We spoke with Thibault Garcia, founder of Reachly, about his journey from six months of silence on Fiverr to building one of Southeast Asia’s leading lead generation agencies—and how choosing the right client portal helped him scale a productized service across six countries with wildly different markets.
Every lead generation agency claims they’re different. Most aren’t. They use the same tools, target the same markets, and compete on the same LinkedIn battlefield.
Thibault Garcia found his edge by doing what most founders avoid: targeting the hard market. APAC had far lower LinkedIn penetration, limited data coverage, and wildly different business cultures. Most agencies would’ve passed. He built a six-figure agency precisely because of those constraints.
Here’s how he turned APAC’s difficulty into a moat—and why SPP.co became the operational backbone that let him productize services across six wildly different markets without losing flexibility.
From crickets to proof
Before quitting his corporate job at Agoda, Thibault needed to answer one critical question: would anyone actually pay for lead generation in a market where most businesses still relied on referrals and personal networks?
His proof-of-concept strategy was unconventional: list services on Fiverr and see what happens. Low overhead, built-in traffic, and no need to build an entire agency infrastructure first.
The first six months? Crickets.
“I didn’t get any order,” Thibault admits. “And at some point it just took off.”
What surprised him most was what people were willing to pay for. He wasn’t running sophisticated campaigns—just basic LinkedIn automation using Dripify and Sales Navigator. Nothing fancy. Yet clients loved the results.
People were willing to pay for it, thought that it was amazing because it worked straight away. And I was like, man, okay, I see there’s a lot of value behind this.
Thibault Garcia,
Reachly
As tools like Clay emerged, requiring more technical expertise, the barrier to entry was rising. Companies that weren’t tech-savvy had no way to run these campaigns themselves. The combination of high perceived value and increasing technical complexity told Thibault everything he needed to know.
There was room for an agency, especially in a region where competition was thin.
Customer concentration & cash flow chaos
Validating the business model on Fiverr was one thing. Building a sustainable agency while keeping a day job was something else entirely.
Thibault launched Reachly on the side of his corporate role, giving himself runway before taking the full leap. Smart in theory. Brutal in practice.
The problem with starting small and bootstrapped? Every client loss is catastrophic.
“When you start and you’re small, when you lose a client you lose like 20, 30% of your top line,” Thibault explains. “[…] and that’s when you try and grow on the side and you’re bootstrapped in the first place you don’t have any capital it’s very challenging.”
One month you’re convinced you’re failing. The next month ten new clients sign and you’re scrambling to hire.
“I’ve had some months where I was like, oh well, I think this might be it,” Thibault admits. “And then the next month you’re like, oh okay, there’s like 10 new clients that come in and you just have a new team member.”
The key was accepting the volatility as part of the game rather than a sign of failure. “It’s a lot of ups and downs, it’s really quite a ride,” he notes.
Standing out in a crowded market
Ask any agency founder what makes them different and you’ll get a carefully rehearsed pitch about proprietary methodologies and game-changing processes. Thibault’s answer cuts through the noise.
Everyone likes to say that they’re different. To me, I very often start my sales calls by saying we’re not so different because we’re not building rockets, right? Even if we were, at the end of the day all rockets are pretty much the same.
Thibault Garcia,
Reachly
So what actually sets Reachly apart? Four things that matter:
Geographic coverage across APAC markets: Most agencies stick to Singapore or Hong Kong. Reachly runs campaigns across Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Australia simultaneously.
Multilingual SDRs: SDRs that pretty much do an appointment setting job that are able to do that job in multiple local languages.
Clay-powered personalization: Hyper-personalized sequences using enrichment data instead of generic templates. “Every message we send is unique depending on them, their background, and whatever the trigger is,” Thibault notes.
Bangkok-based pricing: Operating out of Thailand means charging roughly half what US or European Clay agencies charge for the same quality work.
None of these are revolutionary. But by niching down geographically while competitors focused on service differentiation, they combined to create something genuinely hard to replicate—multi-country operations with multilingual teams that most agencies aren't willing to build.
On paper, these advantages seemed clear. In practice, the APAC market had other plans.
Why nobody else tried APAC
Those advantages Thibault identified? They came with a brutal flip side that became obvious fast.
