Time to read: 2 minutes

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:

- New Signed Contracts: $15,750

- Pipeline Added this week: $87,000

- New leads added: 3

- Jan Revenue: $14,700

- Feb Revenue Contracted: $25,750

- March Revenue Contracted: $25,750

Highlights

• I signed 2 more customers this week. Both are condensed versions of my full service offering that puts a lot of the building on them. I'm excited to work with them and hope to prove out this offering with my time commitment
• I received 3 referrals that all turned into good leads last week. All from a VC relationship!

FAQ

I've been getting a fair amount of questions so I figured I'd share them here. To be clear, I'm no expert at this yet. I'll share what I'm learning in real time.

1. How to test pricing with so few clients per year. Low sample size. I often have <5 clients per year. Clients usually stick with me for 3-6 months. Max 18 months. Over that span I often have to say no to folks as my bandwidth for the side hustle is limited.
   1. This is really valid and something I'm working on in real time. In term of pricing, I've pieced together my offering and been very open / direct with prospects. "Hey, I'm getting started and this is somewhat of a new offering. I'd really appreciate feedback on this and if this even makes sense. I've been able to solicit a lot of feedback and details on where I need to improve. If I were in your shoes and didn't have more prospects to work with, I'd proactively go find 20 people in your ICP that will give me feedback. There's plenty of people out there willing to give feedback for free.
2. How to adjust for, or feel out changes in the market/economy. Up through 6 months ago I feel like I could be pretty aggressive on pricing. Money was cheap. Now everyone is price conscious. For example, my default pricing model is to 2-3X my hourly rate at my salaried day job. I'm asking for 2X right now. Before 6 months ago I was asking closer to 3X. But I'm probably being too nice. How do you approach this?
   1. Again, I'm zero expert here. I think this aligns somewhat to the first questions around pricing / packaging. Selling will undoubtedly be harder this year / next. Be sure to align your value prop to core goals of the business. My value prop is helping increase the valuation of their business 10x. If they can go from $100k to $500k in a short time, it opens to doors to options for the founder (raise a series A, building a team, selling the business, etc)
3. How do you approach pricing with a close friend or contact of a close friend? Those are all of my clients. They don't pressure me to give a low price, but again, I'm probably too nice and don't ask for enough.
   1. I'm giving the customer $1,000 off for being a referral. I'm also sending my friend who referred a referral. Huge believer in 2 sided referrals. With that said, my pricing is still being worked out but this seems to resonate 
4.  Are you launching your consulting all on your own, leaning on friends who have been there, or have you hired a coach to help you?
   1. I haven't hired anyone, should I? I'm honestly just learning about who's even in this space. There's some online courses out there. I bought 1 to see what was in it and felt like I was doing all of the things it suggested expect for 1 thing. Ironically that 1 thing was extremely valuable, so it made the $200 worth every penny.

Thoughts

I've been thinking a lot about consistent inputs. Being a soloprenuer is hard. It doesn't feel like there's a lot of people out there doing it and it's hard to validate your ideas. The thing I find myself struggling with the most: what the hell to focus on. I have a million ideas all the time and fear I could get doing 20 things at once and do a shitty job at all.

What am I learning

Scale

• Starting to work through systems that scale. I'm less concerned about 'new business' right now and more focused on creating the best customer experience I can. My goal is to be able to have 100% success rate with my customers
• How do I now build repeatable success stories - how do I design a customer experience that elicits multiple referrals a long our journey together and relationships that last forever? I've blocked off a majority of this week to work through a lot of this before I kickoff a few new customers next week.

 Slow but consistent efforts

• Online Course - it's slowly coming a long. I can't tell you how inadequate I feel building an online course. Probably because I know nothing about the process of getting it published and am just learning in real time. It's caused me to question, rethink and start over on most of the content 3 different times. Then I question what value it will bring, if any. haha welcome to inside my head.

• .Lead flow - I'm still managing my daily inputs for the most part. I connect with 20 founders a day on LinkedIn and ask 1 new person for a referral every day. I'm hoping to have a better system of inputs → outcomes later next month.

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.
• Best Company - Referrals - download the 'Best Rep' app. It's SUPER easy to request referrals and attribute revenue to customers.
• Stripe - 2.9% or $5 flat fee for ACH Direct Deposit; invoicing
• Freshbooks - $7 / 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
• Taplio - $39 / month; game changer for Linkedin to schedule linkedin posts. I don't use the AI but the interface is great for scheduling 
• Calendly - $12 / month

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!