Many of you succeed in this field, so I'm genuinely curious how to learn it? What are decent learning resources out there?
Thanks in advance
Any advice I give may not apply to you and your business. My business is b2b and it's a platform for certain kinds of professionals as well as an API that powers many well known businesses.
I've only had success through two general strategies:
1. Networking (friend of friends, friend of customers, etc). Leverage your network to find more customers.
2. The "Long Game" (SEO, word of mouth, etc). This is where I get most of my customers.
I'd say focus on the long game from day one (blog posts, good marketing pages, etc). Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want to pay for it.
I think much of the stuff that you need to do is common sense (put word out, write about it, encourage word of mouth). And it's usually obvious what will definitely kill your project (don't talk about it to anyone, don't listen to customer feedback etc.) so do the opposite of those.
My general experience has been that word of mouth is slow but very reliable and the customers you get from there are usually high value.
This is a key thing. A lot of developers operate in the belief that “if you build it they will come”.
A small amount of market validation would prevent a lot of wasted time.
- Do people have the problem you are solving?
- Are they willing to pay a sufficient amount to solve it?
- Are there enough of them to make it worthwhile?
The real danger is that we often don’t want to hear the answers to these questions. So we either don’t ask or we dismiss the answers that we get. Wishful thinking is a dangerous thing.
When you start out, you probably only have a vague idea of what the product will be.
The sort of people you want to talk to might not want to talk to you. They are busy people and you don't even have a product!
People saying they will give you money is worthless, in my experience. Only people actually giving you money counts for anything.
Estimating the market size is hard and not all that relevant. See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fall...
Successful businesses I have worked at have started out solving a real problem for someone (in a business) - with that person telling us that they know other businesses have the same problem.
If someone in an industry comes to you with a problem - and they have worked in the industry sufficiently long enough to have been in multiple companies - they can give you a pretty good idea of what size the prize might be.
The difficulty a lot of us have working in software is that we don’t really get enough exposure to these people.
Simple and superb root cause analysis!
It takes the looooong web 2.0 funnels and flips it to a single step:
Your customers pay to interact with your app at all and there is insatiable demand at the beginning, unless you do some boomer-level system design that is based on pretending that a 3 trillion dollar crypto native audience doesnt exist already and you need to onboard a bunch of technophobes.
In comparison, the entire web 2.0 ethos basically sums up to getting a customer to put their credit card into your website for a small charge, as a funnel for a bigger recurring charge later
in web3 all of your users are at the last step at the very beginning. they are even paying for all your hosting costs. they are paying to update your database! and your actual business model of being some form of plumbing with a transaction fee, if you didnt just sell a token collection, is fine and has low overhead costs
this will continue attracting developers and their entire audience in perpetuity because the entire web 2.0 ecosystem cannot compete with that
Thank you for the insights.
the only people that have an issue with web3 have a characteristic and typically describe an irrelevant system design that doesn’t factor in the simple reality that users are paying in web3 and wouldn’t in web2.0, the only people having an issue creating web3 apps have a characteristic, for example I just got off a call with someone trying to jump on the web3 bandwagon for hotel reservations - a technophobic audience that should be ignored for web3 ux fictions - and the only people funding broken web2 apps that are supposed to use web3 rails have a characteristic
reclaim the term like every marginalized group does
How much did you make?
> reclaim the term like every marginalized group does
I'm 34.
aiming to do more of both this cycle
I'm assuming this is USD?
It's curious, because some of your other posts[0] would suggest someone who is a little more price sensitive than someone who has made more than 10 million dollars from their own website. But I'm probably reading this incorrectly or something.
also out of curiosity, in your world why does me saying a third party charge other people money, over two years ago or at any point in time, suggest what you said it would suggest. it would be a matter if other people are price sensitive, for reference
if one were looking for something to invalidate or grasping for an ad hominem, doesnt it require interpreting the posting accurately as well at a bare minimum?
In my experience, people who are less price sensitive tend to not think about inconsequential sums. So it was surprising to me to read that someone who has made over $10,000,000 would care about whether or not Calendly would charge for no-shows.
Just curious about the thought process. That's all.
the answer is that calendly does not charge for no-shows and my time is valuable, which would match the worldview you’re looking for, and on the defensive perception, I’m not sure if you really understand the interaction proposed.
but if we were on the same page all along, then we also have a different definition of defensive since clarifying whether you are perceiving the same concept is not defensive to wonder about.
Like, isn’t there another comment somewhere else in my post history that would be better to question what you think an 8-figure HN user would be doing with their time? since you don’t know the value of the intended conversations on the calendly schedule, that requesting they charge wouldn’t be factor in supporting your validity or not of price sensitivity or inconsequential sums, and the other party would be charged either way, not me. I would define this whole line of reasoning to be a non-sequitur.
in any case, if you would like to talk more about web3 user acquisition funnels and how it compresses web2.0 ones, removing a magic based marketing industry and replacing them with paying customers, I'm available for that.
no response has acknowledged the substance of what has been said in this entire subthread, only that I replied at all
if you would like to talk more about web3 user acquisition funnels and how it compresses web2.0 ones, I’m available for that
plenty of cool shit for those who do things onchain tho
philisters on HN are not our clientele. they’ll never get it and it doesnt matter anymore. but if you are a developer or “BUIDL” er there are unique system designs that are superior than anything web2.0 infrastructure has to offer.
I always recommend the book The Mom Test to would-be entrepreneurs. It goes into more detail on why asking people if they will buy something is worthless (as you mentioned), and how you can ask much better questions to find and validate problems worth solving.
I'd say in addition to entrepreneurs, it's an important book for product teams / product engineers to understand what the Mom Test teaches, and tune the filter on asking the right questions to get the highest signal, and ensure the solution closely matches the value prop for the customer. Then sales and marketing get a whole lot easier when you've asked the right questions and solved the right problems.
Just set correct expectations that your MVP won’t be something for the customers.
Or maybe it will. But I think biggest issue is having high hopes after completing v0.1.
I don't waste anytime and never felt like I stumbled on a product idea that warrants me building something.
Therefore, I haven't built anything but the projects at work.
As a rule, I wouldn’t trust building anything depending on a small company - “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM”.
(I also wouldn’t trust building a project on top of a Google product. But that’s a different story)
Not as a solo entrepreneur, but I have been on both sides of a similar situation. I was working for a struggling startup where our largest customer who made up 70% of our revenue insisted on the code being put in escrow that they would get access to under certain conditions.
