https://www.listennotes.com/e/fb81834e754d4d7b8eb6811344840f1a

Oh, here we go. What is up, ladies and gentlemen? Welcome to another episode of Unfuck My Startup. We're in a studio today, live with, can we get, can we get the other camera? Live with our special guest. He's a man who has been part of 12 unicorns, 13 exits, a six-time sales leader, a five-time founder, and a three-time author. Is that all true?

Yeah, it's true. It's true.

Oh my goodness.

Well, it's obnoxious, I understand.

Yeah, no, but that's just like a banger description. I was gonna do some research on you. I'm like, I don't need to go any farther than right here, the LinkedIn title.

Yeah, just stay there. Don't go any deeper than that.

So right now he's a fractional CRO and a GTM advisor and his entire life and purpose is to help people like you go from zero to 25 million ARR. So welcome, Scott Leese. While we're waiting for people to roll in, Guillaume, what's up? You are in Austin. Where's everybody calling in from? Drop some, oh, Harrison Weinhold, what's up, my man? New York, San Fran, Denver. Scott was just in Denver. Yeah, this Over the weekend, Bangalore ATL, typically the India crowd is the farthest away. I love to kind of see Toronto. Alexei from Tel Aviv. Thanks for calling in, brother. What time is it in Tel Aviv? Alexei? ZW from Poland. Redondo Beach, California. What's up, Scott? Nathan from Big Sky.

This is one of the coolest parts of these kind of events is you see everybody dialing in from all over the world.

Yeah, it's great. so I have a question for the audience. Our first segment is the pitch slap segment. Does anybody want to come up and pitch their startup to the entire audience? I don't know what the audience count is today because Abdul does Abdul saying yes twice. Nobody. Scott Sands beard. Oh, yeah. That's true.

It took about a minute and a half for somebody to call me out for shaving.

So we got Abdul and Ajit who want to come up and pitch their startup. Does anybody else want to. Want to get thrown into the draw straws of. Of coming up here? So vit. Vit will come next time. But our pit is also wants to. Yeah. Hey, how about. Oh, Nathan Stone. Charles Saunders. Okay.

We got a lot of candidates.

Yeah.

First me. So everybody who said yes, email producer@rbdb.com and we'll pull one of you up next week. Pete and Ely, decide who's going to come up and pitch us because we got audio and we want somebody to pitch us. So, Just to go over the rules of the pitch lap, we are going to have, they have two minutes. And then at one minute and 30 seconds, we throw a survey up and we say, Would you buy or would you not buy? If you were like the target of this person, right? Over 66%, they get a swag box. Over 33%, they get a t-shirt. Under 33%, they get sent home. They get sent home with a wave. And then we try to book them demos from the crowd.

So, which has worked before you were telling me?

I mean, we've booked, we booked, yeah, hundreds of demos. We booked, I think our record, Pete, what's our record demo book? Pete's, by the way, Pete's on chat, he's not live. Pete's basically, he's, oh, what's up Abdul? How are you doing, my man? Good to see you, Abdul's in the community. Yeah, we were just on a call, like, last, you weren't on this Friday, you were on the Friday before.

Rather before, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've gotten in the high 20s demo book before. I know what Abdul does, so I think there's, I think there's, we'll see. I just don't know how many of your perfect ICP are going to be on this call. That would be the problem.

I don't know.

That would be the problem for booking demos. But when he pitches, pretend you're the ICP when you give him the I would buy I would maybe buy or I would not, or I would buy or I would not buy. Okay.

What's the highest score somebody's gotten?

I think we've had somebody in the 70s before.

All right.

We had a guy, maybe the 80s. We had a guy who had this, like, really, I told you before, we had a guy come up. It was like in the 20 million ARR or something. And he's like pitching this like thing that like you can use Google Analytics to like, figure out what you're, I don't even remember what it was. It was amazing though. It was like, he was showing me basically like examples of what I should be doing on my RB2B landing page because of other stuff that's working via everyone else's A/B tests. That's what it was. You only get everyone else's A/B tests and it suggests changes to your landing page. Pretty dope.

I guess that's why he's at 20 million a year.

Exactly. Everybody's like, I'd buy that. And he's like, cool, it's like 30k a year. Nope. No, I won't. All right, Ely, can we give him two minutes? I can't hear Ely. Ely doesn't have a mic back there. There he goes. Yes, in the chat. Okay. Where is it? Hey, Abdul, can you just look at the chat and they'll tell you when to go because we have a different view on this monitor we have and we can't really see anything. All right. So can you tell them when to go? Okay, let's go ahead and start.

Yeah. Okay.

Hit it, bro. You can share your screen too, if you want or not.

Doesn't matter. Okay.

I mean, I'll just, if you can see me, that's great.

Yeah.

