louisswiss

> It's not much of a fair market if one of the items have been removed from the shelves and you have to specifically ask for it and the price.

To be fair, this isn't a very apt analogy.

A better one would be to liken Apple to a smart fridge...

- Is it ok for Apple to say "only products bought through our smart fridge's grocery app can be stored in this fridge" ? --> probably not

- Is it ok for Apple to take a cut when the consumer purchases through the smart fridge's app directly? --> IMO clearly yes

- Should Apple be required to warn you that it'd be cheaper to buy the same brand of milk from a grocery store 10min walk away? --> IMO clearly no

> This no longer exists. You need Twitter in perpetuity. If for some reason you’re banned from Twitter (often there’s no reason at all) there goes an entire career and audience you’ve built for years.

For a newsletter at least, this definitely isn't true.

For context, I'm the cofounder of SparkLoop — a referral platform specifically for newsletters.

We see thousands of newsletters growing 5-50% monthly with referrals (and more if they do other marketing stuff).

Except this doesn't work for Substack users, because Substack doesn't support tools like ours.

The problem isn't that "you can't grow a newsletter without Twitter" — it's that "you can't grow a Substack without Twitter".

Just choose a better email platform and the problem disappears.

easy...

character = trust / competence

> It literally means 'regular person test'...

The whole point is that it doesn't mean "regular person test'...

It means "person who isn't the target customer and who probably cares about you too much to give unbiased feedback" test.

> In the end what changed is that e-mail based marketing was on the decline, with other mediums taking over.

FWIW this is completely incorrect. Over the past 2 years other marketing channels have skyrocketed in cost (eg FB ads) and most brands/companies are now investing heavily into email marketing. It's a significant growth industry right now, more so than at any time since I've been involved with email marketing (since ~2010).

If you're buying a large software license today — and I bet this holds true for at least some houses, cars, other "high-pressure sales situations" too — the vendor definitely won't think of the negotiation as adversarial.

In an unending game of the prisoner's dilemma, either you all win or you all lose.

Sounds like you'd get a lot out of the Sales for Founders podcast: https://pod.salesforfounders.com/

I was in a similar situation to you ~10 years ago and had to learn sales the hard way.

The podcast is my attempt to make it easier for others to avoid all the mistakes I made when learning sales.

Interesting article, however I'm surprised the author only went into the time it takes them to create content.

I run a bootstrapped product called [SparkLoop](https://sparkloop.app) which makes it easy for creators to add a referral program to their newsletter, and by far the biggest (and most annoying) time investment we hear newsletter creators complaining about is marketing, not content creation.

For most newsletter creators, marketing takes as much (if not more) time as content creation does!

> “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

By Ronald Wright.

I've employed developers in Zurich.

I promise you, the market for developers does not top out at anywhere near $100k.

That's closer to a starting salary (assuming a university degree).

> even the workers seem to value the rights of the employers far above the rights of the employees. I'm not sure why this is.

To paraphrase a famous quote, in the USA the workers don't see themselves as workers, but as temporarily down-on-their-luck owners.

Thanks, means a lot!

> They don't use sleezy techniques and unruly ways to "get them". Or aggressively piss people off.

That's definitely NOT what S4F is about.

One of the main reasons I made this course is that most founders - especially technical founders - still have this impression of sales as being sleazy or aggressive.

I'm sure that is still out there today - in the used car industry, for example.

But - in SaaS at least - sales has moved on.

Why?

Because it had to.

Simply put, when you are selling a SaaS product (with free trials, money-back guarantees, monthly billing...) it isn't worth making the sale if it's a bad fit.

Lying, pressuring people into buying something they don't need, being aggressive just doesn't pay anymore. Yes - they might sign up for one month - but then they'll churn and you'll have spent more acquiring them than they paid you.

Instead, S4F teaches you how to move to a 'team' mindset...

- how to understand your customer - how to align your goals with theirs - how to create a shared success plan (so they don't just buy, they actually get value from your product and don't churn) - how to nudge them along that path to success

"If you want someone to marry you, why don't you just tell me that the first time you meet them?"

Same reasons apply here...

- I want to give you time to see bits of the course and learn about whether it's a good fit for you before making a (nontrivial for some people) purchase

- I want to make sure you're the right fit for the course too

- You're more likely to purchase after getting to know me and the course content, understanding the value, and overcoming your objections

Asking for your email address is the happy middle ground of "can I buy you a drink" between "saying nothing" and "asking someone to marry you".

I focus less on techniques and more on strategy and mindset.

There are thousands of 'successful' cold email templates and guides out there for free, for example. You don't need another one.

But they probably won't work for you - any more than downloading the Uber app onto your phone will teach you how to build your own ride-sharing app.

Instead, I focus on the fundamentals of sales - how to approach finding potential customers, understanding them, and creating a shared success plan that results in them 'default buying'.