The condition happened - company was sold for scraps - and then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to them. Yes everything was above board, they worked with the acquiring company to allow me to keep my work laptop and in my severance agreement the acquirer released me from non competes, etc.
Two companies later I was on the opposite side where I was one of the decision makers where we were going to extend the contract with a solo entrepreneur for a SaaS. We were going to be 70% of his revenue. I suggested we also get his code put in escrow and I was responsible for actually watching his build process once per quarter where he pulled his escrowed code out and built and ran from scratch.
Trust no one, and it doesn't matter if it's a Fortune whatever, a small enterprise, a small company or an individual.
A company or business of any size can axe a product they own at any time, unless they contractually promised you support.
Also some companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS etc are more trusted by “the enterprise” than Google.
Is there an easy process for your customers to move their data over to a similar service if they don’t want to renew the contract?
> then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to
Did you live in the same city? Or did you work remote?
Did they want to meet you in person first, before the escrow agreement?
Maybe that can be an addition to your answer: Start with big companies close to where you live?
For those located in India (I would argue anywhere outside US really), in my opinion, trying to find customers in your network is a waste of time, even if you're wealthy. Most societies outside US aren't as abundant in their mind nor value driven the same way people in the US are
Instead focus on the long game, keep filling in the blanks on your ICP and what their pushes and pulls are by trying to figure out who is the right segment to serve so you can save time and energy
Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?
And what tech stack did you use?
The initial product was built with Ruby on Rails. It stayed in Rails for three years. At that point I had enough API traffic the memory on the server was getting out of control and Ruby just couldn't handle the concurrent traffic (with a reasonable budget).
I re-wrote the entire product in Go on the third year mark (converted ERB to Go templates, re-wrote all backend logic with Go, etc).
The Go version worked wonderfully and reduced my server costs substantially (from $600/month to $88/month). I had the Go version running for four years and I re-wrote it again in Rust (actixweb, askama, htmx).
For funsies, I re-wrote a portion in Rust and noticed the amount of code used was substantially lower (about 50% less code in Rust). I was surprised by that (I figured it would use more being lower level). At that same time I was growing frustrated with maintaining the Go monolith (it had a lot of legacy cruft from the Rails port and spaghetti code). I decided to re-write the whole thing in Rust and cull the cruft in the process.
Did you purposely leave out outbound sales? Cold emails, trade shows, working the phones?
The first book I would read is Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. After this, in no particular order you could have a look at:
- This is Marketing by Seth Godin
- Positioning by Al Ries
- The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
- Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
- Traversing The TRaction Gap by Bruce Cleveland
- From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin
I would also have a look at the models created by Winning By Design [1]. But be sceptical! These models do however hold some value in terms of visually presenting the sales funnel and gaining understanding of land and expand.
Best of luck to you!
I suspect success in this area might be only 20% about learning practical methodology. The other 80% would be some kind of self-examination, then analysing and resolving whatever aversions you discover - or deciding on a different strategy such as teaming up with someone who is already comfortable with marketing/selling.
This attitude has served me poorly working inside of larger tech companies because I focused too much on doing excellent work and not enough time advertising my work to others, partially out of a revulsion towards being perceived as the type who self-advertises bad work to non-technical decision makers. It's the "build it and they will come" mindset and it's a hard thing to break.
1. build something noone can live without.
2. it already exists : market is too competitive
There's lots of competition, and most customers are already using something to help with their problem.
What worked for me 25 years ago is not going to work as well today. Well it will, but its much harder to stand out from the crowd.
Some things don't change though. You need to find customers before you find (ie build) product. Ideally you get a deposit before you start writing. Getting customers is harder than writing code, so do that first.
Finding customers is hard. You need to get close enough to see their pain. You need to make that pain go away. It's seldom as easy as you expect to make pain go away (the devil is in the details.)
The good news is that it is possible. And it's hard enough that it keeps the competition away. Do it well, carve out a niche, and you can build something good.
And always remember- customer service is what you are really selling, not software.
To add to this, there's always a catch 22 problem - how can I show something to customers to sell to, when I don't even have a product to sell? It's expected in a sales meeting or often any meeting, that you have a demo that would show your product concept for them.
I can't state this enough, but literally build on the shoulders of giants. Build on existing tools, and I don't mean open source, but existing products. Best advice I got from watching one of those AI fad-chasing YouTubers. Is it an online store idea? Build on Shopify first. Is it a chatbot? Use KoreAI or DialogCX. Is it a CRUD app? Use Glide + Google Sheets. Customer Service? Maybe they just need a Hubspot/Zendesk with some custom integrations.
Most customers are looking to buy a functionality, not a "product" . Oftentimes your MVP will be enough to carry them for a long time. You wouldn't even need to write a single line of code yourself for quite a bit of time.
Like you said, the hard part is actually meeting the potential prospect and ensuring that they will pay you for the product. In my (very limited) experience, I've had 60k-employee billion dollar companies outright refuse to buy (instead hiring 2000 underpaid fresh graduates in India to build a worse product), while a 250-employee million dollar company being super-enthusiastic about paying a premium price for it (even though they have their own dev team). If I had gone by the views of the billion dollar company, I wouldn't have found a market niche for my product, but fortunately I stubbed my toe (literally!) and found the actual customer instead.
The other 60k employee company is a company that does as much in net profit as the market cap of the first company.
That said, it basically boils down to 3 things:
Personas
Channels
Messages
You have an archetype of someone in your head that would like your tool, you want to test if that archetype exists. That persona likely consumes content, your job then is to understand the channels that persona typically likes to consume their content, and try to serve them a message they can understand in the time you have to serve it. There are thousands of personas in millions of channels consuming billions of messages, that is why it's hard.
smooooth finnish with a free puppy
nuance indeed
call that? the keys to the palace and a free puppy sale!, who could say no?
for the parent: hire this guy!
If you cant, then get a jobby job selling retail to the masses, and just sell sell sell, get a thicker hide, and be able to summon a smile for the worst person you are ever going to meet
When I got the job selling an insanely inferior version of the product I couldn't sell the formula was this, sit down and listen...
They had 40 different registered businesses all selling the same software but with a different name to protect the guilty. A modest size call center divided into 40 groups. Each prospect would get at least 40 calls but more often something towards 120. Pricing started high then gradually lowered with a few "errors" so that the prospect could say they got a call 2 days ago and they only charged x. "Ohh, that cheap???" Etc
It worked, people got really angry 30 to 80 calls in and they purchased from the "other" company.