First of all, who's your ICP? Because that's important. My name is Abdul Mukati. I focus on helping lead gen agencies never miss a client reply. A lot of people focus on doing outbound and they use, they spend a lot of time figuring out the deliverability, what tools to use, and they do great on sending out thousands of emails or LinkedIn DMs. But one of the critical things that happens is that they miss replies and timely replies is money on table. And that's what Master Inbox helps you solve. We connect with any provider that you have in doing outbound, no matter what tool you use, email or LinkedIn, and we bring all those client replies into one Master Inbox. So you never miss a reply ever again.

That was the most succinct and beautiful pitch I've ever heard on pitch slot, my man. Yeah. And by the way, great name, too. And you might. I mean, look, you might get the record for the. For the highest.

It's gonna be close.

For the highest percentage buying of all time. Thank you very. I mean, that. What was that, like, 26 seconds or something?

I love that.

That's the definition of an elevator pitch.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if I was a legion agency, I would want to have it. Cool. Abdul, thank you. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right. Pete's reminding us, audience, we're talking to you. If you want a demo of, and by the way, Abdul, can anybody use this besides legion agencies? Like, if you have a growth operation and you're multi-channel and you're using all the tools and you're like a pirate, But you work at a company, can you use it too?

I have a waitlist of 387 people. Just now on my LinkedIn, it's popping off. There's probably 400 more people that just joined that waitlist. So maybe in 60 days, yes, I'll give you access. But if you are the loudest voice, the top 10 loudest voices from that group, you'll get access.

Okay.

I like this.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I like you, Abdul.

Yeah.

If you never want to miss a reply from I don't know what to call it other than Pirate Outbound.

Adam's rebranded. Yeah, exactly.

Other than Pirate Lead Gen style outbound, if you never want to miss a reply, drop demo in. TJ Collins dropped demo. Tom's getting a demo. Anybody else? Demos?

Demos? I want a demo.

Scott's gonna take a demo. I'm not a- Andre wants a demo.

Demo.

All right. Well, make sure to follow up with Scott after the show, too. He's gonna- He's gonna get done with it.

I got a loud voice.

It's gotta be loud, Abdul. A really loud voice. And it's somewhat related to what we're gonna talk about for the rest of the show today, by the way. So Abdul, thank you very much. I'll see you in the community on those Friday calls. And thanks for coming, man. Okay, so what are people gonna get if they stick around to the end.

Of the episode today? We're gonna talk about a way to go specifically zero to one. It's really applied anywhere, but I'm calling out people going zero to 1 million. And how you can get there without hiring a single salesperson.

Audience, who does that sound interesting to? Who wants to go zero to 1 million without hiring a single salesperson? Nirov does, Abdul does, Dean does Nate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is your audience. This is your audience.

Chat is going so fast.

It's like, I can't even read the names anymore. Robert Johnson, I would go for 0 to 20 bucks. Well, you know, that's in Scott's LinkedIn title. So follow up with him after-.

Send me your Venmo. Yeah, my coffee's coming. Make sure I deliver at least once.

Yeah, yeah. And then, so after we decode this 0 to 1 million strategy with no salespeople, I actually have some questions for Scott around because it's things that I struggled with when I was starting my first startup. First of all, you've been a sales leader six times. You've scaled nine figure ARR from basically zero, right?

From zero.

Yeah, from zero. Time and time again. So I want to know, when is it the right time to hire a salesperson? What do I look for? Where do I find this person? When do I know it's gone wrong? And then unrelated. you're fractional, when is the right time to use fractional people and what is not? So we're gonna hit all of that towards the end, but the first segment's gonna be the juicy thing that everybody actually cares about, which is how do we go from zero to one with no sales people? What is the 2025 tactic that is working for all of your clients?

Yeah, I've been running this motion in play with my clients and some big brands and vendors out there who are way beyond 1 million in ARR almost exclusively for about a year and a half, two years.

Yeah.

And if you're active on LinkedIn, you might have heard this phrase, go to network rather than go to market. It's just a little play on go to market. And as things started to change when the market kind of turned 2023 ish, don't quote me on the timeline, but it's 2023, I think there started to be this universal feeling of like, People aren't picking up the phone as much. And email is not working as much. And wow, even LinkedIn is, it's hard to get replies.

Yeah.

Right?

Hold on. Can we ask the audience, is anybody feeling that out there that the phone is not working, email is hardly working, and LinkedIn is not working? We got some yes.

Yeah.

It looks like, oh, Rob, phone works.

Yeah.