“When I launched the agency in APAC I thought I was a genius. I was like, oh man, no one thought about this, I’m gonna—this is gonna be amazing,” he laughs. “And I think a couple months into it I was like, oh that’s why no one launched an agency in APAC.”
The problems hit immediately. Language barriers made standard templates useless. Thailand operates in Thai. Indonesia in Bahasa. Even English-speaking markets like Singapore vary wildly based on seniority and industry.
But the real killer was data scarcity. LinkedIn penetration in APAC is a fraction of Western markets, and since most data providers ultimately pull from LinkedIn, the leads simply don’t exist at scale.
“You do that search in the US, you have 180,000 people that is relevant,” Thibault explains. “You do that search across APAC, you maybe have like 3,000 people.”
That’s sixty times smaller. This forced Reachly to operate more like ABM—going deep within target companies rather than broad outreach across thousands of prospects.
Most agencies would’ve pivoted. Thibault saw the constraint as a moat.
Saying no to most prospects
With the market challenges clear, Reachly couldn’t afford to work with just anyone. The margins were too tight and the data constraints too real to waste time on clients who wouldn’t succeed.
“We have benchmarks, right?” Thibault explains. “We know if we send 10,000 emails, what’s going to be the result from it. But I think a lot of the work is done uphill in the sales cycle.”
The qualification checklist became ruthless: total addressable market needs to be large enough despite APAC’s data limitations. Clients must have existing social proof and case studies. They need real authority in their space. And the ticket size has to justify the effort.
We want to make sure that if we sign them X, Y, Z amount of deals, they’re going to be way over in terms of return on investment,
Thibault Garcia,
Reachly
If Reachly delivers three meetings but the client’s product costs $500, those three deals don’t cover the agency fee—let alone prove value.
“If they don’t have that, we typically won’t sign them because we know it’s going to be much harder to get them any results.”
Certain industries get automatic rejections. If the service is too commoditized or hard to differentiate from competitors, Reachly passes regardless of how eager the prospect seems.
The approach flipped the typical agency mindset. Instead of chasing every lead, Thibault shows prospects the worst-case scenario. “Here is the worst case scenario, here’s the lowest amount of actual meetings I’m going to deliver you—would you be okay with that number?”
If they say no, the conversation ends. No pressure tactics, no promises of miraculous results. Just honest math about what’s realistic given the market constraints.
This selectivity became the foundation for everything else. You can’t build a scalable, productized service if half your clients are destined to fail.
This qualification-first approach inverts the typical agency client acquisition process—instead of chasing leads, Reachly ensures every prospect is set up for success before signing.
How SPP.co scaled custom packages
As Reachly scaled across six countries, Thibault needed a system that could handle standardization without killing flexibility. SPP.co solved the client-facing side—custom packages, branded onboarding, payment processing—all in one place.
“What’s great with SPP.co is that it allows us to customize plan and names of plan and pretty much the entire onboarding process in one place across all of our clients and all of our offerings,” he explains. “And also it’s great because it allows us to keep that part of the process fully on brand.”
For campaign delivery, they went a different route: Slack channels instead of tickets.
The reasoning is structural. “If we were a SaaS, definitely tickets would work well because it’s always one customer, one person handling the ticket request,” Thibault notes. “But because we are a productized service agency and we have multiple people involved behind the deliverables, Slack’s been working a lot better for us.”
Here’s the bottleneck tickets create: A typical Reachly campaign involves multiple specialists working simultaneously—audience building in Clay, copywriting sequences, campaign management in Lemlist, and SDR nurturing. Tickets force linear handoffs where each person waits for the previous step to close.
Slack channels let the team coordinate in real-time. Copy needs validation? Three people weigh in immediately. Client reply needs SDR follow-up? The handoff happens in minutes, not ticket queues.
The split is clean: SPP.co productizes the front-end, Slack handles the messy reality of multi-person execution. Each tool does one thing well.
No shortcuts on culture
Reachly’s marketing runs on Thibault’s personal brand. His LinkedIn content drives leads. He handles every sales call. It’s 100% founder-led.
“The personal brand that I have is at the center of pretty much everything that happens on the marketing side of things and is behind a lot of the sales that we are generating for the company.”
The process itself is straightforward: discovery call, custom proposal, payment link through SPP.co. But here’s where most agencies screw up—they treat every market the same.
