Sell with a high-converting elevator pitch - Lesson 5

Sales Week. Instead of saying this week is about sales, I'm going to say Sales Week. It's like Shark Week, you know? Sales Week. This is Sales Week, which means this is not just a week in which you learn about sales, but this is a week in which you are doing sales the whole week. So 3 things we're going to cover. One is why. Maybe self-evident, but many people really struggle with sales. They think they don't need to do it. 2 is who, like where do you start? And then 3, most important will be how, how do we actually sell? So let me start with why. I mean, the big one, it's kind of one, you know, the, I think what I say in the book is like one sale a day keeps the, I don't know, depression away or something like that. But I find, and you know, there's a reason we use small wins and like a lot of this language is that like building something can be like really isolating and like really lonely. And I find that like sales is like a great opportunity to like celebrate these small wins, literally like one at a time. This is like, you know, like a year ago when I was like, had the book pre-orders were out and I was like celebrating basically every single one of them when the numbers are really small, because in the beginning, like the number's always small. You're kind of going by one at a time. Um, and so, so that's really important, but for some reason people really dislike sales. I, I, and, uh, and I would love to start there actually, which is basically let's make a list of, of a few reasons that sales sucks. Um, I know it sucks because often I don't enjoy doing it. When I try to get people to talk about sales for the book, people really don't want to talk about it. Um, yeah. So why does it suck? Why, why do people dislike sales?

Who wants to go?

Feel free to type in the chat or on mute and I'll write them down as we go. Just spend 5 minutes on this or less. Awesome. Nikot says basically you'd rather build stuff. Yeah, rejection is a big one. Rather build.

It can feel sleazy.

Oh yeah, sleazy. That's a good word, sleazy. People can't see that you would change their business. Um, how do I phrase that?

Um, I'm just going to—

visibility.

I'm gonna say can't see, but yes, visibility. Uh, basically they, they think you're lying to them, I find, uh, when you're selling your product, you know. Um, pricing sucks. It's hard to price. I agree. I'm just gonna put that here.

I summarize yours as inertia.

It's really cool what you're doing, but I don't want to use it. Um, yeah. Hearing the truth, hearing the truth, hearing the truth is certainly sad.

Does anyone really like sales? There's always one person in every cohort who really likes sales.

Someone—

oh, there we go.

Why do you like sales, Ben?

And let's hear it.

I don't know. I just, I think one of my better life skills in general has just been being like sociable. I find myself to hold, be able to get along with like a wide variety of people. So to hop on a call isn't necessarily scary for me. And I don't know if you can really help somebody and like walk them through that process of getting them to realize that I find it to be kind of fun. It's like a fun sort of conversation game, really.

Hmm. Patty, what about you?

Okay.

Am I off mute now?

Okay.

There you are. Yep.

Hi.

Hi.

Well, I've been in sales since I was 14. It's the most exciting thing to me to connect with people. So I don't view sales as, you know, this intimidating situation where you're meeting someone and you're convincing them of something. I think the key factor to any sale is your ability ability to listen, because the longer you listen and the better you are at asking questions, then they tell you everything you need to know to— so that you can quickly figure out whether what you're selling fits their needs and then how to present it in that way. So I love it.

Nice.

