How to Make Money in 6 Easy Steps

Please don't hold the "6 easy steps" part against me. Easy steps anything makes me cringe.

I think customers liked it because it made them feel like they just got smarter (smart enough to make an informed purchase).

The other thing I used to do all the time that worked great was suggesting to hesitant customers (understandable since I was asking them to buy $300 sunglasses in Washington State) that they take a couple of laps around the mall, get an Orange Julius, and think about it. Most of the time they would think for a second, walk out the door, and walk back in about 30 seconds later to purchase the sunglasses.

My approach was logic. I would spend as much time as was necessary very methodically detailing all the reasons why Macs were superior to PCs, and I did it in a way that made it obvious I was a fan and not just a salesman. It took a long time to make these sales, but I was good at it and converted literally hundreds of people to $1000+ Macs, most of which came in to buy a $500 PC. A lot of people do respond positively to technical facts and information.

However, there was another salesman who didn't give a rats ass about which solution was best, and based what he sold entirely on the spiffs he would get for selling them, most of which were based off how many accessories and service plans he sold with the computer. He consistently beat me in sales every day and could barely tell you the difference between firewire and usb (insert nerd chortle). He didn't need the technical knowhow. He would talk to them about completely unrelated things - the weather, their kids, the local sports team, etc. I'd look over at his customers and they'd be laughing and smiling, and then look at mine and see skeptical frowns. But his customers would have an entire cart full of crap they didn't need and the whole process was complete within about 15 minutes.

Most people just want to feel comfortable when they shop. They want a friend to tell them what to buy, not a salesman, so the quicker you can establish yourself as "one of the good guys" the better.

My only consolation was that my return rates were far lower than his.

I don't like depriving people of their potential for ad revenue, but on the second page I got so annoyed at how long it was taking to load that I found and clicked on the "Print" icon. Bam! Full text, cleanly rendered, no flashing graphics or distracting images.

Data. Possibly information. Readable.

Fast.

Now I might actually read what he wrote.

I guess most people here can bring ideas -> products. To bring ideas -> products -> profit definitely take some trying. Take it up a level, ideas -> products -> profit -> acquired ... it's a dream for me at least. And working towards it daily everyday!

I've noticed however that the point he makes about self-funding typically applies to consulting companies: bootstrapping these is very different from bootstrapping, say a SaaS..oops I mean a cloud company.

I would love to hear from other folks that were able to bootstrap a software-product company.

I actually laughed at your anecdote about selling sporting goods. When I was in high school I sold electronics at Best Buy. We would have reps come in and tell us about the printer resolutions and pages per minute, the hard drive seek times, the lcd refresh rate, etc. But, as you said, the customers didn't care about that. All they wanted to know was if they could print a 4x6 photo and have it look nice, or run a word processor, or play a video game.

That hustle doesn't seem to die. I've always found a way to turn something into a more entrepreneurial venture, even when working in a corporate environment.

Thankfully my best friend and I are partnering up to create something of value for ourselves now. It's exciting, especially when I've spent the last 10 years hustling!

Everything in one view.

Here are the most important parts of this article that stuck with me:

"Understanding what people really want to know - and how that differs from what you want to tell them - is a fundamental tenet of sales. And you can't get good at making money unless you get good at selling."

I know I harp on about this constantly but there's this fantastic interview on Mixergy with Tom Rossi (http://mixergy.com/tom-rossi-molehill-interview/) where he talks about the early days of promoting his CMS and there's this part where he says that one of the first things he did was "pick up the phone" and just start calling people to sell it. Andrew Warner is kind of surprised - picking up the phone and actually selling something is so rarely discussed as a "user acquisition strategy". If you can cold call, if you can sell, then you can get money today.

"I thought about the problem and decided to try something new. Instead of doing long, expensive projects, we'd do short, affordable ones. Instead of billing $50,000 for a 15-page website redesign that would take three months, we'd charge $3,500 per page and offer to complete the page in a week. If you want another page, it's another $3,500 and another week. We called it 37express."

Of course, this is one of the biggest lessons from "agile" and 37signals in particular. One way we've implemented this in our own projects is to give an idea of "likely budget" for a big project, then bill in very small increments with the smallest of the small at the beginning of the project.

Say there's a job, and you look at the basics of what should be achieved, and you say "well, $25k will be a good amount for getting something like that done", then the first bill should be for some prototypical product or even just product research and documentation delivered in about a week for something like 10% of the total budget.

Next invoice might be a slightly longer iteration for maybe double that, then by the third iteration everyone trusts each other, you have a good idea of the problem domain and you can really just do a 50% upfront 50% completion for the remainder of the budget.

The other really important part is that each of these early iterations should deliver discrete value - ie. that you could deliver it, the client would have gained some value, but could easily discontinue the project or use someone else to continue if they dislike working with you for some reason.

So you can still do these big jobs, but just treat them as several little tiny jobs, especially in the early stages. This also removes the need for that "contract overhead" - when you remove all the risk, you find that you can more often than not work on basic trust and human decency.

"But that's it. Everything else has been bootstrapped - even though dozens of venture capitalists and private equity firms have offered us lots of money. Instead, my customers have always been my investors. My goal has always been to be profitable on Day One."

We're in the opposite boat ;) although we'd love to get funded for Decal, it turns out "yet another CMS" just isn't hot enough ... maybe we should make it social? In the absence of buckets of VC or angel funding it's been great to have role models in the industry telling us repeatedly that bootstrapping is not only doable, but preferable!

"On the other hand, from Day One, a funded business is all about spending money. There's a pile in the bank, and it's not there to collect interest. Your investors want you to hire, invest, and buy. There's less - and in some cases, no - pressure to make money. While that sounds comforting, I think it ultimately hurts. It replaces the hustle, the scrap, the fight, with a false comfort of "we can worry about that later."*

I've been in both situations - I've been in a company with heaps of funding and (right now) with barely adequate funding and I have to whole heartedly say I 100% agree with this.

Man did we waste money when we had it (office, sales staff etc.). And not only that, but we wasted effort building heaps of features that never made a dime and didn't make the product more saleable. If your product development process isn't commercially driven, I reckon you're heaps more likely to end up with a product you'll never be able to sell.

Thanks for an amazing read Jason, and not just here, but all the other talks, articles, books (Getting Real is great, still haven't made it to Rework yet ;), 37signals/svn, the products (I'm an avid Highrise user), the lot. You're an inspiration and a super hero. Keep bangin'.

- "it's all about practice"

- "it's all about passion"

It's all about overgeneralizing.