I run a video production company — we're five years old and will have 30 employees by June, entirely bootstrapped. I think the best thing is literally the following for the first three years:

1. Handpick 100 of the best companies you'd like to provide video production services to.

2. The companies could relate to a domain you have knowledge, expertise or interest in; let's pick real estate as an example.

3. Craft highly specific outreach to each real estate company you'd like to work with, and ensure that you reach out to a marketing manager, or head of marketing via Linkedin instead of emailing the company email address (i.e don't send your crafted email to hello@realestatecompany.com). It needs to be a specific person and you must put the work in to find them. A premium Linkedin Sales Navigator can do this well, but there are also less expensive tools out there.

4. You'll get responses, so then it's a matter of doing a smaller, faster project to gain trust with your prospect. After that, you'd be surprised how much yield you can get out of a prospect that has a highly recurring business model; real-estate is one such example.

If you're after a cheap way to gain leads, this is it. A founder can do it with pure sweat, and even with paid sales people, I've found the CPAs to be unbelievably cheap when compared to the high LTVs of video production services.

Lastly, I would 100% localise to your state or county and then expand out once there's no more good prospects that you can find. It will be easier for a marketing manager to justify if you're in closer proximity to them; remember they're spending $1000+ at least, so the closer the better.

Lastly, you need to go all-in on a website that plays all your videos; size of portfolio and quality of portfolio matters. You can see an example of our video production company's folio here: https://vidico.com/our-videos/?industry=&type=#our-videos

Hope that helps!