I'm gonna put some of these down. We're getting ahead of ourselves, but it's okay. I like what you said about does it fit, which is kind of a big theme, which is like finding out if it fits. Like you, I think that's like the, you said it so positively, right? You're like, oh, we get, you know, you get to find out if what you have is like a good fit for them. But that's kind of like the other side of that is like the rejection, right? Often you learn that it's not, you know, it's this, this thing that you spend a lot of time building, not actually like a fit for them. I would add one more, which is that sales kind of implies like this very slow manual one-by-one approach. And I think when you're building a software product, at least I feel this way, um, or I used to more, more so, is like, I want to build something, I want to like launch it to the world, and I want like thousands of people, millions of people to use it, because that's like the power of software, the power of the internet. Um, and so sales kind of reminds you that like, that's not really what happens most of the time. Like, it's the same thing that you were, you know, you would have done with a lemonade stand or like selling a newspaper, you know. It's It's just why, because like, you know, attention is just as scarce as it was before. Uh, you know, like the software doesn't change everything. Um, many of these things, and it's actually sometimes worse, right? Because you're like, the easier it gets to build, like in theory, the more stuff that you're getting inundated with. And so like sort of differentiating yourself and your product gets even, even harder. Um, one point about sales, uh, and scale is how often or how many you really need. Uh, Dana Vasallo has this awesome tweet, um, which he basically sort of did the math on 2,000 customers spending $40 a month. It's $1 million a year. Um, and, and, you know, I, I mentioned a couple of these examples in the book. Um, but many, many, I think many people overrate how many customers you really need to build a really great business. Um, both in terms of quantity but also in terms of really, even if you do have quantity, how many of the head of the curve, to draw this out, when you have customers, it often looks something like this. Gumroad, for example, certainly does. If you took this and you said, okay, this is like 200 creators, over here, and then this is everybody else. This is, let's say, 80,000. Again, it can effectively be on infinite, right? It doesn't really matter. Um, but effectively these people bring in roughly 50% of our revenue, GMV and revenue, and these people bring in roughly 50%. Um, so in theory, like, if I just, you know, if I like just found the right 200 people, that's Gumroad. Like, can you like Most people would not think that when they think of Gumroad, like 200 people, crazy. Everybody in this chat times 9, done. You've built Gumroad, $10 million a year business, $200 million a year GMV. But that's what power laws do. The other thing I want to highlight is many people, because of this, and this was my approach, my approach was always like this. I would build first,, right? And then I would launch, I would sort of spend that weekend building my weekend project. Then I would launch this thing. That would be the second thing I do. And then finally afterwards I would sell. Like there's so many problems with this. Um, one is that I sort of think of this as like ready, fire, aim. You know, this, you know, if you've ever heard that term, ready, fire, aim, sometimes can be good. Uh, if you have too much imposter syndrome or something like that, you want to get better at firing. But generally I find that like you're, you're wasting your bullet. Like you're aiming at the wrong target and the power of sales. And the reason I think you should kind of delay launching as much as you can is that you'll actually aim at a much better target. Um, and what I mean by that practically is that your product will change. Your product will improve as you get more and more feedback from, from the market. Uh, in the book that looks like this. Where you basically have a product, in this case, it's not even a product, it's like a memo, it's like a checklist, it's some sort of playbook that you're running people through over time and you kind of keep going through, going in this loop as you get feedback until you have something that finally exits because you kind of hit product market fit. This is all rejection, rejection, change, rejection, change, rejection, change. And then boom, you have sort of escape velocity. You figured it out. And then that's actually what you productize and ultimately like what you launch, right, to the world. Uh, and so I find that sales is kind of like very necessary step in my opinion. Like I kind of don't even want to tell the world what I'm building until I've sort of successfully sold it, um, to many people. Um, cause otherwise what's the point? Like if you're not, if you're not able to successfully sell your product, When you're in the loop, when you're like manually doing it and you're there to answer every single question, uh, how the hell are you going to market the thing? Right. Marketing is effectively sales without the salesperson. Like that's really hard. Um, the other thing I really want to mention, and the reason that I think our approach is going to, is going to lead to a sort of a much higher conversion rate is that we come with the superpower, which is proof of work. We've actually shown. We've sort of spent a lot of time already on this course in terms of writing the memo, that's proof of work, designing a Figma prototype, that's proof of work, building the actual thing, that's proof of work, thinking about and figuring out pricing. This is all evidence that this is not just an idea in my head, but you've actually sort of spent time sort of rashing it out and thinking it through and getting feedback and manifesting it. And I really believe, I mean, I got an email in my inbox today. I got several of them, but one stuck out because it was just, it was basically like, hey, I built a product that solves a problem for you. I know you have this problem at Gumroad. Let me know. That was the whole email. And I was just like, what? Like, and there's basically, and I really believe that this person is effectively showcasing fear of rejection. Which is they don't want to give away any hint of what they're building. They don't want to specify whatsoever because all they see when they specify is the fact that I'm no longer going to be a fit for what they're building or what they've built. And this is why I believe sales sucks. Going back to that first bit, I really believe the reason sales sucks is because you are really— you have to face the truth. You have to face the truth that what you're building is not for everybody. It's, it's for almost nobody. Really, really, really almost nobody. Which means that like in the beginning, when you talk to people before you've sort of like built your ability to sell and figure out who you should even be selling to in the first place, like you will have 99% rejection. Uh, and I think that's a huge reason that people want to avoid this stuff in the, in the first place. Um, yeah. Actually, I wanted to kind of show an example of what this actually looks like in practice, which is, and this is kind of my mental model for what this looks like, which is you start out with a box. Your product is a box. It is a, you know, how does a box look like? I want everybody, actually everyone should draw a box. One of the hardest things I've ever done in my entire life, I swear, I swear on my life is draw a box. Everyone, no joke, like to this day, one of the hardest things I've ever done in my entire life is to learn how to draw a box. Everyone draw a box as realistically as you possibly can. I believe you can only see 3 sides at once of a box maximum. So effectively it should be 3 parallelograms, but everyone should try to draw a box in 3D, right? We don't live in 2D, we live in a 3D space. So this is like level 1. If you want to draw a box, boom, pretty good, pretty decent box, right? But that's kind of cheating because this is technically 3D. I'm just looking at it head-on, right? Um, so I want everyone to draw a 3D box, which might look something like this. This might be like level 2. You're like, oh, I know how to draw boxes. I learned this in second grade, right? You draw the same thing, but then you kind of draw these diagonal lines out. At the same length and then you connect them, right? You're like, haha, I've drawn a box. And my answer to you would be like, I've never seen a box like that. That doesn't— that box does not exist because, well, we live in a 3D world, a world with perspective. Uh, and in a 3D world, parallel lines converge. Uh, right. Otherwise the street that you look at would go on forever, but that's not what happens. What happens is actually there's a sort of a, a vanishing point over here and you have something over here. And this actually points like that, this points like that, and this points like that. So actually, if you drew this properly, you would end up something like this, where this line is going like this. You can still have this right over here, but this should kind of go more up, and this should go more like this. And that is actually much more of what a 3D box looks like, um, right? Uh, now really crazy exercise, really difficult thing is start rotating that box in your head. Start drawing, uh, as many 3D boxes as possible, and I'll stop in a second. I know this is not super relevant, uh, and the reason drawing boxes is really hard is because you have to start to learn how to see the world in perspective like that. And when you start to do this, you realize how little your brain knows about how to draw in 3D space, because the first boxes you draw will probably look like this, like they just won't make any sense. And as you draw more and more and more boxes, you will start to be able to draw boxes that look much better and much more 3D. And why am I able to do that? A lot of practice. But effectively what I'm doing with my brain is I'm just doing the vanishing points in my head where I'm just drawing these out and just doing it really fast, so fast that you can't see. And then the final exercise I would say would be to do this But not randomly. Try to do this with a purpose, because when you draw randomly, you can kind of draw an eye and a nose and another eye. But if you can draw a head, very, very different, right? Because then all of a sudden those things have to relate to each other. And the hardest exercise I think that exists basically is to draw, you know, draw the box that you're facing, but then all of a sudden draw the box that's next to it, right? And then draw this box over here that's next to that. And draw the box on top. And then what's hard, draw this box, the one that's facing over this way. And very quickly you'll realize, man, drawing in 3D is really freaking hard. Anyway, you can keep doing that. The reason I bring this up is because this is my mental model for one, it's hard and fun and I like making people suffer. But two is this is kind of my mental model for sales. Which is I have a product, which is a box. It's kind of how I think about my product. And then all of these people that I sell, you know, this is kind of all these random people that I'm selling to and I'm getting feedback on. And I kind of go out and I like hit, and then I, it hits here and they kind of like Cracks. And then I head over there, I can talk to this person and they give me some feedback on this point and it cracks. And over time I basically sort of figure out what my product should look like. Right. It's kind of like, what is it? What is that quote? Michelangelo or something, right? Where he's like, he sees the sculpture in the marble and he has to just like break it out of it. Right. And that's what will start to happen as you have more and more of these conversations. You'll sort of start to see like, oh, this part of the box, they don't care about this part. They really care about. And it's effectively, this is kind of like a memo. It's just in 3D. Right. And so it helps because I live in a 3D world. We all do. And so when I, I sort of, my mental models are kind of a little bit more 3D. And so effectively you kind of keep doing this and then I don't know what your mental model of a, of a 3D object would look like, but you know, you might have something like this, right. And you're like, oh, this is my product. By the way, spheres are really easy to draw in 3D because you just have to draw a circle and then you're done. Right. Because every sphere's all, all look the same. So that's kind of my mental model for getting feedback in terms of who, who is kind of really simple. It's really only a slide, which is you want to start with the people closest to you. I, this can be really hard. I think, I think this is one reason people avoid sales is because they don't want to start with the people closest to them, because this might be something you're building like on the side and secret. You don't want to tell your family or people at church or your mom like what you're doing because you haven't succeeded yet and you don't want to, you know. I know, Nikkhad, I'm saying mental models way too many times. Like, there should be like a mental model swear jar. Um, there really should be. Um, but, uh, yeah, you want to start with the people closest to you. And, and one reason that's so important, besides getting over yourself, is, is kind of a really important thing to be able to do. Is because they're going to be the ones who give you the feedback. Because why? I think, was it Faisal or somebody else who said, did I write it down? Maybe I didn't write it down, but they can't see. No, I didn't write it down. But someone said basically like, you're not getting— they basically have— it was like, nice thing, but not for me. That was kind of like the phrasing, which is basically what you hear all the time. When, right, because it's like, why someone's not really gonna hurt your feelings. And so you end up with the kind of like the worst piece of feedback ever, which is like, you should keep building this thing, but I'm not gonna tell you any more than that. Right. And so I'm just gonna tell you that you should continue to do the thing that you're already doing, which is kind of a pointless thing to say because they don't wanna hurt your emotions. But they also like, they don't know you that well. Like what are they gonna get out of telling somebody they just met that like, you know, their product sucks.

Right.

So you're not gonna hear the truth. If you wanna hear the truth, which is such an important part of sales, uh, you need to start with people who, you know, feel like they can tell you the truth when it's hard to hear. And so I think it's really important to start with friends and family, start with the people closest to you, then start with, go to your community. You know, we made that list the first class where we went through like all the communities you're in and all the things that they do and all the problems they have with those things. And potential solutions to those sorts of things. Uh, sort of a similar, similar mindset, right? Which is you want to start with your friends and family, the people who are closest to you, get feedback from those people, then go to your community, go to your friends, go to people you hang out with in all of these different ways that already know you, know, trust you. They know that you're not a random used car salesman like pawning off a crappy car. Like, you, you— they know that you built something valuable, uh, and they trust you and like you. And then finally, last step is strangers. That's the end goal. And I would argue that basically you should never really sell to strangers. It's so difficult to do. I feel like you should always have— and we'll talk a little bit about an example of selling to a stranger, but I feel like you should always have some connection to that person. There should be some reason that you are picking them out of the 7 billion people or 8 billion people or however many people are on earth, right? Why me? This is kind of like in the memo, it's like, why you is the question. Why are you building this? Sort of sales is kind of like the, why me? Why are you, what about me is the reason that you were talking to me right now? And if the answer isn't a good one, frankly, it often is not. It's like your email came up in a an email list bundle that I bought off the internet and you just happen to be a tech CEO of a company between 20, you know, that would not work. Right. Um, but you said, oh, I really like Gumroad. I saw the way that you work and this article. And like, we have a product that, you know, specifically for this kind of thing. What do you think? Like, you're, you're basically, your chance of selling me on your software is effectively zero, but the chance of you getting feedback on your software is almost 100%. When you put in that work, that proof of work that I mentioned before. And you can do proof of work even in the process of writing the email. I think there's so much evidence that you've actually put in real work into writing that email, which I, as someone on the brunt of so much cold email spam and all these sorts of things, the vast majority of people put basically zero work. And I actually have a theory that I've never said this aloud, Um, but I've been thinking about it recently. I don't know if this is true. I kind of need to like check myself, but my theory is this is like— I'm gonna call it, I don't know, Sahil's Law of Sales or something. Sahil's Law of Sales Conversion. And we're gonna, we're gonna try to test this later and when we do the examples in the second, uh, or the exercise in the second, second half. Of sales conversion, which is effectively conversion equals 1 over number of people who could have received this email.

This email, right?

