Lee Betts

I Built The World's Largest B2B Lead Generation Agency Here's what agency owners don't want you to know.. In 2026, you can't pay a lead gen agency and acquire customers profitably I helped over 2,500 B2B companies generate over £1B in sales pipeline, across 62 industries in 20+ countries Then in 2025, I shut it down Why did I shut down a business that: ✅ Operated successfully for 8 years ✅ Generated £1B+ in sales pipeline for 2,500+ clients (more than any other B2B lead gen agency globally) ✅ Did £1.5m in revenue last year ✅ I was offered £1.2m to sell last year (Yeh okay, that last one hurt) Here's why.. The cost of generating leads for B2B companies has gone through the roof I couldn't charge my clients to run campaigns, and also get them a good return on their investment The cost to generate a lead for your business is determined by how much your competitors are willing to bid for the same leads. If your competitor does it in-house, and spends £1,250 to acquire a customer that cost you £2,500 to acquire using an agency, your competitor can charge less for the same service, and eat your lunch. The ROI in B2B marketing in no longer big enough for you to get a good return and pay an agency to do the work for you To scale your business profitably, you need to do it in-house But generating B2B leads at scale is hard.. You have to spend tens of thousands on each channel to figure out what works and what doesn't. Even then, you have to get 10+ things right for a channel to perform. Set up one thing incorrectly, and your whole campaign can flop, and you may have no idea why Not only that, but AI has changed the game. What worked 3 years ago may be obsolete now. Running my agency, I personally spent 7-figures testing every channel extensively, to figure out exactly what works and what doesn't. When AI came along, I invested 6-figures into integrating AI into every facet of our marketing funnels to beat the competition. No longer do you need to pay an SDR £30k a year to do deep research on every prospect before you reach out to them. You can now get AI to go to the website and LinkedIn profile of every prospect in your target market and write personalised content that you can use in your marketing outreach. Not only is AI better at doing it than a human, it's insanely fast and cheap. I got it to write personalised outreach messages for 5,000 prospects. It completed the task in just a few hours, and cost me $0.19. I have also seen inside the marketing machines of 2,500 different B2B companies, in every sector imaginable. That gave me a unique insight into exactly how to generate leads at scale, and how to use AI to beat the market. I built a repeatable playbook that I personally used to: ✅ Generate £1B in sales pipeline for 2,500+ B2B companies across 62 industries in 20+ countries ✅ Book 3,000 sales demos for my own sales team in 12 months ✅ Scale five agencies that I founded/co-founded ✅ Build my personal holdco Now, for the first time ever, I'm now sharing that exact repeatable system with the world If you want to learn how to scale your B2B business fast, check out the link in my bio

@samdblond @grok how does Monaco actually do the outreach? Cold email? LinkedIn? Something else? If it’s cold email, does it send from your main domain? Or create domains & inboxes to send from?

We're launching Monaco today. Monaco automates customer acquisition and revenue growth for startups. The platform disrupting sales with AI has finally arrived.

A few years ago, I got my IG growth agency to $10,000/mo doing exactly what Hormozi says: Blocking off half my day and doing as much outreach as possible. More here:

You either use Mercury, or should. @immad @mercury

I got our first 10 customers by absolutely ramming outbound every waking hour. As I explain below, this also comes with an unintended consequence😂

$100,000/mo is a lot easier when you just copy a business doing $1,000,000/mo. Selling brand new solutions is a deathtrap for your bank account.

@NickAbraham12 Listen to the full podcast episode on Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0kaZ7S…

@Shvtwts @NickAbraham12 @grok Today I learned I an an AI-generated avatar 😆

@NickAbraham12 @grok who are these guys

Yesterday I tweeted a super useful free resource to my 1,510 followers The tweet got 26 impressions Similar tweets were getting me hundreds of likes this time last year What is up with the X algo?

I interviewed @IndianAppGuy to find out how he bootstrapped his way to 7 profitable SaaS businesses Had so much fun recording this episode Check it out if you want to learn how to bootstrap a SaaS company to $10k/m and beyond Available on YouTube, Spotify & Apple Podcasts Link in bio #bootstrappedheroes

@IndianAppGuy Listen Here: leebetts.com/podcasts/boots…

@organicbond This is exactly wrong. I tested it for 6 month. Here’s what actually works…

growing from 0 followers is for people who hate money we made $23K with ZERO posts... Trying to grow from 0 followers feels impossible... Until you realize you don't need your own audience Here's the method: Instead of creating content, start hijacking attention from people who already have it Turn on notifications for 20 huge accounts in your niche. The second they post, drop a controversial response: "This is exactly wrong. I tested this for 6 months. Here's what actually works..." The key: be early + be controversial + provide value Their million views become your million views. People click your profile to see who's contradicting their favorite guru In the bio: one link to your highest-converting offer Test this for 30 days: - 0 original posts - 300 strategic comments - 52 sales - $23K revenue Three clients replicated this. Similar results every time The hosts don't care. Comments boost their engagement. Everyone wins Except the people still trying to grow "authentically"

People talk of applying the 80/20 principle to their work Here's a real example I came in to 37 tasks on my to do list today Each one of them something that will improve my business and help me sell more But the outcome of each is not equal If I'd spent 2 minutes doing just one of the tasks (increasing the number of cold emails I'm sending), instead of 8 hours getting all of the tasks done, I'd very likely have seen basically the same increase in sales with 99% less work You have to identify which activities are providing the majority of the outcomes, and double down on them Most everything else is just noise

THIS 👇 Amazing how hard it is to not try to innovate on an idea though. But as soon as you do, you might accidentally remove the ingredient that made it work.

