# How to Get Your First Clients in New Zealand With No Case Studies

Source: https://www.lucidmedia.co.nz/blog/how-to-get-first-clients-nz-no-case-studies/

Business

No results to show yet? Here are the seven proof substitutes that actually close New Zealand clients, and the two risk reversals worth offering.

[Jason Poonia](https://www.lucidmedia.co.nz/blog/how-to-get-first-clients-nz-no-case-studies/#author) | 11 September 2026 | 12 min read

![How to Get Your First Clients in New Zealand With No Case Studies](https://www.lucidmedia.co.nz/images/blog/how-to-get-first-clients-nz-no-case-studies-featured.webp)

You get your first clients in New Zealand by replacing results with certainty. Show the buyer exactly what they will receive, how you will produce it, what it costs, when it lands, and what happens if it goes wrong. A specific, documented, small first engagement closes without a single case study behind it.

That is the whole answer. The rest of this post is the mechanics.

## The Thing You Think You Are Selling Is Not the Thing They Are Buying

Nobody hires a supplier because of somebody else’s results. They hire because they believe a specific outcome will arrive, on a timeline they can live with, for money they can justify to whoever asks.

Case studies are one way to create that belief. They are not the only way, and for a lot of buyers they are not even the strongest one. A case study is proof of what happened to someone else. A precise scope document is proof of what will happen to them.

When I started out in 2018 I had nothing to show either. What I had was the ability to describe, in unusual detail, what I was going to build and why. That is a transferable skill. Here is how to use it.

## Seven Things to Show Instead of Results

### 1\. A Deliverables List Specific Enough to Be a Contract

Most new operators pitch a service. “SEO.” “Web design.” “Social media management.” The buyer hears a category, not a product, and prices it against the cheapest version of that category they have ever heard of.

Write the list instead. Not “a new website”, but nineteen pages, three service pages, a repayment calculator, a multi-step form, GA4 and conversion tracking, a 301 redirect map. A buyer reading that list can picture the invoice being worth it. A buyer reading “web design” is guessing.

It is the cheapest change on this list and the one that moves price the most. An afternoon of writing, and you stop being compared to the cheapest version of your category.

### 2\. A Documented Process

If you cannot show what you have done, show how you work. A named, written sequence with stages, inputs and outputs does two things at once: it tells the buyer you have thought about this before today, and it gives them something to hold you to.

It does not need a clever name. It needs to be real, written down, and the same every time. “We have a process for this, here it is” is quiet competence in one sentence.

### 3\. A Public Teardown of Their Actual Setup

This is the strongest substitute on the list and almost nobody does it properly.

Before the call, go through the prospect’s own website, ads account, Google Business Profile or checkout, and find three specific, checkable problems. Not “your site could be faster”. Their contact form posts nowhere. Their tracking fires on page load so every conversion number they have is wrong. Their top-selling product page has no title tag.

You are not proving you got results for someone else. You are proving you can see things they cannot, in their business, today. Demonstrated diagnosis beats reported results, because the buyer can verify it themselves while you are still talking.

### 4\. A Small Piece of the Real Work, Done in Advance

Give away a diagnosis, never the delivery. A one-page audit, a wireframe of their homepage above the fold, a keyword map, a sample ad set. Something that took you two hours and demonstrates the standard of the thing they would be paying for.

The distinction that matters: you are showing the quality of your work, not doing the job for free. The moment the free thing becomes the actual deliverable, you have taught the buyer that your work is worth nothing and you will negotiate from there forever.

### 5\. Borrowed Credibility

You have less of this than you think and more than you use. Your qualifications and previous employment. A platform certification. An industry body membership. Two people who will take a reference call, even if they were colleagues rather than clients. A partner who does the thing you do not.

Say plainly what is yours and what is borrowed. A buyer who catches you inflating a reference stops believing everything else on the page, and under New Zealand law that is not just a trust problem (more on that below).