So if I'm the only one in— on planet Earth that could have received the email that you sent For example, if I got an email on August 25th that said happy birthday, that's effectively 1 divided by 365. Your odds would be 365 times higher than a cold random email to a random person with zero context. Or for example, if you said, hey, CEO of Gumroad, and I know that you are typing that, not some freaking bot, then effectively you have 100% chance. Um, and, and sort of there's this similar power law probably in which emails probably suffer this level of sort of— there's probably a few emails that are super customized and get 100% sort of hit rate from me personally. Uh, but unfortunately the bulk of what I sort of receive is down here, which is effectively that there's like thousands of people who could have gotten this email Which makes sense because inherently, if there are thousands of people who could have gotten this email, guess what that means? They probably sent thousands of people this email. And so therefore, it's going to dominate all of our emails, inboxes, et cetera.

Okay, Matt, you've made two comments, one about leads and one about finding people you already know. So lay it on us. Tell us what you're building and why you're doing it.

No, I mean, it just depends. On your network, right? If you're not, let's say you're building like a tool for developers, but you only know like a handful of developers and most of the people you know like really well, if you start with that inner circle, they're not gonna know what you're talking about. Like they know how to turn the computer on and off, that's about it, right? I mean, there's not everybody's super connected and building a product that fits into other people's lives around,— Crypto would be a great example. I mean, the average person on the street doesn't know anything about crypto. So I'm just wondering, what would you do in that situation where you feel like you're building something and it's useful and somebody's going to use it, but it's not going to be anybody that you know. It's going to be like nobody.

Yeah. I mean, one thing that happens is, you know, you should be sort of spending more and more of your time with those groups of people anyway, right? So even if they may not be in your kind of direct friends and family or something, like you should be in those communities at least, right? You should be in those subreddits. You should be in those Discords if you're in crypto land. I also think that, you know, you might be surprised at like, you know, your friends and family, like if you kind of widen what that group looks like, there may be some developers, for example, in your friends and family group., right? Or people who are really, you know, I think you can get feedback from people without having them be direct sort of people you're selling to. But yeah, certainly it makes it harder. Yeah, that's fair.

But yeah, I would say— As a qualified customer where, or somebody that was a qualified lead where you know that they would actually, you know, buy it. Right. I mean, there's one thing to just like, kind of seek feedback. Right. But then there's another thing to know that they might actually, you know, need the, need this tool.

Right. Totally. I mean, I would still start with friends and family and still start with community. Like for example, with Flexile, like there's basically nobody I know who would use this, uh, in, in my friends and family, because you'd have to be running a company like Gumroad. Which there's just not that many of those, you know? But I love talking to people about it and getting their feedback on it. And they all have jobs. And so I'm always able to say, to sell them on the idea of it and get their feedback on, well, you know, one day in the future, what if, you know, what would appeal about a company that would want to get you to work like this? Or how do you think about like not having an office and like, is that okay? Or do you need more infrastructure? So I think there are ways to kind of like broaden the, you know, and what are you, what are you working on actually? That would be helpful.

Yeah, I'm not, I don't have the time to really put into anything right now, but I just didn't want to pass up, you know, I'm taking this class and, you know, here following along and hearing what you guys are doing here. So I'm working at the moment, but I definitely have plans to do things in the future. But that's what—

that's—

I'm kind of an introvert. I'm, you know, I'm kind of an introvert. And so, like, you know, you combine that with that— I don't typically get out and talk to a lot of people, you know, anyway. It's been a pandemic for a long time. I mean, there's a— I could keep going on the list of reasons why I'm fairly isolated, right? Um, this is just my personal experience. So, like, that's kind of, like, my— it's super specific to me. I mean, probably a lot of people don't have this problem. But I feel like a lot of times it's just going to be really difficult to come up with those people, you know, for years.

Huh? I'm just kidding. I think we all have that in common. Yeah. You have some thoughts?

Yeah, I just wanted to— so I'm sort of awkward and introverted too. But I made a course on Gumroad after I took Daniel Vassallo's Small Bets course. And it's about basically leveling up as an engineer. And I I, I made a Twitter thread. I basically— I didn't even promote it much, but a bunch of people bought it and it did pretty well. Then I went on this app called Blind where I don't really know anybody, everybody's anonymous on there, and I try to sell it. And basically, I mean, I got roasted. Not, not like roasted, but like— and by the way, like, the app itself, uh, I'm sorry, I'm not— the app, the course itself has like 4.7 stars. Everyone that bought it that knew me from Twitter, and it's like over 600 people, you know, they, they loved it. And I had very, very few people ask for money back. The people from Blind, I mean, like half of them asked for money back. And it's like, it's like so annoying. It's like, why did you buy it? You know? And they consume the whole thing, and then they're like, now I want my money back. And it's like, it's the, it's the worst fit. So, so basically selling to a friendly group, um, really worked wonders for me. Um, like, I would never— I will never sell on blind again. Like, I don't care, um, you know, if you tell me I could make a million bucks, I just don't want to deal with the roasting and the hate.

Yeah, I mean, I think the secret— the secret sauce, you know, if you really don't have those people in your direct network, would be to find the communities in which they're so excited about whatever you happen to be building that they don't even care who you are. They're like, oh cool, another person who's like chipping in on this thing. Web3 is a little bit like that, right? Where like if I was building, I don't know, something in Web3, I guess I am, but if I wanted to sell it or get active customers or something, I would probably go to like the meetups or find the places that people are already hanging out. And Louis' point about like, I mean, Twitter's also like a pretty interesting thing because if you have proof of work and you've like put that in, All you need is one person to kind of retweet you or to kind of like put your, you know, and then boom, you're done. Like you're, you're all, you know, off to the races. And so sometimes sales is kind of that too. It's like if you just get to the right, you know, this is kind of the equivalent of like selling some enterprise software and like you get the logo, right? They call it like you landed the logo because if you get the logo from X, then everyone else is like, oh yeah, of course. Right. So sometimes that's often what it might be about, which is you come up with your, you know, we talked a little bit about in the memo week. Your ideal customer, your perfect customer. And that might— we talked about it mostly in the context of who's your number one customer, who are you writing the memo for, et cetera. But sometimes it might be like, for example, in Gumroad's early days, I really wanted famous musicians and artists to use Gumroad because at that point, no one had really known what Gumroad was. And I thought that getting a famous musician, getting a famous Author getting famous, filmmaker would set the tone of who uses this and give us some credibility and some marketing know-how. And that was manual sales. Gumroad grew for the first 4 years purely, basically manual sales. We got Eminem, we got Bon Jovi, we got Big Machine and Taylor Swift. We got a long list of— Andy Weir, The Martian, Hachette we did some stuff with. We did Jiro Dreams of Sushi, just cold emails, cold emails. You know, everyone has an email somewhere on their website and just spent, you know, a long time doing that. But once we got in front of the right person, like let's say we got like the manager of the director of a certain famous thing, guess what? That manager knows a bunch of people. They're in that community, right? And if you can really sort of prove yourself to that person, they'll help you. Meet more people, right? If you're like, I don't know enough developers, well, you don't need to. You just need to know one developer who knows a lot of developers, right? And has that trust in the community, whether it be like an Adam Wathan or whoever, you know, Steve Shoger or someone like that. So that might be another way to think about it. Maybe it's like, who are the kind of micro influencers in your kind of space or in your niche?

Yeah.

Awesome.

Great.

Yeah, I thought it'd be interesting to kind of deconstruct what goes into a good cold email, uh, together, and then I'll tell everyone what I think actually goes into a good one. Um, so yeah, basically if, if people wanna just like suggest things of like what, what a good, a good cold sort of sales email, or I would also put nowadays DM, you know, on Instagram or Twitter, I guess would be the primary places. What would you try to do? You can use example, you know, you can point to things specifically in this, but you can also just say it should have blank, it should do this. This is kind of the opposite of what we were doing before. Anyone type?

Feel free to unmute or type in the chat.

This is an easy one. I'll put in, you know, this is kind of like that 1 over X, right? Like any opportunity to make it more specific. Of course you can mail merge it, uh, personalization. Exactly. Um, but this goes a long way. I, I, I know that this leads to higher conversion rate. Like I've noticed this in myself when I send out just DMs on Twitter. If I just say, hey blank, um, the conversion rate is, is, is so much higher. Specific, specific, super key. This is kind of the same thing, 1 over x, 1 over x. Specific, something personal about their work, genuinely appreciate their work. Uh, that's a good— that's actually a good one. Um, appreciate their work. It's kind of like the opposite of what you're doing, um, showing them your work. I would, I would kind of also call this like fan mode. Like if you're a fan of somebody, if you can do a deep cut, right? If you can say, hey, no one knows this about you, but I do because I've been following you for 20 years. Uh, a deep cut. I'm gonna write that down because I love, I love that phrase, deep cut. What's your deep cut? Um, super helpful, super helpful. Again, proof of work, right? It's something that very few people would have been able to do. And certainly an automated spam bot would never have been able to do that, right? So super, uh, super valuable thing to do. Um, Ben says tell them exactly what they can save, uh, time, money, etc. Um, I kind of do that here. I probably could have done a better job. This is an email from like 2012.

