What is the best way to build a customer base for a creative services business?

Are you a professional?

(I assume you'll say that you are)

As such, you deserve to be paid for your service and skill.

Rather than offer your services for free, focus your efforts on understanding the need of your big-brand clients. You can underpromise and over deliver without sacrificing the value of your product.

By deeply discounting, or offering your service for free, you actually come off as an amateur who doesn't deserve (or believe in) your rate.

You deserve better.

Instead of dropping your price, consider adding more deliverables.

Discounting tends to show desperation.

The biggest problem I see tech people having is getting enough prospects to talk to.

You cannot simply hang out your shingle and expect the world to beat a path to your door. And it's kind of worse than that: you have to spend MORE time than you thought to get those clients.

http://www.salestactics.org/how-much-time-should-you-spend-prospecting/

In the beginning, three-quarters of your time! That's 6 hours a day. Most people are spending perhaps 2 hours a WEEK so is it a shock that most businesses fail so soon?

And I'm talking about real conversations with qualified prospects here, not posting on Facebook or twiddling around with your website.

I can help you put a plan together.

This may not be what you want to hear but you MUST go try to sell it prior to launching it. I've launched a couple serviced based businesses before and the difference between success and failure is having around 4-5 PAID customers prior to the official launch day.

Do get 4-5 I would reach out directly to LinkedIn contacts you think would be good fits and pitch them the idea. Try to avoid friends and family as much as possible.

Also, remember that anything but a hard yes is a hard no. What does that mean? It means if someone says 'how much is it so I can sign up' or 'can I sign up now' that's a yes. If someone says 'yeah, sounds like a good idea' or 'wow, some people would really love that', those are no's. Do your best to get 4-5 yes's prior to launching. That way you know your idea is validated and maybe you can get some good testimonials for marketing purposes.

Good luck!