock in. If one person disappears every other day, doesn't respond to clients or doesn't do their part, the whole system falls apart. Don't spend the next three months preparing, taking courses and redesigning your CV. Learn what you need while you're prospecting. The goal is not to look busy. The goal is to create conversations with people who have money and a problem you can solve. Three people consistently doing this can generate hundreds of opportunities. You don't need everyone to say yes. You just need enough people to say yes.