Um, live revision.

Yeah, I know, I know. Save benefit. How do you spell benefit? Benefit. Uh, time, money. Let me put time. That's a clock. Um, awesome. Why not to do this, right? I think people get— oh, another, another one. Uh, let me add some based on what I see. Um, I love giving it all away. Add value is what I would put here. Add value. A lot of people don't want to do this because you want them to reply. You don't want to give them everything. To that I say, I don't know, too bad. If your goal is here, let me actually— was it Faisal who said hearing the truth? Why does sale sucks? Hearing the truth. Um, this, I think this is such an important component of, of life and of sales, which is like, you have to be honest with yourself. Uh, and, and I, I find that if you are able to do this and if you're able to add value and give away the value you would've saved, you will, you, it's gonna be really hard cuz you're like, no, I need to save that. That's the thing I'm gonna be charging money for. Um, you're gonna be in such a better place. Like people will convert way more than you think. You should, and you'll feel good about it. And if you're being honest with yourself, speaking of truth, if you're being honest with yourself, your goal here is to help this person, right? Like the reason you're emailing them in the first place is to solve a problem for them, save them time, save them money, et cetera. Well then do it all the way. Like, why are you holding back? And I know this is hard, but I've noticed in my own life, like there's a reason, you know, I don't just like purposefully share everything about my fund just for fun. Like it leads to better conversion. Both with LPs, with investors, way better with founders. Founders love the fact that I kind of— most of the time when I tell a founder, they ask me, "How can I help?" And I say, "Literally nothing. Everything I could have helped you with, I gave away for free. I've told you it all. I don't hold anything back. I help you and then I invest in your startup. I don't invest and then help." Those order of operations I think are pretty janky.

Nobody mentioned my favorite thing, which is that we don't have to schedule a call. I can just check it out.

Oh yeah.

I'm amazed nobody mentioned that. We don't have to talk.

Yes.

No call.

You can get the value without dealing with me, which is the point of what we're building, right? Like the point of what, of products is that you can get, you can use them without a human. That is what differentiates products from everything else. And so yeah, you should kind of do that as soon as you can. And there's, this is such a, it's sort of built into the way that people think. Oh yeah, let me add one more, which is you don't have to oversell, right? Don't have to do that. Just, hey, built this thing, this is why. Think it might help you, let me know. I like, I like to add the exclamation point. It's kind of like body language on the internet. But some people hate exclamation points, so that's just personal preference, but I do find it makes it more personable and friendly. But I noticed this in the, in the, in the, even in the, in the class, right? Like there's certain people are like, hey, I'm building this thing. Do you have time and I can run you through it? Right. Or like, here's a Loom video. Like all these things that are like, Nothing wrong with doing that. I understand why people are doing that, but you're effectively saying like, I could tell you what I built and I could show you, but I'm not. I'm gonna wait. I'm gonna— I need your time. I need you to show up at a certain time and place, and then I will walk you through this thing. Right. Um, and I just find that to be, I don't know, I wouldn't say disrespectful. That's not the right word to use. Uh, but like that level of information asymmetry, I don't like. Right. It's kind of like you walk into a meeting, they know everything about you, you know nothing about them. Like, I just don't, I don't like that. I like the idea that I kind of know everything I already need to know. And ideally, like, the sale is done by the time I've joined the meeting. Like, I already know, like, that's why I'm meeting with you is I'm already done. So yeah, I would say as you can avoid the call, avoid jump, hey, jump on the phone with me. I'd love to get your feedback. Um, again, if you really want that, if you're being truthful, then you could send me the link to your product and I can give you feedback, right? You can send me the memo and I can give you feedback. You can send me the Figma prototype and I give you— can give you feedback. But I really don't see why, uh, I need to get on the phone with you, uh, or do a Zoom video with you. I just don't— I, I can't think of a product, um, that really requires that, um, personally. Um, And often the reason is like confidentiality or really, you know, it's just insecurity. You know, that's really a lot of what it comes down to is insecurity. Yeah. Oh, let me write oversell just so it's noted here. Don't oversell. I use the word like nudge. Like sometimes I'll follow up, but almost never do I follow up. And which is like kind of controversial, I guess, in sales, you know, the fortune is in the follow-up, like blah, blah, blah. Um, but I'm just not a huge fan of it. I think there are plenty of fish in the sea. Like, you can go find people who are like kind of aligned with what you want to do, um, and stuff like that. The other thing I want to mention that I didn't do as part of that email, and it would sort of be a critique for myself, my former self, would be to like pick a price. It doesn't have to even be a crazy price. It can literally be 1 cent. Uh, this is an image pulled from the book, from an example pulled from Predictably Irrational, which is a great book on pricing psychology everyone should read. Basically his point being that humans love free. We love free. We love free so much that we'll stand in line for an hour to save a dollar. But the minute you said you charge money for it, even if it's like 99% off, it's 1 cent, nobody's in line. Free is like a drug. You ever see that? Some farmer's market, there's like a Wheel of Fortune or something like that, and the line is just insane, and the prize is like a little spinning top or something, and you're like, that would be 20 cents. Like, that's not worth 40 minutes of me standing in line. But free just makes the brain go crazy, right? It's like, oh, I win, it's a deal, I got a deal. Um, yeah, so, so just keep in mind that this is something you do, um, and you might want to do this because you're like, I want customers, I want, I want people to respond to my email, I want these people, I want friends. Uh, but really important to be honest and say, am I building something really valuable? And if so, You should pick a price. And we've talked a little bit about this in the, just from the question that Ben was asking, or Matt was asking, I think. But yeah, I would sort of say really important to sort of have something in mind around here and put in the email, charge 5% or $10 a month or whatever it may be. Faisal has a question. Do you wanna unmute and ask actually? Make it more interactive.

Hi, Sahil. I was wondering at what stage you started noticing strangers are signing up at Gumroad without you making any contact with them. And the second part of the question is, at any stage, did you ask them that, why are you here? What led you to Gumroad?

Yeah. So let's do that. So let's say this is like the chart. And I'm gonna use red as like, let's say sales-driven, and then black as like organic word of mouth, right? So I know this 'cause I stared at this graph for a long time, sort of coming face to face with my mortality. Sales was basically like this, like, you know, kind of linear, sort of slightly more than linear. Started off obviously really small at zero effectively. Word of mouth. Oh, and actually let me redraw this because I'll include sort of the something like that. And so this is maybe like the layoffs in 2015 was something like this. Let's put that right halfway-ish. So today I would say we still see sales volume because the creators who we are still active and retain, but we do zero sales now. We do basically nothing. And so let's do word of mouth. Word of mouth, meaning they find out about it SEO or generally mean they find out about it because another creator who uses Gumroad, you know, use Gumroad. Like that. Uh, and I'm not even joking, like in terms of order of magnitude, like roughly like this. Um, and this is shocking to many people because they think of Gumroad as like a— I mean, maybe, maybe it's because, you know, people learn about Gumroad like around here or something like that. Um, and obviously now, now it's mostly word of mouth. It's like almost entirely word of mouth and this kind of historical sales volume, but this is You know, I started the company in 2011, so this is 4 years, and you can see like the discrepancy. And there are a couple reasons for this. Um, one is when you use Gumroad, you are making a large commitment, like I'm going to be processing payments on this platform. It's kind of risky, it's kind of new, it's kind of weird, it's called Gumroad, you know. Like there's a bunch of reasons why you wouldn't want to do that. Um, so effectively nobody does. Like only tiny, tiny, you know, small, small people, uh, really, really do that. And then the biggest reason is because when you sell, you can pick who's gonna use your product, right? And so you can say, oh, like for example, like there was one month I think in which we did $2 million in GMV and Eminem launched an album on Gumroad and it did $1.1 million, right? So like over half. And so this kind of goes back to that power law thing we were talking about, right? Like if you drew that power law here, right? If you had this, this would kind of be, right, that part of the sort of the tail of the curve. And then this is kind of like this, right? And actually, like, you could probably even make it more dramatic and like just do that. And even then it's still boom, like dominates by the sort of sales, right? And so it can take a really, really long time. Anyway, to answer your question, it did start to happen that strangers would sign up. And I would ask them, you know, like there was definitely noticeable. It was like, oh wow, this person made $10,000 on Gumroad and it's the first person I didn't know of until they had done that, right? Like, and honestly, like I never learned anything from asking them, why are you here? What led you to Gumroad? No one remembers, like just nobody remembers. It's really unfortunate. But yeah, it's like, oh, I just saw it somewhere. Like that was like the answer, like 99% of the time, which is unfortunate. We do track it now. So, you know, we just know, oh, it says it was SEO or something like that. But even then it's like, how do you really know, right? They might have heard about it or seen it, or like, it's so hard to track. And this is kind of, um, I guess this is kind of like the meta sort of part about this sort of sales and why it's important, which is like, you just don't know. Like when you rely on sort of scaled marketing efforts, often it's like, this thing works, you know, I don't know why, uh, but it seems to work and it works well enough that we're not going to turn it off and figure out what's broken and what, you know, what don't we actually need. It's kind of the joke, you know, people say about Facebook engineers, like 90% of Facebook engineers don't need to work. The problem is you don't know which 90%, uh, so you can't fire anybody. Um, right. It's kind of like that. Like a lot of marketing efforts are totally zeroed, but you just don't know and you can't turn it all off. Um, so, uh, yeah, it can be, it can be quite random. Oh, Julie says that she first learned about Gumroad when she bought an iPhone mockup on Sketch.