It’s a free hour of consulting with someone that has experience in exactly what you’re struggling with…worst case scenario (no offense neom) you walk away with an hour less to binge Netflix and a hilarious story; best case they point something out that moves you to profitable months or years sooner.
My instinct tells me that you posted this here because you wanted something like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316653
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316653
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37021837
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36922114
Some good recs in the above threads. You'll be able to learn and thrive with those, IMO.
- you can't outsource sales before pmf, and you probably don't have pmf yet
- talk to (at least) a potential customer every day, keep track of what you said and how they responded
- make and give your leads materials they can use to sell internally, figure out who makes decisions (probably not who you talked to first) and make sure it's relevant to them; you may need multiple versions
- aggressively think about pmf, don't worry too much about official definitions here. just ask yourself: "if i took a month long vacation, could sales ostensibly be on autopilot?" if no, you don't have it yet. if yes, take the vacation you're doing great
- look for pmf by making your idea smaller, not bigger, or you will waste money and time
- when you can make a product idea really tiny in scope, and someone will still pay for it, you've identified a strong pain point you can exploit (aka charge for). Build the product/platform around that, not the other way around. Never convince yourself you have to build a huge thing before you can sell it, you're most likely wrong. optimize for finding that tiny scope early on
- when i say look for or find or think about pmf i mean come up with a way to pitch your product, and then pitch it to someone new. then compare that to the last times you did it. you have to talk to a lot of people for this to work, way more than you think. your product will not sell itself, you will have to talk to a lot of people. as many as physically possible to get the feedback you need to create a sales cycle that runs without you i.e. pmf. this is something that took me multiple years to internalize. you're just never talking to enough potential customers
- don't ignore seo, and pick names that are easy to say and read; figure out where your customers consume media and get your content there. every business will be different here, and you gotta get creative
- something i saw on reddit that stuck with me: first time founders think about product, second time founders think about distribution. i operationalize this as: do not begin engineering a product until you're clear on how it will be marketed and sold, bonus points if you can convince someone to sign a contract saying they want it-- and remember in B2B/gov this can (should?) be a sales channel partner not just an end-user
This!! And your related explanation is so good!
then there's the bigger resellers like cdw or insight and companies like carahsoft and similar
some research firms looking at grants will work with you if you offer something innovative to add to their application
it's just making as many connections as possible, everyone wants to make money so just be honest with people and usually they're open to it
*fixed a typo
I'm out of new ideas so I'm competing on price and building tools in a crowded space like Calendly and Loom. https://neeto.com/cal and https://neeto.com/record.
We are also in a space that is similarly croweded and having a tough time being seen.
The savings are enormous for our customers. https://neeto.com/neetocal/pricing-comparison
Hence many folks are switching from Calendly to NeetoCal. And same with NeetoRecord. Lots of folks have switched from Loom.
We've identified that if we can produce a product that is 90% of what the competitors are doing and then charge at 30%, we can still make a killing because there are 10x fewer mouths to feed. Our main advantage in our space is that our customers "need" our software to run their business, so for them it's always going to be the cheapest option that gets the job done (ie. us).
So there's a ton of opportunity here.
Maybe you will end up getting like 25% of their customers but if you play it well that is going to be worth still a lot.
If you're competing on price, you're usually competing for the worst customers. Good for them, but not so nice for you.
This is true. Also, if you are only competing on price, it is easy for a competitor to undercut you.
in terms of marketing the question is how you reach customers, and demonstrate to them that your software is not garbage unlike other within 5 sec of their attention span.
Rather impressive, I must say.
- Search for online app directories like product hunt/indie hackers and put your app entry.
- Search for relevant reddit forums, become a member, start answering questions related to your product and add a link at the end.
- Same a last one. Add a post with lot of content of how to solve a problem that community faces and then add your product link.
- On Twitter join the indiehackers/build in public community. Regularly post your updates/screenshots. Engage in community.
- Write a ebook related to you domain. Create a landing page to collect email to deliver ebook. Mention how users can solve the problem by just using your app. Create ads to market the free ebook.
- Split ebook into smaller tweets/reddit post and regularly post them.
- Cold outreach to member on reddit community and ask for app review.
But if you have bigger ambitions -- you might actually have to talk to humans and look into this weird thing called "sales” and this other weird thing called “human relationships.”
Remember, a vast vast majority of money paid for software and value to be created solving problems with software comes from organizations (businesses, governments, etc). Not consumers or other indiehackers, which are the folks you'll find using the playbook OP mentioned above. Indiehackers might sound like a fun customer base, but be aware they are also the people who will loudly complain "THREE DOLLARS A MONTH FOR THIS??" when you do your show HN post.
that's the step after sufficient revenue generated or funding received to hire ans scale sales team probably. But the question is for solo hacker at the beginning of the journey.
> there are thousands of $million revenue software companies that never posted on Reddit and never wasted months trying to pump a fake-successful launch on product hunt.
do you have a chance to give some ideas how did you collect such insights? How did you find there are thousands companies which never posted, etc, and how they found first customers?
But you don't learn this until after you've tried the latter.
Of course it'll not be easy so expect to put in effort and reps.
Please stop doing this, it's painfully obvious and it's ruining the internet.
The trust you earn by trying to genuinely be of service to the market pays back dividends. Not in an easily quantifiable RoI. But eventually it will.
The other bit of advice is you need to set some boundaries and expectations for working together. This includes closing the sale (we need contract back by X date or we can’t work together) and when executing / serving them (we can’t exceed this limit, we need payment by Y or service will be paused). Hold yourself to being disciplined and not people pleasing. You’ll regret the latter usually. Sometimes the best thing you can do is NOT close the deal.
Don’t undersell yourself. Set a price point where half of your inbound is unable to work with you. Eliminate bad fits early.
As a solo entrepreneur your time is extremely limited. So boundaries and setting a good price point are very important so people don’t waste your time.
And because you’re probably still looking for PmF these trusting relationships turn your potential customers into advisors. Treat your best customers advice as sacrosanct. You’ll find a niche in partnership with them.
I find this video about enterprise sales from Pete Koomen (YC Partner) to be the best summary:
Step 1: Offer your product for free. Free (and useful) products spread organically on internet. If people aren't using your product even when it's free, no amount of marketing will make it successful.
Step 2: If people are "consistently" using your free product over time, you can then offer additional value at a price or try any other pricing strategy.
