Ryan Shank walks through launching a hardware startup in a weekend using a lead-qualification script for gyms and hotels. An engineer built a 2-minute washer-dryer combo and needs customers; Ryan shows how to ask about in-house laundry, calculate time saved, and justify a $1,000 price point. The core move: talk to customers first, not later.
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Hey, what's up guys? It is, actually, hold on one second. I was watching my vlog from yesterday. I was just reviewing it and then I realized that we needed to record the vlog for today. Oh, decent amount of views on it. Today is Friday. Currently still in Indiana but I'm going back to New York in a few hours right now. I'm actually posted up in this conference room. Paul just left. He's going back to Boise or he's going to Boise, not Boise. Why do I think everything is Boise? I don't know. Be able to find startup talent in cities like Lafayette, Indiana and like, you know, Boise, Idaho and things like that. There's a lot of talent. Peoria, Illinois, he's gonna visit with one of his portfolio companies. He's gonna do a meetup there. Really good event last night here, which was really cool. A lot of people were sending me messages that they really liked the talk that we talked about. So basically, one of the things that I think a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is that they make things overly complicated. And that's kind of what I was talking about last night. And then even afterwards, someone came up to me, an entrepreneur, he just graduated from Purdue. So where I am right now is in, it's right by Purdue, so he's an engineer. And basically they created a washing machine It's a washer and dryer combo that washes things in 2 minutes. I don't know if it works or not, but just in theory, like, that's awesome, right? So he was like, you know, what do I do? How do I go to gyms and hotels and stuff? And I was like, literally just go in there. And it's funny though, because I think a lot of times I'll be operating with the mindset that, you know, they kind of know the flow of everything. So I told him though, you know, you don't want to go in there and just try to pitch them and get them to buy it right away. You just want— you want to go in there, call them, whatever you want to do. You want to basically just get the opportunity Set yourself up an appointment to get the opportunity to pitch them. So the first thing you should do is, you know, call into them, ask them if they do laundry in-house, right? You need to qualify the lead a little bit. Do they do laundry in-house? Yes, they do laundry in-house. Okay, awesome. You know, just curious, you know, how long does it take for you guys for your laundry? Oh, it takes, you know, an hour to wash, hour to dry, 2 hours, plus they have to have an employee that folds it. It's like a 4-hour process. All right, awesome. And since it takes so long, you have to have extra towels and stuff for gyms, right? Towels, because while it's washing, you can't use those. So your pitch should be, you know, one, you're going to save them a ton of time and And that's also going to save them money, right? So look, we have this machine. What it's going to do, it's actually going to do all of your laundry in 2 minutes. So it's going to reduce that 4-hour time to about 5 minutes. And that way you're not going to have to, you know, spend, you know, all those hours waiting for it. You're not going to have to have all that extra inventory because all this is locked up in the washer. It's going to save them a lot of money. Do some ROI calculation. Hey, it's going to save you, you know, this many hours per week, you know, 12 hours per week, this many human hours. And then just figure out some ROI calculation on why the gym is going to want that and why it makes total sense for them to pay you you know, $1,000 for that piece of equipment, whatever it is, right? But I told him, you know, it's like, just literally call. And this was last night, Thursday. I said, tomorrow you should literally call at least 30 people. Call 30 gyms, hotels, just get in the conversation. Like, the downside is, is so little compared to the upside. Like, the worst thing they could possibly do is just tell you they're not interested, but the best thing they can do is purchase from you. And then a lot of people are probably going to fall in between. They're going to give you feedback, they're going to tell you why You know, it's not a good fit, good timing, but like that doesn't matter, you know. So things like that, I think a lot of entrepreneurs kind of fall into the trap of like they just like get stuck or they like get afraid to, you know, just talk to customers and stuff. But that is literally the biggest, uh, thing that's going to kind of propel you into just starting something. Then once you're in those conversations, that's going to help you with product development, it's going to help you with all of these different things. So it's like you got to just kind of get off, um, off the ground, be into these conversations. And that's like was the takeaway from the talk yesterday. But welcome to the vlog. Today is day what, like 5 5 of season 2 of the vlog. We're doing it every single day now. Uh, videos are back, vlogs back, content's out. We're starting to, to make some noise. Um, super excited about that. We have a— so yesterday we had a big day. We basically need, need about 15 more sales on the month. There's 5 days left in the month. We need about $2,500 in net new MRR. I have a pretty big upgrade that I think is going to come, but we're behind. Um, not gonna fluff it for you guys. We're, uh, we're behind. I mean, we're still up, you know, over previous month a few percent, but we need to have that 20% month month growth every single month. So anyway, if you guys are new here, my name is Ryan Shank. We're building PhoneWagon from the ground up. Thank you guys for following along on the vlog. We're looking to beat the competition. We're looking to win. It's a competitive space. I know our competitors are following us, so hi guys. I'm at the airport right now going back to New York. It is 5:48 PM on Friday the 22nd, so hopefully we can get this vlog out by 8:30 PM. That's how fast we're doing turnaround times right now. We're basically like filming what I'm doing, then I'm shipping, I'm uploading to Dropbox, I'm shipping to Kane. Kane's getting the footage. Editing it, then he's uploading. That's what we're talking about. And it's like one about the consistency, but also about just like the volume of content that we're trying to put out. So we're trying to get like really behind the scenes. It's not that many right now. So, but we're still going to do it. We're still going to be consistent. We're still going to put it out. People are discovering it later. People who are already— we're hitting top of funnel, you know, they're searching, they're finding it middle of the funnel. It's helping convert, helping to tweak middle of the funnel and increase close rate, increase engagement, increase, you know, just visibility, awareness, that sort of thing. So that's what we're doing. It was a fun time. We're going to do this every single day, 7 days a week. Uh, right now I might have to figure out a different cadence so that like Kane doesn't get burnt out, but also so that I don't, you know, put out boring content all the time. So again, I'm gonna go. So I appreciate you guys following along. Thanks for watching. Hope you're out there working hard, being pioneers, being wagoners. Peace.