There's nuance in what you sell, who you sell to. I'm not saying it doesn't work at all, but nobody can really argue, I don't think that it, there's degradation in return is very different now than it was 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. We as human beings just interact differently. We don't talk on the phone as much as we used to. It's kind of an undeniable fact for most people at least, right? There's nuance to it. I wouldn't tell people, never cold call again, never email again. But I'm saying there is an easier way that is more cost effective and efficient. And the weird thing is part of this motion has been around from the beginning. If you've raised money from venture capital or even angels or friends and family, one of the first places people get their first or second customer from all the time is from their investors, which is almost always an introduction or a referral. The weird thing is we have historically stopped Right then and there with the referral motion until we have customers and then we have this awkward sort of CS sales-ish motion where we're asking current customers, Hey, do you know anybody else, Adam, who might be a good fit?

Yeah.

Right? And I just started thinking to myself, why? Why aren't we taking advantage of the global digital network that we all have, this digital Rolodex, if you will, And why does it have to be people who are invested in the company? Why does it have to be people who work in the company even? Can't we just also tap in to the large digital network of terrible name but influencers? People with big, huge networks on LinkedIn specifically, people who know lots of people in our ICP or in our buyer persona. somebody who's connected to lots of founders or lots of VPs of sales or lots of VPs of marketing or what have you. Right? So that's the motion is you've figured out in theory, you've got your product built, you know who the ICP is, right? You've got your messaging kind of down. You've spent time to build some foundational kind of sales playbook kind of elements, okay? So rather than you as a founder starting to send spam cannon style emails or cold call all day, which a lot of founders, it's not their skill set anyways, right? And you don't want to do it. Rather than do that, why not go to the Adam Robinsons of the world, the Scott Lees of the world, whoever is sort of active in your kind of category, right? Or whose content you enjoy, who has 100,000 followers plus, 50,000 followers plus. Make a big list of those people, okay? And then reach out to those people one by one and say, Hey, Adam, I don't know if you do any kind of referral business or affiliate work or anything like that. I love your content. You got a big network. I built this company called XYZ. We solve da-da-da-da-da. if you're open to affiliate work and making some extra income and making a couple of intros now and then, I'd love to talk to you a little bit more. Okay? Most people in our kind of world and atmosphere are open to additional streams of income, especially if they are low effort, high yield. And making a quick intro is very low effort. and depending on your deal size, it could be very high yield. If you've got a thousand dollar annual product and my payout is going to be a hundred bucks, I probably don't care that much. If you've got a hundred thousand dollar product, that's 10 grand. I could do a lot with 10 grand for just making an intro. Not much work. I might do that every day twice on Sunday.

Right?

So if you've got the right size ACV, you reach out to this list of yours and you see how many people are open to it. I think you'll find 30, 40% of people will say, yeah, sure, you know, I'm happy to do some affiliate work, but they want to know more. They want to verify that you're a good person, that your product works, they want to understand, you know, because they're going to put their name behind it. They want to make sure it's like legit.

Right?

So let's say you sign a few of those people up. Your initial goal should be to sign up 10 of those people. Okay? I know personally about 5% of the people that get sent my way that somebody wants an introduction to. Out of that 5%, 80% of those people will take a meeting if I make the offer an introduction. so let's say your average deal size is 50k just for the hell of it. That's 200k in pipeline that I just opened up for you. If you have 10 versions of me, that's two million dollars worth of pipeline. And you can run this motion on a Cadence of every two to four weeks. So I want you to just start doing some of that math on your own for your own businesses out there. All right, so backpedaling now. you get a bunch of influencers, people with big networks, could be industry experts, doesn't matter who they are really. All right, you sign those people up, you have some generic kind of one page, two page, you know, referral agreement, okay? In SAS, the average term is like 10 to 20% of first year's ARR. You're gonna wanna overcomplicate it, You're going to want to say, okay, well, I'll pay you 15% year one, 8% year two, 5% year three. From my seat, nobody cares about that stuff. They don't, you're just over complicating it. I'm not sitting here thinking, oh my gosh, my intro I made three years ago, is that going to hit and I'm going to get paid again? So don't do that. Don't do that. You're also going to want to play around with the numbers. You're going to be like, well, $1,000, like everybody should be motivated by that, right? This is gonna sound bougie, but like not everybody is. And the people that are good at this motion, you have to understand that they might be in a different economic bracket. And so $1,000 might be a lot to somebody out there or you as a founder who's just getting started, but it's not necessarily to some of these people who run this motion and have been quite successful. Right? So don't mess around with the percentages. Pay people well, pay people fast. Make them feel involved, communicate with them. Make sure they get feedback on, hey, this intro that you made, that turned into a meeting. That meeting turned into a contract. That contract's worth 250K. If that sucker closes, you might get 25 grand. You're motivating me, you're keeping me involved.

Yeah, 'cause you might go back to the guy and be like, hey, how'd that demo go? And just try to like, Absolutely.

Do a very- We'll go back and nudge.

Yeah.

'Cause there's little 10 grand, 25 grand on the line, right?

Yeah.

If there's 500 bucks on the line, I'm not gonna do some of your work. I'm not gonna go back in and nudge.

