First of all, thank you for being here. I've been blown away at the response of people wanting to follow me on this journey, I'm so grateful. 

I wrote a post in detail of my journey and why I decided to build in public. You can read it here.  

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Month 1 Recap:

- December expenses: ~$1,200 (bought some software annually. This should be 1/2 going into next year on a monthly basis)

- Signed Contracts: $76,300 (2 of my customers started before Dec)

- Pipeline Added: $274,000

- Jan Revenue: $14,700

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Biggest Learnings:

I need to figure out scale, but not too quickly

• I felt anxious at the beginning of the month. We had savings but I didn't want to dip into it going into January. I frantically prospected via VCs and word of mouth my first 2 weeks. It paid huge dividends. 
• LinkedIn is a HUGE source of leads for me. Posting daily could get me nearly 1 inbound a day. I'll be tracking this more closely going into next year but have no data to go off so I'm working on 'gut' right now. With that said, I'm building my operating system to be able to track this carefully next year as I collect some early data
• I knew that if my first few customers had an amazing experience, they had way deeper networks of other founders than I did and could refer me to many people. I didn't want to add too many customers too fast so I limited myself to 4 in January, regardless of revenue from each of them.
• I spent the last 2 weeks really building out my onboarding experience, templating my documents that would ultimately become part of the playbooks for each of my customers. I also diagramed out my customer journey and better defined each month, what are expected outcomes at each stage, etc
• As I go into Feb, I'll likely add 1-2 more customers. The benefit here is it helps to build urgency for my buyers knowing I have limited spots available each month. And it's true! 

Pricing & Packaging

• Biggest takeaway: Don't bill hourly. Never. Ever. Also, don't take equity. At the end of the day, you'll work for free with very limited equity and MAYBE, if you're lucky you'll see a payout in 5 years of $40,000. I could be totally wrong here but I just won't do it. I invoice a flat rate each month for 3 months at a time. As demand continues to be high, I will keep adjusting my monthly rate up a bit and testing longer agreements. The longer agreements helps me build consistency on forecast. This makes my wife happy.
• I have MANY smaller prospects that are not quite ready for me. Meaning, they have a hard time swallowing spending $10k / month right now. I'm guessing these can be customers in 12 months so I'm working on chunking down my offering using Volley. This turns into more of advisory work but I'm testing it out now.

Revenue Streams

• I already mentioned Volley. We'll see how this goes. It's something I'm offering smaller prospects as an option
• Affiliates: I've set up affiliate links with everyone I'd recommend. Super easy, free. Haven't used it much, expect with my current customers. I have used a few and might get >$1k in Feb from it. No idea what to expect.
• Partners: I have a few partners I've worked on. Mostly on the lead gen side. It's actually something that my customers will probably almost always need. I formed a partnership with them and and invoicing my customer directly with a bit of markup on it. We'll see how this goes
• Course Sales: I'm building my course right now. The nice thing is that the most customers I work with, the easier the materials come together. It's the same content, just packaged differently. I'm hoping to launch going into Feb.

Revenue Streams

• Referrals & Inbound
  • Every single customer has come from one of these. LinkedIn is gold. My content is alright, there's so much more I can do here. I realized how powerful my inbound lead flow can be if I optimize for writing. It's weird because I always think I'm wasting my time 'creating' or 'writing' when I should be reaching out to VCs. But, my best customers have come from inbound so far... so I'm going to double down in Jan on content creation and building a more systematic approach to it.
  • Referrals: 1/2 have been customer or friendly referrals and 1/2 have been from VCs. I spend so much time on calls with people that don't quite fit my ICP, I found it's best to use that time to at least get 1-2 referrals from them. So, I usually have something really valuable I can send them (a candidate referral, a template of something) then I can ask for a referral in return. At least I can call that time 'prospecting' is how I see it for now. 

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That's all for now!

Three huge asks: 

1. If you're not following me on Linkedin, please do it here.
2. If you know any early stage founders hoping to build a sales team, shoot me an email ([email protected]). If they sign up, I'll send you a nice referral fee and give them $1,000 off.
3. I want to hear from you. What do you want to see here? I'm hoping to build this 100% publicly so nothing is off limits. What's helpful? Please email me and let me know what you'd like to hear about and what you're hoping to learn!

Thanks for all the love and support!