Not all products can be offered for free, and that's okay. It's worth spending some money initially (if you can) because your primary goal is to reach Step 2.
Also don't be afraid to build "boring" software, many times this is what will bring the most steady revenue.
I think its
- right market
- right time
- right product
- right attitude
Rather than building web projects, I'm not shifting my attention to overlooked areas (C, CLI, other low level areas)
1. Exploratory Customer Development - Start with broad conversations. Reach out to potential customers and ask them about their world: their challenges, goals, and frustrations. Don’t pitch your idea, just listen. The goal is to uncover problems worth solving.
2. Focused Customer Development - Once you notice a pattern in the problems people describe, you want to make sure it's shared by a wide subset of customers.
3. Paper Feedback Demo - Before building anything new, create a low-fidelity prototype (mock-ups, sketches, or slides) of how you might solve the problem. Share it with prospects and get their feedback.
4. Real Feedback Demo - When you have a working version of your product, test it with those same prospects and ask for feedback. The goal is to see if the thing actually solves their pain. If it does, you can invite them into a sales process. “Looks like it might help, can we set up some time to explore what it would look like to implement at your company?”
This approach isn’t magic but it works. The best part is that it teaches you how to find customers and what messaging will resonate with them. Resources like The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick are great for learning how to have these conversations without bias.
One thing I see often is that people forget that marketing begins before you even start building a product.
Before you begin building anything you should know, who the product is for, and where those people hang out. Then as you’re building you need to go to where those people hang out and start talking to them. That should be step one most of the time at least.
It has a lot of content & good presentation (minimalistic, but crisp). All about sales and marketing. I have no idea how an experienced sales or marketing person would rate it, but to me it sounds reasonable and useful. Give it a try (e.g. try this video: https://youtu.be/FMzKk73iUhw -- his videos have clickbaty titles, and are pretty long -- don't let that discourage you).
He also has two books (sales and marketing), but I didn't read them yet. The reviews say that they are somewhat basic. I'll still give them a try.
Every company is unique. But at your scale, you can throw blind darts until something sticks. Most tiny companies do not require a principled approach to sales or marketing. You want to try proposing different price points, contract terms, outreach methods & channels. Keep each experiment small, fail fast and pivot.
Once you gain a few customers, feedback & recommendation based organic growth is a good 2nd step. But, your first few wins can totally feel like a crap shoot.
All that being said, the best products market themselves. A problem is only worth solving if it is immediately painful to company bottom line. Sales & marketing only works if the product alleviates such pain.
My approach is roughly: "getting out of my comfort zone" + repeat what worked and drop what doesn't.
With a BIG caveat that this is all running off my own money, not investors. I get tempted by marketing/sales tools (eg: apollo.io, za-zu), vendor exhibitions, paid ads, etc but if I'm not fairly certain I'll get the $-spent back, I do the free/harder way first until I understand that system more. Dollars can give leverage, but aren't certain to.
Also, publicly track the experiments you run as an accountability system (and doubles as a bit of marketing for your product)
EG: Scroll down on 24HourHomepage.com to see a history of how I've thought about growing it roughly week over week
To do it well, you have to do it a lot. And you're going to suck at it in the beginning.
The good news is that if you're good at coding then you already know how to be persistent and self-critical and disciplined. You'll see what is working and what isn't and do more of the former and less of the latter until you get good.
I know that's not particularly useful in terms of "how do I speed run this" but I think it's something that most devs don't want to fully grok.
Keen to chat
still on this way as well :)
(I didn't see an email in your about so this is the best way I know to contact you)
One answer (or better, one idea) I came up with, was to join a network marketing organization. While I am reluctant about this step, it would definitely pull me out of my comfort zone. And I think you can learn a lot sales wise in a network marketing organization.
I would love to hear what others think of this.
I should clean it up and organize it better at some point, but there is a big variety these days.
In my experience, many product makers who describe themselves as being bad at sales just can't get their head out of their own view point. So even speaking to a person who is just marginally above average at sales and describes it as an outsider can really shift their way of thinking. The customer may not use the product in the exact way you think they will when you made it. Having the benefit of seeing how others see your product will put you on the same footing when you pitch it to them.
Also, find a way of presenting that fits your personality. I'm pretty mater of fact and my sales pitch has always been sort like "we have some cool stuff for sale, you use some of the exact kind of stuff we sell, let's talk about whether our stuff would be good for you." Then I just ask them questions. Sales people have the (deserved) stereotype of blathering on about their product or service and being tone deaf to whether it's a good fit or not. I ask and I ask. People will talk about themselves quite a bit and in my mind, I am taking notes on what may be a good fit for them and what might not be.
Eventually, they've run out of things to talk about and I'll start talking about what I think they should look at and why. That brings me around to another thing--fitting in. I have no problem telling people if one of our offerings is not something they should consider. I don't want to force something on someone, when they are smart enough to know it isn't right for them. Cajoling someone into a sale that isn't a great fit just leads to problems after the sale, then I'm putting out fire with them when I should be selling to others. Not only does it build trust with the customer to pass on things, but it's just the right thing to do.
Think of yourself not as a salesperson, but as a problem solver. If they have a business problem your product can solve, tell them.
Good luck and I hope this helps!
The ideal thing to do is become your customer, hang out with them, learn from them. Shape your product around them. They will tell you what they will buy for how much.
Only a few products are so innovate that everyone understands what it is and the value it brings and they demand it and only you can give it to them : think ChatGPT. Those products market themselves once word gets out. Is that your product? If not you have to tell people or show people.
It's both easy and deep reading. Long but worth it. It changed marketing for me from smoke and mirrors to a systematic, fun, creative analytical process.
https://www.amazon.com/STARTUP-SALES-FIELD-NOTES-Methodology...
Lots of great experiences retold - from the startup world rather than some Coca Cola exec.
The only real problem which exists in society is the problem that the system itself prevents us from solving. The problem of allowing people to obtain money to buy the damn stuff that is being produced and whose production could be easily scaled up at will and there is nothing save climate change and other doom narratives getting in the way of massively scaling up production and automating everything. Letting the pie grow as big as is required to satisfy everyone. Ask just about anyone on the street what they need and if they're honest, 99% of them will tell you that they need more money to buy the stuff that already exists. The government could essentially give free land and free money (UBI) to everyone, new cities would be built and the system would expand and decentralize outward, creating an abundance of opportunities.
