Surviving the Start

Founding a company is a series of steep learning curves.

Sure, you may get early sales. But, that does not mean you’re growing.

You have to survive the first learning curve before scale becomes possible.

During that learning curve is when founders gain the skills, audience, and relationships needed to move forward.

For example, we made $16,000 on day one with my first AI company. Day two was zero. Day three was zero. Day four was zero. It took 3 weeks to make the next thousand dollars.

The reason is that it took that long to convert the next round of prospects into customers. It could have happened sooner, but we never asked for help.

🤓 Instead, we kept trying things that did not work.

Stress increased, doubt occurred, and everything seemed hopeless. Until we discovered that a demo was not a show and tell.

Our first few demos, after the initial success, consisted of telling prospects how great our solution was. That failed hard.

Next, we tried to show results. Talking over each other with lots of screen sharing. That also failed.

Last, almost ready to quit, we had a conversation with a prospect. The same thing that got us our first sales. That worked occasionally.

It was not until later that we learned about what a demo that converts is all about. A demo has nothing to do with show and tell.

💊 A demo is finding pain, amplifying pain, and comparing buying to doing nothing.

We discovered that our biggest competitor was indecision and people only bought to remove pain.

🔥 The new demo was a series of questions delivered as a conversation.

We found the pain, dug deeper to understand it, and asked, “What happens if you do nothing?”

💯 Then we improved it.

The first improvement was asking, “What happens if this works?” Not a monologue on how great our product is. We stopped claiming it would work and let the prospect tell us their thoughts.

That’s some of the first learning curve. The other parts are finding a big enough problem, and messaging.

Do that and you’re ready for the next level.

Sales for Founders

A growth system for hackers, hustlers, and creatives.