April 5th, 2020 | Direct Sales

Yesterday, I was looking into direct sales and was looking into Nathan Barry, Jason Cohen and Steli Efti.

Here are two articles so you have an idea:

https://marketingexamples.com/direct/jason-cohen-sales

https://nathanbarry.com/sales/

And two talks:

Steli Efti on IndieHackers:

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/119-steli-efti-of-close

And of course, I went and saw again the best talk of all time for bootstrapped founders:

https://vimeo.com/74338272

Take aways:

From Nathan Barry:

1. If you are under $3k MRR, your time is not valuable. You have to do direct sales to get traction.

2. Go super specific. Nathan went "Email marketing tool for Paleo Recipe bloggers that are women". THAT SPECIFIC.

3. Create an echo chamber. Now, it seems to people in the "Female Paleo Recipe community" that the whole world is switching to ConvertKit, which is funny, because at the time ConvertKit was making like $3k MRR.

3. Before reaching out cold, follow them on Twitter, subscribe to their mailing list, make it so they feel they know you.

4. Don't sell, start a conversation.

5. You want to convert people that are using a competitor, not try to explain to people why they need what you have.

From Jason Cohen:

1. My favorite expression: Be a boutique, not Walmart.

2. Scratching and clawing can get you easily to 50 customers.

3. Ask for advice, don't sell. Offer to pay for their advice.

From Steli Efti:

1. Ask for advice. It helps you not only grow, but learn your customers.

2. Customer discovery and sales are the same thing.


In total, if I were to draw the lowest common denominator:

1. Do direct sales.

2. Ask for advice, don't sell.

3. Go niche and create an echo chamber.

4. Prefferably contact people using a competitor, if it's possible.

What Nathan did in order to get to "Women Paleo Recipe Bloggers" was look at his own customers and find the most successful one he wanted more of.

He then found this big Paleo Recipe blogger. Then he went to list all others but realized it was too generic. He went with "Female Paleo Recipe Bloggers" and was able to list them all down, and started creating an echo chamber.

What about my case?

Today I will try to come up with my target customer and tomorrow I'll make a list of all of them.



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