### 6\. Scope, Timeline and Price in Writing Before They Ask

Most New Zealand small-business owners have been burned by a supplier who went quiet. Ambiguity is the thing they are actually afraid of, and it is free for you to remove.

Put the start date, the review points, the handover date and the payment schedule in the proposal. State what is out of scope. State what you need from them and by when, because the most common cause of a late project is a client who never sent the content.

### 7\. A Risk Reversal You Can Actually Honour

Offer to carry some of the downside yourself, in writing, and the buyer stops needing your history to feel safe. This one gets its own section, because it is also where new operators get themselves into legal trouble.

## Key Takeaways

- Buyers are not buying evidence of past results. They are buying confidence that a specific outcome will arrive, which is why a precise scope closes deals that an empty portfolio would not.
- The strongest proof substitute is a teardown of the prospect’s own setup, with three specific faults they can verify while you are on the call.
- Free work is a losing move. A small, paid, tightly scoped first engagement with a money-back clause does the same job and keeps your pricing intact.
- Risk reversals are legally binding claims in New Zealand. Consumer Protection states a trader must “have reasonable grounds to make a claim about a product or service at the time they make the claim”.
- Your first client is your first case study. Agree the measurement and the write-up permission before the work starts, not after.

## Two Risk Reversals Worth Offering, and the Rule That Governs Both

A risk reversal moves the downside from the buyer to you. With no track record, it is often the sentence that gets the deal signed.

**The money-back clause on a small first engagement.** A tightly scoped piece of work, fully refundable if they are unhappy at handover. It works because the scope is small enough that a refund does not sink you, and because most buyers never claim it.

**The exit-at-any-time retainer for the first term.** No lock-in for the first two or three months. You are betting on the work being good enough that they stay, which is a bet worth making if you are any good.

Both of these are promises, and in New Zealand a promise made to win business is regulated. The Fair Trading Act prohibits unsubstantiated representations, and [Consumer Protection puts the test as needing “reasonable grounds to make a claim about a product or service at the time they make the claim”](https://www.consumerprotection.govt.nz/general-help/consumer-laws/fair-trading-act), adding that a trader breaches the Act if they “make a claim they can’t back up with evidence, even if it later turns out to be true”.

Read that second half again, because it is the trap for a new business. “It turned out fine” is not a defence. If you promise page-one rankings because you assume you can deliver them, the assumption itself is the breach.

The cost of getting this wrong is about to rise sharply. The Commerce Commission has said that under the strengthened Act, [“maximum fines for businesses will increase from $600,000 to $5 million”](https://www.comcom.govt.nz/news-and-media/news-and-events/2025/stronger-fair-trading-act-a-win-for-consumers-and-rule-abiding-businesses/), with changes expected to take effect by late 2026.

So the practical rule is simple. Guarantee the things inside your control, in writing, and nothing else. You control your process, your timeline, your revision rounds and your refund policy. You do not control Google’s algorithm, a competitor’s ad budget, or how fast the client answers emails. Promise the first list. Never the second.

This is general information, not legal advice. Get your own before you put a guarantee in a contract.

## What We Show When There Is No Track Record

We hit this problem on behalf of clients, not just at the start of our own business. Two of the builds in our [case studies](https://www.lucidmedia.co.nz/case-studies/) were for businesses that did not exist yet.

[Tillen Finance](https://www.lucidmedia.co.nz/case-studies/tillen-finance/) is a vehicle finance brokerage. A brand-new brokerage has no borrower reviews and no track record of placed deals, so the site had to create certainty some other way. We built it as a working machine rather than a brochure: three loan service pages, an interactive repayment calculator, a pre-approval landing page on its own subdomain, and a full multi-step credit application with a supporting-documents step. Every form posts to a custom endpoint that creates the lead in Pipedrive with UTM and click ID attribution, and falls back to email capture if the CRM is unreachable so an outage never swallows an enquiry.