How do you solve the problem of helping people to get more money when the entire monetary system is designed to concentrate wealth, to take away opportunities and wealth from the masses. The only solutions to the most important problem in society are political. There are no business solutions for this problem within the current political framework.
There is no incentive to actually automate anything (beyond the point when it satisfies only the elite) when the masses are systematically broke and desperate for money. People will always be as cheap as machines. Slavery exists on the periphery and will grow in the current system. It will come down to the cost of food for a slave or electricity for a machine... However, the slave can produce their own food in the same way that an intelligent machine could produce its own electricity. The net cost is 0 in both cases. Slavery is more achievable, even today.
Now if you're interested in ways to make money without solving the only problem that matters, then you need to basically come up with a solution to make the problem worse; which helps concentrate the money faster, more surveillance, more control, more plausible deniability, more dulling of the senses, more inequality, more suffering... Basically anything that helps to prevent political change. Nothing else pays in the current political framework besides protecting the current political framework.
When capital barriers are low and you are able to build a product which solves a problem 10x better than the competition within a specific niche, it comes as quite a shock when you cannot even find a single user willing to try your product for free. A product which is low capital to build can be very high capital to sell because you need an enormous marketing budget to even get one real user to try your product long enough to realize that it's 10x more efficient than what they're using now. Then there might be a ton of additional regulatory barriers standing in the way of a sale (esp. B2B). Massive chicken and egg problem. These kinds of situations where sale becomes a total bottleneck and stands in the way of delivering economic efficiency can make one feel that the economic pie must be shrinking fast.
And increasingly all economic activity revolves around a handful of megacorps siphoning up all available money, with everyone else trying to insert themselves somehow into the siphoning process. Ideally "as a Service", ie by creating their own little siphon and attaching it onto their hos^H^H^Hcustomer.
Not just software businesses either, but because everyone has been conditioned into spending half their waking time staring at their little screens, traditional businesses too are expected to have an online presence and so carry their share.
I think capitalism based on a hard-money system with a small government with 0% income and sales taxes would be better than what we have now. Private moneys and cryptocurrencies would be allowed and encouraged (not having income or sales tax would greatly aid adoption IMO as it would remove the need for accounting for tax purposes). Import tariffs would be the only acceptable taxes.
Given the current state of technology, I also think a communist or socialist system with some limited ownership rights (e.g. a family would be allowed to own the house they live in and a single small business) could work too. Corporations would be state-owned, passive shareholding would be outlawed.
I think either approach would be way better than what we have now.
I would add property taxes to the list. The root of many gvt evils stem from income tax, sales tax and property tax.
I find the opposite. Almost every business is a unique mix of requirements and theres usually few if any existing perfect solutions.
Businesses often don't know that they are overpaying for one service or another, or are doing something in an extremely expensive manner.
The best sales engineers look at a business, sell a product that saves their customer a significant amount of money, taking a slice for themselves.
Start with the Basics: I spent some time wrapping my head around the fundamentals. Books like "Influence" by Cialdini, "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore, and "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" by Ries & Trout helped me get a grip on core concepts like positioning, target audiences, and the psychology behind persuasion.
Focus on One Channel and Iterate: I learned the hard way that it’s tempting to try every platform, but that’s overwhelming—especially when you’re solo. So I picked one channel that made sense for my audience (initially, email outreach and LinkedIn). I ran small experiments with subject lines, tone, calls-to-action, and watched what worked.
Engage in Conversations, Not Sales Pitches: A big part of sales, I realized, is listening. I started hanging out in niche forums and Slack/Discord channels where my potential users might be, answering questions, and offering help. When people realize you’re there to support them, not just push a product, it builds trust.
Use Low-Cost Tools and Communities: Hacker News, indie hacker communities, and entrepreneur subreddits are goldmines for getting feedback on landing pages, pitch decks, or just your general marketing approach. I regularly post progress updates or ask for opinions—sometimes the feedback can sting, but it’s invaluable.
Document Everything: Whenever I tried a new marketing tactic—be it a cold outreach email or a small Twitter ad campaign—I noted my assumptions, what I did, and the results. Over time, I built up a playbook of what actually moves the needle for my audience.
Build Real Relationships: Early on, I put a lot of effort into meaningful relationships—both with early customers and other solo founders. A quick Zoom call or a coffee chat can lead to referrals, partnerships, or just great insight. Honestly, it’s usually more about genuine curiosity and a willingness to help than any formal pitch.
Adopt a Continuous Learning Mindset: Marketing and sales tactics change quickly—algorithms, consumer behavior, best practices, all of it. I keep reading, trying, and asking questions. And I keep telling myself that every “No” is actually a “Not yet”—it’s just data to improve my approach.
That’s how I’ve been tackling marketing and sales as a solo entrepreneur. Keep things simple, learn by doing, and stay genuinely curious about your customers. It’s an ongoing process, but one that becomes more intuitive with each experiment. Good luck!
First find qualified PROSPECTS and ASK them what they want. In person.
1. X account: https://x.com/johnrushx
2. Directory guide: https://johnrushx.substack.com/p/directory-playbook-build-grow-and
I would start by going back and studying all of his threads.
1. Does this solve a problem we have?
2. Can we afford it?
That's it. There's no magic tricks or dark patterns to be exploited, contrary to what a variety of sales/marketing books might tell you (those books are selling you the books, nothing more).
Here's a few easy things to remember:
1. Your customer has needs. Meet them or walk away before you waste valuable time and create resentment.
2. Your customer is a human that values honesty and wants to make an informed decision, so be prepared to give them the information they need to do so.
If you go into a presentation knowing your product and knowing your customer's needs, there's really no other controls you can account for that will sway that deal one way or the other. So, do your homework. Use OSINT techniques to gather info on your customer, build a profile of what they already use, what their pain points are, etc and don't forget to just talk to them. Not every interaction has to result in a sale, in fact, most are fact-finding/info-gathering sessions for both parties, in my experience.
Despite doing well for myself when I was operating in a sales capacity, I do not do sales much these days mostly because I prefer the troubleshooting and development side of the industry I'm in, but if you approach it with a Troubleshooting Mindset, you're better off. It sets you up to offer the right solution for the right problem if you think of your customer's workflow/processes as something to be studied so that it can be improved.
