👺1/ It's scary to sell 💸
👺1/ It's scary to sell 💸
Lobo Library #19 - 11/16/20 - a 3 min 59 second read ahead...
🗞TL;DR: I made my first $$$ as a founder - through my Intro to NoCode course. It launches today and runs for the next 5 weeks. If you want to learn to know how to build NoCode Apps / Landing Pages FAST, check it out. I’ll give subscribers a discount.
Happy Monday Fam,
This past weekend I attended my first Zoom wedding. My cousin got married, and while it was a fun get-together with a venue that was very dog-friendly #dadjoke, it was a reminder of how much I miss pre-COVID life. Alas, life goes on.
And now for some more exciting news…
🚀 Start-Update
Building an Online Course (part 1)
🤖 Picking up from my last update - I actually did it. I put myself out there and announced that I would be teaching an Intro to NoCode course (though I didn’t say when it would launch). I posted it to Twitter and the On Deck Slack, and I reached out to some of my friends in the NoCode community and got them to spread the word too.
Over the course of the next few hours, thousands of people saw my announcement and a few dozen reached out to learn more. Wow. Amazing, right? Wrong. The excitement that I had from the hackathon win, which spurred me to make the course announcement, suddenly turned to terror.
There were real people out there actually wanted to learn more and maybe even sign up. But I didn’t have anything prepared yet...I needed a curriculum, videos, presentations, demos, etc. I needed a course! I was just about to go off and start building everything I needed to launch a course. Then, my friend Ben stopped me.
Ben gave me two valuable pieces of advice.
First, he told me to not build anything until I got actual sales. There were customers knocking at the door asking to sign up, and there I was planning on disappearing for a few weeks to go build something with the hopes that when I came back, those people would still be interested in buying. Bad idea. Ben recommended that I focus all of my attention on doing things that were going to get me more excited to follow-through with this personal project.
For me, that meant paying customers.
Next, Ben told me I should set a goal for how many customers I needed to consider this successful. “As many as possible” isn’t a good answer here. How many paying customers were going to make me happy to follow-through? 1, 3, 50, 100? I thought about it and decided if I could get 5 people to sign up, that would be the minimum for me to go ahead and build the course. 10 customers would be a great outcome, and the unlikely 15 would be my ‘FUCK YEAH goal’.
So that’s what I did. I went to Gumroad and made a sales page for my course. The course would start two weeks later on Nov 16th. Then, I went back to all of those people who said they were interested in learning more and I did one of the hardest things I have ever had to do….sell.
You know, I always thought that I would be great at sales. I’m gregarious, personable, (handsome), etc. Oh, and did I mention that I know a whole lot about sales? I’ve studied it, worked for a Sales tech company, and have advised hundreds of salespeople/managers on their sales strategy for my job?!
Yup, all of that went out the window when I actually had to sell something myself.
It was an incredibly uncomfortable experience to go to all of those people and try to convince them to pre-purchase the course (especially since it was ~12 hours after they had seen the announcement). Here’s a lesson I learned the hard way - if you are going to announce a product/service/(probably anything), give people the ability to take action on it immediately (e.g. provide their information, or better yet, purchase a product).
Slowly, the customers started to purchase. On the first day, 2 people purchased. On the second day, another 4 people purchased, and with that, I crossed my minimum threshold of 5 customers. Over the week, rather than reaching out to more people on LinkedIn or other channels, I kept pushing on the interested people who had reached out to me. I eventually wound up with 13 customers! That was enough, not just because I had sold way more than I thought I would, but because I was running out of time and needed to start creating content. Even more terror and anxiety.
Surprise surprise, another big lesson. Creating content is HARD (and takes forever).
(…part 2 coming soon…)
Ain’t no party like an Arty party:
🏁Wow - you made it to the bottom. I hope you enjoyed it. Reach out with feedback or to just say hi!🏁
I love you,
Lobo