[Cabin Funders](https://www.lucidmedia.co.nz/case-studies/cabin-funders/) is a specialist lender for transportable cabins and tiny homes, financing $20,000 to $250,000 against the cabin itself. New brand, niche category, and a product most buyers have never heard of. The centrepiece is a repayment estimator built on our own amortisation library, modelling capitalised fees, the monthly admin fee and the optional 40% balloon payment, with the maths unit-tested in Vitest so every indicative figure a borrower sees is correct. Compliance is engineered into the code, with a single rate-disclosure constant so the monthly rate never appears without its annual equivalent.

Neither site opened with results, because there were none. Both opened with mechanism: here is exactly what this product does, here is the number, here is the maths behind the number. That is the same move a new consultant makes on a sales call, built into software.

## Turn the First Job Into the Case Study Before You Start It

The reason most people are still saying “I have no case studies” after five clients is that they treated the first five as work rather than as evidence.

Fix that on job one. Before anything starts, agree three things in writing: the baseline numbers as they stand today, the specific metric you will both judge the work by, and permission to publish the outcome with the client named or anonymised. Screenshot the baseline yourself, because analytics access disappears and memories drift.

Then measure on a fixed date, write it up within a fortnight while the detail is fresh, and send it to the client for approval. A short, honest, specific write-up of one job is worth more than a page of adjectives, and it is the asset that makes client two easier and client ten straightforward.

If you would rather build demand than chase it one conversation at a time, an [online assessment or diagnostic tool](https://www.lucidmedia.co.nz/blog/how-to-generate-high-quality-leads-for-your-nz-business-using-online-assessments/) does the teardown at scale, and our [New Zealand digital marketing budget guide](https://www.lucidmedia.co.nz/blog/digital-marketing-budget-nz-2026-guide/) covers what to spend while you are still small. If you want a second opinion on how you are positioned, that is what our [digital strategy work](https://www.lucidmedia.co.nz/services/digital-strategy/) is for.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do you get your first client?

Pick one narrow type of buyer, find twenty of them, and give each a specific, checkable observation about their own business before you pitch anything. The first client almost always comes from a warm or semi-warm connection who had a problem you noticed out loud. Cold volume works later, once you have a message that has already closed someone.

### How do you get clients with no portfolio?

Replace the portfolio with specificity: an itemised deliverables list, a written process, a teardown of the prospect’s current setup, and a scope with dates and a refund clause. Buyers accept a new supplier when the risk of getting it wrong is small and the description of what arrives is unusually clear.

### What is the 3-3-3 rule for marketing?

It is a common attention-span heuristic: you have three seconds to earn a look, three more to hold interest, and three minutes to make the case. Treat it as a structure prompt rather than a law, because it circulates without a primary source attached and the exact numbers vary by whoever is repeating it. The useful part is the sequence, which is that your first line has to be about the reader’s problem, not your credentials.

### Should you work for free to get your first client?

No. Give away diagnosis, charge for delivery. A free audit, teardown or sample costs you a couple of hours and demonstrates your standard. Free delivery sets your price at zero, attracts buyers who were never going to pay, and makes the paid conversation later much harder than it needed to be. A small paid engagement with a money-back clause reverses the same risk without the damage.

### How do you get your first 100 clients?

Not the same way you get your first ten. The first ten come from relationships and manual outreach, the next thirty from referrals and the case studies you finally built, and the rest from a repeatable acquisition system: a site that converts, [demand capture](https://www.lucidmedia.co.nz/blog/demand-generation-vs-demand-capture-nz/) through search, and a follow-up process that does not depend on you remembering. We have shipped 200+ projects since 2018 and the shift from manual to systematic is the hardest part, mostly because the manual version works just well enough to keep doing it too long.

Written by

### Jason Poonia

Jason Poonia is the founder and Managing Director of Lucid Media, helping New Zealand businesses grow online since 2018. With over 7 years delivering results for clients across New Zealand and internationally, Jason combines technical expertise with proven marketing strategies to help businesses attract more customers and build scalable systems. Background in Computer Science from the University of Auckland.

[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonpoonia/) [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/jason.poonia/)