I say this because I have met countless salesmen in my day that think they can human-hack their way to a deal because they watched Glengarry Glen Ross too many times, or read a Malcolm Gladwell book. They're the reason why we have a used car salesman stereotype and why movies like Wolf of Wall Street are made (that movie is not about a hero). Approach with caution any advice that a behavioral economist or anyone claiming to be a market expert offers; none of these people have crystal balls or mind-reading capabilities and they make money by convincing people they do. You're in a position where a lot of that might seem attractive and I was there once myself, going so far as to paying real money to attend a Tony Robbins seminar more than once when I was first starting out. It's all nonsense in the end, boiling down to getting yourself out there, building relationships with people, spiced with a bit of luck and privilege.
Don't go a month without your biggest clients hearing from you. - Just pick up the phone. Doubly so if you bill monthly vs hourly.
Don't send a shitty boilerplate email to keep in touch with clients.
Don't forget old clients when new ones come along. - I cant count the number of times I have seen a variation of "We spent 500 dollars a month on your product for the last 4 years, but when we wanted to renegotiate we couldn't get any time, now I pay this guy 300 per month on a new 4 year contract"
Don't leave a customer with a problem alone. Solve the problem, or get them to someone they can. - Like for real, the number of successful businesses I have seen where the person making all the money overall spends time discussing and referring support for problems that have no bearing on their product is immense. Be the expert, lest another expert comes along and suggests they cut costs via removing your service.
Don't push a solution that's not viable. - The number of times I have seen customers effectively quiet quit a service is crazy. If they cant get it to work, and they stop trying, they are leaving.
tl;dr for the above is that sales doesn't end when a contract is signed.
Good sales leads will come through your network. If you have a good product and you treat your customers well, they will recommend you.
Keep an eye on upwork and similar sites. Facebook industry groups too. Lots of people who don't know what they want ask someone on upwork to make a plugin or macro or patch some hole or something. You will recognize that they might have a problem for which your product can be the solution. These people know they don't know what they want and often respond well to a pitch. Something like 1 in 10 will give you some time. Again these people probably don't want to pay for a stopgap solution, but will want someone who can talk about their problem and offer a permanent solution.
If you land a big fish, and they have needs outside your product scope, consider changing your product scope to suit the fish. Generally these businesses love something bespoke, and they have competitors in the same verticals with the same needs. Especially if you have experience in their vertical. Partnerships can also work here. The number of times I have seen "We used to be a XYZ business, we developed our own software in house\with a partner and now we are a software company to the XYZ industry" is enormous. Legal. Geophysics. Manufacturing. Solve one problem, and go horizontal.
Dont be afraid of the big fish either, even if you need help landing them. I have seen a few instances of small guys getting really scared to offer their product to a large customer. With a push it has turned out that these large customers had large suppliers and those large suppliers were delivering really shitty products and the large customer was actively looking for alternatives. Friendly advertising is just information, and people with limited options love having information even if they dont action it.
Read case studies on the scale of sales you’re pursuing. A $10 /mo subscription is sold very differently than a $10m contract, but is often bought for the same fundamental reasons. Case studies illuminate the sales cycle at a given scale, and give a glimpse into timeframes, competition, and customers to expect.
Research your competition, big and small. How many people do they employee in sales and marketing roles? Pick one and look at their LinkedIn. What did they do before their current role? How do they sell themselves? What is their quota or target? How many people are they connected with. And who.
Research the crap out of potential customers. What are their hopes and fears? Which align with your offering? Who would trust their decision on a vendor for your product?
Then you can begin the real work of selling which is to favorably differentiate your offering against alternatives to qualified buyers. Spend your precious time with people who have the means, motivation, and mass to make a sale impactful to your company. Many sellers waste the majority of their time pursuing people that can never proceed with a deal, ie unqualified. That is true in both sales and marketing. Learning what a qualified buyer looks like, and where and when to find them is among the most valuable activities in selling.
Finally, sell. If you’re doing it right you’re doing helping your customer achieve the best possible outcome while profiting from it. Sell. It’s rewarding in profound ways. It’s survival. It’s adaptation in action. It’s thrilling.
All of your code is just trapped electrons sitting idle. When you sell, you shape them to fit someone’s reality with value, then they start to move and have real effects. I’m emphasizing this because selling tends to be something developers and founders love to avoid, but it is the lifeblood of a business, what makes it a business instead of a hobby. Getting proficient at selling can be one of the most life-changing pursuits, not just because you can attract money easier, but it puts you in touch with the ur currents of value, the shape of progress. You’re already on the right track by asking good questions here, that’s 90% of the technique.
Having said that, consider just getting salespeople who would work on commission. The good ones would do it, if you have a high-ticket item.
Now, when it comes to sales at scale, through webinars and courses etc, there's a whole other science to group psychology. As someone who built the "Groups" app for the app stores, and working on CRMs and building community platforms with my open-source platform, I can write a whole book about it. I'm going to make a course, actually. But the basics are:
1) Whenever you are at events, focus on effortless and fun communication, showing off the unique things your stuff can do, but never overtly selling it. The best is if you could make a group activity facilitated by your app, by involving everyone scanning the QR code and getting into your demo thing on your webpage. Just make the onboarding easy (e.g. scan QR code)
Anything that involves friction, do 1 on 1 (e.g. private chat) and put all the structural stress on a third party (e.g. some onboarding process, or your app, or someone who gave you the questions to ask, or whatever)
2) Once people have made a commitment or purchase, invite them in a group chat (social proof)
... make it exclusive and valuable access, for both networking opportunities and content, and access to celebrities you bring, access to recordings, and ability to show off the access by bringing a +2 to events
3) Use social proof (e.g. when asking them to do an action, show actions others like them have taken, with their faces / results)
4) Control the messaging (e.g. if they leave a positive testimonial, make it easy for them to spread it, but if they leave a bad review, route it to a support team internally and don't make it easy to share it publicly)
5) Economics: reward them with credits every time someone follows their link / comes through their video etc. The credits can even be something like 10% of whatever the people they bring in spend
Don't think in terms of money only. For example, if someone brings a Twitter celebrity, you can have the celebrity auth with twitter and get their follower count. And then that is a valuable thing in and of itself, so you should scale the rewards both the celebrity and the person who brought them. Make this clear to your community. But it's only valuable if your app has integration with at least Twitter intents, allowing this celebrity to keep posting stuff on their channel, which links back to the app. Make every invite link unique so you can track and reward the one who posted it when people who come through the link make a purchase.
Group psychology opens up a whole set of interesting possibilities, up to an including starting an entire movement or viral brand. Look up the video "leadership lessons from the dancing guy" to get an idea of what's possible.