Awesome.

Uh, so some people do remember. Um, Which is great. Yeah, but, but, but I guess the point here being like sales can get you one very, very far. That's kind of pro sales, but then also I'm kind of anti-marketing. Like people may be surprised at how little marketing can actually do. So yeah, anyway, I'm getting a little distracted. Just to recap, I think we've kind of covered a lot of this stuff and before, you know, next hour we're gonna spend on actually help having, having everyone do come up with their own pitches and cold emails. Um, but just to sum things up, uh, in a sort of more structured way, um, I, I wrote all this on Procreate. Just kidding. Um, don't spend time convincing people, like move on. Uh, don't ask people to buy your product. You don't have to do that. If you just say what your product is, like they will lean forward and do that. Um, I personally hate this phrase, pick someone's brain. Uh, I think it normalizes zombies. I just, I don't need the mental, the visual image of this. So yeah, don't say, can I pick your brain? That's also kind of like ambiguous, right? Even if I didn't have a problem with the phrasing, it's not specific enough. Provide all the information up front and focus on the problem that they actually have. And you should, you should have a pretty precise sort of idea of what that, of what that is. And then this is just kind of like the way that, you know, this is kind of that visual of the, you know, the kind of You can imagine the, the box, right? And then getting the feedback and refining the image, refining what you're building, et cetera, which is, I consider them basically bug fixes. Like every conversation should lead to a bug fix. Like, oh, they ran into this problem. They had this piece of friction. This is kind of what I do when I write an essay and I send it to someone like, hey, can you gimme feedback? I make a list of bug fixes and then I fix all the bugs and then I send it to the next person. More bugs, fix the bugs, do that indefinitely until people just give me money. And iterate, iterate, iterate, just like do that over and over again. And I would say 100, like the reason it's called 100 Customers is I think 100 is kind of a good number. Like you don't have to worry about like this whole 10,000 hours BS, you know? 100 iterations is plenty. I would say like if you do 100 of these, you're better than most.

Right.

So yeah, that is that. And I think we should move on to the exercise.

I'm going to pick on you for a second because you said you get bored of repeating yourself just to the point of iterating. Just every single email is different. Every single pitch different.

No copy pasting allowed.

No copy pasting.

Yes.

You know, this is the one over one, right? We, if we want 100% response rate, you kind of have to, and this is how you learn. Like, I know I've harped on this, but I really believe that like building business is like a body exercise, not a brain exercise. Like it, it becomes second nature to you over time. Your brain can only do one thing at a time. It can only think one thought at a time. So when every, every time you're doing a compound skill of which business certainly is, the vast majority of it is being outsourced to your brain, your central nervous system, or not to your brain, your rest of your body, your central nervous system. Your stomach, your gut, your heart, whatever. Right. Pretty crazy. But yeah, no copy pasting.

So why don't we take 5 minutes and do this?

Yeah. Let's take a break.

One, take a break and then come back.

I'll leave this open so people can see it. And this is, yeah, you don't have to follow this if you don't want to, but I find that this is like a really simple way of making sure that you cover the basis.

Um, yeah.

So why don't we come back at 10:10 and then we can do this all together and, uh, go from there.

Awesome.

I'll just say product here too. You can use, if you don't have a business, like sometimes business is too scary, then you can just say my product, my app, uh, my Notion page, my essay. My blog post, my thread on Twitter. Lots of things, you know, you can do this for all sorts of things. You don't have to sell the specific product, right?

All right, I'll be back.

We can talk, Julian. We're not— we don't have to be total—

totally in silence.

You're right.

It says that the link says that I'm the prior owner of Ali's Adventure in Wonderland, but the link doesn't work anymore. I don't know, I actually don't remember, but Oh well, 2012 is a while. Yeah, 2012 is OG. 10 years ago, man.

Crazy, crazy.

Okay, you ready to get started? Are we gonna go to 10:16? And everyone will just take a second and write the story of their business. When we originally did this, we gave 1 minute for each sentence and then 1 minute to revise. So we'll let everyone kind of informally do that themselves and come back at 10:16.

Awesome.

1 minute per sentence. I'll write that down so people see it if they— Oh, I actually have a new thing I'm working on, so maybe I can do this exercise.

I got a minute, 4 minutes.

Cool.

I have no idea if this is a good product, but whatever.

Just giving everyone the 2-minute warning. Okay, 10.

10:16.

Oh, it's 10:16 already.

10:16 already.

Oh yeah, sorry, I hit this, I hit the thing on my own.

That's fine, I put it in the chat. I think this is the moment that, why don't we, we're gonna come back together and show each other the emails and/or pitch. But let's go into breakout rooms quickly and pitch to each other, show, read the emails to each other, and we'll give you a chance to revise, do a first, first take on revision. There are a couple things in terms of evaluating the email. Is it clear? Is the pitch clear? Is it focused on solving the customer's problem? Is it brief? Do I understand the value? And can I retell this story easily? And I'll put all that in the chat. Those are some of the criteria you can use.

Oh, you already have it written there?

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

Awesome.

Sweet. Boom. I'll keep this open, but—

So I'll go ahead and send everyone to breakout rooms and we'll come back. You're in groups of 2 to 3, so we'll come back in about 10 minutes or so and we'll Then we can pitch to each other.

Awesome. You didn't see the—

Welcome back, everybody. Anyone close a new customer? You never know, sometimes it happens, you know.

Hold on, let's see.

Oh, there we go. Now everyone's forced back. Oh, oh no, there was just a moment where there were 5 people and I thought, where did everyone go?

How's everyone's breakouts?

Who's going to share their email with the group? Any volunteers?

Grain.co call reporter, you want to go? Yes, ma'am. See, this is what I talk about, information asymmetry.

Hmm.

Grain.co call recorder.

I can go.

Great.

Can you share your screen also so we can— you can read to us, but we can also see the words?

Yeah, just give me one second for that.

Of course.

I want to make sure this—

Yeah, let's do that. Like everyone, when they share, we can share your screen as well, and then we can all collectively give some feedback. Also be interesting to see if there was a feedback loop in the breakout room, if there was any sort of things that you learned and changed based on feedback.

Yeah, I'm ready. I'll just share my screen.

Okay.

I think you should be able to—

I think I'm going to override Sahil's.

Oh, yeah, you have to unshare.

There you go.

Sorry, I just overrode it.

Uh, yeah, so this is basically— hey Brian, I'm Tushar. I love podcasts as they feed my curiosity while I'm driving or doing chores. I built a service to search through contents of podcasts that you have heard. This helps me share what I'm learning with others. 10 people have used Spotpad to share their favorite episode content as text. The most popular share is, "All models are broken, but some are useful." People have funny brains. They remember things that they heard but have a hard time searching through their listening brain. You can try it out here at spotpad.com.

Awesome.

First of all, I love that you wrote in Visual Studio Code.