Yeah.

All right. So you sign up these people with a real simple agreement. You've got 10 of them now. Okay? Now what you do is you get them to download their LinkedIn connections into a CSV file. you go into LinkedIn profile and settings. I don't know if everybody knows this already, but you can download a list of your connections. Now you overlay that list of those affiliates connections with a list from your prospects. So these are all people that you want to talk to. Your prospect list. And you find where it matches and then you send the referral partner, me, you send me a list of 50 to 100. Don't send me 10,000 or, you know, some big, huge number, because I'm going to look at that file and be like, I don't have time for this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? I gotta, I need like two hours on Sunday to look at this. You're going to delay me. But if you send me a small list of like 50 to 100, I can eyeball that sucker in a minute or two. as I look at it again, I'm gonna know 5% well enough that I can probably text.

Yeah.

Like right now. Like if Abdul was back here, right? And he was like, Scott, I just emailed you a list of 100 prospects that I want to talk to. They're all first degree connections of yours.

Yeah.

I've already done the work for you, so you don't have to check that. Just scan real quick. I know five of them. for sure, just looking at the name, probably more when I take the time to click on some names that look familiar, the company that looks familiar, whatever. Right now, I just opened up X amount of pipeline for Abdul. Again, multiply that across however many influencers you signed up and get into a cadence of sending me a new list either once or twice a month. A motivated referral partner. that you're communicating with well and the offer, the incentive on the offer is there, that person will not be bothered.

Yeah.

A lot of people think, oh, I don't want to bother these people all the time or whatever. You're not bothering me. It takes me two minutes to look at this list and I have an opportunity to make money and potentially help a colleague slash friend, whoever in my network solve a problem of theirs and help you I feel good. That's a win-win-win. Everybody's happy. You didn't have to prospect anybody, which is annoying. The buyer didn't have to get prospected, get interrupted and throughout their day and everything like that. Right? The relationship starts off on trust. Because what I do when I see a name that I know is I go to them and say, hey, Adam, I don't know if you have this problem or not, but my buddy Abdul has built this thing. This is what it does. Don't take a meeting just for the heck of it. But if you do have this problem and you want to talk to somebody about it, I can vouch for Abdul. Good guy, good product. I put my name behind it, Etc. Let me know if that's interesting to you. 80 of those people say yes to me. Hey, actually, I do kind of have that problem. They might say, I don't think I'm really buying right now, but you know what? I trust you, Scott. I'll take your word for it. I'm curious.

Right?

Then I make a little intro that says, hey, so and so, meet my friend Abdul, hey Abdul, meet my friend so and so. Y'all take it from here. And I get the hell out of the way at that point in time. And now it's on you, right? just doing that is so easy to get to a million bucks of ARR. If you're already beyond a million bucks, you can run this play. There's no reason you can't. You can do it at a big scale. You can go from 10 affiliate partners to 100 affiliate partners. Basically, you could turn everyone out there into a commission-only style salesperson. You're not paying salary to, you're not paying benefits to, taxes on, office space. You're not even buying them a laptop. Nothing. The relationship starts on trust. The sales cycle is shorter. The average contract value on these deals is higher, typically. They churn less, and oddly, they have less support tickets. that they submit. So they're less of a pain in the ass as a customer as well. So that's the simplest way that I can describe this process to you.

So that's incredible. This was exactly what we did at retention.com for 12 to 22. In the Shopify ecosystem, there are a bunch of people that know Everybody. Everybody, right.

And.

I saw this magic happen when I was able to, you know, there's this brand everybody knows called BlendJet. And retention.com kind of sells money at a discount. It like allows the brand to identify and sell more abandoned car, send more abandoned car emails than they were before. And you can see before you were here, now you're here. and, you know, he was, he was, like, paying us five grand a month and making, like, a hundred or something like that. And I showed, I would, I would get on the phone with the guy who knew a bunch of Brands. I'd be like, you know, Belinette, this was what he was making before. This is what he's making after. He's paying me 5K a month. It's an annual deal, and I'll give you 20 for an intro to anybody. And, like, I'm kind of addressing this comment. that I think is very worth addressing. We didn't have an over $100,000 deal and this worked like wildfire. I mean, you could argue that maybe it was a little misleading because I was showing them a 5K a month when our average subscription was 1K a month, but these guys didn't care. They'd make 20 intros if five of them closed.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

And everybody's at a different economic place.

Yeah.

As well.

Totally. Totally.

And so 500 bucks might be super motivating to some people.

Right.

But for some people it might not be.

Totally. And you have to figure that out. And another thing that I would say.

Is.

It'S really important to figure out incentives in general. You know, like, it's like, well, what type of person, you know, if you're going after the top influencers in the world who are selling $30 million a year of info products. Like you're gonna have a very, they may be up for an intro for something, right? Like there could be something that actually piques their interest, like, oh, this is worth my time to go to one of my connections and like, whatever. It's not gonna be 500 bucks.