I could go on and on, but "group psychology" is a huge subject and a lot more fun, in my opinion, than trying to hack the sales with 1 on 1 prospects. But having said that, current state of the art in sales is the 1 on 1 thing. So just have salespeople who do that on commission, and their goal is to get prospects to buy something or book something (setters) and then you verify it and put them into a larger group... and do the group psychology.
You can have recurring memberships and much more.
You can train AI agents to essentially do the "sales calls" but they won't be very good at the "tonality" part.
In terms of what you offer:
1) you should have what's called a value ladder, which is that you keep delivering things to them of increasing value, while they keep increasing the amount of money. ideally have a way to deliver free and customized value first ... but them using that thing gets them invested (entering data, spending time, inviting friends, are all forms of non-monetary investment)
During the initial call you can also have them authorize $1 for some small demo, make sure to explain to them that's all you're going to charge, until they actively indicate that they want to start. Then the goal is to get them to invest so much "non-monetary" stuff above, that they don't want to "lose all that investment" and they'll actively agree to a recurring subscription to "maintain it". Just like you'd pay to continue your hosting or email service.
2) do "consultative sales", in that you walk through what your customers need, and then produce a "statement of work" for them. Whenever you set up the next call, always ask "same time next week?" and "until then, I will have the team prepare the proposal" and ask for their email.
Encourage them to bring other decision makers on the call (this is a form of investment and preventing objections from people behind the scenes).
The "same time next week?" is a good default question if you don't have their calendly, and also allows your prospects to fill a certain "weekly time slot" until they are closed and become customers, and are handed off to a case manager etc. It also allows your sales team to manage their calendars better. If people correct you and change the time to another that's fine too.
The key in sales is to keep the conversation going and either anticipate or address all objections. Including the ones of "hidden decision makers". You can sort of get a sense of how important someone is by how much time they take to talk. If they don't talk very much they have a lot going on.
3) As long as you deliver something customized that "took a lot of effort", they will appreciate your text 24 hours before the next call, and they will make sure to get on the call (it's the "least they could do" after you did 90% of the work for free).
4) When discussing the cost, designing your statement of work, give people a choice of A, B or A+B in same time frame, so this way they can choose to pay the large A+B amount if they want it "fast" for the same price it would take doing it piecemeal.
Meaning, never put them to a "yes" or a "no", but always a continuous trade-off, so they are likely to choose something on that curve. That is somewhere in your value ladder and once you get a foothold, the relationship grows, the trust and dependency grows, their stakeholders will be telling them to keep going with you.
5) my favorite hack: open a company specifically for the new product, and if your product still has bugs, offer your customers shares in your company in addition to the product (legally allowed under Rule 506b if there is a substantial pre-existing relationship, or through Test the Waters leading up to an upcoming crowdfund through Reg CF, e.g. https://wefunder.com/Qbix).
Headline There are many points of view in marketing, and it's always this one that works. (An ocean of options in marketing, and it's always this one that works.)
Description There are no one-size-fits-all strategies in marketing - each is created for a specific business, audience and product. But there are fundamental principles that underpin any successful campaign. These are not magic recipes, but time-tested benchmarks. What are these principles? Let's break it down step by step: (1) You need to know your target audience. You need this for marketing. (You need this for product creation, but we're not talking about that right now). How? (a) In detail, in depth, become her. The best way to do this is to watch YouTube interviews with people who will buy from you. Watch 5-7 interviews. You will form a collective image of your customer in your head. You can conduct interviews, but it is expensive and not always necessary. b) It is necessary to collect a map of interests about your audience. That is, everything you have learnt should be written down. Briefly, what they eat, what they drink, what they watch, what they read, what they wear, what they drive, where they go on holiday, what places they go to, what kind of lifestyle they lead, everything. It's going to be necessary further down the line. You will understand.
(2) You need to create a pledge. Or recycle an old one if you've inherited marketing. How? a) It needs to be simple, it needs to be clear to your audience, Keep it simple. My product will solve something for you. b) It has to be relevant to your audience. c) It has to change something in a person's life. Get rid of something, that's most often the case. If your product is improving, it has to improve multiple times, otherwise it will be hard to sell, because improvement is a movement from good enough to better. When the audience is happy with everything, it's hard to sell something even better. I recommend Getting rid of something, it's easier.
(3) Find a sound problem from your promise, you need this later for marketing. How. (a) Look for the sound of what the problem you are getting rid of might sound like.
(4) You need to create a value proposition. If you don't have one and you create one, then by creating one you may see a significant increase in sales if you implement just this one thing. How? a) You need the perceived value of what you're selling to be higher than what people pay for it. Ideally 1 in 10.
(5) You need to think of a product line, for re-monetisation. This is a super important step, it's the only way to create a long-lasting business. Think about this. You've spent a resource on attracting an audience. Why would you spend a resource on attracting again? It's not rational. and the right thing to do is to create related products for the same audience. So you pay once for the attraction.
How? Think about what else you can sell to the same audience.
We need all the previous points to do marketing. Basically produce content and distribute it. Here's a little bit of theory. Marketing is a simple thing. There's a person (you) and there's another person (the customer), there's words between you. That's it. You just need to answer the question, what words should I say to get him to buy my product. Here is everything we have previously worked through, we need to use further in our marketing. I divide marketing into 4 functions. 1) Attraction 2) Retention 3) Nurturing 4) Monetisation
(6) We need to do ‘Attraction.’ How? a) Create content, depending on your company's available resources, create content across all platforms. To create content, use the audience knowledge you have gained earlier. For example, you sell ‘Prams for Kids’, you can create content about weight loss. Build on the interests of your audience, even though they are not directly related to your product. Do you understand why? I hope so. At this stage, you need to attract attention and sign up for yourself. Subscription is mandatory. This is the determinant of the success of this type of content. If you don't subscribe, you've just wasted a resource on content creation and distribution.