@RetentionAdam If AI genuinely ran your business for 7 days, did it also do all of the marketing? Yet to see a company let go of the wheel on the marketing front

In April, we switched all customer interactions to AI. Then a few months later, AI ran our entire $6.6M ARR business alone for 7 days. 0 humans around. Sales: 176 conversations initiated with a 96.6% accuracy. Only 6 wrong answers total. Support: 248 conversations with an 89% total resolution. By telling people humans weren’t there, another 13% solved their own problems. Conversations: 425 free signups with 47 converting to paying. Customer Issues: 0 material problems went unresolved. Revenue: +4% month over month to $5.96M ARR. The AI agents didn’t sleep, need a break, call in sick, or have a bad day. RB2B grew faster than we had in months. Our goal is to prove $10M ARR is possible with just 3 FTEs. If we can do it with 3 people, why can’t you?

@alexcooldev This is such a bad take People don’t buy brand new businesses, let alone by them for a 6x multiple

If a $20k MRR app can really sell for ~$1.4M… Then the playbook becomes obvious: Build 4–5 products → exit → put everything into the S&P 500. Monthly returns, zero stress, no meetings, no deadlines. Just ships → exits → dividends. Honestly… this might be the simplest path to freedom.

@thejustinwelsh Makes it harder to break through the noise for those of us who have actually built 7-figure businesses Same goes for cold outreach. It the 99 people doing badly with a terrible offer that make it harder for that one person with a great offer to get attention

The people posting AI-generated business advice are the same people who never built anything real. Expertise you can't fake is solving the same problem 100 times until you know every way it breaks.

If I were 18 years old with $1k in the bank and wanted to make $10k/month in the next 90 days, here's exactly what I'd do: Find something I'm good at Productise it Throw up a one website using Gemini Send 50k cold emails Sit 50+ calls Close 5-10 clients at $2k/m

Only those that have run meta ads will understand the true pain

I just finished creating the $10k-$200k MRR Blueprint It's everything I learned from scaling my agency from $10k to $200k MRR Everything I wish I had known 10 years ago - Delegation - Hiring - Incentives - Systems - Lead gen - AI - Focus Follow + Retweet + Reply “200k” and I’ll send it (Must follow for dm)

@AzharDataDrift Want to come on the Bootstrapped Heroes pod to tell your story?

We just crossed $20k MRR with Usermaven — fully bootstrapped. The road here was anything but smooth. We burned money in the wrong channels, chased the wrong personas, built the wrong things, and nearly derailed the product twice. If you're building a SaaS with a small team, here are the 7 mistakes that almost killed us — and the lessons that saved us 👇 1. Burning money on ads that never converted We poured thousands into Google Ads early on, thinking paid search would jumpstart growth. Reality check: - CPCs were brutal - Competing with VC-backed giants was impossible - Conversions were almost zero Paid ads didn’t fix our unclear positioning — they only magnified it. Ads work only when your organic engine already works. Our real growth came from SEO and word of mouth. 2. Building every feature people asked for We were drowning in requests: - Heatmaps - Session recordings - Surveys All tempting… all distracting. These features would've slowly turned us into a generic analytics suite. But Usermaven's mission is clear: Attribution + product insights for marketers, agencies, and brands. The hardest part of product isn’t shipping, it’s saying no to seductive distractions. 3. Own your infra from day 1. Usermaven processes millions of data events daily. On AWS/GCP pricing, our margins would've evaporated. So we took the uncomfortable route: switching to bare metal. The result: - Lower costs - Higher performance - Predictable margins If you're in analytics, cloud convenience becomes a silent killer. Own your infra before it owns you. 4. Undercharging hurt us more than it helped We started with low pricing to “make it easier” for customers to join. But low prices brought: - hobby users - uncommitted trials - constant support demands - high churn When we raised prices 3×, everything improved: - higher retention - better-fit customers - more agencies - more serious marketers Pricing is a filter. Cheap pricing brings cheap commitment. 5. Falling for the “big prospect” trap Several big leads told us: “If you build this one feature, we’ll move everything to Usermaven.” - We trusted them. - We built it. - They ghosted. Every. Single. Time. Never build custom features on a promise. If they won’t pay upfront, it isn’t real. 6. Trying to serve everyone destroyed our clarity We tried targeting: - SaaS teams - PMs - Marketers - Bloggers - Agencies - E-commerce brands It confused our messaging and confused our customers even more. Things changed only when we focused on the people who actually felt attribution pain: performance marketers, growth teams, agencies, and data-focused brands. Positioning is subtraction. Clarity beats versatility. 7. Believing great code was enough As engineers, we tried to avoid sales. We thought a great product would magically sell itself. Wrong. B2B is: - trust - relationships - follow-ups - guidance Once we embraced sales, everything changed, faster deals, clearer feedback, lower churn. If we restarted today, we’d bring sales in on day one. These lessons were expensive, painful, and humbling, but they shaped the business we have today. If you’re building something of your own, I hope this helps you skip a few of the scars.