Right?

Right.

But like, You know, the, the, the world of the e-com founders, which, which I found myself in, I, I thought that in aggregate, and this is a generalization, but in aggregate, they had fairly successful direct to consumer e-commerce businesses where there was this linear trade off between putting a dollar in their business for growth and paying themselves. So they were all strapped for cash because they all wanted to grow in like the old world of 2021, 2022. So any source of cash to them was incredibly attractive, especially as you said, if it was like low lift, relatively high yield. That worked for us in that market. Your motion, it seems very obvious why it would work for as these guys highlight like a $100,000 deal. I think versions of, if you're PLG, if you don't have any large deals at all, actually going direct to people with this motion may not work, but there's other influencer sort of content plays that do.

Yeah, there's other archetypes of influencers as well. Don't go after people who don't get out of bed for 2,500 bucks or less.

Right.

Go after other people that are out there producing good content in good roles. but maybe are earlier in their career or haven't been as financially successful. People who are like, Shoot, for 250 bucks a pop, I'll make some intros. I can make an extra 1,000 bucks a month. That's half my mortgage payment. Totally.

Right?

So, you know, I think you learn as you make these asks of people who's the right kind of ICP to be an affiliate partner for you and why, and when you lock in on it, you know, snatch them up, right? Lock them all in, treat them well, treat them very well. Like I said, communicate with them, pay them fast, pay them well, all these, these kinds of, of things. It doesn't matter who the person is. Anybody on the planet, in theory, could be a referral partner for you.

And, and one thing I always thought about affiliate, which I had never seen science behind, I just believed it. I wanted affiliate to be our biggest channel at retention.com because my view was these are all of the influential people who everybody knows in this ecosystem. If they're all talking about retention.com, maybe none of them get credit when someone comes in and buys because a lot of times people just hear it from five people, they'll go book a demo on their own. At most one of them gets credit. And probably by the time somebody went through that person, they'd heard it from four other people.

Yeah.

So- It was a morality too. Yeah, exactly. So to me, it was like the 20%. I totally agree with what you're saying about just like, pay well, make it obvious. I wouldn't dick around with that whole, oh yeah, we're gonna scale down years two and three.

It's just like- Too complicated. Yeah, and it's- Make me think too much.

Totally. And it's just so valuable to have a bunch of people out there talking about your brand.

Yeah.

I think that's, like, totally worth the commission, especially how hard it is to outbound these days. Yeah.

That's the thing also to keep in mind, how hard it is to outbound these days.

Yeah.

And you're, wherever you are in your, in your company's Journey, whether it's zero to one or 12 to 24 or whatever, everybody right now has a difficult time outbound.

Everybody.

Everybody has the same top of funnel problem, whether you're Salesforce, RB2B, or Abdul's company that's just getting started. Everybody. So this is an easy avenue to explore that costs nothing. It doesn't cost anything. It's not like you're going to somebody and saying, okay, we got to deploy 20K of capital to see if this works. Let's go spend money on marketing. Let's go put some SEO or ads out there, or let's do influencer marketing with like paid posts or whatever.

Yeah.

This costs nothing. Nothing at all, right?

Yeah, I love the strategy. I think when our product improves a bit and with our B2B and we have something that's a little more friendly to this, I'm going to entertain doing it slightly different way, probably. I do want to answer a couple questions that people have.

Let's do it.

So question number one, how do you tackle the ask for download your LinkedIn contacts and send them to me. Do you think that the guy's sensitive to that?

No, there's no barrier to that whatsoever. None. I know that the only way for me to participate in this motion and make it easy for you to put the right people in front of me that I might know is to share this with you.

Yeah.

So there's no, I have no qualms about that. I don't hesitate at all. Yeah, got it. I've never talked to somebody who hesitates, by the way. And by the way, anybody who does hesitate, Not the right partner. If they're sketched out about it, then just be like, all right, no worries, you're not the right person. Off I go to the next. What am I gonna do? Try to overcome objections with this person? Which there are, no, that's not how it works, right? We've not the right person, move on.

Yeah, we've done a lot of shows on this influencer type work before, and a theme that pops up over and over again is like breadth, you know? so I'm thinking about somebody on the DDC side and then Clay, it's like rather than thinking that your whole future hinges on the influencer you respect the most or two other people that you think are the perfect alignment with your brand, if you can get this motion going with 20 people, it's going to be more than 10 times better than that. The smaller and medium guys, for a lot of reasons are kind of more effective.

Yeah, they're more effective.

Yeah, exactly. And they're more motivated.

They care more.

And something about, they don't have big audiences, but a lot of times the smaller audiences are more engaged and it's breadth of audience. So like that was a theme that I heard all the time. And then I also just heard over and over again, like, if you think this is complicated, you're overthinking it.