(7) You need to make content for Retention and for Growth. The audience that subscribed to you should stay subscribed to you, you have already spent a resource to attract them, we don't want to spend a resource to attract them again, it's not rational. How? a) Retention. I will tell you through an example. There is an account of one company in the social network ‘Prostokvashino’ called, so they do not do retention, do not know how . Imagine they have an audience of grandmothers and bodybuilders. So Grandma is interested in watching how to cook pancakes with cottage cheese from Ivlev, and bodybuilders, for example, it is interesting to watch another, certainly not about fat pancakes. So retention should be aimed at the interests of your audience. That's why we worked them out earlier. b) Nurturing. This is a topic that nobody understands at all. I'll try to explain it with an example. You have a classmate, and he was so bad in school, he did not fulfil promises, sometimes he said one thing and did another, but at the same time he is predictable for you because you have studied with him for 10 years, you know in what situation you can deal with him, and in what situation it is better not to deal with him. And from what kind of person, what is your assessment of him, from this depends on whether you are ready to go with him on the case or not. So the lack of information of the client about the person and the organisation from which he will then buy the product, greatly hinders the purchase of goods.
(8) It is necessary to produce content for monetisation. I think it is clear. Except that we do it badly, 99.5% of businesses that I observe. They don't know how, nobody taught them. How? a) We need to do it natively, we do not sell buy-buy-buy-buy. People don't like it that way. Example, talk about one ingredient your product is made of, then the next. Tell how you produce it (or the manufacturer). Show the product indirectly rather than directly. People realise it's about your product. Sell natively with an offer to buy. b) Sometimes you need to sell right away without the first stages. Well, because you can buy traffic and immediately pour it into the selling page. That's how we do it too. In the text or video talk about what problem we solve, what we promise if he buys, you need a personal story about what changed when you used the product. The text appeals to what benefit the customer will get from it, what problem will be solved, what will change financially, what will change emotionally, what will change socially. c) Monetisation uses an offer (previously created)
Headline There are many points of view in marketing, and it's always this one that works. (An ocean of options in marketing, and it's always this one that works.)
Description There are no one-size-fits-all strategies in marketing - each is created for a specific business, audience and product. But there are fundamental principles that underpin any successful campaign. These are not magic recipes, but time-tested benchmarks. What are these principles? Let's break it down step by step: (1) You need to know your target audience. You need this for marketing. (You need this for product creation, but we're not talking about that right now). How? (a) In detail, in depth, become her. The best way to do this is to watch YouTube interviews with people who will buy from you. Watch 5-7 interviews. You will form a collective image of your customer in your head. You can conduct interviews, but it is expensive and not always necessary. b) It is necessary to collect a map of interests about your audience. That is, everything you have learnt should be written down. Briefly, what they eat, what they drink, what they watch, what they read, what they wear, what they drive, where they go on holiday, what places they go to, what kind of lifestyle they lead, everything. It's going to be necessary further down the line. You will understand.
(2) You need to create a pledge. Or recycle an old one if you've inherited marketing. How? (a) It needs to be simple, it needs to be clear to your audience, Keep it simple. My product will solve something for you. b) It has to be relevant to your audience. c) It has to change something in a person's life. Get rid of something, that's most often the case. If your product is improving, it has to improve multiple times, otherwise it will be hard to sell, because improvement is a movement from good enough to better. When the audience is happy with everything, it's hard to sell something even better. I recommend Getting rid of something, it's easier.
(3) Find a sound problem from your promise, you need this later for marketing. How. (a) Look for the sound of what the problem you are getting rid of might sound like.
(4) You need to create a value proposition. If you don't have one and you create one, then by creating one you may see a significant increase in sales if you implement just this one thing. How? a) You need the perceived value of what you're selling to be higher than what people pay for it. Ideally 1 in 10.
(5) You need to think of a product line, for re-monetisation. This is a super important step, it's the only way to create a long-lasting business. Think about this. You've spent a resource on attracting an audience. Why would you spend a resource on attracting again? It's not rational. and the right thing to do is to create related products for the same audience. So you pay once for the attraction.
How? Think about what else you can sell to the same audience.
We need all the previous points to do marketing. Basically produce content and distribute it. Here's a little bit of theory. Marketing is a simple thing. There's a person (you) and there's another person (the customer), there's words between you. That's it. You just need to answer the question, what words should I say to get him to buy my product. Here is everything we have previously worked through, we need to use further in our marketing. I divide marketing into 4 functions. 1) Attraction 2) Retention 3) Nurturing 4) Monetisation
(6) We need to do ‘Attraction.’ How? a) Create content, depending on your company's available resources, create content across all platforms. To create content, use the audience knowledge you have gained earlier. For example, you sell ‘Prams for Kids’, you can create content about weight loss. Build on the interests of your audience, even though they are not directly related to your product. Do you understand why? I hope so. At this stage, you need to attract attention and sign up for yourself. Subscription is mandatory. This is the determinant of the success of this type of content. If you don't subscribe, you've just wasted a resource on content creation and distribution.
(7) You need to make content for Retention and for Growth. The audience that subscribed to you should stay subscribed to you, you have already spent a resource to attract them, we don't want to spend a resource to attract them again, it's not rational. How? a) Retention. I will tell you through an example. There is an account of one company in the social network ‘Prostokvashino’ called, so they do not do retention, do not know how . Imagine they have an audience of grandmothers and bodybuilders. So Grandma is interested in watching how to cook pancakes with cottage cheese from Ivlev, and bodybuilders, for example, it is interesting to watch another, certainly not about fat pancakes. So retention should be aimed at the interests of your audience. That's why we worked them out earlier. b) Nurturing. This is a topic that nobody understands at all. I'll try to explain it with an example. You have a classmate, and he was so bad in school, he did not fulfil promises, sometimes he said one thing and did another, but at the same time he is predictable for you because you have studied with him for 10 years, you know in what situation you can deal with him, and in what situation it is better not to deal with him. And from what kind of person, what is your assessment of him, from this depends on whether you are ready to go with him on the case or not. So the lack of information of the client about the person and the organisation from which he will then buy the product, greatly hinders the purchase of goods.
(8) It is necessary to produce content for monetisation. I think it is clear. Except that we do it badly, 99.5% of businesses that I observe. They don't know how, nobody taught them. How? a) We need to do it natively, we do not sell buy-buy-buy-buy. People don't like it that way. Example, talk about one ingredient your product is made of, then the next. Tell how you produce it (or the manufacturer). Show the product indirectly rather than directly. People realise it's about your product. Sell natively with an offer to buy. b) Sometimes you need to sell right away without the first stages. Well, because you can buy traffic and immediately pour it into the selling page. That's how we do it too. In the text or video talk about what problem we solve, what we promise if he buys, you need a personal story about what changed when you used the product. The text appeals to what benefit the customer will get from it, what problem will be solved, what will change financially, what will change emotionally, what will change socially. c) Monetisation uses an offer (previously created)