Wanted to share a breakdown of how I went from freelancer to helping my client get funding, and in the process, built my agency business.

My client, WhipSnap, wants to serve the niche of 3D car scanning - applications range from enabling car showrooms to conduct virtual sales and marketing to letting petrol-heads scan and share their own cars, with annotations in 3D.

I designed and developed an MVP for them. I also visited high-end car showrooms with my client to scan cars. I was also the "tech guy" in calls with investors (I rarely spoke, TBH).

Here's everything that led to this moment:

[-2]. Pitched to a different client.

[-1]. Got rejected.

[ 0]. Lesson learned: needed to dramatically increase the quality of my proposal.

[ 1]. Heard from a former colleague about another project

[ 2]. We setup the initial call for intros

[ 3]. Before the call, I worked the weekend to research their niche and the technologies they could use.

[ 4]. During the intro call I impressed them with my research, my understanding of their niche and suggestions on how we'd build their app idea.

[ 5]. They signed.

[ 6]. During the project, I sent weekly video updates via Youtube (unlisted). I'm a fan of async comms.

[ 7]. We spoke regularly, via a WhatsApp group chat!

[ 8]. Within 4 weeks we had a useable MVP. Real customers could scan their cars!

[ 9]. Then some chaos: I personally helped scan a $4.5M Koenigsegg.. and the scan failed

[10]. More chaos: Runpod (the GPU cloud provider) became unreliable. I ended up buying an RTX 5090 to run our 3D pipeline on.

[11]. The weekly videos and regular comms kept my client informed and calm. Together, we worked around issues.

[12]. I delivered and hosted the solution. Did some extra bits to increase the quality of car scans (like manual cleanup).

[13]. We onboard early adopters.

[14]. Investors understand and are excited by the solution.

[15]. Investment money arrives in my client's bank account.

I appreciate some of the above doesn't sound scalable. I also appreciate that it sounds unconventional (like using WhatsApp group chat with clients). But they worked for me.

Thanks for reading!

p.s, my company is https://llume.co, you can find a more in-depth case study there - see "Carvatar"