“It would be great if I could have an option of like, hey, here’s the link, just sign up,” Thibault admits. “But I also feel that’s a bit of a challenge in Asia—not every culture is the same.”
What works in the US fails spectacularly elsewhere. American style is direct: “John, you want this? Here’s a link, just sign and pay.” Try that with a Singaporean company or a Thai business owner and you’ll get ghosted.
“People have different procurement processes. We work a lot with the UAE as well. So yeah, I don’t think that’s an approach that really would work for us.”
After the call, Thibault sends the payment link and waits. The downside? Chasing a lot of people who said yes but disappear. The upside? Respecting how different cultures make purchasing decisions.
It’s slower than the typical productized agency playbook. But it’s the only way that works when you’re selling across borders.
3 tools doing the heavy lifting
Ask Thibault what tools power Reachly and you get three answers immediately: Notion, Clay, and Lemlist.
“We run everything on Notion as our client knowledge base, that’s why we do project management, that’s why we do a lot of stuff,” he explains. It’s the central nervous system keeping seven team members aligned across 50+ client campaigns.
But Clay is the real differentiator.
“Clay is the best sales tech tool in the world. It allows you to do pretty much anything and everything when it comes to go-to-market strategy from time mapping to segmenting audiences to pushing things to campaign to writing custom messaging to enriching your leads.”
Within Clay, Reachly uses over 30 APIs across four categories: six email enrichment providers for higher match rates, multiple LLM integrations for message personalization, verification tools to maintain sender reputation, and scraping APIs for data that LinkedIn doesn’t have. That’s what enables the hyper-personalization they sell on. Generic templates don’t work in APAC markets. Clay makes custom messaging possible at scale.
Lemlist handles the actual campaign sequencing—emails, LinkedIn connection requests, follow-ups. It’s the delivery mechanism for everything Clay builds.
The stack is lean. Three core platforms plus SPP.co for client-facing operations. No bloat, no redundant tools. Just what’s needed to run hyper-personalized campaigns across six countries without the team drowning in manual work.
Results and lessons for agency founders
Eighteen months after going full-time, Reachly has seven team members, has served 50+ clients, and is heading toward $1M ARR. They’ve expanded into LinkedIn ghostwriting services and are one of the only Clay-certified agencies in Southeast Asia.
Those numbers validate everything Thibault bet on: the APAC market gap was real, the data constraints could be overcome with better tools, and productized services work even in markets with wildly different cultures—a pattern other successful agency founders have discovered when building for difficult segments.
For founders looking at similar paths, Thibault’s advice is tactical:
Get proof of concept first: Work with 2–3 great clients that have strong social proof and existing case studies. Don’t try to save struggling businesses—you need wins, not charity cases.
Test the model on the side: Thibault kept his corporate job until Reachly had enough runway. The safety net gave him time to figure things out without panic.
Offboard operations early: Once you’ve proven the model works, hire people to handle delivery so you can focus on sales and growth.
The pattern is clear: validate carefully, scale deliberately, and don't mistake early struggles for failure. These steps follow a proven framework for scaling productized services—standardize what works, then systematically offboard operations to focus on growth. Six months of crickets on Fiverr could've stopped everything. Instead, it was just the beginning.
Closing thoughts
Reachly’s story challenges the conventional wisdom that lead generation is a saturated market. It is—if you’re only looking at the US and Europe. But zoom out and entire regions remain underserved, waiting for someone willing to deal with the complexity.
What stands out isn’t just that Thibault found a gap. It’s that he treated every constraint as a filter for competition. Limited data? Use Clay to enrich what’s available. Language barriers? Hire multilingual SDRs. Cultural differences? Adapt the sales process instead of forcing American playbooks onto Asian markets.
The tool choices mattered too, and the decision to build on SPP.co proved critical. Most agencies either stay fully custom (can’t scale) or go rigid productized (can’t adapt to different markets). SPP.co gave Reachly both: standardized client-facing operations with the flexibility to customize packages for Thai vs. Singaporean vs. UAE clients—all while maintaining brand consistency across six countries; Clay enabled personalization at scale; Lemlist handled multi-channel sequencing. Each tool did one thing well rather than forcing everything through a single platform.
The roadmap is clear, but here’s where to start: pick the hardest market segment in your niche. The one everyone avoids because the data’s messy, the sales process is slower, or the cultural differences feel insurmountable. That difficulty? It’s your moat.
