Lancer (AI Agent for Upwork Bidding)

01The full story

Ivan is a builder from Macedonia. For five years he ran MB Masters, a software development agency that did over seven figures and grew to almost 20 full-time employees. Its main client acquisition channel was Upwork — which he calls a very underrated source of quality leads. The pain was arithmetic. Around 200,000 jobs are posted on Upwork each month, spread across all 24 hours of the day. It takes roughly 10 minutes to qualify a job and write a personalised proposal for it. So a human either misses most of the good jobs or burns their week on bidding. Ivan's read: "this seemed like a perfect case where an agent would outperform a human in this task by like 10 times or even more." He built the first version himself over a weekend as an internal tool for the agency. It crushed for them. He then ran a small beta with friends who were also agency owners. Between them, those beta users closed three five-figure clients within two weeks of using the tool. That was the signal. He rebuilt it as a real product over the following three months and launched it standalone as Lancer. Lancer hit $10,000 a month in the third or fourth month after launching, with zero paid ads. On camera Ivan frames the whole thing as a side project running alongside a profitable agency — which is both why he could afford a patient distribution strategy and why the tool existed at all. His closing regret is worth reading if you are sitting on a profitable services business. He says he delayed jumping into products to optimise for income and financial security, and now thinks that was the wrong call, because the skills you learn building and growing software "would be worth more than any income you can generate in a year or two."