Yes.

Like it's literally just, you know, the rote steps of just making this list of people, coming up with how you're going to reach out to them and make them interested in this.

Yeah.

And I talk to people all the time and they're like, how do I automate this and how do I do this faster and all this stuff? And I'm like, stop. Just pause. Pause. Do some work.

This is low.

We don't have to automate every role that there is in every single motion. There's tools that do some of this kind of thing. that costs money. As an early stage bootstrap founder, you're not trying to spend money, I think. I care very much in my business about margin. I don't like to spend money on anything I don't have to spend it on. So if I can make, you know, this motion work, get good pipeline, close some deals, and I'm spending nothing and all it costs me is a little bit of time to build a list and send a few things out manually. that's fine. That's fine. I'm not trying to scale my whole entire operation right now. I'm trying to get off the ground. I'm trying to prove product market fit, hit some level of like sustainability and revenue, and then, you know, options open up to you. Maybe you want to go raise, maybe you want to do whatever, right? The point is just get off the ground.

Yeah, totally. There was a question earlier that is now scrolled up. Do you think that this could work for brick and mortar SMBs?

Yeah.

I know somebody who's in the restaurant space specifically, who's kind of like a, I don't know the right term, he'd probably kill me if I screw it up, but it's sort of like a go-to market for restaurant operations, getting them off the ground and optimizing things and whatnot. and he speaks at different conferences and stuff like that in the sector. And I was talking to him about this motion a month and a half ago. He was like, I don't know why I don't do this. I'm like, what do you mean? You don't do this? You don't like refer all these restaurants to different vendors that you have relationships with? And he's like, no, I don't do any of that. I'm like, oh, dude, you're missing out. So somebody like him could be great. Right? I don't know enough about the types of products, what the potential commission would be for somebody. Can it work? Yes.

Right.

You just got to figure out, it's got to be a line between your offer and the customer needing it, and then that person in the middle, the person in the middle, you being able to, and it doesn't even have to be money. People can be motivated by other stuff than money. Commission's very attractive, but like, I'm just thinking about we have this incredible UGC motion right when we launched RB2B and the people didn't want money. They just wanted visibility through my feet. They were just willing to, it's a little bit different in the deal, but same idea. It's like different people are motivated by different things. So figuring out in that ecosystem, what somebody wants.

Yeah.

What it is that they want in order to access their network.

That's the whole The whole thing with this, it should be a win-win-win for everybody.

Yeah, you know, totally. Rock on. Well, should we do, hey, audience, does anybody want to come up here and do the unfuck my startup segment? So it's two minutes where Scott and I will help you solve a go-to-market problem. If anybody actually wants to do that, say yes. If no, we're going to proceed to the other part of the show, which I was actually quite excited about. Noah, okay, Noah wants to come up and have us troubleshoot. So by the way, this is not pitching the audience. This is you are stuck and you want us to help.

Yeah, you've got a specific problem.

Yeah, you are stuck and you have.

A specific problem that you want us to help with.

Yeah, you are stuck and you have a specific problem that you want us to help with. I will let John and Pete pull somebody up. And I mean, let's just start with this because I don't know how long it's going to take to get this person up here. When is it right? When is it the right time to make your first sales higher?

This is a great question. And it has, the answer to this has changed many times in the last few years. And I feel like things are moving and accelerating so fast. If you asked me this question six months from now, I could potentially have a different answer.

Right.

The first thing I think you need to think about is what is your appetite for founder-led sales and selling?

Yep.

If you are, if you have a background in sales, you can delay it much longer, potentially, because you're good at it. You like it. It's a energy like giving rather than energy taking from you. But if your not a salesperson at all. You're a computer science background, engineering person, you're reserved or whatever. The answer is different at that point in time. You might be thinking about this sooner.

Yeah.

Right. Regardless, I think you need to have closed a couple deals. Even if you're this founder type that doesn't want to do sales, you need to have at least tried. you need to at least try. You need to hear what, you know, you need to get into some of these conversations, hopefully. You need to hear feedback from prospects like, get the hell out of here. And no, I don't like it because of these reasons, or here's my objections, or here's what's resonating. You need that information to give back to product, potentially, to give back to marketing, to fix your copywriting, to fix your talk track and your sales pitch potentially, even to give that feedback to this first person that you might hire, right? So I think it's really important that you at least try and hopefully succeed in closing, let's call it a handful or so, depending on deal sizes, I might have a different answer, but at least a couple, right? And if you have closed a few deals and you're not a salesperson at all, in theory now, you should be able to bring somebody who this is their discipline and they can replicate what you've done and amplify it and do it at a better clip.

Yeah.