Oh no, I was just like finding like everything else had like some—

this is the first place I found that didn't have any other content that I could just—

Awesome. Well, I'll go first with some feedback though. It'd be awesome if other people want to jump in. Um, I don't think you have to say I am blank. I think if you have a role or some sort of, some sort of, I guess this is kind of the specificity thing, right? Like if you have something about you and your background that could be like kind of the why me question. Like this is me, but it's not why me, right? So I would, you know, you kind of say I love podcasts, right? But I think that might be enough. Like I think you could say, you know, I love podcasts as the beginning. I do think that it's probably still too vague. Um, like a lot of people love podcasts. I wonder, you know, and do them while they're driving or doing chores. I wonder if there's anything weird about your podcast behavior that you could like add here as a hook instead. Like, I love podcasts so much I listen to them in the shower or something, you know.

You wouldn't start, you wouldn't start with people have funny brains.

That's not a bad start actually either.

Yeah, yeah, it's just such an unusual sentence. That's my favorite part of the whole thing. You do have funny brains.

It's funny, like, people in the breakout also like that a lot.

Sorry to interrupt, it's just combo feedback. If they— if he started with people have funny brains and then did yours made it more specific.

It is specific. It's like the, yeah, 1 over n, right? Like how many people would have said that? Very few. I like that. I don't actually don't think you have to say 10 people have used. I think saying I is enough. Like if you solved your own problem, like that's awesome. And then you can even make it more specific., right? Like you don't have to, but I'm saying like you could potentially like include an example from your own life. Like I, you know, I listen, I love podcasts so much, blah, blah, blah. I listen to them in the shower or, you know, you know, people have funny brains. They remember things that they've heard, but I have a hard time searching through their listening brain. I built this. I love podcasts. I listen to them in the shower. You know, I built something that basically solved this problem for myself. I don't think you have to say this helps me share what I'm learning with others. That seems like a separate problem almost. Like I think you can just focus on like that one problem, which is kind of like recall. I think that might be enough. Yeah. I think if you make, if you make it more specific to you and your sort of problem, then you can kind of skip. A lot of your, your current thing, right? If you just say, hey, this is something about me, this is a problem that I have, this is what I built, this is how it has already helped me, check it out. Like, I think that might get, get there faster, um, in terms of like, if I'm Brian reading it, you know, it's like, who is this person? What problem do they have? Okay, cool, I have that problem too, you know, um, because really that's ultimately what you're trying to figure out is like, is this person actually going to solve my problem? And the more evidence you can give me that you are like me, you also, if Brian thinks people have funny brains, it's gonna be a good fit, but if he doesn't, then it's not. So I think that will help a lot. And this, by the way, just really like the image of the box and getting refined. I think this is really that feedback I think gets you to a better place. Really quickly. Like, I think if I sat and just tried to get better, it would take me weeks to actually improve. But, you know, one person in 2 seconds offhand can say funny brains, haha, and be like, oh fuck, yeah, of course I should have put that at the top, right? Like, that really can help a lot.

Awesome.

Chris.

Okay, um, I guess I won't give any background on, on the concept. Hopefully it comes across in the email. Okay, so, hi name, I, I've put together the best directory of construction trades in Toronto. I've created a page for you and would like to add some of the projects you've worked on to flesh it out. Would you mind sharing some? We're finding that this directory makes it much easier for developers to find good trades and to reach out to them to get them to bid on jobs. I'd love to show it to you, or you can check it out for yourself. Buildstack.co. Let me know.

Awesome. Could you share your screen?

Possible? Awesome.

Pretty solid. I think I've put together the best directory of construction trades. One question I would have that I assume someone else wouldn't is what is a trade? I would think trade is a verb, not a noun.

Uh, yeah, like a, like a vendor, like a, you know, form worker, carpenter, drywall guy.

Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah, gotcha. Yeah, I see.

One, what do you—

I wonder what I call this.

Could you use it again?

Like people to help, you know, for example, one thing, one thing that I think you might be missing here is what, like, why did you solve this problem for yourself? Um, you do kind of say it with, which, you know, basically for developers to find good trades, as this sort of implication is that you are a developer, you need to help with this. Um, but I think we've kind of had something at the top that's like, you say, I've put together. I think the missing part is like, well, Why? Yeah. Right. Like what made you put this together? Like I recently bought a house and it was a pain in the ass to find a blank. And so I, you know, something like that I think would help.

Yeah.

Okay.

I gotta think about that. There's a long way to tell that story.

So what's the short way? Sometimes the answer is to write the really long one and then whittle it down over time, you know? Naval has a great tweet about this, ironically. He says the best tweet is an essay. You basically write the essay and then everything—

Wind it down.

Yeah, like every good tweet is the punchline of an essay that no one has read. So I think it's kind of like that.

Jimmy's point is very good. Jimmy, will you unmute for a second and make your point?

Sure. I want to hear about the best Construction trades in Toronto.

I think she's saying that, yeah, Best Modifies Directory, not trades. Yes, want to know who that we want the best.

That is funny.

Yeah, because you're going to give, give us the best trades and the best people.

Yeah, so, so it is to modify directory. And just a bit of context, so these would be trades who work on like mid-rise and high-rise projects. And there isn't any directory. So, you know, right out the gate, it'd be the best directory. There are a couple of like printed things that circulate.

Maybe you could say only, 'cause I find like only is objective.

I'll say only online. There are a couple of—

Okay, yeah. Well, this is good. Yeah, because I think this is more specific. The only online— I love only. I love that word. If you can say that, um, yeah, that helps a lot. Um, because yeah, you know, if they're reading this email, then they either will say, oh yes, or not, right? Like, they'll either get it, they'll either agree with that or not. Um, yeah, which is great. Um, I think I've created a page for you.

Um, I'd kind of link to it. It'd be The bones of basically like a profile for their company.

Oh, I see. So this is, you're emailing one of these construction trades basically. Yes, correct. Basically feature you.

Yeah.

I've created a page for you and maybe you could say something like, you don't have to, like it's ready to go, but if you'd like.

Right.

I filled it in with what I was able to find. But you know, if you want me to replace anything with some of the projects you've worked on, just, you know, like that, that might help a little bit. Cuz otherwise it might feel like I need you to reply to this and then until you do, it doesn't exist. The director doesn't exist, the page doesn't exist. It feels like more of a kind of like, but if it's like there's something there, maybe even if it's just like pretty vague, a phone number, you know, whatever could help. No pressure. Yeah. I, I, I like that personally. I even wonder honestly, like I've, depending on how intimate this person is with the problem, like I feel like maybe even that third sentence you don't even need, like, I wonder if you need that. So it's, it is, it's good. But I feel, I feel like because a directory serves such a specific purpose already, right?

Yeah.

You may not even need that. I don't know. I would, this is a good example actually of what I would I would say like, I wonder if I need that. And so I would remove it, try to do a few sales emails that way. And then if the conversion rate seems to work, then it's like, okay, maybe I don't need that at all. Right. Right.

And for, for again, some added context, the monetization strategy is to get them to pay to have a phone number and email added to their profile. So that's why I'm kind of like hit that home that, you know, if you want to be not just discoverable, but also have these people able to reach out to you, You know, sign up.

Gotcha. By the way, the other thing that people really want to pay for, for these things I've learned is distribution. So like highlighting and like putting people at the top of a search, right?

Yeah.

It's like the Google model, right? Like people pay for that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. What's your— Faisal, you have your hand raised.

Uh, yeah, I was thinking, um, um, like I, I do get sometimes emails, like these, like, they're probably cold emails to some startup. Um, so when you say I've created a page for you, it almost feels like, have I by mistake signed up for something? Is this guy going to charge me? Uh, I might just say, please, please delete that page. I don't want to pay anything. So it's maybe a good idea if you're doing it for free, just to say I've just created a free page for you.

Yeah. Yeah. Or yeah, that's a good point. I could, I could see it some people reacting like this is too sleazy. Like, you've already, you know, it's kind of like the— what's a good example of this— but like, I've already printed your license plate for, you know, kind of thing for you. Yeah. Like, but I, I didn't get that on first glance, but I did. I— yeah, I could see that potentially being a thing. Um, yeah.

Or, or BitCloud, where, you know, you already had a profile and you had to come and—

yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like, come 'Come and collect your blank,' right? Right. It's like, uh, right. Yeah, a little weird, but like, yeah, I, I would say it can go either way here. Created a page for you.

Um, and what do you think about being specific about 'I've created a free page for you if you'd like to upgrade and include your contact information'? I don't know. I think that that's, that's something Chris said, but I wouldn't have understood That from the email.

