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.
I'd love to hear from you. Many of you reach out hoping to some day do the same, I want to support you. Email me what's helpful to see, learn, etc.
Week 5 Recap:
- Jan expenses: ~$300
- New Signed Contracts: $0
- Pipeline Added this week: $44,000
- New leads added: 3
- Jan Revenue: $14,700
- Feb Revenue contracted: $18,500
Tech Stack
I had a handful of you reach out regarding my tech stack to get up and running. Here's my breakdown:
Kajabi - $199 / month; Entire website, courses, landing pages. I'm new to using Kajabi but it's incredible.
Salesforce - $37 / month; CRM, you know. There's cheaper options but frankly I'd rather pay a tiny bit more and not have to learn a new CRM. I can customer what I need and there's zero learning curve.
Testimonial.io - Free plan; haven't scaled this much yet but planning to. I've started gathering testimonies for my course launch in a month. Pretty awesome tool.
Stripe - 2.9% or $5 flat fee for ACH Direct Deposit; invoicing
Freshbooks - $12 / month (got a special for December); All P&L tracking. It's cheap, easy to use and has an app I can upload receipts quickly
Going into February I feel really good about my revenue and customer base. It's a very comfortable group of customers that will allow me to work out my kinks and process while not under-delivering. There's unique nuances to each customer and the stage they are at. I'm trying to learn the similarities between each of them and how to recognize where someone is likely to be at earlier in my sales process
Example: A founder + 1 sales rep team is different than a Founder + Sales leader + 1 SDR / sales rep. Understanding where to focus my efforts with each customer in the funnel is important. There's templates and process that I need to build out for each stage. I'm taking the time to build the infrastructure correctly now so I don't have to re-build it with each new customer
Managing what I can control
Daily Inputs
For this first week I've been really focused on consistent systems. Connecting with 20 new founders a day on LinkedIn, engaging with 20 posts daily on Linkedin and writing 3 LinkedIn posts (and scheduling them out). LinkedIn inbound is still my best source of leads.
I've also set a goal to ask for 1 referral every single day. Doesn't matter from who. It forces me to engage with my network of people I know and communicate with regularly.
By executing these in a really calculated way, I hope to come up with some sort of recipe around: X post impressions →Y inbound leads. Or X referrals asked → Y new first meeting set. You can see an example of my spreadsheet below. If you want a copy of it, email me back and I'll share it.See it here.
Lead Flow
A bit slower this week but I'm much better at filtering through the noise. I took nearly 40 net new prospect calls in December. A lot of stuff that wasn't ready for me or could afford me. I'm getting better at recognizing them earlier before spending 30 minutes+ on a discovery call.
I'm working on getting on to some podcasts. Frankly, I hate it. I'd rather die than be on a podcast or have some video recording of myself. It's vulnerable as hell for me. I guess I'm more of an introvert than I lead on. Regardless, I'm taking the approach of 'being everywhere all the time'. We'll see how it affects my LinkedIn engagement and inbound lead flow.
Diversified Income
Partnerships
Formed a partnership I'm trying out this month. I'm reselling some simple demand gen services (email marketing, LInkedIn engagement, etc) Above all, it's a service that most of my customers need as they don't have marketing efforts yet and aren't sure where to start. It also allows me to test messaging faster in the markets we're selling into while I work with their sales reps to build an outbound motion. Small markup on it but could be something that sticks around and scales a bit. If it works well, could turn into +$2k or more a month per customer of cash flow for me.
Building my course as we speak. No idea what to expect from this. Honestly if it got to $1k a month, I'd be stoked. It's a lot of the content I'm already developing for customers so I will fit right in. There's so much I don't know and it slows me down. Luckily, I committed to doing an in person speaking event in Feb and I'm using that as a deadline and a 'launch' event for myself. Growth hacking at it's best.
I've had so much interest in how I'm building my consulting business I'll likely package all this up down the road and build a course. I also am considering something more robust with a community built around it. If you have ideas or any interest in being part at some point, reply back and give me some ideas. Greatly appreciated.
Affiliates
Nothing from this yet but expecting a check in Feb >$1k from it. We'll see.
That's all for now!
Three huge asks:
If you're not following me on Linkedin, please do it here.
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.
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!
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