Right. So if Abdul is out here and he's like, I closed two or three deals from cold prospecting. I'm not a salesperson. I've never sold before. I'm thinking to myself, well, I could probably do this then if he's closed. few deals. So I don't think you should really think about hiring a salesperson until you've run this motion and closed a few deals yourself. And I would deeply explore this motion that I'm talking about to get yourself a juicy pipeline and hopefully some sizable revenue and a little bit of a safety net or a cushion.

Yeah.

Right. We're making that first sales hire is maybe a little bit less scary.

Rock on. That's great advice. Noah is up. And by the way, hey, Ely, can you drop Scott's LinkedIn into the chat? Because Scott actually has a resource that walks through this playbook step by step. Connect to him, DM him if you want that resource. And let's go to Noah. Noah, what's up, man? how can we help you? How can we help you unfuck your startup, bro? What's your start?

Well, yeah.

So it's an AI chatbot, which hybrid, both traditional and AI. I create a conversational chat flows for industry specific, depending on what, what businesses wants, whether they want to capture the leads when they're coming to the website or they are, they want customer help with customer service queries or qualify those leads. The sales team, they spend 70 to 80% of time on qualifying those leads. So that's the product. And just getting us started into this one, not sure. I've been going to local meetups and meeting people, speaking to marketing agencies.

Because.

They help their clients spend a lot in getting traffic to the business. But 70 to 80% of or 90% of the website visitors leave without taking action. And that's why I love RBTV, where they can track those visitors and I help them, my AI assistant helps them to capture some attention and capture some of the leads. So I have spoken to marketing agencies, they love it, they want to refer it for free, they want to put it as an add-on to their product, marketing services products. But I haven't seen any results yet and I don't know how to get direct clients. What do you mean by direct clients? To get direct clients, businesses who I would, like for example, SaaS businesses, they're my criteria, that's where my background is from. Haven't gotten any, I would be starting the outbound, like maybe LinkedIn or email.

Can I jump in here for a second?

Yeah.

My two cents is, and I'm only kind of jumping in cutting you off because we only have so much time, but going after SaaS businesses with this type of product is a mistake in my opinion. All right. What you're describing as your product to me is a commodity at this point in time. It's table stakes. Any product that I buy if I'm a SaaS company, I expect to have this built into it already. So I'm not hearing anything new at all. And this is feature other than a platform and and suite of problems. So I think you're going after the wrong. So I would be going to these more old school kind of services, businesses, brick and mortar kind of stuff where I get warmer reception. That's my feedback. I'll turn it over to Adam to see if he has.

Sounded like going through a there's. from everything else as humanly possible. That's always kind of my approach. and I don't know exactly how I would in this scenario. And the other thing that I was thinking was when early stage in broad, I don't think mixed very well together. Clay, for example, is a very horizontal tool. It took them 12 years to get a dollar of revenue. And then they went, they figured out this incredible product market fit. and then it was slow for a while and then it went straight up.

But.

Generally in the beginning, the tools that I see take off, it's like a super clear, easy to understand workflow for a very specific use case. And then the aperture widens over time as features, functionality, and then additional ICPs get sort of layered on top of it. So I was also thinking that, what specifically is this going to do? I'm a SAS guy. What specifically am I going to get from this thing when I plug it in and turn it on as the founder of RB2B? So if that message was communicated to me differently just now, I might have been, I would have said something differently to you. But look, I'm thinking about targeting spaces outside of SAS with RB2B and how I'm going to go about doing it and designing the product so that it would succeed outside of SaaS? Because it's like, man, building SaaS for SaaS right now is just this cesspool. Is that like a good word to describe it? It's like there's 10,000 products getting launched a day. Everybody's learned how to use AI. Everybody wants to use AI. And it's just hard, man. It's just a really intensely competitive environment. SaaS pool. Arvid nailed it. That's what it is.

I love that.

Yeah, it's so good. So, yeah, man, that is our advice, Noah. I'm sure you'll be at 10 million ARR by next week by taking that advice.

Thank you, guys.

I appreciate advice and using it as fuel to prove us wrong.

Yeah, exactly. Either way, either way.

Yeah.

Thank you, guys.

Appreciate it.

Thanks a lot for coming up, man.

Sure, of course.

All right, we got 11 minutes left. Let's get to the next question. So let's say you hire this person because you've done your deals. Oh yeah, where should we find them and what should we be looking for?

Yeah, not surprisingly, what you're going to hear me say is you should find them from people that are referring them to you. You should not find them from a job board or you know, some ad like that that you put people through an ATS tracking system or something like that, especially if you're early stage, which I think is what we're talking about. Yep. We're talking about zero to one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we're talking about the first sales hire.

Yeah. Right.

So you should go to people in.

Your network that you know and trust and say, Hey, Adam, Hey, Scott, I know you guys probably know lots of salespeople who've done this early stage thing, people who've worked for you before. Do you know anybody out there who's looking? I'm gonna do snow.