Yeah.

So, so I had a version of this that kind of had an explicit pitch and this was the feedback in the breakout. So another way to do it, I guess, is, is kind of pitch the value of having them be discoverable. And then maybe on the site, once they go check it out, they'll click on the pricing tab and see what the—

I think you, yeah, I mean, it depends. I would say the, for a business like this where it's relatively defined, like you can get away with not having that because people will either know roughly what the business model is or they'll find it when they click through.

Mm-hmm. Great.

I'm not going against the group. If the group said take that out, but no, I think it's good.

Awesome.

Thank you.

One small thing would be if, if that URL, you know, could be like a link directly to their page.

Um, to the page. Yeah.

Maybe it already would be, but like if you just said like, yeah, just fill it in like slash blah blah, whatever. Um, awesome. But yeah, I would say you already changed it to only, but best is definitely one of my like red flags. Yeah. Best, better. And you know, it's like, mm, yeah, trade one. Exactly. Yeah. That it's just like a nice reminder to yourself or, you know, let's say an engineer builds it. You're like, okay, this needs to be that.

Yeah.

Makes the email feel more one-on-one as well.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Awesome.

Patty, you ready?

I'm ready, but I just can't share my screen. Is that okay?

Sure.

I'm curious.

Sorry. I'm on my iPad and I, yeah, I'm not that great at that.

Okay.

So I did this tonight with the help of my breakout room. So my name is Patty Goodspeed. I am the founder of Your Mortgage Academy, which I created with 20 years of mortgage banking experience. My academy is designed to teach you how to communicate with lenders and walk away with a loan approval every time. In my career, I've helped many people through funding about $1 billion in home loans. I've learned that no matter what walk of life you come from, all homebuyers experience the same fears and emotions when applying for a home loan, and a little guidance goes a long way. Let's get started at yourmortgageacademy.com.

Awesome.

I will— I love the ending especially, um, because I feel seen at the end especially. But, uh, I, I think a little guidance goes a long way. I think there's potentially an opportunity to kind of include some of that in the beginning. But make it more specific. Like, what is that kind of guidance and what does a long way look like? Like, is that financially? Like, did you know that like, you know, you could get a much better rate or, you know, there's a bunch of money left on the table in this way, or here's just like a fun fact about home ownership. Like, Um, I think that's a good opportunity to sort of be kind of more specific, I think.

So add something specific, like for example, a commonly asked question is like— I'll just give you two things that are common. People think that because they're self-employed they can't get approved for a traditional mortgage, or people think because they have student loan debt they can't be approved. So I would just kind of attack— just give one quick example like that in the body.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. Like that first one, for example, I think is like pretty relevant to me, I guess. But yeah, I think it is that one event, right? Like if you can figure out, and it might require you to email a certain type of person, like it won't work on everybody right anymore. But that's kind of the point is like, it'll force you to kind of narrow down and say, oh, I'm only gonna focus on people who I think have student loans. Right? Like it's people who all live around Berkeley. Or something like that.

Or if it's targeted.

Yeah.

Change it for different targets, maybe.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Or yeah, exactly. You could, you could potentially change it for different targets.

Um, yeah. Okay.

Um, yeah. I mean, but, but, but both of those examples are, or you could just, you know, potentially like a, a level 1 would just be to like have those 2, right? Like just say a couple things that the first, the top 2 things we teach students is these two. There's 50 other things, but you know, like here's two free ones for you.

Yeah.

Perfect. Kind of. Yeah. Got it. I wrote it.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Great. Glamzy. Faisal, do you wanna go with yours?

Yeah. Thanks, Sahil. I'll just quickly share my screen. Thank you. So I kept it as it is. I didn't put it in like an email format yet. So my name is— it would probably become a hi. Hi, my name is Faisal from glamsee.com.au, a marketplace to buy and sell Pre-owned high-end makeup items. What does the My Business product do? Users can have an Instagram-like seller page, list makeup items, receive email plus notification, SMS notification when bought, sold makeup items, and get 5-star ratings. How have you helped people? You can buy never used or barely used makeup items for around half price. Um, and what have you learned? It is pre-launch, but I'll probably use this sentence. Um, Glamsy users found it easier to purchase, uh, makeup where sellers have a good rating, and buyers have an avenue to raise purchase disputes in a user-friendly manner with sellers. I'm looking forward to hear from you to assist with Setting up a seller page if you're interested.

Um, yep.

How are you reaching out to these people? Like, who are you— who do you have in mind when you're sending an email to somebody? Where are you getting that email from?

Yeah. And I'm thinking, um, my main people are probably doing it through Facebook. Um, so there is a group with, uh, 20,000 users in Facebook who are buying, selling makeups like this. So I'm guessing I may have to reach out to them by Facebook message or do some kind of a Facebook ad which just targets this particular group, where probably in that Facebook ad it might have a version of this message.

I mean, I would say that's kind of getting into marketing, not sales. So I, I I think like if, I think this is a great place to start. Like I would just DM, you know, that message button right there, right? Like I would just message them on Facebook and say, hey, I saw you were selling this thing, you know, and then jump into your, cause that's specific, right? If they're doing that, then boom, like, Yep. I would sort of think about that. Like, hey, I saw you're selling this. I used to do this as a way to pay my way through school and it was really annoying. And so I productized it. And this is the before, after. If you want me to set a page up for you, I'm happy to do so. Um, might be a little bit snappier.

Um, yep.

Because I, I think the thing that you miss here so far, I think, is that is kind of the what you've tried part, which is like what, yeah, kind of why did you build this? Um, besides you wanna, you know, build a business. Um, right. Which is like, you have this problem, a family member has this problem, a friend has this problem. Um, and I actually, I think we didn't talk a little about sort of attachments or images or anything, mostly because I find that, you know, if you include one of those, like, your conversion rate probably goes to zero because, you know, the chance of it being marked as spam, etc., is probably a lot higher. But again, this is one of those things worth testing, right? The beauty of manual is you can try out a bunch of things and see if that actually is true or not. Might not be true. Um, But I think the before-after sells it so well that I would kind of be, I would try to like basically do the before and after with words, you know, like before you, you know, it would take me like an hour to like collect all this information and find images and they're all crappy. So I, you know, luckily, you know, I'm a software engineer, so I like built this, you know, basically automated that. This is what it looks like. You can just have a URL too, potentially. You know what would be really crazy is if you took their post and just did it for them, right? So what you say is, I'm looking forward to hear from you and I'll assist you with setting up a page. But in theory, what you could do is say, kind of like the other— was it Ben or was it Chris? It was Chris, right? Like, just build a page for them.

Here it is.

Or it can be a demo, right? It doesn't have to be live, but it's like, it would look something, you know, I took the images and kind of extrapolated, you know, it took me a minute. So it wasn't a big deal and kind of proves the point of what you're building. It's not live or anything, but, you know, let me know if you wanna, you know, set it up.

Sahil Lavingia: I think without building the page, would you suggest I provide links to a seller who already got on board and saying, hey, this person is selling.

Definitely. Yeah, that helps a lot more. Yeah, for sure. Um, if you don't— yeah, if you don't want to do a page, and it might be creepy, I don't know, um, you might want to be careful with that. But I do think a specific exa— like, for example, ideally, if I were telling somebody new about Gumroad, generally I would say I would give them an example of somebody that they would affiliate themselves with, right? Like, oh, you should check out what Daniel's doing, or you should check out what, uh, Elizabeth's doing, or you should check out what Blossom Root is doing, or M&M or whatever, right? Depending on who I'm talking to, I use a different example every time. Uh, I would never generally send somebody just gumroad.com, you know? Um, even now we have a Discover kind of marketplace thing. Like I would send people to their tag or their vertical or their industry. Um, right. Uh, as a, as a way to kind of, one should help like give them better examples and ideas and inspiration, but two, like it shows that I'm doing more work, right. For them, even though it's like, you know, 2 seconds of work, but it adds up, I think.

Yep.

It's kind of like people say, well, it's only 2 seconds of work. So why does it work? And then the answer is like, well, because it's only 2 seconds of work, you know, like, that's enough for people not to do it. And then everyone else who— everyone who doesn't do it is like, well, of course, I'm not gonna respond to your email because you didn't take the 2 seconds of work it would have been to make it slightly customizable. So I'm not gonna response. So it's like the 2 seconds is actually kind of where everything, you know, lives and dies.

Yep.

Thanks, Sahil.