A lot of that will be very useful outside of B2B sales...

- consulting - hiring - applying for jobs - press outreach - pitching investors

I assume someone has already created a great resource on press outreach which would be higher impact for you than taking this course, but it would definitely help.

This is a really common problem!

The easiest way to overcome it is to reframe the problem.

Instead of asking "how do I go from yes to paid invoices", ask yourself "how do I change the default outcome from they don't buy my product to they buy my product".

This involves setting up a shared success plan with the customer.

Mark Fershteyn talks about how to do this in depth on a podcast episode we recorded last year: https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/episodes/How-to-close-y...

> I'd love to just pay someone cash to sell it for me and help me get from zero to one.

I've seen quite a few founders try this, and it normally ends badly.

There are two main drawbacks...

1. The salesperson effectively becomes the CEO. They understand the customers better, have the relationships, and may not get all of this across to you - especially in the event they leave suddenly.

2. If you hire a salesperson without knowing how to sell your product (and some results already), you'll never know if it's your salesperson or your product that is underperforming. And you'll have no idea how to fix it.

I don't know what the best solution for you is, but consider looking into the Mom Test book to help you learn how to get from zero to one by talking to customers. It's a great book, and required (included) reading as part of my S4F course.

Good luck!

OP here. Interesting, thanks for sharing!

I haven't read the book you mentioned, but have come across it a few times previously.

If you're wondering how the S4F course is different from this book (or other sales resources, such as Steli Efti's amazing content on early-stage sales), maybe this analogy will help:

Most sales resources are like programming tutorials - they'll teach you how to write a for loop, for example.

The S4F course, by comparison, doesn't teach you how to do sales prescriptively, so much as helps you debug how you're already doing sales reactively.

This is (in my experience after several iterations of the course) much more effective at helping you get sales results - as the real difficulty isn't in working out how to do sales, but instead in diagnosing what has gone wrong in the first place.

Happy to answer any questions (also about sales more generally).

> I think the answer is that there are two sources of feeling like a noob: being stupid, and doing something novel.

I very much doubt that being stupid correlates with feeling like a noob. In fact, my own experience of 'stupid' people suggests the very opposite.

I teach (technical) founders how to do sales at SalesForFounders.com.

What my work has taught me is that...

a) some founders are motivated by improving their customers' lives

b) some founders are motivated by building the best solution to a problem their customers have

c) 'a' founders are more likely to be successful and less likely to give up than 'b' founders

Interesting!

You probably know this is a crazy crowded space - there are tools out there like ViralLoops and ReferralHero, to name just two of the more popular ones that have been around for years. What's your value proposition over one of those tools?

BTW I've been working in this space for ~2 months now, with a small referral tool built only for newsletter creators. It's super private early access (not even a website) - but we're seeing our early users growing their lists by >10% MoM in some cases!

That is with more established newsletters though - many hundreds (ideally thousands or tens of thousands) of subscribers.

We didn't see 'new' newsletters without an initial audience get too much value out of a referral program so far - so I'm excited to follow along and see what you do differently to help those early stage founders :)

The whole point of the scenario was that there are no good options.

We shouldn't allow people to get into a situation where they have to choose between losing a kidney and their children starving.

But - if someone is in that situation - it makes absolutely no sense not to let them decide which option they find least worst.

By doing that, you're only making things worse.

My original comment (above) made it pretty clear that I believe we should be doing everything we can to ensure people don't have to make these kinds of choices.

But the way to do this is by adding new, better options, not by restricting existing, 'bad' options.

Yes.

As a society, we should put measures in place to make sure no-one ever has to make this decision (easily accessible food banks, state support etc).

And we should make sure anyone making that decision is aware of the alternatives (and implications) and not suffering from a medical condition which is impairing their ability to make decisions.

But the fundamental choice should be down to the adult in question.

Interesting. I’ve never heard that before, but I have heard them called Einkaufspanzer (shopping tanks) several times. The implication being it’s the tank you use to do your grocery shopping in.

Common advice is you only have to be good at either hiring slowly or firing early.

Google, for example, was apparently very good at hiring (slowly) - at least in their early days. So it didn't matter that they were (are?) terrible at firing.

Facebook was the opposite AFAIK. It didn't matter that they hired too soon and too many of the 'wrong' people - because they were good at letting them go before it did too much damage to the business.

On balance, I'd rather be good at hiring than firing, as it seems to be much more fair on employees.

Yep - A willingness to hire slower and fire earlier would be much better advice.

I've found it relatively easy (and very quick) to get something up and running with Firestore/Firebase and React.js.

A cynic would say that's the kind of reasoning that leads to the whole "I once knew a woman who swallowed a fly..." set of scenarios...

Not sure where you are in Europe, but in Switzerland this is perfectly legal. I was employed on a Zero-hour contract as a bartender for much of my time in higher education.