Yeah.

Help you. I would love to help this person in my network, presumably find a new role. Right. So that person would go the second micro Community is not trust of the asks.

Yes.

I've been It It was done. it was that people go to networking events, conferences, stuff like that. Peole are meeting face to face The reason I think that's important is because you can really get a genuine sense of who somebody is face to face much better than over Zoom and definitely much emails, DMs, you see they interact amongst people socially. You see if you go, you see.

Some.

You'Re taking note of things. hours. be kind of scouting and filtering people through this lens of, I wonder if that person would be good for me. I wonder if that person is looking.

And one thing that I just think sometimes it's not super intuitive if you haven't done this before, somebody who was like the sales leader from 5 million to 200 million at a company that you really admire. They might be the right zero to one person, but zero to one is a totally different set of skills than building out once there's a product market fit, building out that sales machine.

Yeah, I would actually argue that they are the wrong person.

Right.

Almost unequipped.

Yeah, yeah. And it's hard, it's just as a zero to one founder, you admire these startups who are who you want to be so much. And I tend to attribute probably way too much of their success to individuals within that company rather than just the whole machine.

Yeah.

There's a phrase that, I can't remember where I heard this, so I can't give proper credit, but you're trying to do stage-appropriate hiring. That's what you're trying to do. So you're trying to go zero to one. You're either looking for somebody who has done that exact thing before, and not is willing to do it again, who wants to do it again. Big, big difference. And if you can't find that person, then you're looking for the person who sat shotgun, meaning Adam was the head of sales at the zero to one, but I was Adam's lieutenant or left-hand man or whatever. I was the second person in there. I watched everything that Adam did. I studied it. I have his playbook. I am his apprentice. I am his, mentee, I'm ready for my first shot. That type of person is the right person. You don't go higher for your zero to one startup, ex Salesforce VP, an ex IBM VP, or even a strategic account executive. Those people have operated in such a different world, right? That it doesn't translate. This is one of the most common hiring mistakes that is made. is people over index on X, whatever company name, branding and logo stuff. Then they over index too much on industry expertise. They're like, oh, I really need to find somebody who's sold to doctors before or whatever, because they'll have a big Rolodex. No, they don't. That almost never works. You need to optimize for somebody with grit, with creativity, with hustle, who's comfortable in ambiguity, who likes to build but also likes to execute and get their hands dirty. All of these kinds of things. That's sales acumen. That's stage appropriate hustle. That's how you get off the ground. That's how you succeed. Not optimizing for a Rolodex or an X-IBM kind of person. It's very frustrating as somebody who's seen this movie so many times before, give people this advice, and then some people still don't believe me. Then they suffer through the mistake. Then they come back and they're like, oh, man, you know, it didn't work out. And I'm like, I can tell you so.

I've been given similar advice. Gone against it. It didn't work out, you know? So that's why I asked the question. It's like, it's just. It's just hard because of how the human brain works and how status, the impact that status has on our perception of individuals and decision making.

I think I would try to invite people to reframe what you're looking for as somebody who can do, as somebody who wants to do more than somebody who has done. and is willing to do. And if you ask the right questions, you can hear people say, yeah, I'm.

Happy to do that.

I can do that. Like if I'm talking to you and I'm interviewing you and I'm like, Adam, you know, the first six months, like you're gonna have to act as an individual contributor. You're gonna have to build your pipeline, da, da, da, da, da. You know, I'm not hiring you to just like hire a bunch of other people and you be the VP of spreadsheets.

Right.

And you'll hear people's response. They'll be like, yeah, you know, I can do that. no big deal. I've done that before. No big deal. That is very different than a response of, yes, I want to do that. I need to do that. I have to do that. There's no way for me to build a team and teach other people how to do this if I've never done it myself. I'm only looking for opportunities at this stage. I am the zero to one guy. That's a very different response and answer. So you have to pay real close attention to nuances like that to get it right.

Bam. Look, I think we're going to end on that. That's pretty amazing. Scott, dude, thank you again, man, for coming. And we drop Scott. Will you guys drop Scott's LinkedIn in again? Hit Scott up. He has a great resource on the influencer strategy. He is advising, consulting people like you. He's not just gonna take anybody, but the right candidate, we all have problems with sales. We all have problems with go to market.

Everybody needs help.

It's just, every year it's just a different one for me.

Well, you're not alone. I mean, every year it's different for me too. Different for everybody else out there. Yeah.

And next week we have another sales man. We had Jason Bay on like six months ago and he just showed up with like slides and just crushed it. He's coming on again. So we have sales back to back. Jason's not going to talk about influencer. I don't know what he's going to talk about, but it's probably outbound and what's working for his clients now. And yeah, I mean, that's a wrap. Thank you for coming and we'll see y'all next week.

Bye everybody, thanks.