Thank you. That was good.

That was good.

Alex.

Yeah, let me share my screen too. Okay, since I already introduced my product, I'll—

Hi, I am Alex.

This is terrible, I know.

I'm Alex.

Hi, I'm Alex Sahil. Yeah, I know, this is so cheesy.

I'm just kidding, it's fun.

That's right, this is why I need help. Yeah, because I thought this was terrible. Yeah, I'm Alex and I help Japanese businesses maximize, which, yeah, I already got feedback that that was terrible. Japanese businesses maximize their sales by targeting English users. Glocu adds native English localization to your company's e-commerce sites. I helped whatever company B do this and they increased their domestic profit by 10 times. Localization is the first step to launching your 'overseas branch' because these local customers will go back to their country and evangelize your product for you, something like that.

Interesting. I mean, if it's important that you're adding that on, I would probably write it as well.

Well, I didn't have time to.

Yeah, but yeah. All right. Let's see. Any— do other folks have feedback? Feel free to unmute and just— shout out what you would change or add or delete. Otherwise I can do it.

Who was in Alex's group and what did you say about Maximizing?

Julian.

That's Julian.

Yeah, Julian, let's hear it.

I can see, I said it was a little salesy. I think it was. Yeah, Maximize sounds like, I don't know, fakey.

Yeah, it's sleazy, right?

Yeah, Maximize. Yeah, well, I will say Maximize sounds very robotic. Okay. Like, what did you do yesterday? I maximized my workout. Like, no one says that, right? Maybe.

I don't know.

They do now.

We're changing the language.

Hey, I'm Alex. I would say for my day job, I, for some, I would put a period after Alex. Just to kind of break it up a little bit. Hey, I'm Alex. You know, for my day job, I help Japanese businesses write, you know, because when you told it to me, I think, you know, and by the way, one helpful thing is to say it out loud because sometimes when you're only writing, it's for some reason harder. When you say it aloud, it becomes a lot more colloquial and stuff. So, you know, for my day job, I think is a little bit more colloquial. Um, and you wanna write how you talk. You don't wanna talk how you write generally. Okay. Um, yeah.

For, for maximizing my lift.

Yeah, exactly. Good example. Um, by the way, when I was doing the audiobook reading, you, you were like, oh shit. Uh, I never, I don't wanna say this. Please don't make me say this. Um, for my day job, I help Japanese, you know, basically the point being like, What I love about— what I love, I love sales emails that are like, I did this as part of my job and then I realized the opportunity and so I built this, you know, like that kind of trifecta. And this is a perfect example of that, right? Where you're like, for my day job, I help Japanese businesses basically, you know, rewrite their websites to increase, you know, conversion or revenue from English-speaking customers. I will say, I don't know if you wanna be more specific about the kinds of Japanese businesses. Because if you did mention, I think it's like D2C primarily.

D2C.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Like that adds a lot of specificity with 3 letters in my opinion. And then you just say, you know, I built, I, you know, I wanna quit, so I'm building my own, you know, you don't have to say that necessarily, but again, that's kind of like being vulnerable, like, you know, stuff like that helps sometimes, you know, storytelling, right? This is about storytelling, not sales. And yeah, hero's journey in a sales email. Good. And yeah, I realized there's a huge opportunity, most businesses suck at it. And so I built the service that basically helps D2C companies add English localizations super quickly.

Obviously I'm not doing a great job, But yeah, no, it's, it is, I, I get the gist.

Yeah. The framing of it I think is really clean. It's, it is, it's just set up for that so nicely.

Hmm.

I would potentially, I'm thinking if there's a way to kind of give an example, it's like, here's an example of a page that I did.

Yeah.

That's, I wonder if you even, that's kind of this line. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of that line. I think an example like that they can click on would be even better. I I wonder if you even need the number. Like, I've, I, at least for me, it feels like such an obvious win, you know? Yeah. That like, like, yeah, of course. You know, like basically for Gumroad, I know like basically the first thing they tell you to do if you do e-commerce is like localize your website. It's like localize your website and support native currencies are like the top two things you can do. And then support native cards or payment methods or something, but that's a lot harder to do. So the other two are pretty, much easier. Um, yeah, I do— yeah, I do like what you said about the evangelize your product for you. That it's kind of just like a fun thing. It's like, you know, another option, you know, another way to say it would be that like, you know, people who, uh, you know, real— like, yeah, I don't know. I think you do a pretty good job. Um, you're kind of— you've kind of sold me, and then you're like, you have 2 more or 3 more sales, you know, to like you've already made the sale almost, I think. So you can almost delete more than you need.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

Then you, then you have, sorry. Yeah. Like I don't, I don't know if you need, I helped a blank do this. You kind of COVID that. You kind of don't even need the second line cuz you kind of said that, you know, you're just doing what you did, but productizing it kind of. Maybe I would keep the last sentence, but Yeah, there's kind of the line 5, 6 and line 11. I feel like pretty good. I would try to put, if you have a URL, I think that would be super helpful. Yeah.

I would probably link the—

Yeah. Like if you could like check out the page, you know, this one page alone blank, right. Or like, I think would, would help quite a bit. Sometimes you want to even pick an example that's not as crazy. Like some people want to, A lot of people have a tendency to be like, I'm gonna use the most extreme example. Cause I wanna be like the create, you know, I wanna show them the best possible outcome. But sometimes that's like, they don't, they're not gonna believe it. You know, like you almost wanna pick like a, an example that they are gonna believe even though it's less sexy. Cause like, would they pay if it's like, you know, 40% increase? Probably. Right. Like what is that number? And if it's 40%, then you don't need to promise 10x, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Realistic expectations too.

And then yeah, under-promise, over-deliver and all that kind of stuff kicks in.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome.

Cool.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Appreciate that.

You're welcome. Assignment and we're done for the week. Let me just, oh no. How do I share my screen again? And then share screen. Cool. Awesome. So assignment. This is a fun one in my opinion. Fun, scary, two sides of the same coin. Join the elevator pitch channel in Slack. Make a 1-minute— it used to be video. If you want to do video, you can, but I like text. Make a 1-minute 1-minute paragraph doesn't make sense with that, but you know what I mean? Put a paragraph of your, of your pitch for your product or service on in the Slack. You'll, if you scroll up, you'll see a gazillion examples. And then ideally give feedback to somebody else and then I will go through and try to give a bunch more feedback. But yeah, write a cold email basically like the examples we've been doing. And we will give everybody else, everybody some feedback to kind of Whittle it down to something pretty darn awesome. It's kind of almost like a memo, you know, it'll, it'll, it's kind of a similar, you know, similar kind of similar device. Um, and then the other thing, just because we have this fun image, like launching, which I mentioned the very beginning, you know, build, launch, sell is kind of the example, kind of like the framework that many people do. They do the product on launch, they do the whatever. Um, the reason I think it's so important to do it this way is one, you, you get a better product, you have customers. And then when you do launch, it's so much easier to launch when you have customers, when you can just point to people, they can bring their friends. Obviously in a pizza party, like makes, you know, physical stuff. You definitely want people, you don't wanna have like a launch and nobody show up, which I've seen. But you know, just so much easier when you do sales, when you, or when you do press, when you do marketing, when you do, when you raise money, like any, everything else becomes so much easier, which is really, I feel like if you get this far with your business and you've started to close customers, like you're kind of at product market fit. Like I think you've done all of the hard work. At this point then it's like, and we'll talk about this next week, it's like marketing, which is basically sales at scale, sales without the salesperson, growth, hiring, finance, legal ops. They're basically like, I consider them like unforced errors in tennis. At this point, as long as you don't, it's like your game to lose. It's not that hard. Once you have a product that people are paying for and it's valuable, that's the hard stuff. Building the business around that, it's hard. I shouldn't say it's not hard, but it's It's less risky, I think. Like, it's, um, you're, you're, that's not where the failure happens. I would say most failure in a business happens like way earlier. Co-founder fights, not building the right thing, you know, execution risk, market risk, regulatory risk, et cetera. Once you get here, you got, you got, you're, you're on, you're off to the races, I think personally.

Awesome.

Well, I'm gonna pat myself on the back for sticking roughly to the schedule. And next week I will try again, but we'll see, we'll see how it goes. See y'all, everybody. Have a good, have a good night. There will be a link in Slack to the office hours, so please book those and either talk about sales or anything else. And then otherwise, see everybody on Monday.

Good night.

Bye, everyone.

Good night.

Bye.